Here on our homestead, we have an eighth of an acre of growing space and we grow all of our vegetables and berries for an entire year. I'm going to take you on a tour of all the things we're growing and give you my best tips so that you can

grow these things yourself. Broccoli is one of our very favorite vegetables. It's so easy to grow and the kids love it because broccoli is a cool weather plant. It loves to have heavy mulch and it especially loves leaf mulch. My first tip is to plant broccoli at the crack of

spring. The reason I like to do this is because as you can see over here, these first started getting bug eaten as it started getting warm and those little white moths came out and so it's really nice to be able to pick the broccoli before the worms come out. When I go to

the greenhouse to choose my broccoli plants for the year, I like to choose the kind that says on the little tag that it gets big heads rather than the kind that says it has really good side shoots. I feel like the head gets a lot bigger on this kind of plant than it does on the

plants that say they're really good for side shoots. I have an organic spray that I will use only in dire emergencies. I don't love to use sprays even if they're organic sprays, just simply because even organic sprays can harm the beneficial insects. I will always add

some peppermint essential oil and a tiny bit of dish soap to the spray. Peppermint essential oil is actually incredibly helpful when it comes to keeping the little butterflies away. It won't do anything with the caterpillars that I know of, but it keeps the little white

butterflies away that actually lay the harmful eggs that hatch into caterpillars. The dish soap that I put in the spray will help the spray stick really well so that you don't have to use it as often. Another tip for when you

are buying your plants at the greenhouse, if the plants look leggy and have a tiny little broccoli head on them already, do not buy them. That plant will not get big and it will only have a small broccoli head. The trick to growing a huge broccoli head is having a massive plant

before the broccoli head actually even starts forming. I have just a couple cabbages here that are ready to be harvested. Cody doesn't love cabbage and so I don't do much, but I do a little bit because I love a good jar of sauerkraut. My

favorite variety of cabbage is Stonehead because it's like a very tight solid head and the worms cannot get inside of it. Cabbage loves the same conditions as broccoli plants, so I do have a confession to make about broccoli and cabbage plants. I don't actually grow

these under a grow light in my house. That's one of the secrets that I have found to growing massive broccoli heads and nice cabbages. I looked into it a while ago and for some reason, it's really hard to have the perfect conditions for broccoli seedlings and

somehow I've just not been able to nail it, so I do buy these at greenhouses and they have done way better than if I try to raise them in my own house. These are my butternut squash plants and I feel like they're not looking that amazing

there's already leaves around the bottom that are turning a little bit yellow here in Ohio the main problem with growing any kind of like squash pumpkins cucumbers Tomatoes anything like that is fungus so I struggle terribly with powdery mildew on my squash and

cucumbers these are looking okay but I have a feeling I'm gonna have to really get on a spray routine for these if they're going to do anything this year I have an organic peroxide spray that really does help to keep the fungus

manageable but it doesn't actually completely take it away we love butternut squash for pumpkin pies and Autumn squash soup we honestly like them better than pumpkins for pumpkin pie and they store so well you literally don't have to do anything with them you can

just put them straight into your root cellar a friend told me that feeding your squash plants milk will help them to be more resistant to mold and fungus and stuff so I've been doing that this year and I actually noticed that they started growing a lot faster after I

started doing that we're also growing them in a raised bed this year for the first time and I'm really hoping that somehow that will make a difference with keeping the fungus down I don't know I planted six pepper plants this year last year I did eight and we had

way too many peppers so this year I only did six I have orange Blaze which is my personal favorite they're absolutely stunning and they're very sweet I also have Marconi Peppers which are giant and red and then California Wonder was just a really great all-around nice pepper

the main thing that I do with peppers is make salsa with them and we also love peppers stuffed with cream cheese. Peppers used to be one of my absolute favorite vegetables and then I had COVID two years ago and it totally messed with my taste buds and now

