We Planted WAY too many onions :)

I keep forgetting to turn these nest boxes sideways. At least I clean it out very first thing in the morning, but some of these have gotten crushed. Not worth cleaning when we have 3 dozen a day. Turn those extra eggs into pork. We got a special visitor this morning, Paul from Seed Time, inventor of the Seed Time tool for planting our garden. It's the tool we used this year, and so many of y'all have used it. It's pretty amazing. Paul, how's it going this morning? Going well, man. How are you? Yeah, take some hay. Let's do it. Well, Paul, I guess we're chasing chickens. I left the gate open. You have chickens?

We don't.

So Paul, these chickens are next to— I advocate for chickens right next to a garden. Yeah, so there's our raised bed kitchen garden. So the chickens are on deep bedding, and we can get compost out of there, and then the garden excess the best, feeds the chickens. And Rebecca likes the vegetables, I like the chicken. So one system that works together, there's two different things.

I like it. Yeah, I realized after I told you that I was, uh, plant-based, I'd like— that's like telling— because you went on a carnivore diet. Are you still on? Are you still on it?

3 years.

We still love animals, and, and like, I love them too.

They taste delicious.

Yeah, we feel like it's part of the create, like God created creation.

I figured you were probably a Genesis 3 Christian, huh? You want to go back to when it was perfect.

Yeah, well, we wish it was perfect, right? There's definitely places in the world where you can't eat plant-based healthfully if you do not have a good variety of vegetables, have a good spread of a diet.

Yeah.

Um, God created animals too to be a blessing to humans, right?

Yeah.

We feel like the plant-based diet is the healthiest Um, but you have to also take into consideration context.

This is what happens when I don't get the eggs at night. They've got a bad habit of perching. Yeah, on the edge of the nest box. This is nature's greatest miracle. We turn those unedible eggs into bacon and sausage. So it's the same thing here, Paul, too. They advocate pigs next to a crop garden because you throw your waste to the pigs. They're on deep bedding a little bit every day to cover their manure. Pigs are really clean. They like to poop in one area. Do you smell anything? Smells good. That's another rumor— pigs stink. They don't, they don't stink. That's mismanagement. Mismanagement stinks. This is your territory.

Yeah, this is my, this is my spot over here.

There's an advantage to doing just one thing.

You can do it without animals, but animals speed up the process basically. Like, it just really speeds up the process of building that healthy soil.

I wouldn't know how to do it without them because so the compost they make me. You have a grandpa that was 96? Yes. Okay, we gotta ask, is he a Seventh-day Adventist vegetarian too? Yeah, he is. Dang, this is the easiest way to do it. Yeah, this is— you— somebody else has already guaranteed they got to this far. Yeah. And now we can easily go in and cultivate around them.

Now what we would often do is take them and like soak them in a little water with like fish emulsion or something.

Yeah. How long you been gardening? And guys, that's all he does. Come on, he's 7th Day Adventist. It's all he eats. This is somebody we can trust for our gardening. Paul, you use silage tarps?

Yeah, we do.

That's where it's at.

Where'd you get this one from?

Farmer's Friends.

Yeah, so that's my cousin.

Oh, it is?

Yeah, Jonathan.

Jonathan is the guy I talked to. They're so cool out there, man. Can you see if that's our smallest one? What do you use to mark your rows?

Paul, for planting, we get Johnny's, um, 30-inch bed rake. Oh, okay, little pieces of PEX pipe.

Okay, that's the big one, bro. Okay, yeah, Jonas got the right one. Paul had an idea to do fish emulsion in our water soak. I think we might have some, but I think Annie's probably the only one knows where that is. Do you know where, uh, Rebecca's all her, uh, compost tea stuff is? If we have a little fish emulsion somewhere. Electric fish? No, uh, fish. What did I say?

Emulsion?

Yeah, it sounded like you said electric fish. Maybe I did. What did I say, Austin? Stahl. Stahl. Stahl fish. She found it. Well, she knew right where it was. I found a box. Let's start with this one. Do we have any in there?

Got some calcium.

Look, here we go. Fish emulsion.

I'm like, it's one of these two boxes.

So wait, I didn't see how much you put in there. How much?

You know, I just dumped it in. It was like, I don't know, a couple tablespoons.

This is just a way to get these watered without having to water the weeds. Let me stir this up so that we can see the gritter. So they want to flatten this out a little bit so that— hold on— so they can see the, see the gritter. Okay, but I'm afraid it's going to stir up all the weed seeds.

It is true, if you flatten it out, it may stir up. So the, the weeds that are going to sprout are like in the top half inch of soil or so. So anything that you go— yeah, you know, a lot of those will have sprouted already and died. Yeah, that's because of the size chart. I wouldn't be too concerned about just leveling it off a little bit, but I wouldn't like dig it.

