1 Year On Our Land Timelapse | Self Sufficient UK Farmstead

1 year time lapse sharing a year in our life on our UK Farmstead, what we grow in a year & how we garden.
Each year we try new things to become more and more self sufficient, move with the seasons and live life farm to table.

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.
Each year we expand and grow more, currently we are around 60-70% self sufficient in our food needs year round.
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, 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! 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

Videos
JAN
Crop Storage & Losses | Garden Jobs For January 👉 https://youtu.be/5blbdRYXUY4
3 Winter Survival Crops We’re Harvesting in Mid January👉 https://youtu.be/YQKkkIfqWsQ

FEB
Why we LOVE Jerusalem Artichokes👉 https://youtu.be/LxQJH2rZ8tM
Yacon UK – No Dig Compost Bed vs Woodchips – In Our Hardest Winter Yet👉 https://youtu.be/-F0djhxlTJU
Growing EXTRA EARLY POTATOES To Harvest In MAY!!!👉 https://youtu.be/P2iNQ5uJu8M
Tour of our New Propagation Area👉 https://youtu.be/tc0T9amNygg

MARCH
A Day ALONE at Freedom Forest👉 https://youtu.be/ESUbU94crvo
Preparing Growing Areas for Spring | No Dig Net House👉 https://youtu.be/S19nsCORNOo
Making A Compost Bay In Under An HOUR … For FREE 👉 https://youtu.be/RNySj2RbCOY
No Dig Gardening, Free Perennial Kale – Vlog 3 Freedom Forest Life 👉

Making A Hotbed – With Humanure!!!👉 https://youtu.be/siKwISNTgyo
No More Woodchips! Finishing Our Terraced Beds V4👉 https://youtu.be/EfZt0mPMvuQ
Forest Garden Additions – V5👉 https://youtu.be/D5EMOGvzFfs

APRIL
UK Food Forest – New Perennial Plants👉 https://youtu.be/x3uTEhXSYvs
JUICING YACON👉 https://youtu.be/LiLNJ4ArQOw
Spring Tour – Vlog 6 👉 https://youtu.be/Ovk3vH3RVc0
Simple Dandelion Honey👉 https://youtu.be/_eXIZmoqy48
Installing Drip Line Irrigation From Gravity Fed Tanks-Part 1👉 https://youtu.be/cQh3BvwbRkE

MAY
Forest Garden Tour – Spring UK 👉 https://youtu.be/Zym5QfpHzpI
Mushroom Logs – Creating Abundance – Vlog 7 👉 https://youtu.be/288Zh5Z95Vc
Harvesting New Potatoes in May (UK) 👉 https://youtu.be/r7AoYEIrPE0
Planting Combinations For Best Use Of Space👉 https://youtu.be/3RFewnJFuiI
Installing Drip Line Irrigation from Gravity Fed Tanks Part 2👉 https://youtu.be/mfEjuhIGCNk
Growing Food – Hobby or Necessity?! Tour – Vlog 8 👉 https://youtu.be/O5LBDk9C1xI

JUNE
Working In Our Food Forest – Vlog 9 👉 https://youtu.be/9ooMBx1d0C8
Vegetable Beds in June (Tour) Realities of Growing With NO RAIN👉 https://youtu.be/HyZl0XV5NWM
Harvesting Seasonal Vegetables and Medicinal Herbs – Vlog 11 👉 https://youtu.be/LDHjjKF6FJg

JULY
Lush Undercover Growth – Permaculture Polytunnel Tour – July👉 https://youtu.be/Z_K_XEezeYI
BIG HARVESTS – Vlog 12👉 https://youtu.be/Mf_daQRP3Ag
Forest Garden Tour – Summer UK – Wins & Losses👉 https://youtu.be/HW5zMtcKMM8
My Tomatoes ARE NOT Fruiting👉 https://youtu.be/yuXvLKgWo1s
Abundance on the Farmstead – V13👉 https://youtu.be/_hLl1KMuFGE
Not Our Usual Type of Video !!! Memories of Millie – Vlog 14👉 https://youtu.be/ffQbeClP1FQ

