In this 20‑day episode of the "Grow 30" challenge, Victor (Speaker A) and Rebecca document a full day on their homestead as they work toward quitting the grocery store. They start by collecting and cleaning eggs, monitoring compost temperature, and managing nest boxes. The crew flips the crop garden, removes weeds for the pigs, and plants fall/winter seeds for a year‑round harvest. Victor sources free wood chips to improve compost breakdown and mentions a partnership with 10 Acre Farm that trades strawberries for a future "He‑Man" butchering workshop. The centerpiece is Victor’s first attempt at homemade chicken sausage: deboning, flash‑freezing, seasoning, and cooking, noting texture and spice balance. Meanwhile, Rebecca teaches friends how to can salsa, shares an apron she received from a sewing community, and encourages skill‑sharing. Teens and family members help turn compost, pile brush, and tend livestock, including feeding pigs with milk‑soaked grain and caring for calves. The vlog wraps with meal planning—steaks, chuck roast, and future burgers—while reinforcing community involvement and the homestead’s self‑sufficiency goals.
Chapters
We got a fair amount of eggs yesterday. Maybe we'll get a little ahead of ourselves. We've been living egg basket to egg basket. Happy day 20. Can you believe it's been almost 3 weeks since we started growth— quit the grocery store? It's been our dream for 2 years, and we're taking 30 days to just quit it. Quit the grocery store habit. Not like it's a bad thing per se, but just notice are happy. It's so wet in here. It's— they're— it's composted. You want to take the thermometer to it, get in? That's how we'll know. It's just, I don't know what job— I don't know what job I could have them do. What I'm doing here is, if you— if some of them get in the nest box at night and poop, they're gonna have dirty eggs that day. So let's clean those out and make sure everybody has good nesting material. And since we're living egg baskets, egg baskets, We're gonna get little eggs that have fallen on the ground too. Can you go get an egg basket? Oh, you do that first.
Okay, maybe the top is better.
It is still active. Okay, well, we don't have to move them out of here yet, but we ought to— no, we do. We ought to, uh, pile it up real good and get this draining. Okay, that's fantastic. I think we still have hope. Hey, you guys got up this morning. All right, boys got up in there. Milk— are the calves separate? Are the calves separate? All right, this means we can go straight into our project. I've got a fun list for today. We're going to continue to flip the crop garden, hopefully getting up at least all the weeds that are there for the pigs. I hope to start some seeds for a fall and winter harvest garden for the front yard. That'd be exciting to have fresh fresh produce all year, right straight up out of the ground. But that has to be planted now if it's gonna happen. One thing Rebecca really misses from the grocery store is she really— whoa, okay— she really likes chicken sausage. So I've laid out some of that chicken yesterday to have our hand at some chicken sausage. Remember, I soaked the pig feed the other day and milk. Yeah, look, that's great. Look at that. Look how I absorbed it all. I probably couldn't even put any more milk in it. Oh yeah, I think it's even fermenting. It smells a little sour. These are those tub-grinded chips, rotten. I'm not happy. I'm not happy. I'm not happy. Not happy. Probably break it down pretty fast because they're, they're, they're so fine and long. That the chickens are compacting this pile instead of turning it. I just need to get regular wood chips. Good news is I saw a massive pile of wood chips free for the taking. Like, I think people dump their wood chips there for others to take over by where Jonah and Josiah play soccer. Prick is gonna be getting them to humble themselves. To grab some wood chips despite the possibility of getting caught by their normal friends. Free wood chips on a path that our boys are already on. Hey, we got the chickens feed fed. Go put that bucket back. Let's meet at the crop garden. We gotta flip this crop garden. Hey, if we want food next year, we got to be on this now. Let's get the plants up. For the pigs. No, don't pull up the watermelon. These old strawberries— this is a joke. I think we would eat— save up strawberries from a whole plot, so we're just going to continue to go to the local strawberry farms. We've got several organic choices. Shout out 10 Acre Farm, who's going to trade us $300 worth of strawberries next year to come to our He-Man butchering workshop. By the way, I believe we're keeping that cart open till Sunday. Come break down a beef carcass with us, learn in person with Ben and I. Can't come to that? We're gonna have an online version. Check it out, link in the description. Let's get the strawberries up and then the pea— the weeds from the peas. And you think we can do that in an hour and 15? I think between that and processing the milk here directly That's probably a reasonable goal. Oh, look who's here! You're getting it done now.
This was like a runner that attached on top of the weed fabric, but then look at this. There's a worm, worm stuck in there. Living in— no, it's alive.
Okay, we got— should we take a round of the pigs? Well, it's hard to know if they like these veggies because he just got milk-soaked grain. Mama's 500-pound pets.
Come here, girl.
Want to know how to torture the beautiful one? Make her pull up plants. Her heart's breaking. She's casting visions, all kinds of visions for strawberries around the farm. Her heart's breaking.
