What it Looks Like to Feed a Family from a 1 8 Acre Garden Full Tour

Our homestead garden is proof that you don't need a large amount of land to grow a massive amount of food. Of course, people's idea of a large amount of land is going to be very different depending on where they're coming from, but in the homesteading space our property is pretty small. We have only an eighth of an acre of actual garden space on our property, but we grow all of our own veggies and berries and herbs and more to feed our family of six for the year. My garden's finally taking off. Seems like it took a bit longer than normal this year. As a whole, my garden is looking lovely, but I have had some disappointments this year. I have some garden chores that I need to get done as well, so I'm going to be getting some of those done as I take you on the tour. This is my favorite video of the year and I just can't wait to show you guys around. Hey duckies. These are my white potatoes and they are looking absolutely beautiful. White potatoes are a staple crop for us, so these are like my babies. I take care of them very well. These are mulched very heavily in leaves. I hilled them one time with soil and then I hilled them another time very heavily with leaves. For our family of six, I like to plant 40 pounds of seed potatoes or approximately 40 pounds. This wasn't quite 40 pounds because it didn't come out quite right for the space. Yukon Gold is my very favorite potato variety, but unfortunately this year I did not plant it because it has been carrying virus Y and the other potatoes in my garden don't get the virus, but the Yukon Gold does. I decided I'm going to have to nix that for a while and hopefully eventually I can add it back into my rotation because it does last longer than any of my other potatoes in storage, but my others do very well. My second favorite is Kennebec, which is over here, and then Red Pontiac. That one is a beautiful red potato that does store for a while, but we eat those first because those will go bad faster. And then I'm trying Blue Gold this year, which is like a new one that the Bertal- which is a new one that the Bertal & Seed catalog had. I'm really excited to see how that one will be. I'm hoping that the flesh is similar to Yukon Gold. We'll see. My raspberries are just starting to ripen. Just a few like here and there. The reason that I'm not getting a ton of raspberries yet is because we cut our raspberries all the way down to the ground every spring. The fresh growth is really good for disease resistance and it also just makes so that I get one giant harvest mid to late summer rather than them just trickling in like all through the year. The variety of raspberries that I planted was Heritage. I got it from Berlin Seeds, like the bare root plants. I planted to begin with I think 25, but then I took at least five of them out. I will say I'm a little bit concerned about these raspberries this year. I'm not sure if they need some fertilizer or what it is as in like compost because I haven't done great with composting them because it feels wrong to dump compost onto like small shoots because like these never go away. Like I don't replant them every year obviously. So I feel like I need to compost them really well next year. I also noticed that like all of these over here are much shorter. Someone in the comment section said it could be the light and I did look out here one evening and like right here the house was shading all of these and not the others. So I do think that has a part to play in it. These are also much closer to the field and I will show you out in the garden some other disappointments that I've had but I have been having some herbicide drift this year and the leaves are a little bit curled, a little bit mangled and so my mom was over the other day and she was also really wondering if this doesn't have to do with herbicide drift. Michelle is a little worried about her raspberries but I am pretty confident in them. I am disappointed how short these are down here but overall these plants are very very healthy plants and I'm pretty confident we're going to have another banger harvest this year. I can hear my honeybees buzzing all through these pollinating the flowers and helping things grow. I love the sound of that and I did want to explain our trellis here real quick. It's pretty simple. I've got a 4x4 post at each end and then a couple just 2x4 posts in the middle. They're spaced 10 feet apart and that seems to be a good distance to support everything really well and this is just electric fence wire that I use for my cow fencing and I've got one wire down here that's I think about two feet wide and then this one up here is probably about three feet wide and then we found that what can happen is as they're growing up they'll start bending way out so I added another wire in the middle that's even wider just to keep the branches from drooping all the way to the ground because we found what happens is when they droop all the way to the ground they get more dirt splashed up on them. They're not as upright and airy. I don't know if you can say it that way but when they're all down they get matted together and there's not