Harvesting Pounds of Food (You Won't Believe These Potatoes!)

Hello friends, welcome to the garden. Today we're doing a pretty big garden harvest. If you're new here my name is Meg and I am gardening in North Carolina in zone 8a and it's June in the garden which means there's a lot of like crop turnover. I'm harvesting my potatoes today, I'm harvesting all of my onions and that's going to make room for me to then plant in my sweet potatoes. We've got cucumbers coming in finally, I've got beans coming in finally, blueberries, blackberries, like the garden's popping off. So we're gonna go around and see what all we can harvest. We're gonna go with the most exciting thing first, the potatoes and onions because I'm most excited for these. The onions look incredible. I don't think I gave you guys an update about the onions. When you guys saw me plant this entire bed out in this video, I planted all of the onions and it was different varieties. So there were red and there were white and then there were the yellow which are the candy variety. The red and the white ones didn't make it and so I had to replace them with just more of the candies. So these are all candies. I don't know what happened with the red and yellow, they just like shriveled up and died. So don't know what happened but at least I had some extra of the candies to replace them with. They look amazing. The potatoes, I know that they can go a little bit longer. Guys, I know. Usually I let them go until they're completely dead like all of the like vines are just crumbled up and and dried out. But I really need this bed space. I gotta plan out my sweet potatoes. I gotta plan out my corn and I think I'm gonna do that in this bed. And I don't mind earlier potatoes. I really don't mind smaller potatoes. That's actually what I prefer to use in the kitchen to make like little smashed potatoes, potato salad. Like I don't ever eat just like a big potato by itself. So I'm fine with the earlier smaller ones and I'm excited so I'm just gonna go ahead and harvest them. I'm gonna pull this little baby onion that's right here. So teeny. And we're gonna get to these potatoes. I'm just gonna like pull them out. Let's see what we've got going on in here and then we'll dig. Whoa. Oh wow. Oh my gosh. Whoa. This is so exciting. I love harvesting potatoes. Look. So many. Oh my gosh. Yeah, these are actually a pretty decent size. Oh my god. The most exciting thing in gardening I swear is harvesting potatoes. A couple more small ones attached and then there's probably some in the soil that we need to dig out. Wow. Look at this one. This variety is so cool too. So this is called masquerade potato and it's so beautiful. It's like this purple yellow marbling but when you cut them open it's just yellow inside. So it's such a cool variety. Gonna move on to the next plant. I'm just like pulling the plants out and then we'll dig. Got a little tiny baby one from that. I think that there's more underneath there. These are the um oh my god I literally just looked up the name. I just looked at it and I lost it. These are the huckleberry gold variety. They're purple on the outside but then they're buttery gold on the inside. Okay we've got some more here. This is the carla rosa variety. I just love potatoes so much. I can't wait to go digging because I feel like there's gonna be so much more to kind of like dig out. Oh we're gonna have to go digging for those. Yep there's the big ones. We're gonna have to go digging for the big ones. I have to like put my foot in here. Oh wow whoa oh my gosh. Okay biggest one yet. This is such a beautiful potato. Look at how purple it is. I've grown purple potatoes in the past and they're not this like shiny almost magenta colored. I don't know if it's even showing up like on camera the way it looks in real life but it's so beautiful. It's gonna make us dig for those. Some of them just don't pull out the potatoes. I think it's the vines that are kind of like more dead. Wow I just like every time I pull them up I'm just so amazed. I'm like wow how is this a real thing? Potatoes are so cool. Okay we're gonna start digging on this side. I don't know if I want to use this pitchfork or if I want to be more gentle and just dig with my hands. I don't know what would be more efficient because I don't want to stab a potato. Oh yeah I knew there were some big ones hiding out. Oh there's one. There's like a big root under here or something. What the heck is that? Oh two big ones. Oh my god it's so hot out here. I'm like sweating. Gotta do it for the potatoes. Oh there's a good one. Ow. Splinter. Some of these potatoes are like really deep in there. I might need to go feral animal and just dig with my hands. Okay we've got to go raccoon mode and make sure that we didn't miss any and I always feel like a feral animal when I'm just like digging in the dirt. Really brings out my my primal side. I'm sweating so much. It was 95 degrees here today. 95 degrees. I don't know what that is in celsius for you international people but it's hot okay. It is like you don't even know. You don't even know. It's not just hot it's humid. I'm like literally sweat is pouring down my face right now. Pouring. Pouring. Okay I feel oh see see this is why we have to dig because the pitchfork is gonna miss some. These are so deep. Some of these. Got another one. What I'm noticing so far is that the purple ones are doing really well. The striped ones are doing really well. The pink ones are a little like smaller like a little more underdeveloped. I said that and then I got this big pink one. I'm sweating so much. Oh there was like a whole family of potatoes that we missed down here. Big ones. Half a bed. Half a bed and there's sweat dripping down my eyeball. You guys I've been out here probably for 15 minutes. 