Giving Up Pasture

Happy day, y'all! Let's see what we can do today to grow our own groceries, 2024 edition. La la la la la, let me be free. Hey, welcome back! Welcome back! Got you a prize. Woohoo! Staff toboggan. Staff—

yeah, there you go.

Hey, where you going? I'm going to get on the swing. It's frozen together. We got this gravel to gravel this area. This is so muddy. it just gets washed away, as we saw in our last rain event. It's not going to the house before the paved road has gotten clogged up. Look at all this water coming down. Hey, we didn't do that yesterday afternoon when it was thawed. Love Lily's ingenuity. Couldn't get this water open. She just gathered water in a pan. That works. Amazing how cold it gets right before that sun comes up. Hey, she's even roped you into it, huh? Horse mom setting horses out to pasture with the cows. I think Randolph's here. I need to ask him a question. Hey, Randolph, good morning. Good morning. When they insulate this, they're coming on the— hopefully the 4th. Does that foam like fall that we need to get all this out of here? Probably need to clear the actual wall space. Yeah, we're gonna clear the wall. You still clanking away? Oh my gosh, I was gonna say just give up till it falls out this afternoon. Look at how much dirt I got out. And then hose it off. Okay, let's try it. Well, it's dead. I'm charging it. We need this track loader for clearing. They left the CD on in it and it killed it. I'm gonna go clear some with the chainsaw. I only got about 30 minutes. To what? I gotta put up Lily's horse ring. Why? Love. Just like tomorrow I'm taking the morning to do an airsoft video with you guys. Last to take the hand off the airsoft gun wins it. You better not take the hand off. $350 gun. Better stay in family. Lily's on to me to put up her, uh, we got her a round ring for her horse. It has nothing to do with growing our own food, save investing in our children. Wow, I want you guys to seize this. Whoa, we've cleared all the way up to the access road. Desperately need this pasture for the amount of cows we need. This is neat. Beautiful rock, rock there, beautiful rock there, the rocks up there. This is a beautiful pasture. This is the old trail, and the boys just started clearing this way. I— we have a lot more this way than I thought. I thought there would be— there's a ravine over there. It's pretty much straight downhill. It's a lot further away than I thought. Pinched my saw. Don't have enough time to be pinching my saw. Summon my tranquil attitude. Ah, here she comes to get me. She's relentless. Here comes Josiah to the rescue. My chain has gotten off the bar. We'll have one person really happy about that. You're so happy right now, and I'm so upset. Why? Because I didn't get to finish sawing.

It's okay, Papa.

Oh, okay, well then we'll just go get the tool and go back at it.

Well, you only had 6 minutes anyways.

I can't feel too bad because he's got a lot of stump work to do. I'm actually way ahead on the sawing. Peaches, we found, is not quite ready for the homestead style riding. He's very used to rings. In order for Lily to safely ride him, like trail ridings and pony clubs, we got some work to do. And one of our thoughts— thank you, Leslie, our homestead horse trainer— is a round ring. What is up with me giving up? It's not our best pasture, it's very shallow soil, but it's flat. We love milking and rotating through here because it's so flat and easy to do, and I'm giving it up for a horse. I'm giving it up for Lily. Wanting to see this, huh?

We should put it right there because this place is uneven.

Hey, you know we love you, right? Yes, because this is like primo easy to milk rotational pasture, right? Yeah, and we're giving it up for a horse ring. Something we're not even gonna milk, something we're never gonna eat. That's love and support.

I just—

ring turned out much more generous than I thought. It's much bigger. Guesstimating as we put it up. Now we have to adjust it to its real size now that it's all— what's it like now compared to 30 minutes ago?

Well, now I have a ring that I can use for lunching and stuff, and I don't have to put on the bridle when I lunch.

Ah, nice. Isn't it as exciting as you thought it would be? What do you have to say for our loss of pasture, our milk house. I'm sorry. Whoa, get on horsey! Gideon likes the round ring. He outlasted you.

No. 3, 2, 1, go!

He learned the countdown somewhere. You gotta let the kids do what they want with the farm too, for them to really buy in. How was the ride? All right, see how they take to their round rings. Are you gonna ride him and lunge him in here?

I'm not gonna ride him today.

And I think Miss Leslie's coming on Wednesday— Sunday? No, it's Monday. Okay. All right, we'll see what she thinks. How do you think this will help you, uh, train Peaches to a homestead life?

Well, maybe it's because he's in a fence and he feels more comfortable like that.

Peaches, unlike Blaze, gets a little antsy when he's not in A ring setting. There is a redeeming quality about that round ring. It could be easily used to create a chute, to create a pen for separating the sheep, or grabbing a steer, or herding something into a trailer. I have a feeling we're going to really be using that round ring for some other things too. Multipurpose everything, permaculture teaches us. This your trailer now? Yeah, you got a rickshaw actually. Hey, looks like you got wheel problems. Well, back. We have a round ring and an airsoft court. We're at that stage, aren't we?

Oh wait, where's the airsoft?

