Thank you, I'm still alive but also still dealing with some side effects, way better today though than say 2 years ago though so it just takes time. I have really enjoyed these raspberries, they taste amazing. If you decide to ever transplant it or grow it in the ground, they will spread (which could be good or bad depending on how much space you have)

Sorry, it's hard to tell what people hear in my videos that I don't know is there because my hearing got damaged during chemo and entire blocks of frequencies are gone. About 2-3 months ago, the fire department shows up at my house at 4am, nearly having to break the door down, because I couldn't hear the C02 sensor alarm, or the fire truck sirens, or the fire truck horns and this isn't the first time this has happened, my sister has come to visit and like what's that sound? I'm like what sound? She narrows it down to the location and it's a UPS power supply battery alarm. Then add to that the constant chirping like millions of crickets because of severe tennitus also from the chemo....I do these videos because I enjoy helping others and it gives me something to get my mind off everything.

I would say it will be ok as long as there isn't any type of mold visibly growing on it anywhere. The alcohol shouldn't allow that but if something wasn't fully submerged it would be possible. It may also be a stronger strength than normal so you might take into consideration to reduce dosage amounts from that batch.

Thank you, hope you can find some other great videos on my channel, lord knows i try hard.

Thanks for the suggestion on sealer. With langstroth long hives, there is a little bit of a learning curve. I'm kinda thinking people wouldn't realize how different they were if they were new to beekeeping but someone with experience is going to see the differences right away. Climate is going to be a huge player in how well they over-winter as that seems to be the biggest issue i have seen for zone 6b.

I paid way more for it myself. I should have waited on the better deal :) But honestly even at the higher price i paid, im still satisfied with it.

@@sharpridgehomestead In this case, who knows if the deal would have come if you'd waited. Your satisfaction with it is the most important detail!

Some tips, related to temperature, timing, & hard seeds. Okra likes soil temperature very warm, like watermelon, close to 70 degrees or even warmer. Okra seeds have a very hard shell, so i use a fingernail file to remove a small part almost all the way through. When that is done, i then soak the seeds in a glass of water 8-24 hours to soften the shell further. If the soil is already above 70 degrees, you can then direct seed to plant them in the ground. Otherwise you should use seedling heat mats to help with germination, or if you have something like an aerogarden, they will readily sprout in those also. Okra produces best in the heat of July and August for zone 6b but will continue to produce all the way through october most years. Hope this helps. .

I didnt always like okra myself but something changed about 10-15 years ago and now it's one of my favorites. That was a strange period in my life because i used to hate sweet potatoes too and now it's also one of my favorites. I mostly prefer okra fried but will alao make gumbo with it too. Heck, i might as well just be honest, 10-15 years ago is when i stopped drinking alcohol. My taste buds changed after that.

@@sharpridgehomestead That's really interesting! I've never been an alcohol drinker so I'm not sure what effect it has on taste buds but I wonder if it's similar to when I stopped eating the majority of processed foods in my diet (instant oatmeal, for example) and started making almost everything from scratch. After that, things like instant oatmeal tasted so salty (or too sweet or... etc) to me. It was as if my taste buds were reset!

@@sharpridgehomestead I was thinking of soaking the seeds & resowing to try once more to grow okra this season but am nervous about filing seeds and damaging the seed germ inside. I'm going to try your suggestions and hope for the best. Thanks for providing such detail! Incidentally, earlier this summer I bought a book called The Whole Okra--about the history, cultivation and eating of this plant. Don't know what possessed me lol. But it has a range of recipes (and even skincare recipes!) included. I'll report back if I find any particularly promising. I hope I do because I hardly ever eat fried foods. Not on purpose, just don't gravitate toward them, I guess.

@@ofrecentvintage thats exactly a similar effect. What we eat or consume affects the taste of other foods. Great job on no longer eating processed foods. Its hard to stop that because of the convenience but health-wise its the best choice. I hate to say it but people are basically slowly killing themselves from all the additives and chemicals included in them to make them more visually appealing or last longer. Those additives and chemicals affects our taste.

That's a squash, you think?

