How We Garden After 19 Years Experience | 31 TIPS AND TRICKS

We've got permaculture tricks like chickens right next to the gardens complementing each other, market farm efficiency, tools we never want to do without, honeybee pollination, and a little bit of woo-woo, believe it or not, animal-induced compost. Happy day! In this video, we're going over tips and tricks, do's and don'ts after 20 years of farming. Oh my gosh, we got to get these beans out. They're overgrowing our seed trays. These tomatoes have to go into the high tunnel. It's a beautiful day. It's Sunday seed day. We got nobody gone, no distractions. It's Mother's Day. Start off with a few tips and tricks in the greenhouse. Beautiful One will join us a little later for more. About a couple of do-nots right off the bat. Do not water your tomatoes on a frosty morning. It's chilly this morning, but it's not frosty. I water my tomatoes like that, plant leaves and all. By the way, tomatoes, if you can help it, just water the soil, not the plants. It will encourage a fungus. Beautiful one, when I came back from our morning errands and all our tomatoes— can you imagine it? I killed every single one of Beautiful One's tomatoes. Do not use cheap weed fabric. You can see how good it's doing though, right? You can see how good that weed fabric kept it at bay underneath that gravel. Have you watered No, you want to? Optional handy quick connects onto this Dram wand. So the misters are good for the little stuff. I don't think I'm gonna recommend this. The quick connects are a good concept, but I think they're just hit or miss. They just fit— they end up failing too easily. Hey, beautiful one! I wanted quick connects to work, you know, save me the 15 seconds. It's just better to Take the 15 seconds and have less fault points. This is a mister. I definitely recommend that. We've been— we've had that for a long time.

This is what you have to use when you have soil blocks and when you're trying to water it where they're just seeds.

If you can help it, do put the brooder or the chickens near the greenhouse. Greenhouse, brooder. Geese especially like the weeds. Good morning, Mr. Brown!

Morning.

Did you do your dishes this morning? Yeah. We are now using this Anna White design greenhouse. We used to— when we're just getting started, we found some windows, we slapped together an A-frame. Well, we should say, you know, the Anna White greenhouse lacked in some things.

It lacked in ventilation. So I actually have a new design going in my head of of what I want. We're going to keep the bottom as is.

Sounds like what happened to our remodel. We ended up tearing the whole top off of our house. No, to make the, the Anna White greenhouse work, we curl up the lower sides of the roof to ventilate. There was zero ventilation.

We've added this in Alaska, so there's a reason why.

Yeah, these don't really work, don't they? They do. They do. They do.

Okay. Chilly.

They do, they open, and I've got it heats up in here, the sun shines. You tired this morning?

No, I just think it's years of— I mean, it's Mother's Day, it's years of not sleep.

Happy Mother's Day. I feel so terrible.

Why?

Why didn't I get you anything?

I know, you said to the kids yesterday, what'd you get your mother? They go, well, you didn't facilitate that.

You didn't act like you wanted to plant any plants at the house. That's usually what we do. Well, I'm thinking that we'll do Mother's Day when we can.

Don't worry, I will call it in. We're not ready.

We do it— she loves to go to the local plant store and just spend bupkus and make the house nice with flowers.

I don't want to spend my Mother's Day gift yet, so I'm going to spend it later. Don't worry. When we plant the tomatoes, I want to plant a variety of tomatoes at the one end Okay, so that I have a— I have like the cherry and the other types of tomatoes that will stay there.

We have evolved in the seed trays that we use for starting seeds. We used to do soil blocks. We tried these biodegradable things. That was one of those things we just wanted to work.

I really like the WinStrip trays or the Silly Seeds. Yeah, because they're very durable.

These are WinStrip.

Yeah.

And these are chili seeds.

Chili seeds. So this is like the traditional, like when you buy—

if you bought this at a store, you're getting this cheap plastic.

Yeah, and, and this is also what's available to other people who are— like if you go to a garden store, that's what they have.

Yeah.

