- 5 days ago
🔗 Save $6,000 A Year with My Complete Amish Home-Saving Method I teach: https://eliasyoder.com
There are four cucumber plants at the end of my row right now, pale and yellow and sulking in the July heat, hardly setting a thing worth picking. A body could look at a row like that and just give up on it. A lot of folks do. They go to the store and come home with a bright jug that promises the sun and the moon, and they pour it on and wait for a miracle.
I am going to tell you plainly, before you go one step further: there is no miracle in a jug. But there is something cheap and honest sitting in your own cupboard, and I tried it on those struggling plants to see for myself what it would do.
It is a little packet of dry yeast. The same kind your wife uses to raise bread. A tablespoon of yeast, two tablespoons of sugar, warm water, left to foam overnight. Now this is not some old Amish secret, and I will not pretend to you that it is. This is a trick I picked up from the English gardeners, and I am showing it to you the honest way, telling you exactly what it does and exactly what it does not do. Because the plant you see suffering is not really what is sick. It is the ground undernea
There are four cucumber plants at the end of my row right now, pale and yellow and sulking in the July heat, hardly setting a thing worth picking. A body could look at a row like that and just give up on it. A lot of folks do. They go to the store and come home with a bright jug that promises the sun and the moon, and they pour it on and wait for a miracle.
I am going to tell you plainly, before you go one step further: there is no miracle in a jug. But there is something cheap and honest sitting in your own cupboard, and I tried it on those struggling plants to see for myself what it would do.
It is a little packet of dry yeast. The same kind your wife uses to raise bread. A tablespoon of yeast, two tablespoons of sugar, warm water, left to foam overnight. Now this is not some old Amish secret, and I will not pretend to you that it is. This is a trick I picked up from the English gardeners, and I am showing it to you the honest way, telling you exactly what it does and exactly what it does not do. Because the plant you see suffering is not really what is sick. It is the ground undernea
Category
🛠️
LifestyleTranscript
00:00Come here a minute. I want to show you something, and I want you to look close,
00:04because it is not what the fellow who sells you the fancy bottle
00:08wants you to see. Right here at the end of this row
00:12these four plants are struggling. You can see it.
00:15The leaves are pale, a little yellow at the edge, curled under
00:19from the heat. They are sitting there sulking in the ground, hardly
00:24moving, hardly setting anything worth picking.
00:27A body could look at a row like this in the middle of July
00:31and just give up on it. A lot of folks do.
00:35They pull the poor thing out, and they go to the store and they come home
00:39with a jug of something blue, something that promises
00:43the sun and the moon on the label, and they pour it on,
00:47and they wait for a miracle. I am going to tell you plainly
00:51up front before we go one step further
00:54so you know the kind of man you are listening to.
00:58There is no miracle in a jug. There is no
01:03bottle you can buy and no
01:05thing you can mix up in your kitchen
01:07that will make a sick garden
01:09into a strong one overnight.
01:11If a man tells you he watered his plants one
01:15time and they shot up six feet in a matter of days
01:18and gave him more than he could carry,
01:21that man is either fooling you or fooling himself,
01:25and either way I would not hand him my money.
01:29So we are not going to talk about miracles today.
01:33We are going to talk about the truth,
01:35which is slower and quieter
01:37and worth a great deal more.
01:40The truth is this.
01:42The plant you see suffering is not really
01:45the thing that is sick.
01:47The plant is only telling you
01:49about something you cannot see.
01:51It is the ground that is tired.
01:53It is the soil underneath,
01:56worn thin and gone quiet.
01:58And the plant is just the flag that shows you
02:02which way that wind is blowing.
02:05My name is Elias Yoder.
02:07I farm a piece of ground here in Lancaster
02:10County, in Pennsylvania,
02:11that my family has worked since 1838
02:15when they came over from the Palatinate
02:17with not much more than the knowledge in their heads
02:20and the seed in their pockets.
02:22And the first thing that knowledge taught,
02:25the very first thing,
02:27handed down from my grandfather
02:29and his grandfather before him was this.
02:33You do not feed the plant.
02:36You feed the ground,
02:37and the ground feeds the plant.
