This ONE Thing Made Chores (in the rain) Bearable

Can you come buckle my pants?

Sure thing. Hey, I laid out socks for you. You're not gonna wear them? No. No, you're gonna just go barefoot? No.

Okay.

And go get your socks! Cleaning up a bit after the excavators. Well, you know what this means? Springtime! Look at everything we have to take out to do the chores. And it's raining. I think we should do the, uh, rain dance. What do you guys think? Okay, that's the dry heave chicken rain dance right there. First things first, let's move the fat hens. They gotta get out of there. It just said grab our grass seed and put it under the garage. Shoot, we need to get that covered over there. Let's see if we can hurry up and do our chores before milking time. And I need to do the luchadors before we get going. The reason I'm so excited about this rain, because it hasn't rained in a couple of weeks. So in this cold temperate climate, 40 inches of rain a year, we're like, we're like nervous. Just pulled the chickens out of here and sheep were here. And they're having to eat the grass down to the ground. And it's spring. Normally in the spring you're supposed to get this explosion and you can cover the farm in 15 days, and by the time you get back with the animals, that where you started has recovered. But that didn't happen this year because it got cold. It was cold up to like— we had frost May 12th. Our last possible frost date is May 10th. So what are we gonna do about water? Just, uh, Well, let's see, let's see if they use— need both buckets, and we might be able to get a water for them here. Just look at this grass grazed down to the bottom. So I've had to slow the— I had to slow the cows down. First time ever I can remember not being able to move the cows over the entire farm in 15 days. I had to slow it down to a 30-day rotation. But as you can see, we've walked 1, 2, 3, 3 plots, and it's already starting to get better. We're already starting to catch up. Slowing down helped, uh, but I don't think that spring rush is going to come back. I think we're too late. Okay, we got a good bit of water there and none there, so I think we can pour some of the used water into the chickens. It's a little tricky doing chores in the rain. Throw in a camera and an umbrella to keep the camera dry. It's a little tricky, but I'm not gonna complain. Mark my words, Jess, I'm not gonna complain about this rain. And if I feel myself wanting to complain, I'm only gonna dance. You think that'll stay without blowing off?

Okay, staying.

Just how they get an egg, there's no nesting material in here, bro. And even in this, this paddock, I had to feed hay. I've slowed them down and there weren't enough— there wasn't enough grass in some of the paddocks. This is where the tree service guys drove, so it's compacted for the moment. So I'm going to use it to my advantage. I'm gonna have to feed hay. I'm gonna put it in the weaker parts of the pasture to build it up. I've given some to Moose and Hamburger. Rotational grazing is such an art rather than a science, but in the end you just want to make sure your grass recovers and your animals get enough to eat. Sometimes that means supplementing so you can slow down. You'd rather go too slow than too fast, I think. Well, this is the general rule, so Slow down when the grass is growing slow. Speed up when the grass is going fast.

Whoa!

Wow, look at that!

So wet. Just fed the pigs. How you guys doing?

Good?

They're loving their new paddock, guys. This rain is just perfect. We just seeded and hayed their previous paddock or two. It's perfect. This is the prime germination time for those brand new seeds. And how are you two doing? You two all right? Doing good. This rain is also good to help them in their till job here. Softens up the earth, makes tilling a lot easier for them. Why do we want tilling out here? Well, because This used to be forest, and we're using the pigs to till up the ground and stir up the grass seed that's there so that we have better pasture for our cows. Say goodbye to the pigs.

Goodbye, pigs!

I just had the worst feeling last night during the member webinar. We looked out and we saw that the gate was not up to the cows. I meant to shut it and didn't, and I haven't seen them this morning. Let's find the cows, Gideon. Are they up there? Yes!

Whoo!

