GARDEN CHAT WITH FAVORED ACRE HOMESTEAD | 2023 YEAR REVIEW | UPCOMING 2024 PLANS
Welcome to Solitude Acres!
Today we are so excited to meet with our southern cousin, Kristen, and join her on her channel Favored Acre Homestead! Enjoy this garden chat with Kira and Kristen!
~ Check out Kristen’s channel below!
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNJVPke5aI1C1dtfw8w60_A/videos
We are viewing our 2023 year and talking about things to come on our channel in 2024! We are thankful for the opportunity to get together and share with you all the great ideas of what we share on our channels and what we look forward to in the future.
~Check out Kristen’s Garden tour video below!
December Garden Tour! MERRY CHRISTMAS!!
~Check out our First Potato Harvest below!
FIRST FALL POTATO HARVEST !! | GARDENING | FALL GARDEN
Be Blessed!
#bees #garden #gardening #gardeningtips #favored #acre #homestead #solitude #acres #chickens #backyard #wintergarden #vegetables #fruit #trees #greenhouse #beekeeping #beekeeper #colab #gardentour #cooking #canning
Get carried off by mosquitoes mosquitoes the state bird down here yeah Okay well hey there and welcome to Solitude Acres I’m here with my cousin Kristen who I am visiting for the holidays and so I just wanted to share this video with you and meet up with her um we love talking about all the different things that we’re doing on our
YouTube channels and just in our Gardens and in our yard and so we just wanted to share some things with you and we’re looking forward to doing this video together for the first time yep first collaboration yes but my cousin Kristen here will share more about her Channel
But her channel is a little bit more about stuff on the land here too that she has so yeah so my channel is favored acre Homestead and my name is Kristen and my channel is basically just just gardening um homem making some cooking a little bit and
Canning um and then we recently just bought some land so my future videos will be um some land stuff and then uh building a new Homestead from the ground up but that’s a little bit about my channel so we got a lot of um potential with our channels that we’re looking
Forward to and we love getting together and kind of talking about it and my hope is that especially in the years to come as our kids get older that we will have more of an opportunity to get together more maybe on a regular basis be able to
Visit each other and just kind of do more collabs together because there’s just so much going on that we want to do we want to train our kids to do as well I think that’s something that’s super important it’s just great to see our kids kind of hop in and do what should
Be natural to them is just being in nature and just homemaking and learning how to just preserve Life as a family um so anyways we’re just going to talk about a little bit what we would like to see happen in 2024 goals for 2024 maybe what we would
Do differently maybe a little bit of a summary of this past year we in the Southeast region of the country so for those of you who experienced last year’s winter um it was unusually cold here we were in the single digits or I think we’re what 10 about 10° here but where I
Live it was more like single digits but I was visiting here for Christmas and it was very cold very unusually cold uh for us so because it was so cold last year I know there were some challenges down here with like your fruit trees and
Stuff like that do you want to oh yeah so we had a late freeze last spring well 2023 we had a late freeze and all the blooms on the Satsuma trees and the kumquat tree it killed all the blooms so this year we’ve only had a handful of s
Suas which is very unusual cuz normally there’s hundreds now even if it gets in the teens the collards should be fine collards are cold hearty so hopefully next spring we don’t have a late freeze but then we did have a drought this summer a lot of heat warnings you had
Too right we had a lot of heat warnings where it was like 115 heat index and I don’t think anyone was gardening deer in that it was just miserable humid down here we’re cons considered tropical so it’s very humid and um which makes the pests even worse so um like the sweet
Potatoes they went through the drought and we could tell that some of them had that look where they kind of split open a little bit and then they scar up and Hill over and that’s what we had to deal with this year yeah the weather this
Year has been so different well we know why everyone knows why yeah so anyways we won’t get political so anyways what um I know the difference like for us is last year we didn’t actually like I have raised gardens I don’t have a an Open Garden
Like this and my dad also has raised gardens we’re just kind of changing it up a little bit and last winter I don’t even think we really grew much just because I don’t think I was mentally prepared for like a a fall and winter crop um we’re not big on collards where
