We Built a Homestead in 100 Days - Day 5

Wow, forget that. That's heavy. Oh, Gideon did not put this down. They haven't pooped in it as bad, and I have an idea. So they're perching on this, and that's why we're getting poop in this. Pretty sure we did the biodegradable clips this year. On these. That means all we got to do is this. Now it's all coming back to me what we did. We gave them a perk via the turkey shawl. Are you gonna spot me?

Yeah.

Okay, I'm gonna open this. You make sure they don't come out.

Yes.

And then we'll put the turkey shawl in. Well, that hadn't happened in a while. Calf's got in with the— I don't know, it flipped. The sheep are up here where the cows are supposed to be with Stud, and the cows are all over there, so we won't get any milk. But that does mean we have more time to clear today, guys. Who did it? I'm feeling a bit Strange after yesterday's meeting. I'm glad we got thwarted. Maybe it's day 5 of 100 days building a homestead. I feel like we had a clear vision for across the creek. There's a parcel over there undeveloped. It would have gotten us far off this road. There seems to be some fair amount of pasture over there that we're starting to clear. Come on, Flossie, get out of your poop pile. Let's go. Come on, she don't want to move this morning. You guys are like me, a little slow this morning. Where cows weren't laying, where cows were laying. We're going to get the cows over to where they're supposed to be, get the sheep back over here where they're supposed to be, and then move everybody for the day. Well, we're gonna have extra time to clear. I feel like we had this real clear vision for over there. For the silvo pasture, for possible house sites. But now it's a little, it's a little muffled. Now to flip the cows, keep the cows over here and get the sheep over. Got any ideas, Josiah? Sheep are more afraid than cows, so you can kind of herd them through cows and they get ahead of them. See how much faster they move? See that? I want to show you guys this though, the frost. You want to get 50 feet up from a valley because look how, look how heavy this frost is. And we're at about the 50-60 mark. See how frosty? Let's see how it gets gradually less and less. These are elevations of house sites. You don't want to be down in the frost pocket. You don't want to be on top of the mountain exposed either, because you want your— and you want your resources to come down the hill, not have to haul all your resources up the hill. And then you got microclimates, which are areas like right below the tree. There's trees, there's absolutely no frost whatsoever, protected from that. People tend to build facing the road. They're taking no heed to where the sun is, having the house face the sun. They're taking no heed to frost pockets, wind direction. In many cases, not taking much consideration into slope. They might build to a view. You don't want to build to a view. Keep the views sacred. Keep the views special. They're your everyday. They're not so special anymore. Hopefully we can pull this with all this heavy frost on the ground. Another permaculture principle is to cultivate around your house, zone 0. Where we're cultivating and clearing, that the house isn't going to be over there, we're misdirected. Not that it would be a bad, a terrible thing, it's just that you would want to develop closer to the house and expand from there. Did you hear her? She said, remember, we have to leave at 11:05 sharp. She's got horse lessons and she wants me to take her today. I'm going to be excited to go take her, so we're going to cut work short. Don't get me wrong, I'm not upset. It's actually why you want to get experts like Ian involved, like the passive solar guy on November 2nd, because if you plow on ahead and you think, oh, I know everything, and you don't invest and some expertise, you could do something stupid like put a homestead house in the wrong— total unideal place. All right, we're going tracking. Cows are definitely not as sensitive as us. They're gobbling down this frosty grass. Flossie's a little upset about it. I guess we do gobble down ice cream. Is this like ice cream to you guys? Fresh plate. The bad news is we're not getting any milk this morning. The good news is we're actually gonna have time to clear when I didn't think we'd have much because we have to cut out early for Lily's horse lessons. Winnie, you remember your old friends? Remember your old buddies? They remember you. Scared to death. I think you're scared. I think you're scared of them. They're scared of you. No matter where the house goes, you know, it's hand— because, you know, I'm like, do I continue clearing pasture up there? Yes, I think I do. I had this realization that, well, we have sheep up there to keep away from Nacho, and we could do that with heifers too. So it's kind of handy to have a, you know, our pasture down here, and no matter where the house ends up, but it's also handy to have pasture up there, a distance away to keep certain animals separated from each other. Us having a breeding program, that makes total sense. Because we're just, we're just creating a pasture distance and separating. So that's making me feel better about the work today, even though we're more uncertain than we were yesterday about where our house is going. Look at everybody hanging out by—

I know this one, this one I had to change his clothes by the fire. He wouldn't let me change him in the bedroom.

Oh, it's funny.

I warmed him up too. I warmed up his clothes. It feels very rustic, you know. I like that. And then, um, I think we were introduced to timber framing yesterday.

