How We Feed our Family with a 20×40 ft. Garden – COMPLETE TOUR

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This is a garden tour of our 20×40 ft garden in zone 4b – Wisconsin. Not all information is provided in this video as it would be far too long. If you have questions, we will happily answer you in the comments.

Thank you for watching!

Links to Homesteading Equipment We Use:

25 gallon Grow Bags: https://amzn.to/3sUHGiQ

Fiskars Garden Trowel Set: https://amzn.to/464vCtU

Organic Liquid Fish Fertilizer: https://amzn.to/45NVp9M

Small Watering Can: https://amzn.to/44OK6wW

Large Watering Can: https://amzn.to/3LgTP84

Husqvarna 450 Rancher Chainsaw: https://amzn.to/3ZfHJCf

Bushel Baskets for Harvesting: https://amzn.to/3PuZie5

Bird Netting: https://amzn.to/3RfYbjG

Contact Us: shadyhomestead@gmail.com

This video description does contain Amazon affiliate links.

So today we’re going to give you a tour of our 20 by 40 Garden you wouldn’t think that a 20 by 40 is a large garden but it actually is especially if you’re doing it properly and it’s planned out and I think we have it dialed in this

Year and we’re going to show you exactly what that looks like so the first thing we have right here is our first raised bed that actually is an arch trellis above our raised bed it’s just a 5×4 raised bed everything is growing really well right here in this art trellis if

You look over here we have a whole bunch of butternut squash growing over this entire thing and that was the idea down below over here you’ve got some zucchini you’ve got two peppers and we have onions so just in this little space we have a mass amount of diversity and food

That’s growing here so what we have here is more butternut squash growing over this trellis you can see that it’s not doing so well over here that’s cucumbers our cucumbers did not do well this year for whatever reason more on that later but essentially what we tried to do is I

Looked at the grocery list and my wife makes every other week week and I thought we can grow a lot of the things that are on that list that’s a good starting point if you’re wondering what you should grow for your house and your family in the future so down here we

Have celery I purposely planted 52 celery plants and the idea behind that is one celery plant per week and everything that we grow we try to make sure it’s shelf stable meaning it’s stuff like onions potatoes that last a long time in a cold basement butternut

Squash that lasts all year we wanted to have things that were easy to preserve offered a lot of calories and often times we end up eating behind you right here are our potatoes and this might look kind of strange to you because it is down here these potatoes are actually

Grown in leaves and I saw this done online some people grow them in Hay but I purposely cleared this out I took all the wood chips and got rid of it put the potatoes right on the soil covered it with leaves because we’ve got a million

Trees around here so I thought why not bag up the leaves behind the lawnmower after they’ve been mulched put on top of the potatoes and then they grew back and we’re 100 self-sufficient on potatoes we haven’t bought potatoes in three or four years because we saved the little

Potatoes at the end of the year keep them in our cold dark basement bring them out next spring plant them in the ground and they regrow every year these potatoes are starting to die off it is August and usually around the end of August into September our potatoes die

Off that’s when we Harvest them and take them inside for the year over here what you’re going to notice is that we have this like teepee looking thing this is actually a thing that you put a grill on over a fire it’s a tripod stand but we

Never do that and so I just ended up putting extra wire around it last year we had green beans I believe on here but this year we decided to do sweet potatoes we took the sweet potatoes from the store put them in soil in our living

Room honestly in soil in our living room in a container watered them and Sprouts came we call them slips those individual slips become plants we planted them here and they come up and they actually trellis up this pretty well some of the plants started trellising out onto the

Ground it’s just it’s too much so we had to compromise and just kind of allow them to go out a little bit you might even notice this plant here we’ve got tons of potatoes randomly growing around our garden and that’s because in years past we may have planted a potato in the

Ground here and it just started to sprout and come up we’ve got them in the walking paths we have on places we didn’t intend them to be but we’re just going to let them grow right down here in this container I filled it up with soil and I thought this would be a

