Wait!, Can I Learn New Things (46 y/o)

Today's the day. Strawberries and colostrum freeze-dried. Well, I hope so. Yesterday I had an implant removed. So as you can imagine, I don't feel the greatest. I slept in. I skipped my workout this morning. I have this inner ear pressure when like I bend over or there's pressure on there. Yes.

I'll show you what we did in there.

Okay. What did you do in here?

It needs to be let out.

Okay. You've You've dug a hole? Yeah, next to this. Looks like you've brought water in here. Yeah, we did. You don't want to do that, do you? It's a stall underneath our house. Should we go mow in a little bit for the cows, for the fence? Okay, so we're gonna just try to maintain our progress on the farm. It is spring, there's a lot of work to do, and see if we can't still advance the farm A little bit based on how we feel. Well, yes, buddy. Depending on how we feel, I mean, often we're pushing through. We have to. So I guess depending on our ability. First chicken turkey check. You want to shut it? Other hand, other hand. There you go, there you go. Let me see your situation. How's she doing? Good. She stay on her Eggs? Yeah, she did. He didn't set that broody hen yesterday. Some fertilized eggs, some of our fertilized eggs. That means she's gonna have, good Lord willing, the creek don't rise, chicks in about 20 days now. Wait a minute, the spooler was broke down. That was on my list this morning. Across the street, did the boys fix it? They pushed it. Yeah, they pushed it down here. I'm suspecting It's the battery. We need to hook it up to the truck, see if we'll start according to that. I learned that from Mark last time. Pretty much dialed in our food systems, and that was— as health-oriented people, that was our major goal here on our homestead. But so now we have more room for some of these other self-sustaining type of activities. I mean, what do you do? You build things, grow things, and fix things. This is fixing things. I'll be way out of my comfort zone. What I learned from Mark is, well, you can see see if this thing's going to start hooked up to the car, and if it does, it's our battery. Yeah, try it. Okay, sounds like it might not be the battery. Okay, let it sit for a second. Looking for any obvious— is this a fuse box? We could check that. What's in here? It's our fuse box. Let's check that. My next guess would be the spark plugs. We did actually put diesel in it a few months ago and it hadn't quite ran great since then. I don't know if we've replaced the spark plugs yet. I can't find them. We've looked all over. We got a lot of farm stuff to do. Mark's coming today. Let's get another schooling in maintaining machines, repairing them. A little extra care and attention on this fencing system for the grazing animals, and they stayed in. That's all there was to it. Well, hey there! Good morning! What you doing? That's Strawberry, everyone, and it's not a male, it's a female. Definitely A2, A2. That's your little calf right there. She not wanting to stay over there? Yeah, she wasn't— whoops— yesterday. Well, I know her calf wasn't as moody. Gotta get her milk. There's way more than the calf could drink. There's milk spraying out. She's not even being milked. They're really protective and nervous about their calves for the first few days. So, um, Jonah, I think I'll carry the calf. You lure her in. Okay, let's get her in from this way. Okay, problem with day 3 is calves are more active. Oh, look at that colostrum poo. It's okay, keep milking. Lily's gonna go get the rope halter. We would just let the calf have it, but right now when she first comes into milk, there's way more milk than what the calf can drink, and that could have negative consequences for the mom if we don't relieve her. They get really rusty. I mean, we haven't milked her in a couple of months. We let her dry off to build this baby, and then, uh, then she's super nervous with the baby moving around. And then how much longer has it been before that in the stanchion? You know, she is not gonna eat. You can't lead, you have to drive. We try to lead her first. I can hold the calf to her and then you'll be able to get her. Hold it. Almost had it. Gotta get better lighting.

Terrible lighting.

Hey, we got it. They got her. Yeah, yeah, we leashed her and then we could rope halter her, and now we're gonna try to get her in here. I got a lot of it out. Uh, hopefully we don't even have to put her in the stanchion. This is working. Oh, we got this plus what we put in our reservoir. We got her milked out. We didn't have to put her in the stanchion. Rope halter was enough. You want to go see the calf? This is your chance. Okay, there she is. Okay, well, you don't have to. Yesterday's milk. Well, let's mix it so you can see how yellow it is. Okay, white. Hey, we couldn't be any further away from the house. I accidentally poured diesel in this thing. It's a gas. This mower is extremely important, especially this time of year. We mow behind the cows and sheep what they don't eat, because they don't eat the unedibles, and we don't want the edibles to go up and go to seed. Want to chop it up with the mower, uh, it becomes organic matter and improves our soil overall. It's like one of the cheapest fertilizers you can get, and certainly most natural. So we need our mower going. It's going to be super tricky because I don't know if this is getting lower than that. Yes, maybe it pumps out. Maybe it doesn't even siphon. Is it— is it going in? Yeah, it's on this hill though. It's not gonna— it's gonna be hard to get it all out. Some kind folks donated some diesel for us during Hurricane Helene. Couldn't get diesel cans during that time, so they just put X's on these gas cans. But I kind of think we used all that diesel. That's not— not even diesel. Oh, maybe that is diesel. Sally has gas in it. Let's see if we can smell the difference. Okay, I think it's gas, but what we don't want to do is if it's diesel, start it and get that diesel going through the fuel line. Yeah, okay, I think that's gas. Can you tell gas from smelling it versus Yeah, okay, we're putting trust in our noses. Well, that was a false alarm, thankfully. The moment we've been waiting for. We had to hard freeze our colostrum and strawberries for 48 hours. Dryer is ready. Beautiful one has been warming it up. The instructions say to hard freeze it for 48 hours, but do you have to? Okay, so that looks a little different. It's not glossy like it was. So you're allowed to put strawberries and colostrum in at the same time?

