How a 1/8 Acre Garden Feeds a Family of 6 ALL YEAR!

I visited @morethanfarmers in Ohio who showed me that you don’t need a giant garden to feed your family! Stay ready with Jackery HomePower 3600 Plus — up to 14-day fridge backup when the power’s out.
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Huge THANK YOU to @morethanfarmers for letting us tour their homestead and being such great hosts! Go check out their channel and give them a subscribe, they are the real deal.

0:00 Intro
0:32 Root Vegetables
1:49 Corn
3:39 Dried Beans
5:14 Sweet Potatoes
6:33 Basil Bushes and Cages
7:39 Butternut Squash
8:42 Banana Peppers
9:02 Red Beets, Radishes and Carrots
9:52 Tomatos
11:19 Cold Frames
12:44 Herb Garden
13:37 Asparagus
15:17 a quick word from our sponsor
18:22 How do you manage this?
21:43 Our “personal grocery store”
24:36 Cold Room
29:54 Dried Beans Drying
30:57 Freezers
32:24 Carrot Storage
33:20 Chicken cont.
34:39 Herb Drying and Soaps

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I’m Anne of All Trades. In NASHVILLE, I have a woodworking, blacksmithing and fabrication shop, a selection of furry friends, and an organic farm. Whether you’ve got the knowledge, tools, time or space to do the things you’ve always wanted to do, everything is “figureoutable.”

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A lot of people feel like they could never do this because they’re like, “We don’t have the money to buy 10 acres of land.” We are growing all of the food that we eat for an entire year on just an eighth of an acre. I’m here in Ohio at Michelle and Cody More Than Farmer’s House and we are touring their 8 acre garden where they grow an entire year’s worth of food for a family of six. Tell us how these 10 raised beds and a couple yard plots actually feed your family. Sure. Right here we had carrots. We just dug like 120 lbs of carrots off of this piece. 120 lbs of carrots came from just this little strip right here. From like half of this garden right here. Amazing. So over here in this strip then the other half of the garden I grew onions and those are already um cured and stored down in our cold room. Yes. That’s wild. We’re going to look at their storage system for their main crops in just a little while. So stay tuned because that actually is the thing that made me find out about you is wondering how the heck you kept up with it first of all that you grew that much food on such a small area. But then most importantly how you kept it from rotting because I like in 13 years of gardening I found every wrong way to store carrots and potatoes and onions and all those things. So we’ll talk about that. How many pounds of potatoes did you pick from this area? Like 200 lb of potatoes from here. So from starting right here. Oh, this little all the way over and then around there. Okay. But 200 lb of potatoes is a lot. And you can keep your potatoes from rotting. Yes. By curing them well. That’s the secret is curing them. Okay. And then storing them in a room that has the proper temperature and humidity. Again, subtle foreshadowing to the next part of our tour, but this is amazing. And so what was in here? So, this whole part was sweet corn. I did make a mistake this year. So, uh this all was sweet corn up to like here. And so, then it shaded this side of my tomatoes. Oh. But that’s okay. They’re still doing great. So, yeah. Also, I want to bring a self-guided tour, this self-guided tour of your house over to see your corn really quick because you did your corn, right? Unlike some of us, their corn is planted in a square. In a plot. Yes. which I was told this year after 13 years of gardening in rows by an old-timer that the reason that my corn isn’t as good as it could possibly be is because corn pollinates in a square, not in a line. The more you know, every year is a new lesson. Yes. Well, and also it’s nice to have it in a plot because it won’t it’s not as likely to get blown over. So, or knocked over by my donkeys and dogs. I used to just do like, you know, so like two long rows and it always got knocked over every single year. Oh. And I was like, why aren’t all the corn fields getting knocked over? And I was like, oh yeah, cuz they’re in a plot. Yeah. So, this is dent corn. This is bloody butcher, so it probably is red. I don’t want to open it cuz then the bugs will get in it. Um, this is red corn. And then this is a yellow corn. And we’ll be using that for like cornmeal and corn tortillas and things like that. So this is dried corn. Yes, this is for dried corn. This is not like fresh sweet corn. Now, did you have to plant this at a different time than your sweet corn so it didn’t cross-pollinate? Yes. We just like figured it out with the like how many days to maturity and like when it’s supposed to tassle, which it complicates