Perfect container for zucchini we did get some zucchini from it you can see this one growing here and again that’s what we make zucchini bread with and also stir fries so if you have an extra pot like this you’ve got some soil you might as well fill it up you might as

Well use it and you might also notice that we have a lot of wood chips here on the ground I get those free from the city at the depository and we put those in here to hi we put those in here to help with the soil erosion and it also makes a

Really nice walking path so after it rains if you are walking on a muddy wet path in your garden rose you’re going to find that those soil erodes and it’s really hard to walk on it’s wet it’s mushy it’s nasty so we do this to suppress weeds as well and it’s just

Nice to walk and it makes the garden look a lot nicer and have a little bit more function here’s our third art strellis you can tell the difference between Walmart seeds like General Big Box store seeds and really good seeds from a seed company these are Walmart Kentucky Wonder pole beans and the

Difference between pole beans and Bush Beans is pole beans Klein bush beans do not we like pole beans because we get a lot more these are green beans and you can tell that the beans over here have done a really really good job we got those from migardener.com a really great

Website for seeds and these have grown up really really nice we get beans every other day we’re coming out here picking beans celery may not look like Munch obviously there’s a ton of it on here so that’s the plant right there we should have one plant

Per week that’s the idea behind here if everything goes well and so far it has celery are not the easiest crop to grow at all they’re actually a lot they’re actually pretty high maintenance at first once you get them established though like you can see here

They grow really well so what we have right here are potato bags these are any type of Grill bag you’d like I think they’re 20 gallon 25 gallon maybe and the reason why we got these is because we can’t grill where our septic system is right here so we decided to put these

Grill bags here and the really good thing about grow bags is obviously you can move them where you want but the other good thing is at the end of the year all you do is dump them into some kind of container like a wheelbarrow and you can pick out the potatoes put the

Dirt back in and use them again the next year so throughout this tour you may notice that we have these borders right here this is just stuff that has fallen during storms or on their property or tree limbs that need to go for whatever reason I just simply take those and I

Line the edge of the garden just to have a nice cleaner look so you can mow the grass on one side have the Garden on the other this is like the crown jewel of our garden this is my favorite raised bed by far and what we did is we took

Fence pickets the things that people use to build fences in their backyard basically and we built these raised beds out of there they’re four feet wide by 18ft feet long 18 feet because you do six six and six that’s how they come at the store and then I took those same

Types of saplings those smaller trees in the woods and I made these little teepee structures up here and just put jute twine around there jute twine decomposers and so I thought we can have free trellises a vertical raised bed over here on this side we have a lot of

Indeterminate tomatoes we also have more butternut squash it’s completely taken over we have flowers that are eventually going to bloom we’re looking forward to that we’ve got onions we have volunteer potatoes again that just started popping up everywhere basically just a big jungle right here another volunteer potato right in the

Middle of the the little path here then if you look here this butternut squash is starting to grow out we had so much abundance in this raised bed alone that we could not even keep it in the raised bed and it’s pretty big 4 by 18 is a

Really large raised bed it completely just took over we’ve got some kind of tomato right here I’ll have to look at the label later I’m not really sure what that is this is just a big jungle mess up here and I’m constantly going around you can see here there’s twine that’s holding up

All of these plants the butternut squash and the indeterminate tomatoes have completely taken over which is a really good thing it looks like chaos but there is some order here we also use a lot of leaves on top of our mulch or excuse me

We use a lot of leaves on top of our soil you can see there it’s really settled now that’s going to help with weed prevention it helps hold in moisture so we don’t have to water as much basically this entire Garden is very very little work if you compare it

To a conventional Garden that’s in the ground where you’re tilling and weeding constantly and watering constantly and we want a garden that we could tend not constantly labor and work and have to be out here for hours every day I come out here for about five or ten minutes a day

And then I go back in the house I’m done so it’s a very low maintenance Garden once you have the infrastructure set up with the wood chips the raised beds The Mulch on top this wood up here this is really good to have so we did

