Sometimes you WIN, sometimes you LOSE.

One of the things we love so much about homesteading and self-sufficiency is that we automatically become more in tune with the seasons and with nature. But while that is one of our greatest joys, it's also one of our greatest challenges. Now after everything has warmed up and things have started blooming, we're expecting another frost this week. We're going to see what we can do to beat it, but whatever happens, we won't let it dampen the joy of this year's first harvest. This year our trees feel like they're finally getting the place where they'd be big enough to actually produce some fruit. Really excited about it. Michelle got them all pruned. She did a good job, I think. And they've got all these blooms on them, but we're a little scared because we got one frost two nights ago and there's another frost. Looks like it's coming probably about two nights from now. So I looked at these a little bit and just look at them now, like honestly these blooms look really good. There's a couple that are kind of brown on the edges or whatever, but one thing that I saw to look for was that if they're like black in the center and these don't look like it, like these look really good, I think they're still alive and well. But this next and a couple nights from now is supposed to be even colder than it was, so that's really scary. We could like lose all of this potential fruit right here. In the past couple years we have had some blossoms on our trees and when a frost was about to come, we would like try covering the whole thing with sheets or spray it with water the night before. None of that ever worked, so I don't know if there's much hope. I mean look at all of these blossoms. If those would all freeze, that would really stink. But I was getting chicken feed the other day and I was mentioning about the frost that was coming in our fruit trees and this guy that I get it from talked about a product that he gets from a company called Blue Gold and it's supposed to help with frost protection and in this random container right here he weighed me out a little bit to mix with some water and then I'll put in a sprayer, spray it on here the night before and hopefully this will help. Asparagus is a perennial and so it knows when to grow and when not to grow. The problem is this year it was very warm and then it got very cold. Here you can see this is frost damage. So this was a perfectly good asparagus stalk and then the top got frozen and so it's not edible anymore. But some of them survived. This one here is also got frozen. You can tell it's just kind of mushy and weird but a lot of this stuff is still good and the cool thing is is that frost isn't going to kill asparagus it's just going to damage some of the stalks that are already too high up. I got very disheartened this morning when I came out here to check on my broccolis and cabbages. I had covers over these and they still have frost damage. That does not normally happen. I have confidently planted broccoli and cabbage for years now before the frost and for some reason they got nipped this time. But down in the center they're totally fine. Next time there's a hard frost which is going to be in two two nights there's supposed to be another one. I'm going to cover these with these buckets and also throw a nice blanket over top of the raised bed and I'm pretty confident they'll be fine. I'm just annoyed because this will probably set them back a little bit but it just is what it is. And you know if these don't look good if they don't make it I'll plant more and it'll be fine. That's one thing I've learned with gardening is you just have to be resilient. You're working with something that's alive. You're working with nature and you just have to be okay with things not always going the way you want them to. So I took a big risk a couple weeks ago and I planted out my nasturtiums because they were massive. I must have planted them too soon. I just had a few of them and I was like you know what they're going to get really root bound inside. I'm going to take the chance and put them out. Those got frozen as well. The base of the plant isn't frozen so I think they're going to be fine but yeah they're looking pretty terrible. These cabbages look almost completely fine. They're low to the ground and I think that really helped. I'm just going to cover these again so that they don't get all the wind damage. Thankfully this raised bed up here I don't have to worry about frost damage. I have never had anything under these glass windows get frozen in like spring or late fall. The glass really creates this greenhouse effect underneath these windows and plus these plants these small tiny seedlings are very close to the ground and so they just really don't get frozen. These salad greens are looking absolutely beautiful. One thing that I've really stepped away from since we quit doing farmer's market and doing like a market garden is I try to not fight the weather. I try to not fight nature. I just plant things out once I know it's going to be safe. Cabbage and broccoli usually just aren't an issue at all and so this year I'm still trying to figure out exactly what happened. Like I think maybe they got too warm under there and then too cold at night. I don't even know what the deal was with that but I used to try to plant out tomatoes really early. I would try to plant like potatoes really early and things like that. I just don't do that anymore because then it's always this like stress hanging over me and one year I lost all the seedlings that I had worked so hard for. I had tomatoes out, peppers out, cabbages out, broccolis out, trying to think all the things I had out. I lost everything and I had to go to a greenhouse and buy all my starts so I really just try to not fight nature anymore. I just take my time. I'm patient and I just plant things out once it's completely safe. Over here is my rhubarb plant. It is a champ. This thing is completely unfazed by frost. It often will start coming up when there's still snow on the