02:40Everything else is just noise.
02:44Now I am going to show you something today
02:46that is a little bit new to me,
02:48and I am going to be straight with you about that, too.
02:52This is not some old Amish secret.
02:55I will not stand here and tell you
02:58my great-great-grandmother carried this across the ocean
03:01because she did not.
03:03This is a thing I picked up from the English gardeners.
03:07A simple trick with a little bit of yeast.
03:10And I tried it because I am a curious man
03:13and I wanted to see for myself
03:15whether there was anything to it.
03:17And I found there was something to it.
03:21Not a miracle,
03:22but something honest and cheap
03:24and worth your time.
03:26So I am going to show it to you
03:28the way I would show a neighbor over the fence.
03:31And I am going to tell you exactly what it does
03:35and exactly what it does not do.
03:38Before I go on, I will say this once
03:41and then I will leave it be.
03:43I gathered the whole of it, all of this,
03:46the old ways of feeding ground
03:49that my people have used for near two hundred years
03:52into a book.
03:54You can find it at EliasYoder.com.
03:57The book is the long version.
04:00If you want it, it is there.
04:02I will not mention it again.
04:05Let me tell you about the yeast
04:07and then let me tell you why it works,
04:10in plain words, without the fancy talk.
04:13You have a little packet of dry yeast in your cupboard,
04:17most likely, the same kind your wife uses to raise bread.
04:21It costs almost nothing.
04:24A tablespoon of it is plenty.
04:26You take that tablespoon of yeast,
04:29and you take two tablespoons of plain sugar,
04:32and you put them together in some warm water.
04:35Not hot.
04:36Hot water will kill the yeast dead,
04:39and then you have nothing.
04:41Not cold, either, because cold water just makes it sleep.
04:46Warm, like the water you would wash a baby in.
04:49Water you can hold your hand in, and it feels good.
04:53You put the yeast and the sugar in that warm water,
04:57and you set it somewhere out of the way,
04:59and you leave the lid loose.
05:01Do not screw the lid down tight.
05:04That yeast is a living thing, and it is going to breathe,
05:08and it will build up a pressure in there,
05:10and you do not want it fighting a sealed jar.
05:15Then you wait.
05:16Overnight is best.
05:18By morning, you will find a head of foam on the top of it,
05:22soft and tan, like the foam on top of a glass of root beer.
05:27That foam is the whole thing waking up.
05:30If you are in a hurry, you can get by with two hours,
05:34but overnight is the way I do it,
05:36because the best things in a garden are never in a hurry,
05:41and neither am I.
05:42Now, while that sits, let me tell you what is actually happening in that jar,
05:48because this is where the fellows on the television lose their way
05:52and start telling you things that are not so.
05:57Yeast is a living thing.
05:59It is a kind of fungus, a tiny one,
06:02so small you would need a strong glass to see a single one of them,
06:06and there are more of them in that little packet
06:09than there are people in this whole country.
06:13When you give them warm water and sugar to eat,
06:16they wake up, and they eat, and they multiply,
06:19and they breathe out gas, which is that foam you see.
06:24The survivors of that little packet are the ones that got fed,
06:29and they breathe, and they fill the jar.
06:32That is the whole of it.
06:35Nothing magic.
06:36Just a great many small living things eating and growing.
06:40And here is the part that matters for your garden.
06:44That water, once it has that living yeast in it,
06:48is not really a fertilizer at all,
06:51not the way the blue jug is.
06:53It is closer to a spoonful of living things
06:57that you are handing down to your soil.
07:00Because good soil, rich soil,
07:03the black, crumbly kind that smells sweet when you turn it,
07:08that soil is alive.
07:09It is full to the brim with tiny living things,
07:14fungus and the like, working away in the dark,
07:17breaking down old leaves and root and manure
07:20into food that a plant root can drink.
07:24Tired soil, worn out soil,
07:27the pale gray dust at the end of a hard summer,
07:31that soil has gone quiet.
07:33The life in it has thinned out.
07:36And when you pour a little of that living yeast water on it,
07:39you are not so much feeding the plant
07:42as you are handing a little bit of life
07:45back to ground that has run low on it.
