We're Building a Life Money Can't Buy (+tips for big harvests)

It's the middle of July and nothing is quite ready for harvest yet. While we wait we are preparing our fall garden and getting our little farm ready for preserving season. We have a ton of stuff to get done today and it's really at the point in the season where we need all hands on deck to keep things moving getting us ready for our fall planting as well as getting ready for our first big harvest of the season. Today I need to get a couple things done in the garden including getting our tomatoes mulched and I'm going to show you why I'm doing that now. We're going to be planting cabbage, broccoli and carrots today to have those ready for our fall harvest and we also need to get our new tower garden filled up which we're super pumped about. Brie also has a few things to show you including the adorable new farm animals we got so this is going to be a jam-packed video and we're glad you're here. The number one tip for success that we've found with tomatoes is mulching. Ever since we started mulching our tomatoes the plants are bigger, the harvests are bigger, the plants look healthier. The whole process just goes all around way better. You can mulch with a lot of different things. We use leaves just because we live in the woods and leaves are all around us. You can use grass clippings, you can use wood chips. The whole idea is to cover the soil around your plants for one to prevent splashback from rain and then for two you're going to retain moisture in the soil a lot better, not have to water as often. It's just all around way better for your plants. Tomatoes are probably the most sensitive crop in terms of getting fungus or diseases and they get things like blight and the main cause of that is the soil that's around them so if you don't mulch your plants you run into the issue where rain hits the soil it splashes up on the leaves and those are going to be the first leaves to start getting blight and getting that dirty yellow color that nobody likes to see. When you put the leaves down the rain falls on that and kind of prevents that splashback and you don't run into the issue nearly as frequently. Just to show you an example this is blight so that's the first signs of that fungus that we're seeing on our tomato leaves and the first place that we notice it is the lower 12 inches of the plant because that's where the soil splashes up when it rains. Now the best way to take care of this for one you want to cut off any affected stems or leaves and also mulching around the plant is going to you're not going to have nearly the issue with blight as you would without it. Tomatoes are definitely the plants that I obsess over the most and I'm super meticulous about making sure that they're healthy. In terms of building our food security and trying to cut down on the amount of things that we need to get from the grocery store we go through a ton of tomato products so I'm super hyper focused on making sure tomato plants survive the season and give us a lot of tomatoes. Sometimes you don't get good ones and you know right away when they're like too pink this one looks pretty good yeah. It is very apparent to me now more than ever how important it is to grow your own food. Here in Michigan I feel like we have had just like a whirlwind of the last couple weeks between getting all of the Canadian wildfire smoke praying for you Canada holy moly holy moly holy moly that's like they got a lot going on. We've had the worst air quality in the world. Was it yesterday? I think it was yesterday. My chest hurt going outside just running errands with the kids. I shouldn't have left it was very bad. So we've been dealing with that on top of the wild not wildflowers on top of the wildfires there has been a mystery parasite that is plaguing the and local fast food restaurants that if you eat the lettuce you're gonna poop your brains out basically and everyone around here is getting super sick. Thankfully we grow our own lettuce and I think they're narrowing it down to who is the culprit of that but now more than ever it is just so important to grow your own food, know your farmer, make sure it's local and so today I am making very safe very non-poop-your-brains-out popsicles. We have been being pretty careful to get all of our produce either from ourselves or the Amish up the road and I am feeling very thankful that we have a lot of farmers around us that we can go to in times like this. It really puts into perspective for Cameron and I how important it is to know where your food is coming from when it has a really large carbon footprint and your produce is getting shipped from around the world I mean you just don't know what your food goes through and I have been trying to make more and more homemade things with locally grown food items for our family to make sure that it is healthy and safe and I feel really blessed honestly that we're able to do that with our for our family because not everybody has the capability to do that so thank you god. I've never had a peach slash watermelon popsicle but I imagine it's going to be delightful. Now I have everything poured in the molds and I'll let this freeze until tomorrow and just a reminder I will put this stuff in the link in the description so if you want to get your own popsicle mold or get this juicer you can. One of the nice things about having pigs on the homestead is none of our scraps go to waste and that brown one who he is not named so I don't get attached but the brown one loves watermelon the most the black one he doesn't care as much. You guys get a lot of watermelons. On top of all of the other planting that we're doing today we're also expanding on our vertical gardening endeavors. We had this tower planter sent to us by a company called Greenstalk Garden. It's really cool and we had all these high hopes for it. We said we're going to go to the greenhouse we're going to get a bunch of vegetable plants and fill this thing up so we went to the greenhouse this morning and they were all out of vegetables. They did have a bunch of annual flowers on sale for like a dollar each so we're going to fill this thing with half flowers and half greens and lettuce and things like that. I told Brianna I would get this thing put together for her but she is going to have creative