Diversity is crucial

Hey guys, welcome back to the food forest. Today we bring you some zucchini blanching, kind of the reason why you blanch zucchini as opposed to jar it. I'll walk around to show you what we've been doing, a new trellis system and a new nursery being set up with some willow water which is really cool, but we also walk around and talk about how the weather's been and the impacts that it's having on crops and why it's so important to grow as diverse as possible. So stay tuned, hope you guys enjoy. This is an insane amount of zucchini. So we're blanching them, boil them for one to two minutes and then into ice water, like depending on the size, like these, probably a minute thirty to two minutes. But if you're cutting them smaller, it doesn't need as long, it's going to go mushy if you boil it too long, and into ice water and then you'll freeze them on like trays, just individual until they're hard and then you can put them into whatever long-term freezer storage. But it's a good way to have your over-harvest push into the fall and winter. I'm just cutting them into dollars and then stacking them and quartering them. These will go into the, I guess you could call it a strainer, and then put into the hot water and then out and into ice water. So the water's boiling, so we'll put them in. A little will spill out, that's okay, it's just water. And just kind of keep pushing the top floaters down so that it's an even boil and we'll just go until we've hit our minute 30 to two minutes and then it'll go in the ice water. So we're now going to let them sit in the ice water and just make sure if you are going to be using bare hands, wash your hands beforehand, just because these are now going to be going into food storage, you don't want to get any dirty bacteria, you know, basic food safety stuff. But you're just going to, until they're cold, keep them in there and then we're going to dry them off on a clean towel, emphasis on clean, and then we'll put them onto some cookie sheets, again clean, and we'll freeze them. And then once they're hard, we'll put them into containers or bags. We are now putting the zucchini in the freezer and what I'm doing is I'm on the rack below, there's slightly less zucchini, so that I can put two already frozen bricks of butter so that we can use more freezer space. And the idea is we're just slowly going to do this until we can just fill this entire freezer with all of the blanched zucchini. Now the reason that we're blanching the zucchini as opposed to canning it is that zucchini is a very low acid vegetable, so it needs to be pressure canned if you're going to can it safely, and we just don't have that equipment. The reason being when it's low acid, over time in the can, you can start to get like different growths of different bacteria and stuff that are going to make you sick. So canning zucchini without a pressure jar, like a pressure canner, can cause it to make you very sick and induce botulism, which can be deadly. So that's why it's important if you're going to grow things and preserve things like zucchini and other vegetables to have a good consistent and reliable freezing storage. Up here, we're very fortunate to have the nuclear reactors just down the road, and we get a lot of our power from hydro as well. So we're pretty much hydro and nuclear here, so it's a very heavy base load and we don't really get too many outages. And if we do, it's due to a storm and repairs are done normally pretty quickly. So we're very fortunate for that, but if you don't live somewhere that you have reliable frozen storage, it might be a good idea to grow other things that aren't zucchini, like squash. Some varieties of squash, butternut is one of them, or acorn, can last up to two years in storage just sitting on a shelf as a squash. So it's a very easy thing that you can store. But just because we have the freezer storage and we do like zucchini, we're going to put a little bit of time into blanching all of this up. But we'll do a little walk around of the property and I'll show you what's going on, and I'll kind of update you on why there hasn't been a video. It's not that we haven't been recording videos, we just have a lot of on-the-go projects at the moment, and it's just been really busy around here. So yeah, let's get into it. So this is where we planted a lot of our tomatoes, and we do have some in the back there, and we've been picking through them. But a lot of the tomatoes in here, and there's another guy down in there that I see, but a lot of the tomatoes in here got hit by some sort of disease, and they all just, they kind of got stunted, and then they didn't keep growing. They just lost all their leaves, and that was it. So we've kind of let this area, we're just letting whatever wants to grow come up, just that there's some flowers to bring stuff in for our zucchini beds, and the tomatoes in here, which have done really well. So this one here, the zucchini got so big that we actually took