It Was So Gross We BOTH Gagged

Let me set up the now famous intro shot. Set y'all up there, walk over here. Usually it cuts in here. I come in, still— I still— I'm still limping a little bit, but I feel so much better. Day 1 on steroids. Not, not an advocate. I'm not a doctor, uh, just saying this is our story. We're hoping that's going to work to bring down inflammation. I'm able to do this without crazy pain, and I've been walking around pretty good this morning getting stuff done. I do have to eat like a normal person, so let's grab some quick breakfast. Hey, get in. Those potatoes are rotten. Oh yuck! Oh, they're juicy. Oh, this is nasty. Just rotting potatoes. Oh, disgusting. They came off that shelf and just— just rotten potato juice right there. Oh, oh, it's bad. It's really bad. Can you hold this open for me? Oh, oh my gosh, I'm gonna throw up. Sorry. It's bad. Anything worse than a rotten egg is real bad. I know, it's so bad. I can't make this stuff up, y'all. Glad I had the camera rolling when that happened.

Always works better with the camera.

If something bad's gonna happen, let's hope the camera's rolling. Actually, I should set this out side. There's one, they stink. Two, it's probably gonna leak through these grocery bags. I was hoping to go do little animal chores with the boys, but the rotten potatoes had a different plan for me. I was walking by here thinking something stinks, but she put out some potatoes earlier this morning. I thought, well, that must have been it. We had residual. I didn't know we had any new potato. Other potatoes stink. I'm thankful this lid was on this. Food van here. Where were we? We were getting yogurt. What y'all haven't seen this morning is us picking up a bit. I'm so thankful to be moving around, but I'm too much. I need to sit down a second. If you will help me, if you'll get a banana, it's over there. Oh, thank you. Thank you for this book.

Do you want to hold him for a second?

Yep. We think he went to the bathroom. Yes, he's still going. You still going? You still going? Must be nice just to be able to go in place. Look at this, Becky, he's squirming out of my arms. This is the first. You want down? Okay. All right, I'm gonna put you here safe in the corner, give you a couple of toys. Bon appétit. That's it. Now, I've been saying Payton is my friend. Well, one of the Abundance Post members texted me this. The Gift of Pain. I just started this book. It is so, so good. I cried in the beginning when, uh, yeah, because there was a point where this man, he works with lepers, and there was a point where he thought he got leprosy, and so his, his, his foot was numb, and he lay— he laid awake that night in just torment, just ready to accept it and see how it's going. It's just just in misery. Well, the next morning he did the test again with a pin and he had feeling, and he realized in his travels the day before, because he was sick, he had put his foot to sleep essentially, or cut off the nerve. But that moment he was just so thankful and grateful for the pain. I wake up this morning with a new perspective on pain, and I am so thankful for it because just this morning it told me to slow down. Where are they going? I thought we were milking. Milking's that way. Maybe they're doing turkeys or pigs. What's going on, YouTube? Where are you going? I'm gonna go find y'all and see what you're doing. Oh, we are feeding the turkey. Nice.

Why do we have everything going?

So we have to milk now. You ready to milk? Yeah. We got a road crossing. Wasn't too hard to convince her to go over here from ice cream grass to another ice cream grass. Hear that?

Her chewing off the grass. Yeah, good noise.