That was a close one. All right, let's do the sea monsters real quick. You know, they look all right. They're eating out all trays. They've got water. I'm tempted to not go down there, but I think it's only gonna get worse. It's only gonna rain more, so maybe if I stock up right now, I won't have to do it this afternoon. The thing is Everything here seems to serve the cow. Like the cat— the pigs are tilling up grass seed. The sea monsters are in weaker part of the pastures to drop their manure to improve it for the cows. The sheep eat the cow's parasites when they graze behind them, and it dies off in the sheep. And the sheep eat weeds that the cows don't like, and more grass is growing. Because of them. I just serviced these guys. They've got these nice King feeders from Premier One, keep that food dry. Premier One also sent me one of these feed trays to try out. You think they like it? I just put it under here because it's raining. I think they love it. Oh my gosh, they're into it. Rosie, how you doing? We did have two casualties. I did come out here the other morning with just 2 sets of legs left on 2 sea monsters. Hadn't happened since, so I kind of wonder if it was initial Rosie getting her wings. I saw some couple crows in here, uh, but I haven't seen them since, so it could have been them. I saw Rosie the other day on top of the meat shaw squawking and carrying on. Talking to some Canadian geese, some wild geese. So I think she's doing all right. Hey, how's my supervisor doing?

Good.

Yeah, look, it's wide open. Come on, she gabs! And every bucket is empty now. Wow, everything is just gonna jam. You can sprinkle your garden, but nothing grows it like a good rain. Bill, you ready to milk? Yeah, let's do it. I found Lily. We've got Teddy, Miss, and Jonah, and the beautiful one is inside getting dry. Hey, there you guys are.

You've been looking for me?

Yeah. Did you guys rake it out down there? Good deal. Figured you might be over here. This is a perfect time to seed, doesn't it?

Yep.

This is a huge area though. It is, but y'all got this. You need me to help or you want me to start milking?

Well, I would love for you to help, but I think milking is what needs to happen.

Well, technically I have 20 minutes, even though we were starting to try a new habit. We were getting up even earlier, we're gonna milk earlier, but We can stick with it. You want me to help you?

Yeah, we did it!

Teamwork did it! 10 minutes to spare.

It would have been better if I could have got my tomatoes in the ground, but yeah, what are you gonna do?

Yep, everything's gonna explode now.

I know, I'm so excited about this week of rain.

We have the heat And the rain now, and the light. It's gonna explode.

It's starting to green.

Nice. What is it?

This is a hosta. I bought like bulbs a long time ago and I forgot about them. And I planted them all in these pots and it's— maybe they're gonna work. Here's my maple. So this I rescued. I rescued these.

That's a silver maple. Nothing exciting like a maple syrup maple.

But so in front of the old farmhouse that your dad grew up in, your granny planted silver maples in front of the house. And I don't know, 5 years ago, maybe 8, I have no idea, they were— got dangerously, um, compromised and could have fallen on the house. So your dad had them cut down, which was really hard for him to do. And honestly, I didn't think he would ever do it. Because that was part of his mom, and his mom's been gone since 2010. So that's silver maples. When we moved in in '01, that maple over there was growing, which is the one we cut down, the one that we cut down. It wasn't too big, it was pretty small still, but I believe that the silver maple in front of Granny's old house made that silver maple grow over there. And then this— these I think came from that one. So I saved this from my raised beds. It was like underneath the sandbag on top of the black silage tarp. Yeah, in between those it was growing. And so I found them, and so I thought, well, this is a great way that we can preserve that silver maple and plant it where we want it, not where it just gets planted. And I saved, uh, 2 more over there, but one I don't know if it's gonna make it. But one of them is for sure gonna go. So we have 2 trees from that one tree. I'm pretty excited to plant these wherever we want them, either in the field or just in decoration somewhere in honor of Granny and your dad.

Even cows are coming. So we cut down one tree We saved 3, so I'm pretty— feeling pretty good about that. Feeling a little better about taking down that tree. I never like to take down a tree, so it's good to replace them times 3. Whoa, wrap it away! Where are you going? Do you do that often? She's got no loop. I threw her off. I'm usually not standing here. Okay, Mustang, thank you. Hang on, hang on, we'll get your other one open.

