After Hurricane Zeta | Farming in the Mountain of NC

Yes, Lily's in her bathing suit. Look at the— look at the porch. Look at the covered porch, how soaked. Can you hand me my boots? I normally don't hang my boots up, but there they are. I'm very happy about that. The show must go on. The chores must go on. But you know what? It really helps a lot that these are not laying down there, out there, like they usually are, and they're dry. The wind.

Hey, you can stay.

The one time I'm not encouraging the kids to go. They said, but I don't have a rain jacket. You don't need a rain jacket, just get in your swimsuit. It's actually warm out here, it's just this is all I've got for my rain gear. You'll notice the neighbor lights gone. We're full on lights. You can smell the diesel fuel right here. Our Cummins generator keeping us in power. Look, water Hannah's coming into the basement. Hey, good morning! Did you just feed the pet hens? And I'm wearing one wrong in my boot, and that's the worst time to do this. Rebecca and I were talking this morning, since the cows are just behind the house, we might actually bring Phyllis in the milker in our old stanchion just to get a reprieve from the rain. Whoa, already overnight the creek is above the bridge. Good morning, guys. I don't know if you can see, but there's shelters in a puddle, so let's get that to higher ground. It's too messy. We need to move them, and probably the fastest thing to do is to grab a pig net and the string trimmer or just move them right there. All right, the next move is going to be a little too tricky after looking at it to do it today. There's a hump Half of it's in newly disturbed dirt. Let's go around and tighten their fence. I've moved their shed up here. Let's get them some, uh, we can get them some hay up in this higher— yeah, Arun, you want to go get us a hay bale? One? Yeah, one, one will do. Half one will do really, but it's probably just easier to carry one. Wow, it got light all of a sudden. We did get the pigs their feed. They seem to be in good shape, and really it's not cold. They got a lot of fat on them. They're hardy animals. We've got— hey, I put hay under their shed and moved it to high ground, so it's dry. It is time to move. Thanks to the rain, they till faster, but I think it's just gonna have to wait till tomorrow. You can see our next spot's a little tricky now that, now that it's light. We have to move the pigs around. It's not adjacent. They have to come over here. That could be tricky with these guys. They're not quite trained to a bucket. We go up through here. We'll have to come up this bank, which can be tricky. This could be a muddy mess too because it was just newly graded. So let's just give it a Let's just give it a day. It's supposed to quit raining this afternoon. What'd you say? Supposed to stop at 10. Oh really? That soon? Yeah. Okay, good. Looks like you guys need to move too. See how they've worked this area up? Let's just move them here. That's an easy enough move. The rain's let off, so let's do it. All right, well, we did it. Did that in about 7 minutes. Looks much better than that. That's perfect for planting now that it's wet. Perfectly tilled. Shoot, my spool got blown out. I hope that'll stay this time. What's the weatherman say?

It's cold.

It's cold.

He says that it's, uh, it's, uh, going fast, that's for sure.

Getting out of here, you mean?

Yeah, I mean, it's moving pretty quickly.

Uh, Rebecca, we're just gonna milk out in the field because the blowing rain is gone. It's just a bit of deers. Well, it's just gonna be easier. Oh my gosh, every single winter cover gone, got blown off. Those are winter low tunnels. Look at Look at this rain event. Holy smokes. I think the straw— I'm glad we did the straw. I think it's holding these beds together. This would have been bad to expose this, put nothing on it. We can see where we need to put drainage. Filling up right there. The chickens though are largely happy, and the wind didn't touch our high tunnels. Which will be what our winter garden is in next year. We are sort of in a puddle. For milking out here, I still think it's easier out here even though the wind picked up. We'd have to walk mom and calf to the stall, walk them back out. I don't know, I just think it's easier out here. What do you think, Arun? Yes, sir.

Even with the rain.

A little easier here than this underneath. A little bit of a puddle, a little bit of manure around. I think if it were dry, we might have moved it and then do this, but we're just gonna gird up our loins and get this done, get inside. All right, hung up my rain gear to dry. It is bright in here. I hear the generator going. What you got? Cats. Oh, the cats are in here? Yeah, come look. Oh, oh nice. Do they like it?

Yeah, I gave them some milk and some cats.

I bet they're happy to get out of the rain, huh?

Yeah, they were meowing at the window.

Sit, sit, sit. Oh, good boy, good boy. That's right. You know, it's miserable enough in the rain. Imagine having to do that and come in here and all the lights are off, fridge is down. This is nice, this is nice having a generator. A generator won't make you happy, but it will make life a lot easier when the power goes out. In other news, Rebecca has gone to town. I think that's pretty bold over given that the weather conditions and the fact that we barely ever go to town. She's going to get my birthday present. I think somehow I know what it is. I wouldn't bet big money I know what it is, but I think I know what it is. So, well, I'm not gonna tell. I could find out so easy. Well, I could, I could start guessing and just watch your face. Do you got a poker face? Maybe, he says. They don't have poker faces, so This is what I'm gonna do. My birthday's coming up Saturday, also known as Halloween. It's a big party. Everybody's partying on my birthday. What's today? What's today's date? Can't be wearing my watch like because I've cut my wrist somewhere. Uh, 10/29. Don't, don't look, okay? I'll say my true love got me a Okay, I'm gonna fill that in. Don't look, don't look. Stay away. I'm gonna write it in. Don't look. Now I folded it. I'm not gonna say either on this because Rebecca goes over my vlogs, I edit them, and she just double checks them. And, uh, I don't want her to see this. This will be fun. We'll open this on my birthday after I open my present. Hey, do you guys know what it is? Gideon, do you know what it is? That's probably good. You definitely can't keep a secret. Okay, this is your mama tank. Hey, okay, I maybe don't know any idea what you get me because what I thought it should not take that long.