AUG
We Grow 95% Of Our Fresh Produce – Summer – V15👉 https://youtu.be/hv_v2-tyYFM
Excitement & Disaster – Late Summer Polytunnel Tour👉 https://youtu.be/JgZiDLwUoa0

SEPT
What We Are Harvesting Now -V16👉 https://youtu.be/mXgJ2L0HEkw
Abundant Harvests & Medicinal Herbs V17👉 https://youtu.be/cujuEAby-Lo
Wild PERMACULTURE Kitchen Garden (TOUR)👉 https://youtu.be/nHkdqloRKRY
SWEET POTATO HARVEST UK👉 https://youtu.be/Q4ByKdoNyok

OCT
How SELF SUFFICIENCY Looks In Autumn – V18👉 https://youtu.be/S4KBbpntgwg
3 Acre OFF GRID Farmstead UK -V19👉 https://youtu.be/1ZY6oX2X8Pk
Making Homegrown ‘REAL’ Smoked PAPRIKA👉 https://youtu.be/HJ08ZkXuYHg

NOV
Planting for WINTER – 70% Self Sufficient Farmstead👉 https://youtu.be/f_yZRI9jHL0
Garden to Plate: Growing and Harvesting Tropical TARO in the UK👉 https://youtu.be/jzk2zs5DvTc
YACON: How to Protect Your Harvest & Winterize Crowns👉 https://youtu.be/9wf7gpX6k2g

DEC
Solar Upgrade ☀️ Log Burner Install👉 https://youtu.be/SQSI25InUeM

✌️🌿

#selfsufficiency #farmstead #offg

Welcome to Freedom Forest guys the 3 Acre edible Oasis that we’re creating here in the south of England where we like to try lots of new things and push the boundaries with what we can grow using permaculture and noig methods absolutely no chemicals we Killers or synthetic fertilizers just

What nature provides we are Dan and Lori and we really hope that you enjoy following our journey and seeing what we’ve been up to this year the year started with a prolonged big freeze which is unusual for us here in the South and this resulted in things

Like frozen pipes and crop losses which we don’t normally experience and it was observing these unusual weather conditions that triggered the plans for another big project which has dominated a lot of particularly Dan’s time throughout this year and that was to fully insulate and heat our storage

Shed to give better protection to the crops that we grow which see us right through the winter a project which is still ongoing and we’ll show more on later in this video we were still harvesting crops in January we call these crops our winter survival crops and they are Oka

Mashua and Jerusalem AR to chokes Mainly we also still had winter salad coming out of our poly tunnel although there were times when it was frozen when we couldn’t Harvest at all we did still have some kale to harvest but we actually lost some of the plants to cold for the first time ever along with

Brussle sprouts and nearly all of our purple sprouting broccoli as well February started with Dan building us a 4 Bay compos in setup which was very much needed and we are put into good use Now yakon and Jerusalem Arch chokes are two crops that we continue to harvest a lot of in February and right through the deepest parts of winter and into early spring in fact both are in the sunflower family and with a good mulch layer will sit happily in the ground Even in our

Colder Winters here so they are great winter crops to rely on when trying to provide as much of your own food as possible we just Harvest them as needed and they help us to remain up to 60% self-sufficient in our food needs right through the winter we sewed extra early potatoes on

The 10th of February into one of our poly tunnels to make use of the space and the favorable environment during the off seon we hadn’t done this before and we got the idea from our friends Bruce and Annie on their YouTube channel offgrid Bruce the thing that we always do for

Valentine’s Day is spend the day together sorting out our propagation area very romantic I know know but it’s perfectly timed for our optimal first sewing dates here and it motivates us having a nice tidy area to work in even if it doesn’t stay that way for

Long March was all about bed prep ready for planting and Seed sewing of course one day I’d like to think I’d have all of the bed prep done at the end of the previous year but it is quite a nice job to do in the spring

At first I felt a little overwhelmed by all of my seeds for early March but as soon as I worked out which ones to put in what size trays it all came together so this week is all about bed prep for us and today we’re making a start up