peppers taste way off. Am I the only one that deals with that or can any of you guys relate? I'm so curious. We ran out of sweet potatoes just a couple weeks ago so this year I planted 40. Last year I did 25. We're growing them all in raised

beds and here's my biggest tip for you with sweet potatoes: plant bush varieties so that the potatoes will grow all at the base of the plant. That way you don't have to dig up your entire garden when it comes time to dig your potatoes. So

for sweet potatoes you don't want to mulch them right away after you plant them because they're heat-loving. They really love heat and I've noticed that if you mulch them instantly after you plant them it'll take them a lot longer to take off. But we do mulch them once

they're very well established because they're almost impossible to weed once they're just like one massive viny mess. The varieties that we planted this year of sweet potatoes are Vardaman and Covington. Last year we did an experiment, we planted a bunch of sweet potatoes in

raised beds and we planted some in the ground. The ones in the raised beds seem to do way better so this year we planted all 40 of our plants into the raised beds and we'll see how they do. Michelle's favorite vegetable, which I think is actually technically a fruit, is

Cucumbers, I don't really care for them all that much, but she loves them. But we also really kind of stink at growing them, but we keep trying year after year because they are Michelle's favorite. And we're trying a couple things different this year. Michelle is

feeding them milk just like she is doing with the squash plants, and we're also going to try trellising them. I know some of you are probably going to make some comments about how we're not quite doing this right, but the thing is is we

weren't thinking ahead quite far enough. Michelle wasn't thinking ahead quite far enough, and the way we planted them was not quite right for how we're gonna do the trellis, but we're gonna give it a try somehow. I'm gonna have to get this

up here without hitting the plants. You want to help me? [Music] I really think that'll be sturdy enough once the plants start growing up. It maybe I'll like stick some T-posts in or something, but I think that'll be all right. The one way that I do like

cucumbers a lot and the children love is to make them into pickles. Michelle makes some awesome pickles. So basically what I think we did wrong here is the plant should have been like on the outside of this, so they grow up on the outside of

the trellis. But what I'm thinking is we might be able to just kind of train them towards this, and once they get over here, then get them to grow up on the outside. We could have like made the trellis come out this way, but it would have been

annoying to be on the path and sticking out there and it would have felt a lot less sturdy this way they can be tied together and I think that'll be a lot sturdier and a lot better as long as we can get them to come on the outside of

it I have two raised beds full of green beans so here's a trick that someone taught me long ago to get your green beans to germinate really well they said green bean seeds like to have a partner to germinate and so when I make the

trenches to put the seeds in I put two seeds right beside each other and then you don't have any gaps in your rows they just germinate beautifully here I have a yellow bean that's called Carson and over here I have purple beans I just

think they're so pretty like look at these beautiful flowers and the green beans are like a dark purple but when you cook them they just turn green like a normal bean and I just think they're so much easier to like to see when you're picking and they bring me joy and

honestly the green ones just don't so green beans are honestly a bit triggering for me because when we did farmers market we literally picked pounds and pounds and pounds and pounds of green beans like we would sell 50 pounds per Saturday at the farmer's

market it was monotonous it was hot it was tiring tomatoes are really important for us because Cody gets sick if he has to eat grocery store sauces so I can all of our tomato products barbecue sauce ketchup marinara chunk tomatoes tomato juice all

of that stuff, so here is a gorgeous tomato plant, and it's beautiful. It looks wild and free, but I can't allow all of these leaves to be touching the soil and the leaves and stuff because they just get fungus so much quicker that way, and

it's also a lot harder for me to spray them when everything is so full. So, you want to have lots of air flow in your tomatoes. I use a spray that, like the first ingredient is peroxide, and it doesn't completely eradicate the fungus, but it definitely keeps it under control

so that I can get tomatoes for as long as I want. [Music] This is the spray that I use that helps with fungus for my tomatoes, and like I said, it's not going to completely eradicate disease, but it does really help to control it. I always add a little