everything because we have then corn fields all around us with genetically modified corn. And so we just do our best. So this bare plot of ground here, just last week we pulled all the dried beans. Actually, you can see some of them in here. Oh yeah, totally. So we do lots of dried beans because this is another thing that’s very nutritious, lots of protein, very filling, and you don’t have to preserve or can it. You can just like leave it till it’s dry. I can show you. We haven’t even shelled these yet. They’re down in our basement. And um you can just store them in food grade buckets. It’s like a really good self-sufficiency food because it will store for years. I love that. Probably the first thing I learned from you that was interesting was how you get the shells off of beans because I used to sit and like pull them off like a I mean again didn’t grow up on a farm. I was like this is so inefficient. So how do you take the shells off of your beans? We dump all of these pods into pillowcases and we have the kids whack the pillowcases against the porch. And once they’re done whacking, all of the beans will be in the bottom of the pillowcase and you can just dump all the shells off the top and you’re good to go. That takes minutes. The hours I could have saved. But also, I mean, this is like this is just yet another thing that makes it actually realistic. Like this is a good protein source. You know, you do you have to soak these overnight before you cook them? Like I always do just for digestibility. So I’ll soak them overnight in water and vinegar and then I’ll just cook them up on the stove or in the Instant Pot and you have a very nutritious meal. And I will add these to meat to like stretch the meat for a family of six. So yep, that’s so cool. All right, so this is the part of my garden that’s actually still alive. So I have um one, two, three, four beds in sweet potatoes. So, sweet potatoes are another one of our like major staple crops that we live off of. People ask us, “Oh, don’t you get so sick of white potatoes and sweet potatoes and carrots and onions and squash?” And I’m like, “Every meal has a carb for a base.” Yeah. And you can make just sweet potatoes and white potatoes into like dozens of different dishes. Totally. Well, at lunch you served like we had basically like taco salad and instead of having rice as the base, we had the potato as the base. But also, I love that you have your sweet potatoes in raised beds. Can you tell me why? So, we were having major issues with fungus on our sweet potatoes. And our soil just I mean, the same soil that grows great white potatoes just was not growing great sweet potatoes. Yeah. And so, we decided to try them in raised beds and they’ve done so much better for us. They don’t have the fungus. My theory, I’m curious to hear what yours is. My theory is that it they just drain so much better and so they don’t have the same fungus. So, I don’t know with that. I mean, sweet potatoes do like drainage a lot. They like to have dry feet, not wet feet. Yes. Also, sweet potatoes, they’re kind of princesses. They like to be treated nice. They do. They are They’re high maintenance. Yeah. These are my basil bushes. And I just got done like yesterday or a couple days ago chopping these way down. So, they’ll bush out like Oh, yeah. bigger yet. And this is endless pesto and I love it. marinara sauce and all the things. I’m also noticing these square cages everywhere. From whence does this come? So, we get these from Berlin Seed Company and they’re the best things ever. Yeah, they um fold up flat so they don’t take up much storage space at all. Amazing. And they are sturdy just like Pokémon. I put them on my peppers. I put them on anything that has a tendency to fall over. I hate tomato cages and this is like an ongoing thing that I’m constantly talking about. But these are actually really great. I mean for so many reasons. Um like they fold flat. What a dream. They do. So we can have 40 of them in a space like this big. That’s very cool. And when we like we have a lot of like tornado warnings and storms and stuff here with cages on stuff. I don’t have to like be inside like I wonder if it’s going to knock my plants over or uproot my stuff. These things are awesome. That’s really cool. Yes. These uh butternut squash here were already harvested, so I’ve just been ignoring these. She made this uh this butternut squash cake for lunch today that was truly amazing. And I’m just like, “Oh, this is yet another thing that you can make from something that is so easy for you to grow.” It is so easy and it stores like a champ. I mean, you cure these on your porch for 2 weeks and then you can put them in a cold room and they stay good for months. And by cure, you literally just mean you pick them, set them on