- The straw hat boys are back.
- Okay.
- I've been donning the straw hat a little bit more.
This is my Sierra Nevada straw hat.
Jacques obviously has the classic hermit.
Actually, no.
- This is a different one.
- This is on the fly.
- We're actually thinking about designing a hat
around Jacques's hermit persona, so we'll see.
But it's been a while on the Homesteading Channel here,
since we've had a day where you can just go to town
on a lot of different, random tasks, there's so much.
All the stuff that you see back here, a lot
of these brassicas, it's 85 degrees Fahrenheit right now.
- Yeah, you know, March, 85 degrees.
- It's March and so we gotta clear it out.
We have a lot of random chores to do,
so come along with us and let's go.
Everyone say hello to Bobka, the official
(cat meowing)
cat mascot of Epic Gardening,
a wild cat that just kinda hangs out here now.
But the first task is just some basic cleanup.
It's taking these green stocks that we kind of put away
for the Winter, resetting them out in the front yard.
- So we dumped all of the green stock leaf,
old beds, basically, into here.
So this is all the old soil.
It's kind of a little, it has some roots.
It's a little bit dry in some places
but basically, we need to entirely refresh it.
And this right here.
(Kevin and Jacques laughing)
- I don't know why, but we're obsessed
with the power planter.
- [Jacques] 100% obsessed.
- Just an auger, really, but you're supposed
to use it for bulb planting
but we found all sorts of creative uses.
So you got some Garden-tone, right?
- Yep. Garden-tone.
- Just take the auger and mess around.
Do you have to use this tool? Absolutely not.
Is it fun? A hundred percent.
- Last thing I added was a little bit of blood meal.
Cause we've noticed that we seem
to have a nitrogen deficiency in general.
- Yeah.
- So, a little boost.
- Almost all the potting mixes you're gonna get
at a store are gonna have a nitrogen deficiency.
It's just the way it is with these mixes.
Hopefully there's a mix in some future that does not do that
but that's what we're dealing with.
So, mix it up and let's get these restocks going.
Well, we're almost done.
We finished one of the green stocks, which you can see
in the background there today's goal was really
just to revert and reset them.
We'll place them and actually really curious what
you guys think we should grow.
We have strawberries that we're putting in a raised bed.
So I don't really think we need to grow strawberries
although that's a perfect application in the green stock.
So open to your comments.
But right now, as Jacque does this, I'm heading
on over to the back patch for a little chop chop.
Before we harvest though, let's say hi to our chickies.
I gave them a cabbage.
And as you can see, they really decimated it.
That was a huge cabbage.
So look, little lavender sizing up,
Butta is absolutely a thick, massive girl.
And the rest of them are doing really, really well.
They've actually just recently learned to get themselves
up into the henhouse at night
and then get themselves back out in the daytime.
So I'm very proud of them.
Say, hi, Gucci. Gucci, your fans.
Aw, look at that. So that's Gucci.
And then this one is our silver lights wind up.
It doesn't have a name yet
but I've got chick grit, water, feeder.
Pretty soon we're gonna transition them to the water bar.
But that's enough of that. Let's get to these cabbage.
Like I said, it's 85 degrees Fahrenheit guys.
The cabbage, it is long past time to harvest it.
Not long past, it's probably right about a couple days
past time to harvest.
And the only correct way to harvest a cabbage
is to take it like this.
Decapitate it.
Look at how big this thing is, guys.
Very proud of the cabbages this season.
This one here is particularly aphid ridden
and not too sizable.
So I'm gonna give it to our chicks as another present.
This is where this double Dutch door on the coup comes
in really handy.
You don't have to really disturb them.
You just pop this open.
Let's throw 'em another treat right here.
Pretty soon they'll make their way through that one as well.
Welcome to cabbage mountain.
(Jacques laughing)
Honestly, it's probably 50 plus.
- Yeah.
- It's gotta be 50 pounds worth of cabbage.
- Somewhere in there.
- So I'd say pretty good job.