good airflow. If we keep them nice and upright there's just less disease problems and less worms. I don't know if you've ever picked raspberries but if you pick them and you look inside and there's little wormies in there it's kind of disturbing so we do our very best to keep those things out of there because they're really hard to spot and it takes a lot of extra time picking if you have to watch for worms all the time. This is my lovely herb garden. This is like my idea of happiness right here. I just got done pulling out all my chamomile. It was just like taking over and I already have a year's worth and now that I pulled it out I'm seeing that there's like hundreds of tiny little chamomiles coming up and so if I want to fall harvest I will have that as well. This is my sage and it is completely taking over this bed and I'm not sure what to do about it because I don't use a ton of sage but this is just one plant that went absolutely nuts and no matter how much I trim it back it just comes back. This here is my lavender. I've already been harvesting some lavender just like little ones here and there. Most of them are bigger than this but I just picked it the other day. My calendula that I started from seed in my house this winter is doing great. A little tip on calendula if you don't keep the flowers picked and then the plant will stop growing but if you keep these guys picked as often as possible like honestly every day to every other day the plants will continue to get huge and keep getting bushier and bushier. Something very very sad happened this year. For some reason my echinacea plant rotted out like the whole root system was rotted off and so I had to pull it. I don't know why like last year it was huge and beautiful and I don't know I need to just research it a little bit but for some reason it just was not loving life and so now I have to start over. Echinacea is a perennial so it should just keep coming back stronger every year. Everything else did but not that so I don't know is it too wet this spring I'm not sure what happened there. This is my oregano. I can hardly have too much oregano because I use this in all of my homemade tomato sauces. If you want to take your tomato sauces to the next level use your homegrown herbs. They are absolutely insane. In here among the sage I have this parsley that is looking gorgeous but I'm definitely going to have to just trim all this sage way back so that it can actually flourish. I'm going to take these herbs into the house because they are wilting as we speak. It is so humid out here today it is like an all-out sauna session. Michelle from the future here to show you what we got in our Thrive Market box. Thank you to Thrive Market for sponsoring this video today. Thrive Market is an online membership-based grocery store but before I show you what's in this box Thrive Market has a new offer. They are offering $20 off of your first three orders and the savings from just that will pay for your membership. Starting off strong with some mushroom jerky. Cody liked this enough I guess that he decided to get it again. What is this? Is it a blanket? Oh all of this for my huge chocolate. There is a heat wave going on right now here in Ohio and everywhere else I assume and the chocolate would have definitely melted if it wasn't for that beautiful packaging. These are pips cheese balls and they are my very favorite salty snack that does not have seed oils. That's why I love these so much. They're made with avocado oil and they're also individually packaged and so I actually had I got two of these because we go on lots of adventures like kayaking trips and stuff and these are perfect if you don't just want to have a bunch of sugary stuff on the kayaks. I of course had to get some avocado oil potato chips because I really like these for picnics or here again just adventures. I got these soft baked banana bars again. They don't have seed oils and they have no added sugar and I just find them to be a really great break from like lar bars and some of the same old bars that we get all the time. I think they're really really good. Our kids also really love these Bob's Red Mill peanut butter and jelly. They call them Bob's bars. They're like a whole grain bar. They are non-gmo gluten-free whole grain and they also do not have any seed oils in them which is wonderful. It's very hard to find bars that do not have seed oils in them. I bet no one can guess what's in this one. It's my good old avocado oil. I get this every single time and also my collagen which I drink in my tea every morning and my favorite beef sticks. I love the Mission beef sticks and if you have never had a date from Thrive Market what have you been doing with your life? These things are so ooey and gooey. I've never had such delicious dates as these. So go to thrivemarket.com slash morethanfarmers to get $20 off your first three orders plus guaranteed savings to come. I'm going to show you guys my tomatoes first because I really need to get the spray on them before the sun gets too high in the sky. I never like to spray anything when it's too hot because that can actually burn your leaves. Often in the heat of the summer I don't have