- It's a beautiful semi-cloudy day here
at the Epic homestead.
You're looking at some leeks here.
And in our recent episode
I answered the question of,
"What do you do
with all of the extra food that you harvest?"
And the answer is simply that we cannot eat it all.
And that means that, unfortunately,
sometimes we do compost a little bit of this food.
Ideally, it's the stuff that's rotten.
But today we have finally set up a donation program
with San Diego Food Bank.
So I need to harvest out some produce today
because she's coming.
She's coming to get this fresh produce
and it's gonna go to people who really, really need it.
So join me.
We're gonna start with these leeks.
Here we are in the bed.
Now it's not all leeks.
There are some onions here,
but this front row here is leeks.
And some of these are kind of old, now.
You can actually see,
this one's throwing up a little flower bud.
So we're gonna get these out of the ground.
I'm gonna pull all of these leeks.
You can tell they're just a little older
'cause they're throwing out an offshoot like this.
I guess what you could do
if you wanted to is potentially root this
but I'm just gonna clean this off
and let's harvest all these bad boys.
I'm gonna leave some leeks.
The ones over there aren't quite ready yet.
And I don't wanna give them something that's not ready.
So let's just harvest out everything that is ready.
Nothing more satisfying than pulling root crops
out of the ground, in my opinion.
Well, that was an onion.
I guess they're getting an onion.
This one I might not give.
I mean, take a look at the size of it.
When it goes to its flower, the fibrous-ness,
if that's a word, that goes all the way down here.
I mean, this really isn't gonna be super high quality.
You can tell it's just not really there.
So this one probably does get composted.
(chill music)
That's it for this row of leeks.
I am gonna steal just a few from over here.
So if you come take a look, you can see what we did here.
We have some standalone leeks.
You can just see one, but then over in this area
you can see where there's multiple leeks,
kind of multi-sown in the same spot.
So for example, I can take this larger one out
hopefully without disrupting the other one.
If I do, it's not a huge deal,
but if I can get this guy out,
which I can, I can harvest this
and now look, which one has a lot more space to size up.
So I'll opt to harvest these larger ones.
This is a triple sown.
And give the rest of these a little bit more room to run.
(chill music)
Okay, that's probably good on leeks.
I'm gonna bring those over to the sink.
We'll go out into the front and grab some lettuce.
Out here in the front yard,
if you remember from a little bit ago
we did reset this bed with both beans and lettuce.
And we have a couple really beautiful varieties
of lettuce here.
So I'm gonna grab one of these Speckles lettuce
and I'm cutting the whole head 'cause I need
to deliver this basically grocery ready to the food bank.
So I'm not going to do like a cut
and come again and give him like a mixed green bag.
I'm just gonna deliver the whole head.
So I'm gonna grab this guy here.
And when I'm harvesting
I'm kind of looking to even out the space.
I don't wanna just clear half a bed
and let the other half roam free and get too crowded.
And so there's four or five different heads in here.
I need to clear one of these guys out,
probably just one in the middle right here.
This is another one of these Speckles style.
So I got this guy.
And then I do want to take one of these from the front here.
Maybe this one here, this is sort of one of those ruffled,
I don't know if it's a Romaine,
I actually forgot the specific name of the variety.
And then before I bring it out to the garden sink,
what I can do, 'cause I know I'm gonna
have to do this anyways,
is just strip the base level of some of the more
kind of nasty looking leaves
that we're gonna have to peel off, anyways.
We'll let these kind of act as
like a living mulch in this bed here.
But let's bring these on back to the back
and start our processing.
All right, now we need to process all of this produce.
Now with the leeks, it's a little bit more simple,
because what we need to do basically
is wash it off and trim the roots
and make sure we give the produce a rinse.
Which is why I'm obsessed with this outdoor sink.
And we actually plumbed the outdoor sink to go to the sewer
because we're gonna be doing so much water outta here.
And I have so much gray water at other parts of the house.