Greg Judy taught me that that's the sound of cha-ching, cha-ching. A market farmer raising, uh, beef cows. That's, that's money. That's money because that means they're growing. Let's hear the cash register. Same for us, really, because she's growing a baby that can be sold or, or be for us. She's resting, building up her body for milking when she has that baby. I've noticed we hit this field too late for the clover. The clover seeded and they ate around it mostly. But you know what, that's one of those things where it's, it's hard to catch it, time it right. But it's not the end of the world because that clover went to seed. So what does that mean? More clover next year. It's a good thing. This is one of the best measurements I learned about knowing when to graze something. Joel taught me this. You look at a patch of grass and ideally, textbook, you would hit this when only 20% of it has gone to seed. So only 20% of it would be done like this, but in this case it's more like 80%. But that, that's, that's just looking at the clover. I mean, we could examine the grass too and kind of factor that in, and it's fine. I mean, they, uh, they obviously liked it. Look, there's patches that they really liked. And Joel was the one who also taught me that this, this, this goes to seed, and some— sometimes the best thing you can do for your pasture is let it mature and go to your seed. And everything that these cows haven't eaten and trampled down will just be consumed by the soil and by the earth, and this will be a better place. Look, they stomped that briar, they stomped this weed. That's hopeless, hopelessly broken. We speed up the process by then bringing in sheep, and they're going to eat a lot of this. Like, they'll, they'll crush this. And then what the sheep don't eat, we speed up the process even more by coming in and mowing with a mulch blade on our highest setting. It chops it up really fine, and so it makes it available to the earth even quicker. And that's why every time we come out here, this field gets better and better. Actually, this is good. This is good. What, they've crushed, eaten about 60% of it. I feel good about that. I don't mind leaving a lot here. She cooperating, guys? Uh-huh. 2.5, almost 2.5 gallons yesterday. Oh, I thought almost 3 gallons. Almost 2.5. Look at me getting full. She's saying it's insane if you fill that reservoir up. That's 2.5 gallons. We're in the same pasture basically. It's split in half. Let's see what this will look like tomorrow after the sheep are done. So look how they've mowed it more evenly. Yeah, they've just crushed that weed right there. They've eaten all the leaves off the weed. It's so beautiful to have the cows and the sheep working together. Just look at this, look at this. Okay, where the sheep are going today, look, look how much more the sheep cleaned it up. Sheep eat things the cows don't eat. They eat more browsey, weedier stuff. So there's no— you don't need any more land. Plus they eat each other's parasites and it dies in, in their system. It's just— and it's a place for the little calf. We've, we've calf separated her so the milk can build up overnight. She's right next door to Mama, so totally stress-free. Gets along well with your sheep. Those ladies in the back are being— one's being grown up for meat, one's being grown up for dairy, and they're close to the herd and— but always separated. Stud can't get to them and breed them because they're not old enough to be bred yet. And one more crazy thing, I mean, we set up this net for cows, move them out, the sheep go in here. You don't have to set up an extra net. 2 species in 1 net setup. Why do we use a net? Well, we're going to run the fat hens when they grow up behind the sheep, and they'll stay in this net. And so we'll do 3 species in 1 net setup. When you've moved everybody out, you just pick up the fence that's empty, and that becomes your next day. So you're only moving 1 fence. Water— you're only setting up 1 water in each paddock, in the paddock. I'm just tickled pink about the system that we've ended up developing. It's taken a while, it's taken a number of years, but it's kind of neat that we're— we've pretty much arrived. Look, and there's a purpose in this briary weed that neither the sheep or the cow will eat. I want you to see this. Do you see that right there? Do you see that? Bee. Bee habitat. Get in! Come back! All right, we're gonna move this. It's quite the move. We're doing a loop out of there, coming down into the gravel, going through these— this amazing walnut patch all the way down to the end of that and into the field. I talk about 1% change, doing 1% every day. Well, if you don't do it every day, you're, you're not making 1% change. So we're gonna have to make about a 10% change on this meat shaw because the ducks have to go out tomorrow. We have one of those situations where, you know, the boys want to landscape this, and that's great, I want them to too. We're having a Rooted premiere this weekend and I want it to look nice, but it's one of those things where we got two important things to do. Which is more? We got to get the ducks out. We got our wheels up. Can today we get the old legs off? How could we set that up so we can get at those legs? Yeah, we can keep the handles, Jonah. We can keep the handles. Let's do one side at a time. And just replace the triangles.

Why don't you just go like that?

Uh, yeah, you could. We'll measure it the right size, but then you have to have a brace. Oh, I see what you're saying.

Screw it in.

You're just saying add it to that?

Yeah.

