Harvesting Potatoes, Planting Garlic & Making Spaetzle
It's time to get our potatoes dug up before winter arrives! We plant 4 pounds of hardneck garlic in the same patch and hope for the best. Once we get our potatoes to their long term storage, we enjoy an afternoon outside making the German dish, Spaetzle.
We appreciate you tagging along for our Alaskan adventure 😀
Thank you for watching and supporting our channel! 💙
- Eric & Arielle
Our First Year Harvesting Huge Potatoes in Alaska - • First Year Garden Pota...
Last Year's Garlic Harvest (2022) - • We Grew Corn in Alaska...
(っ◔◡◔)っ ♥ 𝐒𝐡𝐨𝐩 𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐄𝐭𝐬𝐲 𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐜𝐮𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐦 𝐓𝐢𝐞 𝐃𝐲𝐞 𝐒𝐢𝐦𝐩𝐥𝐞 𝐋𝐢𝐯𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐀𝐥𝐚𝐬𝐤𝐚 𝐦𝐞𝐫𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐬𝐞: ♥ www.etsy.com/shop/SimpleLivin...
Visit our Amazon store to see the products we use and recommend:
www.amazon.com/shop/simpleliv...
Our Amazon affiliate link if you wish to support our channel: amzn.to/2Xi9CvE
Products shown in this video:
Canon R6 Camera: amzn.to/46dqkwy
All Purpose Fertilizer: amzn.to/3N2kllR
Fish Bone Meal: amzn.to/43BMOWA
Alfalfa Meal: amzn.to/3X4qoLf
QSP Pocket Knife: amzn.to/3LMm9j3
Egg Basket: amzn.to/3Q3ibFu
Camp Chef Stove: amzn.to/3Q0Z4vF
Potato Ricer: amzn.to/3tm73u8
Lodge Cast Iron Skillet: amzn.to/3t8xt2s
Don't want to miss an episode? You can 🅢🅤🅑🅢🅒🅡🅘🅑🅔 here: / simplelivingalaska
Our most popular playlist: • Eggs Benedict on the F...
𝐌𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐅𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐒𝐢𝐦𝐩𝐥𝐞 𝐋𝐢𝐯𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐀𝐥𝐚𝐬𝐤𝐚 -
𝐹𝑎𝑐𝑒𝑏𝑜𝑜𝑘: / simplelivingalaska
𝐼𝑛𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑔𝑟𝑎𝑚: / simplelivingalaska
We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.
Ariel and Eric! My favoriteAlaska people.
My guess for the potatoes being eaten, is likely voles or mice & the slugs are after the remains. Great harvest, considering the year of drought. You’re doing great! Thanks for sharing! Have a great week 🤗💗🇨🇦
Totally agree. The unexpected discovery of a potato patch in the woods probably made a vole or two very happy. I think pure slug damage would look different.
Definitely mice (vole), same thing has happened to me too. I caught them when I was harvesting. They had tunnels all throughout the garden.
This is what I was thinking too
I was going to say vole/mice as well. It looks like at least one had obvious teeth marks. If you can grow any mint in your potato patch, the rodents don't like it. However, it is invasive. I just don't know if it will take over up there like it does in the lower 48
We've had something eat our potatoes this year as well and the ones that don't have chunks taken out have lots of tiny little holes which I think came from the ants that killed off the plants way too early.
Potatoes. In 1949. We went to Northern Ireland, visiting my grandfather’s farm. He took me, a nine year old boy, with him when digging up a batch of potatoes fro Sunday dinner. Noting that the spuds he dug up were all coloured purple, I asked Grandpa; “Does this mean they’re already boiled?” My words, from a nine year-old schoolboy, never away from a big city before, went around the entire farming community like a rocket.
"We've got worms!" I guarantee that all gardeners say this and never think of the more icky connotations of that phrase! LOL!
