No more Garden Weeds or Bugs (experiment)

Happy day! In today's vlog, we've got literally hundreds of brassicas— broccoli, collards, cabbage. Oh my gosh, this is getting so big, it's going to start being weed-bound. We have to get this out. This is a significant amount of our family's food starting in just a few months and will last us throughout the year. So what we do today is very important. It is not going to be easy to keep hundreds of plants weed-free, or maybe it is. We're trying something new this year. This is a very special weed fabric. Weeds cannot grow up through this, but cool thing number one is that No weeds can grow through this. Cool thing number 2, it's pre-drilled, pre-cut, whatever you want to call it, to our brassica spacing. So all we have to do is lay that down and then plant down into it. I wish that were all we had to do. Uh, okay, we gotta install drip irrigation. Rain doesn't penetrate this well, so all we got to do is in Well, we got to pull up the tarp. That won't take long. Decide this tarp, install irrigation, install this, transplant hundreds of plants all by lunchtime. I have an appointment this afternoon. Jonah? Yeah? Oh, we ready? And Jonah needs me to help with the chores this morning. A little grumpy this morning? Look at me. Look at me. We stayed up and watched the NCAA men's basketball championships. You happy with the results? We didn't care, we didn't care, but it was fun. Oh no, our water's overflowing. Water, water. Oh wow, it's not engaging. This ball is supposed to float up and turn that water off. I don't know right now, I'm not gonna mess with it. I'm just gonna turn the water off to it. No, I have plenty of water in there. Am I milking or you? Okay, everyone will not stay in. Should we move it up to the Breakfast Posse, that's a bulletproof setup.

They don't get out there.

No, it's not worth it. Despite the recent warm weather, winter is gonna have one last bite. It's cold. You know, it's funny, I've been I've been gardening for 20 years and I feel like there's still so much to learn. For example, I've only done drip irrigation for a few years and only a little bit in our high tunnel and don't feel that confident with it. Maybe 60%. With this weed fabric, uh, 0% because I've never used it. I've heard rave reviews I've seen great things. It seems promising. I'm excited about the possibilities, but I've never done it. So I'm going into this not knowing how this day's gonna go. Notice I didn't put in the title planting hundreds of plants because at this moment I don't know if I'll get there. I hope I do. That will be a wonderful ending to this day. That'll feel great. But between putting down drip tape— that I've only put down drip tape once before, I think— then putting down weed fabric, I know I don't have garden stakes, so So we'll see how that goes without garden stakes. I gotta get some later. And then planting the brassicas. Oh, and then the brassicas have to then be covered pretty immediately, uh, hopefully after I plant them today, or in— because I gotta cover them with bug net or they're gonna get infiltrated with— thankfully it's cold, so it's probably not going to happen, but there's a lot. And I just want you to know, it's okay to not feel 100% confident. Today I'm gonna tell myself embrace the fear and anxiety and, uh, I mean, those are kind of strong words, uh, the uncertainty, and just go for it. We can get into 6 of these beds, 100 feet long, I've got to be planted today with brassicas. Although I should now make sure it's not going to freeze tonight, and I do need to find out from the beautiful one— oh wait, we're planting 5. There's 6 of these. Do we start next to this garlic, or do we start over there next to the strawberries? Whoa, it appears to be 32 degrees freezing right now, but over the next few days— no, it's not gonna— 42, 46, 39, 37. Okay, we're good. Rebecca, did you figure out if we put them next to the strawberries or next to the garlic? I'm excited and anxious, Rebecca, because I don't know how this is gonna go. But I'm excited for the possibility. I was gonna do it with you. Yeah, there's the strawberry.

Collards are right next to the garden.

It's right next to that.

Well, hold on a second. What is going on here?

Does it matter which brassica plant where, or does it matter?

Broccoli, cabbage, and then— hold on one second, let me see where—

did you get a little distracted? Yeah. Hey, you want to help me after you get done putting out hay? He's gonna mow. Okay, wait a minute, we've used it. We have our strawberries under it, remember? Okay, very little experience, one time, and we haven't tried this in season yet. We planted this in the fall, but this is the concept. Ain't no weeds gonna grow up through that. So that's the promise, and that will be 5 more rows down through here. No weeding. Tractions are behind us. Let's get with this. First, how about a B-roll sequence of the before? What's this?

This is my 16.2-hand, um, stallion, warmblood, imported from England. Oh nice, I bought him from England.

What's his name?

His name's Checkers.

All right, how's he work?

He's a really good boy.

I see it.

You can jump really high. I jumped it like 3 foot.

Yes, I like it. Jump that box. No problem. You jumped 3 foot?

Yeah, it's really high.

Wow.

I think I have everything. Source line, attachments to said source line, and what's this? 130 micron. Any of you know what this is?

