The Final Big Harvest From The 2023 Garden | 1/4 Acre Homestead

Hey guys, welcome back to Steven's Parrow Homestead. I am getting my rain boots on. We're gonna go outside. It's been a little while since I have really taken a good look at the garden. I haven't harvested anything in a little while. Things have really slowed down. Fall's officially here and the temps really haven't gotten above 70 degrees, so not too much is ripening or happening out there, but I know there's some things that should be brought inside and preserved. So we're gonna see what we can find and maybe we'll take one last look around the garden, try and find some beauty yet to hold on to until next season because very soon I'm going to be ripping everything out. It's time. You can see in the background it's actually really overcast today. It's misting. We got about two inches of rain yesterday and as usual, sorry for the road noise. Maybe one day we'll live away from the road, but that is not today. I always forget to mention where I am located in these gardening videos. We're in south central Pennsylvania. The closest bigger cities would be like Harrisburg, Lebanon. Lancaster is actually about an hour and 40 minutes from us, but we are in Amish country. There's a lot of Amish around here. It's zone 6b and our first frost is coming up here pretty soon. It usually happens the first or second week of October. We'll see what happens this year. So before we do some harvesting, let's just take a quick look around and see what is still going on about a week out from October. Back here at the cottage garden there are still some flowers blooming. We've got some peppers in here that need harvesting too. There's still some blue sage salvia blooming. I will forever grow this. It really provides beautiful vibrant colors all the way up until the first frost and it's a perennial so it comes back every year which is really nice. I'm trying to invest in and start from seed more perennials that I really love because eventually you don't have to be constantly spending money. So that's blue sage salvia and down here I had a pink salvia planted which has not bloomed. It's down in here somewhere. I think this jewels of opar is shading it out but that's a perennial as well so maybe next year it will bloom for me. But this here, see the little seed pods on it? This is jewels of opar. It has this really pretty like almost lemon lime shade of green leaves that are really low lined. They don't get very tall but it sends up these really pretty bursts of these little pods. They will open. Let's see if there's any that are open right now. Not really. You can kind of see right there it opens into these little pink flowers but if you harvest them right like this and dry them upside down they will just keep these pretty like red and burgundy. There's some orange in there too pods on them and I like to use them in my fall decor around the house. So those two things are still happening. There are still a few roses blooming and a cat's tail. She's so attention greedy. Still a few roses blooming which I love. I'm savoring these. This one is Princess Alexandria of Kent by David Austin. A few pops of color yet on the butterfly bushes. There's magenta and a purple here. I'm really going to need to chop these back though so they don't take over the whole space. A few blooms yet here on this red tea rose and I love when it starts to get cooler the foliage all turns this like bronzy color. Really pretty. Got some gumfrina down here. It's just white gumfrina. Next year I'd like to grow there's like an amber gold color which I thought would be really pretty to dry. Sorry cat's tail for fall arrangements in around the house. This is also called Globe Amaranth. Really great for drying purposes. So I'm going to let these go for a while and then I'll harvest a few to keep inside. Back there I see some cayenne peppers that are ready to be harvested. My plans for that are fire cider medicinal purposes as well as perhaps some hot sauce. There is this massive Tabasco plant in here. This is one plant. It's quite large but none of them are ripening. So I'm gonna let them go until I see there's a frost in the forecast and then I will probably just harvest this entire plant and hang it upside down inside in my basement until they all ripen. I wanted to make some hot sauce with these as well. It's loaded with peppers just none of them are ripening. Raspberries are still producing although they have really slowed down. Oh there's cat. Get out of here cat. Still producing. The camera doesn't want to focus. There we go. Lots of little berries still on these canes. Here's a bit of an overview of my no dig area of the garden. We're going to be harvesting some of these leeks here soon. I see a whole bunch of banana peppers. I know there's still some ajvarski up there. I do want to go through this