Here on our main growing area and we’re going to be clearing and recomposing a lot of these beds and getting them ready for planting whilst I was just sorting out our lunch Dan has been up here doing an amazing job on these beds they are looking so good already

Seriously this guy is an absolute working machine he is amazing when it comes to this kind of stuff I get completely overwhelmed by jobs this big but he just gets his head down and goes for it there he is the Workhorse give us a wave Dan we gave our net house a complete makeover in March as well and we finally got rid of the dreaded black plastic and turned it into a beautiful no dig wood chip topped growing Area on the 8th of March we had snow and by the 16th of March I was getting my feet dirty For the First Time of the Year finishing the compost in and on the 18th I solded my first outdoor Seeds so if you’re watching this and you’re new to no dig the beauty of this style of bed prep is that you literally just lay your compost on the top of the soil and then you let all the worms and the microorganisms do all the hard work

For you they’re going to come up and they’re going to take down a lot of the nutrients down to deep into the soil and also the rain will help to rain all of this nutrient and feed down into your soil and so if you look at it a bit like every time it

Rains the fresh compost layer is like a filter and that’s creating a compost tea that gets watered through into your beds below with each rainfall we made a hot bed for the first time using hum manure from our compost in toilet to give our tomatoes and pepper some extra warmth as we don’t

Have power in our poly tunnels and we’ve got all of our materials ready we’ve got got some horse manure fresh horse manure some straw some leaves some wood shavings and we’ve also got human we’ve got what we also pruned our stone fruit trees in March Dan planted out all of our seed Potatoes and continued to harvest as much fresh salad and greens as we could eat from our poly tunnel March was a busy Month by the beginning of April our food fries was bursting into life and it was time to give it a good tidy up And also put in some new perennial plants and Herbs in mid April we took our last big Harvest of yakon and a lot of this we pressed and turned into juice now it’s getting quite late for harvesting it is the middle of April now we did our last Harvest about 10 days ago but we have

Still got heaps of plants here ready to go so we’re hoping we’re going to find some good tubers okay so we’re going to harvest this plant here because this is the biggest plant that we’ve got left out of everything in this bed look at all of this this is all the grind tips

Here that is the biggest chunk of grind tip I think we’ve ever had what we got on this one few goodies so before we can press our Yak on we have the equally fun part of having to smash it and pulverize it up and I made this this morning and this

Is just a bit of Cypress Wood I had around and I’ve actually got this it funny enough matches it’s a stainless steel this is a like a champagne cooler and I found this years ago and it’s been in the bushes and again being stainless still it is stored beautifully and um

Clearly we don’t drink champagne yeah we don’t drink champagne but I knew it would have a use one day anyway so let’s get some of these in and see how it’s going to Go look at that yakong juice oh my God wow and so the other thing you can do once you’ve got your Yak on juice as well is this is the juice you need to make your own yakon syrup so yeah we’ve done that in another video so make sure you check that one out as well if you’re

Interested in making yakon Syrup By the middle of April our hot bed and propagation area was full up with seedlings and we had lots of veggies in the ground too peas onions col rabie and salads all from transplanted plugs and carrots were just germinating too that we had planted from seed and

Our garlic from an October planting was growing on beautifully too we used the covers to stop the birds scratching out the young plants and seedlings yeah more leaks in this bed they’ve been in all winter again we’re just harvesting those as we need and the overhaul of our strawberry

Bed that you might have seen in one of our previous videos is definitely paying off there is still quite a lot of soral mixed in with it here this is all the soral just kind of pull out any chunks I see but the strawberries are actually B in back a

Lot better than I expected so really really pleased with that and as you can see they just grow up through the wood chip and they just love it we had so many Dand Lions growing in the food Forest so I made dandelion honey or syrup as Some people prefer to

Call it for the first time and it was so delicious I also began harvesting some of the the beautiful fresh young stinging nettles that grow wildly to dry for teas later in the year and we continue to keep sewing more seeds as April is another one of the really big months for spring Sewings by May our food forest was in full bloom and we were getting really excited by the prospect of all the beautiful fresh fruits that we would soon be Harvesting we’ve got blueberries here the flowers are all just coming on the blueberries literally everything is blooming at the moment or has been blooming in the last few weeks we’ve got aonia berries here which are just forming their flower buds and these flower beautifully planted out a whole

