In this informal outdoor vlog, the narrator (Speaker A) rallies his family to protect a garlic and onion plot from an imminent freeze and rain. He outlines the narrow weather window, then leads a step‑by‑step effort to assemble a low‑tunnel: gathering arches, agribond tarp, sandbags, and poultry netting, positioning the structure, and weighting it down against wind. The family searches for missing hoops, improvises with smaller netting when needed, and adjusts the tarp to ensure full coverage. Throughout the build, the narrator shares personal reflections on the value of growing food versus buying it, the health and financial trade‑offs, and the importance of staying active and injury‑free. After securing the crops, the crew switches to a parallel project—cold‑smoking bacon on a Green Egg using wood chips, monitoring the smoke for 12 hours, and adding sandbags for stability. The video concludes with a successful frost protection outcome and a taste of the cold‑smoked bacon, highlighting teamwork, resourcefulness, and a love of self‑sufficiency.
Chapters
Oh man, that's so tempting because the alternative is rain, cold rain. You're gonna tempt it with me, huh? Followed by that cold rain, it's gonna be a cold night. Cold weather is coming again and we need to get our onions and our garlic covered or we could severely hinder their growth. You're gonna save the garlic and the onions? All right, put this off till after 11, but I've got an important phone call this afternoon. We had to get this done today, and this is our only window, and it's a sucky window. Let's hurry up and get the chores done and get on this project. Down one. Got an appointment this morning. Down two, because Mama's taking it. But we do gain Jonah because he can't go to his grading job because it's so wet. You okay? What you doing? Just cold. Oh, okay. It is a little cold. 2 of these. Is he lifting that? And 2 of these. Is that his body weight? That's double it. You're, you're lifting double your body weight? That'd be you lifting 260 pounds. All right, let's make many. Yeah, I just went out. I wish we had Phil-o-vision and you could feel how cold it is and wet. Actually, I don't because I don't want to I don't want to cause— bring that on anybody. Hey, did you put up the harvest rake? Yes. Wow, thank you. Not important right now. All right, you help him, Josie. He doesn't climb up there. I can't climb up there. I gotta stop getting injured, for when I get injured I can't go walk, I can't train, and that's gonna be the secret to my longevity— walking and strength training. And injury is what's going to end it for me if I'm not careful. That's what ended it for my dad. He was doing just fine, then he got injured and he was older and just went downhill from there. We're gonna make men of them. These onions we bought for 25 cents a piece. We can grow them ourselves, it's a lot of work. Or we can buy them for a dollar, done. All the work's done for us. You don't have to work in the rain. Believe me, sometimes I'm tempted, but the other days I remember If we're buying them in the store, who knows where they came from. Some farm raping the earth, um, not nearly as nutrient-dense. We're doing this for our health, so we're not necessarily looking for any shortcuts. And it doesn't even have to make— always make financial sense. It would make more financial sense to just buy it and work more on content. We got to make men of the boys too. Okay, let's go work in the cold rain. Save the onions and garlic. And thank you for picking up— storm hitting tomorrow, it's gonna freeze tonight, so we've got to get this done today. Step 1 in today's project: put on a raincoat. Put on a raincoat. What do they say up there in New Hampshire? There's no bad weather, just bad clothing. Let's save this garlic and onions. Step 2, get up the poultry net from around it. It's been protecting it from the chickens. Can y'all come help me? Where's Jonah? Jonah, come on, we don't have to get sandbags. We can tie it into the Tarps, come on. Already a weed. Already multiple weeds. Come tie this up for me. There goes 60 inches. But we're missing— we're missing them. Okay, let's find the other arches before we decide. Did we— tell me we did not get rid of those. Hopefully they're over at the bass shed. We're looking for these arches for these low tunnels. It's been a minute since I needed so many, and we're not— we're not finding them. We're putting them