Up crossbars right here from one of the teepees to the next and we’ve got more wood up here holding this up and it’s just a really simple free setup that we have from our property that we plan on using for years to come got these great

Big flowers in here it’s just a jungle butternut squash leaves up here and tons of stuff growing all around here volunteer potatoes tomato plants right here these are type of Roma tomatoes that grow up they’re indeterminate so they’re going to keep growing until the end of the season they just keep going

And going and going so if you look here we’ve got really nice healthy tomatoes so that is growing up here all the way to the top you have a whole bunch of little butternut squashes growing again over here you can see one over here growing this is what they look like when

They’re small the flowers falling off right there but then when they’re big you get to a much nicer size that you would think of when you see a butternut squash like this got a large Butternut down here behind that piece of wood right there so we’re expecting a huge

Harvest of butternut squash this year and this is what a medium butternut squash would look like as it starts to grow it’s kind of small yet but it’s eventually going to grow into maturity so this is absolutely just a mess that’s an organized mess and it’s it’s my favorite part of the garden

Because it’s it’s literally like a created jungle I mentioned that the raised beds were 18 feet long this was given to us by a friend this PVC right here and what we did there is we made sure all of our brassic are as much Brassica as we could could fit in your

Brassicas like broccoli cabbage lettuce things like that kale and we want everything to be protected so that the butterflies couldn’t lay those little worms in there and get into the Brassica so I covered it with bird netting these broccoli plants are out of this world they’re super tall like like this tall

They’re absolutely massive I wasn’t planning on that to happen but we did get some good yields you can tell that they’re floured already these are done these have been done for a couple of weeks we’re probably going to take these out of here and the reason why we’ve got

These plants over here which happen to be carrots down here is because we had two feet of extra space it’s 18 feet long but this is only 16. so we’re trying to utilize all the space we can and what better crop to grow than carrots because they fit in the ground

So well you can densely plant carrots and have a good yield so that’s what all of these are and eventually we’re gonna have to take these out but we want them to get as big as possible before we take them out and put them in our house for

The winter and it’s kind of hard to see but we’ve got 28 broccoli plants in here and they’re huge I was not expecting them to get this big not expecting them to be so big we planted a whole bunch of cabbage plants back behind the broccoli which you really can’t see but these

Cabbage plants are doing well I believe we have 18 or 20 cabbage plants here and this is basically just our Brassica bed that we tried to protect from the bugs and the worms which I think we did because when we harvested things from them we didn’t find any Autumn so I

Think it worked having this bug netting on here this bird netting and then over here we have a cabbage bed as well we have eight cabbages in here they’re doing okay but I noticed that the cabbages with the broccoli are doing much better and we’ve got eight of them

Over here because we ran out of room in the Brassica bed which is over there so I thought might as well utilize this space and fill up this raised bed and these are actually doing okay So eventually we’ll bring those into I mentioned before that the soil here in

Our property is average it’s okay you can grow things but they don’t do super well and this is an example of that these Roma tomatoes are the same ones we had over there that I shared with you where we did that Florida weave system with the twine and you can tell by how

Dark the leaves are how much better they got as far as bushiness they really grew out they’re just in standard tomato cages these tomato cages are a lot bigger than they look till we get the bigger ones my small ones just end up tipping over and

This is done really well we have five Roma tomatoes here this is all going to be canned for either pizza sauce or pasta sauce or something that’s what the function is of these Tomatoes is simply just to make sauce we want as many tomatoes as possible they are

Determinate so they only get about this tall then they’ll stop growing and they’ll start producing fruit and you can see that they’re already starting to produce right here they’re small yet but they’re still getting some we’ve got some bigger ones down here again here’s another volunteer potato

Plant I’m gonna take those flowers off another potato plant will have to harvest as well and then we had extra room for carrots we put those here this part of the raised bed is empty because that’s where we had our lettuce and our lettuce is now done for the year

We planted really nice flowers and believe it or not we got these from the dollar store and so for 25 cents a packet we decided to plant these next to one of the raised beds where we had space we absolutely love them and again it greases pollination so we just did