Def zucchini squash. I've already harvested several from it and have an upcoming video on making zucchini french fries and some other zucchini recipes (casserole, bread, flour, and maybe i will do pickles too). Everybody who gardens and grows zucchini always has an excess of them so finding ways to use them up so they dont go to waste becomes a job in itself lol.

@@sharpridgehomestead Haha! This is the first year I have zucchini seedlings that weren't dug up and obliterated by the pesky garden marauders I have. I'm looking forward to a bumper crop (hopefully!). 😁

@@ofrecentvintage i have several upcoming videos and some in past uploads on how to use up excess zucchini. I literally taught a friend over the phone last night the upcoming recipe. I love zucchini but it has this slow trickle to sudden bumper crop mentality that leaves people wondering how they will use it up so it doesn't go to waste. My top favorites which also work for long term storage so you can enjoy zucchini over winter are zucchini fries (i like better than potato fries), zucchini bread, zucchini flour, and a new one is zucchini blondies

@@sharpridgehomestead I definitely like the idea of zucchini winter food ideas! Looking forward to your videos for sure! Can the zucchini fries be frozen to eat later? When you say zucchini blondies, do you mean like a brownie? Also, zucchini flour is an intriguing idea!

That is it, patience which nobody seems to have these days due to running from 1 fire to the next. I try to live a way slower lifestyle.

Thank you! Its sad that it is exactly the way you said it is for a lot of things on youtube. IDK how many times I have seen videos of people homesteading making it out like its rainbows, flowers, and butterflies all the time. That gives a false sense of the challenges homesteaders face every day and then people who perceive everything to be easy all the time quickly get reality delivered to them when they start. Its because of that, I keep everything honest because I don't ever want to feel like I have to mislead people for likes and clicks.

these are one of my favorites, they have a really amazing taste. I can't remember exactly which winter it was because it was during cancer recovery years and those years kinda run together, I think it was 2021-2022, but we had over a week of sub-0 weather and I planted these outside in the ground in a raised bed (not even really knowing if they would survive or not). I mention this because that winter killed a good deal of them off and I haven't really spent much time trying to revive them (mostly because I have been struggling with other more important things still). They have struggled to come back but this year they were finally looking really good in growth and they have spread to pretty much fill up that raised bed again, but they are still under-performing on production from that event. Hopefully they are back to normal next year. One other thing I will mention in case you decide to plant them in the ground instead of a container, they will also spread outside of the raised bed. I will still find them sometimes growing 10 feet away from where I originally planted them but I am fine with that.

yes it is, there is plenty for it to eat here and there are plenty of them around here too. In the video description I was talking about some of the others I have seen over the years before I was really doing youtube videos regularly .... but there are pictures of some of those on my instagram account. The largest one was closer to 8 feet in length and it would come every day and lay in the grass just a few feet away from me while I was building the chicken coop. You could really tell it was an old one, it was just so graceful in everything it did ... like it knew it was the king of the local rat snakes lol and for a few years after that I would see it occasionally but I haven't seen it at all in the last 4 or 5 years now.

you're welcome .... stop back and enjoy some of my other videos, always let me know if you have any questions

I was just looking at my figs earlier today, the indoor figs are doing great, the outside ones not so much yet but they still have time to fruit. Since i got cancer, they have been harder to keep up with the way i normally winterize them and they are not very cold hardy so they suffer and don't peoduce as much the following year. Maybe i will get to them this fall (i still have to prioritize everything post-cancer and only do what absolutely needs done, and winterizing figs the last few years has been lower on the right-now list)

​@@sharpridgehomestead Understandable. Keeping up with it all is a full-time job of its own. Your health and well-being are priority so if the figs (and other tasks) have to wait, so be it. I know how challenging it is to "do it all yourself," especially with health concerns. Based on your videos, I think you're doing great. 🎉

I was also an early user of this app and it has improved drastically over the years. I have suggested this app to many of my friends and I believe they all use it too (or a good deal of them do). I used it a lot when I was doing "square foot, raised bed gardening" but didn't use it this year at all. I started to, but it was not acting the way I expected lol. I think I should have tried to do the garden planning on a tablet instead of my phone or broke the garden down into smaller sections because the size of the garden on my phone screen just made it very hard to drop plants on it even zoomed in. I finally gave up trying to use it and went back to the way I gardened in the 90's .... pencil and paper lol .... which seems like forever ago but you should see the pictures from that time period (the other day I did find some digital garden pictures from like 1997 .... the pictures are so small and grainy you can barely even tell what it is.)

