Living Off Our Land GARDEN TOUR | Self-Sufficiency Gardening & Plant Inspiration – UK

Join us for a late Spring Tour of our outdoor garden beds, where we are growing a HUGE variety of beautiful, fun crops from STAPLE FOODS to FLOWERS, as we try new things and becomes more self sufficient every year.
Mid May is the pinnacle point for planting and now we feel we are READY FOR SUMMER 🌸

We are Dan & Laurie and our land is called Freedom Forest – Its 3 acres in the South of England where we are creating an edible oasis and trying to provide as much for ourselves, from our land as possible, where we are completely off grid.
Our food growing journey began together in 2017 when we created our first No dig lasagne bed. Every year we grow more and more and now we are currently around 60-80% self sufficient in ALL of our food needs.
Our style and methods are inspired by permaculture and we try to be thoughtful about how and what we do, to be as gentle on the planet as possible.

We are MASSIVELY grateful that you choose to watch our Videos and support us in this way, however, If you appreciate and get value from what we share and would like to help us a little more, you can become a Freedom Forest Patreon (link below). In return your name will appear in the end credits of our videos and we’ll message you a password for the ‘members area’ of our website where we share a few more of our favourite recipes exclusively for our Patreon’s 💚

https://www.patreon.com/freedomforestlife

Enjoy & Thanks for Watching

✌️🌿 Peace and Plants

#Freedomforest #gardentour #selfsufficiency #gardeninspiration #gardenbeds #vegetablegarden #kitchengarden #homesteading

[Music] In 2017, myself and Dan created our first vegetable bed within our 3 acres of land, and our journey towards self-sufficiency began. Over time, we’ve expanded our growing areas, installed poly tunnels, and created a food forest, and now we produce around 80% of our own food all year round. We hope that you enjoy this tour and seeing how our growing areas look today. All ready for the summer ahead. Hi folks, and thanks for joining us at Freedom Forest. A lot has changed in our outdoor growing beds since we last showed you guys around, and we are feeling like we are ready for summer. So, it seems like a great time to do a tour and show you how everything is looking. Okay, so we’re going to start at the top of our main growing area. And this is our elephant garlic bed. And the elephant garlic is looking amazing. And we have got some absolutely massive elephant garlic coming up this year. So big, I can’t actually believe it. And it has also just started sending up its scapes, these flowerheads. And that means that it is going to be ready to harvest in the next few weeks. So really, really excited. I always absolutely love and look forward to our garlic harvest, particularly the elephant garlic, because it is just so rewarding and fun seeing the size of the massive bulbs that you get. So yeah, this will be coming out of the ground really soon. Up the top here in this big bed. This is a kind of semi- wild, semi-p perennial bed. And as you can see, the Jerusalem artichokes are already knee high. And it feels like we only just finished harvesting from this bed just a few weeks ago. We’ve got masha that runs all along the front and in another month or so, all of this will be trailing down and that covers up this horrible plastic that we have on the bank. Um, which one day we are going to find a better method for dealing with this. But for now, the masha makes a great edible cover. You can eat the leaves on the masher plant just like you can stium. You can also eat the flowers and the tuber. So, it’s often referred to as a perennial nest. We’ve also got horseradish in this bed here. And then there’s lots of strawberries dotted through. And one of the crops that we haven’t yet put out for the summer, which we will be doing probably by the end of this week, is planting out corettes. And we do normally dot a few corettes along this bed as well. So, they are yet to go in. This bed here is Dan’s mom’s cut flower bed, and this is going to be absolutely packed with beautiful colored ders shortly. So, really looking forward to that all coming up. And one of the big changes we’ve made in this area this year is this bed here. This is where we have grown beans on semi-permanent frames for the last few years, but we got beanwe quite badly last year, and I wasn’t sure how to deal with it initially. So, I decided to move the bean bed, which you’ll see a bit later on in the tour. And this year, we are growing all of our big pumpkins, and we’re also growing painted mountain corn in this bed. And the painted mountain corn is one that we can either use as flower corn or we will use it as feed for our chickens, which I’m super excited about trying that this year. And we’ve also got ochre dotted through this bed still. This is where we’ve grown ochre for quite a few years. So some of it is coming up as volunteer plants, but we also grew some on. And you can see Dan has done