your porch for 2 weeks and then put them in the basement. It just lets like in the warmth and a little bit of sunshine, it’ll just thicken the skin and heal any bruises or anything like that and then they just store forever. I love that. That’s so cool. Way better than pumpkins. And yeah, my pumpkins will rot within 2 or 3 weeks in Tennessee cuz it’s just so humid there. Butternut squash, you can leave I literally I have a whole field of it that I actually hadn’t even picked yet. I just was like, “Well, hopefully it self-cures out there cuz I haven’t gotten to it.” Uh, and yeah, it’s just sitting there waiting for me. Absolutely. These peppers continue to go bananas, but my fridge Are they banana peppers? They are. I didn’t even mean to do that. I have a fridge full of peppers already. And I’m not making salsa this year cuz I have so much leftover from last year. So, we’re just like I’m pickling them and doing everything I can think of with them. I love it. These are a just a quick fall planting of red beets and some radishes. And I just realized that my family doesn’t really like radishes. So, who does really cover crop? Yeah, it’s a great cover crop. And then here is a small plot of carrots that we will eat. These will be our snacking carrots, like our fresh those sweet candy carrots. And it needs to be watered. It’s a little bit h I’ve been watering. It’s nice down there. So, oh, I like I I also like what you just did because the thing is it does look really dry on top, but what we think about a carrot is a root vegetable. It’s going to go down. So, you pulled it back down to where those roots probably are. And it is nice and moist down there and that’s where mulch really helps us out. Absolutely. And I haven’t mulched this because our leaf pile ran out. And our grass, you can see it has little seed heads. Oh, yeah. You don’t want to I don’t want to put that on here. So, that makes sense. So, we are currently sitting in the shade of a tomato fence. Tell me what’s going on here. So, this is about I think I did 15 tomato plants this year. And this is going to be enough tomatoes for me to make all of my tomato condiments. So, I make barbecue sauce, marinara sauce, um ketchup, salsa, chunk tomatoes, tomato juice. Tomato products are super easy to can. And also, Cody has issues with heartburn with store-bought stuff. I’m I’m not sure, but I think it might be the citric acid in them. Oh. And so I do all of our tomato products, and I prefer to take super good care of 15 tomato plants rather than have like 200 like some homesteaders do. So my tomato plants in Ohio, like everything’s really wet and so blight is a major issue. And so I keep everything up off the ground. You can tell like the stems are bare. Yep. Um I keep all the leaves off the ground and I haven’t actually been spraying them. I have an organic fungicide that I use once a week with a dash of um dish soap and a dash of liquid seaweed and that keeps my tomatoes healthy for the entire year. And also having the ground covered, the soil covered so that when it rains, the soil born diseases don’t like splash up on so you just put your like fall leaves that you’ve ragged up underneath your tomato plants. rain comes, it doesn’t wash that blight back up onto your pine. That’s great. Yep. This is what I call my cold frame. Yep. I have this planted. This is full of cilantro right now that like receded, dropped all of it seeds. I just threw some potting soil on top of there because I’m I ran out of compost, but I’ll have some more in the spring. And then all of this is planted in greens. And then as soon as the um greens come up, I will mulch it really good with some grass clippings or some leaves or something. And then as soon as it starts getting cold, like as soon as the temperatures dip into like the freezing range, I cover it with windows. I have the windows over there. I love that. And then I have greens until December. That’s amazing. And so you’re using the sun’s like reflection off of the house and the heat from the house. This is like super warm when the sun is shining on it and it just like heats this up perfectly. and keeps the greens from freezing. That’s really brilliant because all it is, as everyone can see here, is just cinder blocks. Yes. Couple are those recycled windows even? I would bet you are. Yes. I will also say that one of the things that led us to you is that you guys have very similar story to us. Like you started with basically nothing and have built your way up. Like you started your first garden because you needed food for your family. food for our family cuz we we started uh growing our own food because we found out very quickly that healthy local food was expensive and we couldn’t feed a family on it and we were like well we’re going to have to do it ourselves