We’re at our family really yeah she didn’t know this because I’m always normally here you don’t know that and collards are so easy to grow um and mustard greens so that’s why we grow them so normally what we what we actually do have one fall um crop that I
Know works really well and that is broccoli we have done broccoli before where we’re at and it does so great in the fall and winter interesting um I actually did do broccoli last year that’s right I think we covered it before we left cuz we knew we were going
Out of town and going to be here um but broccoli is really the main one that we did for winter and like fall and winter last year um and they’re very like cold hearty too they do really well I think sorry might have been a hair I don’t know it was
A never know what bugs are going to hit you down here get carried off by mosquitoes mosquitoes the state bird down here yeah okay yep got to go watch out for them this this year for fall winter I actually tried from seed never done before um beets spinach carrots and um turnips
Honestly I did not look up any advice about how to do it I just kind of tried it my dad said I pulled the carrots too soon they looked like they weren’t doing anything but they they were little babies but they tasted good baby carrots people buy baby carrots I actually
Haven’t done carrots this year cuz I normally would I may would have some that were like that short like but don’t go down yeah I thought it was maybe the soil down here you have to time it for the carrots it’s so iffy I don’t know if
It’s because I did an erised Garden maybe they were too close together I tried to separate them but anyway so and the turnips I just had no clue how to do I know a little bit more tips from my grandmother now so hopefully I can make
It better next time cuz they were too bitter I didn’t harvest the greens and I guess they got too tough and kind of Pokey and so anyway it was a learning experience now you know now I know and the spinach it would have these little itsy bitsy green leaves but they would
Have never really like interesting get bigger too much I don’t know why so it’s just a learning experience I think that’s the thing about going into 2024 is kind of figuring out what we want to do and how we want to do it differently
So I think but like for us we’re big on doing like banana peppers where we where we at um I have not been able to get bell peppers for some reason reason and tomatoes to grow super well I don’t know if it’s cuz I have two small spaces and
They they you always plant them in the same spot not supposed to plant them in the same spot see I didn’t know this yeah different spots M okay like you want to ro rotate them okay rotational well I didn’t know that see unless you get a whole bunch of
New soil in your pots but you don’t want to put tomatoes and peppers in like the you don’t want to rotate those with each other you want to start fresh so fresh soil basically so it must like steal the nutrients and get some balance and it causes disease a lot
Easier there you go okay well learn something new so yeah so Peppers um are a big thing that we do um jalapenos I do they’ve always actually done super great our jalapenos did good this year and I didn’t even plant them I think rean planted
Them I mean mine do super like it’s but wherever they’re growing they grow fine other stuff doesn’t grow well I did do some okra this last year so I don’t do a lot of it because it isn’t a thing that all of us eat in our family but I like
It I like roasting it in the air fryer so that’s just how I eat it I didn’t do okra this year I did okra the year before and it did really good it was like 10t tall they’re humongous and you have to be out there like twice a day
Cuz they will little grow inches a day and then they’re too hard and tough and then you don’t want to eat them so that yeah that’s learning experience I don’t know if I will do ochra this year I might make cuz they all they do take up
Some room I would like to do strawberries that’s a goal one day for me at a permanent Homestead since this is not permanent yeah and my grandmother said something last night about strawberries that you pick off the first season that you plan them you pick off
The I’ve heard that too flowers and then it helps them grow well the next year or something like that yeah I’ve heard of that um cuz I’ve never been able to get them to grow well in pots so I think I’m going to have to do like a special rais
Bed a patch a patch for them yeah video I’ve seen people have patches of strawberries okay and they just leave them there permanently so every year they come back okay yeah well that’ll be my forever home too because right now we don’t have the space for for that then
So what are your plans for next year so we’re going to be doing a lot of beekeeping for the garden we’ll just have to kind of see I know we do a lot of like sunflowers and Bee and bird loving flowers too because that draws