15 minutes. Gardening in North Carolina is not for the weak. It's just not. Oh my god. It is like all I can do is laugh and there's also mosquitoes like dive bombing my face and I have so much more to harvest. Okay we are on the other side now. Great I just got dirt all in my shoes. Whoa. Okay these potatoes did the best by far. These have been the best pulls and they're the prettiest. Whoa. Okay this is officially the biggest one. Wow. I love how the roots are purple on this plant too. That's kind of cool. Okay now it's raccoon time. We dig. Oh wow. Oh my gosh. Oh look at that. Okay the purple ones, huckleberry gold. These are definitely the biggest ones. They just keep coming. Wow this plant was great for being early too. That's kind of impressive. Okay I think that's it. Okay I am finally done. Sweating buckets. I put these into different baskets to see who won. This is the Carla Rosa and I ordered all these from So True Seeds. I think that this one's going to be the loser. Smaller potatoes, smaller yield, but overall like these look amazing. These are perfect for me. Masquerade potato. Beautiful. I definitely will grow these again. Potatoes are larger. Honestly actually I think these are about the same. I think they're about the same. We have a clear winner and that is the huckleberry gold. Larger potatoes, just overall amazing. I'm so excited. I love potatoes so much. This is definitely enough potatoes to last me. I eat potatoes but like not super often. I usually, if I'm gonna eat potatoes, I like make a special dish with them but I'm really excited about these. I gotta go in, take a break, then come back out and do the onions which some of the onions like caught astray while I was trying to get out the potatoes and they just kind of like came out of the soil. Now I'm gonna harvest all of these onions. I know that these are definitely ready because their tops have fallen over. If they weren't ready they would still be sticking up straight like this but when they fall over like that, that's when you know that they're done growing and they're ready to harvest. Would you like an onion bouquet? Look at all of these onions. They look so good. I'm so happy right now. I've been eating these garlic cloves already but there's still a few left to grab. So the garlic was a total bust this year. I planted mostly soft neck varieties and only a few hard necks so the hard necks turned out great and I've been eating on these like for a few weeks now just kind of harvesting them when I need them in the kitchen. The soft necks, they either just didn't produce at all or they produced these tiny little bulbs and I think what happened was we had a bunch of snow like that snow that we had where we had like a foot of snow. It was unseasonably cold this past winter and soft neck is more for warmer environments. In the years past my soft neck has outperformed my hard neck but every year is just so different so you win some you lose some. Best onions this year, worst garlic ever so it happens. We finally have some cucumbers coming in. I have this little kind of patio snacker variety where they are just really little and then I have this big slicer variety. We also have some zucchinis coming in so I'm gonna grab these. We've got the first flush of green beans going on here. We've got the berries and the eggs and then we're done. I'm ready to be inside. It's miserable out here. It's 6 30 in the evening and I'm still just like so sweaty, so hot. I love living in North Carolina. I love living in North Carolina. I kind of want to move up north or out west. I don't know. I feel like I just harvested so many blackberries from this and now there's more that are ripe. Just so many blackberries from this one vine. I'm obsessed. I get a lot of questions about this. This is growing in a grow bag. It's about four years old now. This trellis is a piece of junk, trash. I don't know, my dad found it. We think it might be like a bed frame or something and then he just he spray painted it black and I was like yeah that would make an amazing trellis. Let me have it. We don't like to waste trash around here but I gotta grab all of these berries. I also get a lot of questions about the birds. When people see me harvest all my berries they're like how do you keep the birds away? How do they not steal all of your berries? I don't know what to tell you guys. I love birds. I welcome the birds in my garden and I feed them. I have multiple bird feeders throughout my property. I probably have like six or seven bird feeders. My birds are well fed and some people say well doesn't that attract more birds and blah blah blah. Not in my experience. I think the birds are going to be there. They're little dinosaurs roaming the sky like they're going to be here. It is nature. This is their world. We don't want to shoo them away. We want to welcome them. Birds are sometimes good pollinators like hummingbirds. They also eat insects. They're really good for your garden. You want birds