The Harvest Begins at Our Self-Sufficient Island Homestead

They are migrating. They know that the winter is coming. They're not stupid. I didn't plant chamomile here this year, but last year I had it growing here, and it has been making seeds. And now we have a lot of chamomile here, but I don't mind because I love it as a tea. Some of the seed turnips look ready to be collected. So we're gonna put them. Still hang and dry. We need to collect them, but they don't drop the seeds here on the vegetable garden. Here will be plenty of seeds for the next year. How tall the peas have grown! I cannot even reach the highest. We've got some parsnip seeds here, that we need to collect before they start to fall on the ground. We're gonna start the garlic harvest now. The end of the garlic leaves are starting to dry out, so it's time to do the harvest. Take one for an example. It's looking really good. This year the garlic harvest looks good, even though I just picked a few ones and there's a lot of them left. I'm happy with what I see. There's some potato growing in here. Not on purpose, though. We let some of the garlics flower. On purpose because we wanted to have these small seeds that the garlics make. We will plant these also this autumn later. There's a belief that if you let the garlics do the flowers and do these, the garlic itself is gonna be small. But let's see if that's true. This one was a bit smaller than the others. Whoa! But these ones are huge. Let's see if I can carry all of them at once. They are heavy. Whoa! These are the biggest clubs I've ever seen. At the size of this club, it's huge. What we're going to do with the garlic is that we're going to peel to get rid of most of the soil. And then we're gonna cut off the roots. Okay, so here's the last garlic, and then we're ready to start the braiding. These ones I'm gonna make into braid, and here's. The ones we need to eat first, since they're some damaged. They don't last that long. It's been three years since I did this the last time. I don't really remember if I'm doing it right, but. I'll give it a try. It's starting to look a bit like a braid. The winter is coming, and it's time to start harvesting the root vegetables. They need to be harvested before the ground freezes. And put in the root cellar to store for the winter. So today we're going to start from the potatoes, and this year we're going to do something a little bit different. We're going to prepare the beds. For the next year, so we have less stuff to do in the spring. We will be making the potato fields into. Garden beds and using the new tool to mulch it, so there will be very few weeds in the springtime, and we will save a lot of hassle and extra work by that. Let's begin the harvesting of potatoes from this area. We have four rows here. Two of them are halfway harvested already. During the summer, we have already cut the stems, so we just need to harvest the potatoes, weed it, and make two beds here, and then mulch it. So let's get into work. My helpers coming. We're gonna start from gently weeding the area where we already have took some potatoes, so we don't bury the weeds in there. Can you do some weed management? No. Like this. It's time to start harvesting. As always, we're gonna weed as we go. I think the potato harvest is going to be amazing this year. Last year we got like three or four of these buckets from the whole field and the other crop field. We already have half a bucket, and I've gone like this much of one row. We have like twenty times more so far. Huge. Wow. How heavy they are. I don't know, 100 grams each. One meal from two potatoes. I remember clearing this area from tree roots in spring. We already have big ones like this. These tubers were our summer potatoes, meant for eating early in the summer. Now we're going to harvest these two rows. It's different variety planted at a little bit different time. Let's see what size they are. We haven't really harvested any of those yet. 嗯哼。 These are very good size as well. That was too big for your hand. Take the smaller ones. We do rotational vegetable gardening, which means we rotate the plants that we grow. On the crop field, we never grow the same plant twice in a row. Next year, we also don't do like a deep tilling. This is the most we turn the soil when we harvest the potatoes. And it marks the end of the cycle. It's a five-year rotation, and next year we're going to grow potatoes on the other side of this crop field. They are migrating. They know that the winter is coming. They're not stupid. We better hurry up. This might be just potatoes, but man, I'm happy to see this after the miserable harvest last year. This is a lot of food for our family. Next year we will be growing potatoes on the other side of the field, and this area I think will be for carrots. Turning