Harvesting 100 POUNDS of FOOD!

I had to go get a glove. I was picking cucumbers and they were really spiky. Look at this. This is heavy. I need to know. I'm going to have to like step on my bathroom scale to see how much it is. I'm actually going to probably have to get help carrying that. My goodness. There's still more on here. This is one trellis. This is one arch trellis with three silver slicer cucumber plants on each side. So six plants growing close together. I mean, I've been harvesting, but I went out of town for the weekend for three nights and four days. I was up in North Carolina, but I'm coming home and getting caught up. That's why you see the different sizes. That's crazy. With the silver slicer, you can let it grow big. It's probably the biggest one I harvested. Like a slicer cucumber and it has the nice white skin. It looks a little more green when it's smaller. Or you can harvest it on the smaller side, which this is what I normally do for this for making pickles. I like it. I think it stays crisper when pickling, if you harvest it small, whereas when it's bigger, it's more like what we have for like a salad cucumber. Now, when it's bigger, I will do spears out of it. My gosh, look at all that. There's still some in here. I keep looking back thinking I got them all and then I'll move a few different leaves and see that there's a whole other few to pick. It's actually growing up around here. I've got a few ripe tomatoes. I had my first ripe cherries last week and right before I left. Yeah, look at this. It's grown through all these cherry tomatoes I've set. Can y'all see those? So pretty. I'm going to let that guy get a little bigger. There's another branch that grew through here. I've got some squash that got way too big while I was gone. So the skin on this is probably too tough to eat, but it can be peeled and chopped and used in like squash relish for canning. I've got some big zucchinis over there. I'll probably make some zucchini bread and you know, the chickens may get a treat, but I want to get all of these. I got to get my knife. I want to get all of these off of here because if you let fruit mature, it's going to signal to this plant that it's made its seeds and it's job is done. It'll stop setting flowers. So we want to get everything harvested, even if it's past the point that I can use it easily. I'm going to need something else to harvest it because this is what I brought out to harvest, like all of it. This is literally the first place I stopped. Oh my gosh, I need to know how heavy this is. Now I'm not super strong, but I'm like, I'm not puny, you know, like I can lift up a bag of cucumbers, but that is heavy. Oh, okay. I need another harvest. I need something else to hold my harvest. I was actually looking online at a five gallon crock, like, um, oh, I'm out of breath y'all. Good night. Winded by cucumber. Okay. Um, I was looking at this five gallon crock. I have a one gallon version of it. It's like an Ohio stoneware crock for pickling and fermenting. Well, they have one that's five gallons and I was looking at it and I was saying, that seems really cool, but I don't know when I would reasonably need that. But pulling in these cucumbers, this would definitely be the appropriate amount. Now these, I'm not going to be like fermenting all of these or pickling all of these because I let a lot of them get bigger than I like to do with that. But still, I mean, even if I were to make some sort of relish, like I could do a really, really big batch. And I've been making sauerkraut lately, pulling in the cabbages. And so I've got like multiple, you know, a gallon, some half gallons, another gallon going in different containers, but then all my smaller containers are tied up. So I was looking at the big crock thinking, would this be beneficial for the, you know, few times a year that I'm going to have enough to warrant it? But then twice in a week now, I could have used that thing. So I think I'm answering my own question. When it comes to like homestead tools and stuff like that, I usually, instead of seeing something and being like, hmm, do I need that? Let me jump on it. I usually like to get myself into a situation where the circumstances of my life prove that I do indeed have use of something and then get it. Those cucumbers are telling me it might be time. Okay, don't judge my high grass over here. We haven't gotten to weeding this yet. I just want to show you a lot of tomatoes that are incoming. I mean, there's so many on here. Look at that. So here are some green tomatoes. Actually I'm about to grab them and I've got these as well. These actually were completely green. They weren't blushing yet. They're starting to turn now. Tomatoes will turn if you pick them while they're fully green, but they don't always have the same flavor as if you wait until they start blushing on the vine and then pick them because that's a sign that they've started producing the gases