2nd Guessing

There they go. It's dark and early. Mom and Josiah weren't able to get into the driver's ed test yesterday. It's crazy here in western North Carolina getting in. Oh my gosh, it is flurrying. Look in front of the truck. Suburban. Back still hurt. I'm gonna see what I can do. Stay moving, right? I think I can at least do halos. Yeah. Just heard from Mom. They're there 30 minutes early. It's like 25 degrees, flurrying. 4 people are already there waiting outside. They're gonna wait in the car. If any more people show up, they're gonna have to get out. Let's see if I can do this one. This one. I don't think so. Well, maybe. How do you feel, young man? Tired. He's starting to train with me. Let's see if we can do a get up. I can do it, right? 1, 2. Oh nope, nope, nope. Why is this happening to me? I can't pinpoint any one thing that's injuring my back. I'm gonna get a workout because we're gonna split lots of wood today. You ready? The goal is to get to chores by 7. We can get started on wood by 8. We can get 6 or more totes done, which is what we need to do to get our— today and every day this week to get our winter supply. Hey Jonah, this is not a, uh, table. Picked up a used ping pong table on Facebook Marketplace. I like this wooden paddle. Paddles from the farm. Not terrible. Good. Let's get some real paddles. It's a little cold this morning. 21 degrees. Not my turn to be doing Cows today. It's your side. Oh really? I'll help with everything but the net. No, we want to get on splitting wood and we need to do both sets of chores. Come on, he made up for you. I'm fixing to try your idea with the chicken. That's our chicken's water. It's not full because it's freezing. The nipples on it freeze. I'm thinking about making that an Everflow too, but that won't stop the nipple— nipple things from freezing. Jonah had this idea to immerse the trough heater, and I said, well, will that keep the, the outside nipple waters from freezing? Might be worth a try. We'll just rely on the foolproof method this morning. Take the frozen water. Actually, this might— we might be able to— I would say switch these out, but actually that's still running, so we'll actually be able to make this work. I don't know how this is not a block of ice. When it gets freezing, it doesn't go past 30 because how does it get more freezing? That's the Minnesota nights. Let's hope we get lucky on this. This one too. Yeah, so these are pretty tried and true. It's 21 degrees and I just broke the water and it's still liquid on the inside. I guess Annie put the goose back in. Hopefully the goose learned its lesson, doesn't kill anybody more. You had this frozen solid, you just put a new one out and then bring this one inside, and then that's your water tomorrow and you just flip them. See how it goes. Most time it gets 40 or more during the day. And everything thaws out by the afternoon. Been extreme events, very cold all day long, not warming out. You might have to switch it out a couple of times during the day. Here, let me yell at the kids to not watch the boob tube. Hopefully he didn't get off my Dropbox uploading files to Austin. They're gone for Christmas. Don't watch TV, please. Well, get some breakfast. It's a beautiful tree we have there. 21 degrees, it Is it still flowing? Hey, no water chores out here today. It doesn't matter if it's 21 degrees. 21 degrees. You as excited as I am? Well, why not? We don't have to do no water chores over here, huh? I don't know why we didn't just include the creek. Well, that's best practice to keep them out of it. The creek is our instructor. It's how nature keeps water unfrozen in the winter. Gravity-fed flow. I haven't been feeding over there because I thought you were gonna kind of grade that. I realized that. So come over here on this higher ground, dude. I'd be a complete waste of a hay bale. He's got to grade that. For one, it's crooked, and two, we're gonna do like that so we don't have the big ditch in the middle of this. There's home this afternoon. Doesn't it feel good to have those bins filled up? Woo! It's 8 o'clock now. We're just getting to milking. We had to do a little animal chores. Kind of forgot about that. We've been a little slower going because of the difficulty of the cold. Jonah said the cold comes in at 8, the coldest moment. That's what the weather is calling for, so I can see that. And it's windy right now. It's cutting right through my toboggan and jacket. Josiah's in the back. It's a test, right? Uh-huh. It's just a computer test. He doesn't