Building a Homestead in 100 Days - Day 42

Henry, come on, come on, they're calling us. Come on. You don't want to go? You don't want to go? Hey, you want to go outside? We'll go outside. No. All right, go see Jonah. They're calling me. Go see Jonah in here. Call him. Jonah. Henry, go see big brother. Go see big brother. Those little rascals, they've done snuck and woke up and did the chores. Hey, you did the chores? Yeah, you little rascal. I heard your alarm at 5:30 and I went and turned it off. I didn't think you heard it. Did you? Yeah, you snuck up after that, huh? I thought you were still sleeping. Good morning, honey. Good morning, Lily. How you doing? Hey, little sneak, you got up and sneaked and did the chores.

Everything?

All the little animals too? Proud of these kids. And speaking of kids, well, they're not kids. Well, they have one kid. Uh, Pete and Mel. Uncle Pete from Green Dreams Florida is here. Yes, they arrived yesterday. Uncle Pete in the house.

It's a little colder up here.

We're not in Manta Land anymore. They all got their coats and sweaters on. We're out here in short sleeves, bare feet. I need my real jacket. Beats from Florida. That's gonna be Matt's kill if he pulls this off backwards. Keep on that trajectory, you're in that big ditch. We're gonna have to take down some trees. The goal is right there. You can put pull down into that field if we just eliminate some of those branches.

I'll go get the chainsaw.

Do we need the tractor bucket to get up there? We need Lucky to raise the bucket, get in there with the chainsaw, and get these branches up high. Will she start? And we killed the battery. All right, well, we need a big stepladder. Forgot to plug that in the other day. The alternator doesn't work on it and we need to plug in a charger.

Go get the 10-foot stepladder.

That one behind the orange, the one in the middle. Pete on a ladder with a chainsaw always works better with a camera.

I'm gonna put on my safety gear.

You gotta get that one. That low? Yep. Here we come. Branches are gone. Now he's gonna get in there. Well, he's got to get around this fence before he gets to the branches. Uh, your foot off of it. Oh, you're gonna hit a culvert. Let me see if you're gonna be able to go over it. Yeah, you should be able to make that. Wait, back up. Back up, Mr. Brown. Yeah, good. Keep going over if you can. Oh yeah, just keep it straight. Wow. Oh yeah, you're good over here. Look at you, man. Mad skill. You got it. And he just barely fit that. I know, dude. No, we'll go around. Good job, buddy.

I might have to go in the field and do U-turns.

Oh yeah, you won't be able to turn, uh, coming out.

No, you got a big metal steel plate you can put on top of that thing for me?

You might could go way down there and do it. I'll try, as long as I don't fall in that hole. One thing that was said off camera is Mel was looking at our children, 14, 15 years old, or older ones. There's just about that same age. And she said, because we've known them for about 5, 6 years and we were reminiscing, but then she said, well, just look at what's going to happen in another 5 or 6 years. Oh my gosh, our boys will be 20. In just a short amount of time. Then she said, soak it in. Yes, because we get caught up in the frustrations of young children and in the moment, and it feels like it's never going to end. But if we take a moment to look in perspective, it's going to end rather quickly, and we need to soak it in, troubles and all. So that's the goal today.

2 days.

Look at all this. Yes, let's do that. Let's move Stud back. Okay, when you're done with her, we'll move her over and put Honey in her spot. Okay.

You should, um, milk out her teeth and stuff.

Whose?

Honey's.

Oh, are they not? No.

You want to do Josiah? I didn't want to milk him.

Josiah didn't milk?

No.

Either one?

He has a broken teeth.

Oh no, she's not been milked. Oh no, I've been— oh no, I've been sitting here thinking, talking. She's been milked, she's been taught, and she's done ate all her alfalfa.

But he can't milk it.

Oh no, how am I gonna milk her? She's gonna be so restless. I thought y'all done milked this cow.

I wanted her to— I wanted him to milk her, but he wouldn't. He said he can't because they have a broken— because he has a broken feeder.

I milked. I milk with one hand, two cows, for 6-8 weeks.

I told him to milk with one hand, but he said no.

I feel like I do a pretty good job. Well, as far as soaking in the moments, I get moments. I don't know if I do a good job soaking them in. I don't know if I necessarily even know how to do that, but we definitely get moments like this one with Lily and I. Milking together every morning. Guys, you don't have to go to Fun Depot, go-kart land, to get bonding time with your kids. It can be just working together, and it can be in utter complete silence. She stood still. She got done. Nope, she finally slowed down eating and then just stood here. So that's good to know. Good cow, good cow overall. Not happy she's got messed titis though, as young as she is. And I pray to God she'll kick it. Milked out Honey's supposed infected quarters. I think she's got at least one infected, maybe two. Uh, still, between Flossie and Honey, that's only 5 quarters, and we got 2.5 gallons. Uncle Pete wake up yet?

