Greenhouse Tomato Harvest

Look at me. This is a good day. I haven't had this kind of day in a very long time. I was on— Becky, I was on a walker yesterday morning. What's happening? Like, big difference, big difference. Am I— have I taken a turn?

Is it the ozone?

Is it—

oh yeah, it could be supplements finally kicking in.

It could be the crappy lettuce. It could just be time. My body has the power to heal itself. Jonah cleaned up very nicely in here. Look at this kid.

He did.

He, um, he has finally figured out—

he's finally figured out that it feels good to have a non-crazy house. Like, you know what I mean? Like, for sure, he's finally like been like, this is— when it's clean, it does make you feel better. Because that's what we've been saying for years.

We got a long to-do list. One of it includes harvesting mom's tomatoes.

Which I'm gonna work on those tomatoes.

You're gonna work on those today? Yeah. And processing them for, uh, well, for, for storage. Looks like you might have a green bean project too. Does it make you wonder if I should still do steroids? Makes me wonder.

Yeah.

Like, am I at the tail end of this? Just need to have patience.

I know, like, is this all working? Because you've been hitting this herb or herbal regimen, it'll be a, you know, a week. It's a week today.

Yeah, we also need to move pigs. Gotta finish the meat shaw. What's the priority? Well, moving pigs is the priority. The ducks are fine on the deep bedding and the brooder. The raised beds need some love. Mega love. They need mega love. The sunflowers Mucho love. Oh my gosh, things are falling through the cracks, y'all. Maybe we can move 1% forward on this. What do you say, Josiah? Can you help me pull up these cucumbers? You want to grab that cucumber?

Go ahead.

Throw this in the compost corner. Oops, sorry, Goose. You did a good job in the house. Thanks. Doesn't it feel great?

Isn't Gideon wrecking it?

Feels great to me. He probably is. We should go get him. Actually, should have known he he wasn't gonna follow. And we have a business to run. At 10 AM, I got an exciting phone call about a new, uh, short film we're putting out on Abundance Plus. Get in, let's go! Hey Jonah, will you get me the drone? Rebecca actually says she's gonna go get some tomatoes. Josiah, we're dividing and conquering. Will you document you guys doing that a little bit? Yeah, with that camera. Thank you. Now there's 3 parts to a story. That's all you got to remember when filming. There's a beginning. So the story is you and Mom getting tomatoes. So you might in the beginning say, hey, Mom and I are down here in the high tunnel and we're going to get tomatoes. That's the beginning. And then there's a middle. What would be the middle? You guys getting tomatoes. So get a couple— get a few shots of you getting tomatoes. And then there's an end. You guys did it or you didn't. So you might get a shot of the harvest and say, hey, we were able to get this much amount of tomatoes, or we had this problem and we were only able to get this amount of tomatoes. You understand? It's easy, right?

I guess so.

Mr. Brown's down here. Arun's down here. Did you have a good weekend, Arun? Yeah. We got to get these pigs moved before we milk. We're really dividing and conquer. Fallen tomatoes. Corinne's gonna set up the nets for today's move. Jonah, get us some grass seed nets. Jonah's poured the water out. Next, we put up the next net. It's just Jonah and I. I'm crippled. Let's, uh, let's not take any chances. Just go straight up 3 lengths, over 2, and then come back down 3 lengths. They're raring to go. Boy, they've tilled that up nicely, but not too much where they've done a lot of plowing. They've just done a little surface till, which is good. It's all we want. Feeders, Billy, can you sneak in there and get our feeders? That's good. And then go 2 over. This is the no drama pig move. Two nets— well, one source net going along back down to the Energizer, and then one net they're in, set up the next net. Once we move them over here, we pull up the old net. So you could totally do this no drama with just three 100-foot nets. Get ready to move them. No drama. Big pig, pig, pig, pig, pig, pig, pig, pig, pig, pig, pig, pig. They're hesitant even with the net gone. They remember they're not dummies, John. Let's feed them in the long term. A little bit higher up. I wanted to clear myself. Getting better. All I got to do is go out into the pig field and I realized how far I've got to go. Yet barely walk on this slope. You can't say we didn't give them a pan. They knocked it over. We're feeding in pans just take away some parasite pressure. Feed on the ground, you might accidentally get it on some manure. Pigs poop and they have a corner. Can you guys tell? Starts right here and they've pooped all up in this corner. Well, they got to go into there and poop. They'll track that poop all over the place, so we just try to take some of the pressure off and feed them in pans. Jona got the net up. Thank you, Jona. Jona, you get us a straw bale up here. I'm gonna check. Jona said the seed was moldy. It is over a year old and it did get wet in the cool room, and we leave our light on in there a lot on accident, so some of it is even grown. But if you're not testing, you're guessing. So this was last week, pigs. You see the straw? Look at there. Already we got grass seed. You can see it right there. That's the new grass. This place will be forever better thanks to those pigs. I'm gonna do this section, okay? You guys do that, help with the rest. I'm gonna do this corner. We did it! Organic straw is down just to hold it from running off if it rains. I'm happy, the pigs are happy. Milking time. Today was the log cabins yard, probably one of our worst pastures. We gave them a huge paddock where they're going today, probably our best, probably our best pasture. So they're going from veggies to ice cream. All right, I gotta leave it in good hands. I gotta go, I got a phone call. Gonna get— keep working on getting content.