control over the planting process. So I have to do this because I couldn't stand Cameron just plopping the plants in here with no consideration of color combination. That is a woman's job and a woman I am. Have you heard of that thing that people I don't know what it's called but people feel like sadness and stuff for inanimate objects. I kind of felt like that today with the plants like all of these plants are just sitting there waiting to be adopted and nobody cares about them and they're like trying to get rid of them and they're on sale and what do they do with them at the at the nursery? They just don't care about them anymore at the end of the season they throw them in the trash. That's rude. Every plant deserves a home. Look how pretty that is. I used to hate the color yellow but now I kind of dig it. No pun intended. So I picked some romaine lettuce seeds up from our local feed mill today and I thought it would be a perfect time to put it in our green stock so all of the empty spaces that we have here I'm going to add some romaine lettuce. Can you hear the empty spices? Can you hear the empty spices? Yes I can hear. All right well Brianna got this thing filled up beautifully. I'm just watering everything in. The nice thing about it it has this water reservoir on top and I'm going to fill that up right now and that'll maintain the moisture levels in the soil so we don't need to water it like I just did too often. So that is really cool for if we go out of town or anything like that. If you're interested in one of these for yourself I will put a link down in the video description as well as a discount code from Four Brothers Farm. A couple months ago you may have seen me plant a wildflower garden and I feel the great need to give you an update on that because I was feeling a little insecure about it because it's right outside of my office and it just looks like a bunch of weeds and ill-maintenanced area but I have come here to say it is actually looking quite beautiful right now. Look at all of these poppies. They're coming up like crazy. It may take a little finesse to get it you know looking real real sweet. I'm going to add maybe another pound or so of them in the spring again because some of them are annuals some of them are perennials so it'll be a bit different each year and I've been planting some random flowers here and there when I have some extra. I would say if you're thinking of planting a wildflower garden go for it and I will link the Etsy shop that I bought these from in the description. It's really cool because they have different varieties. I have the Midwest mix but they have like Southeast, Southwest, Northeast, Northwest so you can get them that are exactly right for your area. We've been having some pretty bad luck with our chickens lately and for a couple reasons. Reason number one is they're eating their eggs and that is super frustrating when you have this amount of chickens and you don't get any of the eggs because they're getting to them first. So I went ahead to the store and I bought some oyster shells to supplement because that can usually indicate a calcium deficiency. So the oysters are supposed to give them that calcium thus they do not need to eat their eggs anymore. The other frustrating thing is they weren't producing enough eggs anyway. The little that they were like one egg every couple days they were just eating it. So I knew that they were under stress which was a little bit confusing to me because they have good food, clean water, and they get fresh grass every other day. And the only other thing I could think of was that the rooster was bothering them too much which I kind of seen him beating them up and it was really hard to watch. And so after so long of that I told Cameron he needed to be rehomed and so we did recently. Pretty much the next day after we rehomed the rooster these girls laid a ton of eggs. That was really really exciting. A huge relief for us because I was actually getting eggs from a local farmer down the road which it's crazy that I had to do that for as much money as I put into these girls. But I think we're finding the solutions and we actually are thriving with the girls now. They're giving us loads of eggs and I haven't noticed any signs of them eating their eggs yet but I've also been very good at collecting their eggs when I notice that they're laying. So fingers crossed we are on a good track. No more negative energy to the chickens. It's hard to tell which ones are the decoy eggs. That one and this one. I don't really know what they're made out of they look exactly like their eggs and they're about the same weight. So I just bought two of them and I keep them in here and I kind of put them more up so that when they go to peck it they can't really do that. So the next thing I need to get done today is getting this cold frame ready for another planting. We planted kale, buttercrunch lettuce, and mustard greens in here a couple months ago and we went through a lot of them. You saw in an earlier video Bree made some fermented greens with the mustard greens and as the season has gotten warmer these have all started to get pretty bitter so nobody's eating them anymore and we need the space for our next planting. So we made the decision we're going to try carrots in here. We haven't done them in a cold frame before but I think with the ability to control the temperature more as the weather gets colder they're going to do really well. This is all really loose soil. This is almost a hundred percent composted horse manure and carrots need really loose soil in order to get big strong roots because ultimately we're eating the roots. When we planted them directly in the garden our soil was way too hard over there and the carrots just never thrived and we could hardly even get them to germinate over there this year. We've also tried them in raised beds before and because of how we put the raised beds together or I should say because of how we filled them there just isn't enough space for the carrots to get real big because we put sticks and branches on the bottom of the raised beds. They haven't totally broke down yet so the carrots have a hard time getting through that. So I'm going to reveal the new animals that we got that I hinted at in our last video. This area of the barn has been many a