somewhere. Hopefully we didn't— the boys didn't put them in the metal yard. Okay, garden stall. Are they buried? They're not buried. This is what we're looking for. It's wide enough to cover 2 rows. It's wide enough to take a 10-foot-wide piece of Agribond, which is what it comes in, so it's perfectly handy for this. Okay, we have all these Little ones, bug net ones, they're good for one row. I mean, if push comes to shove, we'll use those, but we'll have to do twice the work, and the Agribon won't fit nicely, so we'll probably have to do two of those. They'll be way too wide. I'm wondering, are they under these nets? It's just all too much. Okay, I've got 5. Plus I got 4 up in the yard. I kind of was going to use those on the raised beds, but I swear we had 20 or 40. Jonah's calling me. He has some. I was looking over in the Best shed to know about. Hey, where'd you find them? Oh shoot, I knew about those. Shoot, that's enough, but we had more. We're gonna need, we're gonna need to cover other garden stuff. If there's 11 here, we can go every 10 feet for this 100 feet. Second problem is how to arch it all the way across. Too wide with the weed fabric, but I think I have an idea. Went in the weed hole right there, the outer weed hole. That gets us to the outer edge of the garlic. It does it. We're gonna go ahead and lay these out since we're not measuring and get them as level, you know, as even as we can. Sure there was 11. Yeah, it's getting colder and colder. It was 80 degrees yesterday. March is the new February, loco. This is why you don't plant anything you don't love, because who in their right mind would come out here in the cold rain to cover a vegetable they didn't love? It doesn't complement meat so well. Onions and garlic. I don't even think it would kill it. I mean, the garlic's been there all winter, but this will certainly help it big time. I gotta put you guys up, it's starting to rain. We'll go to the GoPro. Got a warm coat on, it is too cold out here. Let's go. All right, boss, see what I was thinking. Hopefully— whoa, told you this wind is going to be a pain. We're got— there's so many sandbags on this. It's only 50 feet, isn't it? We had that other one in there going back. Did it twist? Okay, well, I know you have to do it as you go. It's a pain. All right, go ahead. Okay, did you put it down at the end? Did you just get one here at the end? Nightmare. No, no, no. Needs to come over more this way, huh? Make sure the tarp's pulled up to it. So fantastically Jerry too. Hey, that new piece wasn't long enough. Must have used it before. Do we have enough to get the rest of the way? Yeah. I don't know if we do. Oh wow, it's gonna be perfect. Okay, we gotta start on one end. You can't do it all at once. Cool, that fit perfect. Look at that. Go over, go over it, Jonah. And then I might have to come through and put some clips on this later. Okay, all right, there we go. As the slate starts falling Say we finished it just in time. We still got one more to do, and we've run out of poles, so I got another idea. Little patch right there will be more mulch, and it'll be a frost protector. Hopefully it doesn't rain too much more. It's not supposed to, or else that'll just get soaked down. Now let's finish our— we're smoking the bacon, cold smoking the bacon today. Let's finish that project. We uncovered our bacon after curing it for a week in our vacuum seal bags. We've got a cold smoking tube. Those are wood chips, or the wood pellets. We're There's no heat on this Green Egg. It's just— that's, that's why you call it cold smoking. It doesn't heat up the bacon, just smokes it. We're in this for 12 hours. We started at 7 this morning. It's 12, so we're almost halfway. I'm going to refill that tube about every 2 hours. Yeah, sometimes that happens. We got to secure this. Got the boys on getting some sandbags going. That's what we're doing now. Okay, how many more bags you got? What are we gonna add, 5 more sandbags to each side? We just added, what, 10 or 11 sandbags? All right, we'll check on it after supper and see. 12 hours later, we've got cold smoked bacon. Still cold. Let's keep one out for, uh, well, yeah, it's not supposed to heat up. Let's keep one out for use. It's the next day. It frosted. Did our low tunnel hold up? Ah, we did it! We did it! We got it weighted down enough. Heavy frost. Heavy frost on this. We protected our onions and garlic. Mmm, yes! Happy day.