Yeah, he was coming, but then he got something.

A little chilly this morning. A little cold exposure is good for us. Cryotherapy, or is it cryotherapy?

I don't understand you, Papa.

You don't understand me?

Yeah, I don't.

What?

How do you not like horses?

Oh, well, what? We can't eat them.

You can.

You want to start eating them?

Horses don't taste good though.

You want to raise them to eat them?

No.

I guess you can eat them. Here, hold it like this. You hold it and pay attention to where it is though. There we go. She hasn't even eaten all her food. I'll give her some fresh food, see if she'll go for it. I don't know how she's going to stand still while I inject something into her teeth. Here it is. She comes forward.

You done?

Yeah. Look what fell in the cow pie. Ew, that's so disgusting. And pigs keep sleeping. They didn't wake you up, huh?

You got us in the pig house. I see how it is.

I see how it is. You show up at the end of chores. I'll tell you what woke me up, was that pillow with your picture on it. Mom's washing his little sweater. In 6 years, Mr. Henry will be 8. He'll be getting—

he's gonna be Jonah's age.

Oh my God, 6 years you'll be Jonah's age.

I will.

Yeah.

What are you gonna be doing when you're Jonah's age?

Milking, probably.

Still finding your shoes? Probably not. I've noticed quite a few people asking, where is Teddy? Good question. We haven't gotten around to explain this. Well, when Jonah got hurt, the doctor said, "Do you have any little dogs?" "Sure, we have some little dogs." "Is there anything you would do with him for a couple of weeks?" So she— so the dog wouldn't injure Jonah as he was limping around. "Uh, yes. Our babysitter Leah. How about he go to Leah's house for 2 weeks?" Well, he went to Leah's house. And he was having such a good time with Leah and her family. And they had another dog, Teddy size. We're kind of like, you want Teddy? They want Teddy. And he's extremely happy. I think he was happy here, but I think he's happier there having a buddy. You miss Teddy?

I do.

Well, he was attached to you.

I do miss Teddy.

He was attached to you.

But it was, it's kind of like one of those things of like, we couldn't bring him back here to be alone.

Yeah.

And he is so much happier there. And the mom runs with him, like takes him on runs, and like it just makes so much—

we have too much going on with all the other animals. He's not getting the attention he's getting over there.

Oh yeah, he's getting—

he's getting so much— he's getting so much more because Leah has two sisters.

She does, she has two younger sisters.

Yeah, and then mom takes him on runs. He just did a 5K. Yeah, he just did a turkey trot, so, so we keep up with him.

Yes.

Oh, you know what, should we, should we give Leah this, or do you like this?

Oh, I want it.

That's good memories for you.

It's our remembrance.

A little bow. Oh, Teddy, he was a good one. He was, is, he still is.

He is a good one.

Pete has put on a premiere, a YouTube premiere. How's it going, buddy? You know, we got people in there chatting.

Tune in, tune in, you know what time it is. Doing a little bit of comment action over here about— it's a sweet potato roundup at Master Jim's house. Oh nice, rounded them all up.

You got some activity in the chat. Nice drone shot. You still flying the drone or somebody flying that for you?

Oh, we'll have the drone up here. You guys stay tuned. New Justin Rhodes farm tour with the drone.

You're gonna do a tour?

It's coming, it's coming.

You in there heckling? Heckling in the comments?

I'm just watching, actually.

For some reason it's glitchy on the TV. Henry's into it.

There's gonna be over here, there'll be 2 bedrooms and a bath, 2 bathrooms, and same master. We'll keep this the same.

You're okay with the master?

Yeah, I think what we're gonna do is just move this wall across. This will be now become our vanity area, and we'll have like doors going into this. This is going to be our new sauna. Because this is our current sauna right here, but I want this to be our sauna. And then this will be doors going out into a deck. We'll have a deck out here, and they'll— this room is going to be like the library.

Deck off the back, nice. And what's going to be heated and cooled down here?

This?

Um, no, I just want to do this, this section to be heated.

This is the workshop right now, right here?

This is—

no, the workshop is down here.

I thought there was a workshop over here with all the tools.

Oh yeah, there's tools.

We've never really used that room.

What are you doing down there, squirt? What are you doing?

I am making turkey divan.

Her famous turkey divan. How do you make turkey divan? Walk us through it.

Very easily.

It's an amazing thing to do with leftover turkey.

Well, I like to— I made some cream of chicken condensed soup. It's more like cream of turkey because I used the turkey broth that I made.

