Finally, We Beat This

Happy day! You want to wrap my arm? Yeah. We had hoped that my arm would get— that all symptoms of infection would abate. Yeah. Hold on a second. There's orange in the way. You don't want to step on the orange. I'm gonna— don't, don't, don't stop moving either because people will be— people are actually here and they'll officially start in 7 minutes. We actually have a tour and a workday for our members. She's getting my bandage ready. We had hoped We had a little progress yesterday, a little more towards the end of the day. We had resolved, hey, we need all symptoms of infections to go away or we're going, we're going in. And it's mainly this redness in our, in the arm that we were concerned about. Woke up this morning, I didn't want to get up and look. I was just scared. So I went back to bed. Finally got up, got the guts, turned on the light, and it was much less red. What did you say? So it's finally stopped. Spreading. Yesterday, in fact, we were doing— I was so discouraged, I actually said to my assistant, we should probably cancel this work day. And she's like, somebody's coming from California. We're like, oh, okay, don't cancel that. I'm glad we didn't. I feel a lot better. Tours are going on, and I say to these, these folks, is there anything you want to see while you're here? And one thing they wanted to see is setting up the paddock. So I just caught him. Hey Jonah, hold on, they want to see you putting up the paddock. Name, where you're from, and biggest mistake, how you overcame it.

My name is Aaron, I'm from Los Angeles, Inglewood, California, and, uh, my biggest mistake was I decided I wanted to get chickens, start learning how to do something involved with the homestead, even in the city.

Yeah.

And watching your material long ago now at this point, got chickens, uh, built a borderline aviary for a backyard in Los Angeles, and then decided, well, if I'm trying to learn how to raise chickens and everything about them, next step's to let them get broody and have a clutch, right? Soon found myself with, instead of 8 chickens, I had 32.

Hey, my name's Jeff. My wife and I currently live in outside Greenville, North Tennessee, about an hour and a half north of here. And I don't know if I've made any big mistakes. I am perfect. My wife had the chicken experience. We had 11 hens and a rooster on February 28th, and we currently have 35 chickens. She started sticking eggs under her broody hens and they all hatched.

I'm Wendy and this is my daughter Allie, and we are from Dallas, North Carolina, not Texas. I guess my biggest mistake is not getting started earlier. Like, I wish I started this years ago.

I love it.

Gretchen Bieber. I live in Asheville, North Carolina, but I also— I have the farmland that I haven't started farming in Tennessee. Same as you, I didn't start soon enough, so waited till my 50s. And, um, doing it alone, that's the hardest thing. So I'm trying very hard to find community to help because I know that's, um, Joel Salatin's hint to find to find community. But it's, it's been difficult. But that's why y'all see me every opportunity, because I meet great people here that I've kept in touch with.

That's half of the point of this, getting you all here. And, and you get— you want to come and meet us and see the farm, but hopefully you're gonna go away with friends. Hey, I'm Cameron and it's my wife Carly. We're from about an hour east of Charlotte. Yeah, about 3 hours from here. About a week after this one was born, we, uh, we were slacking a bit on chores. Yeah. And, uh, I hadn't been keeping up with checking the fence and We're changing him, looking out the window, and there's a pig walking towards the house. I recognize you from YouTube, so what's that about? Uh, Project Adventures is the channel. Document our homestead and projects we're doing along the way. Project Adventures, yep. All right, I've seen you clearing a forest on there. Yep, last fall we took down all these trees behind me. Well, we had that rented mini excavator. We used the last couple hours on the clock to knock down all these trees. I just gave a tour for an hour, feeling really good. I'm gonna heat it. I'm gonna have to step away and do an Epsom salt here in a second. I hate stepping away. These people are so cool.

So these peppers are so full. Yeah, but they were falling over.

Wow.

So I'm just kind of staking a rebar post.

And look at this. Yeah, looks—

and I've got shishito peppers I need to get.

Okay, this is such a blessing that these folks came. It only takes a few days to get far behind. Like, they are attacking the high tunnel. So we're all gonna load up after this and come to my house, right? Yeah, that would be wonderful if all y'all got together and said, hey, let's, let's go to each other's house once a month and just do this rotation. We have Dallas, North Carolina on the green beans. Goal today, aiming for the impossible. We know extraordinary things happen. We're gonna weed in the, the high tunnel. We're gonna harvest green beans. What's your name again? Carly. Carly. Carly's harvesting green beans. Look at this. Every day is bring your kid to work day on the homestead. Gotta be. And who's this on your back? Luca. We're starting in the high tunnel. Aaron is already on top of the weeding next to the corn, sweet potatoes, and Cantaloupe. I must be feeling really good, folks. The three little pigs are up for a move, and I'm like, let's do it. I can't think of a better time. Like, I have people here to actually help me, you know, hook this up and get this moved. I think they would enjoy seeing that move. What do you think? I think you guys would enjoy seeing that move. Pigs have tilled. They've got one more tilling length, it looks like, and then we're done. And we've made we've prepped for 3 more garden beds. Put up some lasting weeds in here, then we'll get this covered with silage tarp to prep it for the next planting. And we're gonna harvest all this cabbage. We're gonna kiss a bunch of cabbages today. We're gonna harvest these carrots. When I get real impossible, we'll build this bed and cover it too. I need to go check on the kids. I just keep looking at my arm and I'm like, there's no redness. We beat this. I do not want to stop. Forced pit stop here. It's the 2-hour mark. I want this to keep going strong though. I'm going to soak this, going to stay on top of it. I hate it. There's people out here, they're great people. I want to be out there with them. We're getting some work done on the farm. It's so enjoyable with others. Henry woke up. He's decently happy though. He's not needing mama. That's good. See how I can minister him while I'm soaking this bath. That could save us some time. You want something to eat? You want a banana? All right. Looks like Lily is being able to change him. That's good news.