I’m taking a break from gardening… only to watch this video, then back at it for me! Y’all are my favoritest, bestest, most motivating friends that I’d love to meet from the Internet. The teamwork is making y’all’s dream work, and I’m so happy to be along for the journey! Thanks for having me/us!!!
want your potatoes flowers start to come 🎉 cut them down to about a Foot to High and leave them for a fortnight and you’ll get better skins on and more soft potato inside love you video thanks 👍😂🇬🇧
I second everything you just said!❤
Makes sense to cut them back. Like topping a tomato plant. I’ll definitely try this, thanks.
I would strongly suspect mice or voles are nibbling on the early new potatoes which then scab over after the mice and voles move onto other food as the season progresses. Super common with potatoes grown in some straw. Mice and voles love nesting in straw and it’s kind of a perfect rodent party venue with accommodations and food readily available. As always, great video ❤
Mice and moles make trails through the straw and they stop for lunch along the way. Slugs are just a bonus.
That ice mug smash at the end looked personal 😂
My grandmother was of Lancaster PA German heritage. Sunday dinner was always a roast of some sort. Beef, Lamb, Pork, Chicken, etc. Spaetzle was a standard. Her recipe which I use today is like somdhomestead9031 - Flour, eggs, water, salt. Nana used a spaetzle cutter that was older than her. I use a spaetzle cutter we bought from Lehman's. I learned the hard way using that cutter. Spray the hopper and cutter with vega spray. Easier cleanup. Enjoy. 73 & God Bless
The potatoes could be being eaten by voles, I'd say- google some variation of "voles eating potatoes" and you'll see all the image results have a very similar look to what you're pulling out. If you want to keep them off your crop you'll need to basically line your potato bed with hardware cloth and screen them out that way- plus plant them alongside alliums, so the smell keeps them away. Google also says there's some flowers with bad-tasting bulbs which can be effective, too
19:16 "we're makin our dough, here we go, the ones we know... we've got merlot" (str8 bars)
Grandpa used to call the slugs cut worms, hit tubers and cabbage in the garden, he put ashes around the plants to control them? Mom was German and pronounced it "spetz-lee", would scrape along the bottom of the ricer with a knife to cut them about 1.5 inches long into the boiling water. Super fun to watch you guys each week, keep it up.
It's either a rat, a vole, or gopher. Check around the areas to see if you have any hills, if so you know it's a gopher. Just holes and tunnels are voles/rats. Moles also make little hills, but they only eat worms, grubs and bugs.
Been making Spaetzle for over 50 years. Water, flour, eggs, little salt. We use Spaetzle instead of potatoes with eye roast of beef and gravy.
How do you get the spaetzle in the pot? From lump of dough to spaetzle. My gran would put the dough on a plate and scrape bits of dough into a pot of boiling water. I know there has to be a better way.
Yes, never heard of making spaetzle with potatoes, that would be more like gnocchi.
My German grandma would do the same. The one time I made it, I used a colander.@@Barbara-ui7cy
@@Barbara-ui7cy Thats the exact traditional way "vom Brett schaben"... you can use a press but its not the way they should be make
We just have Käs Spätzle 😜
In Poland, this dish is made from grated raw potatoes, some flour (can be potato flour), an egg, spices, knead the dough and spoon it into salted boiling water. ready-made dumplings need to be mixed with fried bacon and onion, and finally sprinkled with crumbled cottage cheese. You can add fried sauerkraut instead of cottage cheese. delicious!
I am from the South of Germany...we call this "Schupfnudeln". It is also really good if you fry Sauerkraut with bacon bits add the Schupfnudeln and the onions without the cheese. Enjoy!
My favorite couple getting ready for fall and winter picking potatoes and setting in garlic for next year. Always hard workers and make old farmers proud the job they do. Love you guys, hope all works out for you two this Fall and Winter.😍❤❤🙏🙏🌹🌹🌹🌻🌻🌻
✨🌱🪶
A potato /noodle is a POODLE!! Hahahahaha😂 Love the dynamic between you two! It’s inspiring seeing what two people who work well together can accomplish.❤
"shpate-zul" wunderbar!
when i first saw the birds flying, i thought it was the concrete cracking. i thought, OH NO!