to be spraying as much but I do right now just like for blight just simply because it is so humid and wet and that is when blight just thrives in that damp climate. So I like to spray these tomatoes with xeritol. It's one of the safest sprays that you can get according to Berlin Seed Catalog. It's an organic spray that is OMRI listed and one of the main ingredients the active ingredients in it is hydrogen peroxide. I spray this especially all over the bottom of my tomato plants. It's definitely time that I do a little bit of maintenance on these tomatoes again. I did maintenance last week but usually especially when these guys are growing in leaps and bounds like they are right now I have to be tying them up and cutting off the branches on the bottom like every single week. Those are the two main things that I do in order to keep blight off of my tomatoes. So even before spraying I would make sure that the ground underneath the tomatoes is mulched really heavily. You don't want any soil splashing up on your plants in the rain because a lot of blight is actually soil born and then I snip off all the branches that are touching the soil or I like loop them up through so that they're not touching. When it comes to spraying with natural products with like OMRI listed organic sprays it is essential that you be spraying them before the issue gets out of hand because if your tomatoes already have really bad blight this spray is not going to like heal them but it will just help to control things. I put a lot of forethought into my plants and I try to stay on top of things before anything actually gets out of hand. I have 13 tomato plants this year. Most of them are Amish paste and then I have a sun gold and then two others down there. I can't remember what they are. I think one of them is hillbilly something and another one is something else. I'll have Cody put it on the screen for you. I prefer to do only 13 plants and take really good care of them. I keep everything off the ground. I keep them sprayed weekly and when I do it like this I can get boatloads of tomatoes even to the point that I have enough for us and enough to give to my friends at the end of the year. We're talking bushels and bushels of tomatoes. These cattle panels are working amazing as trellises. I will say it's annoying to move them every year but I don't feel like it's that bad. Cody can just pull up these t-posts and he moves it for me which is why I think it's not so bad. My onions are looking really great. I'm very proud of these onions because this year I started them all from seed which was really fun. Definitely some learning curves. I planted them out when they were too small and a little bit too early. A stouter seedling could take the cooler temps that we had and mine didn't handle all the temps too well but most of them survived. I did Patterson and Red Wing and then there was some dead spots like some empty spots where some of my seedlings got killed by the frost and so I filled those in with some onion seedlings from my local greenhouse so that I wouldn't have to ship any more in. Onions are a staple crop for us so I take really good care of these. These can be stored in a cold room for the entire winter without spoiling so that makes them a very very valuable crop for me. I try to keep them as weed free as possible. There's definitely a few weeds in here but with the heavy leaf mulch they're so simple to pull. I can just go through here in like 10 minutes and pull a couple of the straggly weeds. I just don't want my onions to have too much competition because that makes that the bulbs don't get as big. If my onion bulbs don't get as big they won't store as well. Another thing that I do with my onions is I'm meticulous with spacing them. If you don't give them enough space they're not going to get huge. I also plant onion plants, not the sets. For some reason, for me and also the internet will say this as well, the onion sets just don't make as large of an onion bulb. This is my spring garlic patch. We didn't know if we were going to be here yet this spring and so last fall we did not plant the winter hard net garlic and so I just planted some spring garlic in here. It stores very well actually in the cold room. Then right behind me here is a summer squash plant. This is the what's it called this is a patty pan squash that's called sunburst and it works so much better for me with like the blight and also just bugs like squash beetles. This is much more resistant to those because the stem grows along the ground and continues to put out roots and so if vine borers or squash bugs kill the base of the plant the vine continues to re-root and it can continue growing squash. Just on the other side of our onions here is our asparagus patch. This got put in pretty soon after we moved in. Michelle actually started a bunch of it from seed. We have two different varieties. There's Mary Washington and Purple Passion and she started the Mary Washington asparagus from seeds that's pretty cool. We got the Purple Passion as crowns probably from berlin season pretty sure and they are both very prolific. We love asparagus and one thing that we really love about it is that it