What?

I don't know if I know what you got me anymore because what I thought it was wouldn't have took this long. Oh, what'd you get me?

I'm not telling you. I'm not telling you nothing, mister.

It took a long time.

Did not take a long time. Much longer than I wanted it to.

Driving there and back.

Oh.

Alright.

I know, and there's one other— there's another place I should go. Yeah, I'm gonna pick up a cake. I should go do it. Because I haven't had good success. Which I'm upset about.

Oh. You haven't been able to find it, huh? Uh, what do you want for breakfast or brunch? Y'all gonna work on your breakfast? I'll work on ours. She did decide on an egg burrito. Soaking some beef, soaking some pork for some suppers. Lily, you heating up the leftover Indian? I'm thinking we'll just heat this up on the We'll just heat up some leftovers and just make Rebecca hurt. She couldn't decide what she wanted. Finally I said, you know, if you don't want anything, maybe you should just eat something. Like, just get some nutrients in your body, and it's not gonna be pleasant anyway. Just eat something. Lucky for me, she went for it. Oh man, well, that's a contrast of this morning. Nice day. Hi, look who's back! So excited! I'm missing out because she dressed up.

We're back!

You got dressed and I'm getting undressed because it is hot.

It's so hot outside.

I missed it. Okay, where's my gift?

I'm telling you, I'm not telling you nothing about anything.

I wrote it down on a piece of paper.

Where is it at?

Let's see. Well, don't look. You don't want to look till after I open my present.

No, I'm gonna look.

No, don't look. I want to look because I'll be able to tell by your reaction.

Well, maybe I won't look at it when you're there.

No, don't look. Boy, he's acting like he's been away for a week.

I would hate to see if we were gone for a week.

Oh, I know, he'd explode.

Would you just explode with excitement?

Well, that's a kitchen explosion. You ready to eat, Beck? Her a burrito, me some leftover Indian and some eggs. You know, Rebecca came to me the other day. We have not got a name for Snowball. We had plenty of names for girls, and we've thrown out a bunch of stuff and nothing's really stick. But what you said the other day, it's kind of like, really mulling over in our head. We're not going to say it, of course, because I don't know, it might change. It'd be kind of fun to surprise everybody.

Well, we're gonna have— we are, right?

So we're just throwing around.

I think it could change part. I mean, I think we just are having a short list of names, of things that— of names that we like, because Snowball is a perfect nickname. Yeah. Or Button.

It'll probably be as strong of a nickname as Mr. Brown.

Probably.

He'll be forever Snowball. Wrapping up the vlog here with a little bit of an update for those of you who got in on the Joel Salatin Polyface Designs, which by the way, orders are still flying in. Good for you guys, good for you guys. It's a good book. Um, those who got in and you're wondering where the shipment is, I told you to keep you updated. The latest we've got, there's— we've— you knew we had to go to a second shipping. That's not going to get shipped out till January 4th. We had hoped for Christmas. We were told, uh, it'd be done by Christmas from the printer, but it looks like it's gotten put back even further. So January 4th looks like a ship date on that. So what we're doing, because— and we don't know yet quite exactly where the cutoff is, like who's in that second shipment So thank you for bearing with us on that. We'll hopefully know that soon. If we shipped it, usually they— you get notified with a shipping tracking. So there, that's obvious. Polyface, they had some problems with the packaging. It was getting ripped up in the mail, so they put a pause on shipping, got some cardboard box packaging, and are now resuming shipping today. Thank you for bearing with us. What we're doing to make up for for it. We realize this is an inconvenience, is we're going to give a PDF in your package that you can automatically download. And by the way, when you order, you get all the digital downloads right away, immediately. Stream them right away, download them right away. We're also going to give you a PDF where you can print out— it's a nice picture which will say your Polyface Design copy is coming soon, something like that. I think we might even put the estimated date on there. And if you're getting this as a Christmas gift, you can give that. I know it's not the same as the book, but at least it's something nice you can give the person. So just stay tuned there, and we're going to hunt around and look around and see if there's anything else we can give as kind of like a digital bonus to say, hey, we're sorry, we'd hoped to get this out sooner, but you know, just doing what we can to make you guys happy. We appreciate you very much. We want to keep everybody happy. We're going to take good care of everybody, and I assure you, Joel and his little farm elves are working hard as they can to get everything out as soon as possible. So thanks for bearing with us.