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 almost exactly 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.
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 and posted 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 2025.
The attempt to grow 4,000lbs of pumpkins was not successful, but we did get 1275lbs. And we’re already tired of pumpkins!
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.
YouTube
Long-form videos: 65, shorts: 54, livestreams: 10
The Blog
January: 30
February: 24
March: 25
April: 23
May: 21
June: 21
July: 13
August: 6
September: 8
October: 11
November: 9
December: 5
196 total.
I dropped off on blog posts to focus on my subscriber-only content at Skool.
Thank you all for sticking with us this year, and may you have a wonderful 2025.
And finally, I posted this video this morning. As one year ends and the next begins, we are resetting the gardens for 2025!
12 comments
Even though you didn’t accomplish everything that’s still a ton of success. I’m trying to make things more impressive around here. It’s pretty embarrassing at the moment but once I can get the things I want done I’d totally invite you here. Give me a bit of time.
Popcorn trees are horrid invasive trees but they can be really useful. The wood rots really quickly which is good. Supposedly an edible oil and an inedible oil for lamp fuel etc can be obtained from the seeds and or seed coating. Not sure how practical that would be on a home scale but interesting to know. The best thing about them is that bees make killer sugar sweet honey from them. If purely from Popcorn trees the honey is almost like straight sugar syrup in flavor or so it seems to me. The invasive Chinese privet which you likely have as well also makes good honey. There’s likely well more than enough of these trees around beyond the border of your property though. I totally understand wanting to remove them entirely. I would if I could keep up with them. Always popping up everywhere….
Thank you. Yes, popcorn do have their uses! I haven’t been able to extract the oil from them, though I tried boiling it out. Might need a heated press or something.
We’ve got lots of privet, too! The bees like it, for sure.
You’ll get there. Thank you, my friend, and Happy new year!
I wish you wouldn’t plant invasive species like yams and Trifoliate Orange.
If a plant is useful, we plant it and keep it under control. Trifoliate orange is not really invasive here, either. Neither are the yams we grow.
And happy new year, too.
Awesome job to you, the Mrs. and to your “Goods” !!
one “thing”… not criticizing or being a literary nazi (people are nutso these days) Unless your farm is operating with a flux capacitor of some sort..
…. “How to Grow One Ton of Food in Your Florida Garden (in Your First Year), that should be released in early spring 2005.” … I believe you meant 2025?
meat birds… not sure what breed you were using~ if you haven’t already- look into American Bresse.. you are not limited to the 8 weeks before they can no longer walk out of their own “mess” nor suffer health issues due to fast growth… they are a “triple” purpose bird in that.. 1) they are meat… 2) they are healthy and will lay eggs (future gens! woot woot) and their meat is much better tasting and marbled (especially if you keep confined & feed straight corn diet a couple of weeks before butcher date)
May you & yours have a blessed, happy & prosperous 2025!
I have tried the various Red Broiler birds but found them tough, and we did Cornish Cross this spring. I had some Bresse last year and they flew the coop and got killed! Man, they like to run away!
Thanks for the typo catch – fixed! Happy new year!
Congratulations on your many successes in 2024! Happy 2025!
New(er) watcher here. I’m guessing we’re close enough in age to have gone through the same economic swings and been part of the waves of people taking up home food production. It spikes mid-crises and then a certain percentage of people drift away. Point being, I wouldn’t overhaul what you’re doing based on current views or sales. I have no doubt this is a massive trend. People have drifted away but the internet is oversaturated with repetitive and derivative content. FWIW, I hit subscribe because it’s not the same mind-numbing “Plant these 10 things in April” videos. Great job growing!
Hi David! I have a suggestion regarding the book sales that might help. I love your books and own all of them on audible because you read them as if I was listening to a podcast. It is much easier for me and I’m sure for a lot of people, to read “audibly” than to purchase and read a paper copy of the book. I wanted to purchase both of your books that came out this year, but I know I won’t be able to read the hard copy at this time in my life. However, if you’re able to do the audio versions of these books, consider me first in line to buy them. Another suggestion—if you’re not able to produce as many YouTube videos as you’d like, try doing podcasts. It might be less complicated since there’s no video editing. Most people nowadays listen to podcasts more than they listen to the radio. I constantly have podcasts playing in the background as I’m getting chores done around the house but I rarely have the time to watch YouTube videos. I hope this helps! Best wishes to you and your family in 2025!
David, you mentioned the “hedge of death” using Trifoliate Orange. Another barrier plant you can consider is Jujube (Ziziphus) which is a thorny, beautiful tree with glossy leaves that produces fruit you can eat fresh or dried. I planted ‘Li’ and ‘Lang’ many years ago in USDA Zone 6 Boise, ID and those trees grew like crazy and were producing fruit within two years. Asians dry the fruit on the tree and call them “red dates”. Asians prize the fruit and if there are any Asian customers in your area they would buy Jujube trees.
I gave some jujube fruit to a clerk at a Chinese grocery for her mother along with a catalog so they could buy their own trees and the clerk burst into tears! She hadn’t seen a fresh jujube in years I guess.
Perhaps you can use the peels from trifoliate orange fruit to make some organic cleanser for around the house. The fruit isn’t tasty.
Way to go, David, you and your family are amazing!