bit of fish emulsion or liquid seaweed, and I also add just a small squirt of dish soap that helps it to stick and make so that it really does its job. Once your plants are nice and tall like this, I never ever water them like from the

top. I only water all the way down at the root because tomatoes just simply do not like to be wet all over. They're very, very prone to fungus. Another thing that I do with my tomatoes, and this like really pains me to say, but I stay away

from heirloom varieties because they just simply are not as disease resistant as some of the newer varieties. I do try to plant open-pollinated tomato plants so that I can save seeds if I want to, but I would rather have lots of tomatoes that are newer varieties than spray with

a fungicide so that is just one of those things that one of the battles that I choose not to fight as you can see I have heavy leaf mulch down that covers the dirt and makes so that when it rains the dirt won't splash up onto your

plants because soil often is what carries the fungus spores and stuff so these are my massive zucchini plants these two are Patty pan squash and those two are sun stripe squash so you might wonder why I plant like the weird varieties but it's just an effort to

keep fungus down so one year I decided to grow Patty pan squash just for anyways they stayed alive and stayed alive and stayed alive and I was like whoa so after that that's all that I planted because they seem to be way more disease resistant than the black or

green zucchinis those literally die before they even get fruit on them from powdery mildew I do put some diatomaceous earth on them sometimes and I do also spray them with my biosafe peroxide spray to help with the powdery

mildew but they still only last for a certain amount of time and then they're one [Music] whoa I get a ton of questions about how to grow really big carrots and also how to get carrots to germinate the way that I

can get carrots to germinate really well is by sowing them really heavy here you can see like there's a really wide strip I sow them really heavy and then I thin them out to like probably two inches apart you have to imagine how big you

want your carrots to get, and then thin them accordingly. You will not get big carrots that store really long over winter if you have them right next to each other. Carrot seedlings are like feather fine, so you also have to plant them in very loose soil if you want them

to germinate. And you also have to keep them nice and wet, nice and moist in order for them to be able to poke up through the dirt. Danvers half-long carrots are a shorter carrot and they get nice and fat, and they store really, really well, and they also don't break

off when you try to dig them in the fall. And other carrots that get really long, they break off, and then they don't store it all like if they have a broken-off piece, they won't store it all and you'll have to eat those first. Carrots also do

not like hot weather. So if you try to plant them when it's really hot, like in the middle of the summer, they're not going to germinate very well because they really like that cooler weather because they're cool-weather veggies. I really like to mulch them with leaves

once they're well established, because that keeps everything cool and damp, and they really take off that way. I also get a lot of questions about how to get really big onions. Wow, look at that! So the first thing is compost, obviously. The next thing is space them nice and far apart. It's the

same with the carrots. If you plant them too close together, you're not going to get a massive onion. Onions are very juicy, and so I take that to mean that they love lots of water. So I keep mine well watered. So here again, onions are

cool weather crops, they don't love heat, and so I mulch them very heavily with leaves. They love the damp coolness. The other major thing that I feel like makes the biggest difference with onions for us is we plant the onion plants and not the sets. For some reason the onion

plants have gotten way bigger and done way better for us than the sets have. Last year we actually had too many and so I did not up my onions from last year, I just did 100 again like I did last year. Here is our asparagus patch and

honestly I didn't want to show it because it is such a mess. This weed problem is the reason that we're thinking of taking out probably at least half of this patch. For those of you who want to do market gardening, asparagus is an awesome thing to sell

because it's really easy to grow and it can sell for a very good price. Other than the weeding, asparagus is super easy to grow. I mean, it comes up on its own in the spring and all that you have to do is in the fall, you cut the tops off so

that the beetles don't take over. We haven't actually had very much problem with beetles since we got our little DeWalt sweeper. We can just like suction the beetles off right in the spring, like as soon as the shoots are coming up and

they're taken care of for the year. They're a very easy beetle to stay on top of. Cutting the foliage off and burning it in the fall makes so that the beetles cannot overwinter in the foliage. Sweet corn is a really heavy feeder, so

