Putting An End To Homestead Shaming | 8 Things You Don't Have to Do

I gave myself permission to get off the daily vlog grind, and then I'm vlogging 7 times this week. I think there is something special about giving yourself that freedom. And we got a lot to talk about this week with the spring launch of Abundance Plus. This spring's launch theme: immunity. And today we need to talk about paradigm shift. How's this Abundance Plus— how is it different than anything else you've ever ever done. I see a trend in homesteading to do everything, but you know, most of us buy our feed, don't we? I mean, you could grow it. We learned at Homesteaders of America you could sustain a couple of pigs, a dozen of chickens, the quarter acre dedicated to growing grain. Not too many people doing that. That's gonna kind of be our start of where I suggest give some ideas of maybe where we could get some help on the homestead and outsourcing But there are going to be some other ones. They're gonna— one of them's inside that greenhouse, and one of them, it's up there-ish. I don't think it makes sense to outsource the daily milking. And plus, I mean, you love it. I mean, you fall in love with the process. You've got to, right, my man? No, he said no. I like it. You will, you will one day. Mm. I'm going to talk about 7 things that you don't necessarily have to do as a homesteader. Some of them are obvious, some of them are not so obvious. Thing number 1, that behind me used to be a dense forest. We had it cleared by graders to turn it into more pasture for our cows. This is about an acre and a half. Took them with their machines, I don't know, 2 days maybe. Probably would have took me a week. Do you see this brush pile? This massive brush pile? It's probably 50, 60 feet long, 40 feet across. There's another one up there, another one behind it, a couple more out there. That's thing number 2: wood chipping can be one of the most dangerous things you can do. I've heard a lot of horror stories about it. We actually hire a crew who has— and, and then if you, if you had to get your own wood chipper, it'd be like a dinky donk thing. Hire a crew, they have a commercial wood chipper. What you playing? Playing, uh, Ant World. Ant World. All right, we'll come away from your Ant World. Let's go on a walk. We're gonna walk all the way from here across our farm. We're gonna go back in those woods. Before we go to the woods, I should say, the mobile ramp pin— you don't have to learn how to weld. Hire somebody in the community to do it. I know what you're saying. I can hear you saying it. Well, that must be nice, but I can't afford to hire somebody build a ramp pin. Well, you almost can't afford not to. Let me explain. Let's get you out of the can't mentality first. Instead of saying can't, say how can I? And then you realize, if I built a ram pen, I could put 2 feeder lambs in there, 4 feeder lambs in there with them, sell 2 of them, and I'm on my way. You gotta also realize you're freeing yourself up when you say yes to something like building your own ram pen. You're saying no to so many other things. So you could be doing many more things, money-generating things, money-saving things. So I challenge you, how can I? I came over here to show you our woodlot. This is where a lot of those trees, most of them, went out of that acre and a half. Some of these can be sawmilled, but then these are for firewood. Sure, we could get our own sawmill, but then we're saying no to a whole bunch of other things, so we're not. We're gonna hire a sawmill guy. Uh, I wonder if these are sawmills. He's probably firewood. But speaking of firewood, I did the math. You get— if you cleared an acre of forest like we did, leaving some of the trees for a silvo pasture, you're going to end up with $30,000 worth of firewood. That's plenty of money to pay for the grader, pay for the wood chipper, pay for the person to come and process firewood. Running the chainsaw, highly efficient, probably the number one tool of the homestead, but it's also very dangerous. And also very— you're also very capable of hiring that out. Like, that— those, those people are available in your community. So we had the ramp in, that was 3. Sawmill, 4. Uh, firewood, 5. Okay, let's go on to number 6. Number 6: builds. Carpenters are another thing that are readily available. See if you can't get some help with that. Good morning, honey. How are you? How are your babies? You guys all right? The pole barn treating you all right? Folks might wonder, how does he do it all? Well, I don't. This is, this is part of it. I know when to what you call outsource. I know when to get help. Brandon Sheard, the Farmstead Meat Smith, when he was here butchering— what, that, that's one, we're gonna get to that in a minute— he would say pick your battles because you can eat the