ground outside so I'm not even the least bit worried about this rhubarb plant. There is so much rhubarb here. I have been making rhubarb muffins and I have hopes to make a rhubarb pie sometimes. Rhubarb pie is Cody's favorite. One tip when you're harvesting rhubarb you don't want to cut the stalks off. You want to like pull them out so you take hold on the bottom of the stalk and pull up and it will like slip right out. I like to keep my rhubarb plants thinned out quite a bit. They'll keep growing if they're thinned out. These raspberries once again are perennials. They know when to come up. These start coming up sometimes while there's still snow on the ground so they're completely unfazed by frost. These raspberries were cut completely down to the ground early this spring and this is already how much they've grown. They will literally grow like this tall within a month. There is new life on our homestead and as I mentioned in our last video we also have a new animal and to show you what that is I'm gonna take you back in time a few days and then we'll get back to Michelle harvesting in the garden. We're on our way to pick up our broiler chicks from the post office. We order them from Meyer Hatchery and they come in the mail and we got to pick them up. Last year they were all dead. Now that's the only time that's ever happened but I am a little bit anxious and so I really hope these chicks will be okay. The other thing is before we get them back home to the heat lamps I have to stop and run a couple errands first and so I've got the heat cranked up in the back of the van so we can put them in here and they'll stay warmer until we can get them home. Oh we have some chicks. Looking good. Besides our broiler chicks I also decided we needed to get some chicks to raise and replace our laying hens. See what they have. Phantoms. We don't want those. Ducks. Ducks would be so much fun. They're so cute. I know but they just always die. There's barge rock chicks. I love those. We've never had Wyandottes. Maybe we should get some of those. What have we got in there buddy? We got a whole bunch of chicks. Now we got to go get one more thing. You gonna carry it? Izzy's been saving his money. Bought himself a little kayak. Use it in our swamp. Okay let's grab those chicks and take them inside. Eden will be excited to see them. Eden what is it? We got 16 chicks to replace our hens and something else. Eden let's see what else we got in these boxes. We used to get hybrid layers when we had our egg business because they laid so much better and we needed that to be able to make money but we decided to brighten up our flock a little now. We got four Rhode Island Reds, four barge rocks, four Issa Browns and four Wyandottes. It's amazing how fast these things grow in just a few days. Really fun to have baby chicks around and I'm really excited to have the ducks. I knew that Michelle would not be able to resist them. We tried them several years ago. They ended up getting eaten and we kind of gave it up for a while. Decided to try it again. I did kind of get them on a whim and we're gonna have to kind of figure some things out as we go along especially now that we have a dog running around outside. I don't know if we'll be able to train her to be okay around them but we'll just take it as it comes. Not gonna spend a lot of time talking about the broiler chicks here because I plan on doing a full video of how we raise our broiler chicks from start to finish and that'll be coming out I guess later this summer. I will say though that one of the biggest things to watch for with baby chicks is for me anyways that I've found is that it doesn't get too hot in the brooder. I've never had an issue with chicks dying or getting sick or anything like that from being too cold. There's a thermometer on the side here and I saw the other night I think it got down to like 40 degrees in here but both of these heat lamps were on and the chicks were able to get under that. They were totally fine only a couple days old. I have had problems though when it gets like 80 degrees in here they will start getting poopy butt. They'll start getting sick and dying and stuff and so all the stuff you read about it needing to be like 85 to 90 degrees it's not that you want their entire space to be that hot. You need a nice hot place like under the heat lamps or whatever you're using for the warmth but you also want some cooler air around them so that's not just like hot and stuffy everywhere. They're all crowding over there in that corner because I'm over here trying to get away whatever but one way to tell if your room is getting too warm is if they're just getting as far away as possible from the heat lamps if they're just crowding all over the edges. Ducks are so my weakness. I'm not much of an animal person. I'm much more of like a plant lady but for some reason I just really like ducks. I think part of it's because my mom had them. A couple years ago I had six ducks and all six of them got killed one night from some kind of predator. It took like one bite out of their necks and then left and I was just like slightly traumatized from that and was like okay we're done with ducks now for a while but when Cody called me while he was at tractor supply I was like oh I can't resist so I guess we'll try again we'll see if we can put them in a more secure place. Early spring harvests aren't massive but they're one of the most satisfying harvests because it's been so long since I got to harvest anything so I always look forward to this. I'm gonna pick a bunch of this apple mint tea. This is our all-time favorite tea and we ran out over the winter time so I'm gonna start picking this stuff right away and drying it for next winter so that hopefully we won't run out next winter. These mint teas are another thing that are completely unbothered by the frost. I got the plants for this apple mint tea from my local greenhouse. I'm pretty sure that berlin seed has the plants as well. For these I don't know if you're going to be able to find the seeds to