a really good job getting all the corn in the ground. And with the ochre that creates a really nice ground cover. So, as you can see, we’ve planted the corn around the outside of an ochre. And so, that will hopefully act as a living mulch for the corn and help to lock the moisture in the soil all around the corn. And then we’ve also got some sunflowers dotted along the back which will hopefully grow up and look amazing. And sunflowers is another um crop which I’m hopefully growing a lot more of this year that we are going to use as chicken food. We’ve got our permanent strawberry bed here. The leaves are absolutely ginormous and these plants are covered in fruit forming up right now. So, it is not going to be long until we have got a lot of strawberries coming out of this area. Absolutely love strawberries. We’re normally harvesting those by the end of May to the very beginning of June, depending on the season. In this bed here, we have got our first sewing of beetroot and I sewed these in early March. Now, the growth has been really quite slow this year, and that is because we have not been watering very much, and we have had virtually no rain this spring. We’ve only had one lot of rain that I can recall in May so far. It is now the middle of May, and I think it rained twice in April, and not even any amount that was worth making a difference. And we’re completely off- grid here. So, we don’t have any mains water supply, which means we are quite limited on how much we can water. The last couple of years, it’s been fine because we’ve had so much rain. We barely watered at all anyway. But this year, it has been completely the opposite. We always water our plants when we first put them in whilst they’re getting established, but normally then we just leave it up to nature. But these beds are so dry at the moment. Beetroot, however, is a crop that can take it quite dry. So, but growth is obviously being a little bit affected. The next big change that we have made in this area is installing these beautiful frames which we are growing our peas up. And these are purple snap peas and they are just starting to form up. I saw some yesterday. Here, here’s a little one. So, we will be harvesting our first snap peas really soon. In the next few days to a week, I would expect. I do need to get these guys holding on a little bit better. They seem to want to pull themselves in the other direction with the wind. But the flowers on this variety of pee are just absolutely stunning. And that’s actually one of the reasons why I grow this particular variety. We’ve got sweet peas in the middle here to harvest for cut flowers and to look beautiful. We’ve got another tall pee here. And these were sewn later, so they are a little bit further behind up the top here. So, this bed is still got all of our leaks in it from last year. It’s got some selfsewn chamomile, which is actually looking amazing. And I’m going to start harvesting chamomile to dry from tea from this plant in the next few days. As you can see, the leaks are sending up their flower spikes and they will be running to seed soon. I will leave a block of leaks in the ground to save our own seed and because the flowerheads look absolutely beautiful throughout the summer. But I’ve got a block at the end down here which I’ll probably use that because this bed here I’m going to be clearing out completely soon other than the chamomile. And this bed is going to be planted up with amaranth and quinoa. I grew amaranth for the first time last year and absolutely adored it. It is so so beautiful. So I would grow it alone just for how it looks. But this year we’re going to be using the amaranth as chicken food again. So yeah, really excited about all these new things that we are trying. We’ve got kabi which is looking great again. very nearly ready to harvest from a midFebruary sew in these beds here. This is all onions. This long length here I put out a little bit earlier. They were the stronger growth and they are growing on really really well. I have had nearly all of these beds covered up for since we planted out and I just took the covers off yesterday and weeded all of the beds and gave them a good tidy up. Um, the reason we cover the beds is to protect from birds when we first plant out and also with things like the kabi to stop the hungry pigeons completely devouring all the leaves. I find with the karabi once it gets to a certain size they can kind of take it and yeah hopefully in the next couple of weeks we’ll be harvesting from here anyway. So this is red onions here. These went out a little bit later. And to make use of the space I dotted some herbs in between the onions to use as they grow up. So we’ve got dill and coriander in here. But I have to say the coriander is not terribly happy this year because coriander is a cooler loving herb and it has been so hot and sunny and dry this spring that it is too hot for the coriander. Um I’m not complaining about the weather. It’s been beautiful. It’s been so nice working and having so much opportunity to get