What To Do in April for 2026 Homestead Success

Oh, hey, uh, I'm going live. We're gonna try this. We're gonna try this again. We tried this a few weeks ago and I had to step away for a bit of emergency. Am I live? Can somebody comment? Let's see what I'm live to. Let me get it going to Instagram. Give me a minute. All right, just went live to Instagram, and we're going live to Abundance Plus. You definitely, if you're in Abundance Plus, watch from there because that's where the after-party will be. If you're not, you want to join before the end and you can come to the after-party. You can enable those. Yeah. All right, looks like we're live to all places. I do want to see if we can't get some chats rolling in. Let's give it a few minutes for some people. Oh look, heck yeah, I can see y'all's comments. What do you guys want to do today? I've got all kinds of things planned. We're going to talk about farm, we're going to talk about family, a little bit of faith even, uh, fitness, and hopefully a little bit of fun. Thank you. I didn't tell anybody about this because I'm just gonna try it. The, the, the first time I tried it a couple of weeks ago, we had an emergency. We had a brush fire get out of hand and I had to go help with that. 100 Kids and Dogs. Lisa, welcome. We got YouTube coming in, we got Instagram coming in. Steven, Susan, you guys come with, come with questions. I know it's maybe a weird time, Wednesday, but that works for me. You know, I've been at potlucks on Wednesday with 5 other families as if it were a Saturday and Sunday and thought, it's nice to be a homesteader, you know. And this, this kind of stuff could even happen on Wednesday, so Hopefully you can put South Africa, man. I'm going near you soon. I'm going to Eswatini. Oh my God, help me. Formerly Swaziland. Okay, we got Zix. I'm doing good, Jeannie. Thank you. Thank you for asking. We're gonna just let a few more people roll in. Yeah, I tried this, it was a disaster, and so I've gotten the guts to try it again. I've got a whole— we got 15-minute increments, time blocks, talking about all kinds of different things. One of them in which, what should we be doing in April? Or perhaps, what am I doing in April? What are you doing in April? A lot of people saying where they're from. Why don't you go ahead and say What are you doing in April? It's right at 2. I'm gonna aim— should I say this? I'm gonna aim to do these on Wednesday. Our new YouTube posting schedule: a learning video on Monday, a live on Wednesday, and then a— we're gonna try a, a vlog on Friday, but instead of it being a daily vlog, it's pretty much that week. So I think it'll have bigger payoffs. I think they'll be longer. I think it could be something— I would hope that it could be something that you plan on watching together as a family over the weekend. It would be that significant that it would be 20 minutes to even an hour long. This one we're filming this week that will come out next week, it's on moving our greenhouse, our 16-foot by 10-foot greenhouse from down below to way up here into the front yard, all for the beautiful one. And Tony, oh, I have farm also, breadwinner, 3 kids, wife. I have a job. How do I transition and live fully off the farm financially? Well, you got to have a job. You got to have a job, Tony. Oh, so if you want to have a market farm, which is different than homesteading, Very different. Homesteading is providing some of your own food for your family, maybe most of it, maybe all of it if you're hardcore. But you still have to bring in income. You still have to buy feed. You still have to buy— you have your shelter, you probably have electricity, you have these bills, you have cars, you have insurance. So you have to, you have to earn, you have to earn a living. I, I recommend entrepreneurship. It's never been as easy, especially with The AI tools today and the Agentic AI tools, you could whip out a business plan in a matter of seconds. You could get marketing plans and suggestions and things like that. Never has it been a bigger opportunity to create content online or content in period and start a business around that or any kind of other home-based business. You could ask your favorite AI chatbot, what are some home-based businesses ideas that you could start. Tell it a little bit about yourself and see what it comes up with. You might be surprised. Um, let's just, um, I'm gonna ask perplexity right now. All right, I've got somebody in my audience. I'm live. They're wanting to live at home full-time. They want to homestead. And so please give us 13 ideas on what they might, could do as an at-home income generation. How about that? Okay, and while we're searching this, you guys have any advice for him? I have a content creation for putting content online. And then selling products around that. For example, Abundance Plus is one of those. So we have this, we'll be online here free, for free for 45 minutes, and then we'll have to, we'll have an after party in Abundance Plus, and that is a paid membership area. Not only will you get the more intimate after hours, you get access to me in a social community, also to others, like-minded folks. You get learning videos, inspirational videos. Okay. They are telling us