It’s Tuesday, January 15, 2019.

You must be doing something right? I can’t seem to get anyone to watch my videos.

The one thing I have noticed lately is, we don’t really watch tv so in the evenings, what we do, we’re about done with our day around 8:30ish. We stream Youtube.

Watching on TV you can’t interact but I get on the iPad and if I like their video or make a comment I get a lot more people who seem to be interested in my channel.

You have like 35, 53  views, etc. I have like no views. 0 views at all. Watching others, I’ll have to try that.

You have to be persistence. We’ve been doing it for a year and we’re only just getting somewhere.

I see it as you’ve only been doing it for a year!

Honestly it’s been the easiest gardening method I have ever learned!

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Tell us a little about yourself.

Sure, well basically I’ve been gardening most of my life since I was s little kid, life happens to you, and you have kids, we have 2 kids. We always have a family garden, nothing but raising a few vegetables for ourselves. The last few year with the kids out on our own. We have 5 acres, so we don’t need it for livestock and when the kids were in ag.

October 2017. We kind of came up with the idea, what are we going to do with our land now?

We’ve always been avid gardeners so we started .

• market gardens
• CSA programs
• reasons they do it
• health benefits

1/2 acre and pasture next to our house

basically ripped

what are we doing

Just watch YouTube at night

Who do you feel like you’ve been watching that give you the most.

The subjects range from homesteading to organic  gardening

Some of our favorites.

MI Gardener

he’s a good one

Justin Rhodes with the abundant permaculture

vlog everyday they do everything

• livestock and gardening

Living Traditions

• homesteading
• raising animals and things

Well that’s  a good list.

Tell me about your first gardening experience?

Well, as a kid, growing up in town at my parents house, my dad just let me sort of get a small garden plot in the backyard. Other then some squash, IDK what  remember what I grew then. 

My parents had a lake home and we had a 1/4 acre had a big garden there, always helping in that.

Over all the years, raising our family and stuff, the importance of teaching your kids

• where food comes from
• nutritional value of it

raise our kids

responsibility

Good work ethic, things like that.

So did they do 4H or FFA (Future Farmers of America)?

We were involved with the FFA for all of my kids. We primarily raised Texas Long Horn show cattle. The kids earned scholarship money for college by doing that.

• horses
• play days
• little rodeos

Always had an active lifestyle, hunting and fishing as kids, my dad did that when we were kids.

Are you from Texas, born and raised?

I am, lived here all my life, here in the Dallas area.

How did you learn how to garden organically?

Over the years, but in the last few years more important! The older you get, you think.

I’ve been putting this in my food, I wonder what that actually does?

You read the labels and think, I can’t pronounce that why am I eating that?

Sure! Vani Hari, the food babe just sent out an email this morning with all the weird things in Almond milk.

Yeah, absolutely

so many things in

We agree, other than for a holiday or something where we need it as an ingredient we pretty much only use almond milk.

make it ourselves

almond milk

really easy

The almonds:

• get soaked
• ground up and put in a nut bag
• after ground up squeeze through nut bag

what comes out almond milk

takes 10-15 minutes

really easy

almond butter which I love and a lot of the store bought things have a lot of additives

butter is really easy

roast almonds at about 350º

Use a Vitamix to blend them into butter

if they are a little dry add a little oil really goes a long way

a lot less expensive then what you would buy in the store.

Does it come out the texture of peanut butter?

What we typically make is a little bit thicker

add anything like a tasteless oil, avocado or sunflower oil something that doesnt’ have any flavor. You can thin it a little bit by adding oil to it

consistency of buying anything that is processed food and all the additive things that go into them.

I often wonder, is buying peanut butter and making a sandwich is that processed or does that count as home made? Or is that still processed if all the parts are processed but you put them together.

I was just talking to Olivia who Rent Mason Bees about the bees pollinating the almonds.

 my sons a bee keeper

sent all of his hives for the winter

leases the beehives to them for the almond bees

have not had any luck with mason bees.

She said their main goal is to spread them, they’re super pollinators and they’ll pollinate so much more then a honeybee, but they do require a bit of maintenance in the winter, they actually give them a bath, if you don’t clean out their homes, the pollen mites grow and grow and wipe out the bees.

