Building a Homestead in 100 Days - Day 22

Day 22 of building a homestead. It's a rest day today, but still we take a moment to go around the farm and look at the possible jobs if we were to invest into a heavier piece of equipment, like moving all this pond silt, putting it in a manure spreader, and putting it on the pasture. Somebody's out there doing chores. Is it? Yeah, that little girl. It's amazing. And that's definitely somebody you want to have in good times or bad. Hey Winnie, hold down the homestead last night. Interesting enough, we give Winnie this, one of our kitchen bowls, and unlike her dog bowl, she doesn't carry it off. Normally we take Saturday off. Today's— it's Sunday. We went to South Carolina yesterday to Roots and Refuge. For an Abundance Plus party. The chickens probably have poop in their nest box because we didn't flip it around, we weren't here. We stayed talking, having a good time with Jess and Jeremiah, and then 2.5-hour drive home. Thankfully though, it was time change, so we gained an hour. But you guys don't care, you guys don't keep time change. They're still going off the sun. Not as bad as I imagined they could be. Oh my word, one night we blocked them from this and they're trained. There's no poop. There's no poop in either nest box. We blocked them from going in there, might have been two nights, and they're not going in there.

You should rest because we slept in the car and, um, we went to bed earlier.

Uh, they're being sweet and hardworking, but they also don't want me to go because I slow things down. Because I end up seeing problems that maybe they didn't quite see. I guess Mom set her plant out to be watered. Yeah, it looks like that plant needs some help. We can't grow an indoor plant for the life of us. Although I shouldn't say can't, should just figure it out, or say— or just own it and say, uh, we won't grow indoor plants for the life of us. How do you like that though? Contractor boarded up the side of our deck. Looks great. Since today's a rest day and we're not going to do any farm projects, definitely let's kind of catch you up on things. The root cellar, it looks like a little flood right now. I thought that was going to happen this week. People are backed up like crazy. Maybe it'll happen next week. That probably should be addressed before we do that with the root cellar. This is a possible job for the machine. Moving this out of the yard and not having to pay the contractor to do that. You guys want to go see the, the, the, the jobs that need to be done with the machine? Whether I get a machine and do it myself, whether I rent one, or whether we hire somebody to do it, that's what we're trying to figure out. But if we're gonna have enough jobs on our own farm consistently over time, and what kind of jobs, maybe worth it to get one. Remember they bermed this up? That's the thing too, we scheduled these guys, these graders, to clear our pond months in advance. We waited months, and now I asked them lately, what's your wait time now? It's a month. This is silt we've pulled out of the pond. There's countless manure spreader loads of silt. I mean, this is great stuff, gonna go to the pasture. It's drying out. I could technically, I think, load this with Lucky. Could be a little tricky on an angle, getting top heavy, uh, but I would still then need to hire Randolph or something to pull the manure spreader. So one tractor's loading the manure spreader and they're going out. And here's the thing, us homesteaders We really only have so much time because we got to do other things. We've got jobs, we've got animals, we've got all kinds of things going on. This is beautiful. This is a, this is a little retreat on the farm. Just a little peaceful place to run off to. Yeah, we're not building up there, but that's okay. We'll keep this place sacred. Our drainage pipe is not working. They connected it. They stuck a smaller one inside of a bigger one, and somehow it worked before, but now water only gets to there before it goes through the pipe and out. You can hear it running. They cleared up the bank, but they had a big old machine, and it is clumpy as all get-out. It's not going to grow back nice and smooth. We could perhaps smooth it up with a smaller machine than they had. What they had— they had this huge machine, did as good as they can with that big machine. Smaller one might be able to be a little more specific. Silt pond is jamming. Definitely looks like the silt pond needs to be cleaned up around it. Look at all the leaves and sticks that come in there. In some ways that's a good thing though, because we get to harvest it for silt. But you need a machine to do that. I love how fast that's running after a rain, just so, so peaceful. We have an overflow here at the pond that we didn't necessarily address with the graders, and that needs to be dug out just in case you have the gigantic rain event and the pipe can't keep up with it, which has happened before. Then you have an overflow that comes through It comes through this ditch, under that culvert, under that access road, and on out. Mind you, I'm not even on the new property that we're developing, but if I were to get a machine, I'm thinking long term, and I'm thinking, what can I do it across the board, across all the homestead? Kids are about to pull the milk sled. Hopefully it's not too wet. It's super slippery. This— so we had the graders clear some of these trees. We may not graze in there, although after being at the Dortys, they would totally graze in there. So either way, trees need to be cleared so that sun can shine on this grass. This grass over here just fails to thrive for whatever reason. Part of the reason is the sun's over there and this wall of trees is blocking it. But there's a lot of big trees in here, and I don't know if I would ever mess around with a big tree like that. But I can mess around with that tree, that tree, these two trees. That didn't get properly beveled with a chainsaw. That needs to be cut down and beveled like that. I didn't like what the machine did as far as getting to that, pulling it up, tearing up the area. With a chainsaw, you don't hurt the area surrounding it. Can be grazed right away. But it does sprout back like that was doing. A sheep in a rotation— cool cows too— would eat those sprouts. They wouldn't eat that one though, that's a walnut. For— but for the most part, I think they would eat most of our root sprouts. Can we, with Sally, pull her up there? I'm gonna bet you $100 No, it's gonna be too slimy and wet. Remember what I told you? After my birthday, October 31st, the land gets wet and doesn't really dry out until April. And she slipped around in here without the milk sled on.

