We found a Surprise (hidden) Pasture

You want to go on your chores with your new shoes? Best bro?

I need those shirts.

Yeah, you do. Maybe you'll live up to it. It's gonna be a beautiful day, not because it necessarily is, but because our attitude. It's our choice. I choose to find the positive.

You want to go with him today?

Did you pick us up?

Where?

He wants me to drive the track loader over there for him. Working on our very neglected—

probably never got attention.

Lower pond today.

What lower pond?

The one down at the end of the field.

We want to clear around this swampy area just so we can know where our boundaries are in this nook and cranny farming. We, we need to go all the way up to the edge, which looks like we have, but we don't know. Yeah, I want all this brush pulled up out of here. I want to find the pond, the current pond, without getting in the pond. Yeah, clean, clean it out so we know what we're dealing with. So get all the little trees that are in the swamp, little trees and weeds. We don't even know what we got. It's an eyesore. Jonah's begging me to let him do this, let him do this, and it's a good job for him given that he can't put weight on that one leg yet. Although tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow you go to the doctor and hopefully he can start putting weight on this thing. Well, that's gonna do a little further out. There you go. Do some amazing permaculture earthworks with this thing. Oh, I like it. What's happened here? Shoot, they ate all the— ah, this was a good one. You guys have no delayed gratification. This is your shade if you don't kill it now. Yeah, I don't know if a tree can survive getting all its leaves gone, but we'll see. All right, super milk's come in. I don't think it's come in yet, or are the calves keeping up with it?

I washed up this water bottle and I filled it full of our water. Can I drink out?

No. Are you thirsty? Yeah, just, just, just straight up drink some right out of the spigot. Yeah, all right, we'll go up to the farmhouse and get him a drink. Come on, that's it.

Here you go.

No, no, let's let little man drink. Did you find the torch, Josiah?

Yeah.

Right here. He's excited to do farm chores again because he's got a mountain bike. This is what we're dealing with. You didn't get stuck out there on the Mini X, huh? No, it has been dry.

You want the pond to begin here? Like, you can kind of see— look, see that bank right there? Do you like want it to go all down that?

We should take advantage of what's already wanting to be here. Pond this up, right? A little, a little pond in here. A little finger pond. Okay. Comes down into here, and maybe that's just a creek-ish. And this wants to be a pond too, and this wants to be a peninsula. And I feel like this, with a little bit of work, could be another peninsula, and that could be a really neat feature. Wow, look at that huge crawler!

It's got babies on it.

Did you put that on yet?

Yes.

Is that one having babies?

No, it has a ton of babies on it.

It does, it has a ton of babies. You weren't able to graze this. You clear that? Like, Jonah, we— the closest we came was right there, right? About. Yeah. And so now we've gained, I don't know, 24,000, 30,000 square feet. That's probably all together 4 or 5 more days of grazing in a year.

You want to turn this into a creek, that would not be impossible. We just have to bring some dirt in because we take this mud out and then put a lot of dirt right there.

That's true too. Our priority is grazing. We don't need a pond at the bottom of our property. Our priority is dairy and beef and lamb.

Yeah, but it would look—

we should probably do a creek.

No, wait, let me— let's talk about this.

This is your future. Is all the water coming from right there?

Yeah, way up here.

There may be a culvert under there, Jonah. That may be because we have a culvert from the road that we just think is just going into the pasture, but it might not be. It's gotten clogged up for sure because we can't find it. Not clogged up enough that it's not running. This might just be a swamp just because it's just uneven. It might not be a swamp swamp. I'm voting for a creek because if we just turn it into a creek, we don't need like water catchment, so we don't need a pond, and then we'll gain this whole thing as pasture. You voting for that too?

Yeah, it's like a— that's a paddock pretty much.

Rebecca, Rebecca, we're down here at this lower pond. It looks like it could just be a creek out of the property and we could gain a lot of pasture. You okay with that?

Yep, totally fine with it.

