Incredible Harvest At The Permaculure Farm, 100% Organic Real Food

What's going on growers? It's James Prigioni coming to you live from Jersey. Over the last month there have been a lot of improvements, a lot of growth, and a lot of harvests at the farm. Today I'm going to show you the progression and although it's November, the growth and harvests make it feel like it's spring. Fall is in full swing. The leaves are dropping, the temperatures are dropping, but the growth is popping. We'll start things out by showing you the section that I just added in, all the new beds. Then we'll come back to this area and I'll give you an update on these veggies. I mean the growth is unbelievable. Then we'll grab a harvest of some of these prehistoric sized veggies. Last month I mentioned I was adding the second kitchen garden section in this area right here. I decided to add wooden raised beds that I built myself. They are four foot by eight foot, essentially the same size as the metal beds I put in the other section. I have made beds similar to these in the past and I really love them. After using a hand truck to help me place them, I realized the area was not as level as I hoped it would be. This bed you see in the front here is laying on the ground. I can't drop it lower or I'd have to dig it into the ground. So I decided to raise the other beds up. If I dug down, the bed would look goofy being kind of half in the ground, especially after I woodchipped the area. And since these are wooden beds, it's best to keep them up out of the dirt and also out of the woodchips. This will help them dry out better and not rot as quickly. I propped the beds up temporarily with scrap wood and bricks until they were all level, one with another. Then, filled the beds in with some natural soil as backfill. This way the beds have a foundation to rest on. At the same time, my fall crops in the metal beds were really taking off and were consistently kicking out harvests. Some of the heads of lettuce were picture perfect and it was just the time to harvest. The bronze mignonette is one of my favorite varieties. I also grabbed a purple bok choy that was ready. I love the color of this one, but it did have a few bug bites on it. And I harvested a smaller variety of a green bok choy. This one has white stems on it, and it also had a few bug bites. So I figured I should spray my plants with some organic BT to kill off the cabbage worms. Then I made sure to keep my beds covered with insect netting to keep all the pests out. After harvesting my fall veggies, I make sure to always have another cold hardy crop on deck to replace what I take out. This way there's always something growing and we aren't wasting space or time. Tatsoi is a great option because it does so well in the cold and doesn't mind growing through even a bit of snow. The fruit tree leaves were still green at this time and were growing well. There was an insane amount of dragonflies doing work eating insects. I'd never seen anything like it before. But let's get back to the wooden beds. I have some moles around here as you can see so I wanted to make sure to add some hardware cloth to keep the moles from coming up under my beds and snacking on my veggies. Adding the hardware cloth to these wooden beds will be easier than the metal I ordered cloth that was 5 feet wide so I could simply roll it out and attach it to the beds with u-nails. Just gotta be careful not to hit your thumb. Then I only had to cut off a small amount and left a slight overhang, flip the bed back Back over into its spot. There we have it protected and ready to be filled with some high quality soil. At this point the temperatures at night were dropping so I made sure to cover my metal raised beds with row covers to keep the frost from settling on my plants. Even though they are cold hardy this will still reduce the amount of stress on them. The plants were huge in the beds and it was time to harvest a lot more food. I grabbed more harvests of arugula and look at the swiss chard plant. How massive the leaves are and all the growth. The stalks on this thing are unbelievable. So productive and strikingly beautiful. It was late October now and it was time to fill the beds and get some more stuff planted now that I placed them and got the hardware cloth in. I also made sure to place bricks under the four corners of my beds and at the center of the eight foot side to prevent the bed from sinking over time. Seeing how well all my plants were growing in the metal beds, I decided to go with my classic homemade soil mix for this bed. Having the tractor makes the job of dropping in the soil much easier than using a wheelbarrow. I used 2x12s for the sides, which will give me about 12 inches of quality soil, which is ideal for annuals. If you're an experienced gardener, you know what crop I'm planting to put in this bed here. Mid to late October is the perfect time to get some garlic planted. After cracking open the bulbs and separating the cloves, I had a bunch of seed garlic ready to plant. The compost component I use for my soil is a mushroom compost and doesn't have a lot of nutrition in it, so I added just a little bit of fertilizer. Not too much because I don't want a lot of growth right now, but just a bit, and in spring I'll add some more fertilizer. While it's not necessary to plant garlic as systematic as I did, I wanted to get good spacing and get the biggest harvest out of here that I possibly could. Plus, it's just nice to spend some time outside. After watering the