A family cuts back asparagus, mulches the garden with comfrey and straw, and roasts a brined goose with just salt and pepper. They use chickens to turn garden waste into compost and lay wood-chip mulch for spring.
So Josiah, we're gonna put our next fence next to the gravel, next to the creek, and all the way up here to the perimeter, or to the, to the lane fence. Okay, what's happening? Snowball's moving.
Yeah, he was moving. Of course he stops, but then he'll start again, I'm sure.
You hear I set out a turkey. We eat turkey once a month, and this morning I realized it was a goose. That's okay. We wanted to practice cooking a goose so that we're real good by the time we come around for Christmas. Make sure it's actually something we want to do for Christmas, the Christmas goose. So what do you think, guys? We're gonna have goose tonight. It's a really simple recipe. It's my kind of recipe. Only calls for salt and pepper. That's what I'm talking about. All right, you guys gonna go set up the fence for me? I'm gonna wash the— yeah, we forgot to wash this yesterday.
Stop scaring the cat!
Really? How'd that happen? You can all see that cake of manure. Wonder who's more excited. About the guns. Me or them? Who do you think? This was their idea. That's a loud.22. Gideon's turn with his BB gun.
Shells.
Go ahead, Josiah. Do you want to try to cock it? Sure. Here, you try to cock it. Up and then back and then back in. There you go. For this afternoon, Sunday seed day. There's asparagus somewhere in here and strawberries. See our asparagus right here? Needs to be cut back down 6 inches for the winter. There's one dying off. Oh, all the way to the ground. We have strawberries mixed in with it. They're good companions. We need to come in and get all these tomatoes, morning glories. And everything else from choking it out. And I think that's our goal today, just to clear out this for the asparagus and strawberry.
You want the kids?
How many times have we called them? You can play after. What are we gonna do with all this amazing comfrey?
Let's chop it and put it in there.
Use it as mulch. Yeah, because it'll die back for the winter, but it'll come back next year. How do you think we did, supervisor? I mean, she's ripping at him with sitting in the chair, huh?
She probably could have done a little better.
Thanks. Uh, well, now we're gonna take the comfrey and make a mulch. Lily, you were— you win!
She does.
She gets first dibs on the chocolate reward because she didn't say a word. She worked the whole time. And these, these goofballs fooling around on the pile of greens. Hey, there's some word going around. Hey, don't feed chickens tomatoes. Feed them everything. We put this in there. They won't eat that. They'll pick— if they can't eat it, they'll— they will eat the fruit, but they'll just— they'll help scratch, break this down, turn it into compost. Another thing is we put down fresh wood chips, 4 to 6 inches fresh. Sometimes you just break rules, don't you, bud? Because somebody might say you can't do that, but look, we did it. And the wood chips are pretty much dissolved. There's a little bit on top, but not much. Look at that, look at that soil right underneath. Look, right beside the chickens we got cover crop already starting to sprout. It's sprouting, Rebecca. All that rain, a couple warm days. Yeah, we're getting our gardens covered. Hey, you guys are about to have a real good day. The goose is eating the greens of the tomatoes too. Look, the chickens are definitely eating the fruits. They're just little shredders.
And I bet too that they're eating, um, the bugs that we can't see.
Heck yeah. All right, let's go get some straw bales and we'll be done. There's something really right about that. Got that done, got it covered, walk away to the spring. The asparagus and strawberries are now protected and will just come up nicely in the spring. This was our first year with this asparagus. We didn't eat any of it, but next year that'll be really nice. On today's episode of Burn It Up Cooking Show, 325 goose. Don't mind my messy, unfinished room here. Everybody's got one, right? Okay. Uh, I love this recipe. The only extras are salt and pepper. Literally, that's what I'm talking about. We've put salt on it, set it in the fridge for several hours. Just a little pepper to taste, I reckon. We're gonna put it on this cooking rack, keep it up out of the fat, get the fat cooked. Let's do it. She's got bread in there. Okay, I'll put it, put it down below. This all you can tolerate as a pregnant lady?
Yeah. Your hands aren't juicy, are they?
No, no.
If I had to start my Homestead all over again, it could only pick one animal… 