Hedge of Elder berries Along The Back Fence here um and they are coming on really well so you can see they’ve leafed up beautifully here and we’re going to let them come up and just create a new canopy layer here and obviously the berries are great for us

For harvesting I work a lot with those and look at the blossoms covering this this is by far the most Blossom we’ve had on this Quint tree today it is absolutely stunning it it almost reminds me more of a magnolia tree if you’d like to see more on our

Food Forest we have a whole playlist on our Channel all about it with lots of Tours and we’ll be adding lots more tours this coming season Dan had pruned an oak tree so we decided to make use of the logs and inoculated them with lots of different mushroom

Varieties one thing that I’m really determined to grow for ourselves is mushrooms and mushrooms is one of the few Fresh Products that we still buy in on a regular basis and whilst the little plastic containers that they nearly always come in are quite useful espe for us and especially when we sell some

Produce we do recycle them it’s just another industrial process and another part of that product that I’d rather not use and when you grow mushrooms for yourself there is so many more options and flavors um so yeah it’s something that we’re really excited about so we have just done another load

Of mushroom logs as you can see here early in the month I had to start clean clearing the salad from our poly tunnel ready for tomatoes to go in we’ve been harvesting as much salad as we could eat from these plants for the last 7 months right through the winter and it felt

Really sad to see them Go so Dan is now fitting the DP line to a freshly composted bed and if you would like to see more about how we’re installing these new drip lines then check out our recent video part one of a two-part series about the drip lines which Dan has made already it was a

Quick turnaround in the poly tunnel with every day being precious growing time at this time of year and the tomatoes went straight in where the salad had been Miday is a really poignant change over time in the gardening calendar from winter to summer crops so we had a lot happening and the next excitement and welcome Harvest for this point of the hungry Gap was our extra early new potatoes from our poly tunnel today it

Is the 11th of May so these guys have been in the ground for exactly 3 months and we are going to see what kind of harvest we’ve got and see if it’s worth growing them again like this next year oh there’s some potatoes here oh my

Gosh we can see some more oh they look beautiful look at those okay so that is a harvest from 22 plants of Rocket potatoes and I have to say we are pretty impressed with that considering ideally like I say we would have started with chitted potatoes so we kind of lost two

Weeks yeah pretty happy with that Harvest that is a fair amount of new potatoes right there and so we’re going to move on to the Swifts Now pretty impressive haul of potatoes from I think this was 21 plants on this side I seem to remember so yeah 21 plants three months in the ground these are our Swifts so um we’re actually going to weigh these now and see what the weight is so let’s check it

Out and that is coming out at 17 and A2 lb right here’s the Swifts those attached see what we’ve got and that is8 lb so very slightly more from the Swifts and yeah like I said I think it was 21 plants and 22 plants or pretty much the same 22 plants of Each taste test time oh that’s Soft wow SE silk is it yeah it is a taste like no other just yesterday we finished planting all of our beautiful summer crops into our poly tunnels we um grow quite a combination of crops together in here and it’s not necessarily always um put together in the sense of companion

Planting now we don’t purposely plant anything together that we know aren’t good companions but the main reason for the combinations that we grow together is actually to make the best use of this space so what we’re trying to do is layer a bit like we do in the food

Forest so you’ve got your layering systems and then we always get some self-seeded um nostrums which I absolutely love I love the fact that that they um just continue to grow here even though I’ve only ever planted them in once okay so poly tunnel 2 so there’s

Lots of climbing layers in this tunnel and our climbing layers are beautiful juicy melons so this is one of the things that Dan is very excited about growing this year and he has gone mad for tarot so the same is in the tunnel next door t our main crop through the middle of

These tunnels is Tomatoes by the end of May we had nearly all of our summer crops in the ground outside we had planted all of our winter squash sweet corn corett sunflowers tarot sweet potatoes and we had sweet peas flouring and starting to form pods and our outdoor salad was growing on

Beautifully from here on though growing got a little more challenging as it turned out to be a very dry spring and watering can get quite challenging for us as we don’t have Main’s water supply and we only have low press gravity fed hoses or watering cans so it’s a slow