kind of fills in the gap between our winter storage crops and then our summer harvesting. There's kind of this awkward time where stuff starts going bad in the cold cellar and then the other stuff isn't quite ready in the garden yet but this asparagus starts popping up right at the crack of spring and it is this nice fresh vegetable that we can have when we're so tired of the long cold winter. We just stopped harvesting this what like a couple weeks ago and by the time we stopped harvesting it our kids were starting to get sick of it because we were having it almost every meal and I don't know if you can see it or not but there are just honeybees all over this stuff. Again it makes me so happy just like the raspberries. I can see them with a bunch of pollen on their legs and they are just going to town in here. This asparagus is going to stay up for the summer. I actually right now I need to tie it up so it doesn't fall over into the rest of our garden stuff and then come this fall we will we will cut it down and get rid of it. Asparagus beetles will overwinter in the plants so we like to cut it down and then actually burn it so that the asparagus beetles don't survive until the next spring. I feel like before we go any farther I need to explain my t-shirt. I actually hate cantaloupe. I despise it with passion. You will not find it growing in our garden in here but this shirt was a gift and so I told my buddy that I would wear it in a video. I dislike cantaloupe so much that even those mixed fruit bowls that have some cantaloupe in it with other stuff and then like the flavor gets on the other stuff. I can't stand eating that stuff. It's so disgusting. This right here is my carrot patch. Carrots are a huge staple crop for us and so these got mulched and thinned and weeded super super well. I'm meticulous with how I thin my carrots. I like to make so that they're for sure an inch and a half to two inches apart. The reason for this is because I want my carrots to get nice and large because this batch of carrots here is for storage carrots so I will put these carrots into plastic bags and store them in a refrigerator. You can also do this in a cold room in sand but we just think this is easier. We put them in a refrigerator and they will last for months and months and months all through the winter time. The variety of carrots that I plant is called Danvers 126. It used to be called Danver Half Long which I like better but they changed it. They are shorter. They're short and stocky. They work beautifully in storage. Something about that short stockiness works so well and plus they don't break off when we are digging them. They're very simple to dig. If you are trying to get them to germinate in the heat like for fall carrots I like to lay a board over top of them and then the second they germinate I take the board off but the soil staying cool and dark and damp is what helps them to be able to germinate because carrots don't love heat. I have these mulched with something that I don't normally mulch with. You guys probably haven't seen a ton of this before. We just got a bagger, a grass clipping bagger for our lawnmower. I ran out of leaves this year and I'm finding them a bit difficult to find. We just got a phone call today from someone who said we could have some leaves which is amazing but I've been using grass clippings because I really want to cover my soil and it's very sustainable. I'm very excited about the grass clippings. They don't last quite as long as leaves and I don't think they look as nice as leaves but they're still amazing. They do wonderful things for the soil and root crops especially really really like to have cool damp loose soil so that they can get large and mulch is going to help make so that those root veggies can like expand underground beautifully. I have a couple sections of dried bean plots here in my garden. Basically what I did was I planted all of the essentials and then I filled the rest in with dried beans because this year we're not needing like dent corn or popcorn so we have quite a bit of extra, I say extra, we have quite a bit of space. So I'm filling it up with dried beans because dried beans I am now considering them a staple crop because they don't need to be canned or preserved and they're very filling and versatile. I love beans especially because you can stretch meat with them. They're high in protein unlike many other vegetables. My favorite varieties of dried beans to plant are red kidney and tiger's eye and navy and this year I'm trying a new one called calypso that looks really cool. It looks like the orca whales. Greatest adventure of the summer or a Holstein cow whichever. Over here I have another giant plot of dried beans as well as right behind me here. I will say this was one of my big disappointments this year. We got some pretty hefty herbicide drift. I know that herbicide drift is a huge topic right now and I don't just want to add to the noise and the confusion and the frustration but honestly it is extremely upsetting when something like this happens. You can see that a lot of these leaves are just disfigured and I noticed that my beans weren't growing as fast as I thought they