entire animal, guts, eyeballs, everything. It just happens to take an hour, hour and a half to clean out the intestines to have some casings that you could have more easily just bought, you know, and that's an hour and a half of your time that could have been doing something else. For years, decades, Rebecca and I have been potting up our own and starting up our own seeds and starts. We use the soil blocker. What's that doing on the ground? This is our foreseeable future. We're at number 7, and in my book, The Root Life, especially people getting going, I'm just like Go to Lowe's, go to the garden store, get, get you some what you call starts. And then, my goodness, you don't have to have a greenhouse. And even as experienced as we are, we're going towards that. We found a local who wants to start a business growing plant starts, so we can contract with them for exactly what we want, when we want it, sign us up, and then we can be doing other things. I feel like I'm getting into some controversies here. Oh my goodness. Uh, you Justin's not gonna start his own seeds. You just wait, you just wait till I start talking about compost. Uh, yeah, I'm getting rid of homestead shaming. That doesn't need to be a thing. This is a loving, kind community. And, and speaking of which, if you want to do all this yourself, or if you want to outsource more, even more than I do, no judgment either way. Potatoes. I feel like it's pretty common now to buy potato— buy seed, what you call seed potatoes, which is just a potato, and you cut it up and you plant it. And then look what happens. I mean, we cut a potato up into 2 or 3 pieces and we plant it and we get all these potatoes. Oh, here, here's one. That's what it looks like. So it's cut up. I mean, but theoretically, I could have saved my own potatoes. I could save my own seeds. I've— we've never saved our own seeds. So we opted for more diversity than to just do everything ourselves. We bought these onions from the, the lovely couple that's local that's doing starts. Look how big those are, way ahead of the weeds. But for years we've been buying onions like this already going. Onions especially, if you start them by seed, well, they just get a little tiny little bit and you plant them out here and then because they don't shade this area, they're going to grow weeds like crazy. So I think it's a great idea to buy onion starts because look, you're going to get much more production. Yes, it's more than if you were just to seed it, but you're going to be much— that much more successful. What are you doing? You continue your work digging to Australia? We're going to dig. Me and Jonah are going to dig under. We're going to dig down and then under and then up. Okay, I have literally confessed to buying our own plant starts and people have said, you're no homesteader. Well, first of all, who died and made you the judge? And what is homesteading? I used to be a professional mountain biker and would teach people how to mountain board right up there. And one thing I would always say to them is, hey, are you a mountain biker now? After they had ridden all day. None of them wanted to say yes. And I said, were you a mountain boarder before you came? They said no. And I said, you're right, but the moment you put your foot on that board and you started to roll, you became a mountain boarder. It didn't matter how good you were at it or how you were compared to other people. It's the same for homesteading. I don't care if it's even just still in your heart and you're You're studying and you're about to pull that trigger and you plant that first. Well, this— you could do this. You get you some cilantro seed and a terracotta pot with some soil you bought at the store and you put it in your window. You're a homesteader. This is the compost corner, I call it. You can have chickens in one place. I beg of you, put them on deep bedding— wood chips, wood shavings, grass clippings— and they scratch it around. And you saw not after a while, even pretty up close to the surface, is compost. My chickens are next to my garden, so I can feed— so the garden can feed the chickens, and then the chickens can feed the garden, which was what I just did. Got a little sidetracked to get a little excited about that fact. Oh, I composted. I, I made my own compost. Does that make me a homesteader? No. If we are riling people up with buying our own plant starts, we're gonna lose them now. We're about to lose them because I'm here to tell you I don't make all my compost. I actually encourage folks not to, to go ahead and buy their compost. 