From Pasture to Production

Hey all - I usually try to take an hour or so on Mondays and answer everyone's comments but holy cow there are a lot of comments on this video already! I will try to get to more but I gotta get to work on the next video. Just know you all are awesome.

"Dogma is not going to help you in farming..." perfect advice. Great channel. Smart man.

Thanks for your videos. Iwas born in a small village located around Cameroon 🇨🇲 and Nigeria 🇳🇬 border centre/west Africa. Growing up there was no Internet connection nor roads we had to trek for 3 hours to get to Nigeria or 9 hours to get to Cameroon, in other to see good roads or sell our crops, but trust me it was fund and it really made me stronger. My parents where small farmers till 2009 i lost my dad, we had to moved to Lagos Nigeria in 2011. I can remember in my small village my parents didn't have to go through a lot of stress because the land was very fertile and any crop they ever planted was doing extremely well, without fertiliser or watering the crops. 2 years ago I started watching alot of videos on how to farm, because prices of food stuffs in Lagos for the past 2 years has really been going up, and I realised how blessed my small village is lol. I'm happy because my dad's houses are still there. I'm 26 years old and I've been saving up, I can't wait to go back to my village and start up my farm with all this experience I've had in watching different videos and learning more about different virity of crops. I'm really greatful🙏

First time garden. I took a 50 year old lawn, tilled it, spread 4 inches of manure/ mulch and tilled it again in the late fall. Planted garlic and now I have 60 of 70 sprouts growing well in February. I think this is going to work. Thanks Jesse.

One of the most dense, no bs, educational channels out there. Keep it up y’all. And thank you for sharing all this hard earned knowledge!

I'm an experienced flower gardener but completely new to veggies. Started my first two veggie beds this year. One is ridiculously slow-growing. The other is taking off. Almost double the growth in the second bed. Bed 1, the slow growing disappointment: Started with overgrown lawn that tended to flood, broke up the clay soil with a fork. Added bagged black earth (2-3 inches), built my raised bed frame on top of that and tossed in some yard waste and more bagged black earth. Planted immediately. Bed 2, the efficient success: Started with overgrown lawn directly beside bed 1 on a drier day. Mowed down the lawn, forked it, added 1-2 inches of yard waste, dug it in very slightly (I'm on clay soil working with hand tools), covered well with cardboard, soaked and let sit for a week, covering holes with more cardboard when a few small weeds made it through. I then brought in 4-5 inches of rich, living compost (filled with worms and other life) from my boss' manure heap. (Benefits of working at a stable, bonus that my boss grows his own hay, chemical-free). I let the bed sit for around a month before I planted into it at all. Bed 1 does not retain water well. At all. Seeds took forever to get true leaves, growth is slow and disappointing. Weeds aren't bad though, almost nothing came up through the soil, only what blew into the bed to remove. Definitely will need to amend the soil this fall though. Bed 2 holds consistent water levels without becoming flooded but does require a lot more weeding unfortunately but I just chop and drop the weeds for more organic material. Lots of dandelions so at least they're not competing too badly with what I have in there. My plan for this fall is to put in 1-2 more beds doing the slow method and redo the failed bed entirely. I definitely will not be using bagged soil for in ground growing or raised beds ever again. It's just dead dirt. I'll use fresh, living compost that I can source locally. Way cheaper too.

One method I have had success with is using potatoes as a sort of cover/food crop to prepare new ground. You can disturb the soil or not. Potatoes love fresh decomposing sod, and they seem to attract such a plethora of microorganisms and earthworms that you get a decent tilth after they crop. I simply lay the potatoes out at a decent spacing, and I might make a slight hole and dig them into the sod, especially recently as the vole pressure has gotten out of hand, then cover with ideally a weed free mulch like straw or second cutting hay or compost, but usually I use a combination of compost and hay I can acquire cheaply. Hill the potatoes with hay or compost throughout the season, and after harvest the grass will be totally dead and worked up by critters, and the beds can be planted into a cover crop, or fall crop. This is pretty much the ruth stout method of growing potatoes, and lends itself to breaking new ground while growing a crop.

Warning about straw: lately there are increasing numbers of gardeners who get hay/straw tainted with GrazeOn and other persistent chemicals that totally destroy gardens and orchards. Do your research and know your source!

