Turning Abandoned Land into a Wasabi Garden | Off Grid Homestead

This is our wasabi plant. You might be thinking why are we even bothering to grow it in our gardens? Why are we even bothering to plant it? We're never gonna get a good harvest, we're never gonna make any money from it. The leaves taste really spicy and to be honest they're not that tasty. So what's the point? Well I brought back three plants with me from the UK and they've very very quickly multiplied into about 50 plants and then next year we'll probably have more than a hundred and I could sell those plants very easily within our chain of islands or I could even try and actually get a root from wasabi. But that's gonna be really really difficult. We are lucky that on our land we have a natural spring that is pretty steady even in summer year-round. It doesn't really dry up and it doesn't really turn into a crazy river in winter. So because it's quite steady, it's quite narrow but it's quite steady, I am gonna plant wasabi in the stream and I'm gonna put taro. I'm gonna do one row of wasabi and I'm gonna do a row either side of taro and the taro leaves grow massive, like a massive shade which will help the wasabi to stay cool in summer. So by providing the optimal temperatures in summer and winter I'm kind of hoping we might strike gold and get a really good wasabi root but then you have to sell it which might not be so easy. There is a growing, kind of not very sustainable, but a growing culture of sushi here and I think there potentially could be interest in wasabi root from the more expensive restaurants but I also know that you know it's cheaper and more accessible and not many customers of sushi restaurants really care if they're eating the fake wasabi paste or they're eating the real stuff. This area is probably the funnest area, the most fun area we have on our property. You can see my toddler behind me is endlessly throwing stones and rocks into the stream and he's also, are you throwing plants? Are you throwing dead plants into the water? Oh wow, good job Frey, well done, you keep going. He's so busy honestly. So yeah this is actually a very fun area in summer to paddle around with young kids. So this area is a mess and that's because we basically had to abandon the land for about four years whilst we were still disputing it and trying to get it back in our name which I'm going to go into detail in in another video because I'm sure you might be curious. The stream has seen better days, currently it is completely flooding out our actual garden because it's not, it hasn't been maintained. So we're gonna have to get in there, we're gonna have to move some rocks around, we're gonna have to do some digging, hopefully it'll be fun and we're also gonna have to remove all the taro and replant it because at the moment the way it's been planted it doesn't make sense. So that means we're gonna have a lot of taro to eat which is good because we have three kids that absolutely love taro. So we've had a few weeks of really heavy rain and it turns out the stream this spring is doing weird things and our avocado trees have actually gotten really flooded out so planting wasabi in the stream and redoing it apparently can come soon enough. This one's still alive and over here it's just even worse, this one's like it's definitely probably dead. I'm just throwing yellow ones because we don't like them. of April and now it's gone from being like 14 degrees to about 22 degrees and really hot and really sunny. So that's exciting, feels like summer is finally on the way and I'm just weeding my wasabi because my wasabi has actually been in pots for a really long time. I pulled out two plants and I separated them and I got about 20 other plants which is quite a lot, maybe even more, maybe 30. The area that we call the tropical garden, the area I'm in now, is a great example of plants we've grown for free. The avocado tree Magnus grew from seed and the rest of the plants are plants that he got from trade and propagated himself or just asked a friend to take some cuttings. We have banana trees, we have an avocado tree, we have a fig tree that makes really nice fruit but I can't remember what it's called. We've got pineapples that are now shaded out by the fruit trees and I really need to move them. We have taro, we have both varieties, yellow and the one that's like pinky red but we prefer the pinky red one because it tastes better and doesn't take as long to process, well to cook, to get the itchy feeling out of your throat. We also have two tamarillo trees, what you call a tree tomato, that you can very easily grow from seed. They grow really well here it's just the wind that tends to make them fall over. We also have sugar cane which is a bit random but I guess it's good to have if the store ever runs out of sugar. We also have watercress that pops up in this location and we have a monstera plant. So yeah this area is a really good example of plants that Magnus just kind of threw in here for free and they're actually giving us some sort of value but now that I have found a source of plants I can try and make the area even even better. I'm really excited to put in some more avocado trees and I'm definitely excited to finally be able to put in different varieties of flowering plants and things. Do you see this one right here? Nice. Put it in there? Okay. I need to go over. Oh that's icy! That's really cool. Yeah. Oh I found the culprit. I think now I can move it. Give it a little push. Yeah you're going to find yourself a lovely thing. That's really cool. Oh my goodness. Yeah.