farm products they can sell. Okay, no, we don't want that. Of course, this Perplexity gave me 10 ideas that you could do from the farm, which is interesting, which it might be worth reading because that's, that's a lot of times what you people want when you ask that. You want to know how you can earn a living from the farm. Of course, eggs, meat, herd shares. If you go that direction, I would suggest Joel Salatin's Pastured Poultry Profit and start with that. Start with that blueprint, go from there. Start small, move up. Don't quit your day job yet. Um, seedlings— you could grow, uh, we're growing our seeds from scratch right now for ourselves. You could grow those to sell. There's some good money in that. Produce boxes, plant starts. Okay, number 3, value-added foods, uh, value-added foods like cottage foods, pickles, jams, tea blends. And that, that way you can earn more, you can have more margin. You guys are rolling in the questions, that's great. Okay, soaps, salves, candles, body products. Okay, number 5, hatching eggs. And day-old chicks. You could also do that too, where you ship hatching eggs. We got a friend who's doing that, shipping all over the US just fertilized eggs for people to hatch themselves. You could do poults, you know, chicks. You could raise chicks, and when they are near, you know, out of the brooder stage, you could sell them as that and get more for them. There's workshop tours, on-farm experience, homestead consulting and design, renting space. Skill-based services, uh, online content-based income. One, YouTube, blogging, podcasting. You know, that would be Substack nowadays for blogging. Digital products, ebook courses, and printables. So this is more along the line of what I do. But let's do this, um, well, give us 12 ideas that are non-farm related, just an inside job that might take 20 hours a week and give a good income. All right, let me read some comments while it's thinking. How do I keep plants alive? I have a black thumb. Mostly, uh, water them, weed them, put them near the house. How about that one? You're probably missing that one. If you put them on the way out from your door to the car, it's hard to miss them. And, and, and it's hard not to minister to them. But plants are hard, guys. Gardening is hard. So much more harder than animal husbandry and animals. It takes more calories to tend the garden than you'll get from the garden. It's garnish. It should be garnish for the meat, the nutrient-dense stuff, complementary, so you don't get tired of the meat. Creative content skills, freelance writing and copywriting. Let's pretend that one of these resonate with you. Video editing for creators. Could you learn how to edit and become a video editor? Graphic design, Canva work. Ooh, now you could operate AI for people, those who are more hesitant. You could research for people. Social media management, virtual assistant for entrepreneurs, customer support, chat, email. You know, there's English as a second language too. I've known some people get up really early and do English as a second language. Online tutoring and teaching. There you go. Okay, there's a bunch. I don't need to read all these, but say you picked one. Say, okay, I'd be interested in bookkeeping or basic accounting support. Now that might be seasonal, maybe at the wrong time too, because everybody's wanting to pay their taxes by April 1st, April 15th. But I do know a farmer who's just getting started and he still has his tax business. And yeah, it's intense till April 15th, but then it frees up. So that early April time could be intense, but you just pursue that and you say, hey, I'm interested. Then you reply and say, I'm interested in this one. Give me a business idea for it or a business plan. Give me a 30-day business plan to get this thing started. And by the way, I have zero money. Put that in, see what happens. How do you keep the deer out of your garden? Premier One has a really tall deer net. That you could put around there. Cape Town, South Africa, I'm going to your neck of the woods. Um, going to do a per— going to do a permaculture consult there. And let's see. All right. Oh, here's my notes. Where are we at? Okay, so we're going to hang here about 45 minutes and then Feel free to ask your questions. I'm gonna rant and then I'll hopefully look down and this will be interactive. That would be the advantage of live, wouldn't it? So welcome, after-party at Abundance Plus where we go a little more intimate. We'll get deeper into Q&A. So hey, for those watching on Abundance Plus, I hope it's working. Maybe I should take a minute and check that. So everybody is introducing— why don't everybody say where you're from and what the temperature is there, and I will just double-check that we're streaming to Abundance Plus. Somebody say something from Abundance Plus, see if it comes up. All right, we're there. We're on Abundance Plus. Cool. Say, say, say something to him. Okay, coming back. Let's do this. All right. Hey, Desert Streams, Southeast Missouri. We got people from— oh my gosh, Mm— Malanga. Desert Streams in Georgia. It is hot. South Carolina 83, Houston 80. Look at this, look at this, spring is here. Nashville 75, uh, Lorne, Mesquite 82. Okay, let's get going. Let's