FULL TOUR of an ABUNDANT Homestead Garden (+best tips for growing!)

Here on our land we aim to grow enough produce to feed our family of six for an entire year. The garden is looking lush and green and absolutely gorgeous so today I'm going to take you guys on a tour and give you all of my best tips and tricks for having a successful homestead garden. We have some things planted here and there across our property but most of the things we have in two gardens we have a small garden up here by our house and then a bigger garden out in the lawn further out that way. I'm going to be starting up here in this garden. I have my patch here of hardneck garlic. Looks like I missed just a couple of the scapes. I pulled most of those off a couple weeks ago already. This garlic needs to be harvested badly but it has been so wet. Ohio is nothing if not soggy right now. It just rains and rains and rains and I didn't want to harvest this stuff while the ground is wet but I don't think I'm going to have a choice so hopefully these are still okay. Those are looking nice. Once hardneck garlic has the bottom three to four leaves brown once they're starting to brown that is when you want to pull this stuff. If you leave it out too long there can be some rotting and damage and splitting open of the garlic heads. These look like they're fine though. It's definitely best to harvest garlic when it's drier outside but I've just been worrying about this garlic out here so I'm just going to take it on in let it start curing. This garlic I planted already last fall and then it overwintered here in the garden and then this spring it took off and now the very first part of summer is when this stuff gets harvested and cured and it will last in the cold room for a nice long time. Right here we have a year's worth of onions. This is going to be enough onions to last us until onion harvest next year. We're just finishing off last year's onions that are down in the root cellar right now which is absolutely amazing when they last that long. Onions can be cured and then they will store for a very long time in a cold room, no preservation needed. My favorite varieties of onions are Patterson and Red Wing. People ask me all the how do you get a nice big onion? First of all, onions love nitrogen so you're going to want to plant them in very rich soil. Secondly, I always plant onion plants not sets. You don't want to plant your onions too deep. You want the bulb to somewhat be growing on top of the soil. Right here is a really good example of that. The onion is growing kind of on top of the soil. Those are the bulbs that are going to get the biggest. I also like to plant my onions nice and far apart. You want to give them enough space. You have to imagine how big you want your onion to get and then you have to plant them at least that far apart because they're not going to grow into each other. Here I have my carrots for the year. I might do one more planting of carrots in the fall just for those nice sweet snacking carrots but these are going to be my workhorse carrots. The nice big fat carrots that are going to be lasting in storage all winter long. We are still eating carrots from last summer which is mind-blowing to me. I put the carrots into grocery bags, tape the bag shut, store them in the refrigerator and they last forever. It's amazing. The variety that I like to grow is Danver Half Long. Those don't get quite as long. They're just shorter, stumpier and they get nice and fat. Those are really good for storage and they also don't break off when you are digging them. It scratched me so bad. I tried to climb my leg. Look I'm bleeding. Oh my goodness. This is my number one tip. If you want nice big storage carrots, those workhorse carrots that are going to last all through the winter, you want to space your carrots far enough apart. I really like to space my carrots at least one to two inches apart. That way they have room to spread and get huge. Also carrots do not like competition with weeds so I try to keep carrots nice and weeded. Carrots are top priority when it comes to weeding along with onions. This here is my summer squash. This is a sunburst squash. Some people call them patty. It's like the patty pan type of squash. I plant this instead of zucchini. I use it just the same as I would zucchini. I have had super bad success, super bad luck with the black zucchini. They're like a dark dark green color. They just instantly get shredded by the bugs. I don't know what it is about them. They're very susceptible to bugs and disease. I have found that patty pan squash are much more resilient, much more hardy, and they will outlast the black zucchini every single year. My favorite things to make with the patty pan squash are zucchini brownies. I have a really really good zucchini brownie recipe. Then I also like to make a zucchini relish. I usually can it like every one to two years and this is my on year so I will be canning that this year. Here's my rhubarb plant. She's looking a little sad. Rhubarb is definitely a cool weather crop. It does not like heat and it has been very very very warm here in Ohio lately and so this rhubarb plant just kind of like went on strike which is totally fine. She did her good deed for the year. I have lots of rhubarb in the freezer that I use to make strawberry jam and I still have leftovers so it's all good. My herb garden is popping this year. Actually like two days ago I took out a whole bunch of the chamomile. I have been harvesting chamomile like sometimes twice a day. It goes absolutely wild in the heat. I got this really nifty gadget. It's called a berry picker. I just got this on Amazon for like 10 bucks. Not an expensive gadget and it saves me hours of work picking this chamomile. I'm trying to harvest enough chamomile for some salves and lip balms and then also tea that I drink like every single night before I go to bed. I really like chamomile for tummy aches anything like that so I want to have a whole bunch of this on hand