kale and see if there's some that hasn't been eaten alive by by worms. We shall see. There's just a few tomatoes here and there. There's a whole lot of green ones but they're probably going to have to be brought inside to ripen. The strawberry situation is out of control. There are so many runners. This isn't even the bed. This is the walkway which is now gone. The bed's back in there. I asked Heather if she wanted these runners and she said absolutely yes. So at some point here when I start to clean up the garden I am going to dig up all of the ones that have rooted and send them over to her so we can have a bit of a walkway again. I have another bed of potatoes here. I could harvest them now or I could let them go a bit longer but I want to make sure I get to them before a frost happens so no matter what they'll come up within about the next two or three weeks. There's two patches of celery we can get to today and then this here is all sweet potatoes. I might pull up a plant today just because I'm curious to see what has happened in there but usually I wait until these have yellowed and died back. We'll see if that's going to happen this year just with how the weather is looking. Still some of the double gold and the and raspberries up here. We're going to be harvesting two. They put on a nice fall flush for me. Okay look at these nasturtiums. The size of them. Let me go get my tripod so you can see them in comparison to me. You see this? This is one, two, three nasturtium plants and then there's two more behind me. Massive. Looking really beautiful although you can't see the flowers because they're buried underneath but got some celosia in here. The tomatoes are looking pretty sad. We're going to go through them but I'm probably going to be pulling them. They're just ridden with disease and behind me there's some more celery and some Brussels sprouts. Look at how pretty this pink sherbert celosia is. It comes in all of these different shades. I love it. Look at that nasturtium. Beautiful burst of color this fall. I found a massive zucchini. Looks like I'll be making some more zucchini bread. There might be one or two more in here. One of you told me when I had asked about getting my Brussels sprouts to actually form besides removing the leaves is to actually tear off the top of the plant so it stops so it stops like continuing to grow up and starts to actually produce its fruits. So I think it worked at least a little bit. I mean they're still pretty tiny. There's some bigger ones here at the bottom so we'll see. Maybe we'll harvest some of those. There's a celery patch in here I need to get to and then if I spin all the way around slowly. Where are you? Oh my did you see that? That's a big one. Oh my. That's an even bigger one. Hold please. Oops. This got a bit out of control. We'll be scraping out a bunch of seeds and maybe making some zucchini bread. I think my candy roasters are ready to be brought down. The stems are brown now and my butternut squash and I think there's a Long Island cheese over there. We're gonna grab those today too. We're gonna start harvesting. I'm gonna try and find whatever tomatoes I can and then I might let the plants go until I see a frost in the future. I don't want to like cut it so close that I'm rushing to bring all of the green tomatoes in but I also want to give them a chance out here. I just like them better when they're ripened on the vine so nothing none of them probably will ripen until then but I really don't feel like having my counters entirely full of green tomatoes right now. So I'm just gonna grab the ripe ones. I don't know how many there will be. Like I said we just got two inches of rain and these had already been on the vine for a little while. I wasn't doing my job and coming out and picking all of them so definitely seeing some splitting from all that rain. Oh this one split really bad too. See it just swells so much that the skin can't take it all and it splits. Kind of like a stretch mark but that I am not eating. That can go right to the chickens. Only a handful in the slicers. I'm seeing quite a few paste tomatoes. What are you doing? You are really fast running. I'm so fast. I have the fastest legs. That one split. You want to give that to the chickens? Yeah. Thanks. It's like a big frozen. Down into the abyss. I'm always afraid reaching into here. I'm just gonna like grab onto a spider or a worm, caterpillar, snake. I found a snake the one year I had dropped a tomato into like an abyss of leaves just like this and I grabbed a snake instead of a tomato. That traumatized me for a little bit. My goodness. Those basil plants. Oh boy. Oh my god. This is what I've gathered from the paste tomatoes in the back. There's a whole bunch of green ones. I'm gonna say probably like 50 or 60 on these. Maybe more than that. We're gonna go up front and check