Local (WILDFIRE | CODE ORANGE) Keeps Us Inside

We begin this morning with breaking news as fire crews continue to battle what officials are calling the Poplar Drive Fire in Henderson County. The large brush fire started on Friday and has continued to grow. You can't really tell in the camera, but if we had smell-o-vision, you'd smell this acute, sharp, smoky type smell. Yeah, it's toxic air right now. You can see a little bit of smoke coming over that mountain. The fire is just a couple of mountains over. La la la la la, let me be free. There's a couple problems in that with our food growing adventures here. Well, one, we're having fires because we're having record drought. One of the major problems for us, it's no rain, is look, look at this pasture. It's just kind of pathetic. We're going to be on this again soon. We would have been able to go a lot further into the winter had it been raining. That's our overall grass program. But about where we're establishing new grass. We have some seedlings coming up, but boy, they should— they could really use some rain right now in this critical stage. And look at this little creek. This is a little creek coming off of the pond. The pond isn't filling, by the way, right now. It's actually— the evaporation is quicker than the, the filling, and there is absolutely no water in here. In all my 45 years, I never remember this little creek being It's totally empty. This is insane. And the other problem is, of course, it's toxic air and they say it's better to be inside. And we have air filters inside. And so that's going to hinder some projects. And we have one skid for our pig port. So looking forward to working on this, but just being out here makes my chest hurt. After an extended period of time. We've got one skid though. When we come back, it should go pretty quick though. Framing is a quick job, and it's mostly a framing job. So I think we'll take this opportunity for inside jobs like cream separating. Well, you can really tell the difference once you've been inside and then come outside. Suddenly it's strong. How are you guys faring in the smoke? There's really nothing we can do about it for them. Take them in that house. You want to get Stud Muffin in the house? Yeah, that house. Big house. Oh, take them in our house. Wait a minute, guys, there's a yak in the house and nobody seems to care. Another thing we could do today is I set out pig skins one week ago today, and they've still not yet processed them for pork rinds. We gotta move our cow's mineral, kind of a little loop-de-loop, gotta jump up on the road and down and around. We're gonna fill this mineral box while there's no animals. Same thing with the sheep shaw, we're gonna wait to move the sheep shaw because there it is in their old paddock. Nobody bothers you when you go to fill it up. Hopefully I can capture that some on film. Josiah has sent me to deal with the milk, and I'm gonna do exactly as Josiah says because I was sick as a dog yesterday and didn't get out of the bed. Gotcha! I put milk? Sure. Very little. Should be a lot. Should be at least a gallon. Is Mr. Brown taking some steps towards responsibility? I hope so. Yep, good. Hold it by the body. 1 gallon. You want to cool it off within an hour, 40 degrees. So that's a Yeti cooler with ice pack. We are not milking Honey at the moment. We treated her for mastitis. We're gonna let the calf have her to make sure she's getting milked out all day long. We're gonna let her have her for 7 days, so Thursday we'll start milking her again. What you got left? Um, here, you know this. BVC, their favorite mineral by far. Alfalfa meal is the first ingredient. That's probably why. Sodium bicarbonate, bentonite, calcium carbonate, on and on and on and on and on. Oh, I'd say we have a breach in our fence. How you doing, Nacho? Oh look, he's almost back to complete normal. I think he pulled some major muscles when these ladies were introduced and he just went breeding crazy. Wiggle it, wiggle it if it's hard to pull out. You guys doing good. 100-foot net. Concrete's here. Gonna uncover our blankets for our homestead remodel. Concrete downstairs in the garden kitchen and the garage extension. How you doing? Nobody likes time change, but the warmers— or the mornings have been a little bit brighter now, aren't they? Looking good. This is so we can actually extend the garage so that our cars can actually fit in there. Check out the new concrete. Get a half a gallon jar at least. We're gonna do it all, bud. We need a— we need some buckets. I'll go get the buckets. I got this cream line. Can you guys see that cream line? It's right here if you can't see that. Billy, you still feeling down? In here is better thanks to Just making sure it's working. The indoor air purifiers. I think we have 3. I'm gonna try some tea without honey, although I'm not very hopeful. I like the ritual of the warm drink. Try to see tea without sweeteners. It's bad, right? Yeah, I'm trying to lower my overall blood sugar, so no sugar. No complex carbohydrates for 6 months, although we're probably going to cheat on the birthdays. I'll let you skip any one. I know you would, wouldn't you, buddy? You're so kind. More cake for me. Had a good blood sugar reading this morning, probably because we want it to be 99 or lower in the morning. The other 2 days we've been doing this, not so much, but it's probably because I did a 24-hour fast because of that sickness. 