No More Have Died

Lily! Lily!

Lily!

We'll do your horse today at 10. Make a connection with her today. Must we build a fort? We'll do the 10 o'clock. Today? With the horses, yes. Today, make sure your friends can do it. Cousins. I've got ideas to connect with Josiah as well. Future idea to connect with Josiah and Jonah. Spent a little time mapping out our trail this morning. 100-mile mountain bike trip over 5 days, packing in, bikepacking I guess you would call it. We just found the 50-mile mark, the halfway point. The Cradle of Forestry, gonna be a great spot to be to meet up with the fam midway through, refuel, all that. Got about an hour and 40 minutes then until we do a little horse video with Lily. She loves horses. I like making movies. We've found a way to connect. I think we need to still work on these chickens. They need more bedding. We need to make sure— I noticed they were drinking out of puddles yesterday because of all this rain. We need to make sure we don't have any puddle accumulation. No more of our flock has died, so that's good. Hey Winnie, are you barking at me this morning? Oh my gosh, Gideon has recruited Henry to do the turkey chores with him. Let's go see. Let's go see what's going on. Josiah getting wood chips to the— or Jonah getting more wood chips to to compost chickens. Starting to wear it out pretty good. Oh, we got to move the turkey shaw. Did Henry help you with chores this morning? I just kind of chased him. You just kind of chased him? He chased him. Henry, you want to move the turkey shaw?

Henry, I'll guard you from the goose.

Can you move this? No, I can't. You can't? You didn't even try. Gideon, can you fly?

Fly?

Yeah, can you fly in the air like a bird? Well, how do you know? Have you ever tried? Yeah. Oh, you have? Okay. My dad used to ask that and he'd say, well, have you tried? And we'd say, well, no. And he said, well, maybe if you ran down the hill fast enough. But you didn't fall for it. Okay, we got to turn that water with the nipple down. It'll overflow if you don't turn the nipple downhill. You know what I mean? There you go, perfect. Look at this manure load from the turkey shaw. After manure at night, that's why we moved the turkey shaw. Yeah, that needs quite a bit more load. Are you guys spotting the fence?

Yeah.

I wrapped up Shoe Dog, the audiobook, and one of the man's regrets because he lost his son is that he would have spent more time with his son. I'm gonna nail that time with my daughter today and my trip into REI this afternoon. I'm gonna see if I can't just make sure I take Josiah. You can just dump it in piles and space apart and the chickens will spread it. Look how muddy compost gets.

So muddy.

It's evil chicken chicken poo and it's sitting on soil, then the chickens are just going to track it. It's holy chicken squat when you put it on wood chips and it gets absorbed, and that mix of nitrogen and carbon turns into compost. It's got you running the fence. Yep. You like that duty?

Yeah.

Okay, I'm scratching it, turning it, spreading it for themselves. We definitely have a problem. The jungle has encroached on this fence. Yeah. All right, you better let me do that. Look how crazy this is. Welcome to the North Carolina rainforest. What I'm doing here is important. If I don't do this, all these weeds come and choke out this fence and what you call ground it out. And then this electron— this electric fence isn't as powerful as it once was, and it won't contain the chickens. Keep predators out. I got the bulk, but 20— 80% of the grounding out is going to be in this little bit that's left. Everybody breathe with me. A sigh of relief. The fence breathes too. One more thing. A lot of dirt has been pushed up against this fence. I think those weeds will ground this fence out. Dirt going over the fence is the definition of grounding out. And the chickens have their greens, which Joel Salatin says they eat 2 blades of grass, they got enough chlorophyll to fight off just about anything. So we got them their chlorophyll. The kids went up to breakfast. I better go make sure they're not Lord of the Flies up there. You guys are alive and unscathed.

Why do you keep saying that?

Well, you were up here on Supermarket.

Is there an adult in there? There are 3.

No, it's 2. All right, Lily time. Yes, Lily and cousin time. Yeah. Who's gonna ride Blaze today? All right, all right, let's go. Come here, let's go. Let's go to the woods and check this place out. I got an app that tracks this whole 100 miles. We're gonna see if it tracks us in real time because it's not meshing with the map. The map might be outdated. What you doing back there, Josiah?

