FORAGING Food for the DAY -- Touring the High Tunnels

Hi everyone, this is Wanda from Deep South Homestead. Danny's here with me. We're going to be harvesting in my greenhouse, which is the white shade cloth here, high tunnel, whatever you want to call it. We've got several things going here. I have some beans over here that I'm not picking today. They're kind of a shelling bean, and I'm not sure exactly what they are, but I forgot what I planted. And this one here is starting to turn, so it's not going to be long. We're going to let these kind of start turning color before we pick them. And then we have one of our Cherokee purple tomatoes here. This one has not, yeah, it has started blooming. It's got several blooms on it. Some of the other Cherokee purples are blooming. These are, well, the squash in the middle, but the rest of this is burgundy, royal burgundy beans. If you look right here, these things are getting ready to pick. I mean, look at that. Danny and I love color in our food. So we're going to go through here. Danny's going to help me, and we're going to pick the burgundy beans here. We're going to be picking squash. We have Cherokee yellow wax beans, and we're going to show you a little more about what's going on in my high tunnel today. I think it's April the 24th, and we are harvesting beans. And the beauty of these beans are you can see them because they're purple. Now I've got this giant squash in here. I've got a little squash on it, but it's not quite ready. So we're going to just skip over. And I have my little garden seat here and my bucket. And the garden seat works perfect in between these rows. But now our squash is getting a little out of hand here. That's going to be nice to have a whole bunch of beans here in a little while. And the wind blew them blew in this side and blew them all kind of over. We had 70 mile an hour winds this morning. Yeah, we had 70 mile per hour winds earlier. So it's making it a little more difficult because all the leaves are laying in one direction right now to see what's going on. I know they're in here because yesterday they were all over the place. Listen to that bird. Oh, your pileated woodpecker. Yes. Right. You see these, they're just hanging in here under here. But I'm only picking the ones that are big enough. I'm leaving a lot of these. I mean, there's a lot of beans in here, but I'm only picking the good size ones. So we'll have beans tomorrow. And that's the beauty of this. We're trying to get this high tunnel where we have food to eat every day. And if you pick them all in one day, then you won't have anything for the next day. And these smaller ones like this just need to go an extra day or so. We had severe weather this morning. So we had 70 mile an hour winds. We had an inch and a half of rain in one hour and it blew into high tunnels pretty hard. But the beauty of the high tunnel is it's still raining outside a little bit, but we're able to continue our harvest. I mean, look at how luscious and beautiful all this stuff is. I'm loving these purple beans. They're a lot easier to pick than the other ones. And the yellow ones are going to be the same way. Yeah. You got one right in front of your hands or you're missing with your feet. I see it through the... Where? Your left foot. Left foot. It's covered up under the leaves. Right there. Yeah. And when I get on this side, I'm seeing some under there too. Our thing in here is what we're trying to accomplish is to be able to have something to eat fresh without actually having to do a lot of canning. Because lids are becoming so hard to come by that we're going to try and keep as much stuff growing fresh as we can. Year round. Year round in these. And that will supply now... This is our daily food. I mean, what does the scripture say? Lord give us this day our daily bread. And guys, that's what it's all about. It's about having something to eat daily. Now I do get canning and we're going to try to continue to can as much as we possibly can because we have some planted in the field, but those in the field, they're just barely sitting there. They're not doing anything. They're just little tiny plants. And these in here are kicking it. It's amazing what it does when you put something out of the harsh weather. And we've always been able to grow in the fields. Yeah. Every year we've had plenty in the fields, but for the last year and this year it has really gotten difficult. And I'm picking the bad leaves off, I guess you would say, when I see them. Well, that's how you control disease. I'm keeping those out because under here you see how thick they are. And if you can take those, like this one here means no purpose at all. There's no beans on that. And if you can take those type... But you don't want to take too much off because you have to have photosynthesis to keep the plant going good. I wouldn't take too many of them off. But what I did last year to keep them out of the aisle so much, the ones that were hanging way too low, is I'd come in here and then anything under here, like see is already turning yellow. The yellow ones I would say, yes, they would come off. And the ones that have spots, that's what I take off. And it did really well with the yellow wax beans last year, or last winter. Because we ate wax beans until what, nearly December? Yeah, almost December we were still harvesting snap beans. And if we'd have replanted, we would have had them continuous. And we just, we