Oh, you got it.

Next up, now this one protests and won't go in without a scoop.

Give her a handful.

Monday morning. She was acting a little funny when we cleaned her, so we're gonna make sure she doesn't have mastitis. All right.

Okay. Does she have that?

Oh no, she's perfectly clear. That's good. This afternoon it's a loft cleaning explosion. Hey, we can actually show our— off our freezers without shame.

Yeah, cuz there's like actually tidy in here because you can actually see because we remembered we had light bulbs down stairs. Yes, because I went to go put new light bulbs in and I had none. And I did order some more though, so I was like, because we need light bulbs obviously.

But, um, looking good, looking good.

I added another shelf right here. Yeah, and I don't know if I'm gonna keep this here, but this could be a, another place for stuff if we need it.

Okay.

This is leaving.

So this is—

there's a box over there leaving. This is kids' clothes. This is their toys that we need to go through.

What's this gonna look like in an hour and a half when you come back from chores?

I hope it's gonna look really good, but I'm not holding my breath because sometimes things don't happen the way you want them to.

She's been waiting on a rainy day to do this. She got it. Which makes me think about freezers. Do we have enough room in there for 2 porks.

We do.

These are our porks. Yeah, let's check it. Okay, well, we still got a lot of pork. Okay, look, we got a little room over here. You think that's room? It's nice. This is a nice problem to have, isn't it? Yeah.

Well, okay, the nice thing is too is she's going to— well, some of these are bones.

Okay.

And I actually think that I'm going to, um, start giving them to Teddy. Okay. I talked to a dog trainer and she said that, um, pork bones are great for a dog. They just have to be a certain size, not breaking, and stuff like that.

I accidentally put the Band-Aid on the wrong finger.

Yeah, you got pinched right there.

Yeah, and I put it on this thing.

Oh my gosh, I know. Are you gonna change it or just—

I'm just gonna tap it up because it didn't hurt and I didn't thought I had it on the whole time.

So how are you, handsome gentleman? I'm looking at our freezer space for pigs because Phyllis is drying— well, we're gonna dry her off in 2 weeks. Let's see, Josiah, what's he— what are they going for? They find the bits and pieces of weed down in there. What did they go for in this paddock? Not the crazy tall grass. Medium tall grass. So we're drying Aunt Phyllis off. She's 2 months away from— she'll be 2 months away from her, uh, next birth. You excited about that? A new baby calf. So we give them a break, so we're gonna have half the milk production.

Hopefully this year's girls.

Yeah, I know we had bulls, didn't we?

Yeah, I got this for the splicers.

Okay, we're in business now, bro. Hopefully we're gonna get done with chores and we can work on our fence a little bit. That's what Jonah's got there for a real quick wire mending tool Premier 1 sent us. First, let's check on the turkeys. Oh my, okay Jonah, we gotta clean this up real quick, like nice and tidy. All right, that's a bit better. How are turkeys doing, Jonah? Oh Lord, look how big! Huge! They're getting so good and nobody's dying.

Yeah, look what I had.

It's incredible.

I had to make one end lower and one end higher. Yeah, so the medium turkeys, the small turkeys, and the big turkeys.

Oh, that's good. Yeah, your, your hover brooder is higher up on this end than that end.

Yes, good.

They're happy eating and chirping. All right, well, they'll be out soon enough. We'll wait for the little ones to get all their feathers and then they'll go out. All right, we got everything to go. We got about an hour, guys. All we got to do before we work is put Hamburger up and water the ewes, and then we can mend our fences a bit. Oh wait, do we need to do anything on the Sea Monsters?

I'll check their water.

They got plenty of feed, they got plenty of water.

Yeah, good.

We decided to open the cows up a little bit more this afternoon, but I want to show you guys something. This was poplar trees we coppiced on purpose. We cut them low on purpose, and now they're sprouting forth. Roots are deep, bringing up minerals. I guarantee that will be gone tomorrow, this time by the cows. We'll see, we'll check in tomorrow. If not by them, the sheep.