I can relate to Arielle excitement about the earth worm especially here in FL we have nothing but sandy soil.💜
What you are making is almost like a potato gnocchi. They are quite good sauteed in a bit of butter, or even covered in a sauce of some kind. Good luck in storing your potato harvest!! 🥔🥔🥔
Kartoffelnudeln, potato noodles, a German recipe also. The noodles are normally cut to finger-thick pieces, everything else just like Arielle said. Spaetzle are made from flour
Ah yes. Gnocchi are great in Butter with some chopped up sage leaves...
Slugs are responsible for potatoes w holes in them. Otherwise is either voles or mice. Also wireworm which is the larvae of the click beetle 🪲 tunnel throughout the potato 🥔 leaving access for the slugs. ❤
"Do you think anyone's ever excited to hear, "We've got worms." My wife gets excited every time we find one and runs it over to the garden.
Love potato harvest day!!
Me too! Growing potatoes is so much fun!😃
So exciting that you got to do a little gardening this year after all!
Airel you be glowing l8ly . You are both looking happy and healthy in your new home.
I'm going to apologise now for the long comment. 😂 Great video, potato harvesting can be like a lucky dip run by Nature herself. The eaten bits of the potatoes reminded me of what used to happen to my raddishes and strawberries. Not slugs, but slaters (you may know them as sow bugs, pill bugs, wood louse, etc). That really looked like slater damage to me, and maybe the slugs just took advantage? Usually, to me, slug damage looks different. We resolved the issue in two ways... let our chickens in to eat the slaters, planted the foods we didn't want slater eaten in styrofoam boxes (away from the chickens) or hanging baskets only filled with shop bought potting mix. Not going to work for potatoes, except maybe the chook feast bit. 😂 Spätzle (spaetzle) - Arielle pronounced it right. I grew up pronouncing it wrong, and I'm half German. 😂 It's shhh-petz-la. Meant to mean "tiny sparrows" I think. No idea. And two better German dishes to use potatoes in would be kartoffelpuffer (potato pancakes) or hoppel poppel. The trick to getting the extra moisture out of potatoes for the pancakes is to grate them when raw, put them in muslin cloth or similar, then squeeze the moisture out. You can then just add grated raw potato to the batter (for sweet pancakes), or soften it by cooking with some onion until onion goes "glassy", let cool, then add to batter (for savoury). Hoppel poppel is a little like the Uk's bubble n squeak in that it can be made with cooked veg leftovers. But I prefer it the way my Opa used to make it. Boil whole potatoes in the evening before, allowing them to cool in the water overnight. Next morning, peel them (should come off easily with just your fingers), and dice into big bite size pieces. Add diced fatty bacon (speck works best) to a cold skillet then heat so the fat melts and renders. I can't eat onion, but traditionally you cook diced onion with the bacon. Add the potatoes to the skillet, seasoning with salt, pepper, and nutmeg. Cook until edges of potatoes start going crispy. Then crack some eggs over it, and keep cooking until done to your liking. This has to be one of my all time favourite comfort foods. 😁 I sometimes add baby spinach and feta to it. Sorry for long comment, thanks for reading it all. ❤
You made Gnocchi 😊 it's an Italian potato dumpling! It's really good with a ragu or a tomato sauce or even a butter sauce. I think it would taste fantastic with the garlic stuff you made!
They do know gnocchi. If you watch them regularly for years you will see them often make it.
Great vid. Love those potatoes and the Carmel onions. Make those often. That's a good dish with fresh goose. The bee shed looks the trick for protecting the hives this winter. The best with those and the garlic patch. Moles. grubs worms hit the potatoes. Maybe at different temp times. Need you a creeper with a pull rope in the crawl space to handle the crates of stored food. Very easy to hurt you back twisting lifting and trying to work upside down. Much like my 50 years in the low coal mines of east KY. except the sky won't fall. Can't wait til the next one. You all take care. The big change is on now. Time to gather and drain all the water implements. Do some basic service checks on the tractor. It's a southern ride.