They're just not durable. Like they're— they just break. Like, so here, this, I mean, this did get hit with a, um—

Yep, and then you're throwing away plants.

With a hail ball. But I mean, it's no good to me now. I mean, these, you know, I'll hopefully keep these well. Hail ball. Balls.

Not kidding, this big. Come right through the top of the greenhouse. It's ridiculous. We end up doing a lot of times is just go to our market farming friends. It's their top efficiency and say, hey, what do you use? And that's where these— what do you call this?

Wind strip.

The wind strip came from—

that's from NeverSink.

And I've seen there's video of tractors driving over that. We got to get these beans out, honey. They're going to be so root bound.

Oh no, they are. Let's look.

Are those going in the high tunnel?

Yeah, they're going in the high tunnel. They do need— they need to get out.

Okay, we're going to show you the bug netting in action a little later, but you can buy these little wires. And we did this at first to hold up bug net. We got a new way to hold up bug net in the field, but we put these in the greenhouse, especially in the summer, Rebecca, when we fall plant brassicas. The bugs are really out and about.

Fall gardening is hard because the bug pressure is already out. Yeah, and about. And so starting the fall, finishing the fall garden is amazing.

You just cover it in the winter and just harvest all winter long. Shade cloth, that'll go over this. We'll want the opposite effect of a greenhouse in the fall planting, so we'll put it— this will become a shade house as opposed to a greenhouse. Hey Beck, what soil have we evolved to?

Yeah, we're using, uh, Coco Loco.

If you have to buy it, anybody can get it.

Coco Loco is like national. I don't know if this is— this is from Dirt Craft Organics. Okay, they're Dirt Craft Living Soil now, just a organic potting mix. Um, yeah, it's got coconut coir, compost, recommended for starting seeds to transplant. It's local to us. They're like some like nice in our area.

This Gorilla Cart comes in handy as opposed to a wheelbarrow sometimes because, well, you just have to pull it with one handle. Button-up zucchini, because where do they go?

I want to put some up here in the height and the, uh, yeah, raised beds, but then I do want to have some in the, uh, high tunnel as well. And I'm gonna do more. I'm gonna do succession planting.

Just want to transplant those to the raised beds instead of potting them up?

Well, I don't need this many up there. I'm only gonna do a couple up there.

Okay, and where are the others going?

I have a, like, a, a whole line of— in the greenhouse that's gonna be the cucumbers. Yeah, it'll be the cucumbers, it'll be the zucchini.

Well, let's put what we can in the raised beds then. We have to save time for this afternoon.

I know, we have to do the bees.

Yeah, and then box of the bees.

Should I put my two zucchinis here?

Okay.

So they— I'm growing them vertically.

Yeah.

All right, so should I put them here or should I leave this space for lettuce to go and I'll just flip-flop my lettuce back and forth? I'll put my lettuce somewhere else.

Try and zucchini there. You know, hey, we got, we got salad for dinner tonight, baby. How's that feel? Good. We've learned that Mother Nature is modest and she wants to be covered up, and if you don't, she will. And she likes to dress crazy or run away when like water comes and just wash away the soil. He just collected leaves from the fall and put over this, these leaves. Doesn't work great, didn't it?

It did.

Then you just move the leaves to the side, put down in there, and you're gonna try— even after 19 years, we're still trying new things. We're gonna get to her newest woo-woo experiment, this, this in a little bit. Grass clippings. Everybody's got them. And we did, we did wood chips for a long time. We wanted the Back to Eden thing to work, but we found it just did— it just, it captured too much moisture in this temperate rainforest we live in, in North Carolina. And we were growing mushrooms instead of plants. Nothing beats grass clippings. Like, it's just— they're just so fine. They break down into nit— they're nitrogen source. They do their job. They're easy to work with, pliable. Like, it works. You planted this lettuce 2 weeks ago. You don't have to weed. You don't have to water as much. Like, look at that. Nothing's getting through that. It's just so thin. Mr. Brown asking about the bees. You the bee man?

99.