down this side of the trellis. We thought that they were going to push a lot more, but like we had the wooden trellis here, and this zucchini just took off. Like comparing it to the other bed, where the zucchini is much smaller, still has been producing. This bed over here, it took right over. So we've probably gotten, like there's a little guy there. So that's funny, I missed him. I came out and harvested all the zucchini for this video, to do all the blanching, and get all of that done. But we missed him, and I wonder if we missed any more. But this is like a thick jungle of zucchini. We haven't really done any pruning at all on this zucchini, because the way I see it, is the more foliage that we have on it, the more energy it can have, and hopefully the more output. And I don't really care if it spends time growing leaves in less optimal places, because I know they make you itchy when you go in, but I don't mind. And this one has been a good experiment, by not pruning it back a lot. It has produced probably four to five times the zucchini than from the plants that we have in this bed. This bed is doing really well. The tomato are climbing up, and we're getting some flowers on this one here. The raspberry are taking right over. We have a tomato down here that's just about ready to pick, maybe another day on him. That's a black creme. We've harvested the beans here a couple of times, and they're starting to struggle a little bit. We've had some really strange weather this year, where we'll go weeks without rain, and then we just get dumped on like 100 to 200 millimeters. It's been pretty hard on the crops. A couple hours away from us, St. Catharines just got hit with a couple crazy rainstorms, to the point where vineyards are saying that they're going to lose majority of their crop, which, okay, that's not necessarily what feeds us. It makes wine and stuff, but it is a little crazy that we're having these crop failures everywhere. Europe right now, because of this crazy El Nino, they're not getting hardly any rain, while we're getting absolutely swamped with rain. Up in northern Saskatchewan, they're expecting up to 50% crop losses in some areas, and that's just because of extreme rain and flooding. So when you have grocery stores that the produce aisles are half empty during prime time, like this is when we're harvesting everything, and we have grocery stores that are half empty, it tells you that something is going on. This chair, we pushed it over just so that it wouldn't get like soaked in the rain and stuff, and the kiwis grew right into it. We've got so many kiwis in here. They are everywhere, and the clusters of them have so many. We've got more up here. I'll show you from the outside, because this is like the bottom of the vine. There's not as many in here, but look at this cluster here. That is all kiwi. It looks like a cluster of grapes, but they're all kiwi. So we're very fortunate that we've been able to have these kiwis grow in, because I'm going to show you something a little disheartening. I walked over here to show you this peach tree that had two singular peaches on it, and they're not even on it anymore. They fell off. So these are the only two, well, were the only two peaches that we got from the entire property this year. Out of all of these peach trees, one, two, and behind, three, four, five, a dozen down by the pond and down by the chicken coop, we got two peaches that fell off the tree before they were ready. The pawpaws was even sadder. We have mature pawpaw trees, which should be producing pawpaws, but they are not. We got two pawpaws. So I'll show you those, but first I'm going to show you the mature pawpaw trees, because as much as we didn't get any pawpaws on them, they are such a cool tree. Like, they're getting pretty thick at the base, and they're probably upwards of about 20 feet, and I just want to comment as we're walking through here. These sumac that we saw at the start of the year that we wanted to cut down and kind of use as trellising, we left them in, because at the end of the day, we just need carbon out of the air, and this wood, this wood, that all used to be in the air. So the more carbon that we can get out of the air, the better, and then this stuff can eventually be chopped and put into a brush pile to store so it won't break down, and that's now captured carbon. But we'll walk down to the peach, sorry, the pawpaw, just got a bug in my eye, and I'll show you, because they're huge, but they had no pawpaws. This is the old circle garden that we made with rock, the ash tree here that died from the emerald ash borer, but we've just kind of let this take off and be natural again. We don't really come down here all that often, so it's just kind of not the best spot to have the annuals, and then all of our perennials are already set up up the hill. We're getting into the pawpaws here, and like this tree is huge, and if you look at the base of it, like if we zoom in here, for reference, that's