Käsespätzle is the best childhood comfort food! My dad is from Austria so we always had a bag of spätzle in the freezer when he made a heap-ton of it. The cheese to use is emmentaler and the dish is supposed to be made in the oven, (according to me), spätzle, cheese and onion being layered. If you can't find emmentaler cheese (emmental in English) any good cheese used in a gratin is good - it just has to be aged so the flavor is rich.
Arielle Gnocchi is another treat you can make with mashed potatoes, flour,eggs and water😊
They have made it often
Voles are munching on the taters
Moles, voles snd chipmunks do exactly that to our potatoes 🥔
We always stored potatoes, carrots, and related veg in our underground root cellar under sand in my childhood home homesteading. It worked really well, the sand absorbed the moisture. Also insulated. And isolated each veg from the others in case one went bad. We checked once a months and reburied. Apples and winter squash went well that way too. If the veg are stored together in a bin if one goes bad it can quickly affect the others. You can also check once a week if you do that. You choose the location based on temperature in the underground area. You can do bins with sand too to make it easier to check and manage.
Last year we had a a time with chipmunks 🐿️ eating our potatoes 🥔 our new cat 🐈 has taken care of that problem for us.
Good kitty. 🐈
Love watching you guys work together! My favorite homesteading channel!
🪶✨
Always enjoy your videos! It's amazing how many are following you now. We always love you guys! It's midnight sleep tight friends
You have moved so far north that i didn't hear the dinner bell. That look good thanks for sharing your life with us we enjoy this. Be safe
Sending support, love, and kindness from Lexington, Michigan, USA
We look forward to our greenhouse build someday. ❤🍃🤞
That's the prettiest pot of colorful potatoes
Can't wait to hear those geese over my house very soon. God bless!
We've also had partially eaten potatoes uncovered at harvest. In our case, the culprits turned out to be voles that love to eat tubers etc. We're located in northern Ontario, Canada. We thoroughly enjoy watching your videos.
Voles were my first thought as well, Portland, OR here.
…or mice.
Definitely looks like Voles to me.
We had voles eat our potatoes here as well this year. Alberta, Canada
Potato picking, very familiar. We had two big gardens of potatoes every year growing up. We had probably 1000+ pounds of potatoes every year that went into the root cellar.
I love watching all of your videos. I noticed that when you put the potatoes and batteries in your crawl space it was hard to move the heavy things around. Maybe Eric could build a little board with wheels to move things around down there. Also, maybe a leaf blower would be easier than a broom in your giant Quonset hut. Keep up the great work!
My husband and I love watching your videos.
Spätzle are absolutely delicious in a variety of dishes. If you make them with cheese, you would usually put them in an oven dish for a while almost like a casserole so the cheese gets nice and brown on top. The Spätzle without cheese are absolutely fantastic with venison and a creamy mushroom sauce. As someone else in the comments already said, your dough should be a lot more liquid. Think pancake batter. You really don't want to be able to fold it with your hands like this. (I suspect the potatoes are to blame for this - try making them without those and see what you think!) Fully agreed that it looks like you got some voles munching on your potatoes there. Once you are ready to make your new garden next year, it might be a good idea to put down some anti-vole mesh first to try and keep your future harvest safe, if possible.
agree with everything. just wanted to say Ariels pronunciations where pretty good for a non-native german
Hey fellow gardeners, the Spaetzle originated from Eastern Europe and actually it is national dish in my home country Slovakia and we called it Halusky and there is easier way to make them. You just grate raw potato add egg,semi coarse flour and salt and trough special sieve with bigger holes throw them in salted boiling water. Then you sieve them ,rinse them with warm water and once they are sieved you add curd cheese and melted butter,add more salt and you can topp it with fried pancetta or small chopped bacon and also we do it with special kind of cheese called bryndza or you can do it with sour cabbage which you first fried with oil and onion. And this dough you can also make without potato and add some nice chicken stew to it 🙂
Yes, I love halusky! My family from Pennsylvania made it all the time, tough I know the American version deviates from the traditional recipe. We did spaetzle/egg noodles, fried cabbage, onions, and a little bit of smoked pork if you wanted, though I actually prefer just cabbage, noodles, and onions with a lot of good quality butter.