and in past years because of how time consuming it is to pick I just have not hit that goal. This year I think I'll hit the goal. These are calendula flowers and I really like to dry these. These go really well in salves and anything to do with skin. I just dry the entire flower and then I like to infuse these into oil and then use those for body care products and soaps and things like that. The other day when I took out a bunch of the chamomile I also took out a third of this bush of sage. It was like covering the parsley. It was covering the lavender and the calendula so I just took a whole bunch of this out. Back here I have oregano. I've been harvesting this all spring already and it's starting to go to flower. I've also been harvesting echinacea flowers. These are amazing for tea. They're really good for cold and flu season. I like to harvest the fresh leaves on the top as well as the flowers that are completely open. Right here's my parsley. This stuff is finally going nuts now that I moved the sage out of the way and here's my lavender. I wish this stuff was would get more of the buds but it looks like it's starting a little bit more. This herb garden is truly truly my happy place and I'm hoping that maybe next year I can have a second herb garden. I have some more ideas for herbs that I would like to grow but I don't have the space at this point so maybe next year I'll get another raised bed. We're just about to get into raspberry season which is really exciting. I was able to find just a couple raspberries that I could pick. Just barely ripe but ripe enough to pick. They start coming a little bit later for us because we cut them down to the ground every spring and so they start a little bit later than some people's raspberries but then we get a more like heavy loud truck. Then we get more of a heavy crop later in the season all at once rather than berries kind of trickling in like all spring and summer long. Michelle feels like that's more efficient when she can focus more on one thing at a time rather than trying to deal with everything at once. I'm just going to tighten this trellis here a little bit. One of the things that we figured out with raspberries to get a better harvest more raspberries and a nicer harvest is trellising them. When we for the first couple years of having having raspberries they just kind of all droop down onto the ground and they got more bug problems and stuff like that and ever since we did this trellis they are so much nicer and what it does is it keeps them upright and lets more air flow in there and they just turn out a lot better and we get a lot more. I also till beside our patch every single year on each side and get it down to probably about two feet wide barely even two feet wide. We used to just have the wires towards the inside here but we figured out that that wasn't quite enough. Some of these branches go out here and it's nice to have one more wire out there to hold them up. I'm headed out to show you our asparagus patch now. If you're interested in what variety we grow the raspberries it's heritage and I don't know that cutting them down every spring like we do works for every variety so if you're going to get a different variety of raspberries make sure you check that out before you go whacking them off. Had to make a quick pit stop to get some wire. This was not our idea we stole it from somebody else but it works awesome. I've got a t-post on each corner of this asparagus patch and I'm going to run a wire around it because this asparagus is so big now and it starts to hang way out. There's not that big of a deal right here but when it starts doing this number into our potatoes and stuff that's really annoying so I'm going to run a wire around it. It is high time to get that done. This asparagus patch is probably what a third of the size that it used to be. We had a ton of asparagus and we sold it and it sold really well. If you're into doing farmers markets or anything like that asparagus is very good crop worked out very well for us at least in our situation but it is also a lot of work to keep up with the patch all the weeding and everything like that and we just felt like in our stage of life and everything wasn't for us. We still though want to grow enough not necessarily for a year's worth of food because we don't do a lot of preserving with it or anything but it's one of the first things that comes up in the spring so we have fresh veggies as soon as possible. I can just hear bees buzzing in there it's so cool that's my honeybees. Asparagus is definitely a cool weather crop. We stopped harvesting this a while ago already and then we let the plants grow up so that they're capturing sunlight and storing energy for next year. Yeah I should not have waited this long. Hopefully the bees are also nice and happy with what they're getting and not gonna sting me. The varieties of asparagus that we grow is Mary Washington and Purple Passion. Our favorite is Purple Passion. It is a purple asparagus stalk but then when you cook it it turns green and it just tastes so good. The asparagus that we grow is way better than anything you'll find at the store. Our favorite way to do it is on the grill. We encourage our kids to play outside as much as possible but it seems like recently it's either raining or really hot and on those days where it's not such nice weather for them to play outside it's nice to have something for them to do inside that's creative and brain building. KiwiCo is the sponsor of today's video and they have the perfect projects for your kids to work on on one of those rainy or crazy hot days. Comes in a box to your house every month and not only is it something for them to do to build some cool things like this but it also gives them something to keep doing that they can keep playing with or learning with. Our kids had so much fun with their first round of projects. I helped them with a few things here and there but they did most of it themselves. They made an actual