2024: The Year in Review

By admin

Another year has come and gone, with its joys and sorrows.

Overall, 2024 was a very productive year, with new adventures, new crops, and better yields than we’ve ever had.

Let’s start by seeing how we did with our goals.

Goals

Our goals for 2024:

1. Plant a large quantity of purple ube

Yes! We put in 120′ of ube rows, and it has done well.

That is a two-year old ube which weighed in at 11lbs. The new ones we planted were more like 2-4lbs.

We are leaving most of them in the ground through the winter and plan to expand to a much bigger plot in the spring.

2. Plant a lot more sugarcane

Yes! We almost tripled our growing area.

3. Make enough money with the plant nursery to pay us back for the greenhouse

Yes! After many plant sales and trips to farmer’s markets, we not only paid for the greenhouse, we covered the cost of a trailer, all our pots, our plant stock, and our potting soil. The nursery easily broke even in 2024.

4. Raise meat birds

Yes! We had a bad time of it with lots of deaths, but managed to put thirty birds in the freezer.

5. Add 12 Leghorns to the chicken flock

No. We were unable to source Leghorns at the right time. We also had a lot of predator deaths and gave away our flock until we can fix up the chicken gulag and make it predator-proof.

6. Raise 5,000 lbs of food

Not quite.

7. Produce 100 consecutive YouTube videos in the spring

No. Spring fell apart, due to all our nursery work, homeschooling, etc.

8. Fill up the rest of the fenced garden area with crops

Not quite. I decided to leave corridors open to drive the Bobcat through for mulch deliveries.

9. Plant pumpkins on top of compost piles

Yes! We did this, and yielded over 1200lbs of pumpkins.

10. Continue the landrace corn, watermelon, cucumber and daikon experiments

We continued the watermelon, corn and daikon experiments but put the corn on hold.

11. Plant the death hedge

Failed, though we did plant 12 trifoliate oranges and some osage orange in gaps. More needs doing.

12. Get my nursery into the Palafox Market in Pensacola

Yes!

13. Fill in the food forest gaps

Yes!

14. Plant a row of ultra-dwarf apples in the Grocery Row Garden

We didn’t do this yet, but the trees are waiting for me over at Randall’s.

15. Release Minimalist Gardening

Yes! We released Minimalist Gardening: The Good Guide to Growing Food with Less on March 20th.

16. Release Florida Bullfrog’s Survival Chickens

Yes! We released Free-Range Survival Chickens on September 8th.

17. Finish writing The Good Guide to Food Forests

Almost! It’s 3/4 done.

18. Finish writing Alabama Survival Gardening

Stalled, but really needs to happen.

19. Quit smoking for a year

No. I did this through Lent, then decided to go back to some cigars and a pipe. Now I am mostly smoking a pipe and not inhaling.

That’s 9 out of 19 accomplished, with a few more goals that almost got done.

Garden Yields – 3049lbs

Yams 206lb
Ube Yam 18lb
Daikons 16lb
Mulberries 12lb
Pineapple 2lb
Potatoes 134lb
Tomatoes 161lb
Pumpkins 1275lb
Eggplant 32lb
Cukes 44lb
Cucuzza 136lb
Peppers 3lb
Blueberries 1lb
Watermelon 278lb
Tobacco 15lb
Jelly Melon 25lb
Persimmons 12lb
Pecans 118lb
D. bulbifera bulbils 60lb
D. Pentaphylla yams 20lb
Sorrel 8lb
Cassava 91lb
Arrowroot 7lb
Turnips 6lb
Sweet Potatoes 69lb
Sugarcane 300lb

Animal Products

Eggs 901
Milk 90 gallons
Pork (5 hogs): 1203 lbs
Chicken (30) 65lbs

That is 4,317 lbs of food produced on the homestead this year.

If I went out and dug up all the yams, we could probably stretch that to 4,600 or so, but I’ve got so many yams sitting on the porch already that I don’t dare dig more!

Infrastructure improvement

We bought a stump bucket for the Bobcat.

We bought a used Kubota L2501 tractor with a mowing deck.

We bought a 7′ bushhog for the Kubota

We bought a closed nursery trailer

We bought a 2006 Ford F-150 4WD pickup truck

We bought an antique cane mill

We added a corridor to the woods that connects our pastures

We took out dozens of popcorn trees

Other Successes and Failures

We successfully grew lots of Roma tomatoes in the new greenhouse and Rachel made gallons of sauce.

Tomatoes make you feel rich!

We finally got a tractor. This was on my wish-list for a long time. Despite the financial pain incurred, it should pay for itself in saved labor. The Bobcat has certainly done so! The new stump bucket has also allowed us to remove a lot of nasty popcorn trees that were crowding around the edges of our land and pasture. About 80 more and we’re clear.

YouTube subscriptions have been flat. We have 332,621 subscribers, as of 12/24.

Book sales have been poor. Less than half of what they were two years ago.

I relaunched Instagram, but have not had much success with it.

Online sales from my daughter’s nursery have been good and have helped pay the mortgage.

We launched our private community on Skool and now have 204 members.

At Skool, I was able to post lots of Zoom gardening training sessions, as well as multiple exclusive interviews with Florida Bullfrog, JD of Castra Isidore Farm, Steve Solomon and Joseph Lofthouse. We also filmed a 5-part food forest course titled How to Start a Food Forest the Easy Way. I am currently putting together an in-depth Florida gardening course titled How to Grow One Ton of Food in Your Florida Garden (in Your First Year), that should be released in early spring 2005.

The attempt to grow 4,000lbs of pumpkins was not successful, but we did get 1275lbs.

We raised enough pork to fill two chest freezers.

We gave up on chickens for a while due to extreme predator pressure.

Our ducks hatched chicks, but all of them were killed. We started the year with seven ducks and only have three left now. They are 100% free-range and have fed themselves completely via foraging.

The nursery broke even, but sales dropped quickly in June and we gave up for the year. We are now reclaiming our greenhouse, which was completely overgrown with runaway plants that grew through their pots and scrambled everywhere. It seems spring is the best time for plant sales, so we hope to grow enough this year just to sell in spring, then we’ll have a hiatus through the rest of the year.

We discovered that we could propagate sugarcane from single-node cuttings, which allowed us to grow more plants than in the past.

We tested jelly melons, Jamaican yellow yams and Dioscorea pentaphylla. The jelly melons were productive, but not really liked.

The Jamaican yellow yams produced small roots that were somewhat bitter. We are letting the roots re-grow in the spring. The D. pentaphylla did well, and produced lots of bulbils this year.

We added three new varieties of edible D. bulbifera and successfully saved bulbils we can grow out in 2025 into many more plants.

We grew a lot of velvet bean seeds for 2025.

And, last but not least, Scrubfest III was a great success. All the talks from the event were also recorded for the first time, and are in my community at Skool.