things and we have never had these animals before. I would like everybody to give a big warm welcome to our new Nigerian dwarf goats and we named them after the best critically acclaimed actresses of our time which is obviously Della Reese and Roma Downey. We've never had goats we have had sheep so kind of the same zone. I've done a lot of research as much as I can on YouTube and bought a lot of books. I went to Tractor Supply and got pretty much every medical piece of equipment and vitamin and mineral and dewormer and everything that I could for these guys because I have found that they are maybe a little difficult to keep alive so then I developed a lot of anxiety even now I have a lot of anxiety about them just trying to keep them happy and safe and alive. We have a local plant nursery here that has baby goats like a petting zoo situation and I kind of knew right then and there that I was no matter what going to get baby Nigerian dwarf goats. Cameron did not know that that was my plan all along. He really didn't want me to get goats he just said they were kind of pointless we weren't going to use them for anything right away at least but then you know his heart softened it was like the Grinch it was like a Grinch situation and his heart grew larger and he said yes to me. My love language is him saying yes to me and I think that's every woman can relate to that. It was like two weeks later we got the goats we would eventually like to breed them and get some milk from them we're not there yet I just want to get to know my my girls first and kind of learn their personalities and stuff like that I didn't want to get an adult goat and just go right into milking there's a lot I have to learn and get used to before we hit that chapter. I also don't know because we do get raw milk from a herd share locally and Cameron can't have any dairy I mean the slightest sliver of cheese will just set that man off and Cameron's similar to goats he requires a lot of extra help. So these girls were not socialized very well they had a lot of other goats around them and a lot of people at their house but it didn't seem like they had been around humans a lot and it's taken quite a bit of consistency coming into their pen. I've been coming in here with my coffee and just drinking my coffee with them getting this brush and they sniff it and learning that it's safe it's okay then giving them very minimal treats just because I know that their stomachs can be really sensitive but pretty much right when I come in here they don't like just jump right to me and want to be pet I have to really like gain their trust to do this and it's been a solid week and they're still not just running up to me. I actually did buy these little goat harnesses today and took them for a little walk. It didn't go so well because it turns out they were really afraid of our pigs. I'm probably gonna wait a good solid minute to try that again but I just wanted them to get some like fresh greens and forage a little bit instead of being on this side of the fence where it's mostly dirt. The harnesses were slightly big and Della Reese here slipped right out and it became a bit of a scare situation so we're learning each other. I don't want to stress them out too much so gaining their trust right now is the most important thing that I think I can do with them and getting the kids in here playing with them. So if you're new to goats and or you want to get into goats and they're not very socialized beforehand just consider the fact that you are really going to have to gain their trust and be really diligent with them at first. I know that if they were bottle fed babies this would not be an issue and maybe even I heard they could get a little bit too attached to their human but we didn't go that route and I'm kind of glad because I can just kind of train them to no mean they don't know anybody else so I don't regret it. It would be interesting down the road to have a bottle fed baby though and I could just maybe skip this part or if we do get a buck to breed these girls you know next year down the road or something like that make sure he is for sure socialized. So these two things here they have free reign over. We have minerals for them and some baking soda for when they have a little upset belly. These are a lot of electrolytes and vitamins that they need on the daily and I think goats just kind of know when they need them. They're very intuitive with their bodies and they go right to these things when they need them the most. Now they get all of this hay free choice whenever they want to come and get it. Cameron made this feeder for me and yes we do need a top for it. We discovered that they know how to jump onto it and we really want to avoid any of their pee or poop getting into this so a lid is going to be a must do today. But what? You're spooking them. Who's spooking them? Spook my girls. If you are a seasoned goat parent I would love to hear all of your tips and tricks in the comments. Like I said I carry a lot of anxiety with these girls and hope they just don't flop and die on me because that's what it seems like everything happens in all of the Facebook goat groups. So help a girl out and let me know what you do to take care of anything and everything. Thank you. I am just about to the end of my planting day and the last things I need to plant are cabbage and broccoli. So the varieties I'm planting are Danish ball head cabbage and Waltham broccoli. Both of these need 90 to 100 days from seed to harvest. We are at the end of July right now so that's going to put us at the end of October. I think our first frost date is October 15th so there's a pretty good chance we're going to have to cover these in plastic at the end so we don't lose all of our hard work to frost damage. We evaluated the space in our raised beds and we have room for 12 of each so that's what we're planting. We made the sauerkraut last week in our video and we are going to taste test it today. I have been checking on it. It is nice and juicy at the top. There's no mold so we are good to go. You want to try this with me? That's amazing. Is it good? Good. Thank you all so much for choosing to spend your time with us today. If you like this video check out the one in the corner of the screen. We really think you're going to like that one too.