Henry is asleep. And I'm gonna go out to the high tunnel and pick tomatoes, maybe green beans. There are so many tomatoes, very excited about this. So I'm out here looking at the pepper row, and we did get a couple peppers over the weekend, but most of them are still ripening. Um, we have orange and yellow, it looks like, or maybe we just have all yellow. I'm not 100% sure, which is fine. I just like colored peppers. There we go, it's a beautiful one. I found another one. We also have a ton of green beans that need to be picked, so So I'm gonna try to pick as many as I can before Henry wakes up. Josiah is in the house with him, so he'll get him and bring him down here if he wakes up. So we'll see what we can do until then. And you may be thinking to yourself, she's missed tomatoes. There's still tomatoes, red tomatoes on these vines. And yes, there are some red tomatoes on the vines. Either one, they're not ready to be picked, or two, they are, um like rotten or bug-eaten. And actually what we're gonna do is come through here with a bucket and we'll get all of the undesirable produce and go ahead and feed that to the pigs. Hi! Hey, Henry!

Hi!

Are you waking up? Oh, you're too busy looking at the garden, huh?

Hey, before we get on our show, look what these guys got. A basket full of beautiful tomatoes, basket full of beautiful green beans. Good job, Josiah. Let's get their channel playing while we're going. How about that? Off-Grid Living with Martin Johnson. Yeah. Wow.

And hello, something exciting is happening today, guys.

So they're setting up a homestead in Idaho, and I've seen, I've seen the short film that Dan Omen, my editor from Grass-Fed Homestead— he's now branching off and has Grass-Fed Media. He made a wonderful short film on these guys, super encouraging. We all gathered together in the bed and watched this thing. You guys are going to enjoy this. It's something positive you can watch together as a family. They have an off-grid living channel, and that's really helping them do well on YouTube, uh, but their heart is community from, from what I saw on the show. And they've traveled the world, they as missionaries, but then are now here as they build this off-grid homestead, trying to create community here where they are in Idaho. But it seems like wherever they go, they have one mission, and that's create community. I think that's very needed in this time, isn't it? We feel isolated and lonely. He wears a shirt a lot called Keep Smiling. Let's try it, everybody. Let's try it right now, because emotion follows motion. No matter how you feel right now, Let's try it. Everybody, keep smiling. You're probably laughing with me because as soon as you smile, you felt a little bit better. Albeit, you might have felt foolish. You felt a little bit better. So keep smiling. Here's a clip of the new show that's coming to Abundance Plus very, very soon.

So as we were preparing to transition back to the States, you know, we needed to figure out where we were going to live and what we were going to do. We'd been married 17 years at this point. We lived in 5 states, 2 countries, and about 15 different homes during that time being in full-time ministry. And so one of the things that we really wanted to do was establish a home base, you know, someplace that we could call home, that we could build up and could really be ours. And so trying to figure out where we were going to go and what we were going to do to do that, you know, we had a long list of, of kind of like checkpoints, you know, things that we were looking for And it's interesting that Idaho checked every single one of those.