around but you got to keep them happy or they will come for your berries. So I've found that feeding them all throughout my property and just like keeping them happy and well fed they don't touch my berries and if they do I don't mind sharing. I have plenty to share. That's my only advice is be friends with the birds. Just give in to their antics. That's really all you can do. Also I have been befriending crows specifically. There is like an army of crows that lives in the tiny little patch of woods behind my house. A lot of people think that I have like a large wooded area. I don't. It's like so tiny. So little tiny patch of woods and there's a gang of crows that live there and they visit my garden quite often. I leave peanuts out for them. I want them because I want them to protect my chickens. Crows are like really territorial with hawks and so where there's crows you will often not see hawks and I've I have physically seen the crows chasing away hawks before. So birds are your friends guys. They're your friends. I definitely am going to be freezing a ton of blackberries. I still have some inside from earlier this week. They're just coming in so fast but look at all of these blackberries. The variety of this blackberry is called Apache and I like it because it's thornless. So unlike my raspberry I don't have a bunch of like pricked skin. Now I'm going to move on to blueberries. I have this blueberry bush here. This one is called berry bucks and it's a like wild type of blueberry meaning like the blueberries don't bunch up like the other one I'm going to show you and also the berries are a lot smaller than the other variety I'm going to show you but they're so much sweeter. They are like insanely sweet blueberries so I have to like go hunting for these just because they're kind of like all in here. This one is a mystery variety because I left this plant for dead. I thought it was dead and it was dead in this terracotta pot abandoned for literally like two or three years and then this year just decided to like come back to life and start producing all these berries. I think their roots eventually like pushed through the terracotta and went into the ground and maybe the soil is really acidic here and I liked it. I don't know. I'm not asking any questions because these blueberries look amazing but I don't know what variety it is. And then finally we have this jellybean variety which I've been harvesting on for weeks now. This thing was so loaded with blueberries like I mean take what you see and triple it and that's what it looked like and it's just like it keeps on keeping on. This is the best container blueberry plant and yes it's in a grow bag. It's in a 20 gallon grow bag. Jellybean is a specific container variety. It's very bushy rather than tall and it's my favorite. I'll over ripe. I've been too long. I'll feed those to the chickens. I think I'm gonna make blueberry jam. I think I've decided that's what I want to do with these because I'm definitely gonna have enough. I still have a ton of blueberries inside in my fridge. The jellybean blueberries are much larger. Their berries are thick but they're a little less sweet than the berry bucks but they're still really sweet like don't get me wrong. They're sweet. They're delicious. It's just the berry bucks has a sweetness that like is kind of indescribable. Like every person that I've been like hey try this blueberry they're like wow I've never tasted a blueberry so sweet. Okay the last thing I have to do is get the eggs and look at this egg apron that my mom made for me. She crocheted this. Isn't this so cute? So it has little pockets and they're like made out of chickens and you put the egg in the pocket. It's adorable. I'm obsessed with this so I'm gonna go grab the eggs and put them in my little chicken apron. There's an ice cream truck in my neighborhood. This is my broody girl Mavia. She's literally good for nothing other than going broody and we don't have a rooster. So you can't raise you can't raise chicks. Stop it. Okay grab the first egg. I'm gonna put it in the pocket. Oh my god that's so cute. Oh we only have two eggs. Wow. I think the girls are not laying right now because it's way too hot. This is everything we got today. What a harvest. My pantry is about to be stocked. I literally feel like I just went grocery shopping like for real. Thank you guys so much for coming along with me today on this very sweaty but very magnificent harvest. I feel so accomplished right now. Like there's just nothing better than growing your own food and then harvesting it and then putting it in your pantry and then you have food. There's just literally nothing better. Tell me what's better. Tell me what's better than that in the comments. There's nothing. I feel good right now. Let me know in the comments what you guys are harvesting in June. I know we're all in different time zones and different areas of the world. So let me know what you're harvesting. Let me know what you're looking forward to harvesting. If you enjoyed this video be sure to like and subscribe and if you don't want to miss a video that I put out be sure to turn on those notifications. You can find me on all of the things. I'm also on Substack and also I have a podcast called The Garden Girls Podcast. We drop new episodes every single week so be sure to check that out and I will see you guys in the next one. Bye!