didn't think about it at the time. I'm trying to get these leaves off. And that makes it a little bit... Well, you get airflow. Airflow, because we're in a humid climate. And they're all wet because the rain blew in. So it's, even though they're in the high tunnel, they got rain. That's pretty awesome. The outside raised beds stay watered from, you know, from the wind and the rain blowing through. Look at this. That's not big. I mean, they're blooming like crazy. We've been, you know, we put the liquid phosphorus to them. The golden bloom from Dr. Earth. It's a high phosphate food. They love that stuff. And it takes about what, less than 10 minutes to go through these beans? Oh yeah, they don't take long at all. I mean, you can, you can see here, see how they're, they're just hanging up under here. And we don't pick, we only pick the largest ones. We don't pick the small ones. All that will be for tomorrow. We just get these larger beans here. All that stuff like that, that's, that's for tomorrow. Or the next day. Or the next day or whenever, you know, but we just try to stick with. Now we will pick what the little ones, we call them onesies. They didn't pollinate good. And they only have like one bean in them right here. So we will go ahead and get them off. And we were, that's just senseless to leave that. See, it's raining. We can still sit in here. We don't get wet. And we get to pick our beans. So one of the next projects Danny's fixing to do, he has all these onions in here in my greenhouse. And some of them are ready to harvest. All right, this is the Cherokee tan pumpkin. And it is starting to go crazy. It's all on my vine already. It's doing really well. And then the tomatoes in between Danny's onions are still more of the Cherokee purples. So Danny's going to take and get some of the onions that are ready. We have a few of them that is beginning to break over here. This one is broke over, but the onion still looks really good here. You know, this is going to continue to still grow a little bit more. So we're not really going to take one like this out because even though it's broke over, it's still got a little size to it. We're going to probably have to look around. I see some on the other side over here that's probably more ready to pick than this. There's a couple here like this one that's done. The tops are kind of wilting over on it. They're starting to turn brown on the ends. This one's kind of broke over and it's not a big onion, but that doesn't matter to me and Wanda because we're going to chop them up anyway. I'll take them and pull them up like this and we'll just leave them like this to lay out and dry. I usually take all the dead stuff off. You could stick them through the fence. That way they can dry in here. They'll just hang here and dry. When we need an onion, I come get one. And here's another one here. You know, this, well, this one still looks pretty green, but the ends are starting to die on it out here. The top is broke over. We don't want them to ruin in the ground. So this is another beauty of putting the cattle panels in the greenhouse or high tunnel here, you want to call it. Get that dead stuff off of there. You can hang this stuff over like that and this becomes your onion storage out here because it's out of the rain. You don't have to worry about it. And you need an onion, let the top sit here and naturally die down and you can come get you one. I mean, these things serve a multiple purpose here. We've got another one right here. And these onions are what about, I don't know, they, uh, three inches, two inches, three, between two and three inches. They're not really big. I mean, like I said, Wanda and I don't need really big ones because it's just two of us. And we have learned over the years that the real big old onions seem to go bad faster than the smaller ones do. And we've got plenty. We've got a lot here. We've got some in the field. We've got a lot of onions. We probably have 200 onions planted. So size to us is not a big deal. But while I'm sitting here, I'm also noticing that the Cherokee purples are beginning to sprout out at the bottom down here. And I'm going to take these sucker sprouts off of them right down at the bottom here because we really don't need them down here. I'm probably going to just leave one like up high like this because when you have disease, it starts on these things. They usually start down low. And one of the beauties here of being in the high tunnel is we don't have the rain splattering up on the leaves to get disease started in here. And we will go back because these serve us no purpose whatsoever down low down here. These leaves to us right at the ground, it's just a waste of the plant's nutrition. We want the plant to get on up as tall as the panel here. And look at this next one. And oh yeah, the next one is just really nice. It's got blooms in it. It has, look at the beautiful flowers in the top of it. And we've got the door open for pollinators. The doors are open every day. Danny doesn't hand pollinate. I don't have to, but with tomato, all you have to do is come in here on the tomato is just take your hand and bump it like this. And it pollinates. You don't have to have a pollinator. The wind will actually do it for you. And the wind blows through here every day. Pretty cool. Pretty cool. But we've got another onion here and I shake the dirt off and leave it because that's the beauty of the raised beds here and the