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 60-70% self sufficient in 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.
In our videos you can follow our journey as we share our experiences and what we get up to at Freedom Forest. This week is a Summer update around our plots, showing how things are growing and what has been happening here over the last couple of weeks. You can see our 2 Yacon Beds, Sweet Potatoes growing outdoors in the UK, our Three Sisters Beds and a little look at some of our annual crops and our Food Forest too.
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).
It takes us about a day to film some video and another few evenings to edit it, Patreon provides a way you can support what we do with any size donation you wish, it could simply be the value of a packet of seeds! We have many projects coming up, as well as wanting to improve our videos with better camera equipment… maybe even a drone one day to make our videos even more detailed and better quality for you to enjoy! You can help make it viable for us to keep putting the time into making these videos by becoming a Patreon. 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 more of our favourite recipes exclusively for our Patreon’s 💚
https://www.patreon.com/freedomforestlife
Enjoy & Thanks for Watching
✌️🌿 Peace and Plants
#yacon #gardentour #vegetablegarden
6 Comments
Thanks for the lovely tour. Mushroom is something I’ve been thinking about. Maybe in a year or two 😅
Great show, really enjoyed keep up the good work, priceless 😎
Nice update, always good to see the yacon progress. My small patch of just 5 plants is similar in growth development and looks really healthy, but i am having to water them almost daily as they're tending to wilt quickly in my clay soil. Lots of plants packed in too small a space – my fault. Still, there should hopefully be a reasonably good crop in December.
The outdoor tromboncino is going great guns – the number 1 plant must be approaching 20 foot long and is rapidly taking over my pergola. There are half a dozen large fruits (baseball bat size and still growing….finding enough storage space for them could be an issue!) plus many additional courgette sized ones, which i've been harvesting for summer eating, so this has been a great success so far. The strong winds have been tearing a few of the leaves, but the plant is definitely winning that battle with nature. Again, watering these plants has been pretty much a whole watering can every day, and the plants have responded well as a result. Thanks for recommending growing this.
I finally managed to get some ordinary shop bought sweet potato plants to sprout and grow this year (Murasaki variety) and the leaf growth has been really strong, however i didn't break all the shoots off the original potatoes but foolishly planted them out whole, which i now understand means i probably wont get any tuber growth at all, so that's a lesson learned. The leaf harvest is a good substitute though, so still a success.
This year, we have had rats really decimate our potato crop 😕
It took some doing but I have gotten the population back down to a manageable number.
But I have found that leaving a half and half mixture of citronella & peppermint essential oil soaked cotton balls around the crops have deterred them from digging under and eating the tubers.
Hope this helps.
Sweet meat is one of my favorite pumpkins. Great flavor roasted or used for mash! Also fantastic in baked goods
It's looking lovely, and so nice to see some sunshine!