88. Okay, I'm hoping I can put those skins into these 5-gallon pots. Pork skins for me, pork rinds, that's my treat. Good as popcorn to me, if not better. And for those that you don't know, I've been dealing with chronic— well, chronic Lyme disease now for like 10 years. I have chronic pain in my feet especially, a lot of times in my knees, sometimes in my back. And we've tried a number of things to make it better. And because of our healthy lifestyle, because we're growing what we eat and we're eating what we grow, I think I think that does go a long way towards healing, and I'd probably be a lot worse off than if I weren't doing that. Let's give this tea a try. Maybe it's acquired taste. The honey's good for cutting that bitterness. I put a lot of cream in it too, so it's more of a— I wouldn't say it's a chai, which is technically— in a chai, it's supposed to be half milk. Gotta help it. Maybe I need to make a chai. Half cream, half milk. Okay, now that's— that I might can do. We'll see what that does to my blood, my blood glucose, my glucose level. Oh my word, I could get behind this. Hey, what is that? Y'all are back. How you feeling, babe? Tired. Normally it's not like this. Normally I'm like the last to get it, you, Jonah and I, and then normally you get it pretty early on. You've been staying strong. What's the secret? You had yesterday Me, Henry was throwing up, Lily, Jonah, they all three were throwing up. You didn't really throw up. They said I wasn't throwing up, but I needed help. I couldn't get out of bed. We thawed out the pork skin and now we're going to cut it into 1-inch chunks like so. And we got 2 bags. Bowls of pork skins. Let's see what that cream tea did to me. 91. That did nothing to me. That's good. Throw these in the vigorous boiling water. The fire is now 400 acres. Hold on one second. Oh my gosh, how fast is it expanding? Um, well, it was 200, now it's 400, and only 5% contained. And how fast did it go from 200 acres to 400 acres? Well, it was 200 acres Saturday, and now it's Monday. Yeah, so it's doubling in 2 days. Set this for 1 hour. I'm gonna stir this every once in a while just to make sure everything gets thoroughly covered. I don't know for sure, but I feel like I don't need to vigorously boil this. So now that's boiling again, I'm going to turn it down. This is done. I realize it's the worst time ever during lunch, but somehow we managed. We had some leftover burgers for Mom and I, according to the internets. Another mistake I might have been making is I processed these skins right away, cutting the fat off, and everybody's saying let them cool, like in the fridge, for a few hours and strain them. I don't know what of these steps is going to make a difference. If I could just hose them down with cold water instead of putting them in the fridge. I think the fridge solidifies the fat and it makes it easier to get off the skin. 2 bowls of skin. I'm in the fridge. I've got about 2 hours. It's gonna work out good for me to do this in about 2 hours. You got 2 left feet there, bud. Where's your— where's your matching shoe? Electrician's here. Electrician doesn't want to be filmed, but we are making progress. Here we got boxes. We're going over it with him to show him, to make sure we got all the boxes, locations for the electric outlets. Beck, what do you think? It's nice. We're gonna be spending a lot of time here. Hey, we could have done the pork rinds down here, or— and we wouldn't have gotten in the way of cooking. I know. I'm gonna be spending a lot of time down here. Bathroom in here. Yeah, I'm a bit excited about that too. Kids don't have to go into the house in the morning, during the morning, to go— we have some bathroom to visit. You can go to the bathroom. Yeah, and you don't have to take your shoes off. I did have them saw. The only problem is if you have a cart, it could be a bit of a bump, but I don't think it's gonna be that big of a deal. Eventually do, um, yeah, and you said we're eventually gonna put some sort of flooring. It doesn't matter. Give us a run, show them the concrete. Give us a run. Yeah, see if this worked. This might make it easier for getting the fat off. Let's see. Nice. Oh, definitely is easier to do when it's colder. Just take the— uh, see all that fat on there? We cut that fat off the skin. Jonah said very little pork rinds for the amount of work. I'd say maybe, what, 3 pounds, 4 pounds, 5 pounds? Maybe just 2. Oh, you getting sick, Beck? Oh boy. Uh-oh, another one bites the dust. Most sites said like 12, 16-hour overnight dehydration. There was one site that said 4 hours at 200 degrees, so we are going to try that because that could change things quite a bit. We think anyway. For the rest of them arch down. See how they arch up? That needs to be down on a dehydrating tray. 4 trays, that's all we got. Take this lard, or this fat, this pig fat that we got off the skins. I'm gonna dice it because we're going to render lard from it. Smaller we can get it, the better it does. I'm putting the lard on low. Lard, pig fat, right now. The lard is what it becomes when we get all the Water out of it?