Not Enough Land, So I’m After This Water Problem

I can't stop looking at this thing. This is my book. I cannot believe I have a book. It's blowing my mind. I didn't know I was going to be this excited. I would hope to sell a lot of books, but a hope without a specific goal is just a wish. Let's do 10,000. I think we're already at 5 or 6,000. I think we can do it, but a goal Without an end date is just a— I don't know, something creative. By March 7th. Since my book officially launches March 1st, March 7th is the cutoff for the bestseller lists. If we're gonna make any bestseller list, it's got to be before March 7th. The calf already tried to get out the man gate. Oh my goodness.

I know.

That's a vibrant calf.

Yeah.

Can we put the trash can in front of it?

Yes, I did.

Okay, that'll work. We just won't have a mangate. Maybe we'll just do away with the mangate. Yeah. Now that we have a calf. We had a surprise calf yesterday. That's what Shona's talking about. Polly, our heifer we were raising for beef, went and got pregnant. I can say we can do it all day long, but what's more important to get to that goal is to say, how can we? I've already done the first thing, and that is identify the goal and give it a time stream. And I've asked myself, how can I? So the next idea is to just do what I'm going to do today, I guess, relate and share content from the book. I thought I told him not to fly that drone. It's raining and it just crashed. I saw that. You're not supposed to be flying, it's raining. So today we're gonna try to get Mom's lettuce and broccoli out. But guys, it still frosts, freezes at night, so we're gonna do the winter harvest garden concept. So Ross Lackey, a permaculture, uh, designer, special has a specialty in water. It's coming at 9:30. We're looking at what to do with some of our excess water. Actually, a lot of times in permaculture, people are trying to retain water and keep it, but we kind of have the opposite problem in many places— too much water. This did not work. We tried converting the chicken tractor into a cold frame because it's so rigid. The Agribon just got ripped to pieces, and of course our lettuce got snowed on and frosted. So we're gonna try something else and hopefully plant Mama's, uh, broccoli and lettuce very soon. How they doing?

Good.

Checking on the calf.

The baby was just nursing.

Calf is doing great. You don't think Maple's pregnant?

Oh my gosh, no, I don't think so because she got out the other day. She got out the other day and, um, Stud was All right, all right.

We're gonna have to be even more careful. Tough keeping a heifer for meat because of this reason, the management, keeping them separated from the bull. So I don't know if we will.

Jonah said why don't we just keep Polly and she'll give out beef babies? But the problem is, is she gave a beef boy this time, but she could give a girl next time.

It's also an option to harvest her in 2 months. 3. You let the baby nurse for 3 months? If we start selling our heifers, it might mean that we could do more sheep, which we cannot get grass-fed nearly as easy. We have limited amount of land for as much as we're trying to grow.

My neck's feeling a little weird.

She had a bad night, folks. She had a heart— what do you call it? Heart palpitation.

Heart palpitation.

Your heart was racing. Yeah. You don't know what the heck?

No, I called—

I messaged my doctor and we're gonna figure it out.

Interesting enough, Several weeks ago, we actually got COVID. Uh, we started getting really tired one night, and the next day we were feeling sore, like our skin was sore. What else we have? We're super tired. Oh, we felt, uh, what do we do? Super tired when we'd go do chores. And we got a home test, and sure enough, because we had people coming, we had to test and, and cancel those things. Hey, what we're gonna do is get a couple of these low tunnel frames and see if that will work. Let's try it on the one that's uncovered. We could use— we could do the one that's uncovered too. It's definitely weeded. The kids have had a time. It should become a sandbox. We could do this.

We do have another one.

I was thinking we'd do this, but it's not gonna That's 2. You could do 2 of them. I like— actually works perfectly except this one part right here. What do you think about that, little dude? The only problem here is this gap in the middle. It's going to cause the Agribond under weight to, to slump. It might not be a terrible problem. We can fix it with a rod. You're talking about the—

the what?