if we want to eat that way. Totally. Can’t forget this. Absolutely. This is my herb garden and this over here was full of chamomile. Mhm. And I have like jars and jars of dried herbs inside that come from this raised bed. And do you use them for cooking for teas? For I use the echynasia for teas. There’s parsley that can be used medically, but I also just use it in chicken noodle soup. Then oregano, tons of sage. I actually had to like cut this bush way down. And then lavender. And then I have tons of chamomile that I use for tea and tummy aches and all the things. I love it. And also um all of these red raspberry leaves are also very medicinal. Yep. And so in the spring, I don’t I would never harvest these because they’re not like the fresh green leaves, but in the spring, I harvest a ton of red raspberry leaves and dry those for tea. Awesome. Also, you have a really uh incredible asparagus patch over here. Not to self-guide my tour here, but I’m very, very excited about your 9 foot tall asparagus. Massive asparagus patch. This used to So, I started this asparagus from seed. Amazing. And I used to have like this whole area was in asparagus. That was when we were growing for farmers markets and asparagus you can get a very high price for it and it’s very easy to grow actually. However, I don’t know if outside my own garden I’ve ever seen stocks that fat. Yeah, I get stocks like this fat. I mean, here again, it comes down to your soil. Yes, it does. Like I get people asking me all the time like, “How do you grow carrots like that?” Or, “How do you grow asparagus like that?” Or, “How do you get your onions to get that big?” And I’m like, “It’s your soil. I can’t give you any other tips. It’s it’s what’s in your soil. Um, mulching helps like crazy because it keeps that water um in there. So, I usually mulch my asparagus. Amazing. And then in the fall, so coming up shortly here, we will cut off all of these fronds down to the ground and burn them because the bugs tend like asparagus beetles tend to overwinter in the fronds. And so once they start turning brown, we burn them and that cuts down on basically all of our asparagus beetles. We used to have major infestation. So you have super huge, juicy, thick stocks. Everyone tells me that, oh, those enormous stocks are going to be so woody and gross. No, no, no, no. That’s cuz you’re used to grocery store asparagus. Yes. If there was asparagus in the grocery store that was that fat, it would be awful. Yeah, it would probably be. from your garden. It is like juicy and tender, not not stringy at all. Popping back to our homestead in Tennessee for a second, I’m about to show you how we store a year’s worth of food for our family. And spoiler alert, it’s all in four chest freezers. And as cool as these chest freezers are, pun intended, what Cody and Michelle are doing to keep a year’s worth of harvests cool at their place is so much cooler. Again, pun intended. So, make sure you stay tuned for that later in this video. And in the meantime, let’s talk about the sponsor of today’s video, Jackie. Because living here in Tennessee in Tornado Alley, after the hundreds and hundreds of hours, blood, sweat, and actual tears that has gone into putting a year’s worth of food in our freezers, the thought of an extended power outage and losing all of this is not just an emotional loss. It would be financially devastating as well. And we just can’t afford to do that. And that’s exactly why we’ve been relying on Jackaryi battery backup systems since we moved to Tennessee. And this is our new solution in that regard. This is the allnew Jackaryi home power 3600 plus. And it is a powerhouse. Literally, it can power our house. The reason we chose this unit is because it is an essential home backup power system. It has a 3600 W output, which means that it can handle the power surge of a big appliance like a freezer kicking on. But the cool thing about this thing is that if we have a long extended power outage, like we have had many times here, all we have to do is pop on the solar panels during the daytime and the whole unit can recharge as fast as 2 hours. This thing is very well equipped to be able to back up everything you need in your house. It’s got all kinds of USB, USBC, regular power cords, and a 240 output as well. But here’s the thing that makes this unit actually stand out as a home backup unit. We had a professional install a manual transfer switch that switches all of the essential home appliances for our home over to this unit with just the flip of a switch in a power outage, which is huge because we no longer have to run a whole bunch of extension cords or anything else when we do have a power outage. It also functions as an uninterruptible power supply, which means that when we’re in the middle of editing