@@sharpridgehomestead I actually used it a bit less this year also. I needed to see overviews of my whole garden more than just individual beds for planning purposes and I just didn't have the time/energy to replicate my GrowVeg beds in Planter. But when I am able to duplicate/keep my garden plans current in both apps (rare!), Planter is very helpful for that "zoomed in" individual bed view!

Thank you

Word of advice, watch out for those foraging and identification apps. Sometimes they get it wrong and it can make you very ill or even dead. If you have someone local good with foraging, consult with them. At the very least Google "plants that resemble whatever" the app says it is. It is funny how a lot of things we treated as weeds before covid suddenly have use now. I've been foraging and making dandelion and redbud jelly and syrups for years. People would turn up their noses like ewwwwe, eating weeds. And now both are very popular. Some of those same people have even tried the things I make and loved them. There is a video somewhere on my yt where i made wild garlic jelly as a joke and it's literally one of the best things to put on hamburgers.

@@sharpridgehomestead Very good advice indeed! I fell for foraging in junior high when I had a chance to take a mini class but it's not a skill/knowledge base I use on a regular basis. I tend to think of it as a survival skill and eat only what I grow myself at the moment. I do intentionally grow some "weeds"--Italian dandelion comes to mind! And I suppose many of the plants I grow in my medicinal and tea garden beds might be considered weeds. Oh well. Yum yum! Lol. Wild garlic jelly sounds delicious btw. Almost like a savory relish!

It is definitely a workout but there is nothing else i can rhink of as efficient as it is. Years ago i used to use "weed eaters" and between the crappy plastic lines breaking non stop, carberators messing up from stale gas, and trying to remember which gas can has the right gas in it....they are just such a hassle to use. Some places around my property i keep cleaned up in a matter of minutes with this every year and it just works wvery time. I love it like that, simple like me lol.

@@sharpridgehomestead I have an electric weed trimmer, and it works, but the charge doesn't last as long as I would like and I agree with you about the plastic string (plus I want to limit my use of plastic). This tool will only run out of steam when I do. Which may be quick at first lol. But I'll "recharge" faster too! 😂

Likewise and as always, thank you. It always makes me smile when i see your posts saying that.

@@sharpridgehomestead This made *me* smile! 😊 It's only right to reflect the blessings you consistently send into the world back to you 🙏🏾💕

With everything i plant, i dont even allow them to bloom the first 2-3 years with berries and fruit trees the first 4-5 years....that allows roots to establish. Mine are 4 or 5 years old now. The elderberries though, by accident, i let bloom their 2nd year only because i was in active cancer treatment and didnt pull the blooms off. Elderberries do require a slightly acidic soil but not a lot of nitrogen, otherwise they will just grow lots of leaves and never produce flowers. So for elderberries as soon as i see the first signs of life around February or March, i give each plant about 1-1/2 cups of espoma UL30 acidic fertilizer (depending on size) I do blueberries a little heavier amount, grapes about the same amount. Any other acid loving plants get it too. I buy espoma ul30 in the 2 pack 30lb bags from amazon simply because its cheaper and i cant get bags that large locally. They last me about 2 seasons here but i have a LOT of berries that uses it.

i had to look up those varieties .... we should exchange cuttings lol .... this happens to me all the time where people I know post or comment but I don't recognize their yt name but if we live close (and we have to live somewhat close because one of those varieties only grows in zone 6b-7.0) or know each other .... we should exchange elderberry cuttings this fall :) Save us both some money.

