Hi! I am Tim MacWelch of Earth Connection School of Wilderness Survival and Ancient Skills near Fredericksburg, Virginia. This is our video series on Organic Gardening. In this clip, we're going to talk about harvesting your crop, giving something back to the soil, and three good resources for you.
First off, the harvesting of the crops is the best part. You wait till everything is fully ripe, fully formed, at full flavor and then you go out there with maybe some snippers or just your bare hands, and cut everything loose, and bring it back in the house and enjoy it.
Typically, it's a little difficult to wait until everything is fully ripe. You want to get things early, or you want to get them a little bit off-schedule, but it's best to wait until everything is fully grown. And that's the most fun part. Yeah, you have done a lot of stuff to get to that point of harvest, but nothing is as sweeter as that first meal on the table that you grew all by yourself. And specially with organic methods, you know you are bringing something good to the table. You've been enriching the soil, you brought home something that's not loaded with chemicals and all kinds of synthetic materials, and you can feel good about eating it, and serving it to your family.
Giving something back to the soil is part of organic gardening and basically, what we are doing is improving the soil. Every year we use our garden soil, it should get better. Not depleted and not worn out, but better. It should be fluffier, darker, richer, more abundant in small, light forms and more fruitful.
So what we want to do is add compost every year, and add minerals every year. And add all the nice soil amendments that we've talked about in subsequent clips, and do some research and do some testing and find out what your soil really needs and give it what it needs.
So, that way you'll have good soil in the future which is the most important crop you can grow. I want to encourage you to rotate your crops. Plant them in different spots in different years and try to keep track of all that, because different crops will have different nutritional needs and different crops will put things back in the soil or take away things that need to be there.
So, I'd like to take a second to thank my mom, and my dad and my mother's father James for getting me started in all this gardening stuff. It took a good 20-some years for what they started to finally take, but it finally did.
And I also want to thank you guys for watching this MonkeySee video series. I hope you'll watch some other MonkeySee videos. Thank you.
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