We got you a little suit coming up later, okay? The grass clippings, it is readily available. Almost everybody has a lawn and feeds the soil. It's the winning mulch, isn't it, Rebecca? And second to that, leaves. Beautiful one had to go remove a tick from one of the kids.

Let's finish this thing.

We've got this handy-dandy grass collection for our mower. Building of these raised beds was something special. I'll be honest, I was a little skeptical. You know, I just wanted the cheap and easy, put it in the ground. For the longest time, we just had gardens in the ground here. We've pretty much always had chickens next to the garden, which is, which is totally clutch. Let me show you. We might be hard-pressed to find some weeds right now. Weeds will develop. Extra produce will develop for sure. Produce, when you're done with it, weeding has never been so fun. Turn those weeds into eggs and chicken. That would be a very basic permaculture design. Put the chickens next to the garden, and then the garden can feed the chickens. Oh, I see some more too. They'll like this. You got weeds growing out the cracks of the side. That's permaculture, turning a problem— weeds— into a solution. You don't have a weed problem, you have a chicken deficiency problem. The beginning of it was in 2018. I think we had something like 80 inches of rain, which is double what we normally get. And this being the base of the mountain in the valley just flooded and destroyed her tomatoes. Look what I've uncovered. It's like a spring. Look, water's just flowing out of there. It's not flooding the tomatoes, but it sure is streaming by it. Look. The wood chips have soaked up this moisture and now it's slowly releasing it. And all these wood chips combined are— it's like, it's seriously like a little mountain spring. Look again. Okay, there's a theme here. We evolve and progress based on the destruction of your tomatoes. Yeah, you know, never watering them in a frosty morning. Yeah, getting them in raised beds off the ground, off the flood. I was pretty skeptical about these. Is it worth the, the money? But then I did the math. If you do a square foot gardening method, you can plant so many things into this. It's $1,000 to build even with expensive cedar, and just the first season you can get $3,000 worth of produce. These have been here a while. She's got dreams of rock raised beds. Anyway, these raised beds are amazing. We've had pergola additions. I'll leave the link— actually, all this stuff, I'm gonna leave link for it down in the description. But we're giving away these plans, guys, from our Homestead Builds book. You can have the chicken tractor plans at homesteadbuilds.com. Chicken tractor— well, that one too, but also the raised beds. Get in, he drives it. Okay, okay, you guys come down. Hey Henry! Oh, don't bang the new house. Bring it around. Getting— have him bring it around. He can carry a plant over with his truck real quick before we go. I've shown this once, I've shown it a thousand times. But it's so important. Get your chickens out of their moonscape run. They're just living in their own manure. Put them on wood chips. Over time they scratch it, they manure, and over time down here below you've got compost. And then you feed your garden from the chickens. They feed each other. How many beds are we planting today?

Green beans, one, one row, at least one row of tomatoes, if not two. Cucumbers, zucchini, and okra are in one.

You want to start over there?

Yeah, we'll do green beans in that far row.

All right, this silage tarp has come in key. You know, you get your beds ready, cover it up, minimizes weeds. We're planting over half the high tunnel today. Beauty's ho-ho-ho, and a little bit around the edge where the silage tarp wasn't. These little cherry tomato volunteers really want want to grow. This is something that didn't really work. We had this wire here for the chickens, and now it's here, and it's going to be getting in the way of hoeing, and this is just going to be a weed heaven. Oh wow, I can actually just pull it up. Yay! Don't get married to anything and get ready to rework. I mean, work hard to put that in, that's not working for us.

It goes out somewhere along the line.

We got us a high tunnel, didn't we? And this year, really maxing it out for the garden.

Yeah, I mean, when we're not in the middle of a remodel— in years past, like April, yeah, I was already planting tomatoes in here. So I would, I would—

for an early start.

Yeah, so hopefully next year we'll be getting an early start.

We don't need it all for chickens, so we house our chickens in here too during the winter. They love it. They keep laying, they're out of the rain, they're out of the snow, it's warmer. They build soil. A lot of this is chicken soil, babe. I know, we just scraped off the wood chips.

