I Survived 30 Days Off The Land - Day 1

Happy day! Welcome to day 1 of Grow 30, where we're quitting the grocery store and discovering the abundance all around us. You excited? Yeah. You dreading it?

No, I'm excited. I feel like we've got— we've thought about it, what we want for our Grow 30.

Yeah.

And we've— I feel good about what we've decided. Yesterday Vanilla had her baby. So it's a girl. We're just excited that she had a calf because we have milk. We don't care what it is.

We just ran out of butter yesterday. Yeah, and we need more cows and milk because yes, if we run out of butter, everybody loses their Christianity.

It's a bad day. It's a bad day in the Rhodes house.

Miss doing the cow chores. Thankfully I have two teenage boys that are doing that now. Surreal. We let them have the colostrum that first day. We don't milk, but the next day we milk. Our best bet is to probably go ahead and milk Honey, who's been in milk. Then we can move Honey over and we can do Vanilla. Hey, there's one for you and one for me.

I'm not— I'm not— we're gonna just start milking a cow like that.

She comes right down. Let's go get Honey's calf to her. We separate the calf with the sheep at night. Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey! Hey, hey, she ended up walking through. You've never seen that happen? No. That is a bad habit we cannot let start developing. Fence is off, she can walk through without getting shocked. Problem is she could start walking through even if it's on if they learn to just do it really quick. Why didn't y'all finish the paddock? Sometimes that just happens and they got out. You know why grass is greener on the other side? Because it's not about the grass, it's about the freedom. That is the same grass, and they found the hole in the fence and went for it, and that caused the calf to get all off and excited and burst through the fence. Okay, Vanilla, you ready? You're our key to butter. We don't get enough from one cow to have milk, yogurt, and butter. We get some, but not enough. So we need two cows, and we've got it today. Hey, are you gonna come down, Vanilla? Are we gonna have to come to you? They get crazy with the calf. You do it. Come on, do it before Mom gets here so she doesn't get stressed. It's not necessarily a clean-cut process. First day, first couple of days milking, Mom's all— the vanilla's all gonna be all nervous. Oh my gosh, it's always a little disorganized. That's it. That's pretty normal. Normal. They don't have a big flow at first, and that's gonna have some colostrum in it. Back any memories for you, babe?

Having a baby? I definitely was not a milk cow. I definitely was laying in bed.

Oh, they get up, don't they? You got to get the calf over too because she don't get the memo. And he told us we got to name a calf after her. Now that Annie's gone, this is our new Annie. Annie wanted that because she wants us to be able to serve the meat and have fun and say to everyone, we're eating Annie. And we're probably going to eat that as the veal when it's 6 months old and we wean it. Why? We need meat. Meat is so expensive because this is why. Papa. They don't come into heat till a year.

I'm gonna go out into the garden and show you guys what I've been working on out here. Cleaned out all the garden beds that had like herbs that have bolted and things of that nature. So in this garden bed we had— oh, I see you guys fogged up real bad. I had a lot of cilantro in here. I had some onions. I pulled those onions. I planted— I have cilantro growing. I have new cilantro plants. I have itty-bitty baby plants. And then I think over here I also planted a little bit of lettuce, which it looks like a cat came in and destroyed. So let me see if I can't uncover my lettuce. This is the problem with raised beds— there are cats. It's annoying. In this bed, I replanted yellow squash, and I planted zucchini down there. I want to talk about my tomato trellis though. Look at it! It is gorgeous. It is everything that I've ever wanted in a tomato trellis. It's just so fabulous. It's so fabulous. How it has just— it's just amazing. We have some ripe already, and then we have some that is still ripening. It's just beautiful. I just love it. It's just, it just makes me so happy. This bed, we had lots of weeds that I pulled. I planted more dill. I have a little bitty baby dill. Let me show you. So this is the little bitty baby dill right here, and I've got it planted throughout. I also harvested tomatillos. Um, I'm letting the parsley breathe. Kind of trimmed this back a little bit. I know it doesn't— it doesn't look great, but it's still producing, uh, cucumbers, so we're going to keep doing that. And then in this bed, I went ahead and planted some more lettuce, and I actually put grass clippings down as well in this one. In this one I planted lettuce. I got just little baby lettuce in here, and that's all I did. I might have cleaned up the sunflower a little bit, but yeah, it's— I've been working on this for 2 days. My flowers are doing so beautiful. I just love them. I am sad that I don't have many flowers this year. It's just not high on the priority list.