Um, no, but I also saw you all put it up, but I didn't—

This is a—

I don't remember that.

This is a pressure reducer. That's our piercing tool. This is what gets me unsure. Now the feeling you get after this, figuring something out, maybe it's worth it.

It's a filter.

It's an alcohol filter. Okay, I don't know what to do. All right, here's what we got. Okay, don't know what this is. Don't know how to do that. Don't know what this is. I do know what this is. We got a bunch of those. That's good. I know what this is. You fold the ends and that's how you end a piece of tape. We're going from a garden hose to pipe hose. Forgotten, it's been so long since I put one of these together. Garden stakes. For staking this— the line down. Don't know if we'll need it under that drip tape though.

What's this?

Shoot. Then we got these little things. What's that? It's two of them. There's some more. And then a male-to-male adapter, an angle. I'm surprisingly getting pretty far on this without any instructions. I'm probably gonna have to watch a video. Okay, garden hose, our water source comes into this. That's a garden hose thread, obviously, to a pipe thread. That's gonna have to go on our filter here, our pressure reducer, and then takes from the pipe fitting pressure reducer to attaching to our— let's just call it our, our source pipe. Oh yeah, okay, yeah, that'll do that. Okay, we got that. I know how to attach to the source. I can run my drip tape, pinch it off at the end. These are if I have to, you know, splice my drip line and hook it up. I still don't know then what this male-to-male adapter is for, and I don't know what this blue thing is for, but I I think I can go ahead and lay this out, get my drip line in. I think I can even get it going. And I don't know what these little nipples are. I bet those plug up a hole that you decide not to use anymore. Say you want to poke into this with this, and then you're like, oh, I don't need that anymore. Hopefully I don't need these right now. This is where we're going. I'm tempted to go ahead and string trim this so that I can just work in there with the drip tape. I'm going to end up pulling this tarp up, then we need to put down the drip tape, 2 on each line. Hopefully I got enough. That's 5 at 100, that's 500 feet times 2. Did I get 1,000 feet? Shoot, I don't know.

I don't know if I got 1,000 feet.

800 feet. Shall we mow this? We shall. All right, we got it mowed. Oh, it has instructions. It has instructions.

Okay, don't use the instructions.

Be a man.

Connect the header flusher valve to the end of your poly—

Heck yeah!

That's this.

You figured that out?

I was—

I mean, I did it.

What was the mail-to-mail then?

I don't know.

I'm to the point where I could pull up all the tarp. Oh good. But I don't have— I'm hesitating because I don't want to do that unless I can finish it all. So do I just do one row at a time? It's more efficient if I pull it all up. This is the new one. Let's test. Let's test my skill. Oh. Okay, well, we needed this because we had to make a turn. Oh, the male-to-male got us to that ball valve. See that? Yeah, it gets us to a ball valve, which just didn't come with a ball valve, or I might have figured that out. Okay, well, we'll use that. Yeah, and that'll be for spare. That'll be a spare. We need to mount that to a T-post, probably. That— yeah, it was attached to be like this. That can almost wait. What really can't wait is I gotta get these plants in the ground, so let's just make it happen.

Our thought— okay, so the thought would be watering can come tomorrow. What we could do today, Justin, is work on getting the pipe laid down.

That's what I was thinking.

And the stuff, and then the fabric, the fabric on it, and then we can plant tomorrow if we have to.

Okay, I like it. And it's more efficient if we just pull all the tarp off. There's going to be a blank bed uncovered, but I'm thinking maybe leaves. Would you let me put leaves on it? Oh, we need to uncover that. You're right, that's carrots. Shoot, has it been— it's been a week and 2 days. Shoot, watch your T-posts. We're cleaning this up today, babe. Cross your fingers, everybody. Hopefully we have germinating carrots. They're not dead because they germinated. I don't see any carrots.

Oh, I don't see any carrots.

What are the chances that they're all bad? That's why I like these tarps though, by the way. Look at that worm. Look at these worms. Encourages the worms.

Look at this one. Look how big Look at all these worms right here, dude.

There's like— there's 1, 2, 3, 4.

There's just worms everywhere.

Now we have to— this is going to be big. We're gonna have to cut a tarp to fit this. Well, we need to do that anyways. We can cut tarps 100 feet long, 4 feet wide, and we can cover it. I just looked at my notes from Casey. He said 7 to 10 days. So then all this tarp needs to lay on top of this thing. Do we want to cut a tarp for this or just fold all this tarp onto that? We're going to cut strips because this happens sometimes where all that's going to be open but one row is going to be unopened. So we really need some strips that can just go over one row. For the sake of time, I don't want to go cut a tarp right now. Now let's fold all this over onto this. Do we pull it out, get the water off, then pull it back and then fold it over? There is a ton of water on this, and if I'm going up that way with it, it's all gonna wash— it's gonna wash my carrots out. I think I got good news. This is, this is two tarps. There's one, so it's not this whole thing. Okay, it's only about half. Okay, let's get the water off of it. We got the sandbags off now. Milly has an idea for the tarp. I asked her for an idea because I'm not sure.

