2 Must Have Garden Tools For A Reluctant Gardner

Red skies in the morning, sailors warning. We've been needing to plant these onions for weeks. It's supposed to rain today. Hopefully we can get this done before and it'll get the fresh straw and the newly planted onions will get a nice watering. You ready to do this, my man? Yeah. Okay, first up, what do we do? We're gonna get the old straw out of the way and into the paths. Okay, I think that one's done. If you want to keep working, Josiah, I'm gonna go get the gritter. That's actually not the gritter we're looking for. We're looking for— I think there's 2 or 3. We're looking for the smaller one. That's the bigger gritter. Let's put it in here. I think we got the smallest gritter on there. All right, I thought we had a little bit smaller, but now that I look at it, I think it'll work. This gritter, absolute game changer. I need to make things as easy as possible in the garden. Currently, I don't even eat vegetables. Look at that garden plot. I'm telling you, the silage tarp, this thing— oh my gosh, between the silage tarp and the grader, two recent improvements, it's made gardening so much easier. The silage tarp is a piece of UV-treated plastic. It would go down black side up. No, it does not collect a lot of heat that way. If you want to collect heat, you need to do clear plastic. Josiah, let's start planting. Grab the onions. Gosh, that does look so good though. This looks so good, kind of makes me want to eat a vegetable. Actually, I probably will eat some of these onions. Good morning! Good morning!

We're apparently late to the party.

Oh, I know, man, we're burning daylight. You're burning daylight, as Boots would say. I would have gotten here faster, but I held him up. Here comes the reason.

I held him up.

Here comes the reason. He's sleeping in, isn't he? Josiah, why don't we start planting planting them on every single grid. This thing has 4 grids, so one every, every spot. 1, 2, 3, 4. And this is going to give us, I think, about either 6 or 9 inches, and either one's all right. Hook a hole— the soil's so soft you can— and then bury the onion down to the roots. Well, why do I do a garden? Well, I like to garden in peace. That basically means I say whatever you want, honey. Happy wife, happy life. The Garden of Peace. We just pulled this silo tarp up yesterday, so this is more what it would look like. Makes it so much easier because it's just on standby until we're ready. The worms are active under there. Whenever we're ready, we just pull it up and it's supple like that. Using that plastic then Begs the question, well, it's plastic, that's not permaculture. A computer's plastic too, so, um, sometimes I think there's a worthy compromise. Make sure you guys plant them on the grid. You got to leave room for hoeing. In one week I'll need to hoe this, and you're keeping them, I don't know, 6 inches apart. And it's somewhat easy to hoe, especially with like a 3 or 4 inch stirrup hoe. I was hesitant to do this myself, the plastic, until I finally did it. But I'm telling you what happened the first time I pulled that plastic up. I saw all these worms, I saw all their— what you call worm castings— their worm holy— and I was sold.

We are planting onions. We're using this grid pattern on the soil as our markers for where we're doing our spacing.

Onion bomb! Video bomb! I mean, unless the cow gets out and steps on it, but in that case, they even sell a patch. Oh, by the way, you're probably going to want to know where I get all this stuff. I'll leave the links down in the description. No affiliate, no sponsorship, just good stuff.

That's my cue to add in the Bitly link.

Yes! Yes, we're— Dan's here because he's now my main editor, like full-on full-time. I have told him when I mention a product, go ahead and make a Bitly link for it. What's a Bitly link? Well, Bitly is like, you can shorten what you call the URLs. It's not this long crazy URL one, and then it can track how many people actually clicked through it. If you're curious, just a subtle mention or or of these things is like, they'll probably be— I'm talking a little bit more about it— you'll probably be at least 1,000 of you click through that. That's crazy. So as you can imagine, a lot of companies and people and what they're not very like, we get emails like constantly every day. I tell overwhelming majority no, and it's not because I don't want to serve you guys or help somebody out. These are generally kind people, I'm sure. It's that I don't believe or would use those products. So just want to let you guys know, I would never recommend anything that I don't like fully believe in, to the best of my knowledge. Guys, do we have any more onions? Nope, I got the last. Oh, guess what? Mucho más. 3 or 4 more of what you got right there. Boom! I'm sorry, Josiah, you thought we were done. Probably have at least 2 beds of this. So Full transparency, I'll let you guys know if, if I'm getting an affiliate link, if it's sponsored, if somebody paid for me to review a product. I'll give you an example. Redmond's Salt contacted me and wanted to do a partnership. I'm like, heck yes, because Redmond's is our go-to salt. And no, I didn't get paid to say that. I guess that's a bonus, but with them. I believe in them. I wouldn't get mine— I wouldn't mind getting paid to say that. What do you think, Dan? You, you use Redmond exclusively? I know, right? For salt.

And I use specifically their salt and selenium mix for the sheep.

I knew a health-conscious dude, you'd appreciate that. I'm glad you mentioned that because I didn't really know they did homesteading products, like farm products too.

I think that's a new launch for them.

Yeah, I think maybe that's why they found me and reached out. So I'm like, heck yeah. Same deal with that Cummins, Cummins generator. They actually sponsored that. It was a big brand deal. And the only reason I did a deal with them when they reached out is because I had a Cummins in our bus, and that thing was a beast, and it was so reliable, and we had no problems with our backup energy with that, with that generator.