You and him, you're gonna go see Mama very soon.

She's out at the garden. You're excited? Yeah, he wants to see the boy who's his age. He wants to see what? Oh, there's a boy here who's your age, Luca. Go say hi to Luca, you'll have a friend. I'm done with that soak. I won't need to do it again until right after they leave. Let's go see what kind of trouble we can get into. We are about to move these 3 little pigs, and we're wetting down the area that they were on so that once we cover it with the tarp, it'll, it'll get even more supple over time, and it'll be easier to shape these beds. We're getting a little off in our pull here, so pull, pull it towards this way more. Whoops. Now go slow. Let's go slow. Keep coming this way more. I think you need to come hard this way. There you go. Tell him when, Cameron. Oh, we got it! There it is. This never gets old— new animals on new grass. What we're gonna do, harvest the cabbages, put them in one pile, harvest everything else. We're gonna put it in the bucket of the track loader when it gets here. You want to do it? That's fine. And then break this off. There you go, assistant filmer today, Wendy from Dallas, North Carolina. You pulled it all up, it's good.

And he did it across his knee.

He did. There you go, kiss the cabbage, Wendy. There you go. All right, let's see how you do, Allie. No, well, here's the thing, we need to cover this whole garden bed, so we need these cabbages out of the way. So we don't care, we're going to harvest even the small ones. We got to get everything out of the way. If we just leave it and just wait on the small ones, the weeds are going to take over everywhere, so it's just not worth it.

There's cabbage.

We'll kiss it first. No. Oh, come on. If you want to be in the vlog, all you got to do is kiss the cabbage. You want to kiss the cabbage? Oh, he embraced it, buddy. Okay, all weeds and cabbage excess into the track loader. Carrots. It's a good one. Wow, even Jonah's gardening. Call the Inquirer. What brings you to garden today? Yeah, you made me do this. You, you look at my— must not be that old. You find your buddy? You're so excited. You're not that old. Getting your hands dirty, there's something right about that, isn't there?

Look at this.

Yeah, buddy. It's a beauty. Yeah, buddy.

We gotta wash them and get them in bags, man.

That— okay, all our weeds, all our wasted cabbage. The pig port is in a till job right now, but normally it'd be at the end of the garden and we could just throw all this right into it. What they don't eat, don't compost. We don't put it in there right now because we want them to not eat this. We want them to eat grass and till. Jeff is dumping compost that the pigs made right over there. They're getting to see the whole garden flip. There was cabbages here. Now we're getting some tarp ready. We gotta cover behind where these pigs were or weeds are gonna grow up and it's gonna be very hard to build a bed. Cameron covering up a hole in the— yeah, they were already getting— thank you. Yeah, you can see, show, there's a hole in this tarp and you can see how the weeds— immediately you already weeded them. Yep, the weeds were taking over. And we got the tarps over them. That would have been stupid to cancel, although I didn't think I would even be able to be out here yesterday. Big change yesterday and today. The last of our carrots. Hey y'all, you want to get a group shot? I want to say thank you, thank you, thank you from the bottom of my heart. California kept us accountable. I think we just wanted to sit around and do nothing. And recover, but then we just recovered. We had no choice. California's coming, and we knocked it out. It wasn't even close. Like, we finished well before time's up. So thank you guys so much. That's what it's about. Let's get a picture. Just got into another salt bath, and sorry it's dark in here because the power just went out. And Mom just informed me a year ago today—

what was Jonah's Hip surgery.

Oh, isn't that something? For her to go to sleep means a lot. She refuses to take a nap. She's tired. She's been caring for me. She just recovered from sickness, bless her heart. She needed this. You wanna know how I know I'm still I'm still in love with her just like when we were dating. Did you see that shot? She's got her head on my shoulder. I would have loved to like get up and gotten a book, but I just wanted to hold on to that moment. I was enjoying that moment. Like the old days when you're— when you just met a girl and you're holding her hand and you're sweating and it's getting uncomfortable, but you don't want to move. Or the first time they put your head on your shoulder and you're just— you're so uncomfortable, but you're not gonna dare move because you don't want the moment to end. How was that? I can read. Thanks, Mom and Jonah, going to get us Chipotle, the one place we'll eat in a pinch. Power's not coming on back on until 7:30 if we're lucky. It might be early bedtime for everybody. It's fine for me. Happy day.