Process when we do have to water Outdoors by early June we were harvesting our first strawberries maybe one more and getting back on with some maintenance Jobs I also added three King trari and mushroom beds to our food Forest when I was up here looking for strawberries earlier I noticed that we’ve got our first purple sugar snap peas which are just about ready and I think this is the biggest one here so

I’m going to eat my first purple sugar snap early June is when a lot of our summer crops start to get going for us here in the South and things are just starting to get going we are a little bit behind where we would normally be

And that is for two reasons one of those is because we’ve had literally no rainfall for nearly a month now and the second thing is because we had quite an unusually cold spring so some of the plants were slower to get going our next planting we’re going to expand and I’m

Going to sew the whole of this bed with elephant garlic we absolutely love elephant garlic we Harvest it around the end of June or beginning of July depending on how things are looking so that is nearly ready to come out of the ground and that is one of my favorite

Crops to harvest I get super excited about that by mid June our beds were full with parsnips carrots Onions herbs beetro col Rie and much More and our potatoes were looking great and even though we still got a really good harvest from these potatoes we have learned a big lesson this year and that was that we should have been watering our potatoes more regularly during the dry period which was when they would

Also been really getting going we decided to do a rain dance as we didn’t want a full drought like we had the year before somebody heard us as soon after it did start raining and today we’ve had more rain than I have ever known and then the abundance of broad beans began Are Then snap peas began and I also started harvesting medicinal herbs like Feverfew and chamomile for making tinctures and Drying so it has been 5 weeks since we showed you around our poly tunnels with which we did back on the 26th of May and the growth throughout June has been crazy good Crazy by mid June the Harvest were epic with berries coming on in our food Forest we have potatoes Ready and wheelbarrows full of Garlic I think this is the biggest elephant garlic I have ever grown Wow that is massive absolutely massive although we did nearly lose all of our elephant garlic later on as we struggled to get crops like this fully dry as we were now having a very wet moist summer it is the second week of July just and our food Forest has been a

Mixture of successes and challenges so far this season we have been enjoying amazing aming crops of raspberries so far this year but the interesting thing is these are our Autumn rasberries and they are cropping better than our summer raspberries right now our fruit trees overall this

Year haven’t got as much fruit on the main trees for the age of our trees we had quite a lot of apples last year they’re just in their fifth growing season now um most of these trees and yeah so this year we don’t have so many

Apples which is kind of normal I think a lot of fruit trees do go big every other year also this little plum tree last year was absolutely Laden in plums for its size and this year it’s just got literally a handful of fruits on it but I think this is also potentially

A result of two consecutive really hard grind Seasons we had a big drought last year which I think is having a knock on effect to the trees this year and also um this year we had a 6 week period plus 6 weeks plus of drought already so some of our new plantings and

Our younger trees are struggling because we can’t always get enough water down here regularly enough um to really keep things thriving but other things are thriving like the blueberries and we really must get some net on this soon because these blueberries are just about to ripen and this bush in particular is looking

Absolutely Lush big plump blue bries and this bush here is Covered our gzb have been really good we’ve had a lot of gbes we’ve got a run of good gbury bushes all through the middle here both um red and green gries I generally find our red our hinari red gbes are um more productive but I’m not sure if

That’s just cuz I can see the fruit more and then I don’t see the fruit on the green ones and the birds and the squirrels get the fruit first by mid July I noticed something didn’t seem quite right with a lot of our tomatoes in one of our poly tunnels there just

Didn’t seem to be enough fruit setting on them so it turns out Tomatoes don’t actually like setting fruit and will become stressed when temperatures are above 90° F which is a little bit more than 32° Centigrade now I don’t have a thermometer in this poly tunnel

Permanently but I do know that it has regularly been reaching temperatures over 40° Centigrade so this would explain why our lower tomatoes that are set in Fruit before the heat comes when the weather is cooler are doing exactly what they should and then the middle section when we’ve had heat waves aren’t setting

