In this December‑31, 2020 vlog, Victor Justin Rhodes walks viewers through a chaotic day on his family homestead after his pigs escape through a broken fence. He first rallies his children—Jonah, Josiah, Gideon, and Lily—to help corral the animals, then demonstrates a step‑by‑step repair of the pig fence using additional T‑posts, deeper driven posts, and wire ties to prevent future breaches and to keep the pigs from breeding. The video shifts to a three‑day treatment of the family cow Phyllis, who is recovering from mastitis; Rhodes shows milking techniques, discusses clogging issues, and explains the use of hot water and careful milking to clear the infection. Interspersed are casual family moments: the kids prepare a quick chicken‑and‑lard fry, and the crew waits for concrete and gravel deliveries. Rhodes then gives a detailed tour of his raised‑bed and soil‑block garden system, highlighting the Polyface Designs plans, cedar construction, retaining‑wall details, cover‑crop usage, and integration of chickens for soil health. He ends with a promotional call‑to‑action for viewers to order his garden, soil‑block, and chick‑shaw plans before the end of the year. Throughout, the vlog blends instructional content, farm‑life humor, and family interaction.
Chapters
Oh, Christ. Whoops. Y'all are not supposed to do this. I'm not sure exactly how we're gonna fix this. I'm getting the pig stuff, and I just realized there are no kids with me. They're supposed to be with me. Kids, they're in the back. Okay, there's one of them. Kids, get in here. Okay, Lily's gonna come out at milking time. She can sit in there quietly. Here they are. Freeze! You got me. Hey, nice hairdo this morning. All right, y'all getting wood? It looks like they finished leveling for the concrete yesterday. Gonna come back and we still got to put in all the, um, the metal. Do you know where my children went again? Oh my gosh, it is hard to keep up with these guys. This is my number one chore, getting the kids involved. Come, come, come, don't take your coat off. Come on, Jonah, let's go! Josiah, where's Josiah? They're all in here, let's go! Come on! Oh wow, look, there's a dump truck coming, but the guys aren't here yet. I guess he, he was the guy yesterday, so he knows what to do. I guess we needed another gravel load, so I guess there's more leveling to do and putting in the metal. There y'all are! Good to have you back. Oh Christ, whoops! Y'all are not supposed to do this. Okay, they dug, they got under. All right, we haven't even fed them yet. Maybe they got excited when Ken did the chickens. Oh, look, they pushed it and got under. I'm not sure exactly how we're going to fix this. So if we undo it here, we can probably swing that open. Let's get our parts to, uh, fix it though, back. We just have to do more down at the bottom. We put one pan of food on the side of the fence. Okay, see if one of them go over. All right, I like it. Let's try that. Once we get them over though, I want to be able to be ready and secure it as fast as possible so they don't do it again. All right, I got our supplies. All right, where can I set you guys for this? Okay, I got that loose. It's pretty much just trying to get one to eat on this side and one to eat on that side. We got food to the one side. And of course they both rushed over there. We lifted up the gate, they went over there, and then this was what I thought would be the tricky part, but we were easily able to push Cheesecake over, get her satisfied on another, uh, thing of food, and easily get in between them. Now we gotta hurry and put these on. Let's put them on down at the bottom first. We've got that low— I don't remember if we did a low one, just I had the idea to do more than, uh, more T-posts, that's not a bad idea either, you know, especially in between, because we're trying to keep them away from breeding each other. Let's do that now. We've reinforced the bottom of these T-posts. I feel like they've gotten these loose. We're going to add more T-posts. We're going to drive them really far down into the ground. My man, look at you guys! Woo! You got all 5, Josiah? And we tied this up to this post here with wire, but you see how good that did. I think we need to put in another T-post so we can actually put these T-post— I don't know, let's call them metal grips, I don't know— on there. We got them separated. Basically, we doubled up on our T-posts, drove them a lot further down in the ground. Put two connections at the bottom. She's still got some feed and he can't get over there. It's good that you're working out these kinks now before they are of breeding age. I will give you 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 reasons why I hope to God Phyllis gets out today. We've been down here with Phyllis, our family cow, for 3 days treating her for mastitis. I am done. Looks like she cleared it up at day 2, middle of the day. She's clear this morning still. She's out. Oh, that's awesome! How did that happen? I did have really puffy hair this morning. Yeah, I don't know why, but then I brushed it. Oh, here she goes. Got the alfalfa just side. Give her a scoop. Since she's down here, we're gonna milk her down here anyway. It's a little easier. And then get her back up. Let's cross our fingers. Okay, it's a little tough getting it going, but once it's going, it's going. Let's cross our fingers during this milking session it doesn't lock up on us. I don't know what gives. Day and a half since she clogged up, she's clogging up, and I'm gonna have to get hotter water. This is cooled off too much, but I think she needs to go out. I think we'll just make sure we get it out every morning. What do you think? Yeah, that's weird. And they said it could take up to 7 days after treatment. Yeah, to work. But I'm gonna get really hot water here. Oh wow, honey. Here, let's get that in the resin. Good job. Steaming hot water. Let's finish her off. She's— she didn't knock much. She still got a big old knot in there. I guess that's what it is. I'm just gonna have to commit to this 30 days if I have to. Not down here though, in the field. 