Bryndza is a soft sheep cheese made in the Tatra Mountains in Poland. (It can be aged/hardened/smoked too, and comes up close in texture to halloumi but the flavour is really unique.) Now, I'm getting hungry for it😂
Oh, man! My Oma(granma), made the best dang spaetzle! I still have her spaetzle board and knife(almost 100 yrs old). Its a small handheld cutting board That's thin on one end. She would put dough on the board then slice off them off into the boiling water, lightning fast and perfect. Then, serve with browned butter !
lol loved the ice mug smash at the end and the smile it brought.
Love it when you harvest veggies. Cannot wait for you to start your veggie garden at the new home. Hope it going to even better than the old place. And that is going to be hard one to better. ❤
I looked it up. Slugs often spoil main crop potatoes by making holes in the tubers. Damage can be serious in autumns following mild, wet summers especially in heavy soils.
Cycle of life!! Give that slug to the chickens!! Nice!
Please put 3 bed and breakfast rooms on your property. I need to be able to spend a week there. I know others, need to spend a week there. 🤣
Congrats on you no work potatoes harvest! Natural. Organic. Homemade. Free!!!
The hens are just as excited to hear your potato hill has worms!
I thoroughly enjoy watching all your videos. A senior, as I am, many of the things you do are out for me. Nonetheless, it’s a pleasure to learn from you. There is always something new. Thank you for sharing. You have become very dear to me, even though I am so far away from you. Stay safe and enjoy ALL your dinners. ❤
Thanks for following along :)
Sandhill Cranes @13:25. "Ribeye in the sky". Delicious!
I'm so excited to see how your garlic grows and the garden next year! The bird formations were amazing-I can't imagine all the noise those birds would make wherever they land😂
You just prepared "Halušky", which is traditional dish in Slovakia (Europe) however we just boil them and combine it with bryndza (soft type of sheeps cheese) and bacon. We even have a special gadget for making it (but very similar to ricer you used). Love it!
Lol! Great video as usual kiddos! The ice cup smashing was fantastic! lol
So my hubby is Dutch and we make spaetzle and traditionally it’s just flour and water and salt through a spaetzle machine. I am Italian and you pretty much made gnocch noodles…gnocchi is potatoes, flour, egg, salt……all looks amazing no matter what you call it…yum 🤩🤩 oh and we add crumbled bacon to our spaetzle….delicious 🤗
I enjoy watching potato harvesting, finding all those treasures. Can't wait to see you with a garden next year, bigger and better than the old homestead.
Potatoes are determinant and indeterminant so chilling for one only keeps the taters from getting sun
What a life you, too, have. I love watching you guys do your thing. THANK YOU come to you from Connecticut USA
The potatoes being munched on is voles or mice . They got me one year.
Just read that growing potatoes following grass can lead to slug action. They likely were there for the grass and got lucky. 😮
Saw mice getting at the potatoes on "Alaska, The Last Frontier". Might be the culprit here.
I have to say I love seeing a gardening video from you guys. I was a little sad when you converted the high tunnel to the chicken run. But hopefully you do a bigger and better one.
Bet they have something planned for the summer :)
Eating potatoes under hay, My first guess would be meadow vole. AKA. Field mouse
We live west of Bragg Creek, Alberta in the Eastern Foothills of the Rockies and you have voles eating your potatoes. Our weather and landscape is so similar to yours. I found i had this problem with voles when I covered my potato rows with straw and/or wood shavings. The voles love to use these layers as runways and homes with food readily available. I don't have the problem as much when I layer with soil and compost. hope this helps. We love your videos and have been watching since you arrived in Alaska.
