https://spectra.video/videos/watch/21f7583e-15a1-4a96-ba94-22cf145f3a02 Your garden won't feed you if you're thinking about growing vegetables instead of subsistence farming. Tomatoes and eggplants won't keep you alive. Staples will: grain, beans, oil, and the perennials that come after. A walk through the August harvest on a subsistence farm in the northern WV mountains. Sunflowers coming off the plants for oil, pole beans climbing the stalks, chop and drop building soil around neglected blueberries, pests cataloged instead of fought, and a storm that sends water running off the land faster than we can hold it. The first year is about one crop. Year five is about everything. This is what growing your own calories actually looks like. Not a highlight reel. The work, the failures, the water getting away, and the slow building of a food system that does not depend on the grocery store. The full philosophy behind this, gathered from 5,000 years of agricultural writing, is in my book: https://loopfarmstead.com/meditations Website: https://loopfarmstead.com Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@theloopfarm Watch more on Spectra: https://spectra.video/c/the_loop_farmstead/videos 0:00 Subsistence Farming 2:58 The Sunflower Harvest 3:39 Year One: One Crop 5:37 Chop & Drop: Building Soil 7:59 Cataloging Pests 12:28 Pressing Oil 13:49 The Land Around Us 14:39 Water: The Other Pillar 17:26 Plant for People You Will Never Meet Wed, 19 Aug 2026 19:22:26 GMT https://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/rss2.html PeerTube - https://spectra.video https://spectra.video/lazy-static/avatars/71f5d173-eea9-47a7-b254-f7e91f9f5d25.png https://spectra.video/videos/watch/21f7583e-15a1-4a96-ba94-22cf145f3a02 All rights reserved, unless otherwise specified in the terms specified at https://spectra.video/about and potential licenses granted by each content's rightholder.