garlic in, I made sure to add a thick layer of straw as a mulch to help insulate the cloves and keep them happy. I also had a few crops that needed to be harvested with all the beautiful sunny days we were having. I grabbed a huge head of green magic broccoli. The stalk was so thick it was tough to cut. But I finally got it and the head was absolutely perfect. It doesn't get better than this. And I made sure to get some cilantro and also some arugula planted in the spot where I removed the broccoli to keep the future harvests coming. Next it was time to wood chip the area around the raised beds to keep the weeds down and make it easy to maintain. I decided to dig out some of the dirt around the raised bed. This way when I add a wood chip mulch it will be even with the bottom of the bed instead of up against the side of it. I like to roll out some contractors paper before getting the wood chips down to block out any light from getting to the weed seeds and to suffocate anything growing. This is more necessary if you have a lot of grass or weeds already growing but I figured it wouldn't hurt to do it anyways. The wood chips will also help me level out the whole area and fill in any Any low spots. I won't have to worry about drainage or areas of water pooling up because my soil is essentially all sand. And here is what the second kitchen garden section looks like now. All wood chipped, beds in, leveled, and garlic planted. I decided to go with some wood raised beds in this section because I already had metal. This way I can have a little bit of the best of both worlds. you'll notice the wood chips they don't go much higher than the base of the bottom of the bed but i still have a few inches of them and it matches up well with the strawberry patch here so there's not like a big drop off i'm really happy with how it came out let's actually go over to the section where i have the metal beds we'll grab some harvests of some massive veggies and i got a bunch of cabbages ready first off look at the growth in these beds i mean it's Really encouraging to see. The kind of growth we're getting is something you would get in like spring or summer. We have had some beautiful days and today is one of those, but it's just amazing with the level of growth we have in here. And let's grab some harvests. Let's start out with this one right here. The Chinese yellow cabbage. Look at the size of it overall. It's huge. It's going to be heavy. And look at the beautiful yellowing on the center there. This is a really cool one and it grows relatively quickly. I think it was only like about like 50 or 70 days. I don't even know how I'm going to cut it out with a pruner because if you come down here look at this look at the size of that base that is unbelievable all right let's see if I can get somewhere with the root zone harvesting this kind of stuff is so fun and then oh yeah there we go checking this out oh my gosh it's unbelievably heavy unbelievably heavy let me pull off some of these outer leaves to get a better kind of view of it look at that real food To go from a seed to something this heavy and this much food it's why we love gardening and to be able to harvest this stuff in November if you stick with it the garden season just never seems to end. Let's grab some more stuff come around the other way. You got to see the size of these cauliflower leaves here and you'll notice we've got some little small bok choys that are growing. We've got some more mustard greens here coming up and we've even got some claytonia hiding back here. This has got to be one of the biggest leaves I've ever seen on a cauliflower. Look at the size of it. I have relatively big hands. Look at this. Look at the size of this leaf. And the cauliflowers aren't heading up yet, but soon we'll be getting them. And it's really nice to have the cabbages come, the broccolis, and then the cauliflowers a little later. Let's actually grab a cabbage right over here. So this looks like a little bit of a smaller variety. It might be the pareo, off the check. But you can see it had a few bites here. But that's okay overall. It's nice and dense. It's perfect time to harvest. So we'll grab this one. Yeah let me see if I can see the variety here. I'm sure it's in here somewhere but it's buried under all the straw. Excellent cabbage. Gonna make some fantastic snacks out of this one. We pull off these outer leaves which we still could use. But I just want to show you the cabbage. Look at that. Dense. Incredibly dense. Really high quality. Love that. Let's grab a broccoli right next to me over here. This is the green magic broccoli. This is by far, I mean, I just love this variety so much. It does so well for me and the heads get huge. Look at that. And I'll show you after I harvest this, there's other like side shoots that I'll leave in that will get little additional harvest from that as well. So let me just come, come down here. Look, look at the, look at the size of the stalk. I probably shouldn't even use this. The size of this thing is crazy. It's going to be hard to cut, to cut out. I'll just keep working at it though. Oh yeah, this is crazy. And we could use these leaves if we want to. That's a big head. Second big broccoli of the season. Look at the size compared to my hand. Holy moly. You just love to see it. And coming here now, look at this. This whole shoot here is like a little mini broccoli. There's another one over here. It's already heading up. You can see a little broccoli head on it. So we're gonna leave this in