should and now I understand why. The new growth is looking okay but I can definitely tell that these got a major hit. I'm 95% sure that this has to do with herbicide drift. I noticed it mostly on my beans like on these broad leaves. I noticed quite a bit of damage on these. I noticed a little bit on my tomatoes. I noticed it on my peppers and my squash. A little bit on my sweet potatoes. I also think it may have hit my raspberries. I think that's why the leaves started to curl and I did smell it in the air one day and I guess the way I'm looking at it is I kind of like bounce back and forth between frustration, anger and then I just come to a place where I'm like we live where we do. We chose this property 10 years ago and didn't take all of the fields into consideration and there's people in the comment section who are like you guys just need to leave and we are trying to find a new property but it also just isn't that simple. You can't just like up and leave. It takes time and so for now we are just dealing with it. This has happened before and one thing I will say I do not understand why people rip out their entire garden if they have some herbicide damage. I personally do not think that that is at all necessary. It's not like these plants were drenched in it. They just got a bit of drift. The rest of the garden is completely organic. This is going to be way better than anything you can find in the grocery store. I would argue even better than organic produce in the grocery store. You do not know what all is on organic produce so for me I am just going to take good care of these things. They will easily recover. I will get a great yield. This has happened over and over. It happened to my mom when I was growing up. Everything's going to be fine. We're going to try to move because we want tree coverage and all the stuff so that we don't get all this drift but for now it is what it is and I'm just going to choose to look at the positive. My garden is still beautiful. My garden is still going to yield well. I do just want to say one quick thing to add to the noise a little bit. We totally understand that it is completely the farmer's right to do what they want with their own land. To spray whatever they want on their own land but the thing that I think of is what if it was our dog running over to their property and destroying their garden? Like how would they feel if something that we were doing that wasn't just spraying was going over and destroying some of their stuff? I feel like there should be a little more, I don't know, consideration about making sure that stuff isn't getting sprayed when the wind is blowing this direction at the very least. Just my thoughts. This part of our garden is not growing anything. It's on purpose. It was growing way too many thistles here. This is where our strawberry patch was and a strawberry patch is kind of like a perennial. It is a perennial. It'll keep coming back but you replace them every so often and it was ready to be replaced anyways and we weren't sure if we were going to still be here so we didn't plan another patch but anyways it was getting so overgrown with some really nasty grass that was so hard to get rid of. Michelle was doing a ton of weeding and it just kept coming back, kept coming back so we decided to tarp it and totally get rid of that grass. So we haven't looked under there to see what's happening but this area here should be getting rid of all those weeds so that if we are here then next year we can plant something new here and not have to worry about all those terrible weeds. And then up here on the other side of this little bean patch is our corn and like Michelle said a little bit ago we're not growing any dent corn or popcorn this year. This right here is just sweet corn and we don't do a ton of it. It's kind of like an extra for us. It's really tasty and it's fun. The kids love it but we don't see it as a staple crop. Our staple crops are the ones that we really heavily rely on. This is a little different. It's a starchy thing that's going to turn into sugar in your body. That's okay to an extent but we don't want that to be a main part of our diet. These here are my wildflowers that are actually looking really good. I thought they weren't doing great at first but they are looking pretty decent. I can't wait for these to bloom. This is just another way to invite the honeybees into my garden. I used to think wildflowers weren't worth my time but now that my children can help me with all of the preserving and stuff, I have a little bit more time. And to me it is absolutely worth it to get all those good pollinators into the garden. This is my broccoli patch that is over for the year. Thankfully these broccolis were ready to harvest like a week and a half ago and it is supposed to be very hot this week. I think on Wednesday it's supposed to be 93 and it's so humid. It's like a sauna out here and broccoli would just not be okay with that. So I'm very pleased that these guys are all done. I still have my cabbages out here and I see that they really need to be taken in so I'm just going to take them all in today. Cabbage is not something that we really rely on. I only have like