Them all to the yard and the bees are big on the pollinators there’s certain type of pollinator like plants that we plant for them we always have blueberries and then um we have blackberries too I want to do berries but I just figured I’ll just wait until
Cuz you don’t want to leave them here we’re clearing now but I don’t know exactly where I want everything so I’m like well I might have to wait till next year to plant fruit trees which is okay but I’m just ready to plant stuff there um I know we’ll be harvesting garlic
That we just planted we have that on our Channel as well if you’re interested in looking at the shorts do you know that people love garlic shorts I don’t know why but they’ve been some of our biggest hits for uh our shorts on our channel is garlic people like seeing us plant
Garlic Reagan planted some garlic in that Ray’s bed back there oh we have the onions and garlic and then I’ve got a whole bag of onions and garlic in the kitchen that I need to plant CU they’re sprouting oh there you go so I might
Just do it along here and up along Ong the fence line This land has been in the family for how long you think they’ve lived here um 63 years you know like where I live and where my parents live the land hasn’t been in the family the
Land hasn’t been processed over time so that’s benefit that you have is obviously having all this like there’s just so much depth in here of like nutrients and I think that’s the good thing is you have so much going on here and that’s why stuff grows so well as
It’s been growing for a long time and then it had seasons of rest where it didn’t oh yeah throw anything for a while so for a long time when my papa was here they had a garden then they took a break from gardening they had chickens so for a long time there was
Not a garden here and then whenever me and Steven moved here next door to my grandmother we started a garden because Grandmama wanted me to plant some cucumbers and then she told me about the beans and so it just slowly little by little little and then we ended up
Tilling so we ended up tilling a little small space for potatoes and that day we ended up tilling the whole garden we were just going to do like two rows for potatoes and then we were like well let’s just do beans yeah and then the
Next year we did a fence cuz we had a rabbit come in that is one thing I’d like to do this year is plant a cover crop during the summer so I don’t want to grow anything during the summer do a summer cover crop to put nutrients back
In the soil cuzz I feel like since we’ve done a garden everything has just like sucked up the nutrients and we do use commercial fertilizers which eventually I would like to never have to use a commercial fertilizer and your food will taste better if you don’t use commercial
Fertilizers um and then if we get chickens which we’re supposed to um in January then that will help with the soil and the last time I tested the soil the pH was good another problem that we have is the sunlight so you can see that all these trees it does not get enough
Sunlight like it did whenever my papa and grandama had their Garden because these trees were so small y they grown up a lot so that’s another problem that we have we do need more sunlight and with the shorter days it’s been these collars would be way bigger if we had
More sunlight I know you mentioned it just the heat down here too is just kind of you can’t really predict what it’s going to do and it’s so hard to manage a garden in the heat I mean I even have that issue with my raised beds like I
Don’t want to go out there when it’s blazing hot and you have to go out there when it’s almost dark outside cuz it’s just you don’t want to be out in it my raised bed it gets the afternoon sun so it’s going to get that hot sun it
Doesn’t get the morning sun it gets the afternoon so yeah that’s just something that you know you have to take into count we had um we didn’t have much rain at all this year so hopefully next year we will cuz that’s really hard we are we
Are also on City Water you are too right we’re on City but we have the well oh you do have well okay so there is well water yeah I hate using City Water cuz you know it’s like pump full of chemicals and it’s like that’s going
Into my plants and well I have a friend whose husband works for the water company he’s like an engineer for the water company he literally calls it um just treated sewer yeah that’s basically what it treated sewer I would love to use a rainow Barrel if we could um but
We would like to be on 1 to two acres we want something a little bit small smaller manageable um well all of this together is one whole acre so you can kind of see you know we would like to get more space 2024 I don’t know what we’ll particularly do I know what
Will’ll do cucumbers too the do you all do beans I have the space for beans dad even vertically dad probably could I don’t know because the way our garden well of course it would be vertically but it wouldn’t be a bush of beans probably we’ll have to do it maybe in