you want to make sure you're using a lot of compost. Sometimes Michelle uses liquid seaweed or fish fertilizer, those work really well. We only do a little bit of sweet corn, just enough for fresh eating. We don't like to freeze it or anything like that, it's just something

fun, mainly for the kids. We didn't do any last year because the year before the raccoons came and just like ate all of it, but we've got a dog this year, so we're hoping that, I mean if need be, we'll tie him up out here by the sweet

corn and hopefully he'll keep the raccoons away. This is my old strawberry patch. I have gotten mixing bowl after mixing bowl after mixing bowl of strawberries off of here this year. They are just finishing. I just send the kids out with bowls to get a handful here and

there. They're pretty much over with. Over here is my new strawberry patch. This patch has been in business now for four years, and so we try to swap them out every few years. It helps with disease. It also makes so that you have bigger berries. If I'm honest, I don't remember

what variety these are. Cody ordered Cavendish, but they were out, and so they sent us a different variety. I think it might be Brunswick, but I'm not 100 sure. So I'm really sorry about that. People say that it's really hard to grow

organic strawberries and it actually has not been that hard for us. One of the things that you for sure want to do is give them lots of space to breathe, just like everything else. They're called strawberries for a reason. They love heavy, heavy straw. If your berries are

sitting in the soil, they are not going to be very good; they're just going to be like mushy and rotten, kind of. So every spring, Cody will take the tiller through and make so that there's very defined rows that are quite far apart. You don't

want big, fat, thick rows. After my patch is done in the summer, which is like right now, we are going to just mow it off, and this year we're going to be tilling this up and planting something else in here. But if it was a normal year,

we would just mow it off and let the fresh shoots grow back up. That really helps with the strawberries being more resistant to disease. The only other thing then that we do with our strawberry patch is in the winter, around December, we will cover the strawberry

rows with straw. It just helps with the soil, like freezing, thawing, freezing, thawing. It helps keep the roots intact. At least that's what my mom and my grandma told me. These are pink Champagne currant bushes. Pretty sure I just bought them because I like the name. They

literally take no work at all. Well, we haven't done anything with these bushes, and I think that's actually why we got them in the first place was just like an easy food source type of thing. You don't have to spray them, you don't have to

trim them. You don't have to do anything literally with them. I'm going to try making a currant pie. We've gotten a bunch of them this year. Last year, I made a currant jelly, and I feel like they taste a little bit like rhubarb.

So this is it for our main garden now on up to our front garden we've got about a 40 foot row of raspberries right here and I need to get this wire back up on the outside of them This is this trellis that we built here has a wire down here

and up here works really well but some of the plants you can see that don't quite make it up to the top one start hanging out once especially once the raspberries start coming on so I put another wire about right here that's wider but I had to take it off so that I

could till beside the row and raspberries are really really simple but there is a couple things that really really help to make it easier for you to pick and to get a better harvest and one of those things is to till beside the row every year raspberries get suckers

that means like they under the ground they will start growing more plants and they'll start growing and if you just let it go your patch will just get wider and wider you don't want that because you want the plants to have good airflow just like almost everything else

Michelle was talking about every year I till beside the row and I keep it about this wide and so I had to take this thing off to be able to do that The first year we had them we didn't have a trellis and they all just like hung down

to the ground that was really hard to pick The best berries are always the ones at the top because they got the best airflow so that works really well and also we compost it a lot so once we're done with the harvest we leave these plants go until like really early

spring before they start growing again and we'll cut them down I did that this spring and this is how tall they are already You don't gotta worry about them growing back you cut them down and that way you've got fresh growth and they're a lot healthier and they do a

lot better and that also makes so like if you leave them you'll get like a trickle of raspberries all year long but if you cut them down and then they grow up in the spring and summer in the fall you'll get a big harvest more all at

once We're starting to get to see a few raspberries now but most of them will come starting like late summer early fall and then we just get tons of them and literally like gallons and gallons and gallons of raspberries that we get to put in our freezer and have them for