soil mixture that we have. Look how easy the dirt come off. It stays right there intact. Ready to plant something else. Yeah. We're going to go ahead and just hang that up there. Let that one be. Now look at my Cherokee tan. I was showing you on the other side. Now look at this side. See the, how it's coming. We've got it wound around and it's already that far. So how, how far would you say? It's growing about five, six, maybe five foot. Five feet. Okay. So the Cherokee tan's already five foot long. So that's pretty cool too. I'm, I'm excited about the Cherokee tan. Okay guys, we went down through here and we've got all the onions we felt like was, um, you know, pretty close to being ready. We've got them hanging in the cattle panels up here, uh, in the high tunnel. That'll be where they'll hang at and completely dry. And when Ms. Wanda needs one, she'll come out here and get it. Now we'll probably take one in with us today to go ahead and cook with our meals because the next thing we're going to do is we're going to look at our squash. Now they're scattered all over the whole high tunnel. Uh, we're going to look right here. We got one, this is the gold prize from Hall's Tool. A nice, pretty yellow squash we're going to put in there. Uh, these others aren't quite ready. We're going to move down. And I think what we're going to do here is while we're here, we're going to go ahead and take a few kale leaves because we'll mix some kale in with what we're doing. Uh, I think this dinosaur or lacinato kale is, uh, is beautiful. I mean, it's just outstanding. I know Ms. Lippy didn't do, uh, too bad a job trimming our kale. Yeah, you ain't gonna hurt it by trimming it. And see, I took the, um, I, I took the top out of one of these the other day and it's still growing and it's not going to seed. So I think that's pretty cool. Yeah, these, uh, and that's what, three plants? Yeah, that's just three little old plants. And look, look at this. Isn't that gorgeous? This is an, this is, guys, this is going to give us our meal of our kale right here. So we have purple beans, kale, and at least one squash. There's one squash in there right now. We're going to move over to the other side of the, uh, high tunnel and see how the squash are doing over there. But now these are the, these are Egyptian walking onions. Yeah, these are the Egyptian walking onions. So they're starting to break over. Yeah, they're, the tops are popping open on and putting the new onions in the top of them. Won't be long to have the bulbs up there. And when they break over, we'll harvest them and replant them. And they're looking just beautiful. Beautiful. And you can see all the tomatoes on this side, the Cherokee purples. This is my corn. This is the popcorn, the Cherokee long eagle, no, Cherokee long ear popcorn. I think I said eagle last time, but it's long ear popcorn. And look how pretty. It's halfway up the, um, panels now. Danny's fixing to fertilize everything in here. Yeah, it's time for it to have the ammonium sulfate put to it. And so everything's going to get some fertilized shortly. Petunias, they just go crazy. They go crazy. Um, the aloes and stuff in the corner. More Egyptian walking onions here. Yeah. These are the Algonquin beans. Some kind of little creature likes the leaves on these, but they are up and doing okay. The, um, mullein is doing okay. Yeah. Let's just get under these squash and we'll come back and pick these beans. This is just, look at this. This is more of the gold prize. Yeah. We just got three or four plants in here. Look at this. So we have plenty of squash for lunch. Oh yeah. That's going to be beautiful. That's why Danny wants one of his onions and some squash. We're going to be stewing down some squash. Squash down with some of them new and fresh onions there. One more. I'll see one right here. So Wanda's High Tunnel is paying off. Well, today it will provide our meal for the day. And thank you Lord for giving us our daily bread today through the High Tunnel. I see, is this an eggplant? Yes, it is. I planted eggplant in there. So I've got eggplant coming up. I just happened to notice that. And now look, these are the Cherokee Trail of Tears beans. I have three of them. One over there, one here, and then one here. And y'all, it's already reached the top. They're already blooming. And before long, they're going to catch each other. So I'm hoping to have Trail of Tears all across the top of this with the squash and eggplant down below. I think that would be awesome. Wow. So we have the daisies on the end still producing. When they fall over, I break them off and just some pretty color there. Now we have this kale. I don't actually know what you planted back here. This was the Hoss Tools. It was a kind of a combo thing or something. I don't remember. I'll have to go back and look. But it's a type of kale. It's not as big as the other yet, but it has some lacinato. You see in the back? I see the lacinato in the back. I was wondering. And this other was, I don't know it. I don't think it was all lacinato. But I mean, I don't remember. You know me. I just plant. Now these are the Marketmore cucumbers. They're up what? How tall are they? They're about three feet tall. And look at this. We have blooms everywhere on the cucumbers. It's not going to be long. Our pollinators hit all this. We're going to have cucumbers. Okay. We've got a little more kale here to stick in there with our other. Look at these onions. This