of the soil can be considered as good and bad. The good thing is that it adds oxygen on the soil, and the bad thing is that it disturbs the balance of bacteria and mycelium in the soil. Everything about gardening is about the health of the soil, and the microbiome. Is the key thing, so we don't want to disturb it every year. Completely, we don't want the unaerated bacteria to come to the surface, and the air, oxygen-related bacteria to go to the bottom where there's no oxygen. So that's why we do the no-till methods, and it has proven to be working concept. My Klaus is finishing the potato harvest. I'm gonna start sorting out the potatoes. We're gonna put green potatoes to the side. And then, first and second class, we're gonna eat the second class first. And leave the first class for later in the winter. These ones that have gotten some damage while harvesting, we're gonna eat today. Since the potato has been in the sunlight, it's it has. This compound, called solanine in Finnish, I don't know what it's in English, but. I hope everyone knows that it's not edible. And these green potatoes are going to be seed potatoes next spring. This year we're gonna need way more of these buckets for the potatoes. That's a good thing. Goes to Gryffindor, Slytherin. Gryffindor. Here we have first class potatoes. And second class, that we're gonna eat first. And only a few green potatoes here. And we still have more potato growing on the other field. We're gonna harvest them later. On this crop field, the potato harvest is done. It's time to continue. Very good yield this year. As always, I'm gonna mark the path. Flatten out the beds. I'm gonna make a path here. Good, good white bath is a good bath. Before we mulch this area, else it's gonna form the beds. And it's always good idea to collect some rocks to better the land. Everything will start growing better once you take care of the land. We add organic matter, remove stones, and year by year the soil gets better. All of a sudden, it feels like spring because it's so warm, and we're preparing the beds. We normally do in the spring. Feels funny. It was so cold this morning. Here are the damaged potatoes we're gonna eat today. Go and wash them. Klaus uses a drill for cleaning the potatoes, but I use normal. I've actually never seen a red potato like this. That's green. I wonder, is it really green or some other color? Ah, just when I said it, I think this might be the green one. Yeah, when I actually take the skin off, it's green underneath. Okay. Okay, it's time to collect some mulch, and for that job, we're gonna use the multrator and multrator. Is the sponsor of this video? This here, ladies and gentlemen, is the Moverator S1, a four-wheel drive electric lawnmower that can do other things as well. Today we're going to collect some leaves with it. To collect some leaves, we're gonna use the mulching blade. It has better suction. It sucks up the leaves better. So let's install the blade now. Looks like we're ready to go. This remote-controlled mower can do many things. It's not just to mow your lawn. It can also collect some leaves. You can even tow some stuff with it, and because it's an electric. Four wheel drive with just pretty cool towing capabilities. There's also snow plow kit to it, which I'm going to test later this year, once we get some snowfall. We have the auto dump back installed here, which is a great attachment because we want to collect all the mulch, and dump a lot of it close to our crop fields. Our yard is so uneven, and we're having the mower here in such a low setting that I keep getting stuck in these bumps and especially on these surfacing roots. And it's because the blade housing gets stuck in there, and we lose the grip on the wheels. For this purpose, we have the high suction blade, so we can lift up the housing and not get stuck so easily, and still efficiently suck all the leaves. Let's try out the high suction blade if it sucks the wet leaves even better. It's been raining for a couple days, and everything is so wet. So there's a bit of leaves stuck on the ground. So, let's see. I love the fact that this remote control mower is electric. It means no oil changes. It means. No gasoline. It means we can run it with solar. Charges up in something like ninety minutes. Here we have the regular blade, the mulching blade, and the high suction blade. They all have different profile and different function. I'm really keen to try this out. Let's change it on. See how it works. Standard kit includes the standard wheels, manual grass collection bag. A regular and a mulching blade and a mulching plug for the grass. It is a beast, and it goes absolutely anywhere, and does a great job. But if you have some problems, climbing some steep slopes, for example, you can replace the original tires with these