Yeah.

And then you mix that with some sour cream. You slightly steam it. You put, and then you put the broccoli in the bottom of the pan, then you put your turkey on top of that, and then you slather your sour cream cream of chicken mixture on top of that, and then you put cheddar cheese on it, and then my favorite is crumble up some—

Mmm, the stuffing.

Cornbread stuffing on top of that.

Okay, let's do it. You brushing up on old recipes?

I am. This is a very old recipe. It's like turkey over broccoli.

Becca was saying you could pretty easily grow this on the farm.

You could grow this entire meal on the farm. So you would have to make cheddar cheese, you'd have to make sour cream, but the cream of the, the soup that I mixed it with is just milk. Broth, onion, which you could obviously grow, butter.

Broccoli, easy.

Yeah, so, and then the broccoli, and then obviously the turkey.

The difficulty would be the corn stuffing.

The corn stuffing, but—

You go corn, I guess, and grind it.

Actually, technically, the kids are wanting to maybe try to grow our own corn.

We should make a movie sometime, Growing Our Own Turkey Devon. Because it would be quite different. We act like it's easy. Easy. Going in? Going in. 325?

Uh, 350.

Woo!

And then it'll just, I mean—

How long?

20, 30 minutes.

Okay.

It's not, because it's already pretty much cooked. Just warming it up.

30 minutes later. Boom! Way to make something special out of leftovers.

It smells so good too.

You guys ever think about what you'll be like in just 6 years? I mean, 6 years ago we were on the Great American Farm Tour. 6 years, you're gonna be 20 and 21. Lily, you'll be 17.

Yeah.

Oh, you might have experience with your own horse by then. Insta-perfect.

Well, I'm doing a, uh, a takeover for Hookstead Mamas on Instagram, but they wanted me to have—

better be insta-perfect.

The recipe.

Better be. You want to pass the salt when you're done? Yep. Meanwhile, Gideon's been asking me to make peanut butter balls. We had to let Thanksgiving get underway, and I can put it off no more. 1 jar of peanut butter, 1/4 cup of honey, 2 teaspoons salt, 2 tablespoons coconut flour.

I'm mixing that.

Mix it in. You gonna do it? Yeah. Okay, you do it. Sock it to it, buddy. Sock it to it. And then I think we'll freeze them. Bring her again, put it in the freezer. Put it right there. That's— that'll work. Now put it up and they'll be ready by the end of supper. Hey, Mr. Brown, let's go! One more treatment for honey.

You had an old slate sidewalk here before?

Uh, we had a rock sidewalk. There's grass growing up in it. Oh yeah, I remember.

Big old rocks, like pieces of slate.

Yeah, remember you guys helped us build a keyhole garden right there once? I remember.

It's gone, huh?

It's long gone. A little bit different. You want to save the, uh, straw— the tomatoes drowning in the front yard.

Yep, yep.

That's why we have the raised beds now.

Is that grass?

And we're doing just fine. No, it's cover crop.

You put a cover crop in there?

What? It's just a winter, winter cover crop mix. Speaking of which, the chickens are getting in it. Look at this, they're tearing it up. Completely. We got to get them in the high tunnel. Look at this. Are they still good layers? We gotta raise that fence. They may not be able to jump up on this, but they can jump right through here, and they figured it out. The poultry wire didn't go all the way up. Well, somebody's able to jump on top of it because look at the deposit they left us. So we're gonna raise it. It needs to be about— needs to be about 50 inches tall. Gideon, let's go! Give them these old persimmons. I love that. Interesting, they're eating the seeds first. Alfalfa, meds, pan, rope halter. We're good except we need Mr. Brown. Mr. Brown, you gotta want to spout this. So you call what you do ecological landscapes? Why not call them edible landscapes? Are they not always edible?

No, but the ecological kind of wraps in the natives and the edibles. You know, we're really creating—

you don't always use just edible ecosystems, you know what I mean?

And we have to, you know, we have to deal with the mainstream world today, you know. I mean, not everybody wants a food forest, not everybody lives on a farm, you know. We have to adapt to these HOA communities.

Ecological sounds kind of, uh, fancy, classy.

I feel like, you know, the regular neighborhood, the average person's not ready for the permaculture in all aspects, you know, where— oh, you know, basically you're doing permaculture, uh, trying to apply as many permaculture principles as we can with ecological landscape. Yeah, but you know, our favorite's the permaculture mullet, you know, business in the front, party in the back when we get in the HOA. I love ripping people's grass out. Don't be a grasshole.

What do you do with the grass? When you rip it out?

Compost it.

Yeah, you love it.