I could do chores by myself. You know, it took like all morning.

Proud of you. We're gonna leave the shed. We've got Lucky the tractor. I don't want to do it today, rest day. Tomorrow we can move it, but tomorrow we can just milk the cows next to the— if this isn't as critical because they don't need the shade, they do need the minerals, but going a couple days without the minerals is going to be okay. The brush piles, they're from a year ago. They need to be burned, but they need to be stoked, and I don't want to stoke them with Lucky on this 35-degree grade. It's more like that, more like that. Here, for those of you don't know, you can't just burn a brush pile and it all get burned. Not out here in the east. You have to ignite it, get it going, and then you have to kind of keep piling it on and stoking it, getting air to it to really burn it all the way down. All right, Lily, let's run the new fence line. We also got to move the sheep. Which one you want to do? You want to do the fence line? It's starting to rain. I can— you can hear it coming. That was a brief rain. On this side of farm for clearing, we got, I don't know, 2 or 3 acres along the access road. We probably have over time 15 to 20 acres in total to clear this.

I know, what if we put all the trees in it and then got some dirt? Yeah, and laid over the trees.

And if you're the Dohertys, you open this up to cows even though it gets steep down in there. You open it up to cows or at least sheep. There you go. You got your tester? No. Oh, I thought I told you to bring the tester. Listen, here's how to test it. Here's a hillbilly tester. Listen, you're hitting. Yeah, it's working. You're done with your chores?

Yeah.

Good deal. People want to know, you're gonna get back on that thing?

I hope. Yeah, I think so.

Well, Yeah, last night was the best night I ever had.

How so?

'Cause this is fun.

Playing with the Sauer kids?

Yeah.

I can see 5 jobs for a track loader right here. Filling this in, loading that to manure spreader, unloading feed, digging holes for trees along the road, and digging a water line and, uh, a lake.

Touché, touché. That's a track loader.

Yeah.

Yeah, I'm leaning 55-60 to getting the track loader. An excavator also, 15% chance. Yeah, right now. Now I don't know, I mean, it's ambitious to think we could start a small grading business. Yeah, and, and you're going to be the track loader 16 soon enough.

Track loader could dig out, make ponds.

Yeah, pull trees out and, uh, we're gonna go and look at some more possible jobs. You want to go? Yeah, it's not too bad right now, but at the bottom of this hill— actually, I can show you. This is a swampy area coming off the mountain. That culvert just goes right into here. So either we could dig a culvert all the way down to the creek, which would cost thousands of dollars with a grader, or have our machine do it, or, which we've worked out with a permaculture designer, we reroute the road a little different and the road serves as a wall, not quite on contour, uh, swell, slightly off contour, to slowly run the water away. And then it's not puddling down here in the bottom. We'd be building roads that don't sink in.