start this mint but I know that you can find the plants. Tea is something that comes up on its own every single year. It's like a taste of spring for us. You'll notice how it kind of looks like this tea is just in our lawn. It's actually buried in a container. If you don't put this in something it will spread everywhere. You will soon have a lawn of tea. I also have chocolate mint tea but I'm going to let that grow a little bit before I cut it down. These grapes are looking pretty good. This is the first year that we get to see them like bloom in the spring so from what I can see these look really great. The next thing that I'm going to harvest is well protected. I need to unplug the cow's fence for this one. This fence here is for the cows and I'm telling you it shocked so freaking hard. Cody fell against it one time and it left like a purple mark on his neck. Last year when I was gathering my stinging nettle which is the next thing that I'm going to be harvesting my metal bull got against the fence and I thought I had died. It was so bad. This here is stinging nettle and it's like nature's vitamin. You don't want to touch it. It will hurt and itch and sting but it's amazing. I love adding it to mint tea and nobody knows it's there but it's just like tons of extra vitamins. It just kind of tastes like grass. My drying racks inside are dying to be filled again. They've been empty all winter. This here is just growing wild. It's not something I planted. This is just something I'm foraging. Comes up every year. This large bush of thyme overwintered which is super cool because I have run out of thyme so I'm going to dry some more. Harvesting herbs and teas is honestly like my very favorite thing that we do here on our homestead. It's kind of like my hobby because it's like really easy. There's not a whole lot of like preserving and stuff. It's just drying it and then putting it into pretty jars. It's shelf stable without canning it and all the things and I have some really big plans for herbs this year and later on in this video I'm going to show you guys some of my big plans. What's crazy to me is that this thing is in such a small box. This is for Michelle. I decided to buy a raised bed this time instead of building one. This looks like it should be pretty easy to put together. We'll see how it goes and then I'll have Michelle tell you all about what she's going to do with it. A whole entire raised bed in this box. So this is a Bertie's raised bed. I did buy this. They didn't send it to me. You can put it in a bunch of configurations. 10 by 2, 6 by 6, whatever. We're going to put it in a 4 foot by 8 foot and we're right here at the end of our raspberry trellis. This is where there were raspberries planted right here and we had you know we had decided to take some out because we just had too many. So this is going to be the perfect spot for this raised bed right here. Let's figure out how to put it together. This is a metal raised bed with a coating on it that is supposed to be totally safe and it's supposed to last for like I think up to like 20 years. So sounds pretty good to me. Part of the reason that I wanted to buy a raised bed instead of building one this time is just to show you another option, another way to get started with raised bed gardening in case you don't have the time or the skills or whatever to build your own. And this looked pretty simple to put together. It looks like it's good quality. For this they sent a cute little wrench. I don't want to use that. I'm going to use a man tool. Well I guess this one will have to be taken back apart. That was pretty simple to put together. Watch out for sharp edges if you're putting it together but it's just these edges right here. All of these are not sharp. Plus this is going to get like a bumper on top. These things right here are braces for the middle just so that when we put dirt inside here it doesn't bow out. This will be down in far enough that we won't hit it with a hoe or anything like that. I wanted to buy this myself instead of them sending me a free one so that I could give an honest review on it. At first I thought it seemed a little flimsy but after it was all put together and filled with dirt it felt very solid and I can say that I'd really recommend it. We started using raised beds a couple years ago and we absolutely love them. There's a link for these in the description and you can get a discount if you use our code which will be down there as well. We busted out our good old drying rack again. I'm so excited to fill this thing up again. This is the first time this year that I'm putting anything on it. This drying rack makes drying herbs and teas literally effortless. Almost nothing to it. If you're wondering how Cody made this drying rack it's really simple. He just got some old screens from the warehouse that he used to work at and he just kind of built a frame around them. We don't actually have plans or a pdf or anything because the screens are obviously going to be different sizes depending on what kind of screens you get. So basically it's just legs and then it has slats for the screens to sit on. It's okay to kind of pile these on the trays because these herbs will shrink quite a bit after they start drying. It's been a really long day and I'm actually going to keep a few of these tea leaves out and make myself a cup of tea tonight. Tonight is the evening that it's supposed to dip below freezing during the night so I just went and picked all the asparagus that was up. Cody is going to spray the fruit trees with the blue gold spray to hopefully save those. We also need to spray the strawberries and maybe tarp them off. Also throw some blankets over the cabbages and just make sure everything is ready for the freeze tonight. It's getting dark so we have to hurry. I'm gonna fill this thing up. I've got about three ounces here of the blue gold and I think on the directions it said half an ounce to an ounce per gallon of water so I'm gonna put three gallons of water in this thing. Full disclosure here not sponsored