Okay, yeah, we just got off the show. I encourage you guys, while you wait for this to come out to Abundance Plus, check out the Martins' channel. I'll leave a link for that down in the description. It's, uh, let's get the name of it in case you don't want to go to the description or if you're viewing on an iPhone or a TV. Martin Johnson Off-Grid living. You'll smile more if you go over there, I guarantee it. Go enjoy that. It's such an honor to be working with people like that. I did get a little stiff sitting there. I had my ankle up. Becky was busy in the background. We might convert that combo into a podcast. She's dicing tomatoes.

I'm just quartering them.

And you came in with a good idea. You know, we talked to the Martins about extra content. They have their inspirational show, um, I should call it a micro-documentary coming, but could we get any educational pieces out of them? And Rebecca thought, you know, I have this really good way about living frugally, like, well, they also— they're like tents.

They did a different— like, most people would do like an RV or something, but they didn't do that.

They had a different perspective on that.

They chose a different route, and they— I mean, I think it worked for— it worked for them, obviously.

Well, they said that, you know, most people go RV, but then they're cramped in all these quarters, and it wasn't like, oh, we're tough, look at us, we're in a tent. Where is— no, it's like, hey, this is for sanity. Everybody gets their own space. So they have some, they have some fun inside. Out of the box thinking. Where's your partner? Henry? Yeah, Henry.

He's outside.

It's kind of sad to see his little empty seat right there. Go say hey to him. Are you out here hanging with brother? Just living life? Josiah, I saw you pulling up sunflowers during the meeting. What got into you, bro?

Well, Mama said, and well, I asked Mama If I did it, if she'd pay me, she said yeah.

What are you gonna do with all that money?

I don't know, save it.

Oh, Papa would like that answer. What are you saving for?

I don't know.

I think you probably like that answer even better. I think you just like to save for saving's sake. That looks a lot better. They were getting quite ragged. Filled up the compost corner. And this is tomato, tomato leather, tomato leather. You just dehydrate that and that becomes tomato chips. You've already got 2 going and you're gonna fill that whole dehydrator full. Is this the same ingredients as you do for a sauce, or is it different?

Different.

That's a shot of Rebecca looking at my doctor report. I feel like I made big progress today. I've had this much progress in the in a long time, especially that quick. The blood tests show, which was taken earlier, still got crazy inflammation.

Yeah.

Amy is in town, and so she's picking up the steroid. Mm-hmm. And it's kind of like that, ah, am I getting better? Should I do, you know?

No, I just think we need to do it.

Yeah. At some point, we just, we go with our guide and put our faith in her and just go for it. But a lot of our friends and people—

Yeah, a lot of people have told us, hey, this really helped. So hopefully it's gonna really help. My fear is just that it's not. Yeah. Or that it's gonna help while you're on it, but then when you go off of it, it doesn't help. I just don't know. I'm just— it's overwhelming.

Yeah.

It's hard.

It's the afternoon now. And I've done my midday self-care. You saw me just carry this over here like that, right? I'm carrying a big old tripod. I just want to show everybody this pre, pre-steroids so that if, if they don't get all the credit. I am— yeah, look at this. Like, we just watched the vlog that Dan edited that's going out today. I'm on a cane walking out the door. No, I'm on a walker.

Yeah, you were bad. You were bad yesterday morning.

I still waking up, you know, hands You know what, my, my wrist has stalled there.

Yeah, it's been there.

Okay. And you know, I feel it in my fingers. There's no way I could milk. It's kind of stalled there.

Yeah.

And so we're gonna see what we can do. Nothing's a guarantee, babe.

No, it's not.

It all has—

your Lyme treatments were supposed to work too, and we've done so much of that.

It all has side effects. But y'all know what we're dealing with. Reactive arthritis. Yeah, and we are not doctors. This is just our journey. We are not making suggestions. Still able to cook my meat. A little olive oil in the pan, a little salt on it.

Uh-oh, here you go, Henry.

Maybe he's having his first food besides breast milk.

I don't have a cup for him, so I'm just going to try some broth.

Salty. Its face. I think it's too salty. Do you like that, or is it too salty?

He doesn't know what to make of it. It's not even that salty. It's barely salty.