drive or anything, right? No driving. What? I'm making a movie. We're gonna explain to the doctor why I have frostbite, right? Chopped my toes off. Tell them we were making a movie. Actually, high today. Looks like it's only gonna be 33, so they might have some challenges this afternoon with water. We'll see. You want to make a snowball, man? I love it. Is it snowing, Papa? Yeah, it's snowing. You need a little more snow. Please make me one. Oh, I will make you one if it's Snows more, his snowball man. I love it. Lily made homemade beef tallow marshmallows. Oh my gosh, bacon, fried cabbage, my favorite. These eggs look awesome. Holy smokes. I'm trying to get on back on my healthy habit wagon. Yeah, kind of falling off the wagon a bit. I need to do more fasting, so that's part of it. So intermittent fasting this week. I'm just doing little things at a time. You know, maybe I should have been like, I intermittent fast for 3 days and then eat. Maybe I'll do that. Just little small steps. So maybe intermittent fasting every day for a week, the first week getting back on the wagon. It's too much of a leap. Big dreams but small steps. So what we'll do is we'll eat today breakfast And then I've intermittent fast for 2 or 3 days. I'll do that again for 2 or 3 days and then stricter step next week. Put an egg on top of that and have a bacon sandwich. One heck of a day for Josiah to drive for his first time. I know, snowy. Just got a text from Mom. He passed and they're on their way home. It kind of sucks to be Working wood in this cold, but I guess it would be worse if it were hot. You ever heard that saying, wood warms you up twice? Once when you work it up. Hey, is that them getting home? It is. And twice when you burn it. Hey, look who's driving! He drove home in the snow, and I heard he made 100%. The written and the signed, 100. Good job, buddy. Proud of you. I think we're encroaching on 9:30. I'm glad my goal was to start at 8. We are starting earlier than we normally do. 9:30. Woo! 9:28. That's pretty stupid trying to do this without protective eyewear. Little shards are going into my eye. Could be worse. Problem is I don't know where the glasses are. I just want to get started. Any protective eyewear? I've got a pair in my car, I think. Rebecca? When you get a chance, can you order us a 10-pack of protective eyewear? Not expensive because we just lose them. I forgot to say, I found some glasses. I like these. These are all encompassing. Mandy gave them to me. I'm excited to open It's a record amount of pile of logs though, isn't it, Josiah? Splitter's definitely a bottleneck. Remember what I said about getting warmed up? Yeah, just under 2 hours. You think we can split all this in that? 2 bins in 1 hour. Let's, let's talk about something, boys. Something about the cold and doing this 2 days in a row got me thinking. When I've been to Polyface, they have a wood boiler. Now they have a traditional one. It can burn wet wood, it can burn just crap. I have a gasification wood boiler, so it needs at least seasoned wood. But does it have to be split? This one, can we pick this one up? No problem. You pick that one up. Oh, oh, maybe we do need to split them. Why'd you drop it? Now the next question is, well, can my boiler do whole logs? And then the question after that would be, can y'all load these pretty easy in the track loader bucket? It. We could even just saw smaller logs. See, that would be very hard to pick up off the ground. That might be too much, huh? Do you know how much time this would save? We could just burn logs. You know, that'll last us a month. Yeah, we've already— that all this that we split, you think? Yeah, 4 days each. 4, 8. Yeah, that's, that's a month. Dang, we don't need— we can kind of actually take a break and don't need to split some more. Would be good to knock it all out at once and then be done and then start working on the hurricane or, uh, start clearing woods or something else. We didn't have to split big ones, we would— we can come down here and work up that pile, say right there, and just be done. Y'all would pile it up into a nice pyramid and then we would, uh, cover it up. What do you think? Wait, if that's a month Only trying to get 3 months. See if we can burn whole logs, and let's see if we can dump it over by the boiler. What do you think? It's got to be big, not so big that you can't put it through that door. Do it. It would fit in there. All right, put a couple of those, burn all night nice and slow. We're gonna try it. We're gonna clean this