I'm gonna mess around right here a little bit, see if we can't find where all this water is coming from. Come right here, let's find the source. That's not it. No. Wow, gentle right there. Come on, it's coming out there, so be gentle that we don't hit a pipe. Hey, there's a culvert right there. We got the culvert. Let's see if that's a culvert.

Yeah.

All right, pull on it. Gushing out of there. If you dig this ditch down more, we'll be able to see what's going on. Go get a shovel and some rubber boots. We're gonna find that. Before we get boots and a shovel, big daddy's down here inspecting. Let's see what's going on. We don't have this cut. He needs it cut. She said, she said they have a saw. Problem is we can't get none of our concrete guys. We got 3 calls out. Can't get any of the concrete. Guys, come cut that and then process more concrete. Jose's gonna call his friend who has a concrete saw. That might at least get us there. He's talking to his friend, I guess. Did you get your guy to cut it?

Yeah, we got these 3, um, and then this little baby girl. She lost her claws.

Hey, look, she's got babies on her! That's incredible.

Yeah, that's why—

those are eggs. Good.

Papa, they're fighting. See, they're fighting. We don't want them to fight together.

No. Let's solve this mystery. I'm gonna find this pipe. We found this water source. It's a culvert about that big. Can you come over here and dig this ditch deeper so we can get below this culvert? You can see the culvert now. Once we get it draining, it should dry everything out. We'll be able to work with it a lot better. Culvert— the water is 2 inches from the top of it.

It needs to dig down so the water is more like 2 inches from the bottom of it.

Yeah, dig down a foot.

That's it. Look at it gushing out of there.

Well, we might have to mess with this end of things when the animals come through. See, she's about 500 feet away. That lower— what we thought was a swamp area, it's just a bogged up area. Just need to be cleaned out. We have runoff off the mountain, we have a culvert under the road. Hear that water? It's just dripping into our pasture. I've always assumed that's why it's so boggy down here in this. There is a black culvert the size that we found down there. Imagine my dad or somebody else— yep, there it is. There's water going into that. Why do we get swampy right there?

The pipe is crushed there.

It even gets kind of swampy right here, doesn't it? That culvert's way down there, so it's probably not a leak from that unless it's clogged up. I mean, It was clogged up at the end, Rebecca. This is when I wish my dad were alive for very practical purposes, or I would have asked him. Here's where we were, water coming in, and it's real swampy right here because in general I'm talking about this whole swath. Like maybe something's backed up and water's just spread out. Jonah unclogging the bottom of that drain and freeing it up could very well do that, so we'll just see before we go digging around. I don't know where Gideon and Lily went. I'll go find them so he has somebody to play with. Can you guys come play with Henry in the creek? Now he wants to spread his mud around.

Mud spread out like that?

Was this creek going downhill all the way to the end of our property?

Yeah, I built a little tiny pool, so there will be a little tiny pool.

He's got to get that out of here so the slope can come all the way down to the creek. That's going to be really rich soil, so we're just going to spread it around. See, I think he's smoothing it out. He needs to dig it out more. He wants it to be done. He wants this to be a couple-hour project and be done. So 6 inches to get to the bottom of that pipe. It's about half full. This was not a swamp.

No, it wasn't.

Why did it—

why did they leave? I wonder if they just ran out of pipe.

Bad drainage. Yeah, they ran out of money. Surprise pasture.

More digging.

There you go. Gentle slope away from the creek. Super muddy stuff though, but it's going to be pretty dry for the next 10 days as far as I can tell. That'll dry that out and then we can slope to our existing slope and we'll have a nice gentle slope down into this creek. No more bog! That's a big old glass of vodka. Homely looking lady coming in there buying— you bought not just one of these, I bought two.

Two.

I hate going to the liquor store.

She went in one time, had to buy this. This is making— this is for her making vanilla. I think you had four little kids in totes.

I was 30-something weeks pregnant and the ladies were like, what are you doing with that? And I said, I'm making vanilla.

You don't get questioned too much at ABC Store, but yeah, that day you did. You have vanilla beans in there.