one is getting pretty good size in there. About three inches. There she went again. There she goes. Our big old Indian hen. Now look at this. Isn't that gorgeous? Look at that. Onion chives starting to bloom. So some of these onions aren't doing as well. And some of them are doing fantastic. Now we're to the Cherokee yellow wax beans. And y'all look back here. Look what I got volunteer. Sunflower. From last year, I've got a sunflower. So our sunflower challenge. Let's see how many Cherokee yellow wax beans we've seen. Where the others were purple, these are yellow. Look at that. Beautiful. Look at there. Look. It's just awesome to see all them yellow beans hanging in there. This is our favorite bean. This is, yeah, that's our favorite bean of all beans. After we started growing these last year, we were just hooked on the Cherokee yellow. My thing is, look at that. Isn't that gorgeous? That bean's probably six, seven inches long. These are just a sweeter bean. I don't know why they're just sweeter. And they stay yellow. They don't turn green. Now the purple ones will turn green when you cook them. Yeah, when we cook them, they'll turn green. But these actually stay yellow when you cook them. Another sunflower right here. Oh wow. So the sunflowers are coming up volunteer. Yeah, they're from last year. Right here, Malabar spinach to go up this pole. We have that planted. I have some of my flowers in here. And look, you see these Cherokee yellow wax beans are blooming. All the little peas or beans are on here. So these will produce for quite a while if taken care of. Yeah, if you take care of them, they'll produce. Okay guys, we're over in the other high tunnel now. This is the onions we have growing in them. These are a little bit better shape. They look a little bigger. This one here, this one's ready. We're gonna shake the dirt off it. This one's a nice one here. Twice as big as the others. Yeah, this is twice the size. I got to get Danny's asparagus. Actually my asparagus in Danny's greenhouse. So part of my lunch today is asparagus. That one here, right here. And we're going to take these to my greenhouse and put them on the rail. These are some nice onions. I love it. I mean, I'm loving this. The greenhouse is making us into totally different gardeners. We're totally, we're going to be having another one. We're going to go ahead and just go ahead and get the other one. It'd be foolish not to seeing how, I mean guys, this is so easy. I mean, we can come in here. Now there's a little weeding needs to be done. Yeah, we can come in here. It's just a matter of a couple of minutes and everything is weeded. And the thing about it is when you take these weeds up in here, we throw them out in the floor. You know, we've got this yellow wood sorrel right here. It's got the little pod like okra on it. This stuff is very high in vitamin C. If you had to have it for sickness or something like that, you can actually eat it. I used to eat it as a child all the time. And if I need some occasionally, I'll put it in my mouth and just start chewing it. But what we do is we come through here and we just pick this stuff. And the chickens love it. And that's what I want to say. We come back with a container and we pick all this stuff up and we take it to the chickens and not even the weeds are wasted because nothing here is sprayed. We don't have to worry about that. We don't use any chemicals. We don't even use organic chemicals. For the most part, we don't use much of anything. I do have some neem oil I did on some of mine. But that's, I mean, basically that's it when it comes to weeding. Just that fast while I picked these. I mean, it looks clean now. And by taking some of these onions out, it opens up some of this so that the onions that's left, they actually get a chance to grow and to do well. And I'm not one that would ever say that weeding is a wonderful thing. But guys, I'm going to tell you what, after having the high tunnels, weeding is almost a joy now compared to what it is in a big open field out there trying to weed a garden. You know, this is... So you want to show them, this is the high tunnel while we're in here with the fruits. We've not done a big... We haven't done an update on a lot of the fruits that's in here. Now we have a squash in here. We might already check the squash because I did bring one or two over and put in this one. Okay, we just got through pulling some of our onions. Now we do have some strawberries in here. One tonight, we come in here every day and pick the strawberries. There's none on here right now because we literally clean them up. Now they're re-blooming. They're doing good. And I have the yellow Marconi's here. They're trying to come back from the stalks that I cut off this past winter. They had a little bit of bug issue and this is something I put the neem oil on. Okay, so she came in, I wasn't aware of that, that she sprayed a little bit of neem oil on it. I guess I should have known because I can see right here where it got on that. Yeah, the neem oil to get the bugs. They were trying to eat all his leaves. And then we have a little bit of Malabar spinach back here. We stuck a couple of them here because this is where we had our cucumbers last year. We figured the Malabar would run up this trellis and would give us, always gives a fresh green leaf to eat with something. And then we have the, this is the Lola banana peppers back here. We stuck a couple of them in