out the romas. Oh yes. All the ones on the ground have been eaten by something. Not surprising. If I don't get these out of the strawberry bed I'll have tons of tomatoes in here. Grow me next year. I'm gonna go find my garden gloves. This is gross. All right. That does it for tomatoes. I'm harvesting some of these rompecante squash. I still have yet to try the other 11 that I harvested. I'm gonna pick the rest of them off the vine here. The vine's pretty much dead anyways. These are not trambucino squash. I've seen a lot of people say, oh you have trambucino squash. No, they're rompecante. They're a variety all of their own. They're a hybrid so if you were to pick them when they're green and soft and much smaller you can use them as a zucchini, a summer squash, or you let them cure on the vine like this and then you can store them over the winter and use them as a winter squash. So I'm gonna grab the rest of these. While we're over here by the rompecante this is one bed of the sweet potatoes and I saw one here peeking out and it's tempting me so I I'm gonna dig up one of these just to see what happened. The soaker hose. Which one do I want to do? Let's do this. Oh that was a big spider. Probably a bad idea since it just rained and things are gonna be incredibly muddy. Oh well, I'm just doing one. I'll wash them off and I go inside and we'll eat them this week. Oh no, something has been eating this one. There's some big chunks out of there and it looks like I broke it in half. Oh I saw more. Where did they go? Yeah well maybe I can salvage some of it. I mean it would have been a decent size but now I'm wondering if I need to dig up the rest because of these bite marks. This is what happened to me last year. Uh the thing is it's supposed to rain nearly every day in the 10-day forecast so this is not really gonna dry out. Ah okay well at least these don't have any bite marks on them so I'm gonna let the rest go. I just wanted to double check and make sure that I wasn't gonna lose whatever I did get. Super anti-climactic from one plant. That's what I got. I know it's still pretty early. I can let these go longer but they're not gonna withstand a frost so I don't have that much longer to let them go. Ideally they would be yellowed and dyed back but they have not gotten there yet. I planted them early this year. You'd think they would be further along but we've had a pretty long cold stretch here. So I'm gonna let them go. Hopefully the ground dries out a little bit so they're not so messy but we shall see what becomes of my sweet potato harvest. It's starting to rain a bit. I'm gonna grab these raspberries. Hopefully they go to mush from all this rain we've been getting. I think this little friend is taking a nap. Okay do you see that? That's slightly terrifying. That massive hornet. It's about two inches long. No thank you. So my camera battery died on me and when I went inside to grab the other one I realized I never put it on the charger so it had to charge for a bit and I didn't get any more footage of the raspberry picking so sorry but that's what I ended up with. It looks like that's about all we might get now. There's a few of the canes that have a lot of new berries on them but with these lower temps I'm not sure that they're going to ripen. It'd be nice if they did because there's a whole bunch but I did get a really nice raspberry harvest this year. I think I'm up to like 15 or 16 gallons of raspberries so I'm very thankful for that. We're gonna see what we can find here in these peppers even if they're not ripe. I'm probably just gonna bring them in and let these ripen. These are not gonna ripen outside anymore not with these temps and rather than have a ton of peppers and a ton of tomatoes all at once ripening let's just do this in batches. So we're gonna grab a bunch of raspberries. So we're gonna grab whatever peppers I can find. These are those ajvarsky peppers. They should be red but they'll ripen up inside. Looks like I've got a whole bunch of jalapenos too. The basil's in here too so every time I move the leaves oh my goodness the fragrance. All right there might be some over there but I'm gonna grab all of these. These are my not-opinos. Throw in here too. Really a great year for peppers. I have so so many. More than what I actually knew what to do with. We like peppers but I always plant more than I actually need just because I like growing all of the things. But um we're not like huge pepper eaters. There are certain recipes I like to use them in. We like cowboy candy um I like freeze drying some freezing some for casseroles and tacos and fajitas and stuff like that. But I don't mean an occasional stuffed pepper but I'm not like huge pepper eaters. I've actually given a whole bunch of you away. This is my little pepper harvest from this patch here. I've got some banana peppers over there some