three, six, nine plants here but we do like a coleslaw every now and then with tacos. I really really like stonehead cabbage. It's an heirloom and it's very sweet and I just love the nice compact head. The worms can't get in there as easily. Wow that is beautiful. Right here you can see it's starting to crack. That definitely needs to go inside and they are not wormy. I saw this one was kind of wormy for some reason but none of the others are. And the reason for that is because I sprayed BT like one time. That takes care of so many worms. That's how I can have broccoli and cabbage that are not wormy. That BT combined with getting my plants out as early as possible in the spring to give them like a good head start before the worms even come out. If cabbage is really difficult for you to grow you should try the red cabbage. This stuff does not get bugs nearly as much as the green cabbage. I don't know why. Does it like confuse the worms? I don't know why but it's a hack. Here I've got a couple rows of red beets. These are just for me. The rest of my family doesn't love them but I do. I have another couple rows in another bed. They're just kind of to fill things in. These are my luffas and I'm slightly concerned about them. They're not looking as good as I wish. Everything this year like squash, cucumbers, luffas, anything in that family has gotten slammed with the striped cucumber beetles. It's like the striped cucumber beetles are coming out of the ground and I have been doing everything in my power to get rid of them. I came out here every single day and was picking them and it definitely took the population down but they did completely kill my cucumbers and so I'm restarting those in the house and I'm just going to keep trying. I don't know if I'll get cucumbers this year or not. My butternut squash here I think are going to make it and do okay but these also got hit with herbicides. You can see the mangled like the disfigured leaves. So somebody on my Instagram told me that wood ash has been very very effective for them with the striped cucumber beetles and I went to try to gather some but it just rained last night and so it's all wet. I'm not going to be able to sprinkle that on. So I know that you're generally supposed to be putting this in water and spraying it on but I'm just going to sprinkle some of this on the dirt around my plants. Just kidding. We discussed this a little bit off camera and I decided to go with the diatomaceous earth. I am just sprinkling this on the soil around them because when I put them on the leaves before I just didn't feel like it did great things to the leaves. Yep. Butternut squash store beautifully in a cold room and so I like to have a whole lot of these on hand. I use these mostly for like desserts like pumpkin pies and pumpkin breads and things like that. As these guys grow taller I trellis them and they're going to just look beautiful on this trellis that Cody made and hopefully my luffas will make it as well so that we can have like this tunnel of beautiful foliage here. Last year it didn't work out so well hopefully this year will work really well if I can stay on top of these cucumber beetles. The variety of butternut squash that I grow is Waltham. Those have just been the most resilient to squash bugs and cucumber beetles and disease. Often they do still come down with blight towards the end of the season but I can still get good squash off of them before they die. Another thing that really really helps is to mulch underneath them and then also to trellis them. I've noticed a huge difference with the trellising and them getting blight. Often the bugs are down on the bottom not up in the trellis. There's definitely some up here but most of them are down along the ground. My sweet potatoes are looking great. I planted I think 40 sweet potato plants this year. I have them in four different beds. My all-time favorite varieties are Covington and Vardaman. The reason that I really love the Covington and Vardaman varieties is because all of the potatoes grow right at the base of the plant and so they're very very simple to dig. They also do so well in raised beds versus in ground because I found that when they were in ground they were much more susceptible to fungus whereas up here in the beds these drain really well and the potatoes just love it. Last year out of our four beds of sweet potatoes we got around I think it was like 250 pounds of potatoes. That is a lot of food from a very small space. This right here is where all of my cucumbers were. They germinated fine and everything but before they could grow tall the cucumber beetles struck and they ate the plants off like at the base and so I ended up just pulling them all because they were going nowhere and they were just dying and so I have a whole bunch of others started on my porch and I'm just letting them get as big as possible up there before I transplant them out here because once I transplant them the battle is on. There's a Japanese beetle in my hair. This is my pepper bed and these peppers definitely have herbicide drift on them which makes me really sad but they're going to recover. They'll be fine. The top leaves are just kind of