Bug net rods, right? I think if we zip tied that— yeah, should work. I want so bad to grab Becca just to get some compost out of the chicken run and do this, but why did this— we gotta help, we gotta milk. Is it gonna work, Rebecca? I think so. So we're gonna zip tie it and then cut the extra, is that right?

Yes, that's the plan.

We need to come up to that line right there with our compost, which is probably going to be one wheelbarrow load down there and one there. But no worries, we've had our chickens on this deep bedding all the growing season, and there's going to be crazy good compost under there. But alas, I'm having to put it aside for bigger priorities. That's going to be milking and then permaculture design. You ready? Right here. There you go. Come on now, don't get shy. I told her she needs it. I got a fever and the only prescription It's Mark Cowbell. I told you you need to do TikToks, start dancing on TikTok. So I want to demo this for the book. We have a whole chapter on this in The Rooted Life. So we need to get us an Agribond. Before we do that, we need to put in compost in and plant. And I would really like to get your lettuce and broccoli planted so it doesn't overgrow those pots. You're putting all that in the chicken run, right? Oh, okay.

Good job, guys.

Good job. Proud of you guys. This twig hit Mama on her way down. She's getting the honors every year, huh? Look, isn't that satisfying?

It is.

Oh, I love pruning. We have to prune before it starts sprouting. Looks better already. Well, big part of the Rooted life is to— is balance. You gotta know what you want. You gotta have a priorities. We've prioritized in our foundation, which is our dairy cows, and they keep us centered. They keep us focused, keep us resting. It's actually a rest. It's meditative. It's actually meditative to sit there and milk. We can think more. Do we want to sell Polly? Do we want to keep her? What do we want to do? Give us this day our daily milk. This is our sanctuary. There's a couple of pieces of crap in there. When in doubt, throw it out. Uh, it's not raw milk that would make you sick, it's crap in the raw milk that would make you sick. So And even then, grass-fed raw milk isn't as dangerous as grain-fed.

There's less of a chance than grain-fed.

So it's a chance that we could drink that and be just fine, but we're not gonna. We're gonna, we're gonna turn it into— it's sad, but we can turn it into piglets. Yeah, let's give that to the mamas. The sow is going to be due by March 4th-ish. Oh no, you're right, the gilt.

So March 4th.

Ross is here. We're about to do a walkabout. Goals. So our goal and priority is the family cow. Our life centers around that.

Yeah.

So beef and milk from them. So we're looking to water them from the land, not the well. We're looking to maximize our pastures. We have two little pastures for the amount of livestock we need, so we're trying to make it more and more productive with what we have.

Cool.

It's always good to get another mind, another perspective on the problems. He's also got this cool app and he's gonna help us find springs because ideally we'd spring feed our livestock. If we have to, we can do a pond, but I would really like to do a spring.

It wasn't, it wasn't going over the road. I mean, we have had that happen, but it wasn't— yeah.

Problem number one, we have this, all this water coming off the mountain. And I know we're gonna figure out how to turn a problem into solution. And it's going down into this pipe, and this pipe— my dad seems to think that the pipe used to go all the way to the creek and empty in the creek, but we cannot find that pipe. And it's swampy down in the field down there. So right here, this is in a swampy area that's hard to graze.

Soggy here.

Yeah, I mean, swampy.

This is, you know, possibly telling me this, uh, this species of grass. Yeah, it's telling me that.

Yeah, it's a swamp grass.

The point where it ends here. Yeah, it's crushed, or yeah, or it's filled with sediment, or like something with, uh, smooth wall pipes do a little bit better, but the corrugated inside, you know, something could have got jammed up years ago and just accumulation of roots or pressure or anything. And, uh, yeah.

You can actually see the water, and then this excess road is just mucked up.

And I mean, you can see like down there where it's not wet, the grass has been able to stay. But here where it stays— yeah, so much, you know, we don't really want roads like in our pasture, right?

Right. But you do want them to perform.

Well, this would probably be an access road.

No wetness.

Once we solve this problem, we would actually probably gravel this and have an access road. Okay.