a video and the power suddenly goes out, it switches over to this unit in less than 10 milliseconds, which means that the computer doesn’t shut down and we don’t lose our work. And that’s huge for us. And because life on the farm is so incredibly chaotic, one of the things I like most about this unit is that on a single charge once a year, it will only lose up to 5% battery life over an entire year. So, I’m not worrying about keeping it on a trickle charge. I don’t have to maintain a gas or a diesel engine. I don’t have to do winterization and make sure I have fuel on hand. I can charge this thing once a year and then count on it all year long, no matter what weather or power things come our way. So, if you are looking for a solid battery backup system for your home, I highly recommend you check out the Jackary Home Power 3600 Plus. There’s a link below that you can click for more information on the unit. And a huge thank you to Jackary for sponsoring this video and making making videos like this possible. So, I mean, we call our gardening lazy gardening because it truly just basically needs nothing. Yes. But you kind of have to do that if you’re going to actually be realistic about how you’re growing your food for your family. Right. Right. So, tell me some of the things that you do to make sure that it it’s easy for you to garden or or realistic for you to garden. Okay. for me, like one of my strategies with kids and not having overwhelm. We grow lots of root vegetables because I don’t have to can and preserve those. Number one, that’s my number one tip. And number two, I really try to just maximize everything that I do. Um, when it comes to sweet corn, instead of planting like succession plantings of sweet corn, I try to just plant one big picking and then I’ll have like two massive preserving days and then I’m done with sweet corn for the year. So, for my raspberries, some people like to have raspberries trickling in all through the season. I would prefer to just have a big fall crop so that I can just focus on raspberries. Um, with green beans, I only do those every other year because those take like a lot of picking and snipping and snapping. Whereas broccoli, I can just cut the head off and I have a massive amount of food that did not take me long to harvest and I can just blanch it, throw it in freezer bags, and I saved myself a ton of time. So rather than succession plantings, I prefer to do one big planting of something and preserve it in some way rather than just constantly have fresh food coming in. And I would love to have fresh food coming in all the time, but I But then your full-time job would be gardening and picking and harvesting fresh food for every dinner takes a lot of time. It does take a lot of time. Like in the winter, my meal prep is actually easier because I just bring up all of the veggies that I need for the week from the root seller and I peel them. I don’t cook them, peel them, kind of plan like these rough meals, put them in ziplockc bags and I have my food for the week and I don’t have to think through meals. But in the summertime, I’m, you know, like, okay, we’ll have zucchini fritters tonight or we’ll have fresh green beans or fresh tomatoes, like a salsa or something. And so like meals actually take a lot longer in the summertime when I have all the fresh food coming in. Yeah. So that’s wild. So in the winter when it’s like school nights and all of these other things, it’s actually easier to meal. Actually much easier. Yes. And another thing that I do for homeschooling moms is I only homeschool when I’m not gardening. I try not to split my focus because I get really overwhelmed with that. So, I start I quit homeschooling in May and then I wait to start homeschooling until October. So, most moms have already started school for the year. And I’m like, nope, not until gardening is completely done. I’m hearing a common theme that I actually think is probably very important for people who watch my channel. It’s a lot of everything all at once all the time. And I would be the first to tell you that that is the least effective or efficient way to do anything because splitting your focus is going to mean you’re splitting your time and your energy and everything else. Multitasking is a myth. I’ve already learned so much from you just in hey, we could do all of this one time and actually if we know how to put it away, right? Subtle foreshadowing, then we never have to think about it again. So cool. Yes. [Music] This is our personal grocery store. That’s what I like to call it. I love it. Yes. Um I love it the most because this is um not the most spacious place in the world. It is not. And yet you are still able to store a ton of stuff that you’re going to eat. I notice a few things right off the bat. You have a