working ukulele, a trash can that might actually encourage them to clean up after themselves, and a remote control delivery bot. Not only did they have fun building the things and playing with them but they also learned some stuff along the way. When we told our kids that KiwiCo wanted to sponsor one of our videos they were super excited and they had a lot of fun building these things. I'm sure your kids will too. It's a subscription box but there's no commitment so you can pause it or cancel it at any time and if you want to get your kids started you can use the link in our description and our code MORETHANFARMERS and get 50% off your first monthly box. This is my potato patch. I really focus on white potatoes in my garden. I baby my white potatoes. These are hilled, weeded, and then hilled with leaves. So they're hilled with dirt first and then I hill them with leaves. I feel like if you hill them with just dirt the rain tends to wash away the dirt from those top potatoes and they still get green. With leaves it keeps that from happening. This year we planted 40 pounds of potatoes. This should give us around 400 pounds of white potatoes. I really like to focus on white potatoes because we can cure them and then have them down in our root cellar and they will last all winter long with zero preserving, no freezing, no canning, no blanching, nothing like that. It's amazing. The varieties that I have planted are Kennebec, Yukon Gold, and Red Pontiac. Red Pontiac I don't plant as many of those because those do not store nearly as long. Those are always the first ones to go but we really like the red potatoes for fresh eating. I also don't plant too many Yukon Golds because in the past we have had some issues with disease in the seed potatoes and so my all-time favorite is Kennebec. I plant a ton of those. This is the time of year when my garden is gorgeous. Everything is lush and green and beautiful and I like to just like soak it in to every pore because so quickly everything changes. Soon the potatoes are going to start getting yellow and dying back. These are already flowering and so very soon they're going to start kind of falling over getting a little bit yellow and then they'll start dying. The strawberry patch is already looking very spent. Everything just kind of starts looking spent when it comes to the middle of the summer so this is the time of year when I like to just soak in all the green. I have weeded this corn patch already two times like very thoroughly but it just rains and rains and rains and rains. Ohio is so soggy right now and so I can't even really do anything with the soil and I ran out of leaf mulch and we are making do with grass clippings so this is just what it is. Soon the corn will get tall enough that it shades out the weeds. There won't be nearly the weed pressure. I had to replant my sweet corn this year because we had a really cold spell that happened this spring soon after I planted the corn and I've had a lot of Ohio gardeners asking me, did you have to plant your sweet corn over? Did your sweet corn not come up? They're like, mine didn't come up. It was because of the cold spell so I replanted this and it came up great. My tomatoes are looking really good but there is definitely disease pressure because of how wet it is. It's like a sauna out here right now. I started spraying these last week but the second I spray them it just gets washed off with the rain and so I'm just doing the best I can. I am trying to keep these nice and pruned so that there's good airflow and I also have these plastic clips that I got from Berlin Seed this year. In past years I've just been using twisty ties but I decided to use these this year more like Cody decided that I use these this year and they're really handy. If I see branches that are falling down like this one is going to eventually just fall down I just like to clip them up like that. Very very simple. I'm not the person to talk to about pruning tomatoes. I don't know like all the ins and outs of it. Basically what I do is I just prune for airflow and I also keep anything off the ground. The very first thing that I mulch usually in my garden is the tomatoes. The reason for that is a lot of the disease that affects tomatoes is going to be in your soil. It's soil borne and so when the rain splashes down on the ground it splashes the mud up onto your plants and that is where a lot of disease happens. So I keep everything off the ground and I cover it with leaves and when I spray I also spray the ground down around the plant. I like to spray once a week when disease pressure is at its worst especially if you're having some yellow leaves. I definitely have some yellow leaves down along the bottom of mine. I like to use xeritol. That's something that I get from Berlin Seed Company. Their magazine says it's one of the safest yet most effective organic sprays for disease. If you've been here for any amount of time you know that Amish paste is my favorite paste tomato variety. This is my favorite for any kind of sauces. They are fat and meaty. They're an indeterminate tomato so they will go like up and above and beyond these panels. This year I'm experimenting with a couple newer varieties of tomatoes that I haven't tried before. The seedlings that I started in my house did not turn out very well this year. Something was wrong with my grow light. The bulb needed to be replaced and I didn't catch on soon enough. So I got some at my local greenhouse and I'll have Cody put the names up on the screen for you guys because I can't remember them offhand. Last year I had 10 tomato plants and I had way more tomato plants than I needed. I was giving bushels of tomatoes to my friends because I could not use them all. This year I did 12 because I need to do a quite a bit of canning this year and my kids are starting to eat just copious amounts of food and so I decided to do two more this year. I'm sure this will be more than enough for our family. I prefer to plant my tomatoes nice and