here. Looks like the squash going to get them until they get up. Yeah, they better hurry up. The squash is going to catch up with them. But these cool nights, peppers just don't like these cool nights we're having. And then we have our multiplying onions down here. They're, they have gone, a lot of them going to seed. Won't be long until they'll all start dying back and I'll be ready to forlorn take them out of the ground and have them ready for this coming year. This right here is a wild raspberry, rasp, it's R-A-S-P, raspberry that we got from an elderly lady several years ago. We had it in our arbor outside. We had to do some moving of stuff around. So we put them in pots and brought them in here. They're loving it in the greenhouse. They're fixing to make berries. Fixing to make berries. So I don't know what I'm going to do here. We're excited. We have another squash plant over here in the corner. The squash on it is doing wonderful. Look how it's blooming guys. Look at that. And this gets rained on because it blows in the sides. So we, we're not going to pick those right now. Now we have our tree here. Now this is a bay leaf tree. Like you get bay leaves from the grocery store that you cook with out of. We're trying to get it growing good. We've got some Malabar spinach coming up all around it. We're going to have to get out of that pot and get it transplanted. Now we did have a little bit of a problem here. We had one of our pots here. We planted this seedless grape in it and it started dying. And I kind of had a suspicion that one of these pots had some Grazon soil in it. So I took all the soil out of the pot. I put this back in the pot and I'm not sure whether this one's going to make it or not. The Grazon may have got it. I'm not a hundred percent sure. These are our Egyptian walking onions. I found them growing off over on the edge of the woods. So I just kind of stuck them in here and they're already done growing up and putting on babies on the top. So they're doing real good. This is our other seedless grape that's actually trying to take off. This one seems to be doing pretty decent right now. It's not showing a lot of signs of any kind of problems. We do have a few little weeds, like I told you before, weeding. I love weeding in a greenhouse. It's amazing. Just this fast and I'm through. I love it. We put more of the multiplying onions here. Now the multiplying onions here are going to serve a twofold part. One is to deter, it's like a companion plant. They're deterring insects from around our trees and our grapes and stuff here. Now these are our peaches. These two here are the empress peach of this tree. And this one is a dwarf peach. Guys, this has got peaches on it. We're excited about that. They're all over it is peaches. It don't matter where you look, there's peaches in there everywhere. We're excited about that. They're all on the ends of these limbs up in here. I mean, just peaches, peaches, peaches. Here we have a rasp. This is a tame raspberry. Now we've never been able to grow a tame raspberry here that the disease doesn't just ruin it. We got this one from Grower's Solutions. It is trying to put on some berries. I will say that, but I look at the leaves and I'm beginning to see the disease beginning to hit the leaves. And I don't know whether it'll make it or not, but we'll see. All I'm going to do is a little bit of checking here because I noticed the way the leaves look is showing me that there's a nutrition deficiency, maybe magnesium or something like that. I'm going to look it up and see. Could be a little bit of nitrogen and I'm going to try to amend that and see if I can get it. Now this is not a thornless. This one has thorns on it. This right here is the first time in my life I've ever tried to grow one of these. This is called a colomer apple. It doesn't make limbs like a regular apple tree does. It just grows the stem up and the apples grow right against the trunk of the little tree. I'm going to try to train it up to the top up here and maybe get it on top of one of these rails up here and see if I can't just let it grow that way. And guys, I just got to try it and see if it works. I've never grown a colomer apple before. This here is a miniature blueberry. We've got it in the high tunnel here. I'm trying to see how it's going to take off. This year it's doing really good. It's starting to come out, putting on a lot of new blooms in here. From this point forward, we start our tropical part of the high tunnel and we have a kumquat tree here. Now these kumquats are ready to pick and ready to eat, but Wanda and I are not going to pick and eat them because when we bought the tree, they were already on it as little ones and the tree had been sprayed heavy with a chemical to prevent bugs and anything from eating it. So we won't eat the fruit this year. Maybe next year we will. But this pot was one of the pots that I was raising my freedom raspberries in last year and I dug them up and replanted them on the other side of the greenhouse. And guys, look what, if there's a piece of root left in the ground, we have new berries coming up out of here. And what I'll be doing is I'll be digging these up and replanting them to expand our freedom blackberries. This here is our Kalamondon orange. When we first started this spring, the whiteflies came out and hit it pretty hard. I put their little sticky things up here, totally eradicated the whitefly problem. They just went