lot of 5gallon buckets. Yes. And also this is just a beautiful masterpiece that I hope you photograph sometimes in beautiful light. And then you also have two chest freezers. Yes, we actually have three. There’s one, two, and then there’s another one around the corner. Amazing. Yes. Great. So give tell me what we’ve got going on. Perfect. So this is my canning shelf. And this is still definitely not full. Probably this entire thing will be full by the time I’m done because I’m still thick into the tomatoes. So I’m definitely not done with tomatoes yet. So, most of this stuff is going to be tomato products cuz that’s like the main thing that I can. So, we’ve got ketchup and then all of this is marinara sauce. Y all of this is marinara sauce and then tomato juice, raspberry jam. There’ll be more of this. And then all of that is barbecue sauce, chunk tomatoes. There’ll be more of these coming. And we’ll also be filling another shelf with applesauce and probably bone broth. So, yeah, more of this to come. And then up here we have dried beans. And we’ll be refilling this. I’ll show you what we have around the corner in a second. So, we’ll have a bunch more dried beans up there. And then down here is like salt, sugar, uh rice, beans, wheat berries, um what else is there? Oatmeal. So, all of our dried bulk goods we store in food grade buckets. That way we can just stay out of the grocery store. Amazing. And do you like order that stuff in bulk? Like the stuff that you don’t grow, which is probably not a lot, but you order it in bulk. Do you get it from like Azure or something? Azure standard is where is my go-to for most things. I do get some sugar other places. Like I have my weird little preferences and stuff, but most of it is from Azure Standard. What I love the most about this is I always say like I wish I could time travel because you know the Wild Wild West was an interesting thing. thinking about getting all of your stuff from a merkantile and then getting everything else from your neighbors and like that’s your only option is maybe you get your flour and your sugar, but you guys are actually doing that like for real here. So, we’ve got like do you ever I mean I’m guessing that you probably don’t have to deal with mice. No, this whole basement is concrete. So, people ask us what about mice and I’m like it’s just naturally rodent proof. Well, plus you don’t have anything sitting around. Well, in the in the cold room, we do, but we’ve never had a single problem with rodents or bugs or anything. That’s incredible. What is a cold room? Because right here, this is just like your run-of-the-mill basement below your house. What’s a cold room? So, basically, oh, Cody, you need to explain this one. I’ll get behind the camera. You explain it. So, traditionally, a lot of people longer ago would have used a root celler. root seller, you would just dig into the ground and you’re using the earth’s natural temperature, which is usually around 50° and it’ll stay about that if you have all four walls and like buried in dirt if you have it all in the dirt like that. 18 in below the ground surface most places is the same temperature all year long, no matter if there’s snow on the ground or sun in the sky. A wild thing, right? So, but we didn’t have the money or the equipment to dig a root cellar, but we had a basement. So, what we did is we walled off part of our basement so that two of the walls in our cold cellar are um touching the earth. They’re in the ground. And then the other two walls I just built and super insulated. So, we actually talked about this in one of our recent videos and I went into some detail about how I did it and everything. So, make sure to check out More Than Farmers to find out more information about how you, fellow basement owner, can create your very own cold room/root seller without an excavator. It can be a very simple process. So, like I said, I just built two walls against two basement walls, super insulated them, and then one key thing for anybody to remember, you have to have good ventilation in there. the vegetables that are in there as they’re starting to rot and things, they will give off gases that if there’s no ventilation, they will actually kill you. So, you need to have plenty of ventilation and it needs to be really insulated. One thing you can do if you want to actually make it colder, ours, we actually struggle a little bit with having it cold enough to keep some of our crops for as long as we’d like to, but if you want to do it colder, you can get something called a Coolbot that you hook up to an air conditioner and you can actually turn it into like a refrigerator room. That’s not something we’ve done. It’s worked for us. It keeps a lot of our crops for long enough, but it could be even better if we did something