Yes, though, my goodness, the sheep eat this.

So the cows are where we first started clearing pasture with our pigs. They're so fat and happy there. I opened up the fence, they don't care, they aren't moving. They're so happy and content. Jonah, let me get this down for you. See if you can just herd the hamburger. He's going the wrong way. Come on, you know what we want, Hamburger.

He tries his easy tricks on me, then he tries his harder tricks.

Don't stand right next to each other. Here he comes. I'll go open the— I'll go open the fence. All right, bring him on. I open the gate for you. Look, he knows, he knows. Jonah, are you adding water?

I'm emptying the bucket so you can add water.

Okay, back to our milk story. So what if we're in half? We're gonna have what, 15 gallons of milk to deal with? Well, we count on it because you get 1 quart of cream for 5 gallons of milk. That leaves a lot of skim. That's a significant amount of feed. So I'm estimating our pigs will actually be probably 200 pounds by that time. Sure, they could go up bigger. They could go up to 220, 250, but we won't have as much skim. So why would we want to finish them on grain? We can feed them skim, harvest them when we dry off the cow, and then the skim from Aunt Flossie will go to the littler pigs because they don't eat as much. Now they drink all this water all at once. Oh no, you poured it out. How much was in there? Okay, problem is this fence is not hot, not hot. We busted a ground wire or a wire going underneath the ground. Let's go fix that now. So Jonah put this in. That was so kind of you, Jonah, this underlying wire, because yeah, on a zero day, right, rest day. So he— we had the source of the fence coming here, and then it's got to go under here to catch both, to get both lanes lit. In just one second. We got too close or too far out, so we need to run another wire and then come right up here because I think I ran over that with Sally.

Yeah, you hit it.

All right, pull it. Oh yeah. All right, let's, let's redo it. Went pretty good except we hit a huge rock here, so it actually went around it. It's not like it's a water line or anything, it's just a little electrical line. We'll just Go around it. Okay guys, that looks really good. Good job. Notice a little bit of suds right there. We treated the cows Monthly maintenance: Shackley Basic H. It's a soap, it's a natural soap, classic. It's a dewormer. I learned that trick from Joel Salatin. Just once a month when we remember, and for a couple of days. It's said to do wonders, and it's— so far it's done good for us. We got our line coming up, riding this pole. We got alligator clips taking it from that to the system. We shut it off to that lane because that, that, that one needs some work. It's coming under the ground and up and tied there. So let's see what it's hitting at out there, guys. So there's our source. It's hitting at 8.9. That's 9. That's about max. That's max for this one. Now you hook that up. Are you sure you want to be on that side? All right, now let's— what's this sitting at? Okay, yeah, not doing that great. 1.5, it's showing some— oh no, 5.8. That's not so terrible. It is grounding out somewhere along the line though. That could be our net, that could be it hitting the metal post somewhere, who knows. All right, fellas, time for supper. Oh, it's moved out of the loft. Oh my word, did you mop too?

I hands and knees it.

All right, washing the floor.

Well, the water was disgusting. I literally scrubbed it with a scrub brush and then I would wipe it off. And so as you can see the difference here— clean, not clean.

Oh, okay, I was gonna say that stain. Oh, I can see it now. Huge difference. Thank you, Rebecca. Now look at this, how cool.

I mean, 100% done, like this is This is all being donated. I need to find places for this. Okay, so I'm not 100% done, but I'm gonna work on it again tomorrow.

Nice rainy day project.

And get it taken care of.

Speaking of keeping the pork going, we got a bit in our Brussels sprouts, some bacon bits, uh, quinoa, and oh my word, pork chops. Does this supper make it worth it, my man?

What is it?

This is why we work, rain or shine. It's goodness. Like every night.

Yeah.

Well, you gotta look under there. That's the good stuff.

He's worth it.