What if we built a pond right there? It's already in a natural swell.

There's this spot too that's naturally wet, and it's just screaming to want to be a pond. He's right. That's wet, I think, because you had the mountain runoff. This road naturally just sinks in. It fills up. It puddles, and that's just useless troubling water. That's back there. Right here, it's actually naturally happening. This is kind of raised up. We're not talking like graveling these roads or anything in the fields. They would stay dirt and grass. But right here where I'm at, here's the, here's the Sally. The road would just ever so slightly do like that, and then the road would be on a contour ever so slightly along this, bringing water to— well, if we had an excavator, we could build a pond right there. Yeah, multiple ponds. Just a little series of ponds there that's naturally swampy and to us unusable right now. Now let's go to the new acreage that we're cultivating for this 100 days and see what, what kind of possible jobs are there.

Sort all the logs, firewood logs, get them in place.

This is where they're easier to saw up too. Yeah, for firewood. Oh, you could use the machine to load a track loader or a sawmill. We had to pay for their track loader when the sawmill came. There's a lot of little-ish type of trees like that that need to go. Grading this— grading a road. We could push a lot of these trees down with an excavator. Pull them out, especially trees this size. There's an incredible amount of just from here to like 100 feet over. It's like this wild ravine that could be smoothed out.

We'd have to culvert a lot of it because there's creeks in it.

Oh, well, I think you did— I think you ditch it. I mean, you leave it ditched, but just you direct the runoff to the ditch and it goes down. Oh, up here, house site. House site number 2, our favorite so far. Uh, digging out a house site, a pad, uh, what, building a road. Yeah, this needs to have a meandering road. That can be— Brian was estimating $50,000 with a grading company. That's a lot of money. Well, that was a good restful morning. You ready to go on a walk? Yeah, you know, we're gonna go on a walk, so we might as well go take a measurement. House site number 2, our favorite option. Just keep on exploring it. We ended up having a nice walk, got some more rest inside watching some shows. Now, I mean, you guys get to— you don't get to see this much, uh, Josiah and Jonah are making fries for tonight, so let's— I'm gonna go do the afternoon chores. That's a joint out there, not in there. The joint's not over there. Let's sneak down below them. All right, come on, let's go up the hill. We haven't seen the opening yet. A little tricky on these hills. Somebody see it? It's right there. I think you see— cows want to cooperate, they just don't know what that cooperation is all the time. Thank you, guys. No, plus he looks a little empty here at the end of the day. They're all just kind of standing around. I don't know if they're really excited about this grass, and they've probably gotten about all they want from it. You want that back left flank to be full. You want your cows to be busy eating or laying down chewing their cut, and they're just kind of standing there, so tells me they're probably not real happy with the grass. Whoops, I threw the hay on the fence. Cows like it though. And the problem is hay conducts electricity. I can't just grab the hay. The connection is down there. I'm getting tired, honestly. I just want to go inside and make supper and be done. Let's go and plug that fence. They would have walked right over. That ends the day. I'm excited about this week, feeling energized and ready to go. Moving sheep tomorrow, gonna continue to clear pasture, Lord willing, and the crink don't rise. Hang with us. But listen, thank you all. We had such a great launch for our member, um, the Abundance Plus University and Abundance Plus, and many of you joined. Thank you so much. I appreciate it so much. You guys are gonna not regret it. It's gonna be an amazing experience. Also, for those of you that couldn't do it, I realize some of you can't afford it, uh, you're going— maybe you want to just test it out. And you don't want to commit to the annual membership. So we're going to offer now a free trial. So you got a 7-day free trial. Get inside, look around, consume it, use it up, watch it all if you can. I doubt you could watch it all in 7 days, but if you could, do it. And then cancel before the 7 days over, or just hang on like most people end up doing because it's that amazing. So 7-day free trial inside Abundance Plus. Happy day!