And not have a big old long brace? Yeah. That's kind of jerry. We want this to be right, lest you guys copy us. We want you to copy us right and not jerry. I see there's a bolt there. Do you have a wrench? You might need to go get us an adjustable wrench, please. I think there's one in the back of Wheelie. Okay, I'm gonna chuck these wheels, Jonah. We're gonna lift it way up to make it super easy to work on. Or we could put it on these sawhorses. How's that? How's it working up like that? Oh, that's a wrench. You don't have an adjustable? No, but I mean, that's a plier. You don't have adjustable wrench?

I didn't have one.

No. All right, but you need an adjustable.

I need another.

I need another. That's too hard to twist. Yeah, and hold at the same time. So you need two adjustable wrenches. Did these come off, or just one?

Two of them. Okay, I just need an adjustable wrench to attach to one side like this.

You have the— so we only got 5 minutes. Homesteading is a great balance. I mean, we have the garden landscape we need to do, we have the, the meat shaw, we have inside work, domestics as Jonah would call them. We gotta, you know, make sure lunch is getting on. We got to— and then I got a business phone call at 11:30. Jonah, if that's not working, let's focus on getting these screws out.

Okay, you gotta drop for the next 5 minutes, and tomorrow we'll have wrenches.

We'll have the right tools.

Yes. Do you have a star bit for me?

The right tools matter. I don't know. Is there not a star bit in one of that? Some of that? Well, we got something done. We got a little bit unattached. We gotta get— with this remaining 3 minutes, Jonah's gonna get the tools for tomorrow. It has to happen tomorrow. There's no 1% change tomorrow. It's all the change tomorrow. Then the meat shawl— we got to get the ducks out of the brooder. They need to be out on fresh grass, growing healthy, eating the bugs, eating the grass, getting in the sunshine. They don't need to be in the stale brooder. Any longer. Coach John is excited about this landscaping job. He's not excited about the, the meat shawls. So he's going to take care of this. I'm going to take some care of some things inside. This is going to be more interesting. Let's put it on time-lapse here. Basically, uh, converting this bulletproof garden— just seasonal, it's over. We still have some herbage, so once a year We want to weed it, put down weed paper, and then mulch it. Best hack I may ever discovered is we make leftovers. So we make enough for supper that we have the leftovers for the next day's lunch, and the kids basically— and Mom eats basically a snacky breakfast, and We spice it up a little bit that this was Taco Tuesday, but then today make nachos and it spruces it up a bit, right? It does. Hack number 2 you caught in there is Taco Tuesday, Indian Wednesday, Lamb Thursday, Fishy Friday, and you never have to think about what you're gonna have. You just say, what day is it? Oh, okay. And you can mix it up a little bit if you want. Like Taco Tuesday can be fajitas or chicken or beef. We're gonna have a little huevos rancheros with our leftover Mexican this morning. Hack number 3 is somebody who's not gonna eat the starch, it's fine just to put the meat down, put the cheese on it, melt it in the oven, even do a broil, and it gives you that little bit of a— I don't know, it makes it special. Sure, you can flip it. I have to apologize, that was kind of a lame time lapse. We ended up— boys took a break inside, forgot to get the camera going again. But they, they nailed it. They did a good job, didn't they? Hey Jonah, did Mom help you mark the herbs, or did you just go for it?

I know what an herb looks like.

Okay, I hope you didn't bury any. I mean, you, you left that one open. Did you mean to leave that one open?

That's a—

that's a dill.

That's like an access peach.

Oh no, there's dill there.

Dill, dill.

You know how she gets. She's crazy. She's a crazy plant lady.

Okay, he's got them.

Okay, he says, hey, let's start throwing— let's start throwing this somewhere besides in the— right in the doorway.

Look how they get under it.

I know, they love it. Look, the rooster's under there scratching, finding bugs.

They eat the seeds out of them.

Come here. Thanks. Good job. Glad you get motivated on this. This looks a lot better. We'll keep working on our raised beds maybe tomorrow in the yard. Good. Look at the leaves falling, man. It's that time already. I'm sad. I love the warm weather. I'm just taking a moment to enjoy it. I know the journey is the destination.

I'm not done.

Sometimes it's good to— that's good, that's good. It keeps us happy, never being done. I'm not done though. We'll end it at that.