I think we knew about it.

I felt like I knew about it. There's a house that I've showed you. Have you ever seen timber frame? Yeah, but I really—

I wasn't making the connection.

I didn't realize.

Oh look, there's a good one. Pull that one up so people can see the frame.

Well, it doesn't have to be so ornate. And I don't know if I necessarily want it so ornate. Like, it's very— like, I like the pegs and all that, but like this little finial, like, I don't know if I need that. And these, all these extra finial, that would be more— I mean, maybe not exactly like that, but I know what you mean.

Yeah, see, that's nice. So I don't want all wood walls, but it's nice to have.

Yeah, I like the wood on this. I like the wood on the ceiling and Yeah, I really think it's from the farm.

This house is going to have a story. More tractor work today. Yes! Yesterday we tightened up our chain, looped it around more, got a little bit of flex. I think we're going to be more streamlined and we're gonna pull up stumps. Was that easier to hook up today, Josiah?

Yeah.

Okay, I think This is a much better setup. All right, it broke the chain and the back wheels of the Kubota were getting left up. What the heck? That's a— that, that root, it's that powerful in that little tree. Do we have a bigger chain? I know we have a bigger chain. Where is it?

Short. You think only this long?

I don't think it's gonna get that one. And this one, these mountain laurels, they're breaking when we try to pull them. So I don't know if this pulling up business is working, huh?

Papa, why don't we just get an excavator? 10 times easier.

Yeah, let's go. Well, then we're not building a legacy together, are we?

Very.

They do have forestry mulchers that would just grind that to bits, but I think it would still sprout up. Well, one thing we learned yesterday with Ian is he's not going to need this, so we can work this up. I'm trying to make a decision. Do we pull them out, go find a bigger chain? Where is that big old chain? Want to take this out and just re-hook it? Maybe there was a weak spot. I've gotten this pin straightened out, but I cannot pull it out for the life of me. Or hammer it out. You guys, the chain— oh, really big daddy had a chain. Yeah, we'll pull the tractor over before we break that chain, won't we? Uh-oh, these are not stronger than our other chain, I'm pretty sure. These clips. Did we just destroy that? Yeah, we destroyed that. I'm not impressed with that. Why aren't we just wrapping a chain around it like we used to do when I was a kid? Totally destroyed these links. And that one, look at this, look at that link all warped. Maybe what we should do with this 20 minutes is go find our big chain. It bent this thing. This thing was heavy duty.

Oh, but in the form of wrapping a chain around it, what?

Yeah, it would slip off. It's that, or we just saw it all the way. We just saw it down to the ground.

I think saw to the ground. Saw to the ground, or get a really, really, really, really big chain.

Here's what you do with the chain. You wrap it around a couple of times and it does catch. It does catch. We maybe not— we maybe not saw it so low to the ground. We may have it a little longer, but once Once you pull on this, they don't catch. Watch, we could do this, we could do this right now. We are not gonna pull roots up like that. I'm gonna show you guys why in a second. But with this little— we have a little bit of time. Let's go ahead and queue up everything. For hopefully this afternoon. Oh, I do not like this result at all. Here's what I don't like about it. Although it does get the roots out and this tree is not going to grow back, look how much soil on that. Look how much organic matter is there. And that's the best stuff. That's topsoil. That's the black stuff. See, black. Not black clay. You can see the layer of topsoil here. That's the soil that the forest has built, and we've just pulled it up. Now we can rake this over and smooth this out. Then we have the disturbance from the tractor— another root job there, digging down into the clay. So you know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna work with nature. Stump does not want to be pulled up, and I've cut it so close to the ground a mower could get over that. So if it sprouts and the animals don't eat it, we're mowing behind the animals and we knock it down. And you, you cut that off a number of times and it does eventually kill it, and then it rots. This one I've already started to do it here. We could bevel the edges so that it doesn't get caught in them on the mower decking or anything like that. This guy, maybe 2 inches up right here, surface over there. So yeah, you just take our saw and bevel it. It's gonna be a lot easier than pulling it up. Yeah, I just don't like the looks of that. Just tore it up. We want to work with nature, not against. Sometimes it's tempting because we have the machines to do so, and there's a time for it. There's certainly a time for but not in this case. May change my mind tomorrow, but not in this case today. You guys want me to show you what happens to a stump? Look, see all these sprouts coming out of it? Yeah, that's what happens. But the sheep ate all this, so it's food. It's coppicing. It's food for the animals. That—

how we didn't cut down that?