that do develop a lot of the flavor. The reason why we say store-bought tomatoes taste like disappointment is because they are usually picked green because they are having to travel so far and therefore they never had an opportunity to start developing those gases. Not always the case, but like these I don't think will taste any more exceptional necessarily. Now, I don't know, they've grown in healthy organic soil, so their nutrition is better. Look at that. These green tomatoes are from a few branches being pruned and we just lined them up on the side. I just hadn't carried them in yet, but a couple of them started to turn, but it's not exciting as this is. This is actually a, I think it's a Thorburn's terracotta, let me see, I can't find the tag because this feels pretty dang ripe to me. I'm just going to go for it. I don't know, the back was a little green. We're about to get a bunch of rain though and I don't want it to split. I'd really like to know though what that variety is. I guess I'll wait and see till some of the others around us start coming on or till I get one that's a little further along. And this is a pink Berkeley tie-dye. I can't believe I have tomatoes ripe this early, but I'm not complaining. I'm here for it. The green tomatoes, I usually make green tomato chow chow with these. This might not be enough. Maybe I can make a little small batch or they're really good pickled, or you can make like a salsa verde, or you can leave them sitting on the counter until they start turning colors, which they will. But I like to usually just use them green. All right, it is evening now. I have recruited a little help here with Toby and Ezra who are looking like teenagers. The audacity of that. Look, they're both right there. I'm now becoming the shortest one in the house. Ben's the holdout. Well, Malia is shorter than me and she's fully grown, so at least I'll have that. All right. They're going to help me with harvesting because there's quite a lot out here that needs to be handled. So here's my basket I abandoned earlier. I did take the massive bag of cucumbers in and I weighed it by standing on the bathroom scale with it because it was so big, like it was way too big to weigh on a kitchen scale. So I held it on the bathroom scale and then sat it down and weighed myself 45 pounds of cucumbers. Is that not crazy? So I wasn't being puny. That's actually pretty heavy. All right, dudes, I'm going to have you guys pick the green beans. So let's come over here. Oh, hey, look at my sweet potatoes looking pretty good, huh? Nice. I just realized I think I may have grabbed a different apron coming back out here. All right. Look here. You see these plants? See all the green beans on them? Just start picking. Be careful. Hey, be careful when you pick these. So try to kind of grab them and then pinch them off. But if you just go ripping at them, you'll pull whole branches of the plant off. So just try to yeah, just what I usually try to do is like grab the bean and kind of brace the plant a little bit with my hand. So make sure you're holding the plant back. You're giving the plant a little bit support when you go grabbing on it. Or you could set that basket down on the ground and stand and just pick and I'm talking about them being kind of pokey. Yeah, they just are. You can come over here on this side, Toby. Look at this. I'm going to finish grabbing these tomatoes. These are the chocolate sprinkles. I really like these. I found them last year as a started plant at a local place. And then this year I got the seeds from botanical interest. This was one of my favorite tomatoes last year. So I'm going to be putting some serious time into preserving cucumbers the next couple of days. Friend Erin gave me the idea of doing a cucumber kimchi. So that's going to be definitely on the list. I'm going to do some sliced pickles, like just regular pickles that are canned. I'm going to do more fermented this year. I have a few pickle eaters in my house, but not a ton. And I actually still have some regular pickles from last year. It was just like a box that had gotten stuck in the pantry and I was still using the ones from the year before. So I don't really need to make a lot of those. I may do like one, one single batch, but relishes are definitely something that I want to make. I'd like to do some fermented pickles and then I want to do that cucumber kimchi, but I'm definitely open to suggestions. If you guys have any like great life changing cucumber recipes. One thing I really like to make, which I have not made yet this year is tarator, which is like a cold cucumber soup that I learned about from Will. It's definitely different than anything that like I was used to eating previously, but it's very refreshing. It's a really great like garden lunch. If you're out in the garden and you want to eat something, you know, come in and eat a nice cool lunch that's refreshing, but satisfying. So I will link