I think so.

Oh my gosh. So now what do we do?

I'm gonna close the drain valve.

Okay, let's shut this. It's good the thing tells you exactly what to do.

It does.

Okay, get down.

Telling us exactly what to do so far. This is open.

That's open.

So we're gonna close it. It's freezing it.

How long? I don't know. We got a lot to learn. Join us in learning about this May 15th. You and Carolyn— or am I getting on there too?

Carolyn, Thomas. Yep, the two of us.

Ladies, take care of it.

And we are going to learn all about freeze drying.

Free webinar. Yeah, I'm gonna put a QR code up right there. And while that's— while you get out your phone and scan it, why do you want to do freeze drying?

Why?

Yeah, just give me, give me 2 or 3 reasons.

So you personally, personally, for me, the main driver was, was organs.

Okay, freeze drying the organs, sneaking our liver.

For our family, it would be easier if I had a jar of organs that I could just, um, put into— you can put in smoothies, you can put it in, uh, whatever. Anything that, um, accepts a powder. So then I would have that. And then, um, I wanted to do the herbs. I wanted to freeze dry all my herbs. Yeah, because there is a, um, that's how you— there was a study, it's like 97% of the nutrition is retained in freeze drying.

And then you can have your own spices.

Yeah, and then like the strawberries, I want to take that and we can put it in our yogurt when we're eating it, um, in icing to make— for Lily likes to do that for cakes. Those— so the organs and the herbs were my main driver. Also to make like, um, freeze-dried meals for camping and things like that, just like having like my boys will be like, I'm hungry, there's nothing to eat. Well, go, go pick off the— you can have any meal you want right there, you know. I want to package them into like, um, single servings so that then my, my children can have a nutritious meal right off of the shelf. Leftovers can be really great. Right now we're kind of eating all of our leftovers, but sometimes, you know, like chilies and soups, if you make like a big batch of it broth. I mean, really, it's endless. My kids want to try candy eventually. I told them we'll do it eventually, but right now we're focusing on the more nutritious foods.

Here we go. Like, this stuff is shelf-stable. That's what I like. But what's she talking about camping food? We got taco soup. You can take that on our bike ride campout. We got these peaches. We bought them in bulk from a local farmer, super cheap. And now they're freeze-dried and ready to go. They're peaches. We just don't need to forget they're here. This is funny. This is chicken broth. Yeah, it turns into like cotton candy consistency. Yesterday I couldn't quite tell if the drag was working. I didn't know where the boys did it and where they didn't. So let's see if it's— let's see if it's gonna work. Thanks. It's working great. This is a huge patch of spread manure instead of it all concentrated in one area. Hadn't hit this yet. It has spread out big time. I think it'll be less habitable—

habitable—

habitable by flies. And yeah, see the flies? They don't have quite the pie they did. And this is gonna— it's gonna be a bigger patch of green fertilized explosion. Not so concentrated. Boom! You can see it from here, just the darker area where he spread that manure. Just amazing spreadage. Not only did we halt the growth of any weeds, add organic matter to the soil by mowing it, we spread the fertilizer love and probably reduce the pest cycle of flies. Now that we're talking about different fuels in the wrong machines. Let's see if this is diesel. I think it's gas. Just had lunch. Oh no, I'm afraid when we were inside we missed the four-wheeler getting fixed. What's wrong with the four-wheeler? I don't know, we just took the spark plug out of it, cleaned it, put it back in there, and it didn't start. Yeah, we had to jump it all. We're gonna pull this little sucker right here out. Mm-hmm. I'm loving the sound of it. So there it is. Y'all just took it out, cleaned it. What'd you do, run it through? Did wire brush. Okay, wire brush. Good people right there, good people. I got a checklist for next time. So hooking it up to the battery, you know, hooking up to a car, check, make sure it's not the battery, you know, spraying the starter fluid in there. That doesn't work, then it's the spark plug, and that can be about it. Unless of course it sounds funny, and then maybe it's a starter. So I got a 3-point checklist for next time. This may seem like so obvious, so basic to most of you, but even though I grew up in the country and even I grew up on a farm somewhat— I mean, we had cattle— my dad never taught me this. He wasn't interested in this stuff. I wasn't interested in it. So I have to learn it. I got to start somewhere. And most of you are in that same boat. We're having to learn all this stuff. And so we're on this journey together learning different things. We just ate a huge burger supper. It's turned out nice. How is it compared to just straight up? The consistency is better. It's not as— doesn't break apart as much. It's more smooth. I think the egg improves it, although it's a little less vanilla-y tasting and a little more— there's— it's, dare I say, meaty. So the consistency is better, but I think I like to just the colostrum custard. Without the eggs, in any regard, it's good. I'm gonna eat this whole thing. Not tonight. Happy day.