Fruit but usually when we come through this period and later on in the year these Tomatoes become really prolific again and if you’d like to hear more about what I learned and observed with my tomatoes then check out the video my tomato tomatoes are not fruit in on our Channel so we are finally getting to enjoy a few of our own fresh blueberries now that I put a net over a couple of our plants and I don’t really like using the nets for a few different reasons but this is the first year that we’ve

Actually had more than just a handful of blueberries so it is kind of worth it so I’ve just come up to the tunnels to harvest some fresh things for our lunch I’m going to get some trombone cett some New Zealand spinach and some fresh Basel from the tunnel next door to make a

Basil and cette pesto to put on some pasta but yeah it’s actually raining again at the moment there’s been lots of showers today it’s been really wet and windy over all this last Week we harvested more potatoes this month and we also had our best Harvest of onions to date although like with the garlic we struggled later to fully dry them Lots learned though as always on how we can do this better for next Year and the blueberries kept on coming together with lots of other delicious berries from our food Forest too the jly harvests were beautiful and abundant but the end of the month came with sadness as we had had to say goodbye to our much loved old girl Millie after many months

Of ups and downs with a stomach issue she had a great life though and we are all very thankful of the good times that we had together and she is still with us forever at Freedom forest in August our Harvest started to get even more exciting and prolific and

Most of our crops were growing on really well wow look at that big watermelon that I’ve got there just spotted that one and by the end of the month we will harvesting various melons including our first watermelon Chili Peppers buckets of tomatoes Obin and sweet corn

We also had our first big Harvest of aronia berries from our food Forest which I made into a delicious Jam we’ve got a beautiful watermelon here which again I don’t think that one is that far off so we’re going to be enjoying watermelons soon and this year

We’ve just grown um sweet corn super sweet sweet corn and then we’ve got a load of different squash all everywhere in this bed and we have got some really good fruits forming up here this one is a jumbo pink banana and then just here I think that one is one that’s called

Sweet meat as you can see there is lots of lush Greenery going on in here right now and then we’ve also got a few strawberries so we’ve got so many cets this year we put in way too many plants but we are producing an absolute abundance of food from them some areas

Were starting to get a little wild on us though and the critters were moving in on us too with moles tunneling under our carrots and rats in the poly tunnel but we have had one semi disaster in um this tunnel tunnel one and that is that we’ve

Had a rat in the tunnel and the purple sweet potatoes that we’ve got as a ground cover on this side the foliage had been so Lush and beautiful and they were growing really well and then I realized that we’ve had a rat in and his dug under or chewed off nearly all of

The sweet potatoes and again same story as everywhere else everywhere has been a little bit neglected but with that neglect I I also just see such beauty it’s so wild and beautiful at the moment and if you’d like to see exactly how much food we harvested from just one of

These poly tunnels then check out our previous video from here on the Harvest just kept on Coming with chili peppers we made smoked Paprika I made sundried tomatoes cette and tomato chutney and my favorite roasted tomato paste I also gathered more medicinal herbs from our food forest for tinctures and teas Our little family pear tree is absolutely loaded with pears that we have just started to harvest now sweet corn tastes even more amazing when eaten within minutes of harvesting and one of our favorite ways to enjoy it is by cooking it on the fire with the husks still on this really

Helps to keep some moisture on the corn and stops them getting burnt as you can see they come out super succulent and moist and it tastes absolutely Divine okay so from tunnel one I have just harvested 12 cucumbers an Obe uh green pepper which had snapped off cherry tomatoes big Tom tomatoes and some mild spicy red peppers and our first few Cape gurries too you can literally feel the hot air just flowing

Out of this tunnel as you stand by the door here but I’ve been in and harvested another beautiful melon and this is the orange variety that we haven’t tried yet this year so looking forward to that one by the end of September our main outdoor growing area or our kitchen

Garden area was looking truly wild but absolutely stunningly beautiful and it was still providing us with so much fresh produce then at the very end of the month we harvested our outdoor sweet potatoes we should have had a huge amount of sweet potatoes this year as we

Gave them twice the amount of space as we normally do but unfortunately our resident rats had been in before us and put pay to a lot of our Harvest this is disappointing so far not what we want to be seeing so guys we’ve just had a pretty disastrous day harvesting our sweet