@@sharpridgehomestead You recommended Espoma UL30 to me in one other comment but I forgot to look up what it is. I'll do that today. At the moment, I use Espoma soil acidifier and Dr. Earth Acid Lovers fertilizer for my blueberries. Didn't realize elderberries needed acidic soil too 😬 I clearly need to do a bit more research. Thanks for the heads up!

@@sharpridgehomestead Alas, we don't know each other IRL. I'm a channel subscriber in New York zone 6a/6b. I try to use microclimates around my house, along with other tools/techniques, to push what I can grow here. Winters can be very harsh indeed! I've never tried to take a cutting from one of my plants (the elderberries are 1-yr old now) but I can learn how and, if you think they can survive the mail, I can try to send your way this fall.

Its worth a try but the success rate goes down drastically the older they get. Its usually best to treat it within the first 4 weeks after they are born. I've told others in other comments, the over-all goal is to get the chicken where it can eat food and drink water without any help but its also a good idea to try to mask the fact it is "different" within the flock. Chickens in general can be mean to other chickens who are injured and if they sense a bird is injured they will kill it over time through constant abuse and they do this for the overall health of the flock (and that is because through evolution, chickens know an injured chicken will attract larger predators). If the flock seems like they are singling that one chicken out and fighting with it, your only options then are to put it down or separate it from the others in the flock.....which brings up another issue, a single chicken on its own will be targeted by other predators. Hope this helps, if you have any other questions, don't hesitate to ask.

lol, def cheaper than a yacht.....i think :) I live one of the most frugal lifestyles of anyone I know. I raise, grow, hunt, forage, barter 80% of everything I eat (sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less). I cook 3-5 home made meals for each day (although I do what I call homestead meal prepping, sort of like fitness meal prepping for an entire week), even so far as bake all breads, buns, biscuits, cookies, and cakes from scratch....heck, I even make my own ice cream. About the only thing I really buy from the store are dry beans, rice, flour, the occasional craving, and sugar and the sugar is mostly for the bees because I use honey instead of sugar most of the time. A lot of times when people hear my story, they think I do it because its cheaper and that is not always the case but what makes what I grow or raise different is that I know exactly how it was grown and raised and prepared. I really believe and my cancer doctors have agreed, my lifestyle and fitness level before i got cancer was a huge contributing factor to beating cancer (the cancer is a weirder story, I hadn't seen a dr or been sick in over 25 years but like everything in life, it was go BIG or go home so cancer it was). I generally avoid any pesticides and try to use fertilizers sparingly (but I do have a couple of large compost piles I keep going every year). Not every year is a good year for fruits and berries though, many of my 70 fruit trees haven't produced for 2 years now because of the weird early spring weather. Its a full time job to do it at the scale i do things though, so that is always fun staying up to date.

@@sharpridgehomestead So... If you have to work that much for it... it's not free per say.. But, it keep you moving and it's obviously a great thing for your physical and mental health. I wish you the best. I live in apartment, in Montreal. I also do my bread and pretty much all meal from basic ingredients. It's amazing how little garbage and recycling I do per year. I started a 46 square feet garden this year. I have to share with birds and insect... But it makes me smile. I've bought 2 raspberry and 2 blackberry. The yellow raspberry die after two weeks. The soil was way too damp. The other ones are barely surviving... I hope for the best. One month latter, they have new leaves, I think these 3 will survive. "I never lose... Either I win or I learn."

@@alexandrevaliquette3883 now I am really jealous since you are in Montreal. I was there a couple years ago for work (2018 actually). It was a pretty cool town. I was only there for a week but tried to see a lot of points of interest. One sticks out .... there was this restaurant just outside of Montreal I fell in love with because of the REAL maple syrup and not that crap they try to sell us in the states as maple syrup. That place was called Érablière Au Palais Sucré. Their food and overall experience there was excellent. The way I look at "my time" raising all this stuff, its like tax free work. Its about the ONLY thing in the states they haven't figured out how to tax yet ... my own time. So in a way, its my way of sticking it to the man ... if that makes sense. I also don't have much trash or anything to recycle, except for amazon boxes and that's about 50% of my compost. Suggestion on the plants dying, most berries prefer an acidic soil so if you haven't check the PH of your soil. 2-3 weeks is about how long most plants live if the ph is wrong, which is why I suspect that could be a problem (but as you said, waterlogged roots would be another that takes about that much time)