smoothies all winter and summer and then Michelle makes the best raspberry jam ever and if she's feeling exceptionally nice to me she'll make me a raspberry pie for the most part raspberries are really easy Don't have to worry a lot about disease pressure and pests for the

most part but one thing we do have problem with is some little white wormies that get into the raspberries and we found that basically it's when it's really hot and if they get overripe if they get overripe at all you can almost plan on seeing a little white

wormy in there so we try to keep picking them every day and get them before they get overripe and we've also found that the ones that grow up here at the top are a lot less wormy than the ones that are down more inside and stuff so it's

that airflow thing again that just really helps and also there is a spray you can use that spray that Michelle talked about out there spinosad but we really try to avoid using sprays like that if at all possible also I'm sure some of you will wonder what variety

these are I don't remember for certain because he's been here for several years we just don't do good at writing this stuff down I guess but I'm pretty sure the variety is Heritage I planted spring garlic this year in previous years I have done fall garlic like the hard neck

garlic but I usually forget it in the fall and so we started just doing spring garlic and it works great honestly I really don't do very much special with my garlic except I will plant it in the spring make sure that there's heavy compost and once it is established I

mulch it with leaves and other than that I just sit and watch it this is our white potato patch white potatoes are very very important to us because that's kind of our basic staple white potatoes and sweet potatoes this year we planted Yukon Gold and Red Pontiac potatoes we

had been other years planting Kennebec as well but we were having issues with like kind of a hollow rotten spot in the middle of the potato especially the big ones and I read it has something to do with like the fluctuations between wet weather and dry weather but the other

potatoes didn't have that so I started just planting Yukon Gold and Red Pontiac this year I planted 4 40 pound bags of potatoes last year I only did 30 but this year I upped it up by 10 pounds

because we ran out just a few weeks ago we choose to hill our potatoes with leaves rather than soil because it's just so much easier and I feel like it actually like keeps everything cool and damp and the potatoes somehow just get a lot bigger than if we only hill them

with dirt over here is our rhubarb plant at the beginning of this year we had six of these so like this whole area was rhubarb but there was no way that we could eat all of that rhubarb so sadly I took all of them out except one and I've

been making rhubarb strawberry jam with this I have plans to make rhubarb muffins and maybe a rhubarb pie because rhubarb pie is my favorite when you pull a rhubarb stalk you don't want it you don't ever want to just cut it off you

want to pull it out you want to hold at the bottom and pull up and it comes out like this you never want to cut it for some reason the plant just doesn't like that and it will die been there done that we have a raised bed up here by the

house where we raise all of our greens this year I planted it all full of lettuce the key to beautiful lettuce is lots and lots of water I water this raised bed almost every day soon I'm going to be taking all of this lettuce out and giving this raised bed a break

for the summer I don't even try to grow lettuce in the hot summer because we don't like bitter lettuce I have yet to find a variety of lettuce that truly doesn't get bitter at all during the summer and plus it's just so hot and the

Watering gets old about mid-summer. I will replant this so that we have salad greens for fall again over here, separate from our gardens. We planted great plants this year, pretty excited about those. We planted Concord, Steuben, and Niagara varieties, so we're hoping for some for

fresh eating, but probably mostly for juice and maybe try some wine making. I think that would be a lot of fun. So, we just got these planted. First time we've ever done this, so not like I've got a lot of tips on how to grow these things.

I do think I did a pretty good job with the trellis, and we do have a video about that that you could watch and see how I did that. Also beside the grapes here, we've got our tea plants. We've got an apple mint plant and chocolate

peppermint. We have these planted down in plastic tubs because if you don't do that, they will just spread everywhere. So, this is keeping them contained. We used to have it in a patch. We would try to till around it and keep it tilled, but it

1/8 Acre Abundance: FULL TOUR + BEST TIPS for Growing

1/8 Acre Abundance: FULL TOUR + BEST TIPS for Growing

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