That whole row down here because we had the space to do it and over here these again we have these wooden poles I just put into the ground about three feet and then I put this extra chicken wire or Hardware uh wire that that we have laying around the property and I put

This here and we had our peas here but it’s too hot for the the peas so we actually ate a lot of those took the plants out came to the chickens and now we’re basically done for the year with peas unless we do a fall crop now

There’s a lot of method to the madness and I’m basically taking an entire two or three years four years worth of information that led to the system that we have and putting it in this video for you it’s no mistake that the chickens are right next to the garden and there’s

A couple reasons why we do that every time we a pruna plant pull a plant out because it’s done for the season we feed it to the chickens they don’t always eat it but they compost it they break it down by having it in their chicken area

Then next spring what I do is I take the top six inches or so of the soil from where the chickens are and I put that back on the garden like chicken compost basically we also take a lot of the leaves that fall in the yard we dump

That into the chickens so between the leaves and the manure that’s what I filled these raised beds with quite a bit of it now a lot of this is soil brought in from a different place but a lot of it is also chicken manure compost and leaves that we have from around the

Property I would say about 50 50. so these chickens do a lot of good things we have chickens because of eggs but I originally got these chickens to help with the garden so we did add two raised beds these beds where I got this lumber from this is from when we had some

Products shipped to the house or whatever for a building project so I didn’t I didn’t pay for this either this was Lumber that was kind of just part of the shipping process and what we have here is kind of an experiment what we do is we bought two strawberry plants place

Them in the ground and you can see that there’s a mother plant here a mother plant here and we’re kind of just letting them do their own thing they’ve sent out tons of Runners these Runners are creating individual plants once those plants get established what I

Think I might do is pick them up or reposition them basically so that they can take over the rest of this garden and then from there I’ll just cut the runners so that they’re not going crazy behind this bed is another Arch trellis this Arch trellis is running at 50

Capacity right now because the other side’s not doing well but this side is these are pickled cucumbers so these are a special type of cucumber that are really good for pickling because the seeds don’t get too big they grow on really good abundance and they’re really good for pickles we already have

Multiple jars in the fridge just for this sometimes we Harvest them at big sizes like this that’d be a pretty big pickle size cut them slice them however you want and sometimes we’ve even Harvest them harvested them like this at this size because sometimes we like eating them that size it’s basically

However you want to do it we planted the exact same type of cucumbers over here and they’re not doing well same soil same Sun I’m not quite sure what happened there but basically that’s just how it is and these cherry tomatoes have completely taken off I purposely put

Them in front of the crops behind them because I thought they would be smaller it appears that they’re indeterminate it didn’t say in the package I assume they’d be like this tall we’d pick a few and we’d have fun eating them fresh but we’re probably actually going to end up

Preserving some of these because we have so many we’ve got three plants one two and three just in this bed and this is probably enough for the year for making a ton of sauce behind them we have Roma tomatoes and there’s a robot tomato plant there

There and back over there and you can tell they’re still kind of small they should be doing better but they’re being blocked out by the cherry tomatoes in front it’s too late in the year to switch things around obviously so we’re just going to leave it and they’re being

Swamped out and not really getting much sunlight like they should be getting so next year we’ll have to do something different but for now we’re going to harvest as many tomatoes as we can they still fruited really well you can see there are a lot of tomatoes on these

Plants we believe that if you can feed yourself as much as you can it’s really going to help with your family it’s going to help with health it’s going to make you a better person it’s a great healthy activity to get your family involved if you have a chance to get out

There and grow something maybe you just start with a pot on your deck if you live in an apartment somewhere or whatever it is get something in the ground grow it it’s not as difficult as you think the hardest thing about gardening is people not being successful

Right away our first Garden wasn’t great we really struggle we struggle with weed control we struggle with getting the right nutrients in the soil we struggle with certain crops working out and certain crops not working out we still have that struggle today you saw the Cucumbers how some did well some others

Did not do so well get out there and grow something for your family you’ll be glad you did it thanks for watching take care