Prepping a $7,200 garden in the front yard

Wow, it didn't help. And it's the dawn effect. As soon as I wake up, I guess the stresses start flowing and my blood sugar spikes. Now, not out of range. I'll train as soon as I get up. I was hoping that that training right away, exercise, would curve it, but it just kept climbing right through it. But I didn't go over, so I'm not too worried about it. It started. La la la la la, let me be free. Garden right out front our door. It's been neglected this year because of the remodel. We should be in this thing for the growing season next year. That means we got some work to do today in December. That's definitely the key to homesteading success, is time management. Hitting and doing things ahead of time. Sometimes a lot ahead of time. We need to weed, we need to fill with compost up to here, and then we need to mulch. Nature is modest and she wants to be covered up. Let's cover her up before she does herself with this kind of nonsense. I do wonder if the chickens will like this. It's not coming up nice. We need a hoe because I'm not even rooting it up. Nope, no takers. Oh, there's one eating it. That's a beautiful sight. Can't see them right there. There's 3 people working together— brothers, neighbors, and a partner farmhand. Community on the homestead today. That's good. Well, I was hoping to come down here and show you how dry our wood chips were under our new, uh, lean-to for the pig port, but nope, the wind blew it off. When I was over working on the chickens, I heard it Crash! Is there a way? Oh look, there is. We gotta screw into the 2x4. We had just set it up there. Obviously that's not gonna work. We're gonna have to secure it. We fixed it. I will say it broke this morning, so there are dry wood chips under here, and that's good. Annie, does it stink here? Not as bad as you would hope it would. This is not your typical pig stuff. Yes, you guys are already on it. Okay, I need a compost team. Who wants to be on the compost team? Okay, Jonah and Sam, how about— or Jonah and John. Yeah, what does that entail? That'll warm you up, Jonah. Break open a big, I don't know, 6-foot by 6-foot spot. We're getting the wood chips off of this deep-bedded chicken run. If you're not gonna sift, you definitely gotta get a good portion of the top layer off, even if you're breaking aside some— there's some soil in there, and we could sift it. We run it through like a half-inch wire mesh, something like that, and that definitely gets all the wood chips out of it. Takes 2-3 times as long, so better to miss out on some to just get down to the 80/20 of it, guys. Get down to 80% of our results for 20% of the effort here. They're doing 80% effort in 3 things where if you just did that extra 20 for the one thing, you would get more on that 20 than you would on everything else. See how fine we're getting in there now? Then you can just shovel that material. It's 27 degrees out here, windy and cold, so probably feels like 15. These two neighbors and friends are very special. How cold out here is it, Sam? Cold. From a 1 to 10, 10 being like glorious, I'm in Hawaii, this is awesome, wonderful feeling, to 1 being like, whoa, whoa. I'm gonna die. Um, 6 or 5? 5 or 6? It's not that bad, but it's like, it's pretty cold. And mind you, this is a— is it Wednesday? It's Wednesday morning. Hey John, why didn't you just sleep in this morning? Uh, so you could come to your house? When I was growing up, I lived in the country. We had a four-wheeler and I would have friends come over and we'd ride that four-wheeler on Friday and have this really good time. Well, Then Saturday morning came. My dad would get us up. But early. And put us to work. Wow, look at that compost. The chickens made that. We didn't turn that compost once. Just put them on wood chips in a deep run, and over time, that's what you get. You've got to get it up to this line. Not all of my friends would come back after that Saturday experience. Why didn't you work on Friday? That's a good question. That's because my dad kind of had a regular job. He was a salesman. So he was working on Friday and I went to school like a normal person. Sam and John getting picked up. Hey, what? Best practice not to stand in there. How do I get this? This is in my way. All right, try to minimize walking on there. Cringe. Compacting, killing the soil microbes. But what are we doing here? First and foremost, I'm growing chitlars. And so he's working, he's getting excited. Hey, you figured out way to get off of it. That's even better. We lost the neighbors, we gained Annie. Uh-oh, everything was going real good until this. We had to pull a lot of material back. Some pressure off that so we'll be able to push that back. I thought these were hurricane 5-proof. On-farm mulch, free mulch. Yeah, ideally we would have weeded those gardens before we got the chickens out of that area because the proximity— been a lot of totally obliterating this compost pile. We want the mass to keep it worm, so it'll be breaking down. Hey, how's he doing this morning? How you doing this morning? You still a wreck? A horse doesn't care if we're sick, does he? Now that was a fun and satisfying and sexy job. Didn't take nearly as long as I thought it would, but We still got a string trim. We still got to deal with all this. Hey, how was the appointment? It was good. It's like she like adjusted me. I could just feel the draining of my throat. I want you to look at this. Yeah, this is nice. Poop tube day, huh? You starting to feel any better? A little bit. You look better. You slept okay. He did. He actually slept like 13 hours. He did. He slept okay. 13 or 14 hours. Rebecca, is this a Christmas tree? Yeah, that's the Christmas tree. All right, it looks beautiful up there. Now next year we're going to make up for this. Yes, we're gonna get a crazy Christmas tree because you can. We're gonna have such big roots. Came with decorations. Hey, that's my kind of tree, which is why I bought it and it was on sale, so I was like, okay. Hey, it looks good. It's nice enough. Okay, it makes us feel festive. I'll take this little tree home and decorate it and I'll show them. It really will work in our place. We just murdered some short ribs, one of the most underrated beef meats for sure. And the only way we discovered this is when we harvested our whole cow. We're like, what do we do with short ribs? Paula Deen is what we do with our short ribs, right, Rebecca? We found an amazing Paula Deen recipe years, years, years ago. Oh, Henry's helping himself to some more sauerkraut. I say short ribs are underrated because if you have to buy meat, it's usually inexpensive cuts It's so good, is it not? It's so fatty. It's got a good fat ratio. It's a good fat. You want to pull out some sauerkraut? What is this? Everybody's gonna want to know. It's a red light. Red light! What does that mean? We see it's a red light. It's just like good for when you're sick and— Okay. It helps. It like, it makes me less achy when I have it on. All right, special delivery. Bedroom. Bedroom bath day coming up. You don't want him to see his socks and underwear. Dude's gonna be 16 tomorrow. I remember when I was 16 years old, I thought I knew everything. You think you know everything? He's a pretty humble guy. Do you think Mom and I are idiots? No. Good, we've done something right. One thing I did this afternoon is looked up the value of those raised beds. Here's the thing, if you do that raised bed and you plant it just once, you can get up to $400 worth of produce. That's just once planted. You can plant 3 times in a year. You could get $1,200 worth of value the first year, and it costs less than $1,000 to build. That's including— assuming you're importing your initial soil. I say that to say this: I want to help you guys out. Plans for the raised beds down in the description. Early Christmas present.