So what we're gonna do, I've got my Felco.
It's actually a budding knife, but I'm gonna
use it for the purposes of stripping the cabbage.
Dude, what do you have?
- I got the Felco multi tool, I think it's like 506.
- Pocket knife, basically.
- My favorite, yeah, it's my favorite.
- So really what we're doing here is kind of pre
prepping and cleaning these cabbage and just
making sure that some of those aphids that you saw earlier
haven't really penetrated too deeply into the core.
So I'm willing personally to sacrifice
some of these outer leaves just to make sure
that I'm not about to cook up like a big batch of aphids.
- One thing if you haven't tried with cabbages,
is to actually cut them into wedges
and roast it in the oven, like broil it almost.
- Yeah.
- It's actually incredible.
I didn't think it would be that good.
- Yeah. I can actually attest to that.
I tried that out after you mentioned it
and it was quite nice.
- Nice.
- So, all I'm doing here is just removing some
of these dirtiest-
- Right.
- Leaves and honestly, look what you're left with here.
- It's a pristine cabbage.
- That's actually a really nice looking cabbage.
- You take, I'd take that to the market. (laughing)
- I mean, honestly, I'm buying this for myself
at the market and you know what, it's remarkably tight.
What we noticed earlier in the season,
is that the cabbage it was heading
but it was sort of a loose head.
And I think just giving it that little bit more time
really helped out and Jacques, I always give him trash.
We always trash talk each other in our garden.
It's it's a way to keep each other motivated.
- Yeah.
- But this year I actually did beat him-
- He did.
- On cabbages.
- Total annihilation.
- Yeah, total annihilation. But you tried a Bulgarian one.
- Yeah.
- Yeah, Jacques went to Bulgaria
in a time of need for Epic Gardening.
He said, I'm out and I'm going to Bulgaria.
(Jacques laughing)
And he somehow got seats back.
I'm not gonna say you smuggled 'em
but certainly not gonna say you didn't either.
- Yeah. We don't have to go there.
- I don't have an opinion personally, legally on that.
But you brought back some Bulgarian cabbage, right?
- Yep. They were called like Balkan, fitting name.
And I said, you know what?
I want all of my cabbages to be Bulgarian this year.
- Yeah.
- Without even thinking about it.
And let's just say they didn't like this climate.
- Yeah. They really didn't.
And how do you know? How'd you know?
- So first of all, they stayed loose and then
before they started tightening, I was checking on them.
I noticed that one of 'em was getting a little peak.
Like it was peaking around the top
and the next day a flower erupted through it.
A huge flower stalk just erupts all of a sudden.
- Yeah. It looks really weird.
- It looked really weird.
- Cause you, I mean, honestly with cabbages,
you think that when it starts to head
it's going to, that's it, I mean,
- Right.
- That's the terminal sort of part of its life,
but of course you plant cabbages
from seed and there is no seed when it heads, so,
- Right.
- It has to do something else and that's what it does.
I haven't seen that yet.
And most of the reason why, and this is my own,
you know, weakness, is I haven't gotten cabbage
at least until this year to a point
where I could even see that.
(Jacques laughing)
You know? So, that's a really big cabbage.
That's a really big one.
This one, I think right here might be the biggest.
- Honestly they're just all bigger
than any cabbage I've ever seen.
- And you know what's crazy,
this isn't even San Juan Cabbage Strano.
- No.
- This is not even the giant one.
- Not even a special variety.
- Yeah. Well here's what's crazy though,
think about it this way, everyone's obsessing
about basically cannabis and wine, right?
- Yeah.
- Cannabis and grapes.
Oh, the soil matters so much like, oh,
you gotta do this to the soil.
It's like, actually that's true for every plant technically.
- Absolutely.
- But those are the ones that have high economic value.
So those are the ones all the growers obsess about.
But you can apply the same sort of logic to growing cabbage,
tomatoes, et cetera, and actually dramatically
change the profile of the flavor, for sure.
- Oh yeah.
- And no one just, no one talks about it.