away completely. Plus I planted the Egyptian walking onions in here with it and the citrus smell that it gives off based on the onion smell has confused the insects to a point where we're not having any insect problems with it. This is our Meyer lemon. It is putting on new leaves here. I'll look for it to start blooming here before long. We shouldn't have a problem with that. This here is our Owari satsuma. It has done started putting on new leaves now. I figure at some point it's going to start blooming here in the very near future. We also have one in the background over here. It's done got to be a lot larger. It's doing really good. We have one of our herbs growing in a pot here. It's done rooted into this pot. I feel it as I move the pot. Yeah, we may have to move it. It's doing pretty good. We have our dwarf banana here. Now guys, this shows you the difference. We talked about this last year. This banana and this banana were exactly the same age. It planted at exactly the same time. This one was planted in the high tunnel. This one was planted outside. I dug it up. It spent all year outside and got no bigger than that. This one in the high tunnel got to be this big. It was actually bigger than that. It was bigger than this, but the freeze knocked it back. That told me that I needed to get the one from outside and bring it inside and grow them in the high tunnel because they're just going to do better. Now I'm getting pups started on this one. It looks like we're going to be able to dig a couple of pups up off of this one and get them transplanted and have even more dwarf bananas. How great would that be to have your own fresh bananas? Now over here is another Kalamondon orange. We have it here. I have the Egyptian walking onion planted by it also. I like the weed as I go. Another banana that was outside that he brought in. Yep, brought that one in. Here we have our, this looks like spearmint. Yeah, I believe it is. Yes, this is spearmint. I have a dwarf Meyer lemon below it. Isn't that amazing? It's putting out leaves. It's putting leaves out. When we got it, we first thought it was dead, but it's actually starting to put a few leaves on and starting to grow. And here I have my Hamlin sweet orange and I have little oranges on it. Look at them guys. Look at all the little oranges on here. It's amazing. Maybe we'll have a few oranges on this one. Here we have our Fuji apples. We're going to try the Fujis in the high tunnel here. I don't know whether they will work or not. They have a little bit higher chill hours than the other ones and they are a full-size tree or semi-dwarf tree. I'm going to keep them cut back. The company told me that if I cut them back that they would do fine in the pots in the high tunnel. So we're going to see how it works. We've got three of them and then we come down here. We have three Red Haven peach trees here. They're semi-dwarfs that I'm going to keep cut back to grow in the high tunnel here. And we have one of last year's banana peppers here with it. And I've got to pick these. Look at that. Lunch. They're going to go with lunch today. I think there might be another one down in there. There is. This is one that I cut off and saved the plant because it had green on it. Yeah. And just left a little green and we've already got peppers. This is last year's pepper. In April. Yes, we're picking peppers from it in April already. How amazing is that? Then we come down here and I have a Santa Rosa plum in here that I've got growing up. I'm going to be keeping it pruned back when it gets up to a certain height here and just let it bush out. And then right beside it, I have another pollinator, which is a dwarf plum here. This one is a dwarf Mount Royal plum. We're going to be using it as a pollinator for this. And guys, once again, these were tubs that I had my Freedom blackberries in and little tiny pieces of the root got left in there. And look at this. They're coming up everywhere in the pot. Look at this one. It's done growed all up into the tree here. That one's got to be moved. Yep. They're going to have to be moved. This one here, look at this little blackberries. That tells me that we are going to have an abundance of blackberries this year. Now look at that. Just that quick. We need the pot, nothing to it whatsoever. This is a sweet Southern cherry. So we're going to take this and we're going to, I don't know how cherries will do down here. I've never seen anybody grow a larger cherry. Now we have wild cherries, but wild cherries here, we try to keep them cut down because they carry diseases that attack all your other fruit trees. So I'm curious to see whether this tame cherry here will, this is a Barbados cherry in that family, how it will do in the high tunnel or whether it caused disease on my other trees or not. We're just going to try to see how it works. And then we have a couple more pots here of the Egyptian walking onions. I have a dill from last year coming up in here. This is one of the seeds fell on the ground and it's come up. We're going to leave it and let it go. And then over here in the corner, we have a mullein growing over here in the corner and the petunias has taken over our onions in here. So I'm going to have to wait and see how that works out. We may have to do something there because they're, they may be taking completely over. This was a bell pepper, a California bell pepper. It is beginning to sprout out at the ground down here. Here's