things done and enjoy the sunshine. But if it could just rain at night a few times a week, that would be absolutely perfect. In here, I’ve got rainbow chard. We’ve got some spring onions. And just yesterday, I planted out some bulbing fennel. Now, bulbing fennel is something I’ve not had a lot of success with before. Um, usually I can’t even get it to germinate for some reason. So, I bought some new seed this year. It did germinate really well, but again, it’s not been loving the heat that we’ve had in the poly tunnel. So, I actually took it out of the tunnel and have been growing it on outside for the last couple of weeks. Um, but yeah, it does look a little bit scorched. Hopefully, that will pull through and grow on because yeah, again, something I’m really looking forward to working with in the kitchen and just trying new flavors. Uh, yeah, really good. So, this is an area that I just cleared yesterday. It had all winter greens in it from last year. Put down a centimeter or two of compost. And this area is ready to plant. I’ll probably putting some more carrots in maybe here. We’ve still got last last year’s carrots in here. There’s probably a few that are still okay to harvest, but I do need to clear these out. And then I’ll replant that with our next sewing of rainbow chard. Under these covers here, we’ve got two blocks of parnips. And I just keep them covered whilst they’re germinating and whilst they’re small to keep the moisture in the ground because parnip seed really likes a lot of moisture to germinate. If you haven’t sewn pastnip already, there is still just about time. In fact, I prefer sewing my parsnip later in the season because then they’re um ready in time for the winter. I think if you sew them early, they are ready kind of at the end of summer. And I’m not ready to be eating parsnips at the end of summer. So, this is the block of um leaks that I’m going to leave into run seed. So, you can see some of them are sending up their flower spikes already. So, this will be beautiful flowerheads in a few weeks time and that will be seed for next year. And then at the end of each of these rows here, I’ve got some more tall peas. And these are peas for potting. And we’ve also got sunflowers behind for both their beauty and for chicken feed. We’ve got maragolds, which I’ve just popped in yesterday. So, I cannot wait for everything to be in bloom in this area. It is going to look amazing. On this bed, just a little bit lower down here, you can see last year’s parnips. And these will stay in mostly. Um, and that will be my parnip seed for next year. I always save my own parnip seed. And then in the rest of this bed here, and in fact either side of the parnips, we’ve got broad beans. And we have actually got broad beans ready to harvest here, which I’m really surprised about. I’m pretty sure they haven’t come on until June in the past. Um, but yeah, we’ve got broad beans that we can start to harvest any time from now. They’ll be sizing up over the next few weeks. The plants have stayed quite small this year, though, which isn’t a bad thing because it stops them falling over quite so much. However, um I think that that again is probably due to how dry the soil is. And then the plan for this bed for our next sewing is going to be putting corettes into here. And I’ll actually start probably by the end of this week, I’ll start dotting corette plants into the gaps between these broad beans. they get a little bit of shelter and protection from the broad beans whilst they’re still growing on and harvesting. But hopefully they get enough light. It’s something I’m trying this year growing these two together. Um yeah, so stay tuned to see how that goes. On the last bed down here, we’ve got our French garlic. Again, same as the elephant garlic, the French garlic will come out of the ground usually by the end of June. I did plant this slightly later than the elephant garlic. So, elephant garlic will be harvested first and then the French garlic. Now, normally there’s only about three months of the year that the garlic isn’t in the ground. So, I usually leave this bed bare um and just put the garlic back in as we are ready. But I was just thinking yesterday that I might actually try doing a quick crop of salads in this bed um for the time that the har that the garlic is harvested. So yeah, I might make use of this space in that way. This year we have got one little block of salad down the end there under that green um mesh and that’s all ready to harvest. Right now, I like to keep the salad under a little bit of shade cloth uh when the weather’s hotter because I find that that stops it going so bitter again. It keeps the moisture in the ground which um lettuce really really enjoys. So, yeah, that is our main growing area. Something else I am super excited about and I just have to show you guys and I really want to document this and get it on camera as well is the rhubarb that is growing down here. So, this is our perennial bed. We’ve got asparagus down the back here. We planted these two crops