So every once in a while I poke through, I hit like a pot a pocket of air, like a hollow spot. I'm guessing that's where the rodents were.

Yeah, tunneling. Probably some rats. Do I have to plant one down here? I mean, follow your gut. You definitely want to plant it— if you can't plant it far away from each— far enough away from each other, definitely don't. So back to the plastic thing, I realized, well, it lasts forever, that's a good thing. But two, I'm so much more efficient with growing our own food now. With just that plastic addition, that that's that much more food I'm growing on the land isn't having to be trucked from California, or isn't some, some things coming even from internationally? Doesn't have to happen as much anymore. And look at this straight line, this square pattern. It's going to be easy to take a little stirrup hoe and just zigzag through there. And that's because of this, that's That's the Never Sink Gritter. Comes with 4 different, or 3 different of those metal plates, different spacings. It's expensive for what it is, but it's unbelievable how much time it has saved me. So unless you like really enjoy hardcore gardening, uh-uh. But if you're more like me, I don't really like gardening, then you want to make it the easiest. I like the end result feeding my family, family wonderful homegrown nutrient-dense veggies. This event, I don't necessarily like the process. I like the process of growing pork, process of growing chicken and eggs, process of growing milk and beef and sheep— I should say lamb. One cool thing about finally getting a permanent run is you haven't had to be putting the chickens up at night because this is pretty much predator-proof. Josiah, will you go ahead and water our, uh, newly planted raised beds? That's another thing— raised beds. If it were up to me, this is all the gardening we would do. And not that we would do more raised beds. I think 6, 7 in your— our front yard is plenty. I would talk Rebecca into just doing this. What about the crop gardens? What about the potatoes and and onions. Well, could we maybe trade with like a friend, Honey Tree Farm or something? You can grow so much in here. Like these little plants, we didn't even plant these tight enough. And it's so easy being higher, just having more control, getting it off the ground. But oh my goodness, Justin, you're a homesteader, you have to— huh, you have to have a garden. No you don't. No you don't. Who made up that rule? Grow what's closest to your heart. And for me, that's a lot of animal products. So, uh, if, you know, if they were up to me, we'd be focused even more attention on all these animals. Because one reason is because those are so hard to get. It's hard to get 100% grass-fed lamb, and if you can, it's very expensive. It's impossible to get organic pork other than organic bacon and sausage. Dan, are you waiting on me?

Yeah, I didn't want to make it cover up.

Just cover this. Oh, okay, cover that up. Thank you, you're so polite.

Just this side.

It is so fun. Yeah, sure. It is so fun filming with somebody who, who is used to filming. They pay attention to this kind of stuff. The tarps are noisy, and they homestead too, so they know tarps are noisy. They know I'm trying to make a movie here. Before you grow what's close to your heart, you might want to grow what's close to your spouse's heart. Remember the Garden of Peace? Yes, honey. Hey, he's squirting at me. Oh, you better not get the vloggers wet, guys. We had a major photo shoot last night. It felt high pressure. Writing project I'm working on, more on that soon. Been working on this for like a year and a half. Josiah, let's— so We planted that for the, for the photos, but it's legit. Yeah, go ahead and put those peas right over here on this trellis. Thank you, my man. Do you know how to get them out without crushing them? No. Okay, here, hold the camera. Okay, so here's how you get it. You pinch at the bottom and it comes right out. Usually that one got— I might have gotten lucky, but that came out really nice. Look who's here. Concrete day's final day. They're coming to seal it. Big Daddy said we need to seal that concrete if if we don't want like liquid stains going through it, like blood on the butchering— for the butchering shed, liquids being spilled in the people barn. Hey, whatever it takes to get this to last even longer, be even better. It's just a small addition to take it that much further. This was a popular video. You guys really liked this, this community center we're creating out of the old barn. Probably one of my most favorite comments was, "Let's call it the People Barn." That's good because we have the pole barn. This is now a people barn. These old barns, perfect for people, not so good for farming. Look who I got, and I've dressed up We're about to go into town. I'm actually going to the doctor. It's been a while since I've seen a doctor about my Lyme disease. Just gonna go get some guidance, have somebody to filter all different kinds of ideas through. Got a bonus for you guys this weekend, and it's not from me. Tim Schmoyer, Video Creators from YouTube, a YouTube expert, filmed me and interviewed me for a podcast, but it's a video. Now, if you guys are ever interested in like this approach I have. Like, you, you're learning something, but it's not a lecture. I like to call it immersion learning. Well, Tim was really fascinated by that style of teaching and did a whole show about it. So if you guys are interested in kind of my approach to this thing, I would encourage you to check that out. It'd be extra content for you guys this weekend. I'll leave the link for it down in the description. I thought it turned out really well. I had been an authority. I had made this course about permaculture chickens And now I'm going to go through a challenge and start showing our real life. All of a sudden we had a sick chicken. And I remember posting this video. This very early on made me sick, made me so sick I had to take a nap. The expert's not supposed to make mistakes. It blew up. And you know what happened, Tim? That became our first viral video, and that launched our full-time career on YouTube.