One thing that's gonna be different during this— is I'm gonna have to force myself to appreciate the cooking more. Why go through go through all this trouble to raise such beautiful food and not take the time to enjoy it, as Shayla would say. I guess I enjoy the outside process. We don't want this Grow 30 to be a torturous diet. We want it to be wonderful. Let's start saving the colostrum. Excuse me, the colostrum. And don't worry, The calf's still getting a lot of colostrum. It's had it since the time it was born until today. We only took half. I estimated I took half of it today. It's not nothing. Look how yellow it is. Regular milk, colostrum. I should say that too, that's not straight up colostrum. A better word for it would be colostrum milk, and she'll come in milk in about 2 or 3 days. Had some milk from yesterday. I'm gonna need to be more involved in the processing of the milk. Here's why. We need to salvage every bit. A little bit of cream line. Now in the past, I was so afraid of skim milk. Skim milk is terrible for you. Fatten you like nothing else. You need whole milk, you need complete milk. And we've been feeding that to the pigs, but then I talked to Ruth Ann and she said, well, are you ladling? Are you just manually doing it, getting the cream? I said, yeah. She said, well, that's not— what's left is not skim milk. It still has— see, I'm gonna leave, I'm gonna leave some And that's from yesterday too, a little bit. I don't know if that's enough to make butter. I'm gonna take this, shake it up really good, get all the fat off the sides of the jar, cream. And then I'll label this drinking. This may not work. The kids aren't gonna drink it because that's not the point. And we got potatoes in. We might get enough cream from that that we got today this afternoon. Maybe make some butter. Welcome! We have some butter I found in the freezer from our cows, so— but this, maybe, maybe 2 days, more like just 1. That's our homegrown pork. The problem is it's not fatty enough, and also it's not as good as US Wellness Meats, uh, breakfast sausage. Rebecca is also into Chicken sausage. She needs a lot of protein for the morning. I'm determined there are no bad ingredients, only bad recipes. So we had some frozen pig fat that I'm going to try to increase this fat by 20%. 20% of 2 pounds, how much in ounces? It's probably going to tell me in ounces. We had the screening of a documentary I'm working on. Our our 100-mile bikepacking trip just to get feedback last minute before we submit it to the Banff Film Festival. I stayed up late cleaning up after that. That didn't end until 10. 7.2 ounces, maybe this much? No, a lot more than that. The reason I want to get this right is because we have a huge bundle of fat. We could thaw out all our sauce, redo it, and then freeze it back. You know what, I didn't take the whole thing, but it's close. 1 ounce off. You always use that much butter? Yeah, that's okay. That's great, but I don't think we can afford that right now. Do tallow.

Oh, say go.

Save out the butter. You just have to be smarter during the growth spurt. I think that's what it's going to help us do. It's a 30-day reset. You know, maybe address some habits. Lily, should I get the mixer? I'll do the mixer. I think what we're looking for is not a lot of fat chunks alone because those are just going to melt down and not incorporate into the meat. This would be the advantage of parting our own meat. We slaughter our own meat, so we don't part it. No, would that be good to do that while— that might not be I'm gonna put spices in it. That might be good to do while it's in the mixer, huh? I'm asking Grok for a copycat recipe of US Wellness Meats breakfast sausage. What are the rules for Grow 30? Basically, what we've grown or sourced within 100 miles, we can eat as much as we want. That's the point. The point is to hopefully point out our any dependencies we might have on the grocery store and convenience and open up our eyes to the abundance all around us. We have grown— she freeze-dried this. Is it ready to use? We are allowing for salt, minerals, spices, and sauces, and they're not going to count against us. Well, to explore how we might source those ourselves. But those are such an enhancer with such a little input, it's okay for us. And salt's absolutely necessary, and we're not growing any salt. Wait a minute, US Wellness uses— I don't know if that's true— grass-fed beef, pork, and bison. Not in every one. That might be interesting to do a— is that a thing? Put some beef in the sausage. Oh, this is cool. It told me what to do if I have a fresh And what if— and if I have it dried? This is boughten thyme. It's a little finer, a little drier. This is our fresh thyme. So honestly, I'm probably going to use this because it's just to get our base and then figure out, do we count this as fresh or dry in our ingredients? She made a fresh bread for herself yesterday to cheat for this event. And you were gonna have a cucumber sandwich.

So I think what I might do— what I might do is make my own cream cheese and then put cream cheese on it. Although I bought cream cheese at Azure. I don't know what I was thinking.

Yeah, I was just going on with my ring and the Azure trucks coming today. So do you count it as fresh or dried?

That's—

this is dry. I got all the spices in there. Let's incorporate it and the fat at the same time. Part of this 30 days is to see how long— if everybody can make it 30 days. You already gotten off the wagon? Just like that? Wow. One of the tests if it has enough fat is if you can cook it without adding grease to the pan. I did that and I can't quite tell if we're good yet. We want it to not stick. It might be a little sticky. Very disappointed. In this first experiment. It's not fatty enough. It's burning. I cannot believe that's not fatty enough. And it's crumbly. I think though you can fix the crumbliness with more fat. There's not enough grease in the bottom of this pan. There's not enough— there's not enough fat coming off of it. I'm gonna go crazy tomorrow and I'm gonna double that. I'm gonna go to 40%. Let's, let's go to the other— let's hopefully go to the other extreme and then maybe meet in the middle. Glad I didn't cook it all. That means we could experiment right now. Okay, that's not it. I'm curious to see what you think of sausage. I can tell you right now it needs more fat because it wouldn't burn in it, it wouldn't cook in its own grease. The spice is growing on me.

It's actually really good. It doesn't need more fat.

It does need more fat. You agree it needs more fat?

Yeah, but it's good.