Nothing.

We got our driver. Get to spend some time with Jonah too. Oh, right along there, the state. So pretty. We're at the supposed start of this thing. This GPS app is tracking me. I can see myself and I can see where I'm supposed to be. This looks like the start of it. Be feeling good right here. What in the world? Already you can't even— you can't even do it. Obstacle number 1 right here. This is gonna be a very interesting adventure. We're gonna have to figure out a way around this. What? Did you check if it sees you? What sees you? Your phone. Yeah, it's tracking me. We're gonna have obstacle number 1 right off the bat. Trail's closed. It's just the beginning of it though. There's many trails and there's other ways. Now let's go into Piscisum. I want to see what happens when I lose reception. Reception. Kind of need this thing to track us even offline because the map's outdated. It's not tracking us. Oh, it is! I'm in total airplane mode and it's tracking us. This is really good news. Let's go look at the first place we get on the trail, which is not very far. We're 2 miles in, airplane mode, it's still tracking me. I also see that I can download for offline use, but how is the GPS picking up where this phone is without my signal. It's a little sus. It'll be part of the adventure. All right. REI. Wow, look at this, Chandler. It was a garbage truck. The whole side of the road is closed. It could be toxic, I guess. We got our bikes, put them in the back of the truck. Literally the back tire popped on one of them, so take it back in. Is that a bad sign? —or a good sign. We're getting the trouble out of the way now. Well, we went to roll it in and it fixed itself. It's one of those tubeless tires. I've got to get used to that. You're sure it's not leaking anymore? This happened to me. Okay, how many people can we fit in this house? Annie's been processing tomatoes. How many quarts you get?

It smells so good. Probably—

ideally 7. Add it to the list. Bailey, what'd you make us?

Come give me a chewer. I made baked potatoes.

Zucchini. Of course. What do you need cheese for?

My potato.

Oh, don't get mozzarella, shred up the cheddar. And we got roast. Grace, oh, you eat squash? Sometimes. It's okay if you don't. Are y'all used to garden food? Do you have a garden? What's in your garden? What? What's in your garden?

Um, we have grapes, tomatoes.

You have grapes in your garden?

Yeah. Good job. Way too many.

So what is Nebraska best at growing?

Corn. Corn. And soybeans and cows.

Exactly, all of those.

However, we don't have any corn. It's literally flat and then there's like corn and then sometimes the wind breaks and houses and that's it. Herbs. For miles. Literally.

Hey, hey boys, have you hoed your corn? No, I saw Annie doing it. You gotta stay on top of it. Annie pointed out the song, the Alison Krauss song. Oh, they're matching. They are matching. The woman couldn't marry the boy because he wouldn't hoe his corn. Come September came a big frost and all the young man's corn was lost. You gotta hoe your corn. Okay, okay, I'm not gonna get no girlfriend. Yeah, if a girl knows what to look for, man, she's gonna find her a man that hoes the garden. I think they put on the garage doors today, didn't they, Beck? They did. You want to go see them later?

It looks really good.

You guys, will you guys miss this coziness? No. And will you miss the fact that the air conditioning is not keeping up right now?

Because all this cooking and all these people, it's like a pioneer house in here.

Yeah, all right, another rain, which made us think of a tarp, a lightweight tarp. We're gonna have no shelter in the We're in the woods and suppose we need to cook our meal.

That's what my thought was, like, at least you could break this out and like put it up and then everyone can get off of it and like towel off and be dry for a minute.

Because we're gonna have no tents, we're sleeping in hammocks.

They've got rainflies. They have rainflies on the tent.

But who wants to just hang out in your individual hammock? Exactly. With the training. At least you can like sit together.

Yeah.

Underneath the tarp. And it's supposed to scattered thunderstorm 3 of the 5 days. It's the next day. I forgot to show you the garages, but I could fit in— I still fit into this vlog. Not the garages, the garage doors. You and I are seeing it together for the first time. Oh my gosh. Oh, it's big. It's legit. It's smooth. It's black. It's missing handles. Wow, that's nice. We're getting a garage and we'll use it for cars. First time. Mark it down.