30 minutes later, we got the teat milked out. Let's get the calf on her and get our second milking. And I hope, you know, hopefully I got all that out of that quarter and the calf doesn't bring much to that because we're just gonna have to do it all over again. All right, bring her on. Let's see if the calf gets anything out. Well, she didn't like it because it's watery and soapy. Here, I didn't mean to throw you off. I'll wipe it off. Sorry. Go ahead. What's the deal? There she's getting some. Yeah, the calf brought more milk, but it's clogging, so the kids will milk the other side while I Milk and massage and milk and massage and milk and massage. All right, it was only 15 minutes that time. Well, that was— I guess she went out right here instead of around there. Oh well, she's ready to get back with everybody. We have our harness, but we might not need it because she's going to want to get back with the cows. But you can do it, whatever you want to do. You want to take it off? Let's drop this single strand electric. All right, we got one in. You can let her go. Here it is. There we go. Okay, how good does that feel to get her back? Look, guys, pole barn next to the barn. It's gonna look good. I wonder where the guys are though. There's a load of gravel in Big Daddy's truck. Josiah heating up some hot dogs. Just— Jonah, what do you got? He's heating up leftover rice and beans. Today's Burn It Up cooking show. We're gonna fry some— well, we have some chicken legs and stuff left over from— well, wings too, from the Taco Tuesday last night, the chicken tacos. All right, let's get some lard. That was good cooking that chicken in that lard last night. So I'm gonna do it again today. That turned out to be a quick, nice quick way to cook it too. Let's set a timer and then we'll flip it. When it goes off, we'll flip it? Yep, yep, leave it be. We got the vent on high heat all the time. Uh, being animal-based, you don't have to be fancy with the spices. We can just do salt. I feel like smoking it up. Whoa, guys, talk about high heat! You can turn it way down, guys. I think they had it on literal high heat. It's supposed to be a joke. Get them off before they burn. They're already burned in my life. I think it could go a bit more. Okay, now what do you think, Gideon? I think it's time to turn it. Yes, perfect! It's turned out nicely. We've got it browned on on both sides. Despite the frequency on my show, I don't want to burn it up. So, uh, let's get this in the oven. The oven was already heated up earlier, so it's gonna go for it. This was a fun little way to heat up some— make some chicken really fast. And of course it's delicious. All right, it's gone. Concrete guys here. They're not coming to work today though, I don't think, but they are getting the gravel out of the way. Little afternoon project today. I'm giving away these plans. These are my plans for— where is it, where is it? Oh, for the soil block starting tray with Polyface Designs. That's just one of them. I have a good working order on these plans. Just tweak a few things, make sure the measurements are all right. That's good, that's good, that's perfect, excellent, nice, perfect. Let's go get the raised beds. Some people are already ordering this and say, hey, hey, where is it? Well, they're ordering Polyface Design, aren't saying where is this part. Well, I'm working on this now today. I'll get it to Jason to update Jason's working on the Chickshaw. Those are quite complicated, so— and we had quite a few changes. So here's what we're going to do. If you order by the end of the year, which is tonight, December 31st, 11:59 PM, I can't say I'll get it to you January 1st, but probably by the end of next week. But you've got to be a previous customer. Doesn't matter if you are a very first customer months ago, we're going to send it to you. All right, let's do these raised beds. Just some history on this: we did these raised beds last year for the first time. I was skeptical. I did it for the beautiful one, but they ended up being so easy, so beautiful right here in the front yard. I absolutely love it. Now one thing I'm probably gonna do is build a chicken tractor that would just go right inside of it. Well, I'll do it by the time we need to work in this cover crop. Some people are wondering what do I got in here. This is just cover crop. It's keeping the soil intact, rebuilding the soil. We'll put chickens in and they'll eat it, they'll scratch it, they'll manure it. We'll move the chickens out, put down tarp for a couple of weeks, and then plant. Oh, I cannot wait. Now that gets me excited. Anytime we can incorporate animals into the gardening, that's when I get excited. Found a mistake. I mean, I'm not happy about the mistake, but found it so that you guys don't have to deal with the confusion. While I'm out here, let's give you a little tour, a little concept behind these things. So this is cedar. It's naturally rot resistant and doesn't have any chemicals or anything like that. Yeah, sure, we didn't put our boards on the outside. I wasn't sure how that looked. It looks a little backwards at first, but I actually think it has some character, especially now that it's getting a little older. It's kind of like the Justin Rhodes signature. But it's got the big daddy Hurricane 5 strength because it's a retaining wall. It's a retaining wall for all these boards. These are 1x6s inside. This is the mistake I found in our previous plans. The— these need to be indented. These, these 1x6s can't come all the way to the fourth because it's gotta— you can't come all the way to the board here, the, the post, because it's got to leave room for, uh, this retainer wall. So that works. That's— that was kind of a bad— I guess that was kind of a bad cut here. Hey, you're not supposed to be in the garden. No, I know that's not where you poop, honey. Come on, keep going, keep going. Come on, go. Don't poop in the garden. Another thing of note is we just put the 4x4s a little higher up just for accent. I think we were gonna get knobs or something, some of that, one of those fancy decorative tops. I think we've forgotten. Maybe we'll get on that this year. That would be a nice little touch. Super simple. You just basically build the long walls, build the short walls, put it together, add the, add the 4x4s, and you're done. Oh, what's, what's inside it? What's inside it? So about to, right here, if you haven't been following us for a while I don't know, a third of it, 10 inches, is, uh, rotten logs or wood chips. And then we filled it up with garden soil. So you, you purchase, you import the garden soil, and you can plant directly into that. And every year we add compost from our chicken run. The chickens have been working in there on the wood chips, breaking it down. We have a compost. And right now, yeah, I already mentioned earlier, we got the COVID crop, so You come out here and you, you don't— you just don't have to bend over much. And for us, we put it here because it looks good, but also this ends up being a floodplain. We've got the runoff from the water from the, the mountain, we've got the runoff from the road, and we've had floods in here. But this keeps our gardens elevated, and it's really nice just to come right here, get some weeds or something from your garden, throw it into the chickens. It's been a really, really nice system. So I encourage you guys, check it out. Get my soil block plans, my raised garden plans, and my chickshaw plans. Sign up by tonight, link down in the description.