07:49Think of it like this.
07:50You have a fire that has burned down to nothing,
07:54just a few gray coals barely warm.
07:57And you take a little handful of dry kindling,
08:00and you lay it on and you blow gentle across it.
08:04You have not built a bonfire.
08:07You have just given the coals something to catch on,
08:11so the fire can build itself back up.
08:14That is what a cup of yeast water does to tired ground.
08:19It is the kindling.
08:20The soil does the rest on its own time.
08:24Now let me tell you what it will not do,
08:27because an honest man tells you both halves.
08:31It will not save a plant that is dying of neglect.
08:35It will not water a garden in a drought.
08:39That is the plainest thing I can say to you.
08:42And I heard a man claim otherwise,
08:45and it troubled me,
08:46because a body might believe him
08:48and lose a whole garden
08:51waiting on yeast to do the work of a rain.
08:55Water is water.
08:57Nothing takes its place.
08:59If your ground is dry,
09:01you must water it.
09:03And I will show you a gentle way to do that in a minute.
09:06And it will not keep the blight off your tomatoes
09:10or cure a sick plant of its disease.
09:13I have heard that claimed,
09:15and I do not believe it.
09:17And I would not have you believe it either.
09:21What it will do is feed the life in your soil
09:25so a healthy plant has a fuller table to eat from.
09:29That is real.
09:31And that is enough.
09:33You do not need to dress it up as a miracle
09:37to make it worth doing.
09:39So there is the yeast, plain and honest.
09:43Now let me show you how my grandfather would have made it better,
09:47using the things that cost you nothing
09:49and were never meant to be thrown away.
09:53Because the yeast wakes the soil up,
09:56but the yeast does not feed it much on its own.
10:00The food, the real food,
10:03the minerals a plant builds its body out of,
10:06that comes from other things.
10:09Old things.
10:11Things most folks rake up and haul to the curb
10:13without ever knowing what they are throwing away.
10:16The first one is wood ash.
10:19Now I keep a fire through the cold months,
10:22and all through the year the storms bring down limbs,
10:25and I burn them in a pit out back.
10:27What is left when a hardwood fire burns down cool is a fine gray ash,
10:34and that ash is full of the minerals the tree pulled up out of the ground over all its years
10:40of growing.
10:41Chief among them, the mineral that helps a plant set fruit and stand up strong against the cold.
10:48Now here is a thing my grandfather drilled into me,
10:51and I will drill it into you the same way.
10:54You must gather that ash up dry.
10:57The minute a rain gets to it, the good of it washes down into the ground and runs off,
11:03and what is left in your bucket is near worthless.
11:07So when your fire has burned down and gone cold,
11:11you scoop that ash into a bucket with a lid,
11:14and you keep it under a roof where it stays bone dry until you want it.
11:20Dry ash is a treasure.
11:22Wet ash is just gray mud.
11:25Remember that.
11:27A word of care on the ash, because I would not steer you wrong.
11:32It is strong.
11:33It sweetens the ground, which is to say it takes the sour out,
11:38and most vegetables like that.
11:40But a few, your potatoes and your blueberries and such,
11:44they want their ground a little sour, and the ash will put them off.
11:48So go light.
11:50A little goes a long way, and you can always add more next year,
11:55but you cannot take it back out once it is in.
11:58The second thing is eggshell.
12:01Your wife cracks eggs near every morning,
12:04and most folks toss the shells in the slop or the bin without a second thought.
12:09Do not.
12:11That shell is nearly pure lime,
12:14the very mineral that keeps the bottom of your tomatoes
12:17from going black and rotten in a wet spell.
12:20But a whole shell tossed on the ground takes years to break down,
12:25so long you will never see the good of it.
12:27The trick, and it is a small one, is to let the shells dry out,
12:33and then grind them to a powder, fine as flour, in an old blender,
12:38or with a rolling pin and a bit of patience.
12:41Ground fine like that, the soil life can get at it quick, and it goes to work.
12:46You can stir a spoonful of that eggshell powder right into your yeast water,
12:51and now you have handed your ground both the life and a little of the mineral it feeds on,
12:57in the same cup.