It's a little— what, crumbly? Yeah, the texture is meaty.

Dry.

Yeah, we'll print out that recipe and keep that spice, that, that recipe, just more fat. I'm thinking I'm gonna double the fat. You know what, how many more meals to go? 90. Look at that, we've already got cream separation. It's only been a few hours. It's Friday, we're winding down our week. We take the Sabbath. We ought to be pressing towards that goal, the weekly rest. Let's just do a little project. It's not as hot as it has been, thank God. We're gonna have to get in a new groove because I can't be spending that much time making breakfast, and we're gonna eat big lunches and leftover dinners, suppers. We can't be spending that much time during the morning when it's cool out. So Rebecca had a good idea. Let's do a lot of the prep in the afternoon. For the next day's meals. Hey, put acorn squash on the menu! Something happened to them though. They, uh, oh, this is kind of soft. Look how rot— look how dead. All right, you got— hey, Henry Gideon, you want to harvest acorn squash or help me pull weeds? All right, you harvest all these acorn squashes, put them in a pile. Look at this, and this is a weed. There's a weed fabric too. You'd never know it, but you're gonna know it here in a second. I could have harvested all up. There's our spent broccoli. I only want to give what a pig will eat in a day. I might be pushing it right here. I think this is the hottest year we've ever had. Yes. I guess we're spoiled around here. It usually doesn't get this hot. I feel like we're being babies about it, especially knowing how hot most of you are probably getting. All right, come on. Normally do not have a bad acorn squash season, but we've had a bad one. So what I think the world calls Farmers carry. Us farmers just call carry. Let's get these shucked. The exploded ones, we'll just go give those to the chickens.

Got Ashley here hanging out with me. I had a really big zucchini. You can see by this being the butt and it had the— this is the seed. It's like kind of weird. So I took that out of it and then I grated it, and then I'm grating it into a tea towel, and then I'll squeeze out the juice, and then I'm going to pack this into super cubes. I have grated my cucumbers. I have grated my zucchini and put them into the Super Cubes, and I have some tomatoes here. And so I think what I'm going to do is go outside, get more cherry tomatoes. I think Ashley's gonna come with me, and we are going to pick in the shade because my tomato trellis is all shaded. We're picking and eating. It's so good. Um, I saw right here— where did I see it? Right here. So I looked up. Oh my gosh, he's huge! He's living his best life, man. Oh my gosh, he's huge! Look at how big he is! Oh my gosh, I can't believe I don't have many hornworms out here already. Look! The goose. I don't know, my chickens don't go like insanely crazy for the hornworms. Oh really? I don't know if it's because they get a lot of bugs already, you know, like they already have a lot of bugs. They don't like— they're not jonesing for it. I don't know. We've got a whole basket full. I'm gonna send some home with Ashley because I don't think we need this many. We're gonna have so many ripening still on the, on the vine too.

And what are we making for lunch, Birdo?

Corn, hamburgers, green beans, and cucumber.

All right, deluxe burgers. It's a go-to. It's all from the farm. Rebecca, are you seeing this? Deluxe burger toppings. We are allowing sauce. Although by the end of this, you're gonna make our own ketchup. Yeah, you try to—

I'm so tired. I didn't get enough sleep last night.

I can't—

got me up late.

I can't run anymore like I used to on 5 hours of sleep. All right, this should be more than ready. We're cooking stud muffin. Nice little lunch. Meat suffering. This is stud muffin. He's delicious. We made our own pickles, onions, tomatoes. Deluxe burgers are good when in the summer when everything's in. Cucumber salad, which is just cucumbers and onions. I don't tire of that. I could have cucumber salad every day. Are you just needing to warm up?

I just want to be in the, like, sunlight and just shade. It's nice. It's like nice. It's not burning hot. It's not being cremated the moment we step out of our house.

You didn't know we're getting cremated pulling those weeds, weren't we?

Well, were you in the high tunnel?

No, we were in the garden.

Well, we're not in the sun. See, the sun is over there. We're in the shade.

It is unbearable in the sun.

I like it.

I went to PT this afternoon. I can barely hold the camera up. PT this afternoon for my shoulder. We didn't get much done in the afternoon, winded down for the rest day tomorrow. We just did leftovers. Indian chicken. Uh-oh, off the wagon. Day 1. I got off on me eating rice. Josiah, you staying on the wagon? No. Day 1, you last out a day? I guess you're off the wagon too, eating rice. But I don't think we're gonna have Lily Bean prepare it after those leftovers are gone. If we do a 9 out of 10, I don't know if we can count— are we counting the kids? Because they're gonna really bring our score down. No, if they drop out at day 1, I don't think they're doing it. The kids could do corn, they could do potatoes for starch. Jonah, Josiah, you guys would be happy with corn or potatoes instead of rice, right? Okay, I think this 30 days is going to be a journey. When we do a day like this, we like to eat a big breakfast, big lunch, chill for supper. When we do that, I don't think we're gonna film that far into the day. We'll get this footage to Austin to turn it around quicker for the next day. Aren't we at 10 of 10 today? I think we are. Happy first day of Grow 30.