And I'm for doing what these kids want to do, even if it's wrong, because they need to take responsibility and take over eventually. So I'm just like, okay, we'll learn. Yeah, if we stir it too much, you, you get the weeds coming up. Jonah is wanting to be able to see our gritter. He's right. If it's not to a certain point, it's hard to see our markings from this. This is telling us where to plant things. All right. Yeah, it's hard to see with the bed leveled— with the bed or unlevel. So ideally we'll do that then before we cover it with size of tarp. What cultivating tool do you like to use then?

Actually, the linear hoe that you were just showing me, that's one of my favorites.

Yeah, push down on it. There you go. We're planting 4 across, so it would go 1, 2, 3. You'll do it, just poke it in there. These onion starts are handy because look, they're already 4 weeks ahead of any weeds, so if any weeds do come up, we can get them with our Kalenior hoe. Our internet went down, so can you get seed time offline? Not yet, not yet. He's like, you're gonna ask me the second question you ask me, I'm not gonna be able to deliver. Okay, so we have a lot of people that ask that. Well, here's why. Yeah, our internet went down. Yeah. And we're like, dang, where are we supposed to plant the potatoes? I think the potatoes are supposed to go right next to the garlic. Yeah. And that's where we planted them. The redeeming value of Seed Dime is when the internet comes back on, we can just—

it's super flexible. The goal is to make it where there's like an offline version that you can take out and, and do stuff, and then when it comes back online, it'll sync back to your plan.

We are quitting the grocery store, I think, come June, so it's going to be very important that these onions go because I— well, I love— I don't eat very many vegetables. Onions is one of those vegetables. Leave it to Jonah to get the tool. I think Jonah would figure out how to garden with a Mini-X if I'd let him. That's a good idea, Paul. Do you think these onions will hold— handle a little frost, or should we put a low tunnel over them?

They can probably handle a little frost. I would— the more you can protect them, the better they'll grow. I mean, the faster they'll grow.

Low tunnel. For the low tunnel, these onions are cold hardy enough that they probably would have made it, but they are going to grow better under this warmth and under this protection, and it wasn't that much harder though. Give them some protection. How hot's too hot for an Agribond?

Yeah, we probably don't even have to be putting it on right now. You probably only want to put it on at night.

We planted in the coldest part of the day. We just planted 400 onions. Wait, 50— let's say there's 50 weeks in a year, that'd give us 8 onions a week. Don't know if they'll last a whole year. Even in the root cellar. So cut that in half, 16 onions a week. She might have a little went overboard. A crazy plant lady.

If you plant 400 onions for 7 people, that's just to go through the fall planting.

If we planted 400 onions and they last 6 months, say that's 16 onions a week. Well, this is the thing.

Can you guarantee that your chickens are going to stay out of my onions?

Oh, I know. Oh, touche. I'm gonna go. I gotta go do the podcast. Podcast time. That's got us ready. Paul, you did good.

This has been great, Justin. Yeah, yeah.

Yes, I will feed you, but all I have is meat. Good meeting with Paul. We're using his software tool this year. To plant our garden, have really enjoyed it. If you guys are interested in that, he does have a free version. I'll leave the link for it down in the description. It's looking so good. I think the painters are done with the outside, just waiting for the drywallers to wrap up. Sean the framer is here. We're keeping things moving with this rebuild. Okay, he said he's gonna get you in by your birthday, even though you have to put plywood on the counters. Your birthday is May 6th. There's a contents manager here. He takes inventory of the damage. The cabin was our home away from home while we build our homestead dream house, and then we had a grease fire. They ripped out carpet and threw it out the window. I guess we're going for it. They're checking out the carpet. It's getting extra in here. They're taking out the carpet. There's a good snake rock. This has turned into something gigantic. It's surreal. All our stuff is in these little boxes, and somehow we're living without it right now, barely. Gideon, can you go get me some garlic? Where is it? The root cellar. All right, Lily, we're gonna shine. We've made it to the afternoon. We're about to have salmon. The best fish in the world. Fish is a real quick— oh, I forgot to thaw something out. You can thaw out fish really quick. You can even cook it from frozen. The Wild Alaskan Company, not sponsored, just Good stuff. I just realized those people are cleaning every single individual thing. They're boxing it up. I don't know if it would make sense for us to go over there and unbox and put everything back. I kind of feel like they're packing for us. Then either they put it back or we put it back, but we might say don't do it, we're moving. Can we, can we last? Can we last in this house for 2 months? If the boys sleep in a tent, yes. This is next. Not, not really working. Man, you're the hero. You stepped it up. Take inventory of all our supplements. Uh, some. No, I have more homework to do here. I had no idea what happened when they said you got to disregard any open supplements. What do you guys think about staying here? It doesn't make sense for us to go back because then we're gonna have to unpack. Kids table, adult table. Been a good week, y'all. Bonus video this week, another podcast coming out tomorrow. See you then. Happy day.