Potatoes that the rats and the mice have got to long before a lot of the potatoes even had chance to mature so I do not want to take any chances with our beautiful pumpkin and winter squash Harvest so it’s late in the day we’re hot muddy disgusting but we are going to

Quickly as quickly as we can haul in a load of these winter squash and get them in the poly tunnel curing off where hopefully there’ be less appealing for the rats to sniff them out as we move into October our cape gures and sweet pepper were really providing vibrant colors for Us seasonal eating is truly such a delight and as we continued to harvest our crops for winter storage it was also time to change beds over again clearing out summer crops and planting hardier winter Veg and this is is all of our own homemade compost that I’m putting on this bed today and I’m really excited to see if we have a noticeable difference in growth next year because this homemade compost with all its vegetable scraps and lots of different plant diversity that we’ve been adding over

The last year should make it a lot more nutritious than the municipal waste compost that we have been using in the past there is certainly a lot more life and activity going on in the soil already and that’s now going to be being added to our beds so I’ve probably said this before

But I actually find spreading compost really calming and therapeutic I could actually do it a lot quicker than I do but I don’t know there’s just something really soothing about smoothing it all out over the soil and just feeling the love and the goodness that is going back into the

Earth I guess and just thinking about the beautiful crops that it’s going to grow for us next year yeah it’s um it’s almost like a bit of a meditation I sewed garlic this month planted the poly tunnel up with winter salads greens and herbs and we moved all of our pumpkins into

Our newly insulated store room and workshop that Dan has been working really hard on to get finished in time for winter Autumn is such a beautiful and giving season probably my favorite of all the seasons as I just love autumn colors too I think that’s one of the

Reasons why I love harvesting sweet chestnuts so much as well because of their beautiful Brown glossy coat by the beginning of November our winter salads and greens were off to a great start and I’m sure this is due to the homemade compost we use this Year we were still harvesting the last of our Peppers or capsicums but our harvests and Homestead life was definitely starting to take a slower pace which I’m always ready for at this time of year and feels very natural our OCA bed was growing strongly and nearly ready to start harvesting from and we

Also had what we felt was a very successful first harvest of tarot a tropical tuber that Dan has been learning about all year and we have been enjoying lots of tarot CES with It Okay so for outdoor winter crops we have got our amazing Jerusalem Ary chokes and our yakon which I’ll show you in just a moment and we will start harves in both of these crops anytime from now and these Jerusalem Arch chokes have literally just lost all of their leaves

In the last couple of days only a few weeks ago they were looking beautiful all covered with their lovely little miniature sunflowers near the end of the month we took our first harvest of yakon it had been very mild up to this point but with some harder frost forecast it was time

To protect the plants for the winter Ahead as we moved into December it was time to make sure we were ready for winter and we had decided to upgrade our solar system batteries to lithium as our older lead acid batteries weren’t holding as much charge as they once did Dan kept pushing ahead with our

Workshop refit and in December we had a reclaimed log burner installed that was gifted to us from our neighbors so we can now keep our stored crops above 5° in here on colder nights which is an awesome Milestone this space is currently doubling up as our winter

Yoga space too until the next stage of fitting out the workshop side begins Dan has nearly finished putting all of the clading back on the outside now too we took our first harvest of OCA in December and I really do need to get on with harvesting the rest of this

Colorful tasty tuuba now if the rats are mice haven’t got to them Already we’ve still been harvesting lots of beetroot and making yummy beetro bean burgers and we’re enjoying stacks of winter salads and lots of beautiful food from our store it has taken a long time to put this video together looking back through a year worth of footage videos and

Photos but I have enjoyed the process and being reminded of what we have achieved created grown and learned in one year is very satisfying and fulfilling and it has made me even more excited about the season ahead all of the individual videos used in making this one are in the video

Description if you’d like to see them in more detail too we hope you have enjoyed this video as much as I have creating it and living it don’t forget to like And subscribe to our channel to continue following our journey here massive thank you to our patreons for the extra support that they

Give us and thank you all for watching and now it all begins [Laughter] again M