that. I have a farmer's table video. I truly cannot believe that it is the time of year that my harvest basket looks like this. Where does the time go? As I say this with my little baby sons who are taller than me now with feet that are bigger than mine. So I have quite a collection of little aprons, waist aprons are my favorite and they all have a knife in them. So I don't have my, I have like a harvesting scythe. That's my preferred knife for cutting stuff off of plants. I just really like it, but I grabbed the wrong apron whenever it came out. I'm going to cut all of these squashes off because like I said, they're really too big to do much with. These are a little on the harder side, but I want to get them off the plant so I can have more squash. It's a jungle in here for sure. There's some good soft ones in here that are still good for eating. So I am pulling, I'll just drop them in here, I'll show you the tops where these basil plants are trying to go to seed. This happens fast and I mean, you can still use basil when it started to go to seed, but the flavor can change and it needs to be pruned anyway. By picking your basil right at the top of where it splits here, just anywhere, you can do the multi-purpose task of pruning it and keeping it from going to seed and it'll also make it bushier. Now typically what I'll do, and I'll probably do this tomorrow, I'll start, especially when it's trying to go to seed, I'll come and take like the top half of the plant off. My plan for this is to freeze dry it. I just got one big batch of cabbage out of my freeze dryer. I harvested a few really large heads of cabbage out of the high tunnel. All that stuff is coming in right now and I don't have a whole lot of time, I can't leave it for long because it's so hot that it'll go bad. You have a little bit of wiggle room with harvesting some things, but that's the point. Oh I did, look at that, forgetful me, it worked out this time, it doesn't always. This is what I was looking for, it wasn't in my apron pocket, but I was bringing those cabbages in because obviously they're going to go bad if I leave them out in the heat. And I thought, well I'm just going to make a whole bunch of sauerkraut. I cut it up and it filled my 42 cup bowl, two heads, I still had one giant head left. And I was like, well I don't know that I really need that much sauerkraut. So I ended up just putting it all in the freeze dryer and I pulled it out, I think it's going to work really well, this will be my first time doing it. So I will report back if freeze drying cabbage is a good idea. The next thing I want to put in though is a full load of basil, I would just like to have freeze dried basil. When you freeze dry herbs especially, in my experience, and then you just put them in food it's really like fresh, they have a whole lot of flavor, so I'm excited about that. So these little honey drop tomatoes were the first ones to come on this year and they've been a little slow in ripening since then. My little garden dinosaur Benjamin has been out here snacking on them. He did tell me one time, Mom, I went and ate every ripe tomato I could find. I was like, you go boy, that's what it's for. I don't think he could easily do that now though. Look at that, that's a wild boar farm's little cherry tomato. That probably wasn't really red enough, but isn't that pretty with the anthocyanins? It's gorgeous, it doesn't even look like something real. I have to tell y'all, this is a sight that makes me very happy. Why? The boys working in my garden. Oh. You're not a boy, I'm a man. You're not a boy, you're a man. Okay, I will concede that you are a young man. I am too, because I'm older. Yeah, you are a young man also because you're older. Do y'all want to see me pick green beans? Are you fast? Yeah, I'm fast. It's going to be like your arms blurring. I don't think it's like a blur. Alright, I'll film. You're going to film? Sure. Is it filming already? Let me see. Yeah, it says ready. Have you seen you pick other things? It's like boom, boom, boom, boom. So, some of these plants are actually further along than others. Yeah, the one on the very left. Well, some of them I filled in later. So, some of the green beans are a little more mature. So, you want to go down to the bottom to make sure that you're getting the mature green beans. Dang, you're fast. Well, the faster you do the job, the sooner you're done with it. Yeah. If you stand here and pick them one at a time, slowly, it'll take you a long time. Here, can you show, because I was trying to show earlier while I was holding the camera. So, how I do it is I hold the plant with one and pull with the other, is how I really like to do it, so that I don't accidentally pull any branches off. That's pretty cool. We have a lot of green beans, guys. Yeah. That's a lot. This is like one pack of seeds. Isn't that crazy? That is wild, how much one pack can produce. Have you ever seen the size of a mustard