What? That one, the stump. Yeah, you know, that might be where a machine comes in. This is already work that somebody else has done. Some— either we saw it, I don't know if my blade's long enough, or we actually get a forestry mulcher or a stump grinder to do that work. This is a case in point. So this stump has been cut, it's coppiced, and you can see the leaves up here. That's where the sheep haven't been able to reach. But the sheep eating these leaves, it's actually a good thing because these roots are deep down and they're bringing up the minerals. They're mining minerals. And so when the sheep eat this, this leaf, they're getting mineralized. So I think keeping the stumps in is actually— could be part of our mineral program. There's just something very satisfying. Sure, I could get a machine, but there's something very satisfying about us working this land and now us looking at our our finished artwork. We had this blank canvas and now we are getting done. We can see it coming together. I'm imagining it, you know, this one's gonna go on up and then I'm gonna— just wait, just wait guys until we've left some of the trees and it's a silvo pasture. Oh, that's gonna be nice. Let's go guys, it's time. You gotta do push-ups. Yep. Can you not do one on the ground, babe? We have a train.

Are you heckling me? No, I can't.

All right, you're good. Can you do a pull-up? No, I think it's gonna be the day. Is that what we're working up to, Jacob? Pull-up? Oh yeah.

I am made for birthing children, okay? I'm not made for climbing trees or doing pull-ups.

You may not be made for it because what would you use a pull-up for?

I'm gonna train to it. I've never tried to do any of this, so Good.

Done training. Gonna go do something very important, get a break from the homestead and take Lily to horseback riding lessons. You excited to show us?

Yeah.

Vloggers too?

Yeah.

You getting on your horse riding boots?

Yeah. Okay, so obviously I don't understand. It's not that big a deal.

Light but more frequent corrections.

On which leg are we sitting down with? So you right now are sitting on—

good job.

We want you to be bouncing and sitting on the outside. Where do you end up being when you're done? Do you turn or do you use the whole ring?

All right, how was it? Good. That's the first time I've seen it. I was impressed. I'm proud of you. Yeah, did you do good as usual? Yeah, good. You're normally in there. I bet it's because it's so warm, huh? Yeah, or it's so cool, whatever, nice temperature.

Because it was so cool.

Yeah, it's normally hot, so you're, you're having to be in there. The only hope for redeeming turkey soulene is to cook it covered in bacon. What happened here?

The cows.

Was this a rainy day? Yeah. God, they mucked it up. That's why we don't graze in the winter. They muck up the pastures. That just happened on one rainy day. Well, this would explain why they're getting out if there's no energy from the source to the fence, they're not staying in. We've decided on his name— Graham. That's Honey, that's Graham. Honey Graham. Oh my word, Lily, will you go back and get them some hay? You guys have crushed it. Let's get these stumps up with the tractor. We've got a big pine tree there they want to get down. Is that what you want to go after, guys? Well, we got to get around it. We got to get around in here, get it cleared up. I kind of need to get— getting you to go get my tape measure because we could sawmill that just because that is not going to be a timber frame. Doesn't mean we can't have it sawmilled and used for something else. It would be very satisfying to get this thicket, don't you think? We got a little less than an hour and free up these big trees and get an idea of the silvopasture. Can you guys start to see our future here? You're starting to see it. Little savanna. We made it all the way up to that little knoll. I get more excited about underbrushing. The kids get more excited about felling trees. And here's a couple of ugly hardwoods we need to get down. You want to do it?

Yeah.

Now if we fell them, that means we have to work them up, and that's going to be the rest of our time. Look at that view though. Alrighty, something we couldn't enjoy before. We're getting high up and we have a— we've cleared a view. We got that whole tree worked up. One more tree. But man, we are doing so much better than at the beginning of the week. I'm seeing progress. Let's see, we only got to go up this mountain to— well, you can't really tell, but maybe right up in there. And that's going to be an interesting view. If the views get this good right here, what's it going to be like up there? Let's go see. Well, you're not gonna be able to see because of those trees in the way. More that way too, guys. It's gonna be magnificent.

Yeah, look how many eggs you got.

Oh my God, and they're clean. Yeah, they're clean. Yeah, did you put the nest blocker up? Yeah. Okay, good. How's that turkey smothered in bacon?

Good, good, good.

What about you, buddy? You like that turkey leg? Good deal. How you guys feel after day 5?

Good. Great.

Building a homestead.

I feel wonderful.

I feel good. Yeah, I know you were, you were taking a nap on the acupuncture table. Yeah, we were sawing it, but we're getting a lot faster day 5 compared to day 1. We're gonna do this.

I think we cut more than 3 trees down.

Oh yeah, we probably cut 30. You want to say bye?

Want to blow kisses?

Go ahead, kiss.

Woo! 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15.