far apart and then baby them so that I don't have to have as many tomato plants. If you take really really good care of a tomato plant it can give you bushels of tomatoes. My raised beds are going wild with all of this rain. Here is my broccoli and cabbage. I guess I forgot I should check this cabbage. I should probably just take this in. I don't know if that's going to get bigger or not. I harvested all of my broccoli last week because a heat wave came through and broccoli will bolt in the heat so I took all of this broccoli in plus another whole bed of broccoli down there and I got a ton of broccoli put into my freezer. My all-time favorite variety of broccoli is imperial. It gets a nice big head. It's not as good for side shoots but I really like broccoli that is known for its big head rather than side shoots because by the time that I can't even harvest side shoots the worms are out in full force and so it's better for me just to get a nice big head to start with. These are my lovely cucumbers that I hope will climb up this trellis. I've really really struggled with cucumbers in the past but last year I did have success so I'm really hoping for some good old success with these cucumbers this year. The sweet potatoes are slowly taking over the entire garden. They are looking absolutely amazing. I just love a nice raised bed that's just like spilling over the sides. My all-time favorite varieties of sweet potatoes to plant are Vardaman and Covington. The reason that I like Covington and Vardaman so much is because they are bush varieties and so the potatoes grow mostly at the base of the plant which means you don't have to dig up your entire garden in order to get nice big beautiful sweet potatoes. We've got several different varieties of peppers right here. Rather than trying to name them all off I'll pop them up on the screen. My favorite is Jimmy Nardello. They are a nice red pepper. So delicious. Perfect for snacking. Michelle likes to use the tomato cages on her peppers because her pepper plants get so big and bushy they just go nuts and this just really helps them to stay upright and they just produce so much better when they're kept up. These butternut squash plants are going nuts. They're supposed to go up the trellis, not this way, but they're going both ways. These pepper plants were not looking that great earlier this spring with the cool weather we were having but now that it's warming up they are taking off and they're looking amazing. These are tomato cages that we found with our tomato plants. The plants just get way too big for these. These are the perfect size for the pepper plants. For our tomatoes, that's why we started using the cattle panels for our indeterminate tomatoes and then some bigger cages like this for our determinate tomatoes. You can pick these up at Berlin Seeds, Holmes County, Ohio. There's probably places you can get them online but they have been hard to find on there but they are amazing compared to those round ones or making homemade ones because they fold up and they stack together and they take up way less space. The garden is more of Michelle's domain but one of my dreams was to have really pretty trellises in the garden. Last year this turned out so cool with the luffa squash we grew. This year we're trying our butternut squash on these arch trellises. The trellis turned out so well last year that we decided to do a second one this year and we planted some butterfly pea flowers that are not really going anywhere. I don't know if they'll get bigger or not. I'm really hoping they'll start crawling up here because I would really like to have a nice beautiful tunnel going on but so far they're not doing a whole lot. Here we have more sweet potatoes. I aim to plant around 40 sweet potato plants. It takes up four of my raised beds. I really like the raised beds for my sweet potatoes because I find they don't get fungus as much as they do in ground and I think it's just because the beds drain so well. Here's another bed of broccoli that I already picked as well as some cabbage and then here I've got some basil plants. They are taking a hot minute to start off because it was so cold. They just are taking a minute to love life. Here's my bed of thyme that comes up every single year. Thyme is a really great perennial and I use a lot of thyme in my kitchen. Here is some snapdragons that my daughter planted that are looking really amazing. One thing that I've really made priority in the last few years is to plant flowers and herbs and stuff among all of my other things. I'm not the kind of gardener who finds it efficient to just put a whole bunch of different kinds of plants in one bed like just scatter seeds. It's just not efficient enough for the scale of gardening that I do but I do really like to try to add in some variety just to break things up and try to keep bugs at bay. I have also really come to appreciate beneficial insects all the more especially since we have honeybees. They help my garden out so much and so I plant flowers and stuff in among everything just to bring them in to my vegetables. Here's some peas that my daughter planted and I bet she doesn't know that they're ready to pick. These are so good and my kids, I hardly ever get a chance to eat these because my kids just pick them. I am just entering green bean season. I picked my first batch yesterday and they are going wild. There are so many green beans in here, so many green beans in there. They're not quite ready yet for a second picking though thankfully. My favorite variety of green beans to grow is contender. It's an heirloom and I really like to plant heirlooms when I can. I only plant green beans about every other year or so. I don't like canning. It's not one of my, I don't think it's very fun, put it that way. Green beans are pretty time intensive in the kitchen with the pressure canner and stuff so I tend to grow things like broccoli that I can just quickly blanch and freeze but I do like my green beans so every other