Um, yeah, my gut reaction here is this is your major— it's like roads, pathways are all— those are your major— those essentially are your water management systems. They are in the environment. Our roads and things, like, they have all ditches, they're all culverts, right? So this, like, in, like, the energy to create this functioning path can double up as your, um, system to solve this wet, wet problem right here. Maybe keep the path a little bit higher through here.

Yeah.

And go in there in the construction of this pathway investment of— yeah, you don't have to invest in gravel and, like, making necessarily that, but you do need to have it ditched. And so, like, the crowning, uh, even of a natural dirt pathway will make it so it doesn't rut out and puddle. Um, so just kind of some quick—

so you're saying you can, you can, at the same time we're making the access road, you can do a berm and, and direct this water out of here?

Yeah, or I would— I mean, just right away, you know, I would kick it sideways. And so I don't necessarily have it figured out of where the water's going, but essentially you're gonna, you're gonna, um, you're gonna swell it.

Yeah, put it on, but essentially the road ditch could be the swell. We've seen this curve here, there's kind of kind of a, almost like a handmade curve. So we're wondering— and then there's a pipe down here in our little swamp. Kind of wondering if the pipe swerved that way. Where's the pipe? Just, uh, see, we have this pondish area. See, there's that wet grass. You can't like walk or mow in here in wet weather.

That pipe flows from there to here. I think that's, that, that seems That might be the explanation of what's going on. This is a good spot to hold water, you know, if y'all are wanting a pond. I mean, this is a good spot for it. There's water coming out of the ground right here that might probably be related to a buried pipe. But besides that kind of input of water, there seems to be a seep coming out at that holly tree right there. And then if you look right here, you kind of see a seep coming out of the ground with this Yeah, grass species right here.

And that's probably— what do you think, just being at the bottom of the, uh, the watershed?

Yeah, just that whole— there's the pressure of that land and the water that is under the ground is, is coming out at this inflection point right here on the landscape where it gets to be flat. So there's water underground here, and that's essentially kind of where the water table in a way is pushing out the water.

I was really liking what you're saying. You see a high spot here, you're talking about, and you see a high spot here little— a series of little ponds, not, not big pond, but maybe a pond here, uh, maybe one here and then one over there, a pathway through here.

So like, uh, yeah, I would probably describe these as pocket ponds or like little, uh, uh, so yeah, if you had a series of 3 of them.

We're gonna take Ross up to the one spring I know about just for curiosity, measure it because We're talking about if you had 10 cow units, 15 gallons a day, that's 150 gallons a day of water you would need. Let's see how much one of these little springs, how many gallons a day they would push out. Put in there, I'll time it. Okay, that's how we do it, right? Yeah. Wait, go. It took 2 minutes and 18 seconds. That's a lot if you're parched. He just came up here to get you a gallon of water. 576 gallons a day. All right, I think, I think just if we can find a spring like that higher up— yeah, even if it's 4 times slower, it would do it for the livestock. Hey, he's trying it.

Tastes good.

Okay, if you get diarrhea, it's on you, buddy. It's all right, let me know. We'll do it, then we'll know. This is always wet. This never dries up.

These are salamander eggs. Okay, it's probably a, like, a spotted salamander or a marbled something, like a big one.

That tells you this is always wet.

Yeah.

So I don't know if the road doesn't just drain here well, or this is a spring somewhere.

I think mostly it's your road, okay, is this shape and it's pulling and it's draining into this location. You got a little bit of a downhill here, so this is just the bottom.

So you're missing this bottom from all the way around.

Yeah, so like dig out that ditch more, uh, and give it places to go out. Or this is the spot for strategic culvert, like right here, to drop it in, drain it out there.

And then, yeah, but see, then what's there?

I mean, I, I would suggest you take it sideways you know, uh, it's just a ditch or swale.

Yeah.

And take it, uh, it's— and then this water, you know, irrigates this.

Okay, you got something. That's probably the base of this creek though, although there's nothing running in it right now. It's just forking off the creek, it looks like. Look at that. That creek met this creek right there.

That orange line's your property line, so it very well could be flowing.