Dad’s Garden he’s got more a little bit more space and that’s where he grows like you know sunflowers and other stuff too remind me and I’ll give y’all some seeds for the big mama beans I think that’s the main things like we just go through cucumbers and like peppers and
Zucchini and squash if we can but even that can go out that can go crazy that that’s a lot every day um I will say I was so proud of our squash and zucchini I grew saw your video so I think it was 177 squash and zucchini plants and it
Was one full row those plants got so huge I had so much zucchini and squash that I turned it into the pineapple zucchini and um homesteading with the Zimmerman’s that channel she has a recipe and you it’s Canning but you just water bath it I think and you turn your
Over like your big squash and zucchini that gets too big you peel them and you turn it into pineapple I remember seeing that on and it’s good too so I love squash and zucchini chicken so what are you thinking how many are you thinking of getting and what kind um I don’t know
What kind because uncle Stanley he said that he would give me some that are either already laying or about to start laying so you’re not getting the chicks you’re just going to get them work I I don’t want chicks because I don’t have I if I had chicks i’ would want to have
Them on like a porch or something to keep an eye out so I’d rather go ahead and get them when they’re a little bit older but I have not done a video yet about our future chicken coup but that is in the works and I think I might just
Start off with maybe 10 I guess some people say start off with maybe just five but we go through around 10 eggs a day so I know that’s the thing like I thought about it how many we go through and I asked a homeschool mom who AES chickens and she was like calculating
The cost of how much it cost to raise and feed her chickens and she feeds them good feed you know not the cheapest she calculated eggs that she buys every year versus like raising chickens and it is it is cheaper I mean you’re all putting
In the labor of having to take care of them I calculated that we spent a Max of $120 a month a month on eggs and then I did the math on after videos that I watched of how much it would cost to buy the feed and even calculated in treats
And and stuff like that and I figured that it would be around 60 anywhere from $55 to maybe $7 a month SS about right M you have the expense of building the coup but that’s like your one time a lot of people have chickens for a while and then they just
Want to sell used CS so that’s something you know that people can always do if they’re interested in that but I know my 12-year-old wants to build one with his grandfather so he’s he really wants to do that so we’re just trying trying to figure out the space and the money for
That um but that is something I would definitely love to have I think it would be a good thing for us and our family to have chickens but everyone I’ve talked to said it’s easy that’s what I having chickens so we have Hawks that’s our only we have um hwks and raccoons and
Possums so we have the in my parents backyard which is where we’d have the chickens we have an8 foot high fence wood so that would be a real big benefit you hear coyotes from time to time so they won’t be able to get in you know to
That space Oh wow um but yeah the Hawks and like snakes uhhuh we have snakes that type of wooden fence I think it would keep out most Predators but my mom hates snakes and I know we all hate hate the idea of a hawk coming down and sweeping and getting chicken but it’s
Like you know is it worth the is it worth it to have your own eggs and I feel like I think it is when you’re when you’re deal when you’re dealing with um the organic eggs the freerange eggs that we want that it’s hard to find or you
Have to find a farmer to sell them to you you know and they’re trying to make money off of their own eggs um I think it’s just something that is worth it so stay tuned on our Channel we might be getting that but I know you’ll be
Getting it I want to see a documentation of it all it’s to be an exciting process I overthink everything so I get nervous too about having some other animal I know it’s two kids a dog everybody in a 900t house and then adding chickens and you just got to make
Sure they get in at night time before the sun goes down yeah so it is it is extra responsibility but I would say it’s no more than a than a dog or cat really something that I wanted to do for next year is plant more
Potatoes so we did three I guess 40 I think I said 48 foot long rows or 45t long rows yesterday not yesterday it’s okay we’re all messed up on our days in the spring that’s how many potatoes we did and we ended up getting I think I
Said around 250 PBS did I I think that was how much we got you had a lot but we split it between everybody so I would like to do more potatoes for us because I want to can more if I could get a Year’s worth and then be able to can