um last spring, so we’re not harvesting the asparagus yet. We have had some small harvests. Well, I say small harvests, they’ve actually been quite big. We have taken some harvests from the rhubarb so far. And yeah, I think we could take just about as much as we like. But this rhubarb is massive. I’m going to get in here if I can and stand behind this leaf so you can get some concept of the size. These rhubarbs are growing more like gunneras. They are huge. And not only are the leaves huge, but the stems are as well. If we get in here, hopefully Dan will be able to get in with the camera as well. Look at the size of this rhubarb. I can’t even get my I can just get my longest finger around the width of the rhubarb. And when I last harvested some of this a while ago, I was a little bit concerned that perhaps it would be a bit woody where it was so big, but it was actually completely the opposite. It was so Juicy and crisp. Absolutely amazing. So, what is the secret with the ginormous rhubarb? The thing that I think it is that we come back to time and time again here for abundance and amazing growth, particularly in this area here, is wood chip. And wood chip doesn’t always get the best rep when it comes to gardening other than being used on paths, but we love it and we have had huge success using wood chips on our beds, particularly in areas where we’ve got more long-term or perennial plants. Yakon grows amazingly in wood chip and it also makes our soil so loose and beautiful that you can harvest it with your hands. Over winter we mulched over the top of all of these rhubarb crowns with wood chip. We did the same last year when we planted it and this is the results. They are no special strains of rhubarb. It’s just ordinary ordinary rhubarb that we bought online. We’ve got four or five different varieties here. And you can see that there’s not a huge amount of difference between the varieties. So, it’s not like one variety of rhubarb is growing bigger than the others. So, all I can say is is wood chip. Okay, we’re going to go over to the other side now to uh what we call the new land and we’ll have a little look what’s happening up there. Okay, so through to the new land and we’ll leave the gate open because Murph is somewhere around behind us and if we don’t just be barking at the gate in a minute. Okay, so if you’ve been following our videos for a while, you will see that it is looking a little bit different up here. Last year was the first time that we grew in these beds here, and we grew potatoes in this area. However, we decided that it wasn’t a great idea continuing to grow potatoes here. Whilst the potatoes grew amazingly, the prevailing wind here comes from this direction and blows downhill. And as you can see, this is where we’ve got the entrances to our poly tunnels where we grow all of our tomatoes. Now, we grow blight resistant potatoes, but we grow regular heritage varieties of tomatoes. And so, we decided that probably for disease resistance, it wasn’t a good idea to continue growing potatoes up here. Now, as I was saying earlier, we had beam weevil last year. So, I decided to move the beam frames. So, this was where we thought we would try it this year. However, it is not going to be their forever home because we’ve decided that we don’t like how these frames look up here in this area. Now, they will look beautiful when all our beans for dry harvesting are covering these poles. It is going to look amazing later on in the summer, but we usually leave the frames in a semi-permanent position. And obviously, that’s going to mean more than six months of the year when we will be looking at this bare scaffold city as we’ve been calling it. So yeah, it was a big effort to put these in the other day, but next year we might well move them back to where they previously were because I’ve actually now learned, thank you to my friends at Bedworth Seed Swap, how I can dry and store the seed and get rid of the beam weevil by freezing the seed um after it’s completely dry. So, actually, I’m not worried about that anymore, but we had already taken all the frames down before I learned about these tricks. Anyway, wait. We will be making it look beautiful. I’ve got a bed of Zenia here that is going to grow up. These Ainia to have as cut flowers, and I’m going to be putting more flowers along here at the front of the frames. Dan has got beautiful bananas coming up that will hopefully grow on well this year. So, this area will look a lot nicer later on in the year. Another favorite point about this area here is that this strip along the back, this wild hedge, is actually my main blackberry harvesting area as well. So, they are flowering up. Really looking forward to lots of blackberries this year. our raised beds here. We’ve got sweet potatoes in this side and we are trying to come up with methods to keep the rats off of the sweet potatoes because the last few years our losses have been getting more and more and more to the point that we’re not growing them in outdoor beds this year. So, we’re