my hand, like that tree is huge considering it was practically a stick when we put it in the ground. It is truly astonishing. The comfrey down here is doing a lot better. It gets shielded from the elements a lot, like that's why the pawpaws do so well down here, but we had no pawpaws, so I'm glad that our tree survived, because a lot in the area did not after last winter, but not a single pawpaw. Now I am gonna run inside. I don't know if you guys see the sky, but we are in a week of rain right now, and I'm starting to get a decent headache here, so I'm guessing it's about to start coming down, but yeah, I'll continue this video after the rain comes. If it does, it might just be passing us by, but I don't really want to get soaked, but it's crazy, because we have all of the land on earth to grow food, but because of these weird weather events, like this strong El Nino, paired with the global warming that we're seeing, at the astonishing rates that we're seeing it at, you might have all the land in the world, but you might not be able to grow food, so that's why diversity is so important, because okay, we didn't get any strawberry, any peach, any pawpaw, our tomato crop failed, and our onions didn't really do too well this year, but we've had good zucchini crop, we have good bean crop, which I'll show you after rain, which it's sunny all of a sudden, and we're gonna have good kiwi crop, so as long as you grow diverse, and you grow more than what you need of everything, you'll be fine. The problem is, is when you put all of your eggs in the basket for say canola, and you grow it in a big open field, when torrential rain comes, you lose half of your harvest, because your field floods. There's a guy down in St. Catharines, he owns a grape vineyard, and he says that we should all be growing for the global weirdening, that's what he called it. I seen it, it was an interview on some sort of news station with this this farmer, and he's like climate change, it's not so much global warming, it's global weirdening, where you can get hit with the strangest weather, no rain, a bunch of rain, crazy winds, and you need to be ready for it. So he has turned his, just quickly, that's our comfrey tea that we have brewing right now, for a fertilizer, but he has turned his vineyard into like almost like a swale set system, where it's raised beds with lower valleys, so that when torrential rain comes, it can seep and store into the earth, and then when droughts come, he's probably okay, because he's storing all of that water, rather than letting it all run off of his land. So we got a little bit of a rain, it was quick, like 15 minutes, but this here is our new trellis system. So we'll walk through it, on the right hand side we have the Jerusalem artichoke, and they're doing really well this year. I brought some of them into the nursery to sell, and we've only had one customer ask for Jerusalem artichoke. When it grows this well, like we've had months without rain, and then torrential rains, and it is a jungle, like a lush jungle. Yeah, there's some browning of the leaves and yellowing, but these things are doing incredible, and I guarantee you under that ground, there is a lot, and I mean a lot of tubers. So it's a nice insurance, because when you have crop failures, guess what? You have the hardy plants that produce no matter what, sure they might not be your favorite, but if you have no food, this you can eat. So our system here, the idea was we have this raspberry patch that runs along, and we have the kiwi growing over the chicken coop, and our idea is to get that kiwi to grow across to this trellis, and we'll have an undercrop of raspberries, which hopefully will slowly get shaded out, and start being less invasive, because as much as we love the raspberries, it would be so cool to be able to walk under here, and you're harvesting everything from above. So grapes, kiwis, etc, and we already have other raspberry patches, so we don't need this one, and obviously we can start to propagate it out beyond the Jerusalem artichoke, and on this side as well. This year, because we figure it's going to take probably a year or two for all of the kiwi to grow across the trellis that we built, so we did a crop of pole beans, and these things are doing insanely well. This is, I believe, week, I want to say week four, maybe week five. So the beans just took off. It's normally 55 days to harvest for this variety. I believe they're just Kentucky greens, but we're only at about day 30, maybe just over, and they're doing incredible. We just put up some old chicken wire from when we built the chicken coop, and they love it. I mean, like, I'm like five eight, and this thing, I can't even reach the top of that. This thing is probably like seven feet, maybe a little more, but it's done really well. So we're gonna have, we've got about 50 plants here that we sowed in. I counted just on one of the plants. There's about 20 flowers, so if it all gets pollinated properly, which