Maybe just one quart jar per week so if I could get 52 quart jars of potatoes I’d be happy along with eating fresh we did a little bit of of lettuce too you have you ever tried lettuce or it too hot um I grew lettuce one time and it
Was covered in bugs it was awful yes it’s Hit or Miss but I know like I’ve done the butter butter lettuce like I want to try that the soft one and then I’ve done a little bit of the red Romain I did do that I tried to at least do one
Lettuce in the spring and summer um for salads and stuff so we can’t eat fresh with that everything we grow I think it’s just Hit or Miss cuz you never you never know what the weather’s going to be like you never know what and it’ll never be perfect either the weeds uh
Weeds I can’t even with with weeds I’m just so like I’m so done I do have a natural weed killer that’s like a like a vinegar base kind of I don’t know if you’ve ever tried that before it’s like high powered like it’ll burn your nostrils oh wow it’s bad if vinegar
Could get worse it’s concentrated um but it does work it’s just um but even even then when you spray it’s like it still is going to come back and you still have to be on top of getting that we have um we have like fire ants that try to get
In we have fire ants too yeah the weeds that will make someone never Garden again if they have a weed problem cuz that’s how ours got in the summer you can see in previous videos it was grass this High out here cuz I just it was
During heat waves it’s so he hot you can’t take care and they it’s like weeds thrive on heat it’s like it’s an energy boost the best thing is like what you can see there’s leaves in between but we’re going to put more leaves down um because the weeds aren’t terrible right
Now I’ve heard the hay yeah you just want to make sure it wasn’t sprayed right yeah just something to kind of keep the weeds down I mean we even have like Mulch on the outer parts of our raised beds you know not where the food
Grows but it still is like so hard to keep um that it’s a weekly maintenance it is and if you don’t do it one week and you miss a week you regret it you regret it it makes up for making you miserable the canning you did a lot of
Canning youve mentioned the potatoes what was the like other favorite thing that you like to can that you’ve been enjoying so the potatoes and then green beans so I canned 46 or 40 I’ll have to go back and look I wrote everything down that I canned but I want to double that
This year my goal this year was 52 quarts I didn’t get that I got under I got like 46 or 47 quarts and I realized that that definitely does not last us a year because we eat two quarts worth so when I make them I make two quarts at a
Time I would need to even more than double that I’m not going to like get upset or like stress myself out to do it yeah um but it was nice reaching those goals and then the pineapple zucchini that was really good to can um and then
I caned and I think I only had three pints of English peas but I was so proud of those English peas um but I probably won’t can that anymore because it tasted kind of burnt from the pressure canning oh really so you have to do it for a
Certain amount of time but the sugar content in the peas I think it causes that burnt taste so I might just freeze these English peas that are blooming I’ll probably just freeze those instead of canning them um what else did I can H that was a video I was going to make as
What all I can this year but be really good now I’m starting to I don’t have like a full Pantry like I did but I can show I can just talk about how much I can but I’ve canned like over 200 jars of stuff this year and this is my first
Year ever canning we did um a little bit of pepper jelly actually um love pepper jelly it worked out pretty well and then we did we just bought some like apples and bought some strawberries and just did our own like strawberry jam we did have blackberry jam that worked pretty
Good we had enough blackberries so we really tried to do like the fruit we didn’t do much of any other canning for vegetables we did more freezing of our vegetables just for this year I don’t think we were fully into it but I want to get the same pressure caner she has
Cuz the way my parents have canned is to do it in a water bath and that’s kind of just I know there’s some good things about doing it that way too I would like to do is start canning a little bit more with the pressure cooker and just you
Made it look easy it is really easy with that caner it is so worth it and after Christmas they probably have sales it’s so worth it cuz you’re going to want it for the spring yep yeah that’s what I was thinking about having it so there’s
A lot of things that we want to do I’m excited to just continue to do more you and I weren’t like trained deeply and but like our parents and grandparents I think did some but it wasn’t like we were fully involved in these processes when we were younger and now that we