seed? Yeah. They're tiny. Yep. Have you ever had a mustard seed? Well, I mean, yeah. You know when I have the whole grain mustard, like that has the seeds in it? Oh, yeah. You know what I'm talking about? Yeah. Have you planted any? Yeah, I've grown mustard plants. Are they giant? Um, not. They're not as here. They're not as big here. Are you referencing the Bible verse? Yeah. Talking about the faith, the size of a mustard seed. Maybe somebody in the audience can tell us what exactly tree that's referencing. Because I bet there's something contextual to it. I bet if we picked all of this, that basket would be very full. Yeah. I don't know if we'll get to that this evening because there's not just a whole lot of light. But like look at this. Like these plants are like laid over heavy. And that's one pack of seeds. This one's hanging down. Mom, look at this. Let me see. Yeah. Pick them up. Good job. This plant is not particularly happy with its lot in life. The other side died back quickly. Oh, snap. That's what this is? What? I thought this was a melon. What is it? It's an Armenian white cucumber. And I was just over here ignoring it. You didn't even know what it was? Well, I had planted. Yeah. That's what it's supposed to look like. Hey. This one got a little funny looking. He got deterred in growing. It's okay. It's still good. Do you know what it looks like? Stop, bro. It's your crown. You're the king of the cucumbers. If he's king of the cucumbers, he needs to go haul around that 45-pound bag of cucumbers on the kitchen island. I took it in earlier. I think it'd go like this. Oh, there you go. The king of the cucumbers. Oh, look. You have your scepter, too. This is your scepter. It's your shirt. Hey, you can knight Ezra. The knight of the cucumbers. There we go. Do you have another one? I don't think I do. There's also some strawberries here if you all want a little snacky. No, the one with all the other stuff in it. Here you go, brother. Beautiful. Oh, it's a cube. Yeah, he is shaped a little strange, isn't it? I've seen weirder. Some of these are soft. I once saw one that literally looked like eight grew and then they grew together into this huge strawberry. You know what causes that? When the blossoms are fused, they grow together like that. Hey, Ezra, if you want to go grab my harvest basket that has the tomatoes and stuff in it, you could pick all of the tomatoes off of the green stock here and put it and add it to them because they're. I set it down somewhere over there. All right, you know, set that down. Toby, you go finish on the green beans or keep working on the green beans. You're not probably not going to finish. Ezra is going to work on these tomatoes. Look at this pretty one. What is this? Dynamite Delight. OK, it's taste test time. You don't have to taste it, Ezra. I know you're not a fan of raw tomatoes. Look at this. I like tomato sauce. Yeah. All right. So this is one of my new varieties. I tried this year for the green stock. It's so good. It tastes like love. You're really trying to win me over here, aren't you? Is it working? No. So these are like just some little pickling cucumbers. A couple of them got on the bigger side. Boy. Yeah, I'm definitely going to break the 50 pound mark of cucumbers today. That's wild. And not even from that much space, like a couple of trellises. Yeah, a few of these got real big. They're not climbing up. I need to. I don't have my clips right now, but I've tried a few times to like train it through. But sometimes, you know, they'll get blown back down. Oh, my gosh. Look at that. Ezra, look at this cucumber. That's a thick cucumber. That's crazy. That is not intentional at all or advisable. Don't want to do that. I was out of town. There were a couple over here that got really big. So the first year that I gardened, I did not realize that cucumbers could be so prolific. I always plant extra, though, because now that I have gardened for a long time, I have had multiple years that even though obviously there are years that are like this, sometimes it's awful and I get like next to none for whatever reason. You know, I mean, like there are circumstances that lead to that. But when I first started gardening, I felt like I had to use absolutely every bit of everything that I grew. I mean, obviously, I don't want to be wasteful. I want to steward well what I've got and use my resources. And so I think I made something like 50 quarts of sliced pickles or something like that. Like just an insane amount, like way more than we needed. And for three years or so, we used those pickles. And it turned out to be a good thing because a couple of those years were those bad cucumber years. A couple of years got a bad cucumber year. I think I had like two cucumbers and Will brought me some and it's because the roly polies. But now I have learned that some gardening years you have absolute bumper crops of things and some gardening years you don't. And it doesn't