I quit my job to become a market gardener a month ago, took out small loans for living expenses and starting the gardens. I am doing the quick risky method of no-till-->paper-->compost-->seed in midwinter Zone 7b. Sod was mostly eaten down by horses, manured, and had years worth of oak leaf grounds on the surface, full of earthworms. I laid down two layers of builder's paper, and built beds 4 ft wide with 4 inches aged horse manure/bedding compost that my neighbor cooks up in huge piles. I would be more apprehensive if it was hydrophobic mulchy stuff, as I had hell trying to grow in that stuff before. This specific horse compost is some of the most friable I have ever seen. It almost never loses moisture and drains well. I then immediately broadcast a "cover crop" polyculture of mustards, carrots, turnips, beets, radishes, chard. I am starting indoors heading brassicas, cilantro, lettuces, peas, green onions, spinach to plant into the polyculture after thinning. I admit this method will be difficult for predicting yields/quick harvesting, but my hope is that the reward will outweigh the risks/cons. Will report back in a month.

I have always been a very visual learner. So your videos coupled with your book helps it to sink in. Then applying cements the lesson. Thanks Jesse and thanks Hannah for sharing your soil nerd!

It took me 2 weeks of intense manual labor to dig up a 12x12 area of my lawn for a tomato garden with a shovel & my hands. I moved about 30 wheelbarrows full of thick, heavy, compacted, clay soil. The soil had an insane number of rocks, which I used to line the garden for drainage. I recall ONE hole for one plant taking 10 minutes to dig! I thought I was escavating a rock the size of a massive bowling bowl at one point. I then moved many more wheelbarrows full of composted horse manure to use as topsoil & hand built tomato cages with old metal farm fence. Then tonight, I dug up a 10’x4’ area of sod to build another garden beside it & it took less than 2 hours! It’s amazing how different areas of the yard can be SO different to work with! We live on a huge hill & I can’t afford to buy the lumber to build raised beds for root crops. I find that growing potatoes in old chicken feed bags works amazingly well!

I've started many gardens due to career moves. Those I started in the late summer early fall were always the best having 10 mos or so for worms, compost, covercrop & mulch to do its thing. I never had great success with gardens slammed together in the spring unless I was at least able to cover the area in deep mulch some months ahead.

I've experimented with 3 different types of beds thus far! The deep compost, beds built with native soil from around the farm, and then building beds in place with the soil that is there! I'm adamant about bringing my native soil to a standard that will grow any crops i want to grow and that crop be healthy!! So far I rather enjoy building the beds in place. Having 100 acres of farmland i am able to go i to the woods and gather leaves as well as leaf mold at will whenever I want. This is proving to be a great way to add organic matter and microbiology to the native soil i am turning into garden space!! I am also adamant about making my own liquid fertalizer and have been studying the jadam techniques alot. I think the inspector will be pleased when we finally do go to get our organic certification!!

Love seeing the kiddos helping out. Our three-year-old granddaughter, who lives with us, helps me daily with planting, weeding, and eating the fruits of our labor. Great stuff!

I really appreciate that you provide multiple methods, calling out the ideal, yet knowing things are not always ideal. I moved cross country and was able to put a garden in starting in June. Well, it has been a humbling experience. I went from lovely loam to yellow clay. I now realize much of my garden prowess was the soil I had. I expect I can get there again with a multi-year approach. Happy growing.

I fought to sign in to leave this comment. That compost is absolutely lovely. It looks very very healthy. I cannot lie, this does make me somewhat jealous. I thank my nan especially for showing me many gardening and agri techniques. Happy growing. Peace and Blissings

Loved the longer video! I know it takes a lot of work to make so thank you! I have had luck with just a couple of layers of cardboard covered in compost and left to sit over the winter, by spring the cardboard is soft enough to plant right on top of.

Jessie I’ve been watching for the last two years (subscribing on patreon too) and I just wanted to say thank you for the time and effort you put into your videos. I appreciate you and your team. 🧡

How don't you have a million subscribers? Your content is great👍

I would have liked more talk about the damage to soil micro organisms as a result of covering beds in plastic, and the damage to soil structure caused by even one till.