by Chapin but they did send this to me to try it out. I've been using Solo sprayers in the past and I thought it might be a good idea to give this a try that way I can tell you guys which one I like better. I feel like one thing that Chapin and Solo could both do is make more comfortable straps on these things. Did you like mix that really well? Yep I mixed it. I'm gonna start with this cherry tree here since it's got the most blooms. I think the main thing is just to get everything for sure covered. I think anything that's not covered is not gonna be protected. I'm gonna try my best to get all of these. If I happen to miss some of them I mean at least some is better than nothing. Supposed to get down to 31 degrees tonight which is obviously below freezing but that's not just like a super hard freeze so I'm hoping with it you know not getting crazy cold and with this that it'll help. I really want these apples this year. We have had some nasty shrively apples in our trees a couple times but never a good harvest and I don't want to lose this one. I'm just going to go down the entire row and spray everything really really good and we're going to try to cover these too I think for some extra protection. I'm running out. It's like driving faster so you don't run out of gas right? We're gonna let that dry a little bit before we put the tarp over top of it and we want to get blankets on top of these here. We have done what we can. This is one of those times where I just like you just have to let go. As a gardener you're working with nature you just let go, let come what may, do your best and that's all you can do. Hope for the best and I guess we'll see what happens in the morning. Yeah. Let's see how it looks. It's above freezing now. It's still chilly out here. I came out here early to milk the cow and it was 31 degrees and now it's warmed up a little bit so we want to get this off as soon as possible. We looked up how to tell if a strawberry bloom is dead, killed by frost, or if it's fine and right here you can see there's two right beside each other. One is nice and yellow and green in the middle and the other is black in the middle. A whole bunch of these are black in the middle. Here's one right here that's totally fine in the middle. It's yellow and green. That is a good one. I'm gonna say that like 50 to 70 percent of the blooms that are already on these plants do have the black in the middle. So I'm guessing we lost quite a few strawberries but I'm hoping that these will just continue to rebound and continue to put out blooms and give us berries. I'm pretty sure though that it wasn't last night's frost that killed those blooms. I'm pretty sure it was the frost that hit like three nights ago that we weren't prepared for. Somehow I missed recognizing that it was going to happen so these did not get covered last night. I mean we saved the ones that are still here so I guess we'll count it a win. It's pretty disheartening honestly because strawberries are like one of my very favorite things on the homestead but I do think that we'll still get strawberries and that these will still continue to put out more and more blossoms. Hopefully we'll still get enough to stock the freezer and if not I guess it just is what it is. There's nothing I can do to change it. So I've had a bunch of people telling me that I wouldn't have to cover my berries with straw. So I do recognize that in Ohio they're probably it's not totally necessary to overwinter my strawberries underneath the straw but the deal is is this is the exact reason why I do cover them is so that they don't bloom before they're supposed to because Ohio has lots of like kind of warm spells and then it will just get freezing cold again. So that is my main reason for covering them with straw so that they don't bloom too early. In past years I waited to uncover my strawberry patch until about now and then my berries will start bearing in June but this year I just couldn't do that because the plants themselves were dying and getting slimy and yellow underneath the straw because it was so warm. There's ice on top of these buckets. It was very cold. I'm pretty sure it like finished off my nasturtiums no surprises there. I'm gonna guess I have a good feeling about the cabbages and stuff. I don't think those are gonna be... Yeah see those are totally fine. These are completely untouched by the frost so this was the freeze damage from before but you can tell these are looking totally great down underneath there. I feel like these look pretty much how they did last night. Some of the petals have like some brown on the edge but if I'm like looking into the center of the flowers it doesn't like look black or whatever they said it should look like if it got frost damage. My gut feeling is that they might have got touched a little bit by it but I really think they're okay. That right there those just look like perfectly healthy flowers. So many blooms on this cherry tree. Some of that looks pretty shriveled up there but then that there looks completely normal. I feel like I'm a real newbie with this fruit tree stuff so don't judge me. My gut feeling is that they're okay but I guess the real test will be in a few weeks or whatever we'll be able to see if stuff's still growing. So now that hopefully all the frosts are past I am wanting to plant this bed full of herbs and have a beautiful herb garden up close to my house. Super excited and hopefully I can show that to you guys soon. Dealing with something like frost can be stressful and overwhelming. One of the biggest things we want you to get out of our videos is the confidence you need to overcome overwhelm in your own life and homestead. I made a playlist of our videos where we dive deeper into that and really give you the tips you need to make that happen. Tap or click here to watch it next. I had also mentioned last week that Holly might be going to her new home this week. It didn't work out for a new family to come get her but they're coming soon so we'll be saying bye to her in the next video.