Girding Up My Loins for the Tomato Trellis | She's So Happy Now

Only 9 days left to Abundance Plus. Don't put your shoes on in there, that's not the point. I hope to hang the tomato trellises today.

See that little dot?

Beauty's gonna help, that's the plan. But that's where it hurts. We got everyday distractions. It starts with a splinter. There it is. You guys see that? It's on my thumbnail right there. I can barely see it. Kind of hard to see. Amazing how something so little causes so much trouble. Hey boys, what have you done and not done? Gotta see this. Look at this sight. It's all happening right out there. Quite the eieio farm. Fat chicks being raised up, lambs, fat hens. Cows, luchadors. Quite a lot going on in that little 1 acre. Not quite. Look, yellow squash coming on. This jammed so well, but now it's getting got. Get it before they— before they do. What, nobody's rushing over to eat the collards? There goes somebody. Say no, I'd rather dig for bugs in the mulch. What do you got in that bucket? Chick. What happened?

You guys left them.

That's funny. We, uh, we put the sea monsters out yesterday and I guess left some behind. Hey, Guinea, will you take those up with your truck? There we go. Okay, go ahead. Oh, can you go around? Go ahead. He's learning how to drive. That's— you can go now, you can go forward. Better learn on a plastic car than the real thing, right?

I'm going to string trim, okay?

What? What did you just say? I'm getting faint, I'm getting faint. Hold me up. Come on, why are you fading? Well, he's, he's volunteering to string trim at 7 o'clock in the morning. Thank you very much, my man. The electric truck is coming in handy. There you go. We put our little sea monsters out to pasture. One graduated the freezer, one graduated the pasture. Okay, the boys have done good. They've Got grain in there. Doesn't look like any crows have attacked these guys, thanks to the goose. And no hawks or owls. Everybody's doing good. Put it here on the middle one, or the second one down. There you go. Yep. All right, now can you turn it on?

There.

Water Mom's plants. And just do it slightly, slightly. I'm glad they're a little older. This is what we're doing today, I think. I hope we're gonna hang these roller hooks for our tomatoes. And our— there's only 4 instructions, so that can't be too hard. You getting a little distracted? Come on, buddy, come on. The greenhouse out here is coming along very nicely. This might line up with that middle one. I think it does. Does that line up with that one? I think it does, but that's a long way up there. That's going to be a big ladder, and then This one, it's got nothing. It's got— there's no bar, so we're gonna have to run our wire through it and zip tie it up. So we need some zip ties and we need some big ladders. So that's not bad, 2 of the 3 already have a pole. We're just gonna have to run one wire. That's a huge, huge zip tie. I'm on it today. Everything is in its place today. I do not have a ladder that ridiculously big, but I knew— I do know somebody who does. We're gonna let Cubby warm up out here a little bit. Oh, while he's warming up, let me show you something. Do you guys see that? You can see my breath. It's that chilly outside. That's why I love calling Western North Carolina home. Usually always gets A nice chill in the morning. Hello? Speaking of chill, I guess the geese are under their cover. Oh look, brand new geese! You guys are cute. Thank you McMurray Hatchery for sending us the Christmas goose. And if more than one makes it, we'll have several geese, which all of our geese made it last year. It's delicious. Turkeys are doing fine. Looks like everybody did their chores all right. Hey! Rise and shine! Oh, we're up! We're up! Can we borrow a ladder? Sure. All right, thanks. Look at this! What does everybody ask Grandma when they see this? So tall. They ask that, right? Well, tell them that Bruce is going to put a bathroom in it upstairs, right? No, it's so tall because he wants to put this ladder in it. Right? Yeah. Well, that, that tall ladder is about to come in handy. It's a 10-foot ladder and there's another one on the other side. Oh, okay, thanks. Okay. All right, all right, Rebecca, can we figure this out together? Here's the instructions. Okay, not many. Look. Okay, so I think I release this lock and then— no, that looks buried under there. That's like at the bottom one. I wonder if it's tucked in though. Nobody shows this part on the internet and nobody says anything about it in the instructions. How do you— this end is like pinned underneath and it seems like it's the end Is there another start somewhere? They assume everybody knows what they're doing when they send them these things.

Well, and there's 4— there's 4 steps in the directions and none of them tell you how to actually do it.

So then you do something with that lock. Yeah, so when there's that lock, look, you hang it like that and then it can't come down. You pinch this— they don't say nothing about pinching this to unlock that.

It's press release handle until the direction of movement.

What does that mean? Well, we figured it out. And then we put it up there, we release this, and we put that in. Let's do an instructional for Abundance Plus.

I did it, but it didn't— I'm glad you know how to do it because I still don't know what I'm doing.

So there we go, and then that would do it. They didn't say you have to gird up your loins to get this thing going, but we figured it out.

You're climbing a ladder.

How about an instructional video? An Abundance Plus for the rest of us, for all those who have never done this before.

For all of us newbies. All the Market Gardeners are laughing at us right now. Yep, because they're like—

but all the homesteaders are like, yeah! This isn't gonna hang on that big pole though. Dang.

No, we have to have the wire.

