Sustainable Living on 3 Acre PERMACULTURE Farm - Harvesting, Storing & Preserving for Winter - V27

Welcome to Freedom Forest guys, the three acre edible oasis that we're creating here in the south of England, where we like to try lots of new things and push the boundaries with what we can grow using permaculture and no-dig methods. Absolutely no chemicals, weed killers or synthetic fertilizers, just what nature provides. It felt like autumn came all of a sudden this month. It has been a complete whirlwind and I cannot believe the month is nearly over. We have had lots of beautiful harvests, we've been preserving and drying and we have not been able to keep up with the abundance of apples that we have had from just two trees already. At the beginning of the month we had lots of wind and rain and it made me feel like I wanted to clear away all of the summer crops. Thankfully the sun has been back and it has given us a chance to chip away at lots of the seasonal jobs here on our farmstead which help us towards sustainable living. Our food forest has given us so much this month with apricots at the start of the month, then the apples began to ripen and the autumn raspberries have been gradually increasing. Our first big harvest of apples is now slowly fermenting into apple cider vinegar and I have probably eaten more fresh apples this month than ever before in my life. By investing our time and our care into this land every year we are being rewarded with more abundance, more than we can share even. Growing food for yourself is definitely a way to feel rich and also create greater self-worth. Harvesting winter squash is always fun. These little orange yu-chiki-kiri squash are one of my favourites. They are early to ripen and easy to handle in the kitchen and they have great flavour too. And on the 12th of September they were looking more than ready to harvest. We gathered them all from our main pumpkin patch first, then we discovered this had happened overnight in our smaller bed. So we made the quick decision to harvest all of our bigger pumpkins and winter squash too before we lost any more to rats. Ideally we would have given them another week or so but the skins were hard enough and the stems were starting to dry off and we are very happy with the harvest, especially the biggest jumbo pink bananas that we have ever seen. And now they are all curing off in the polytunnel with some well-timed sun. Dan has been busy organising firewood ready for winter. The smaller logs he's stacking is actually gauze wood that we've had in covered piles for around five years. It's what we had to clear from our land to create our main vegetable beds and the food forest. And it's actually a very hard slow burning wood we've discovered. The larger logs are eucalyptus that we grew from seed and felled ourselves, utilising what we can provide ourselves from our land as much as possible. Dan has also been pruning all of our stone fruit trees this month and yes we did also get a drone which he has been enjoying playing around with and seeing all the different amazing footage that we can now get of our land. We started harvesting our first dried beans for shelling around the middle of the month and we'll continue just to pick them as they dry out and we finish them inside in a drying rack. Dried beans are such a valuable source of home grown protein for us. One of the big jobs that's always on my radar for the end of September is garlic planting and around the autumn equinox is a really good time to start thinking about planting your garlic out, especially if you're growing the big elephant garlic like what we grow here. Autumn equinox is the perfect time and so that is exactly what we're going to be doing today. We're going to lift the plastic on this bed that we've had covered up since I harvested, do a little bit of bed prep and then get hopefully about 250 cloves of garlic in the ground. So that is 241 cloves of garlic planted into this bed and the last 17 that we planted were huge big rounds which sometimes grow into really massive bulbs of elephant garlic so it's always fun to have a play around with those and see what we get. We're just going to put a light covering of well-rotted wood chip onto this bed now. It just helps to keep the garlic snuggled up and then it feeds the soil and the soil life below. We've been using this method for quite a few years now and it seems to work really well with the garlic and we've been planting garlic in this bed for at least three if not four years now into this same bed and if you would like to see a more detailed video on how we sow our garlic then check out this video here. Okay it is the 21st of September today and we are going to harvest and I think this is one of the biggest ones we've ever grown and you can tell that it's ready to harvest because around the top of the stem is starting to go brown. You can have a look and make sure that they've got a nice pale patch underneath where they've been sat against the ground and also they should start to sound quite deep and hollow. So I've been keeping an eye on this melon for a few weeks and I think today is the day. Now all of our watermelons have been quite late this year in ripening. Normally we're harvesting them from around the middle of August and we only harvested our first one in September this year and I think that's for a couple of reasons. The sunlight hours were quite reduced this year it would seem for growing overall and also these plants from seedlings this year grew really quite weakly and we weren't sure if they were going to take at all once we planted them out but thankfully we got them in the tunnel and they got their roots in the ground and they did their thing and they grew us some amazing watermelons. And one other thing to tell about watermelon ripeness is when the first tendril on the vine closest to the melon has died back as well that's another sign of ripeness. Now all of these vines have pretty much died back so that's a bit harder to tell but I'm still sure that this melon is ripe. Let's see how much he weighs. So that is an absolute whopper at 19 and a half pounds which is approximately nine kg so I'm excited to see what this one looks like inside. This watermelon is absolutely perfect and remember when you eat watermelons the seeds are actually super nutritious so make sure you crunch those up too. My last big job for September is to do what is probably my single biggest seed sowing of the year and that is all of our winter salads, herbs and greens that we grow in the polytunnel all through winter and right through until May next year hopefully if it's a good year when we clear the polytunnel down ready to plant tomatoes all of the summer crops so this is a really important sowing for us and gives us beautiful fresh food all through winter. We hope you've enjoyed seeing what we have been up to this month and all the things that we have been doing to help us live a more sustainable and beautiful life connected with nature here on our farmstead. A particularly big thank you if you have watched this video right to the end, it really means a lot to us. If you've enjoyed this video please also give it a thumbs up as this helps us massively with the YouTube algorithm and gets our videos seen by more people. Any comments or questions that you have drop them down below we love hearing from you guys and we look forward to seeing you here again soon. Thanks for watching, peace and plants.