In this personal homestead vlog, the narrator (Speaker A) updates viewers on his knee injury recovery and outlines a day of low‑impact farm work. He emphasizes a disciplined healing regimen—rest, Epsom‑salt baths, arnica salve—and balances it with productive tasks to stay motivated. The vlog walks through several homesteading projects: culturing buttermilk/cream over 24 hours, making butter, shredding and freezing mozzarella for future pizza, and starting a 7‑day bacon cure that will be cold‑smoked, using a recipe credited to Meg from Holler Homestead. Throughout, he reflects on perseverance, drawing a parallel to the book Skeletons of the Sahara and its "why lie down to die when you can walk" philosophy. He notes the farm’s seasonal timing, plans to work on raspberry trellises, and mentions an upcoming live show. The tone blends instructional detail with motivational commentary, illustrating how he keeps moving forward despite physical setbacks.
Chapters
Happy day. Believe it or not, I'm having improvement in my knee. Enough for me to say, okay, let's take a day. Let's be restful. Let's be serious about healing this thing. Let's just catch up on what we set out to do yesterday, and then hopefully tomorrow we can do some meaningful work outside where I want to be. It's beautiful outside. I just want to be in denial. I'm not injured. I'm not injured. But I am. I've got a plan to deal with both my injury and my FOMO. Today's vlog, let's go. You didn't turn the butter for me. That's all right, let's get some buttermilk. That ended up being a 24-hour culture, which I think would be really nice. This is cultured cream or cultured buttermilk. We poured the liquid into that. For every quart of something other I want to, uh, ferment, I need to— wait, would this be buttermilk? Because it was cultured. This might be buttermilk. That was cultured, so that may be already cultured. I'm thinking if I had made butter from fresh cream— Gideon, where's your mom? I don't know. I said, okay, I want to fast this morning for Nanny, but let's taste. Let's taste, see if it's sour. It's not sour. It's still very sweet, so let's just get this milk off of it and go check on the boys. That's good to know that we didn't take it too far letting it sit out 24 hours. Probably could have let it go further. Are y'all done? Got the milk? Yep. Milk, carry it for me. Thank you. Hey, we got a Reservoir Plus! We're back in milk. You guys excited as I am? Mmm, it's good. Leaving us? Yup. Hugs. Alright, while I'm thinking about it, and down here, let's get the bacon out. Alright. Ding ding ding ding. Uncured bacon. Check it in 24 hours. Force rest. It's still work. Still get some work done. Blood flowing. I want to push through. I'm in just such a denial. It's just a beautiful time. It's that time between winter and spring that you can actually work all day. It's not too hot. It's not too cold. It's just wonderful. But my first priority then has to be healing and healing as fast as possible. So that means taking it easier. So resting, Epsom salt baths. Beauty's got me on some salve and some Arnica. And since I have this inflammation in my knee, in the morning especially, I'm gung-ho. Fast! Let's knock this thing out. Spoiler alert. Everything okay? Yeah, I was coming to check on you. You want to go see it? Sure. Are you done for today? Good job, bud. You're gonna be able to stoke it throughout the day. Yeah. How long has it been since we've had that brush pile there? A long time. That's our goal this winter, right? Yeah, to clean up these 2 acres that we cleared a couple years ago. Glad to be back progressing the farm instead of just repairing it from the hurricane. I was gonna fast, and then I remember we're having Argentine leftover for lunch. This was the best I'd ever made. Not missing that. Without Jonah here, we can all fit. Barely. Here's my plan for the foam. Do what I can. I can work to finish the domestic inside, less intensive jobs, finish making the butter see if we can't get some buttercream— buttercream? Buttermilk. Finish my mozzarella project and start the bacon curing. Supper behind us. The rest of what we began yesterday. Let's shred and freeze this mozzarella. Who wants to come? Friday night pizza just got easier. Next time we want to do pizza, we just say, hey, we got the cheese, and then Just right away, I'll make some more cheese and we'll always be ready. The name of the homestead game is to always be ready. Thanks. I've got a live show in 30 minutes. Probably need to be sitting down to it in 20 minutes. I've forgotten about this. Hopefully— what is that? Will it weigh this scale? I don't know. It's not heavy enough. You think it'll hold that much weight? It's in the other drawer. That's where we like to keep that orange peel. Uh-huh, back in our jars. Must max out at 5,000 grams.
It is 4,634.
100 grams of salt, 2.5% in weight. So 100 grams of salt, Rebecca?
104.3.
I might have did this wrong. Hey, you watch me sprinkle this. I'm not so sure most people give me exact instructions. Yeah, I mean, she heard that good when I saw their pepper.
It had quite a bit.
Thanks Meg from Holler Homestead for this recipe. And I say I didn't even like our homegrown bacon until we did this. Yeah, this is more than I did last time, so this is actually probably going to be better. Homesteading life is going to be full of surprises, full of sideswipes, and all kinds of distractions from your goal. What I've found to be important is I read this book, Skeletons of the Sahara, where they were stranded in the Sahara Desert and doomed to die. They figured they were gonna die, so many of the crew just laid down to die. It was that desperate, and everybody felt it. They all thought it was over. But a few of them said, why lie down to die when you can walk? And so it's about just doing what you can. At the end of this day, I harped on myself, or I felt all day like I'm not getting as much done as I would want. I'm not getting stuff done. But now that I look back on it, I shredded mozzarella and froze it. I started the bacon curing process, and I made buttermilk. In a new way. And that's not to count what I got done with the business resting. So it's about even when there isn't even hope, even when you don't feel like it, even when you wanted to do so much more and you're full of disappointment, just do something. Just keep moving. Why lie down to die when you can walk? Even if there's no hope, keep going. Must have miscalculated the life. So we liked that bacon the way we did it, not nearly as much spices.
I told you, I know it didn't taste as good as Meg's. Meg's was so—
this is gonna be as good as mine.
It was so good. I just remember being like, you have to tell me.
We're gonna— we're marinating. If you call that marinate, what are we doing? We're curing it for 7 days and then we're gonna cold smoke it, which I did nail the cold smoke.
You did.
This gives us some room for moisture to come up and not get a whole lot more seal. Get too much moisture in your seal, it won't seal. See, you barely got any moisture. You're right. We use a lot of plastic in this process. Well, that was fun. We did it. At the end of the day, I did raise myself in a point of the healing. I did improve. I'm excited to get back outside, and looking back, I did get so much done. Hopefully tomorrow I'll be able to do outside project. Hopefully it's working on these raspberry trellises. Happy day.