I know, I was hoping to not have to do the wire since it was right over it. But all right, we'll do the wire. So let's tie one line then here and then walk it all the way across going above the wires, and then I'll hang it over there, pull it tight. Here's the view from the top. That'd be really bad news if I fell. Anyway, here's what I did. I strung the wire around the little— what do you call those? I don't know. Anyway, some hardware there, and then got it as tight as I can, which is not very tight, but we just need this to hang the— here, we'll do it in a second, and then we'll zip, and then we'll zip tie this to that. I've got the zip ties in my back pocket. Maybe in the middle, I think so. Look tidy. Okay, this will last forever. You know, we're doing this this year, but then we don't have to. There you go. Thank you. Just trade with you. I got my wire here. I was easily able to put that on there. I was— I've got my zip tie loose on there just to hold this up and keep it tidy, keep it from sagging. I want to be able to attach this— well, I don't know if I have to attach this. If we plant in the same place every year, we just come roll this up in the winter for the animals to come in. We did it! Well, we did one row of tomato trellis. We got drip irrigation in here. This is where the animals were. We got the wood chips mulch. We're doing it. We have, we have one row. This is almost July. Hey, one little bit at a time, just one, one step at a time. Another day, all we got is the cucumbers and this other tomatoes, and we got We got some time. I mean, it's not— it's not out of control.

I'm worried about my cucumbers.

Yeah, they're a little— they're suffering a little down here. Yeah, from bug attack. Have you guys ever been watching the vlog and wondered, how does he do that? Well, more of that coming your way to Abundance Plus when 3-minute videos, easy to consume. The vlogs are going to Abundance Plus too, by the way. 9 days. That's funny. 9. Here, not 4 days, 9 days. Okay, this one's for the cows. Yeah. Okay, she's got an idea to separate the cows and the The sheep. Jump. All right, Go pet the sheep. Call them up here, Lily. Sheep, sheep, sheep, sheep, sheep, sheep, sheep, sheep, sheep, sheep, sheep, sheep, sheep, sheep. There you go. Well, he got through after all. One of them. One of them are in heat. I guess we'll get to see that these electric fences work. Keep them out. I want to make yogurt this morning. I got all my mix together from this morning's harvest. Problem is I need this dehydrator, but Rick— Becca's just gotten done drying out the dill.

It's dried like 4 days ago, but I haven't had time to get it out.

What are you gonna do with that dill?

Use it in cooking.

I'm pretty sure just that one tray is a lifetime supply of dill. I know. So what we're gonna do here, you grab it by the stem and then scrape all the dill off. It's rather easy. I'm not gonna save the stem. Oh, I think you got a stem in there, bro. Thank you, Jonah. We did that. Classic label here, Jonah. I am over dill, he says. We got our yogurt going. We'll have a good laugh when we go get our dill. The rest of our bulk herbs. Look, look at these guys. You got them in the water yet?

No, we, we took one swim yesterday.

You haven't put them in the water? Yeah, it's amazing. Just right away yesterday, 2 days old, they just go right in and swim. Today, 3 days old, they're swimming.

They were swimming yesterday.

Look, it's just totally natural to them. They're drinking, eating. Now you guys have some swimming buddies, wading buddies. 3 things of note: we are— we have sold the greenhouse, and they're happy to get it. They're happiest to get it as we are to sell it and have our yard back. We do not need it anymore. We're gonna house our animals in there, and we're just gonna do a little bit of lettuce over the winter in the raised beds. We're eating less leafy greens now and more, I guess, fruits, squashes, and those save well, 6 months on our counter. We are doing potatoes and sweet potatoes and things like that. I had the light on. Why did I have the light on? Well, I just tried something new. How about member consults? Premium members How about I get on the phone with you, Zoom, and we do a consult? That is full of hay and they have little shoots. We did this with Adam just now, who just got a homestead. Let me turn this down. And then where we have— he just got a new homestead and, you know, wanting some advice on setting it up. We talked about deep bedding, we talked about the most important skill you can have as a new homesteader. And what I'm trying is What if I filmed that with somebody like Adam but then make that available in Abundance Plus? So it's a perk for premium members because they can apply and maybe get a consult, but then everybody in Abundance Plus can watch it. Here are some highlights from our conversation. There's more money to be had in experiences, events, tours, education than there is selling raw milk or beef or whatever that you might could alternatively do out of there. We made the mistake of putting them on the electric netting without training them, and we saw Adam high stepping over neighbor's cornfields trying to catch his pigs. Yeah, I would get— I would totally put new animals in that stall no matter what time of the year it is. We always, we always did that. We did that with our sheep. We do that with our pigs. Get them in that holding, and if, if you're getting a cow, put them in there too. Uh, and just, just make sure you put some, uh, wood chips down. Yeah. And, or it could be pine shavings. Uh, so it could be wood shavings, leaves, organic straw, spent hay, something. If your priority is meat and you're just starting over the first thing you would want to get is Cornish Cross meat chickens, sea monsters, because you're going to have meat in 2 months. You're going to have meat in 58 days. One more thing, Abundance Plus is live to current members and it seems to be going well. We've got some comments. Like, if you go to— if you go to watch Rooted and you go to the fifth, the fifth episode, we've already got Quite a few, quite a few activities. Spring comments are working brilliantly. So if you are a current Abundant Permaculture member, look for an email from Abundance Plus this morning telling you how to migrate over. Super, super easy. We made it super easy for you guys. For everybody else, we're going to work out any kind of kinks, tweaks. Everybody else, 9 days. Abundance Plus, it's coming.