@@sharpridgehomestead It warms my heart that you had a great experience in Montréal and you took the time to write with the proper accent . It show a deep respect of my culture (no pun intended!). I'm pretty sure the waterlogged was the main issue. But I've think about pH, and for no logical reason I've not take it. (full disclosure; I have a real pH meter on my desk, pH paper and I'm an... analytical chemistry technician!). I know about the acidic requirement.. I'm just lazy! Ok, I'll take a sample today. I'm curious about the symptoms of waterlog Vs pH issue? What I've got was yellowing from bottom to top over a 2-3 weeks process. Then stabilised (on died, 3 other stay still for about 7 days), then they start to get life back slowly. One even get new leaves. And, obviously, the dead one is now part of the yellow raspberry spirit! My garden is filled with only 100% 3 years composted horse manure (organic, no pesticides). Once I suspected the waterlog problem, I've removed the plants, mixed 30-50% sand and decomposed wood chips in the hole. The objective was to dry the soil/root and aerate it for future proofing. Other topic: I've got a microscope last week. I was so impressed by the amount of life in my soil! It seem like I have almost more living thing compare to (inorganic + dead) mass.

@@alexandrevaliquette3883 I liked it in monreal, I wish I could have visited longer. Always planned to go back up some day. The people I met on the streets were generally nice and welcoming (another thing you don't see in the states very often, especially larger cities). I expected it to be way colder but kinda realized one of the differences between where I live and montreal, we get bitterly cold here and way below freezing, so cold it can't snow and if it does snow its a very dry snow. But montreal seems to hover right around that freezing mark so you get very wet snows (at least when I was there) What you described yellowing from the bottom up and then getting better gradually is usually an indication of water logged (or magnesium deficiency). With ph, the symptoms are usually gradual yellowing that never improves an gets worse almost always with stunted growth, leaves falling off, and eventually death, bark that starts to scale off. Adding sand was definitely a great idea, as long as the water in the bottom of the hole has some way to drain away from the roots or the hole is much deeper than the roots will ever get for more than a day or 2. We have poor native soil in kentucky too. It has so much clay, the top inch will turn into concrete when it dries out. But believe it or not, most plants grow pretty well in it anyways because it is so nutrient rich in the parts that don't dry up and turn hard and that top hard layer forms almost a lid where the moisture can't evaporate under it ... so the soil generally stays pretty damp in the 3-8" depth most vegetables grow. Microscopes are so neat and you are correct, there is an entire universe in what we can't see with bugs, fungi, and all kinds of organisms (you often will find after you improve soil with woodchips and compost that mushrooms will start to grow in those areas as part of the wood chips breaking down - the one to be most aware of looks like white hairs buried in the ground and they are super beneficial to plants, they are called mycorrhizae and you can artificially add them to soil - I've used a company caleld "Great White" for many years, you can find it on amazon. Google Mycorrhizae for all the benefits.

yep, daisy's are all part of the same family asteraceae which includes frost aster and fleabane but medically they can all have different uses. The last few weeks, in several of the foraging groups I am in, I have seen people asking questions about how to prepare daisy for herbal tea and noticed not all they had in their pictures was daisy .... so knowing fleabane is different is very important (it promotes menstral flow which can cause problems with those pregnant or trying to get pregnant)

The last few weeks, in several of the foraging groups I am in, I have seen people asking questions about how to prepare daisy for herbal tea since its in bloom everywhere right now it seems and noticed not all they had in their pictures was daisy, almost all contained fleabane to some degree. So I mostly recorded this video for them. Fleabane promotes menstral flow which could be bad for someone pregnant or trying to get pregnant

Emmenagogue is the technical name for "herbs that increase blood flow in pelvic region". I should also add, fleabane isn't the only common foraged herbs used for medicinal purposes or just enjoyment with that trait, and its not even the strongest. There is an extensive list here: herbpathy.com/Action-of-Emmenagogue-Cid177

@@sharpridgehomestead I haven't heard/seen the daisy tea content but good of you to warn folks!