I don't care.

So get the water all over to the one row and then we'll fish it out. John's gonna hit our weeds. We got some potatoes wanting to come up. Let some of them come up, like, hey, it wants to grow, so We are trying to grow onions here, not potatoes. Always appreciate a good volunteer. Save your piles of greens for the pigs. That's why we have pigs next to the garden, so we can throw them our weeds, they can throw us their compost. It wouldn't hurt to grab some of these bigger weeds. Gotta get them out by the roots, Birdo. That's 3 50-footers. We were supposed to do 2 more. Let's do 3 50-footers here. We're supposed to do 5 100-footers, so let's see if we can do 3 100-footers. All right, I've got 3 beds uncovered and ready to go. We got it uncovered. Longer than expected. Let's hope we can get drip down for 3 rows, weed fabric, and some plants in the ground. The minimum we need to do— we'll have this, I can go here, but, um, we just got to get the lines that are going to go under the weed fabric. We don't have to connect them yet.

Let's cut plenty of excess.

I got drip underneath 3 beds at this point. I think it would be really great if I was just able to put down the weed fabric. If that goes really quick, maybe we're planting some. You know, it's not that hard to weed around brassicas because they are 18 inches apart. You know, like onions, they're kind of a nightmare because they're so close. But here's the kicker— we're going to cover them with bug net, and that is a pain to come and lift that up, uh, hoe them. It's going to be an all-in-one system— rain protection or Yeah, rain, water, weed protection, and bug protection. Yeah, it's some work setting it up, but I'm gonna walk away until harvest. Oh my gosh, okay, that, that makes it worth it because I was wondering. 11:45, I'm gonna have to find a stopping point. Let's see, let's do it.

Can we do it?

Can we get the weed fabrics? Down. They're gonna blow away because I don't have stakes. I'll just use bags. I really want to get this down. That confirms some thoughts in my head. I just lost all my work. I've been rolling that thing. I could sandbag it, but I'm gonna stake it anyway, so that's some extra work. I might sandbag this. The wise thing would definitely be wait till I get the garden stakes, otherwise I'm gonna be doing rework. I don't know if I have enough sandbags anyway, but you get the point, right? It's going to be weed-free. We're working hard now. Our future self— future self will thank me. That's what I'm telling myself. We got our weed fabric down. I'm thinking the wise thing to do, not do the rest of the weed fabric right now. It's almost— it's quitting time. Uh, I'm pushing it. I'd be pushing it too hard. Plus it's just gonna blow away, and it's too much work to put the sandbags on to just remove them when I get the staples. Hopefully I can get some gardening staples in town today. We have another weed-free approach. We've gotten some of those leaves, we're putting them down in between these onions. Onions These are hard to weed, hard to tell them from a weed, and they're close together. It's just hard to get going really quick. We'll see leaf mulching one side as opposed to nothing on the other. That's nothing new since like Ruth Stout pioneered mulch gardening so long ago. Very permaculture-friendly style. I've done wood chips, but those just stay so soggy grows mushrooms and plants don't do well in them. So grass clippings work great, but that's a lot of grass clippings, so we're gonna try leaves.

It's good.

I was extremely hopeful this morning. That's probably partly why I was so anxious. You just don't know how long it's going to take. This is kind of the worst case. Not really, I mean, I'm We've proved concept, you know, we've worked through the kinks. Now I know what I'm doing, so in the case of tomorrow, it's going to be much more pleasant experience. But I didn't get nearly as far as I'd hoped. But anyway, I was thinking, how do I get you guys the links to all these resources in an easy way? I just found out most of you are watching on TV. There's no link in the description. And then if you're not watching on TV, you're watching on your phone. Only like 15% of you are watching anymore on on a computer. So let's do this. I've talked with Farmer's Friends, they gave me my own domain. So it's farmersfriend.com/justin, and it takes you right to here, to all this nifty cool stuff I'm using from them, all in one place. farmer'sfriend.com/justin. Austin, QR code. They're watching on their TV. You're watching on your TV? Get out your phone, take a picture of the QR code. Oh, we found all these garden stakes. Set out today to plant all those brassicas and we really didn't even get close. But I figured out drip irrigation. I— well, we got staples for the weed fabric. We know how that's gonna go. We got all the weeds picked up out of 3, uh, beds, and we know how the two others will go. So we're really— we didn't get to our, our goal, but we set ourselves up for tomorrow and have ourselves supplies, so we should be good to go. Happy day. See you guys then.