curled and weird. That's just how herbicide drift is but they're fine. They're getting bushy and beautiful and especially in this heat they're going to be fine. I really like to put tomato cages on my peppers because it just makes so that they don't get like blown over in storms especially being up in raised beds. This just like helps me relax at night if there's a thunderstorm knowing that everything in my garden is fully supported and if you give your pepper plants a ton of space they will get massive. I also like to put a cage on my basil because my basil because I give it so much space it gets massive and I have had my bushes get so massive that then they are susceptible to blowing over in storms and so a tomato cage really helps to keep that from happening. This little guy is a bit of an overachiever. I'm going to take this pepper off to give the poor thing a break so that it can actually focus on growing the plant rather than one giant pepper. Peppers are one of those crops that we just really like to have a bunch to eat fresh. I also will make these into salsa but other than that I don't preserve a lot of peppers. My favorite variety is California Wonder. It's an heirloom and it's just an all-around great pepper. I also really really love Orange Blaze. That's a hybrid but man it's good. And then Cody loves Jimmy Nardello. They have a bit of like a pineapple flavor. It's like a nice long pepper and then I also do some sweet banana peppers to pickle for my kids because they go nuts over them and then I think I also have some lunchbox peppers and some carmen peppers which are like nice big red peppers. Cody just reminded me that his Jimmy Nardello peppers died this year. I had forgotten. They got frozen. I planted them out too soon and they got frozen so... These pink champagne currants are over for the year. These things are completely no fuss. I love them so much. They have stood up to herbicide drift. They are truly rock stars. We harvested a bunch of these and made them into jelly. I showed that whole process in our last video. Separate from our gardens over here we have our grapes and then our tea. Michelle will show you our tea in just a little bit. These grape vines are looking so much better than they did last year. I still think they're not looking the best but they are looking better. We did a soil test here. We added some amendments. We've got them mulched really nice and I'm trying to keep them tied up so I actually need to do that now. A bunch of the stuff is falling down again and I also pruned them a little differently. I had put in four wires here that I was training vines to and I don't know where I saw it but I feel like I saw that somewhere. I got that idea from somewhere that I should do that but I did more research and found that I would really only want to have one or two sets of vines going out. So I'm going to do two and that's the way I've been training and pruning them but they are getting out of hand and they need to be cut back again. I'm not actually going to prune them like you would for production. I just want to get rid of some of these suckers that are coming out of the bottom here and maybe when it's getting way above the top up there because in my mind at least that's taking away energy from the rest of the plant that I actually want to be growing and fruiting. These elderberry bushes make me so happy. My first elderflowers. I'm so so happy with these. It made a huge difference after I mulched them. I just feel like it really set them up for success not having all of that competition around them. This one is also really looking really great. Oh man I hope we get some elderberries. It looks like we will. These are like elderberry clusters. Yay! My tea continues to grow really really well. This right here is chocolate mint and this is apple mint. This is my all-time favorite mint for teas. I use this all winter long and last summer I planted a new, I sank a new pot because we were running out and so I just like cut this off every couple weeks put it down on my drying rack and then it just grows a new batch. Mints like this have a lot more flavor in the summer than they do in the springtime. I don't know the exact reason for that except somehow the flavors are just a lot more concentrated. So I like to mix my dried spring tea with my dried summer tea so that there's like a more intense flavor with it. I like to leave some mint around the edges because we do also drink quite a bit of this fresh or like in the evenings when I make my bedtime tea I'll just come out here and grab a couple fresh sprigs. That's one of my favorite things about summer is being able to customize my evening cup of tea by just walking through my garden and gathering things. That is the extent of our gardens. I have officially had my sauna session for the day now and I'm going to go in and take a very cold shower. If you guys want to see how we preserve and store all this food you can watch this video right here. I'm sweating, we all smell bad and there is a cucumber beetle. Where'd you go you little loser? Don't tangle now. Good grief. There we go. See I just had to get mad at it. Oh I think something just bit me. Charlie bit me.