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Greetings dear visitor, Croprepper here. I am glad you dropped by.
This time i want to talk about my experience i gathered last year.
Getting independent of food supplies.
That means, i decided to start a project, pilot project
To see what I need, and which knowledge i need to have
acutally, how to get the basic knowledge to become a vegetable farmer.
This means the whole process from seeding to selling vegetables on the market.
All homegrown of course.
We created a legal family business.
So we were allowed to sell our own products on the market legally (vegetables).
Now in this video i will talk about the beginning, how we started and how it developed and..
and what were the opinions.
The target of this project was for me to see how much I need and if I am capable
to self supply myself and my family if it comes to the worst case scenario.
or even become a supplier for the local community.
The beginning
There was work to do, very much work.
After the regular job we continued to sow the seeds into styrofoam container.
It was so much work to do, we were in the basement until 10pm every day.
We had about 6000 sowed holes for sure
and we had plants on mass. (overkill!)
We were very ambitious and motivated.
As you can see the styrofoam containers were all over the place.
We had to find a very warm place. The winter in 2013 was unusual long.
So we had to heat the basement all the time.
They sprout out very fast.
Thus it was still late winter, they had a lack of light.
So i decided to build a shelf and put it near the window and from the other side there was my fishtank light.
I build a small tent and figured out it was stupid to heat up the whole room instead of the small tent.
I kept the temperature constantly over 20°C
with sensors and automated heaters.
The plants were very healthy.
The grew too fast so the moment came where i had to build a greenhouse and migrate them out because they had no light.
Greenhouse
We decided to build a greenhouse with plastic pipes on wooden base.
Because it is cheap and easy to build.
So we decided the length about 20 meters. It was about 22mx6m in the end.
With wooden posts.
Thats me...
We improvised the binding of the pipes to the top wooden carrier.
It was much work to do. I did not expect it.
We did this along with our regular jobs.
So we were busy the whole day - every day.
Here the pipes are set up. Then the foil had to be installed by digging in the ends.
This is what it looked like.
Acre
We had also 2 fields available, so we decided to continue to plant our plants.
Because we had so much plants, we sold more than half of them and still got too much to plant in the fields.
So we decided to do it more the industrial way on one field - with foil.
Because there is no way to grub this area.
So we made lines with foil.
Here is the other field on which we sowed corn and other veggies.
This was after one afternoon on the field.
Foil, watering, netting for cucumber, binding of tomatoes Everyday work.
Watering was done with 2 tanks 1000Liters per tank.
We filled the tank from a well. I used a submerged pump and a small generator.
It did well. I took about 45 minutes to fill up 2000 Liters
This is a panorama of our 2nd field. Its kind of screwed up, dont know why.
Tools
I just needed a small tractor 4x4
It has 14 hp. It serves me very well.
I got a cultivator. Shredds up very good.
The trailer can be tilted. This comes in handy.
Also 2 tanks with 1000 liters each. I bought them used.
A simple sumbergable pump. With good specs.
And a simple generator which i also got used.
Fruits of Labor
The vegetables did very well. Very healthy, untreated vegetables.
We had all sorts of vegetables. Pumpkins, paprika, tomatoes, all kind of sorts, everything.
The halms were so strong and got intensive smell, all people from the village wondered about it.
So in the end the people came to us and bought the veggies directly from the plant.
It was all homegrown and healthy.
We did very well.
Here we prepared for our market run with the veggies we collected.
And this is our first day at the market.
It was difficult to compete with the resellers. But it was not bad at all.
We were glad to see the buyers happy faces, after he tried our veggies and bought them.
I hope you enjoyed the trip to the last year.
I can surely say we worked our *** off. It was so much work, much more than expected.
You can't do this much along with your regular job. We had no free time at all.
Work, home, work, sleep, work, home, work sleep.
All the time, all the summer.
But it was worth it. The project was successful.
You can make a living of it for sure. It is very hard but you can.
When you get your loyal customers and do some marketing, here and there,
when the rumors start working about your quality, you can do it for living.
Of course it is very hard and you got many responsibilities, but its possible.
So summarized I can say, if it comes to the worst case, make yourself a small greenhouse with basic tools.
You can supply yourself and your family with vegetables without problems.
This year I am gonna make me a small garden with my girlfriend and supply myself.
Like: be independent, live off the grid, don't depend of the vegetables from your local store.
That's it. I will talk about meat in one of my future videos.
I hope you liked my video, i'd love to see a comment or like or subscribe.
See you!