This is video log number 100. It's been 100 days since the aliens invaded and dropped the bird full infested clown zombies. I was prepared for that contingency. As a prepper, of course you would prepare for that. So the very next day I started my fortifications and of course gardening. Now I'd never gardened before. It's been a bit of a rough go. Steep learning curve, I suppose. But this morning I finally started reaping the rewards from that garden. I just harvested 20 pumpkins. This is the largest of the pumpkins. This is smaller than I anticipated. I don't know if this is going to work out. Hey YouTube, this is Praxis Prepper. We're in my garden right now because I wanted to give you an update on how things are going in the garden. I'm always talking about how important it is to be practicing your skills that you plan to use during a collapse situation before the collapse situation. I think none of those is important. There's a lot of error you need to get out of your system before you become a successful gardener. I'm still learning these things. I'm getting better at every year. It's important to just get those trial and error situations as much as possible out of the way before collapse. If I have a failure in my garden now, it's just like, oh well, that didn't work. If you have a failure in your garden during a collapse and you're depending on that garden for food, then you can starve to death. It's important to get that practice in before your skin is really in the game. I've had some successes in the garden this year. I've had some failures. One of the big successes is the squash back here. You can see the yellow flowers of the squash back over there. That's been doing really well this year. Also the peaches on the peach trees have been doing really well. I've had a lot of beans. I've done poll beans, German poll beans and some bush beans. Those have all been pretty successful. Things that haven't been so successful are my potato crop. We really get hit by potato bugs this year. It really is massacre the leaves and the tomatoes also have not done very well at all. There's a couple of reasons for the tomato failures. One of them is that I just wasn't able to get them out into the greenhouse. A seedling started that early because I was getting attacked by chipmunks in the greenhouse and they were just destroying anything I put out there. They got a bit of a late start. Once I actually put them into the garden, I was busy cutting firewood. I was doing a lot of firewood chopping. I neglected the garden at the beginning. It got kind of weedy. The weeds grew up in over those tomato plants. They weren't getting the sun that they really needed. Also this summer has been fairly wet and overcast for a lot of it. Tomatoes love hot dry weather where you're watering them from below. They're getting that really nice dry heat from above. It hasn't been an ideal year for tomatoes anyway. These are things that I'm learning. I think it's really critical to not only hone your skills as a gardener but also find out what works really well in your area. Year over year, I'm finding out what are the crops that grow like weeds in my particular area right here. Those are the crops that I choose to grow. All things being equal, why not grow something that pretty much grows itself? One thing that has worked really well this year for me, that has helped with the garden, is I have a new watering setup. Now this is just a hose with a little sprinkler head on it. Kind of as I attached it to a stick and I kind of move it around like that to water the garden. Now that's nothing really revolutionary at all. It's just a hose. But what this is hooked up to isn't the, you know, my well and water pressure from the house. This is hooked up specifically to my rain barrels. We're about 10 feet below the maximum fill level of the rain barrels down here. I think it's something around around the order of like seven pounds per square inch, like difference in water pressure the lower you get from where your rain barrels are. So we're about 10 feet down from there and it has some decent water pressure. And I'm going to show you, you know, back what we're doing up at the rain barrels to show you the setup that I've got going on this year. There's a first year I've really benefited from it and I think it's something that's really worked well and I think it's something worth sharing. And here we are at the rain barrels where I do all my rain water collection. Now it's collecting from a section of roof that's about 25 feet by 25 feet. You know, you could do the math 25 times 25 that's how many square feet of roof I'm collecting from. And these guys will fill up with even just a moderate rain for like an hour or so. They do really well and there are seven of these barrels. These are 60 gallon barrels. I think they're used for lawn maintenance or whatever. They come without lid so I made these little plastic lids to keep the ski dos from laying eggs on the inside of them. And you know, seven barrels times 60 gallons, you know, again you can do the math for how much water I store here. But this size works fairly well for me. I think it could be a little bigger. A lot of times you know it's raining and these guys are maxed out and I don't have anywhere to put the rain. And you know every once in a while I feel like I wish I had a little bit more rain water when I am watering the garden. But largely speaking this worked out really, really well. Now this is kind of a version 2.0 for me. Well probably even more than 2.0. I've had several incarnations of this. I started with just taking, I think I had two or three of these barrels and I just parked them underneath the drip edge of the roof and had the roof water just running into them. Later on I added a gutter to the roof and now you can see this little black pipe over here. It collects the water from the gutter and drops it all into this barrel. And that one used these two large diameter tubes to go into this big manifold and then that sends it out to the rest of the barrels. I made a mistake at the beginning where I was using exclusively just hose fittings to connect all these guys together. And that was a mistake because this main barrel was overflowing and it just could not get the water out to the other barrels fast enough. You think these are like half inch diameter hose sections here but when the water actually goes to a fitting the diameter of the hole is even smaller than a half inch. I mean it's smaller than like the diameter of a little pinky finger. If you imagine the diameter of a little pinky finger coming out of this main barrel and then having to be divided up seven ways to go into all these other barrels, you could imagine how slowly these were filling. So I changed that by making a double bulkhead with a large diameter tube going into this manifold and then disseminating it out into all the barrels. I also have this fitting here which is the on-off valve that sends water directly down to the garden. That's what I was watering from earlier. I even put a little spigot right here so I can get water for convenience because these have lids on them and if I'm over here I want water. I want to have an access point to get it. But this worked out really well. It's been a good size I think and it's fulfilled all my needs. You might think it's kind of strange that I put a roof over this. Don't you want water to be falling right into the barrels? The reason for the roof was for snow load. These are just left out in the winter. If I didn't have a roof, all these barrels would get covered in snow and these plastic lids would all get dumped in and everything. You want to keep these things dry in the winter because you can't have water in all these pipes and everything because it'll crack all the fittings. That's why I have a roof over it to keep the snow out and water out so that in the winter the system can stay dry. But it's worked out really well for me. It's helped me to maintain my garden and I'm always learning, I'm always growing, I'm always developing. I think if I were to do a new version of this, I think what a great thing to be doing would be... Now you might have seen I have goldfish ponds in my greenhouse. I've done a few videos on those. I think it'd be great to be watering the gardens from the goldfish ponds because they have algae and goldfish poop and everything which would be beneficial organic material to be plumbed down to the garden. I think it'd be great to be watering the garden directly from the goldfish ponds and then use the rainwater to replenish the water in the goldfish ponds. You'd have clean water for the goldfish so you could actually see them a lot of times when goldfish ponds are pretty murky. You would take that murkiness and use it somewhere where it would actually be useful down in the goldfish ponds. I'm still growing, I'm still developing and coming up with ways that I can prove whatever I'm working on. I think that's the name of the game. It would just be happy but never be content. That still sounds bad. You know, just... you know what I'm saying. Keep striving for hire but be pleased with wherever you are at whatever given moment. So I'm pleased with where I am but I'm always thinking about better things that I could do for improving. That's it. Thanks for watching. you