You gotta haul it out of there. My dump truck.

More satisfaction. You, you ripping out grass is like me moving the cows to a new paddock. Pretty much. It's just satisfying. No, are you ripping out grass is like me ripping out these weed trees and crooked trees, expanding into the forest? Yeah, opening up, making new pasture.

It's a little easier though, you know. I've got flat ground and sand. You've got kind of slopes and rocks.

You're kind of doing the opposite. You're taking grass, which could be pasture, and turning it into a forest.

But typically the grass that I'm taking is irrigated and chemically treated to look pretty for the king.

Yeah, you don't want to eat that. There's no animals on it, you know. How was the night in the RV, my man?

Wasn't bad, you know.

Heard some pigs out there. Did pigs wake you up this morning? Not this morning, during the night. They were making some noises, some grunting. Mr. Brown, let's go! Mr. Brown, let's go! You're getting crazy. Let's go treat this cow. You want to go, Henry? You get Henry, I'll get Mr. Brown.

All right, deal.

Come on, come on, we're gonna have you peanut butter balls for dessert, don't forget. Come on, let's go do this so we can eat and then you can have the dessert. You've got dessert for everybody, remember? Come on. Oh, he's holding Henry.

We got the same outfit on, you see?

Now you guys, he knows what's up. Now you know. That is the last treatment. That's 3 days twice a day. Now we wait. Now we have to wait 7 days to see if it works. So we'll just milk her as usual. We will milk out suspected infected quarters and we'll see what happens. We really need this to work. We don't do antibiotics, not good for the cow, certainly not good for us drinking that milk. So she's, she's eating, she's drinking. This is by no means a severe case, no temperature. This needs to work. She's a young cow. We could go on to the next thing. I don't know what the next thing is. This just needs to work. We've had cows lose a quarter. Flossie is down to 3/4. Phyllis, before the end, got down 2, so we could lose a quarter. And that's not the end of the world. I mean, she's still giving— she'd probably gonna give 2.5, 3 gallons in her prime. You just hate to see that happen, her so young. Let's do the utter cream. I suppose one thing we could do is dry her off, and her being so young she could probably nip that in the bud, heal that, and be primed and ready by the time her calf comes. But then we're out of milk that whole time, and I think you just got pregnant, like a month. So we don't really want to do that because we'd have— they don't have babies till 9 months, you dry them off at 7 months. So we got 6 more months of milking her. The problems never end on the homestead.

He's literally about to open this door. If you want me to let—

Is he really gonna open it?

If I let him. Look what he did to his gate!

He figured out how to open it. He pushed it. Oh, he pushed out. Oh, okay. We need some more of those metal clips or screws or like, uh, we need something like ratchet straps or something because— No, if you get one of those metal straps, we can screw the metal strap around the gate. I'll show you. Come on. Wow, okay, he couldn't lift it up so he just pushed it over. Let's get him in there.

The other pad is more secure, you think? Yeah, they should switch the water.

All right, well, he's going in there, so go with it. Just put the other pig in there. Is it, is it okay to just switch the water, Josiah? Sure. Or do you just want to hold them in there until we get this other one fixed? If you guys want to fix this, we need those straps too. Side. Where are more of those straps? See those metal straps?

But look how much more heavy-duty this side is. It's got T-posts. Looks like he ripped up—

yeah, he has. We're gonna have to put more of those straps in. Oh, and then we have to put more metal wire on this side. So either we reinforce this one, or, or we leave them in here. And move the water over. Honestly, we're looking for the easy thing, guys, because we're trying to take it easy. Well, you can't get in there. Pig can get out, but we can't— human can't get in. I see where the chickens have escaped. That needs to be lowered, and this needs to be where this door can shut. Is there water just high? Do you have water in that hose? Okay, I'll go get you a shut-off for it. Thank you for holding my hand, Henry.

Yeah.

Aw, before I know it, he'd be scooting around on the dirt bike.

Come on, little guy.

The Indian chicken turned out nice.

It did.

Tzatziki sauce turned out nice. Rice turned out nice.

Yeah.

Let's get the peanut butter out. Gideon and I made peanut butter balls for everybody. Whoa. Take a couple.

Yeah. I need you to watch me. No, Cameron, don't do that.

Looks delicious.

What's in a peanut butter ball?

Peanut butter, honey, coconut oil, and salt. That's it. Mmm. 4 ingredients.

Peanut butter is Justin's favorite. And he can't really eat it. It doesn't agree with him. It causes inflammation.

How is it?

Good.

Everybody like it? Did it hit, Mom? Mm-hmm.

We should've dipped these in chocolate.

Ooh.

That might've been better.

Take it up a notch.