I mean, it's beautiful. Around 2 acres. They're no longer little and on our backs. No, they have their own ideas now. Yes, and they're taking over the farm slowly.

Wherever we're at, it's fine.

Slowly but surely. You mining salt? It's a group effort lunch. You know, if we're honest, why I cook a lot of the meals? Why? Because I get so hungry and I want it at a certain time. You're more laid back with timing.

Yes, I am a nut.

I am not laid back when it comes to timing, period.

It's okay if we're a little late or whatever.

I know when something happens to me, they might eat lunch at 1:30, dinner at 7:00. 12:00. 5. What do you guys got going in now? See french fries in y'all's future. Is that the secret, Rebecca? Soaking them?

Well, you're supposed to also bake them, but you didn't.

Soak them, dry them, fry them. We're eating flossy tonight. Let's check our grill. 350. I think we want 450. I think I heard Gordon Ramsay say that once cooking burgers. Burn It Up Cooking Show, high heat all the time. Smoked burgers tonight. Show you guys what I was working on the car. You guys ready for a 2-minute teaching. Today I was writing out the how. I'm about to wrap up this booklet workshop talking about the design how, the kind of stuff you need to know about the different elements. Elements are like the things in the homestead—gardens, cows, the things you're growing. It's not an exhaustive how-to. Boy, that would be, that would be a book. Maybe I'll write that one day. Maybe that's in the future. It's more of a like how to set it up in relation to like where you would put things. So in this 2-minute Tuesday, how to set up and place The garden. Front door. Kitchen garden. Garden's right outside your door. Compact. This is 8 feet wide, 4 feet long. 8 feet long, 4 feet wide. Raised bed. You don't have to do raised bed. You can get— you don't— you can have to get rid of all this, but we're at the base of the valley, and in big rain years it floods here, and it got Beauty's tomatoes one year, and I'll never forget it. Never make the same mistake. Yes, dear. I'll get you some raised beds and bring on the rains and we're not flooded. Found out it's really a lot easier to till and harvest, and that's a good thing because this is highly concentrated planting, like Square Foot Gardening method, like 4 lettuces per square foot type of thing. Plant them 3 times a year, $1,200 worth of produce easy. How do we set them up? Well, we got them on leaf mulch. That's what's available here. Under here we have rich— whoo! It's all frozen down in there. We have rich compost from the compost corner right next to it where the chickens are during the growing season. Fill the compost we bought— bought in soil to get it started— for about here, maybe a foot and a half. In the bottom, just logs, horticulture style. Jonah's calling me. What do you need? All right, we gotta go turn the cows' water off. Timeout editor, put us a timeout on the 2-minute teaching. The cows or the bromance? Okay, now I can't leave the hose in there or it'll all drain it out. I learned the hard way. You gotta pull this hose out or it's gonna suck it all out. I bet they've done that in the past, why that's gotten so low before. If we leave it uphill, water will run out of it in the night and it won't freeze, and this hose will be empty in the morning when it is freezing outside, and we'll be able to use it. Hey, you got the track loader going! All right, Austin, start my time. Aye aye, Captain! Garden number 2, how to set it up. Our crop gardens, you would want crop gardens a bit further away. Way up there in the front yard is our zone 1 kitchen garden. Way down here, crop garden, meaning you plant a big crop like onions or pumpkins, something like that. You weed it, water it once a week, and then you harvest. So only a few visits in a week, whereas a kitchen garden you visit every day, more than once a day. For crop gardens at the homestead level, I suggest 1,200— no, uh, 21 feet wide and 50 feet long. If you have the space and the gumption, you could go 100 feet, but these things like silage tarp, greenhouse plastic for low tunnels, Agribond for low tunnels, all come in a 100-foot piece, so it's easy enough to cut it in half. Same reason for the width. Why 21? Well, that gets us a 30-inch bed. That's just shoveled from the pathway, a 1-foot pathway, not very much. Maximizing the space here. 1-foot pathway, 30-inch bed, 1-foot pathway. That gets you 6 in 21 feet. I'd like to go 24 feet because these tarps come in that, but it's not quite enough to have 7 rows. But you can put 6 of these beds— sorry, it says rows, but I mean beds. Let's call it— I call it a plot. We have 4 plots here. We have one 1,200, 21 foot by 50. 2 plots, 3 plots, and there's a 4th plot under the high tunnel right now. Nature, she's— well, always nature is modest. So right now things aren't growing. We have her covered, as you see. Whenever we're ready, we just pull this silage tarp up and plant. Done. Finished teaching just in time for these burgers, folks. I got a lot more than that. We got an afternoon to teach you how to design your best homestead ever. Coming February 4th. You don't want to miss it. Live. It's free. Link in the description. Look, I'm ready to start the burgers whenever you think that's good. Look at those. Who would know? I don't believe they're gluten-free. Look at those burgers. They're done. Fries are done. The smoked burgers come out great. Hey, is this your second apple? Trying to get him to go to bed, stuffing him full. Stayed a hot dog, now you're gonna eat an apple. You eat up, buddy. We want you sleeping good. Can you tell everybody happy day?