for now, not replace it, and get some of those additional future harvests. Look at the kale here. Look at the beauty of that. Oh my gosh. Striking. The shine. The sheen. Another cauliflower. Then come over here. We've got another cabbage ready to harvest. A different variety. This is, to me, this is looking like the Brunswick and it's tight and ready to go as well. So we'll grab this one. And then what I like to do is I'll plant a number of different cabbages that all on the same day that take different lengths of time to go from seed to harvest. This way we get some earlier varieties, like the Foreo, and then we get some later ones. Which I'll show you in just a little bit. But look at this. I'll take just one more leaf here to show you. Perfect cabbage. Dense, organic, homegrown. I mean, there's only so many things you can say about it. But it looks like art. And it tastes like something even better. And right here, we've got another Asian green. This looks like it's probably a bok choy. Big one, though. Look at the base of that thing. So we can grab that today. Why not? So much food. Good soil. Good fertilizer. Good timing. I mean, you get a lot of food. And then I showed you earlier the Swiss chard, which is just incredible looking. So I've shown you that one earlier. We'll move to some others. Look at all the sides of this arugula too. Needs to be harvested. Then let's swing over to the other bed. As you can see, all these beds are incredibly productive and doing amazing. Look how packed this is. There's like no open space. You almost don't even need a actual mulch because you've got the living mulch of how densely it's planted. This tatsoi performing really well. Happy about that and then here's one of the cabbages that's a bit later. Takes a little longer. A nice purple cabbage. So it's just starting to begin heading up. It's still got a little bit of time on it so we'll let that one go and then I'll come around the other side. I want to show you just a couple more things. Come over here. More arugula that I need to harvest. There's been a plethora of it. I've had to have like six or seven harvests off the one plant and then look at the color of the of the mustard greens. Look at that. Isn't that amazing? it's just so beautiful and they're so productive it's hard for me to even keep up on it then we've got the really really late producer this is the Russian kale these ones do so well late in the season so we'll have the tatsoi the kales all these things producing just incredibly late for us so this way the food just never stops coming with the first two kitchen garden areas all in it's time to move to the next up this terrace here i'm gonna grow stuff on these terraces that go a little more vertical so the plan is on the right here i'm going to grow some cucumbers and some pole beans in this area and then to the left of me here this is where we'll grow a bunch of tomatoes this whole area will be dedicated to tomatoes growing vertically it's going to be really cool to have a shot similar to where you are or even to the right we have all the beds and stuff in the front then you have the taller vertical plants all in the back here so it's just going to Be super productive and also just paint a beautiful picture. I'm happy that I got this whole entire bed planted with garlic at just the right time. It's so much fun to come out here and get some work done, especially when it's nice out and a little bit crisp in the morning. Some of the Frost dropping and then to just be out here it's honestly just such a blessing and I'm happy with a lot of the progress that's been made. I've done everything myself by hand besides actually the help from the tractor so it feels good to see things come together to go out there to do a little work and then to see the progression over time and then to see how well the fall garden did and how hopeful I am about that winter garden. I mean I can see harvesting things all the way up to Basically next spring. Some of that stuff is incredibly cold hardy and it's nice to be able to have that fresh herbs right out the back door, but also just fresh veggies right out the back door. Able to grab it, organic, barely even have to wash it. It's so nice. That's today's video growers. Thanks for watching. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you got something out of it. I hope you truly got some value or encouragement or inspiration from this video. The best thing we can do is just go out there day by day, add the little investments that will just pay off in dividends in the future. And now that I'm getting a lot of these things in the amount of planting area is just seems to be doubling every month and I'm excited to fill all these areas as we get the kitchen garden areas up top too. It's just going to be a true paradise. The fruit trees I'll show you in the future those are doing really well. We're going to do some pruning over the winter. I still got to do some work on the strawberries. The blueberries have done fantastic and next year just looks like Looks like it's going to be an incredible year, but we're not going to stop working on the little things to make that make really big differences you know that little pebble you throw that makes a little ripple that turns into the big wave that's what it's all about. I want to send a thank you to one of our new channel members Jude Mueller thanks for being a part of team grow thanks for having your hand in everything we're doing out here we'll catch you guys at another one real soon.