year I do a whole bunch of green beans, try to can enough that it lasts for two years. Our current bushes are a little sad this year. One of them, I think maybe we pruned wrong and it's not growing anything. This one is looking really nice but I think the birds came in here and feasted because we did not get a lot of currents off of here. We got a pretty decent amount of currents last year. We were able to make some current jam. It was really really tasty, about my favorite jam so a little disappointing. The fruit thing around here is something we're really working on. I feel like we've got the vegetables pretty nailed down. The raspberries do really well. The strawberries do really well. I brought the mower out here because I need to mow those down. That is part of our strategy with the strawberries, mowing them down after they're done for the year. Helps take care of a lot of disease and stuff like that. The fruit trees we've got here, we've got some apple, pear, cherry. They just don't do very well for us so far. We didn't do a good job of keeping them sprayed for diseases and stuff when we first planted them and now I'm trying to like catch back up with it. So I've been doing a little better this year and I'm hoping to get something out of them but I don't know. That feels so wrong but it works. Our strawberries didn't look as good this year as some years maybe but they still did really well and we've got a whole bunch of strawberries in the freezer and a bunch of strawberry jam. Not new for us but something that we haven't grown in quite a while is dent corn. We've got several rows of it here. Dent corn is super fun. We did a long time ago and it is awesome for making cornbread. Homemade, homegrown cornbread is better than any other cornbread I've ever had. We're growing two different varieties. Reed's yellow dent and bloody butcher. Reed's yellow dent is pretty obviously a yellow kernel corn and that's pretty normal. The bloody butcher grows like super tall and that's a red kernel and it's really cool. It makes like a purple cornbread and that's something that's really cool too that you don't have to do any kind of preserving. Once it's dry on the stalk you harvest it, shell it, then you put it in a bucket and it'll last for a very very long time. These are going to be our dried beans. We are just going to let these dry completely on the stalk, pull these up, take them inside. Dried beans are really great self-sufficiency food because well number one they're very simple to grow but they also don't need to be preserved or like canned or frozen or anything. They can just be dried and stored in food grade buckets for years. This year I'm doing navy beans, tiger's eye, and red kidney. I usually do black turtle but we still have a bunch of those left over and we just don't like them as good as those nice meaty kidney beans. Here is my patch of wildflowers. These ones, these bachelor buttons that are already blooming, are covered in bees and insects and all the other stuff. It just looks like a patch of weeds but it's actually not. These are wildflowers that are going to start blooming soon. Some of them are already starting. There are definitely some weeds in here but most of this is wildflowers. I really really like to attract as many pollinators into the garden as I possibly can. So this tea that I picked right here is apple mint. This is our all-time favorite tea to drink in the wintertime and also in the summertime. I actually drink this every single night before I go to bed. I planted a new patch of the apple mint just this year and it already completely filled this entire container which is awesome. This over here is chocolate mint. This is much more of like a true menthol peppermint that I really like for congestion and things like that. We're racing a thunderstorm so I don't have time to harvest all of that. We planted this walnut tree here several years ago and it is by far doing the best out of any of the trees we planted on our property. It's an English walnut and I don't know if I can see one from here but there are actually a number of walnuts on there. Here's one. It's pretty exciting and for me more than the walnuts it's just really cool to have this pretty tree to walk through. To get to my office here and in front of my office I have my two little tea plants. Here's some lemon balm. I think that's one of my favorites to have in tea adds a really really nice flavor and then over here is some orange mint. So it'll be a little bit the same as that apple mint over there except it tastes more like citrus. It is super cool to add in with other teas and give you some citrus flavor. Right on the other side of this walnut tree is our grape trellis. Something that we are trying to learn. I think we're doing a little better with it this year. I've done some pruning. They're climbing up the trellis pretty well. We had a storm a little while back that blew them over. I put them back up, did some pruning, tied them to this trellis and this is actually the first time I've looked at them in about a week or so and there are some legit grapes growing on there. The plants just still look so sad. The plants do not look very nice but they're producing some grapes. Really hopeful that we can get something going with these because that would be so much fun to have some fresh grapes to eat and also I would love to make our own wine with them. Starting to rain but real quick we've also got some elderberry plants here. We've got three of them. We had four. One of them died. These were sent to us by a subscriber. Thank you so much and there's also a couple of them planted down by the bees and that is pretty much everything we have growing on our property. If you want to see more of what we do on our homestead click on this video right here to watch it next and now we need to go inside. This garlic needs to be harvested. Oh there's flies. A little vampire kitten or they will be all like crooked and wiggly and stuff. Wiggly is not the right word.