12:59The third thing, and I will be honest that this one is not from my grandfather's day,
13:04is Epsom salt.
13:05It is a plain thing you can buy at any store for a couple of dollars,
13:09and the true name of it is magnesium sulfate,
13:13which is just a fancy way of naming the two minerals in it.
13:17Magnesium is the thing that makes a leaf green.
13:20A plant that is starving for it goes yellow between the veins,
13:23while the veins stay green.
13:25And if you see that on your tomatoes or your peppers,
13:28a half a teaspoon of Epsom salt,
13:30stirred into a quart of your mix,
13:33will often bring the green right back.
13:35But mind me, and this is important.
13:38Only use it if you see that yellowing.
13:41Do not just dump it on healthy plants because a video told you to.
13:46Too much of any one thing throws the whole table out of balance,
13:50and a plant needs its minerals in proportion the same as a person needs a proper meal,
13:54and not just a fistful of salt.
13:57So there is your recipe, and I will keep it plain.
14:01To a quart of your foamed-up yeast water,
14:03you may add a tablespoon of dry wood ash,
14:06a tablespoon of ground eggshell,
14:09and, only if you have seen the yellowing,
14:11a half teaspoon of Epsom salt.
14:14Stir it.
14:15That quart of concentrate then goes into a five-gallon bucket
14:19that you fill the rest of the way with water.
14:21And here is a small thing that matters more than you would think.
14:25Do not fill that bucket with cold water straight from the well or the tap.
14:30Cold water is a shock to warm soil and to the living things in your mix.
14:35Let the bucket sit in the shade a few hours and come up to the warmth of the day first.
14:41Room temperature, or a touch warmer if the sun has been on it.
14:45Then it is ready.
14:46Now you carry that bucket out to your row,
14:49and you give each plant about a cup, poured right at the base, where the roots are.
14:54Not a flood. A cup.
14:57You are not trying to drown it.
14:59You are trying to feed the ground around its feet.
15:02For a plant that is really struggling, you can go a little stronger.
15:06Use a bit less water so the mix is richer.
15:09But do not get carried away thinking more is better.
15:13In a garden, more is very often worse.
15:17And you do not do this every week.
15:20Every couple of weeks is plenty.
15:22The soil needs time to take the kindling and build its own fire.
15:27And if you keep dumping more on, you never let it do its own work.
15:31Let me stop here and say a plain word about who profits from you not knowing this,
15:37because I know some of you are wondering.
15:40And the answer is going to disappoint you, because it is not a wicked scheme.
15:45Nobody is sitting in a dark room plotting to keep the yeast trick from you.
15:50It is simpler and sadder than that.
15:53There is no money in teaching a man to use the packet in his own cupboard,
15:58and the ash from his own fire, and the shells from his own hens.
16:03There is no salesman who gets rich off you gathering up the free things you already own.
16:09The money all runs the other way, toward the bright jug on the shelf with the big promise on the
16:16label.
16:17So nobody with a paycheck on the line has any reason to stand at your fence and teach you the
16:24cheap way.
16:25It is not that they are keeping it from you.
16:27It is that no one profits by handing it to you.
16:31And that, to my mind, is why the old knowledge slips away a little more with each passing year.
16:39Not because anyone stole it, because no one was paid to pass it on.
16:44That is the job, I suppose, of a fellow like me.
16:48Now, while I have you out here at the garden, let me show you a couple of other things,
16:53because the feeding is only half the work, and I told you I would not let you go on thinking
16:59any brew takes the place of water.
17:02In this heat, and we have been in a real scorcher, near a hundred degrees day after day,
17:09the trouble is often not the food at all.
17:12It is the drought.
17:13And I told you plainly, the yeast will not fix a drought.
17:18So let me show you the old, gentle way to water, which does more good than a hard blast from
17:25a hose ever will.
17:26You take a plain gallon jug, the kind that milk or water comes in, and you make one small hole
17:34in the bottom of it,
17:35no bigger than a pin, with a needle or the very finest bit you have.
17:40You fill that jug with plain water, or with your mix, and you set it down between two plants.
17:47And it does not gush.
17:50It weeps.