out tomorrow. Go at it hard, stalling. We should be able to get all the firewood we need in one morning sawing. Before we get too excited, let's ask Rock if this stove can take full, full logs. Central Boiler Classic Edge burn whole logs. Please say yes. Okay, it's just talking about the— this size cam accommodate whole logs, especially smaller to medium— smaller to medium-sized logs. Burning whole logs might require more frequent cleaning or could potentially lead to incomplete combustion if not managed properly. Was that— was that just coincidence, or were you walking away because you're hearing that it's better to burn split? All right, well, let's just not burn these gigantic logs. It's probably not talking about these. You know, it's got to get airflow, and so if we're burning stuff like that, I think It's fine. So maybe this is too big, but maybe then this is okay. I wouldn't mind giving up some efficiency. Like, how much is it? Because it's awfully inefficient to split all that wood for just a little more efficiency. We're getting a high tunnel Friday. Lord willing, the creek don't rise. We leveled our other plot. You did so well, thought you might be interested in this. This one's not as wide, so it, it's 21 feet. It's 24. It's close to 24. And we can't put it back where it was because we have that big hole, and we're probably going to need to bevel that from the hurricane. All right, to gain height right there, quickest thing we figured we can do— look at this, look at this hurricane did right here, took all this soil away. Anyway, we have this huge cliff now, down to the cliff, down to the creek, and we're thinking we're gonna grade it and just bevel it. That means we could take some of this soil to build up our area right there. The cliff from the hurricane? Yes, we're gonna bevel that. That's why you have to bevel all the way up, you know, just a gradual grade to our— to where our high tunnel will be. Well, we can take some soil from this cliff and put it up there and build up our high tunnel. That'd be the quickest quickest, easiest way. You happy with that? Are you gonna scrape what's on top off? Try. Yes, and put it in the pile. That's fine. Look at our soil off the top of this garden. It'll break your heart though to see it move. It's gonna be 96 feet long. It's gonna be huge. Holy smokes, really? There's the stick way out there. I gotta go do some office work. Let's put this on a time lapse. Randolph's doing a spectacular job. That's not gonna be so bad, is it? You know, from there we're just gonna kind of gradually slope our land. I mean, it'd be nicer in the, in the end. On today's episode of Chicken Minute, my first 4 chickens were a disaster. I brought them home, I had no coop. I put them in a stall in my house, and in our excitement, you know, it had the Dutch doors in there. In our excitement, we would go and check on them every few hours. We named them Uno, Dos, Tres, Cuatro. A couple of visits in, we open that door, Uno and Dos jump up. One flies all the way over, Dos lands on the Dutch door. And you know, the first time you try to catch a chicken, you're like, but you kind of hesitate. Dos got away too. Of course, we weren't able to catch them. We don't know how to catch a chicken at that time, and they weren't oriented. They didn't come back. It was their first day. I saw Dos the next day on this roof. No lie. Of course, I couldn't get him. He jumped off the fence. Who knew a chicken could fly so well? So we started shutting the door, and Trace and Quatro lived happily ever after for about 2 weeks, and then they got got by predators. Of course I didn't give up. Eventually I built a proper coop, and then happily ever after. I mean, after the part where a raccoon got 13 of the 14. But yeah, eventually happy ever after. The point is, you can try, you can fail, you just keep getting back up and you keep doing, and you keep just getting better and better. And of course, build a proper coop. Homesteadbuilds.com. All my designs in this book, it's good till December 12th, you'll get it by Christmas. You'll get a signed copy plus the very first build in volume 2. It'll be how you take and turn the meat shaw, which plans are in here. Shoot, I didn't even show it on the— anyway, the meat shaw, how to convert it into a sheep shaw, or God forbid, a goat shaw. Okay, you'll get those plans. That's a bonus if you order by the 12th at homesteadbuilds.com. How's it going? Well, pretty good. I believe I can do it. I believe you're doing it. La la la la la, let me be free.