the bees, and the wasps, and the ants have been doing an incredible job, then we should have about a thousand beans for our first harvest, and they'll keep producing right through to October. So it is quite cool what you can do. Like, we took all of these pieces of wood, and like just put them into the ground, and it was all free. It was all like dead trees that had just been taken over by either getting shaded out by other cedar trees, or some of them had some dog strangling vine issues, so they just got shaded out by it. But it's all cedar, so it's gonna last in the ground for practically ever. And yeah, we'll have to add some reinforcements and stuff, but we've had over 100 kilometer winds through here, and it's doing just dandy. Coming down to cedar land, this is the area just below where we have all those Jerusalem artichokes and the beans and kiwi right now. Once I get down here, I'll turn around and show you that, but we're gonna turn this into like a little nursery. It's gonna be gorgeous down here. The idea is we're taking out some of the dead ones to make some space, and we're just gonna chop up all the branches and leave them like mulch like this. And we're just gonna, when we prune our trees in the spring, we're gonna jam them all into the ground, and we're gonna water them with some willow water. So we have this giant willow that is just astoundingly huge, probably like 50, maybe 60 feet tall. And we're just gonna go and cut off some of the new growth branches and toss them into buckets and let them soak, kind of like how we're doing our comfrey fertilizer. And we'll just water the sapling, soon-to-be saplings, with this willow water. For those of you that don't know, willows are extremely well at rooting. So you could take a branch and just put it into some water, and it's most likely going to root, which is a really interesting property of the willow, also because it grows so fast. So we could be taking these branches, rooting them, and mass planting these willows, obviously not creating monocultures, but it's cool because the quicker the tree, the more carbon it's going to pull out of the air quicker, and it roots for free. But what's interesting is you can take the willow and some of that rooting chemical that it has within it is going to leach out into the water, and now when you water your saplings or your cuttings, they're now going to have a higher percentage of the ones that will root. So yeah, okay, not everyone is going to root, but if you could even get, and this is saying pretty low, like five to ten percent of your little sticks to root, you can now make a permaculture guild for free. So that's kind of what we've been doing this summer. We have been expanding our area so that we can grow more, and prepping areas to help us grow more. So the little nursery in the cedar land, that's going to help us by giving us more trees that we can plant around. This trellis system has extended us out towards our fire pit that we use for making biochar, while making the area just gorgeous. Because it's going to be like a lush green wall, especially as these beans start to thicken out and get more leaves, it's going to be beautiful. And we're reclaiming areas that have been taken just by invasive species like dogvine, which we have everywhere, and there's not much we can do about it. But like making this more useful and growing more out of what we have, because the idea is to be diverse in a day like today, where you could lose half of your crop and still be okay. Just earlier in the season we had a pest problem with the grapes, and I don't know if you can see here, I'll put my hand behind it, we lost all of our grapes on this plant. Like they came through and ate them all. Well that's all for today guys, I hope that you liked the video. To end the video off though, I'd like to recommend a book, it's called The Limits to Growth. I just listened to it as an audiobook whenever I got the free chance. But it pretty much is a bunch of scientists got together and it talks about like how far can we take this as society. And it's so important that people know about this now and can act now because it's only going to get worse as global temperatures rise and we see more crop failures. Like if temperatures go high enough there's going to be mass famine. But it'll all just be because of our own greed. As a society we have technologies that are sustainable and we have practices for farming and industry that would be far more sustainable than what we're doing today. The problem is they're not as economical. So it is what it is and we can do our own part. A little bit of a sad note, but the book emphasizes everything in a way that anyone could understand it and it just puts everything into picture. So it's a really good way to either wake up yourself or if you have friends that aren't awake to it, it will wake them up. It's a really inspiring book and I do recommend it. But yeah, take it easy guys and I'll see you in the next one. Take care.