Oh, it keeps going from right there, all the way across. So it's very— it's off of us. Yeah, he's gonna keep exploring. I've got to go make lunch. We'll meet back together in 1 hour. What do you say?

Okay, sounds good.

Maybe there's a side chute. I got the homegrown bacon cooking for Ross. That's one idea. Another idea is to get bonus. And if you guys have any ideas, feel free to share them in the comments. Bonus. Let's do— if you order by March 7th, we got lots of bonuses. Let's just talk about one at a time. Let's do the gardening chapter. Well, you get the PDF, so if you order the book now, you'll get the PDF of the gardening chapter right away and the garden master class. Dan, will you roll a clip of that now? Let's start with container garden. No matter what kind of container you use You're going to want to fill up to an inch and a half from the top with potting soil, and you can get that at any hardware or gardening store. Next thing you want to do is plant your seeds directly in the soil, just by, you know, you poke your finger down in there and put those seeds in. It might tell you how deep, and if you want to plant— if you're like us, you're planting one basil plant, it's a 5-inch pot— go by the spacing on the plant package on the seed packet, and we, we plant those in. And if, if you can only put one in there, plant 5 because they won't all make it. And some will make it, but some will really make it. You can get that no matter when you've pre-ordered. You could have pre-ordered 3 months ago. Go to therootedlife.com and fill out the form. If you haven't ordered, go to therootedlife.com, order, and then fill out the form. It's self-explanatory if you go there, so do check it out. Russ, I saw you come in with a blank piece of paper. Either you have plans, or that may mean there was nothing up there.

Um, just confirmation of what we knew, or what we thought we knew.

Oh yeah, so this is a plan rework. That's what's going on right there. Yeah, we're gonna rework the plan.

Yes, I, um, follow the water up, uh, And it continued on way past the property line.

What about the one across the creek?

Uh, we'll get to that next.

Okay, so maybe after lunch.

Yeah.

Okay, good. Meanwhile, outside—

Josh, get in! Don't run him over! Don't run him over! Go, go, get out!

Go! Josiah, you ready to do 1% today on your cart?

Yeah.

Let's do it. We've got our frame, our steering, we need— our nuts are ordered.

You want to do your seat?

Under your seat?

Yeah.

What's going on with you?

That's where you put your feet.

Did you buy those, or those?

No, that's from his ass. Oh my gosh, he's jerry-rigged his axle. You put a little motorcycle seat on there?

Yeah.

You made that? Yeah, with foam from Foam and Fabric. Nice. So Josiah, you could have it— you could have as wide as this board or as wide as your base. Which one you want to do?

Probably wide.

Wider the better.

Yeah.

If you do it like this though, don't go all the way across, then you only have to cut it once. Okay, you can cut it across that way.

We'll cut it once.

How high you want it? A foot, foot and a half?

Probably.

How's that? That's good. Nice. I think that'll hold you in there and brace it right there. How's that, my man? We're getting somewhere. Yeah, wouldn't you say? All right, tomorrow we'll drill the— what do you call whatever the axle hangs on to? Ah, this. And I didn't mean to say drill, I meant to say cut. But yeah, I guess we could drill too. We thought more about Polly, and I, I think the best thing to do is to eat her because she's going to be stunted.

Yes, because she didn't— she was too young.

She's not going to give us much milk. As she would have necessarily. So she's not going to make that great of a family cow, plus she's A1A too.

Yeah, I was just thinking, I was thinking about it and I thought, you know what, yeah, we like to breed our cows later for a reason.

Yeah.

And that's not really fair to sell her to somebody. So now we got two for the price of one.

Yeah. And I was thinking, so what, we'll harvest her? I was getting kind of disappointed that we wouldn't have more beef until Joey Yeah, I mean, we still have some beef in there, but we're gonna be out pretty soon. I don't want to wait on Joey. We could eat her in 3 months, right? Yep. Give the calf her 3 months, and then we have another meat— meat.

And then we have him.

Yeah, I was sad to sell him too because that's another meat cow. Yeah, yeah. Okay, I'm at peace.