trying um chicken wire mesh on the top and it is also on the bottom of the beds. What we need to do with this one is actually come around and fold all of this up against the edge of the bed to try and stop the rats digging um from above and pulling it down, which is what happened last year. We’ve got a few sweet potatoes in these pots as well as a safeguard that hopefully the rats won’t get in from underneath. So hopefully we’ll have a few. And in these two beds here, I am doing um cut flowers. I’ve got status and straw flowers in here this year, which I absolutely adore. Um, so yeah, hopefully they’re going to look amazing. We’ve started doing some local markets, so having a few cut flowers seems like a really nice idea to help um expand what we can offer. And also my mom has a little store locally in an antique shop where she can sell the the dried flowers as well. So she’s done that in the past buying them from somewhere else. So yeah, hopefully I can grow some for her this year as well. So really excited about all these new things. Like every year there is just so much choice in the garden both with flowers and with food. There’s just always something new to try. It is so exciting and amazing. It looks beautiful. It tastes great. What more could you want? Our poly tunnels, they are nearly fully planted up with our summer crops now. And we will give you a tour of the poly tunnels really soon. So stay tuned for that video and we’ll share what is going on in those. our seed um our seed table is nearly empty right now which is a really good feeling. I have still got another sewing to do for May though yet which I’ll be getting to in the next few days. So it is feeling really nice to have lifted so much of the plastic that we’ve had down all over winter. We don’t like the look of the plastic, but it really does help us to stay on top of the maintenance of these areas. And it has been an absolute dream to be able to open up these beds and have really minimal weeding to do this year. So, this area is where we have planted all of our potatoes this year. And we grow mainly the Saro variety of potatoes which as I was saying earlier is a blight resistant variety. They grow really well and they they offer a really good range. Sarapo mirror we grow as our main crop. And then I also like Kifley which is a waxy potato. Um then the one potato that isn’t saro that we do grow is pink fur apple which I just absolutely adore. Waxy potatoes are my favorite to cook with. So, lots of potatoes in here. This area will give us enough potatoes to see us through a whole year. And we always have plenty spare, which we end up composting at the end of the season. But it is much better when you’re growing for self-sufficiency like we are, to have more than you need rather than not enough. So we always overgrow and obviously friends and family and now with the market there is always an outlet to get rid of any surpluses that we can spare. As you can see the bananas are beginning to grow up and look beautiful. They have got a little bit of wind damage on the leaves that came out first but they look absolutely stunning. And again, in a couple of months time, it will give this area a really tropical look. We’ve had a tidy up along this edge of our poly tunnel as well this year and made this beautiful bed here, which is packed out with our favorite red ders. So again, this is going to look absolutely stunning when it is all in bloom. And then finally down here on this big bed, Dan has just planted out our sweet corn. And this is our first sewing of sweet corn. And we have still got some pumpkins to go in this area or winter squash. Now, the bed I showed you earlier, um, which had pumpkins in already, was a slightly earlier sewing because they are bigger varieties of pumpkins that will store better that will see us right through the winter. So, I’ve given them a little bit of a longer growing season, whereas this bed is going to be filled with smaller varieties of pumpkin like u, chickiky curry and acorn. And yeah, I’ve got a few others that I’m trying for the first time this year. Lots of different shapes and colors. So again, just so much variety, so much to play with. They will be going out probably by the end of the week and hopefully we’ll get some more sunflowers along the back here. I have got a second sewing of corn um that will also be going out in a few weeks time and we’re hoping to do that in rows between the bean frames uh because we’ve made the paths quite wide and that will give us a succession sewing of sweet corn. Yeah. So, that is how our outdoor growing beds are looking at the end of spring. We are ready for summer. We hope you’ve enjoyed having a look around today. If you have, make sure that you give this video a thumbs up. Drop us any comments or questions down below. We really enjoy hearing from you guys. Share our videos with your friends and on your social medias where you think they’ll be enjoyed. And we look forward to seeing you here again soon. Thanks for watching. Peace and plants. [Music]