like that. Cool. So, let’s Should we go take a peek? This is the cold room. Amazing. Yes. So, these are our beautiful shelves that Cody put in. I love it. And these are my potatoes that are curing right now. Curing is a huge, huge part in having your vegetables actually last. So, this is fewer potatoes than we had last year. Unfortunately, we had double this last year, but this will get us through. Um, it will be enough. So, once these potatoes are cured, we’ll just pop them in these crates. And we’re actually going to be moving all of our potatoes, including the sweet potatoes when those come in over to the other side. Yeah. Um, there’s a door in between because you don’t want to have like onions and potatoes in the same room. This is actually a big aha moment for me. I thought because we were in Tennessee that, you know, we have these like little wood boxes in our pantry that we have the onions and the potatoes. And I thought that because of our humidity, our onions and our potatoes were going bad so fast. Turns out onions and potatoes make each other go bad faster. Now, this is actually a question I have because I saw this on I saw a real about this on your Instagram account. Like, is there a reason there needs to be this much space in your shelves? Like, do they need this much space to be able to cure? What if you were to have like much shorter shelves and 10 times the potatoes? That would be totally fine as long as they’re in a single layer to cure. Like, you don’t want them like on top of each other. Yeah. You don’t want to bring your whole wheelbarrow of potatoes in directly from the dirt and then put them in a box and think that they’re going to last for very long because that’s a great way to spoil them real quick. Yes. Exactly. And then over here, I will fill all these shells with our butternut squash. Then the onions will go along here. And then back here in the back, should we come back in here? Squish Cody back in here. We’ve got all of our onions. Oh yeah. Look. That are already cured. Roughly in numbers, how many onions are we looking at right here? Oh, probably around 150 to 200, I’m guessing. So, an onion a day something away. Amazing. And so, this is this little room here is literally just a like studs, insulation. Mhm. And it’s a wall of your basement. I think that the most important thing for us to talk about is that how small this is. I mean, it’s very small. One thing that I really want to emphasize is that it may our house may appear bigger. Oh, like through a camera lens, but in real life, it’s like 1300 ft². We have a very small basement. This is a very tiny space. I don’t know if you can see how crowded we are in here, but this is enough space for us to um grow and store enough food for a family of six for the entire year. So, you don’t need a massive amount of space. Yeah. You don’t need a huge piece of property. You don’t h need to have the massive house. You don’t need to have all of those things. In fact, I having gone from a much smaller thing to a much larger thing am constantly like I am so grateful for what we have but also many times find myself longing for the days when I had a whole lot less stuff to take care of because that left more time for some of the other stuff. All right, so from this tiny space to that, [Music] what is this moldy um pile here? So these are all of my dried beans. And we like to just pull them off the stems and let them dry out completely cuz some of them aren’t as like you can see there’s still some green leaves in there. I just like everything so that they’ll for sure um come out of the pods when we whack them with a pillowcase. Well, and also I would imagine that if they’re still a little moist when you put them in the jars, they would then be cold. Yes. So, actually after we shell all these beans, we even lay just the beans out on window screens for a week or so just to make sure that they’re completely dry. They’re dry when you can poke your fingernail into them and they don’t dent, which these feel very dry. That’s cool. So, if it doesn’t, this still leaves a little dent so they’re not perfectly dry. Amazing. Yes. This is navy kidney, which is the red ones, and then tiger’s eye, which is those beautiful Yeah. Yep. So cool. Also, growing up, I was like, true security is like in what you have around you. My biggest bragging point at our house has nothing to do with anything except what’s in our three chest freezers. We have a beef, a pork, and a chicken. Yes. And you, I see, are a fellow freezer lover. So, can we Absolutely. Can I look in your freezer? Absolutely. What do we have? This is our beef freezer. Excellent. So, we’ve got actually there’s some chicken over there. Um there’s steaks, roasts, there is um sew it for tallow, there’s a whole bunch of hamburger, just a