I really don't feel too bad letting some
of my water go back out to the system.
And there's just so much debris in here.
So with leeks, all I'm doing is just stripping
away a little bit of the outer coat.
In fact, just that right there kind of did the job
as far as getting the dirt off there.
Of course I will still rinse it.
And then what I want to do is give it a trim just like that.
So trim those roots off.
And then we're just gonna start a little bit of a rinse.
So I'm coming in getting a lot
of the dirt outta here, just like that.
And then you wanna rinse a little bit
down in each of these creases, just like that.
There we go.
And then we can set this one aside to dry.
That's the process for the leeks.
With lettuce, if you're doing it in whole head
it's a little bit different than
if you were doing it in a sort of mixed green situation.
So if you're doing it mixed green, it kind of goes
to that market gardening style,
where you come in with like a quick cut greens harvester.
You're actually severing off right about here.
So you have loose sleeves.
And what a lot of people do,
will put it in a sink and then they'll use a salad spinner,
which is usually like a converted laundry machine.
A lot of these smaller scale market gardeners
will use a laundry machine that they've converted
and they'll just sort of spin it out.
Just a huge salad spinner.
In this case, all we really need to do
is rinse the produce.
Make sure we give it a nice, healthy rinse.
I want to be removing some of these sloppier exterior leaves
that are more prone to capturing some of that dirt.
So we're gonna be taking these away
getting more to that heart.
And this also lets us spot
if there's like a latent pest issue
that we didn't potentially notice, right?
So we're gonna do that.
You can see there's just little bits of dirt in here.
We'll get this out.
And what we could do
is actually fill up this whole basin and soak it.
It's a little dirty right now.
So I don't wanna add dirt to dirt.
So I'm gonna do a quick rinse, just like this.
So there you go.
You've got a beautiful head of lettuce.
It's been rinse with fresh water.
All the dirt's been removed.
It's been cleaned off at the bottom.
All the sort of nasty leaves are gone.
We'll let this out to dry in the shade
get the field heat off, keep on going.
(chill music)
Okay, I've got the produce.
Honestly, I think we could probably donate a little more.
Let's see what happens this time with the food bank.
The cool part is I just got word that when she comes
this food is going pretty much right around the corner
in our neighborhood
to people who actually really, really need it.
All right guys, they are here.
Look at this bounty.
Let's go meet them.
Hello.
- Good morning.
- How are you?
I heard this is going
right around the corner - Oh, hi.
in the neighborhood.
- Yes, right around the corner.
We are actually the Community Food Bank of National City.
- Oh, okay.
- And we give away like 250 households average a day.
- Every single day?
- Every other day.
- Every other day, okay. - Yes.
Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday.
- Yeah?
- Yes. - Nice.
- Yes.
All right, well, I have lettuce and I have leeks.
- Oh, okay.
- Which should be pretty good, right?
- Yeah. - Okay, great.
- Oh, beautiful.
- All homegrown in the backyard.
- Oh, thank you.
- Yeah.
Hey.
(laughing)
- Thank you, so much.
- Oh, that's amazing.
Can we take a photo together? - Of course.
- Oh, that's awesome. - We really appreciate it.
- Oh yeah.
- This donation is the beginning
of what's hopefully a long partnership
with the food bank, because food is scarce
for those in need and especially fresh food.
It's one of the most rare things you'll actually
find at one of these food drop-offs where food
insecure folks come through
and try to get some food to feed their families.
So Bobby and her friend came through,
they wanted to see the garden a little bit.
So we showed them just some of the plots where all
of this food is actually going
to be coming from as the seasons ramp up.
And of course, they had to see the chickens as well.
It was really cool to meet both of them.
They were wonderful, wonderful women.
The first epic donation went well, guys.
I'm super excited because, like I said,
I don't want this stuff to get composted
if we can't eat it or give it away fast enough.
And we're growing a lot of produce here.
So thanks for watching, stay tuned.
Good luck in the garden and keep on growing.