Have our own families and are starting to educate our own children on things I think getting back to the basics of life and understanding how to do those things and be more self-sufficient I feel like our parents generation was a skipped generation like our grandparents did it
Yeah our parents didn’t really do it they did some with when they were growing up they did with their parents but yeah but now with how the world is I think a lot of people are wanting to get back to learning how to do just the
Basic things that we should know how to do well we went from everything being convenient and just like running to the store and popping it in the oven to now where it’s like he conscious health conscious and I think we’re learning the value of doing stuff with our own hands
And even though it’s a lot of work and it makes you feel better at the end of the day it’s exhausting but you know my husband and I talk frequently of just the feeling of putting in a hard day’s work towards something that you’re eating um and I know from all my health
Studies is that when you touch the food or you pick the eggs and you take them in and you’re you’re actually connecting with what God created and I think that there’s something to that there’s something actually that happens in our bodies and in our minds chemically of a positive almost like endorphins like
This is so exciting as I worked for this I’m touching it now and I’m going to transfer it inside to something that benefits us as a family same with preserving like when you pop that lid on a can that you grew it and then you preserved it
Does it make you just want to cry be like best fing and then we’ve had several meals where we bought a pig from someone and had it butchered and so we had like fresh bacon homegrown eggs from Uncle Stanley and then potatoes for hash browns from the garden and that was
Breakfast and it’s like farmed table when you get your meat from local farmers and if you you can even get your vegetables from local groups or something like that but it does make you feel a whole lot better yeah it definitely does it makes you happier
Yeah and I don’t know if it does that for men but for us moms and having to take care of our family cuz we are hom makers I think that’s the thing too is um but I think a man you know when he knows that he’s brought home the food basically
Brought home like he’s he’s done his part in trying to bring stuff I think I think it just depends on um the person but yeah I think it’s great um I think it’s great that we were able to do this today and to just see each other’s stuff
And fun um it was cool to do I don’t know when won’t be able to do do it again maybe in spring time if we could call these like our Chit Chats or something yes maybe anytime y’all are down we just do one of these and just kind of chitchat yeah chitchat that’s
Sound it’s not a pantry chat it’s a garden chat a garden gardening yes I like that Garden chat our garden chat Garden chat with Cara and Kristen we’re going to call it that oh yeah so yeah we’re going to let y’all go for now because we got kiddos that are
Pointing our attention but we are so thankful you stopped by today um and just uh make sure that you like and subscribe to our channels if you haven’t already thanks for sticking with us this long this long it’s been a long chat but it’s been fun so we don’t to do it very
Often maybe we can get her to come visit and that would be check out the bees yeah check out the bees um Mom and Dad’s uh Greenhouse that we’re trying we’re trying to get it going it’s it’s it’s a work in progress inside dad got all of
It done on the outside but like we’re trying to figure out like what all are we wanting to do like in January and February to kind of start growing so maybe this year that can be one of our goals is to come up that way cuz I’d like to see the scenery and
All that kind of stuff all right well we will let you go for now and hope youall have a blessed um holiday season and we will see you in the new year all right bye y’all bye all right you want me to go first then it is a lot different with somebody
Else I know you feel like put on the spot I got to turn down my phone so it don’t go off oh me too we are excited about training our kids I know speaking of kids you know in families because it it’s just wonderful to be able it’s wonderful to see your kids
Just kind of just go and pick fruit off the trees freely no no no I just burped and I thought you were no I didn’t hear it since mom was born so well I don’t want to tell her [Laughter] age now I thought about doing a rain
Barrel but oh cuz we we are allowed to do that in our state we just can’t we’re not supposed to like drink it but using it for gardening it’d be fine um but yeah I mean how would they know I don’t know I’m just so over the government wow
Man okay we’re just going to keep talking sorry I’m not used to hear noises when I’m recording for some reason threw me off okay
1 Comment
This was a lot of fun!! Can’t wait to chit chat again!!!