- Yeah. There's always gonna be a slight difference
and variation in the flavor, depending on where it's growing
or what it's growing in, like a hydroponic versus non.
- All right, well, we'll finish this up.
- Yeah, we got a lot of cabbage.
- We'll see you guys pretty soon on the next task.
Cabbages went well, we are not stopping though.
We're gonna put some strawberries in this bed here.
This is actually the bed the strawberries were in last year.
However, we over Wintered them in a grow bag,
which I'll show you.
But we also topped up with some Seascape new bare roots,
probably about 25, Jacques?
- Yep.
- 25 or so and then we'll put in the other ones
that we have right over here.
So these were the ones we over Wintered and they don't look
like they're doing that well.
But honestly, if you clean, 'em up a little bit
we'll probably get about 20 or 25 out of this as well.
So we'll have plenty to put over there.
Okay. What we have left of Espoma Berry-tone,
we're just gonna dump in and surface sort of mix
across the top here.
Probably not even necessary but we have it
and it's not gonna hurt.
- Yeah. No reason not to.
- The water you guys are seeing coming
out of this hose is actually water directly
from the big cistern that we capture.
We put a pressure sensitive pump
on it and we're pulling water.
It was almost full almost 5,000 gallons.
And so it feels good to be able to actually
utilize that water as quickly
in the season as right about now.
- Yeah. It's awesome.
- Something when you're hydrating a really, really dry bed
like this one is to kind of agitate
as you water to force it, to accept and rehydrate.
- Yeah. And I'm kind of making a little mound
and then pitting the roots down.
And then the key with the bare roots
is to not bury the crown which is where all the new leaves
are emerging, which there's a full video
on the Epic Gardening channel.
- Yep. Main channel, we got two parts strawberry video.
This is kind of just the second season.
- A reset.
- All right, Jacque, why don't you explain
in detail exactly how you're transplanting the strawberry.
- All right.
- You don't have to do it this way,
- Yeah.
- But it does seem to work pretty well.
- So I'm gonna get a nice start out.
- Yep.
- And then I'm gonna locate where I wanna do it.
So it's gonna be right around here.
- Okay.
- So what I'm gonna do kind of swirl out a little dome.
So there's like the center.
- Yep.
- And then I'm gonna spread the roots out
so they go in different directions.
They have more options for water that way.
- Yep.
- And I like to kind of push them into the soil
and then bury them.
- That's much closer to how a strawberry would've
naturally developed its root structure underground.
- Yeah.
- Than if you just plopped it in vertically.
- And then, there's the crown.
So there's the start point where you see
those roots coming out.
- Yeah.
- So we wanna make sure that's in, but not any deeper.
- Yep.
- And that's it.
- So you can even see a tiny bit of roots peaking,
but besides that, you're good to go.
So it's just repeating that
across the surface of the whole bed.
So we did decide to mulch this
with about an inch or two of the garden straw, just
because we figured it's been a hot day, it's gonna need it.
And maybe this will prevent some
of that crazy runner activity that we saw before.
For those of you who care,
here's a quick update on San Juan Cabbage Strano.
Look at the size of this thing.
We built this little makeshift shade cloth
and we have to expand now, but this isn't even close.
You thought the cabbages were big that we just grew.
This one's gonna be absolutely massive.
So it's been a good day.
It's actually been a while
since we've been able to kind of just jam in the garden.
- Yeah, seriously.
- At least at the same time.
- Yeah.
- So it's really good.
And I have to say, today's harvest, absolutely solid.
Why don't you take one of those? Bring it on home,
- I'm gonna take three.
- To the wife and kids, Jacques.
(both laughing)
We also have little Bobka here hanging out.
She probably wants a little bit of the cabbage
and of course the chickens also got their own cabbage
and they've been decimating it.
Absolutely destroying it, eating all those aphids.
So pretty good, as we move into Spring,
a lot more coming here on the Homesteading channel,
including more recipes, so stay tuned.
Good luck in the garden and keep on growing.