Let me tell you, I just dug out this root.

Yeah, this root, energy in that root.

I never hit clay.

Those chickens built up some—

they did. We built— we, we have built some really good soil in this.

So why don't we do half of it in chickens though, and then switch it every other year so, so the chickens can still build soil?

Okay, I like that. So then let's We'll have to build a wall. Yeah, that will go all the way to the ceiling with a door in it.

That's temporary. Let's plant some beans, baby. You know what the trick is to resolving conflict on the homestead? Husband and wife, the garden of peace. Yes, dear. When I'm at my best, it's yes, dear. I'm not always at my best. There's a hole in the bottom.

I'm just popping them. You know what I think I'm gonna do is pop them here.

This is for me, kid. This is a good time to talk about your woo-woo stick. Your electroculture here. Is that brass?

It's copper.

Copper around a stick. Those beans did good.

They did. All my beans germinated.

It's electroculture.

So electroculture is harnessing the Earth's magnetic and, uh, atmosphere, all the goodness in it, via copper. They say it keeps pests away. I don't know about that, but like, it's just supposed to help everything grow better. We're trying it out this year. I've heard about it. Lots of people have shared this with me. It's fun. It's fun to wrap the copper around it. It's fun to experiment. The other thing I want to talk about with learning is learning what your family likes to eat. We have grown lots of things in our garden, but, uh, my family hasn't always enjoyed eating them.

Remember when we grew eggplant?

Yep.

Just because it was cool. Well, And then when the bugs got it, we could care less.

We grew eggplant too because we were doing a CSA, and I thought that people wanted variety, but we— it didn't, it didn't work out. Um, and nobody cared. Nobody complained that there was not eggplant in their box.

That's a secret nobody talks about, that there are some vegetables that nobody likes.

But then also green beans. My family does not like the strings and they don't like to string the beans.

Well, why, when there's an alternative? Why would you get string beans? Because your alarm's going off.

That— I know, because that's what's available at the garden store.

What are you supposed to do? It's 10 AM.

Work out.

All right, let's go.

Look, I only had a couple.

You only had a couple that didn't germinate?

Yeah, I think it's just these three. I think I got plants out of these. They were just like this one, really small.

We had chickens in here on deep bedding. We had them on wood chips, and then at the end of this season, we pulled the wood chips off. We've left them in the past hoping it would be a mulch, but then it's just too hard to cultivate. Weeds still come up through. It just becomes a jungle in here. Once the wood chips were off, we shaped the beds and then added compost. You got to get the kids on something. You know what my rule of thumb is with kids, Beck? People say, how do you garden with kids? Plant 25% more than you need. Because he already pulled one of the plants out of the No, it's soil, didn't he? She's laying them out first and then we're gonna spread them out. This compost is a fail-safe. I don't think we've amended our soil in 10 years. We just use compost every year. I mean, it'd be best practice, but we just don't. What's cool about the homestead is everybody can have a job no matter what age. Lily is getting the beans out. Henry can carry them. Lily, let Henry carry them over. Are you pushing them out from the bottom, Henry?

No, you're just pulling them.

We're lucky they're coming out. This is a recent trick we learned. Got a little fish fertilizer in there with some water. We're gonna soak these because they're gonna be stressed out in this transplant, and that'll give them a good watering and hold the soil together. Look at all those volunteer crazy cherry tomatoes. Good job, Henry. Now hand it to Lily. In this high tunnel, we're planting heat-loving crops. It'd be hot this summer, so that's tomatoes, uh, bush beans. What else? Squashes, okra. Hey, we're trying okra for the first time. Yeah, I'm gonna let you do that egg. Is this another woo-woo trick, planting the egg in the bottom of the, um, tomatoes?

No, don't do that.

Don't do that. Please, Henry. Mom, now you can help. That's our watering can. Right now we need to set up our drip irrigation in here. Yep, tomato plants do not like their leaves to get wet, gets blighty. That's probably good, huh?