I’ve heard that they are such great pollinators

• not as aggressive
• don’t sting

IDK why we don’t have more of them. They say they’re everywhere

maybe Idk know what I’m looking for

I would love to know about them and get them on our place.

I know she said that they ship different ones at different times of year. Maybe it was the wrong time of year or something. Maybe you’ll want to give that episode a listen to.

Tell us about something that grew well this year.

It’s pretty much winter right now

a few things in the ground

first greenhouse able to put up this past season

• carrots
• spinach
• broccoli
• cauliflower

growing and doing pretty well.

Over the season last year, the biggest things we had the most success

• lettuces
• kale
• daikon radishes

I didn’t know about them until I started gardening. They are 

• amazing
• grow huge
• flavor is good in soups and salads

Really diverse.

I didn’t know that you could saute radishes and in the beginning of the year before the beets etc were ready, and they were so good. Mike grew a lot of different colored giant radishes. I grew kale for the first time last year!´

first vegetable!

• dinosaur kale
• blue dwarf kale
• garlic did well for us

I call it a green house, but it’s basically more like a hoop house

not polycarbonate

green colored plastic mesh that filters out some of the UV rays

really inexpensive

starting on a shoestring budget.

challenging

found this company

here in Richardson, just north of us, fresco

Delta Canopy Company

greenhouses of all kind

I found this greenhouse, that was like $400

I put it together one day, literally took maybe a day to get it all set up

We really had one big failure, before I had tried to make a high tunnel or greenhouse out of pvc of grannies plastic. The day that I finished we had a really big windstorm, it was kind of funny we were out there. 

trying to tag this thing down

We kind of worried when we bought this one

Our wind  can be horrible sometimes

40-50mph for a couple of days sometimes

held up well

lightweight aluminum frame

Greenhouse

• door at both ends
• windows down both sides for ventilation
• plastic comes down on the sides
• wider then the greenhouse frame

So we put a lot of mulch on outside edges of it. On the inside I took the screw end ground anchors. We wired an anchor from the frame to the greenhouse, it might move an inch or two here or that but it still strong so far.

We’ve had a lot of wind and snow problems here.

Every once in a while we’ll get a snow.

I know it snows in Texas because when I drove through Texas I was going from New Mexico to New York the day after Halloween and I got stuck in a big blizzard in Texas!

Is there something you would do different next year or want to try/new?

Well, last year the produce that we grew,

• friends at church
• people we would meet and talk to
• come to our house
• take things to church to buy

Which worked pretty well with what we were growing but this year with our new garden plan and layout we should have a lot more produce this year!

So what’s exciting for me is we are going to try to set up a little farmstead, under a couple of tables and so people can come to us on Saturday mornings and buy what they want.

Some gardens and market farmers will do a pick your own, but I’m a little skeptical of that right now.

What I am hearing is that sometimes you get people who don’t know how to harvest lettuce and they’ll not know to cut your lettuce and pull it up!

Leaf lettuce will continue to produce

pull the plant up it’s done

exciting thing to try to grow enough

I talked with Pam Grewe here in Whitefish and they had a farm and they would have a big volunteer day once a week. She said she really had to focus on helping the volunteers and managing and moving around interacting, helping them and then on the other days, she would work quietly and be very specific about not having people on the farm on off days.

That’s might be something you want to look into is having a volunteer day, where you focus on teaching them so they are getting an education too.

build our clients up by having them

That’s a good idea, I have thought about it, but haven’t really done anything to get it going.

She said so many people told her how much they loved the farm and remember visiting as children. Management whether your managing preschools or volunteers or a farmer’s market that takes a lot of give and take, and understanding and listening. I always like to expand on what’s successful and go from there.

Tell me about something that didn’t work so well this season.

What didn’t go so well last year? I’ve been gardening last year was simple green beans! 

I was reading that blog post.

it’s like what is going on here

planted

different points

different times

different conditions

They just wouldn’t take off

• they’d grow up
• would look great flower
• wither away

no idea what was going on?!

last round planted some

simple blue lake bush bean

literally so prolific, I thought pretty much the same thing, they flowered and we were having beans like crazy!

So I had to recheck the package

• climbed everything
• went crazy
• vining climbing all the trellises
• everything they could touch they were climbing.

bush beans

really climbed like crazy!

Trying to grow them the normal times and stuff that you would normally grow...