17:51It lets the water down slow, a slow drip over an hour or more, right down into the soil where
17:59the roots are,
18:00instead of running off the hard, dry crust on top and away down the row.
18:05Slow water sinks deep.
18:08Fast water runs off.
18:11My grandfather did not have a plastic jug.
18:14He had a buried clay pot.
18:16But the notion is old as farming itself, and the notion is the same.
18:21Give the ground time to drink.
18:25And there is one more old habit worth knowing, and it costs nothing.
18:30You can feed a plant through its leaves, not just its roots.
18:34They call it foliar feeding, which is just a fine word for wetting the leaves.
18:40On a cool part of the day, morning or toward evening, never in the hot noon sun,
18:47you can take that same plain yeast water, thin, and mist it over the leaves.
18:53A leaf will drink a little in through its skin, same as the root drinks through the ground.
18:59It is not a substitute for feeding the soil.
19:03It is a small extra kindness, and on a plant that is struggling, it does no harm and a bit
19:09of good.
19:10Just never do it in the heat of the day, or you will scorch the wet leaves under the sun,
19:16like a magnifying glass on dry grass.
19:20Now I want to be fair with you about what to expect,
19:24because I have watched this on my own plants, and I will not tell you a tall tale about it.
19:30You will not walk out the next morning to a different garden.
19:33That is not how living ground works.
19:37What you will see, over a couple of weeks, is a plant that looks a little less sulky,
19:42a color that comes back toward a good, deep green.
19:46New growth that starts to come on where it had stalled.
19:50A few more blossoms setting where before they were dropping.
19:53It is a slow turning, like a sick animal coming back to its feed.
19:58Not a thunderclap. A mending.
20:02And if a man ever shows you a garden that changed overnight, ask him what he is selling,
20:08because something is always being sold in a story like that.
20:13The reason this works at all comes back to the one thing my grandfather said that I have never once
20:19found to be wrong.
20:20The life is in the soil. Not in the plant. The plant is just the part you can see.
20:28All the real work, all the building and breaking down and feeding,
20:32that happens down in the dark, in the ground, among things too small to see.
20:38When you tend that, when you put your care and your ash and your shells and your bit of yeast
20:45down into the ground itself,
20:47the plant takes care of itself. It always has.
20:52We just forgot to look down instead of up.
20:57I keep my yeast in the icebox, by the way, so it stays good a long while, longer than the
21:02date stamped on it.
21:04Kept cold, it holds its life.
21:07And if you can lay hands on fresh yeast, the wet kind, it is livelier still,
21:12though the dry packet works just fine and costs less,
21:16and I would not have you hunting all over creation for the fancy kind,
21:20when the plain kind is sitting in your cupboard.
21:24So here is what I would ask of you.
21:26Try it. Not on your whole garden.
21:29Try it the way I did, on a few struggling plants at the end of a row,
21:34and leave a few beside them untouched, so you can see with your own eyes what it does and what
21:41it does not do.
21:43Do not take my word for it, and for certain, do not take the word of the man with the
21:49jug to sell.
21:51Water a few, leave a few, and watch.
21:55Then come down here to the comments, and tell me your county, and tell me how your ground did, honest,
22:02whether it helped, or whether it did nothing at all.
22:06I want the true report, not the flattering one, because that is how the old knowledge gets tested and kept.
22:13And if you have a trick from your own grandmother for waking up tired soil, put that down there too,
22:20because I am always learning, and I am not too old or too proud to learn from you.
22:28Next time out here, I want to show you how to build a proper compost pile the old way, the
22:34slow way, layer on layer,
22:36so that a year from now you have your own black crumbly gold, and you never have to buy a
22:43bag of anything again.
22:45That is the real answer under all of this.
22:48The pile that turns your scraps and leaves and clippings into the richest ground you have ever put a seed
22:55in.
22:56We will get to it.
22:58But for now, remember what I have told you.
23:01There is no miracle in a jug.
23:04There is only the ground, and the life in it, and the small, honest things you can do to feed
23:12that life with what you already have.
23:15Feed the soil, and the soil feeds you.
23:20The people who built this country with their hands knew that, and we are only just starting to remember it.
Comments