Another year has number and live on , with its joyfulness and sorrows .
Overall , 2024 was a very generative class , with unexampled adventure , unexampled crop , and better yields than we ’ve ever had .
Let ’s start by seeing how we did with our goals .
Goals
Our end for 2024 :
1 . establish a great quantity of purple ube
Yes ! We put in 120′ of ube run-in , and it has done well .
That is a two - twelvemonth quondam ube which weighed in at 11lbs . The young ones we planted were more like 2 - 4lbs .
We are leaving most of them in the ground through the winter and program to expatiate to a much bigger plot of ground in the spring .
2 . Plant a lot more sugarcane
Yes ! We almost tripled our growing country .
3 . Make enough money with the plant baby’s room to pay up us back for the glasshouse
Yes ! After many plant sales and trips to sodbuster ’s markets , we not only yield for the greenhouse , we covered the price of a trailer , all our pots , our works stock , and our potting soil . The nursery almost exactly broke even in 2024 .
4 . provoke meat birds
Yes ! We had a bad time of it with lots of deaths , but supervise to put thirty wench in the freezer .
5 . Add 12 Leghorns to the chicken hatful
No . We were ineffectual to source Leghorns at the right time . We also had a lot of piranha deaths and gave away our flock until we can secure up the chicken gulag and make it predator - proof .
6 . Raise 5,000 lbs of food for thought
Not quite .
7 . Produce 100 back-to-back YouTube videos in the spring
No . bound light asunder , due to all our nursery study , homeschooling , etc .
8 . Fill up the rest of the fenced garden area with crops
Not quite . I decided to depart corridor open to ride the Bobcat through for mulch deliveries .
9 . plant life pumpkins on top of compost piles
Yes ! We did this , and yielded over 1200lbs of pumpkins .
10 . Continue the landrace maize , watermelon , cucumber and daikon experiments
We continued the watermelon , corn and daikon experiments but put the corn on hold .
11 . constitute the demise hedging
Failed , though we did plant 12 trifoliate oranges and some Osage River orangeness in gaps . More needs doing .
12 . Get my baby’s room into the Palafox Market in Pensacola
Yes !
13 . meet in the food forest gaps
14 . Plant a row of ultra - dwarf apples in the Grocery Row Garden
We did n’t do this yet , but the trees are waiting for me over at Randall ’s .
15 . ReleaseMinimalist Gardening
Yes ! We releasedMinimalist Gardening : The Good Guide to Growing Food with Lesson March 20th .
16 . Release Florida Bullfrog’sSurvival volaille
Yes ! We releasedFree - Range Survival Chickenson September 8th .
17 . Finish writingThe Good Guide to Food Forests
Almost ! It ’s 3/4 done .
18 . Finish writingAlabama Survival Gardening
Stalled , but really call for to happen .
19 . Quit smoke for a year
No . I did this through Lent , then decided to go back to some cigars and a tube . Now I am mostly smoking a tube and not inhaling .
That ’s 9 out of 19 accomplished , with a few more goals that almost got done .
Garden Yields – 3049lbs
yam 206lbUbe Yam 18lbDaikons 16lbMulberries 12lbPineapple 2lbPotatoes 134lbTomatoes 161lbPumpkins 1275lbEggplant 32lbCukes 44lbCucuzza 136lbPeppers 3lbBlueberries 1lbWatermelon 278lbTobacco 15lbJelly Melon 25lbPersimmons 12lbPecans 118lbD. bulbifera bulbils 60lbD. Pentaphylla yams 20lbSorrel 8lbCassava 91lbArrowroot 7lbTurnips 6lbSweet Potatoes 69lbSugarcane 300 lb
Animal Products
Eggs 901Milk 90 gallonsPork ( 5 hogs ): 1203 lbsChicken ( 30 ) 65lbs
That is 4,317 pound of food produced on the homestead this yr .
If I become out and dig up all the yams , we could probably stretch that to 4,600 or so , but I ’ve get so many yam sit on the porch already that I do n’t defy dig more !
Infrastructure improvement
We bought a pulpit bucket for the Bobcat .
We buy a used Kubota L2501 tractor with a mowing deck .
We buy a 7′ bushhog for the Kubota
We bought a closed in nursery trailer
We bought a 2006 Ford F-150 4WD pickup truck
We bought an antique cane mill
We add a corridor to the woods that connects our pasture
We took out dozens of popcorn Tree
Other Successes and Failures
We successfully grew lots of Roma Lycopersicon esculentum in the new glasshouse and Rachel made gallons of sauce .
Tomatoes make you palpate robust !
We finally got a tractor . This was on my wish - list for a farsighted sentence . Despite the financial pain get , it should pay for itself in saved labour . The Bobcat has sure enough done so ! The new stump bucket has also allowed us to remove a caboodle of nasty popcorn trees that were push around the edge of our nation and lea . About 80 more and we ’re clear .
YouTube subscription have been vapid . We have 332,621 reader , as of 12/24 .
rule book sales have been poor . Less than one-half of what they were two long time ago .
I relaunched Instagram , but have not had much success with it .
on-line sales from my girl ’s nursery have been skilful .
We launched our private community on Skool and now have 204 members .
At Skool , I was capable to mail lots of Zoom gardening training academic session , as well as multiple exclusive interviews with Florida Bullfrog , JD of Castra Isidore Farm , Steve Solomon and Joseph Lofthouse . We also film and station a 5 - part food for thought wood class titledHow to Start a Food Forest the Easy Way . I am presently putting together an in - depth Florida gardening course titledHow to acquire One Ton of Food in Your Florida Garden ( in Your First Year ) , that should be released in former spring 2025 .
The effort to arise 4,000lbs of pumpkins was not successful , but we did get 1275lbs . And we ’re already tired of pumpkins !
We raise enough pork to fill two chest Deepfreeze .
We devote up on chickens for a while due to uttermost predator pressure .
Our ducks hatched chick , but all of them were killed . We started the yr with seven ducks and only have three left now . They are 100 % free - range and have run themselves completely via forage .
The glasshouse separate even , but sales dropped rapidly in June and we gave up for the twelvemonth . We are now regenerate our greenhouse , which was entirely overgrown with runaway plants that grow through their pots and jumble everywhere . It seems spring is the best time for plant sales , so we hope to grow enough this year just to sell in leap , then we ’ll have a foramen through the balance of the year .
We discovered that we could disseminate sugarcane from exclusive - guest cuttings , which allowed us to grow more plants than in the past .
We tested jelly melons , Jamaican sensationalistic yams andDioscorea pentaphylla . The jelly melon were productive , but not really like .
The Jamaican yellow yams produced little roots that were somewhat bitter . We are letting the root re - grow in the spring . TheD. pentaphylladid well , and bring forth fortune of bulblet this year .
We add up three new motley of edibleD. bulbiferaand successfully saved bulbils we can grow out in 2025 into many more works .
We grew a lot of velvet attic seed for 2025 .
And , last but not least , Scrubfest III was a great succeeder . All the talks from the effect were also recorded for the first meter , and are in my community at Skool .
YouTube
Long - form videos : 65 , shorts : 54 , livestreams : 10
The Blog
January : 30
February : 24March : 25April : 23May : 21June : 21July : 13August : 6September : 8October : 11November : 9December : 5
196 total .
I dropped off on web log posts to focalise onmy reader - only content at Skool .
Thank you all for sticking with us this yr , and may you have a wonderful 2025 .
And finally , I station this video this morning . As one year ends and the next lead off , we are resetting the gardens for 2025 !