I like to plant deep as I can. Stick it in. Now take the shovel and poke it. No, no, wait, poke, poke the egg. You get to do it. Poke it hard. Break it, break it, break it open. Let's take that.

What is this? Plant do?

It, it uses the calcium from the eggshells.

Yeah, let's plant all the rest of this tomorrow.

We will need to get the things up. So I ended up doing 3 rows of tomatoes 2 feet apart. In the past I've done 2 rows 1 foot apart, but I just wanted to give them maybe some extra space to— since I have the space so that they can breathe better, have better airflow. All right, another tip with planting is— where'd my family go? Things come up, children need attention. In this case, Gideon got a splinter in his foot, so Justin's going to deal with that while I finish planting my shishito peppers. So That's another thing I've learned in gardening. Sometimes everybody's helping, and then sometimes nobody's helping. Last bed for today. These are peppers that I bought. My peppers that I transplanted— these I think are orange bell peppers. I started red and yellow in the greenhouse, and they're not big enough yet. So, but these need to get in the ground, so I'm getting these in the ground and then I'll transplant the rest of them in that row eventually. So here we go.

Here at the crop garden, we've all kinds of tried all kinds of different gardens, but what we ended on is the market farm garden, the JM Fortier, the Elliot Coleman, 30-inch wide bed, 1-foot pathways, just composted every year. 2, 3 wheelbarrow loads in this 50-foot path. We have a 1,200-square-foot garden here, a 1,200-square-foot garden there. We have another one under that tarp, and then of course the high tunnel. It's 4,800 square feet of crop garden. You can see we've done the old-school half-inch electrical conduit with a pole bender, and then you get 10-foot-wide, uh, Agribond And this, this could be a low tunnel. Well, what's this, you say? Well, we're trying out these Quick Hoops. They're supposed to be— not need sandbags. It's supposed to be a lot easier to come in and out. It's hot, so that's not Agribon, that's not frost protection, that's bug protection. If you want to be organic, which we are— we're beyond organic, we don't even put organic pest control or any, any of that on this garden. So that's actually one of our best things for pest control is just keep it covered with bug net. I'll be honest, this is supposed to come down It feels like it should, it should be a little easier. I don't know if we're doing something wrong. I may yet still have to put sandbags on that. For peas, we've got this nice trellis system between T-posts and metal wires hanging up here, and it's worked nice for that. Right next to the garden, a pig port. Tried this particular model first time— this should say design— this year. Two ends come out and you can pull it off of the deep bedding, and then we mound the compost and make the compost in place where it can be easily wheelbarrowed to the garden. So you see crop gardens, pigs next to the crop gardens. The waste of the crop garden goes to the pigs and feeds the pigs, and then the pigs, in making of their compost, manuring on this deep bedding, ends up making a compost that then feeds the garden. We're gonna go in the beehives, inspect for the first time since we've got them. Probably gonna need to add a box. These are pollinators. Bees are right there. All the gardens are right there. Creek's right next door for them. Gotta lift it all the way off.

Oh wow, oh wow!

Does that mean they're full? Yeah, I don't know how to inspect. I don't know what that means. Do we pull those up?

They are so docile.

Yeah, they're very docile.

I'm gonna see if they're gonna—

are we gonna open those up and look at the— look at them?

Okay, brought back up. No, no, I mean, I don't know what to look at.

Put this box back.

No. Wow, we did it! Grass is growing up around these hives.

We need to get the grass mown around the electric Premier fence that's around it. I think the machine was just too, too loud and it'd get my suit all messed up. This would be much more peaceful, wouldn't it?

The scythe. Let's see. Oh yeah. What do you think?

Scythe did a pretty good job, huh? Yeah, that was peaceful. I think it only aggravated a couple of bees. Look at this, we have a view from the old farmhouse. That was a nice Mother's Day present for your mom. Clear the old boxwoods. Hey, we got dressed up for Mother's Day. You look so nice.

Thanks.

Up here at Grandma's. You look nice.

Thank you.

Here, take your pond de casserole so nicely made.