another California bell pepper. It is beginning to sprout out up high. It's got little blooms in it right there. Little pepper is getting ready to form. This is a red roaster pepper and look at it. Blooms. This was a giant pepper tree last year. Look at that. So we cut it back. It made it through the freeze. We didn't try to protect it or nothing and it done just fine. This is the freedom black berries and look at this. Look at the size of that berry. Break. That's a big old berry. It ain't quite ready yet. It will be tomorrow. By tomorrow, it'll be ready by tomorrow. But look at that. Isn't it beautiful? And look, there's another one turning. Yep. And look how many is on this. I mean this whole tree. Look at the new stalk come out. I topped it the other day because I didn't want to get any taller than this. I want it to branch out so I can tie it to the arbor here. I'm going to tie it back up like this, you know. All right, let me get over here. And we have a bunch of these. Yeah, this is actually three plants that we got. We got them from Grower Solutions. And they're all... These are new canes that's coming out this year. They'll be tied up next year. The berries will be on these canes right here. But look at the berries. Look at the berries guys. We have and I mean just a ton of berries on these things. We don't have to go to the woods and pick blackberries. That's what's amazing. We don't have to go hunt the wild blackberries out of the woods. We can come in here and pick these big juicy sweet ones. It's just amazing to me how well they're doing. I mean and then we're back to our onions here. Now we have garlic planted along the outside. We have garlic planted along the inside. Now this is elephant garlic. We don't grow the other garlics here because it's don't get cold enough to have a bulb that's decent enough to use. So we're keeping the elephant garlic along the inside and the outside. We have the Texas legend onions down through the middle. That's what I'm holding in my hand here. We thin them out and as we thin them out the other onions will have an opportunity to grow larger. And we're going to take these now and we're going to take them over to the other high tunnel that has the cattle panels in it. And we're going to be hanging them in there to let them dry guys. I'm going to take this one in the house for us to eat today. Okay guys this is the yellow wax beans that we picked here. The Cherokee ones. We've got a little asparagus and a couple of peppers in there. I can see that the meal today is going to be a great meal. So we have two buckets now full. I'm going to lay the onion over in there. The onion will go with the squash that we're going to be cooking. And we're going to head out. We've got one more little project we're going to take care of out here and take you along to. And I hope you enjoy that one. All right we're here at our spaghetti squash. These things got so many spaghetti squash on it ain't even funny. We had 70 mile an hour winds here this morning guys. So kind of damaged up a little bit here. But look at all the spaghetti squash. Look at that here. I mean there's probably 20 on this one plant right here. And not to mention the ones that's done went bad. And the plants don't even look good. I mean that's the thing about it. We've had these cold mornings but they're hanging in there. We got some little squash here and there. A couple over here. I see this plant had already began to put roots on right here. And the wind this morning jerked it up out of the ground. I gotta be careful that I don't break it. Look at all the look at all that squash. I mean that's a lot of squash. And then this one right here it's trying to run off down the hill. Maybe it'll warm up here before long and these things will kick in and it not be so cold in the mornings. Because they these spaghetti squash don't like cold weather. Okay guys this is our indigo series blue cherry tomatoes. I think we're gonna have plenty of cherry tomatoes for salads. I really do. And this is not weeds you're looking at in here. This is carrots. This is the corroda carrot. And we occasionally from last year we have a sunflower coming up. And it just happened to be coming up in the cage here with them. I think that's pretty amazing. We have a few little weeds in here we'll have to come along. Some of this wood sorrel. We have to get that out of here. But guys there's the carrots serve a dual purpose here. The roots on the carrots run deep in the ground and break the soil up so that the tomato roots can expand and not be packed down in there. The carrots and the tomatoes are companions. They both give off something that the other one likes. The tomatoes deter the carrot fly from getting in here. The carrot maggot from getting in here. And vice versa you know the carrots help out the tomatoes. And it's just amazing to watch both of them grow together. And once the carrots get up to be big and lush in here. Then what will happen is they will shade the ground. And we won't have to worry about the dirt splattering up on the bottom leaves of the tomato plants. The ground will stay moist because the carrots keep the ground shaded. Guys it's all part of an ecosystem or as we really would call it a permaculture type system. And what I've done is I stuck a carrot over here in the corner from last year. Right in the corner so that we would be able to see if we have one to go to seeds because carrots are a biennial. They