Nice ice cup! Bird formations we awesome! Good potatoes harvest too !❤
The cooking, gardening & build videos are my favorite! Pls Keep 'em coming ~ you two have a unique charm about you, thx for sharing with us
... and the fishing.
I gasped when you showed the long lines of cranes migrating, high in the sky. What a treat to see! Thank you.
An acquaintance of mine told me he went to a composting conference around Thanksgiving. He said the people putting on the conference buried whole turkeys in their compost pile and they were baked by the heat.
The noodles are called Zwirl in Germany and are better if the potatoes are cooked the day before. great video ❤
Zwirl are different shape, pea size
Interesting I'm German but I've never heard the name Zwirl but I'm also not from Bavaria. I'd probably call these Gnocchi because that's what a Spätzle shaped potato dumpling (aka Knödel) kinda is 🤣
These potato harvesting are always my favourite.
Possibly shrew, mice or ground squirrels ( chipmunks) ate your tubers. Still fun to hunt for potatoes.😁
I just love when you put out a vlog of your Alaskan living.
You young folk are such good cooks!! 🙂 What a wonderful channel!
Ariel and Eric, glad to see a video from you guys. Blessings to you guys and your fur babies.
Even though we are In completely different states, I know that we have similar climate, flora, and fauna. We are zone 3 in Northern Maine. I battle the same issues with my potatoes (and carrots, peas, beets, turnips, and winter squash) and one of our biggest issues is voles. They love to eat our garden before we can. I was mulching with straw, and it turnout voles absolutely love straw. Just a possibility to consider. Ours survive in -30+ under the insulating snowpack. Good luck with the coming winter. We’ve enjoyed watching you for years!
Nothing like growing and making some goodness...
👏🏻👏🏻🎉🎉🎉🎉Yay, potato harvest.
After several years of working on our soil, I was so thrilled to see all the earth worms! So I get that!! Looks like a pretty good harvest for the potatoes, considering it was your first attempt. We have a crawl space too, but not as nice as yours. We just filled our wood box today, in anticipation of twenties at night later this week. Great video as always, just love watching your adventures!!
My routine here in tropical Alligator Creek, Queensland, Australia when I wake up and there is a vid from you guys: I immediately put on a vid from anyone else, so I don't miss anything of your vid while I go make a cup of coffee, feed/water my parrot, and do anything else I need to do so I can be undisturbed for 30 to 60 minutes. Grab my coffee, head back to the laptop, select your vid, go full-screen, and enjoy. Love your vids and they are the highlight of my internet-viewing week. Thanks.
Google says...Voles eat them...wireworms tunnel into them, also making a tunnel for grubs...I live and I learn lol
You guys are awesome.Thanks for sharing! (Never seen someone so happy to crawl underground with potato baskets...) :))
As a gardener in Australia those weird looking spuds are Pink Fir Apple I think, an old variety I love and that’s how they usually grow.
Italians make something similar called gnocchi pronounced "in yo ki" using potatoes, flour, egg. Then you thumb the dough to make a shell like pasta before boiling them. Usually use tomatoes sauce but have also seen them used with a cream sauce.
They have made gnocchi often. Look back videos
I use "Irish spring" soap to repel voles. Just shave the soap bar in the area to be planted and continue 1/month till harvest.👍
Soooo loving what you two are doing on your new property. ❤❤❤❤
I really love this couple and their content. So relaxing watching you guys. Even-though I'm sure it's hard work, it's inspiring me to test my own skillsets.
You never know what you are gonna get until you try different things. Cool
I was waiting for a shout of "Another!" after the smashing of the mug. Very Thor of you 🙂
Those mutant potatoes remind me of balloon animals! I'd be happy with what you got! I need to try growing potatoes. Hi from Massachusetts!
I definitely get excited to find out I have worms (in the garden, of course)! Love all that you share, thank you!!❤✌
Sand hill cranes flying over, nice capture of their formation and sound
Moles and voles will eat potatoes ,mice and rats also slugs drill holes in them. Nice dinner!
More vids you guys great 😃