Yes, and I've made vanilla with these beans, so I'm just— I'm reusing the beans.

How many times can you do that?

I'm not— I, I like change them every couple years.

Oh wow.

But I have a lot of vanilla going, so look, so I have— I like to let it sit like 6 months to a year.

Well then, how are we going to not touch that?

I'm gonna—

oh, I am cool. Why don't you put the date we can open it? That's really bad.

Well, I put the date that we started it. I know, and then I know. This vanilla—

you might want to hide it—

that I did, and this was, um, this over a year old that I—

oh, so we're good, we're good on vanilla on this one.

And then I have this one that I started in February of this year. I have more vanilla beans should I need them.

That's all you got to do to make vanilla?

Uh-huh.

Why does it cost so much? Because you have to let it sit for so long.

I think that's why.

Look, my little sweetheart trying something new. This is a special one. That is Grandma's handwritten banana bread recipe, and you're giving it a go. This is a family heirloom recipe. Grandma wrote that down with her hands.

Yes, but that was like a week or two ago.

Oh, Grandma did?

Yeah, I thought this was—

I thought this was banana bread you grew up with.

Well, before that, the recipe we got was out of that red and white check cookbook, Baker's Checkbook.

Wait a minute, I thought this was a family heirloom recipe. You should have let me go with it. It's a much better story. You and your truth, really?

No, we don't like— I don't like to lie. Then the one I ate growing up was from the Betty Crocker cookbook.

The red and white stripes. And that's legacy now.

Banana bread is like their family dessert, but not this recipe.

Yeah, I get it. Aw, you're sweet making this.

Wow.

How'd the banana bread turn out?

Good.

Good. It's still warm, that's clutch. You got to put lots of butter on it, Josie. Lots of butter on it. How you like my attic, Gideon?

Good.

Right here, there'll be plenty of space.

Stairs. Yeah, I don't know what code is. I don't know how close you can get to pipe. You might have to go look that up. Our bedroom's right there. Come out to the deck, we go down the stairs, we go check on people in the pole barn during the winter.

You can see everything.

Yeah, that's a view we haven't really been able to access on the farm yet, have we? This is neat. Downstairs. This will be where we think we're going to come in the most because the garage is right there. We come into the house here. Oh wait, we come through there, don't we?

This will be a door.

Yeah.

How you gonna feel using your garage as a garage?

It's gonna be so nice.

I guess that door is to access the basement, the shop.

Coat hook could be all right here.

Okay, so is this a mudroom right here?

This will be benches. Yes.

Exit through here, through the garage, and then—

this isn't a door.

Is this stair climb up and then over? Is that what's going on here?

It goes— it's like a couple, 3, I think. Okay, 3 stairs, a landing, and then stairs.

Mega cool room you got right there, babe.

I know, it's gonna be so nice.

Where's this thing gonna vent at?

I'm gonna do a mini split.

You got to do the CoolBox trick or not? Okay, house remodel is coming along. Let's check out what happened today with our job.

Good morning.

Look how dry. We're trucking out a bunch of water.

Well, it's a creek, Jonah.

You'll already be able to handle this. Look, he might be kissing those crutches goodbye tomorrow. He's going to the doctor. You guys think he's gonna release him from the crutches?

Nope.

She's got her fingers crossed.

I have— I'm scared because it's been a lot of bad news.

Yeah. Is this area all lower than that area, so can that start drying out?

Yeah.

Okay, good deal.

I think you'll need to go over there with a bow rake.

Look at all this pasture we're gaining, Rebecca. I mean, that may not seem like a lot too much, but we have a limited amount of pasture on this farm. We got a lot of steep woods. This is another paddock, which means 4 days a year more.

Yeah, I mean, it's— it might be—

yeah, that much less hay or that many more animals we can have.

Much less hay. I don't think we need any more animals to join them in the mud.

And now that— that's a hump there that can be Leveled out. You guys are filthy. Oh my goodness, you gotta sit right there. We're getting washed up. Yeah, I like it.