seed every second year. So we're going to try one this year and just see if it will actually go to seed. But now we've got a whole bed of these things. And quite a few sunflowers. We've got quite a few sunflowers here. We've got another one that came up right here. We're going to try to keep them inside the cage so that they grow up with the tomato plant. Look how tall that one is. That's a nice one back there in the back. That tomato plant is actually blooming back there. It is. It's doing really good. Okay these are some strawberry plants that we got in. Kind of a last minute thing. We cleaned the bed out here and we came out here wanted it and just stuck them in the ground right quick. We haven't had a chance to actually weed and put down any straw or anything yet. And they put on berries. Some of berries are actually no good. But there are some like this one here. It's a really nice berry. Now we'll have to wash them because they've got dirt on them from not having any straw down. But that's okay. We'll take them inside and wash them off real good. These things are some beautiful berries. Look at that. They just got to be washed. They're putting on babies already. Look at this. Wow. And part of these came from grower solutions. The other part came from gurneys. I hung this one over to the side. This is our prize. Keeping it out of the dirt. I was keeping it out of the dirt. It was the one I could do that. Yep. Alright as we forage around the place here, underneath our apple tree here, we have some dewberries that are actually getting ripe. We're going to mix them in with that. They all got to be washed. We're not going to worry about it. I'll look around see if I see any more over in there. Right here. Oh there's one hiding underneath that. Oh yeah. Okay. Grab you a handful of those garlic chives for lunch. I need them with our lunch. Like five or six. Alright we're over at the off-grid cabin. We have our wild huckleberries. We're going to add them in with our fruit salad. Out of the wild. These taste like little mini blueberries. Oh they're actually they're better than a blueberry. Like quite powerful punch. We got that really. Oh look up in here. Beautiful. Things are everywhere. And these grow wild. And we just leave the trees and pick them. Well it's part of the permaculture. They grow up underneath the other trees. You used the p word. Oh I did use it. But look at that. Man. We sat here yesterday with Permapasture's farm and ate these things like crazy. They loved them. They enjoyed them. I think it's their first time to actually have wild huckleberries. Wow. Yeah. We're gonna have potatoes to go with our lunch. We're gonna have potatoes to go with our meal. I really don't need a shovel. Ground's wet enough huh? Ground's wet enough I can just dig my fingers in there until I feel. And I'm just gonna get one from each plant. Like eight inches deep down there. And they're not real big yet. No well these don't get very big. Oh that's right those are the small ones. Yeah. Ah. I'm just gonna take this whole plant up. Here come one. You can't you can't tell Not unless you feel them huh? Yeah you gotta feel the mud to make sure that there's not see like that there's a potato there. Makes them hard to dig. Yeah really hard. In mud anyway. But you got a handful of potatoes. Got a handful of potatoes. I think this will be great for us. To add to lunch. You ready to ride? Ready to ride. I was gonna add a few mulberries to it. Nothing like good old mulberry. Oh my hand is all messed up. Having to pick out over the water. Yeah. Danny's newest edition. We were at the hardware store. Y'all $150. You cannot beat it. Danny couldn't have made it for that. So he's gonna paint it but he's gonna let it dry for quite a while. Yeah it's got to cure for a while. And we figured awesome place to just come and sit. It's under the mulberry trees here and under the crabapple tree and he's still picking berries. Frogs are hitting the water. Yeah I saw that in the background. Oh I didn't bring my gun and there is a moccasin. Okay we gotta have it. Dang. And that was a moccasin. You can't have those in a pond if you're gonna have kids fishing around it. Guys I know that was kind of unexpected and I apologize if it bothered you but one thing we do not contend with is water moccasins around the pond because we have grandkids here. We're down here just picking our berries foraging for our dinner today and I happened out the corner of my eye I happened to see his head sticking up out of the water right here and this is the first one we've ever seen in the pond and I have a theory if you nip something in the bud you know you can take care of it real quick like you don't ever give it a chance to multiply. Thank you for coming along with us today here at Deep South Homestead on our journey for our food for a day. Guys in the near future that is what it's going to become is you're going to have to get out and forage for your food and if you haven't designed a ecosystem that is food friendly or a permaculture system that is food friendly then it's going to be very difficult probably in the future to be able to survive and hopefully as the summer comes on and the spring fades away we will be able to show each and every one of you guys some new things that we have going on here at the homestead and how we go about foraging for our food and maybe encourage you to do the same for yourself. So thank you guys from Deep South Homestead.