bunch of random things in here. What? So you don’t have to show the simple truth pizza. Well, and here’s the thing. Actually, I love real life. We’re not going to pretend that we don’t sometimes need to have something to toss in the oven. Like absolutely. I shamelessly like it’s like when we’re on the homestead, we eat what’s on the homestead. When we are at home here, I’ll close this. I don’t want you getting freezer burn on those beautiful steaks. But when we’re off the homestead, like I am not too good to eat at Taco Bell if I need to. Like it’s everything in moderation, at least for me, that keeps me both sane. And also, I think the stress of trying to be perfect and do things perfectly is far more damaging. Again, in my own personal opinion, I’ve been known to like on a big canning day, I’ll bust out the hot dogs because, you know, in order to eat really good all winter, it’s okay to have a sacrifice during the week. Yep. Absolutely. And then this here is our carrot fridge. Okay. This is the thing that I wanted you all to see probably almost as much as that because you literally pulled them out of the ground. Yep. And then put them in plastic bags. I put them straight into these plastic bags. Do you wash them first? Nope. No washing. I tape this up. You can see there’s some condensation in there. That’s actually a good thing. I want a little bit of moisture in there. Not too much or they’ll get slimy, which is why I don’t wash them. But I cover up all the air holes. And if you don’t cover up the air holes, I noticed that the carrots will get like they’ll kind of shrivel and get a little rubbery. Yeah. And so you want just a little bit of humidity in there. And these stored last year for us for 10 months. That’s insane. So it is insane. You have fresh carrots for 2 months and then you have stored carrots for 10 months and then a lifetime supply of all these pops. This is our chicken freezer that is freshly stocked. And you raise all these chickens out in your yard right alongside your garden, right? Yep. Amazing. Yes. So, you can raise this much meat on not a lot of land. Absolutely. I feel like this is a common theme. Exactly. Exactly. I think this is 65 chickens in here. And that’s a year’s worth of chicken for your family. Yes. Cuz we like have a whole bunch of beef, too. I I go a little heavier on the beef than I do on the chicken. Just a personal preference. Same girl, same. Yep. And then this here is my berry and vegetable freezer. So, it’s a bit in a disarray right now cuz as I preserve things, I just throw them in here at the end of preserving day. I’ve got peaches, sweet corn, raspberries out of my ears. There’s broccoli, green beans, lots and lots of freezer jam. Amazing. Um, strawberry jam. All sorts of things. Zucchini brownies, all the things. Heck yeah. In here. This is great because I love showing stuff like this because this is like both the in progress for some and the finished product. Like for me, if I’m too busy to do something with it, I will literally take it straight from the garden, put it in a bag and put it in the freezer and then deal with it later or forget it’s there and then sometime in the middle of the winter I’m like, “Oo, exactly. Look.” Also, since we’re here, everywhere I look, there’s something that you’re doing in the thriftiest and best way possible. Are these window screens you got from your old job? Yep. I um dried quarts and quarts of herbs on this drying rack this year. So So no fancy dehydrator? Nope. I don’t have a freeze dryer. I don’t have a dehydrator. I don’t have any of that. I just prefer simplicity. Um no heat is going into this. This basil has been here for like maybe a week now and it’s already getting crispy. Amazing. And then I just throw it in the blender and I’m good to go. And then you’ve got soaps down here. This is what we use for bathing. This is what we use for washing dishes. This is what I use for mopping floors. It’s made out of tallow from our beef cows. That’s so awesome. And I would imagine like kind of a common theme that I’ve learned from you as we’ve talked about all this stuff is that you do this in batches. I made maybe four batches and I’m about ready to make more just because it’s so much fun. I just just like to do it, you know? It is fun. Well, I mean yours are really pretty and cool, too. So that’s that’s that I genuinely feel like I could give myself a self-guided tour of things all over your life for the rest of forever, but we actually have to go back to Nashville. So, thank you so much for having us. Everyone, make sure you go check out More Than Farmers on YouTube. You can learn so much about what to actually do with your stuff once you get it in from the garden and growing and everything between. Thank you. We’ll see you there. See you there. Wow. [Music]