mild jalapenos over here and all the way in the back I have some hot jalapenos. Then we have cayenne and the Tabasco whenever I grab those. Um I grabbed, where are they, teeny tiny little bells. They aren't gonna get any bigger so we'll just dice them up, freeze them. I have about a dozen of the ajvarski. Only a few are red and that's fine. You can eat them green. I just like the flavor when they're red. And then I have a whole bunch of not-opinos. I'm thinking the not-opinos this time. I'm gonna freeze a whole bunch of jalapeno poppers. Keep um on hand for some quick appetizers or a snack I want to bring out. Um now that I've cleaned out my freezers I know I have some space available so I'm gonna put it to use. I went and I grabbed a few of the mild jalapenos up front. There was about maybe a dozen or so so I just put them in the other basket. I've got a new basket. I'm gonna throw all of these banana peppers into. I'm just gonna pick all of them and there's quite a few. We really like pickled banana peppers on cheesesteaks, on pizza, on top of chili, um in subs. That's our favorite way to eat them but I'm thinking I might stuff some of these with sausage and freeze them along with the jalapeno poppers. Banana pepper is the last of them this season. Last of the spicy jalapenos. I'm gonna throw in here with the banana peppers. Really I think I'm just gonna reserve these for making fire cider but I was wondering do I have to use fresh jalapenos in that? Like if I were to freeze dry these and then use them? I mean it preserves all their nutrients. I would think it would be fine. I would just have to account for them sucking up some of the liquid. Let me know your thoughts if you have tried that before. They just keep coming. I think that might be all the ones that are worth harvesting. There's some itty bitties but just let them go. There are spicy jalapenos. I had to run inside and grab a fancy container for these. Used a whole bunch of like our five gallon buckets for when we were harvesting chickens. I won't get into the details but um I need to sterilize those before I would put any spicy food in them. So now I'm scrounging for some containers. So check where it is and harvest. All right we're gonna harvest this bed of leeks here but I gotta find my spade which I think I left up here. I really need to find one of those forks like a pitchfork I guess. I've been looking around at the antique shops and the thrift stores and nobody has had them. So this will have to do for now. It's gonna be fun. Maybe I'll wait on these. I think I'm just gonna harvest the leeks I want for some soup this week. I want to make some potato leek soup. Um they're really messy. The ground is just super wet so I'm hoping that once it dries off they'll come out of the ground easier and shake off a bit better. And besides that I am gonna have my freeze dryer already really full of some other things. So I'm just gonna probably pick about six of these for the soup and we'll come back another day and do that. Let's go grab some celery. First I gotta wash my hands. It's really starting to rain now. I don't know, can you see it on the camera? It's not very pleasant. It's only about 56 degrees today so it's not exactly the coziest day to be out here. A bunch of, there's fox. Well make sure you've got the chickens away. I'm gonna try to at least get the celery here. Oh there's one more up here. I'm gonna leave these little ones go. And we're gonna go see what else is up front in the other patch. All right you guys, it's really raining. I'm gonna take a break inside. I might resume this tomorrow. There's all the celery I got. That's about it for this year. I left a couple small plants but a whole bunch of it was actually dried out in the centers of the stalks so they just went to the chickens. But I'm gonna take all this stuff inside. Maybe I'll see you later tonight. Maybe I'll see you in the morning. We are back out here for day two of harvesting. I'm just picking up where I left off last night. I came in here to these Brussels sprouts and the ones that actually like formed some sprouts. I've been just taking the leaves off and um there's a few on the stalks I think that we can harvest but they are starting to get eaten by bugs. So I do want to harvest them today. Whatever I get I get. It's just been an experiment each year. I'm trying to figure it out. This year is probably my best year for growing them. Last year I didn't get anything off of them at all. So I am just gonna keep taking all these leaves off. There's a frog. And then I'm gonna just chop these off at the base and at some point I'll work at taking these off the stalk. Spoiler alert. There wasn't actually very many Brussels on here that were seligible. I think I may have gotten two cups worth off of the five stalks that I harvested. There I could have gotten more but there