Not ready for it yet. We have to build a, like, a little retaining wall.
This is my happy place, ripping up plants.
But you like strawberries, that's the thing.
Yeah, well, I like to go, uh, give them $15 for a gallon. So now we have to pull up all these weeds. But watch the watermelons and the— I don't think that is watermelon, Rebecca, because that's watermelon.
Yeah, well, it might have had two different—
so that's either cantaloupe or it's cantaloupe.
Okay, cantaloupe or watermelon.
All right, so now what you got to do, guys, just get these bigger leaves that you can know for sure aren't. That area was overgrown. I forgot about it, honestly. We had watermelon and cantaloupes in there. I think we might have saved them though. We can get some sunshine now. It is breakfast time, but Beauty's harvesting tomatoes for salsa. I know she ain't gonna quit till that's done, so let's go help her. We doing a crate, two crates?
Um, so I was thinking I might do kinds of salsa.
Okay, that's good. What do we got here? Tomato, two crates of goodness. Lily's calling breakfast. Oh, rounded up some steaks. We have some random steaks that I've been finding. Skirt steak, filet mignon, beef tenderloin, which I can turn into filet mignon. That's $30 a pound right there at the store.
Dory from the Delightful Cottage, um, messaged me and said, so she saw how I was needing an apron because I I couldn't find mine, so she made me one. So she sent me several ones. Super excited. Oh, this is, this is for the little ones. They're adjustable. Oh, she sent me some seeds too, which I'm excited about. Okay, put your arms up.
A movie star.
If you want to sew your own apron, go check her out on Instagram. She has sewing memberships. I actually think I was maybe gonna try it maybe in a couple of years when my life slows down. I don't know, maybe over the winter, because I would like to learn this.
Rebecca's in there. Our friends have arrived. She's gonna be teaching a salsa class to friends. That's the best. We're dividing and conquering. Man's dream. I've got one teen on turning the compost pile, and I got another teen on piling up brush. I was thinking maybe you'd do this. No, it's not nearly enough. Look, look at all this soft stuff. Yeah, I missed the action. It's 100 degrees. Anything above ambient outdoor temp, anything higher, means your compost pile is still alive and breaking down. Shoot, Jonah, did you— hey, let's get these guys in. This is too many. I hope it's not too soggy to burn. We've consolidated our burn pile. I might be rotten. Yeah, anything will burn if we can get it hot enough. How's this lesson going, Beck?
It's going great.
What'd you get, jalapeño in your eye? I don't know. Kitchen's full up there. This day 20 of Grow 30, let's see if we can't make our own chicken sausage. So we're gonna go ahead and, uh, debone it, de-skin it, put it in chunks in a bowl. Chickens and chunks. Next, it says to flash freeze it 15 to 30 minutes. I'm gonna go for the 15-minute mark because I got PT today. Try it, and it's not— it's not solid. Crock thought that'd be about 7 pounds. I think that's probably about right. It's a little over 2 pounds a bird. They're probably 4 pounds in our freezer. That were just Rebecca, she'd probably eat eat 2 a day. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7— that's a week. Got it cleaned up just in time to go to my PT for my shoulder. It feels good. Look, took a little longer than I expected, but it was my first time doing it. We'll see. Seems like they're a little spicy, a little too much spice for what it was. I'm I probably should have added some fat, but we'll see. I think it's a good start. Jonah got a job for the neighbors. Now we're geeking out on his first job. Those dorky parents coming out with their video cameras. Don't jump off the boat, Becky. I know.
I used my apron today. I loved it so much. It was so nice knowing that I wasn't getting my clothes dirty, although that doesn't really matter because my clothes are farm clothes. But we are done. We got— we probably got 8 quarts of sauce. It was like a super thick sauce. I did really good at, um, draining like as much liquid off as possible. And then we just did pints of salsa, and I had so much fun teaching our friends. I'm no expert, but I do have experience, so I encourage you, if you want to learn how to can, there's somebody in your life that knows how to can, and just reach out to them because they most likely want to help. Like, she had said, like, oh, I want to learn how to do this, because she had come to my house and saw that I had salsa sitting on the counter, was like from a couple days before that, And she's like, oh, I really do want to learn how to do this. And so I was like, come anytime. Like, I'm canning salsa next week, um, I'm gonna can next week, let's come up with a time. So the next day I texted her and I had said, hey, I'm gonna do it, like, let's plan a day. And, um, so she picked the day that worked for her and it worked for me. So people who people want to help, so I just encourage you to reach out and, um, ask, ask for it, and people will want to teach you.
We— for us, we had to finish off these steaks, and you can't have steaks till Tuesday, okay? Do we get He-Man? So it's back to burger. Okay. Oh yeah, we found a chuck roast too. Burger and chuck roast to Tuesday. All right, happy day, y'all.