always have to do with what you put into it. It's not always input matches output. Sometimes there are genuinely circumstances that are out of your control in the garden. And so I have learned now, like I've got these massive cucumbers. These got a little weird on the bottom. Thankfully, I have a farm and so I have animals that also enjoy cucumbers. And when I have, hey, there you go, sir. When I have extra, I just use them to grow beef. Look at that happy guy. Look at that dude and tell me that's waste. He's just crunching away. Here come the others. And when you just acknowledge everything as a resource on the farm and you see it not as a waste to like give it to the animals or even to build compost with it, but just recycling those resources back into the farm. I don't know. You just don't feel bad about it. And it honestly, for me, it allows me to plant extra on the off chance that maybe something does struggle. You know, maybe I do have a hard time getting the seedlings up or maybe a bad hailstorm comes through or whatever. I mean, there are so many different things that are out of our control in the garden that can affect our yield. But there's also the very real chance that we end up with an abundance. I'm going to have to get another container to get these. This is probably, I mean, another 10 pounds of cucumbers. And it's not counting. I'm going to keep one of the massive ones to just see how it is. But it's not even counting what I just threw out. And I think understanding that there really is no waste when you look at the recycling of energy and you look at your garden, your farm as a whole. You know, either you're using things to build soil, you're using things to grow animals or you're using things in your own kitchen. It's all use. It takes the pressure of the abundance off. Because this is a lot of pressure. Having 50 plus pounds of cucumbers to process and you only have a handful of days to do it. That's a big job. That's a lot of work. Look, my butterfly peas are starting to bloom. The blue one's my favorite. I didn't even plant these. These all volunteered. Alright, one more thing to check. And I bet it's done because they were just starting before I went out of town. Aha! Eggplant. That one's on the small side. Let me look down here. Oh yeah. Look at that. Oh my god. That might be too big. Either this is going to make a lot of great baba ganoush or it's going to be too big. But again, gotta get it off because, gosh. Holy guacamole. That's a big fork. Holy baba ganoush. Boy. Well, that's a giant eggplant. I bet that's pretty foamy inside. They get kind of like... Squishy? It's not squishy. It reminds me of foam. I don't know if that's the best way to describe it. When they get kind of big. But these are a little on the small side. That's wild. Yeah. That's enough to make some baba ganoush though. I'm going to go put this in the harvest bucket. Alright. It's over there at the bottom of the greenstalk. And I have quite a few more coming. Oh my gosh. It's garden season, you guys. So what I'm not picking today that I do have is I have a bunch of beets down there. I still have a lot of carrots. And I'm probably pushing that. And I need to harvest all my onions. These are melons. They're not coming up yet. I still have space. I put some seeds in. How does it sneak up on me? Every year the garden sneaks up on me. I know that's silly. But I prepare for it. And it still does. Green bean harvest. Very good, sir. Oy. Look at that. There's a lot in this one. There's a lot in that one. I got another basket out of the greenhouse for the rest of the cucumbers. Yeah, I just got these cucumbers. Now. The thick one. When did you harvest the last one? You got a really thick one. No, this was the- No, the- All the cucumbers in the house, the 45 pounds is the white cucumbers. Oh, over there. The silver slicers. This is just a little pickling cucumber. I think it was Boston pickling. Or maybe it just said pickling. I bought the plant started. It was back when the roly polies were killing all mine and I was worried I wasn't going to get any. That's funny now. Yeah. That I was concerned about that. Oh, shoot. Holy guacamole. That's a giant ganto. Man, these grew fast. Because this- Before I went out of town they were like just barely there. I guess the rain will do that. Okay, these are probably- We'll go by the chickens and share the love. The cows ate all the ones I gave them. Oh, man. There's more down here. Dang. I don't think I get to take credit for this. Yeah, that's another 20 pounds at least. I am going to stop by. Some of these have some damage. I'm going to stop by and give these big ones with some damage to the chickens. All right, y'all check out our harvest. We got some food to eat. Indubitably. Thank you guys for hanging out with us today and all the days you do. You're so hasty. You're just ready to bless them, huh? Thank you for hanging out with us. We bless you. Until next time.