1,200 square foot garden there, 1,200 square foot garden there, another 2 1,200 square foot gardens. See this bare area? Yeah, it's right by the road because the dump truck— which we need a dump truck load of compost every year. Yes, vegetables are hungry and don't regenerate themselves. We'd have to have a heck of a compost corner to do it, and we could. I mean, we could. It's just so much easier and quicker and supportive of the community to have them dump it here and then put our 5 wheelbarrow loads per bed, 24 beds times 500, almost 100 wheelbarrow loads of compost to buy it. One, what doesn't have any weeds in it, it's perfect compost. Perfect compost is hard to make. And two, it's so much faster, meaning I can do almost 5,000 square foot of gardening as opposed to if I was doing everything myself, I might be able to do a 1,200 square foot garden. Got one more thing. What are we going to be on, like 8 Then we're gonna put this down in the mama pigs and the piglets. They're growing and they need to have a feed all they can get. And plus those mamas lactating, they can have all they want. Butchering— this is another one I feel like we personally insist on harvesting on farm. Hang them, gut them, dress them, skin them. We do all our chickens, which that is outsourcable too if you have a processing plant near you that does it. I'll tell you one thing I do not like doing, I'll admit it, and for me I think it's a time suck, is breaking it down, like doing it into the cuts. There's people that like that, there's people that want to do that. We send it to the butcher. We killed on farm, it was humane, it was peaceful for the animal, uh, and then we get it ready for the butcher and they break it down. We figured it out. Didn't take long. I say all that to say we really aren't and we really don't have to do things alone. That's especially the case for learning and growing yourself inside homesteading. That is where Abundance Plus is particularly strong. Now I'm going to show you guys something. I want to make sure you know about this. Uh, if you go inside Abundance Plus, if you get inside, you sign up, you can sign up right here. Uh, you can— you got 3 tiers to choose from down here. Okay, let's go back up. Let's sign in. Once you're in here, of course, you have the ad-free vlog, censorship-free vlogs, the, the Divergent series, raw interviews inside there, Rooted, all 10 episodes, Wildersteel, 7 episodes, Discovering Home, our vlog, ad-free. Look, I'm really excited about these long-form podcasts, interviews, author James Reebanks. Tara from Slow Down Farmstead. Uh, lots of cool stuff there. Let's go— you go to a community. This is like our own Facebook but without the silly parenting stuff. Okay, we announced the marketplace. I'll show you that in a second. But here's somebody who found an awesome video about how to rotate vegetable crops. Well, thank you for sharing that in here. Uh, here's somebody. Morning, fine people of the chicken group. I am looking to get a plucker and scroller. Please give your recommendations, pros and cons. She has 3 answers already, and that only happened an hour ago, y'all. She's already got 3 answers. This guy's looking for reputable hatcheries of Muscovy ducks. They've already got 3 comments. Uh, Mike Dixon posted his ad-free vlog. Okay, this lady's showing, spent the morning, early afternoon in the forest. This is so cool, sharing some of that. Looks like she found some tomatoes in the forest. She planted tomatoes, experimenting planting tomatoes in the forest. Love it, love it that she's sharing that journey with us. The newest thing, the marketplace. We touched on it in an earlier vlog this week, but this— we've got somebody— you, you can get on here and sell an old tractor, sell a dog, sell, sell your eggs continually, sell meat, sell your farmhouse teas, uh, all kinds of stuff. Oh my goodness, there's like 9 pages of this stuff. I listed Autumn, our heifer, and our piglets and sold them within couple of days. There's a map that I'm very excited about. 2,335 people in this map. You can list yourself to be found, and you can find other people. Look, there are 1,500 people in eastern United States, 721 in the southeast, 322 in western North Carolina, eastern Tennessee. 61 people around the Asheville area, which is where I'm at. Almost 2 dozen people within an hour of me that I don't know, that I could get to know and they could get to know me. So that's what I'm saying. Together we are immune. Herd immunity, for, for lack of a better term. Really, what's stopping you? Get in there, uh, test drive it out. You don't like it, get your money back. We've added so many improvements We still kept the price the same. I know people are raising their prices. We're not. We're not. We're happy. We're serving y'all. People are happy. I just want as many people as possible to be in there, which by the way, there's over like 13,000 people in there. And I imagine this registration is gonna give us another 1,000, 2,000, perhaps more. The more the merrier. So join us. Let's do this together.