were a lot of little tiny wormholes throughout them. I didn't do a very good job of keeping after the pests this year. I just got too busy. So if I decide to grow these again there's a few things I'd do different. I wouldn't plant so many so close together. I would support them so they'd stay up off the ground. Continually take the leaves off and then at a certain point I would definitely take the tops off so they focus their energy on actually producing the Brussels. And ideally I'd let them go through a mild frost or two. It's supposed to really sweeten their flavor but it just wasn't going to happen this time. I just grabbed them while I could and at least I got something right? Now let's go grab those couple pumpkins up there. Fantastic. I ended up grabbing three of the candy roasters and three butternut squash. There's two more butternut squash and a cheese pumpkin that are definitely not ready yet. These two here, well there's two of these guys and one of those, they're on different plants from the other ones and they didn't get as much sunlight. So they're a little bit further behind. So we'll grab them before the frost comes. I got luffas. I wasn't so sure I was going to get any of this year. This plant takes about 120 days to come to maturity. I mean I got it planted late. So they're at least on here and mature. We'll see what happens before the frost comes. They will not survive a frost. They'll turn to mush. So I will harvest them before then and hopefully they'll dry well enough in my house. I'm pretty sure that's how I did it the first year I grew them but that was like five years ago now. The last last year I didn't get any and then the year before that I got a whole bunch and they dried on the vine. So we'll see how they do drying inside. I'm not harvesting these. I'm actually harvesting all of these jack the little pumpkins in and around here. There's a ton of them. So so many. I had two plants and I have enough for the entire neighborhood. No lie. I have them all over my house. Grant has quite a few. He likes to use them in his dump trucks. That's like a core, a new core memory for me is him coming out here. He'll grab a couple more off the vine. He'll take them in and he creates these little construction scenes with his jack the little pumpkins. So I'm gonna go ahead. I'm gonna grab the rest of these and these are all probably gonna go to family and friends for some of their own fall decor. That's what I got here from this one plant over the archway. I had already harvested I think another 10 from this plant. So that's quite a few little pumpkins from one plant and I had two plants. So maybe these will go off to my mom or maybe over to Heather's house if she doesn't have any. Look at that. It just opened up. We have beautiful blue skies today. I think that's everything I'm gonna grab today. At some point we're gonna come back out for the rest of the leeks. We're gonna harvest sweet potatoes in the next probably two weeks. The rest of the potatoes in the next two weeks. I'm gonna have to grab the Tabasco plant and bring that inside. We might have a couple straggler raspberries, a couple tomatoes that might ripen on the vine but I'll be bringing in a whole bunch of green tomatoes here soon as well. I've got some herbs that I can still harvest. They're still looking really good and I'm gonna have my hands full again with what I have inside. So we're gonna leave it at that today. So I am just going to gather up everything that I've harvested today, take it inside, and show you everything I got. All right here it all is laid out for you to see. We've got some brussels sprouts, candy roaster squash, our butternut squash, assortments of peppers, there's cayenne, banana, mild, hot, and not-a-pino jalapenos, there's ajvarski, some mini bells, all of these jacky little pumpkins, our behemoth um zucchini, some tomatoes there and in the back here, celery in a few weeks, and then our meager little sweet potato harvest. That wraps up this harvest video for you guys. I hope you enjoyed coming along. This is probably going to be the last at least bigger assortment of food coming in from the garden, the last fairly large harvest. Just a few things probably coming in here and there and then you know some potatoes and leeks, but other than that this is about it for the 2023 season and I'm quite excited about that. It's been a great season. I'm very thankful for everything that came out of it, but now I'm ready to be done. I'm ready to be done. So soon here I'm gonna be putting the garden to bed, but now I'm just gonna make some room in my fridge for some of these more perishable items. I'm not gonna work on any of it today because I'm tired. I have two sick kiddos and we need a day of rest now that that little bit of harvesting is done. So I hope you have a blessed day and I'll see you next time. Take care.