@@sharpridgehomestead Yup. I'm aware of this term and have used some herbs for this particular effect, though not specifically for pregnancy-related situations. Thanks for the link! It'll be interesting to see what I'm already familiar with.

@@ofrecentvintage I think its great that foraging for food or medicinal properties of native plants has gotten so popular since covid but I really wish people didn't trust "internet" so much. In this day and age, its hard to tell if people are just misidentifying things or are they trying to intentionally cause harm?

lol, does it sound like a pool hall behind me? The chemo and radiation treatments ruined my hearing to the point I have to wear hearing aids and some sounds/frequencies just don't register now. I should have recorded a video on the day the fire department showed up at 4am and was 1 step away from breaking my front door down when I finally woke up .... apparently sirens and smoke alarms and c02 alarms are all things I can't hear now.

Awesome! If you weren't adding beans, you would want to add fertilizer on both sides of each corn row. If you planted beans around the corn like a 3 sisters method, you might be able to skip the fertilizer. Corn loves fertilizer though and its how you get nice plump kernels. What hilling solves is the corn will get blown over during high winds if you don't hill it. In smaller backyard garden sized areas for growing corn, space is a premium so hilling is a great technique to keep it upright if you get any heavy wind from storms. For larger agricultural sized fields (I kind of assume the amish plant huge fields of corn), they generally accept the loss from corn getting blown over which normally would only affect the first few outer rows. That's kind of the differences hilling or not hilling.

Thank you always and God bless you too

My wife just finished radiation and chemo. I know how much of a battle it is everyday. Good luck to you!

@@91210paige Thank you and good luck to you and your wife. I dont know her name but i will pray for her and you both. Be strong for her, she will need you now more than ever.

Thank you very much.

Thank you, i hope someone has a solution or maybe even a comment leads me down the right path.

Im eating about 7000 calories in excess per week, so i should be gaining 2lbs a week. Pre-cancer me, that's about correct but post cancer me it doesn't work

Thank you for the suggestions. I will look into those things. I can tell you I spent a large portion of 2021-2022 lifting heavy 5x5 extended program with similar diet only I was doing 3x body weight in grams of protein per day plus added olive oil to the protein shakes and the drs kept complaining about me losing weight. I was probably working out 8-10 hours a week and they said I was working out too much so I started to cut back on time in gym 2023-current to see if anything changed. But I do know I am absolutely correct on calories and macros, I've done this my entire life, tracking macros to get whatever goal I am currently doing. This isn't something new to me, Its not something I am not accurate with. I know how to track calories and I use a kitchen scale in grams for all meals that are made from scratch so I know what exactly is in each meal. Lets take for example what I ate yesterday, 6 sourdough pancakes for breakfast, each had about 1/2 tablespoon of butter, each had 2 tablespoons of syrup .... the pancakes alone are 900 cals, 21.2g fat, 147.1 carbs, 28.25g prot. 6x butter totals = 225 cals, 25.5g fat, 0g carbs, 0g prot, 6x syrup totals = 660 cals, 0g fat, 168g carbs, 0g prot so that alone is 1785 calories, 46.7g fat, 315.1 carbs, and 28.25g prot. Then I had 2 pints of home-made high protein high fat ice cream (there is a video with the exact ingredients used), but they are each 619.5 cals, 17g fat, 72.125g carbs, 39g protein each. Some days I have 3 of those. I haven't even added lunch and dinner yet and I am already at 3024 calories. If you want to double check the ingredients in the pancake mix ...(you can look it up: 125g ap flour, 6g baking powder, 3g baking soda, 21g honey, 3g salt, 100g sourdough starter (which is about 1/4 cup/31g flour), 187g milk, 1 egg, 14g butter should come out to 900cals, 21.2g fat, 147.1 carbs, 28.25g prot). In 2021, for about 8 months straight, I ate a normal food diet around 2500 calories and supplemented it with 4 bottles of nutren 2.0 that are 500 calories each (decent proteins and lots of good fats) so that was 4500 calories per day