deformable tires. With these, it will go absolutely anywhere. But I found that they are kind of violent in the ground, especially if you turn a lot. So I prefer to use the original tires on our lawn because we don't have that steep slopes. All right. Let's continue. I'm very happy how it collects all the leaves and how it makes this very nice mulch for us. We're gonna add these to our crop fields to boost in the nutrients and to control the weeds. There's a bit of grass in there and a bit of everything. I think it's perfect. We were able to do such a great job. We have huge piles of mulch right where we will need it, next to the crop field. Uh, obviously there's just more and more leaves coming, so I'm not trying to do a perfect job today. And I can't reach under the buildings or close to edges with this machine, so it doesn't replace leaf blower or raking, altogether. But it definitely made this process easy and fun. I'm now able to do this in one day. Without getting completely exhausted, when back in the day when I did it only with a rake, it would take two or three days to remove all the leaves from everywhere, and that would be such an exhausting job. So, yeah, I'm happy. All right. I think it's time to put this machine away. Thanks a lot for more rare for sponsoring this video. It means a ton to us. All right. Since we have these huge piles of mulch now, let's mulch these freshly formed two beds. You remember how I spoke about health of the soil earlier? This organic matter, the mulch, is one of the key things for that, because as this starts to decompose, it will attract all kinds of good stuff, some bacteria, some mycelium, earthworms, and so on, and all of this will be released. Here on the crop field, and not just the nutrients of these, but the good type of mycelium and bacteria that are beneficial for the plants, because those are the things that move the nutrients in the soil. The plants can't use all the nutrients alone; they need the help of the mycelium and the bacteria. The lingonberries are are gonna go to the freezer. And I just heard about a new trick of how to preserve apple. Is to add it, with some crushed lingonberries, so. What I'm gonna be trying out today, so it will preserve in the. Liquid of the crushed lingonberries. Nothing else needs to be added. If you have already tried this method of preserving something, Crushed lingonberries. I'd like to hear. Let me know. What you have tried and how did it go? Would be really really nice to learn. And know what's possible. There's about five liters of lemon berries here. Got a small batch. Apple lemon berry to try it out, and there's I guess about three apples. We have been also harvesting quite a bit of things growing on our yard and around in the nature. Um, here, for example, we have nettle seeds. I'm just putting into the jar. They have been drying on top of the. Masonry oven, just out here in the room temperature. We've been already heating, the masonry oven, so. It's creating a nice heat that makes the. Everything dry a bit better faster. I simply rub them in between my hands, and the seeds are formed. I find it so. Funny and at the same time sad that we have so many plants growing outside. That are full of nutrients. Meadow is a really good example. People still see nettle as a plant. That they want to get rid of, that they don't want to utilize, or. You know. Use it. This is what we got. For Nellie. We're gonna be collecting our turnip seeds that have been drying here. When we collected the seeds, I think some of them were still a bit green, but now it seems that. All of them are pretty ripe, so we're just gonna try to collect most of them. Alright, I think there's enough. The seeds are at the bottom. We're making sure that we don't have seeds left here. Quite a lot of seeds from just a few plants. We've had the potatoes drying here for a couple of days. The skin gets thicker when it's in a warm and dry place like this, so they store better. But now we're going to bring them into the root cellar because we have some cold nights coming. We don't want these to freeze because. Before we bring these to the root cellar, let's wait. Have a guess how much potatoes we will get this year. We will reveal it in the next harvest video. The first load waited. Okay, these are now waited. Remember before guessing. We have most of our potatoes still in the field. The best feeling in the world. Pushing wheelbarrow load of food into the storage. Very soon we will see how much our crop field yield in all together. We will be harvesting rest of the potatoes, the carrots, the sweet turnip. Parsnips, pretty soon, but all that will be in the second video. So stay tuned if you're interested in seeing all those being harvested. Stored in the root cellar for the winter. Of course. Thanks for watching.