give, uh, I gave the YouTube update, farm update, uh, and what to plant in April. So my farming update would be included in the things that we ought to be thinking about planting in April. First of all, before the leaves come on in many places, it's time to mark your territory. We roamed the boundary of our property, just reestablishing where our property line is. It's wild and woolly and, and, and gnarly here in the mountains of western North Carolina. Um, Okay, Rewilder, you're looking for it on Abundance Plus. Hmm, I wonder if I can make it a highlight. It's, it's, it's not coming up for you. Um, yeah, I should figure out how to highlight that. Let's do a content highlight. There we go. All right, try to refresh and see if it comes up as a content highlight. Let me see if that works. Because those of you, you'd probably rather watch this on Abundance Plus and then you don't have to, then you can just streamline into the, uh, the after party. Yeah, there it is. It's there. It's on front and center as soon as you're in Abundance Plus. So refresh. Thank you. Thank you for pointing that out. I'll add that to the workflow. Yeah, Happy Passover. Anybody doing Passover tonight? We got the lamb thawed out, ready to go. What are we going to do in April? Well, we're going to mark the boundary before the leaves come in. Any clearing, any last minute, uh, forest clearing you want to do, it's a lot easier to do before all the brambles come in. That reminds me, I need to go cut the brambles before they get crazy on our field. I need to put that on my tomorrow list, basically. And then I'm glad I'm going over this. This might be more for me than you. Hey, have you not planned your seeds? You know, check out SeedTime. It's a great planning tool, good for that. I think Rebecca might be done with that. If not, we're getting pretty close. At least she's gotten some— hey, hey, Rewilder found it! See if you can comment from there, Rewilder, and see if it, see if it I'd like to see if it pops up here in my overall comments. See, I can see who's coming from YouTube, Instagram, or wherever. It'd be cool if I could see if it's from Abundance Plus and make sure I get to them. So that would be another thing. Okay, spring cleaning, sell stuff is top of my list. I just don't want to go through my used stuff and sell it. I just keep putting that at the bottom of my to-do list. It's not a terrible idea. Um, build garden beds. Next week we are going to be— or mending garden beds. Next week we are going to be mending the raised beds from Homestead Builds, the book, uh, the plans and the raised beds. After what, uh, 8 years, they're rotting and we need to replace a corner and some of the boards. And we will be doing that next week. It's also time to— I see you, I see you, Rewilder, starting seeds right now. Try commenting on Abundance Plus. Did it work for you through Abundance Plus? You're still doing it through YouTube. Um, restarted seeds, and I'll get on that. Yeah, cold hardy crops, so, um, Greens, uh, spinach, kale if you do it, lettuce, uh, I guess, yeah. And beyond the, beyond the greens, carrots, you would want to direct sow those. Beets, you could start those. Beets, turnips, peas, or bunching onions. That's time to plant those. Maybe potatoes. I wonder if we've missed our potato planting. I need to ask Rebecca about this. Seems like we should have already— we should have already planted our potatoes. All right, but it's not too late. If, if we haven't, we're going to make sure we get them and we're going to plant our potatoes. What's my motto? Just plant. Yeah. Hey, put in what you're planting, guys. Thank you, Nitro. Yay, here we are! Nikki, what did you find out? What ideas did you find out for planting? Um, I listed off all the ones I can think of off the dome and what we personally have planted. Well, we have planted cabbages, collards, so the brassicas, broccoli. Our broccoli didn't germinate too well. For those of you gardening and wanting tips, I'll tell you this: it's hard. Just keep going at it. And do know this, One year your broccoli will do really well and your potatoes won't, vice versa. It seems like there's always a plethora of things that do well and sometimes many things that don't, and it just wasn't that year. And just know that gardening's tough. You would have to really just be all about it for it to be terribly— uh, oh, um, yeah, okay, you had to be all about it to be terribly successful. And homesteaders are generally diversified, aren't we? And that's why, okay, it's sort of okay if the broccoli doesn't work because all the other things did, or most of the other things did. And, you know, even if the category of the garden wasn't so great, you still have various amounts of livestock. Probably many of you have chickens, but you might have pigs, you might have sheep, you might have cows. And so we have this diversity that spreads the risk, doesn't it? Okay, Rewilder, I don't have that subscription. Hopefully someone else comments in there. Yeah, yeah, thank you. I thought you were wanting to log on on Abundance Plus, so no worries. Anybody in Abundance Plus will— this live will carry on over after the— after what, 2:45? We'll, we'll do the after party there. Those who want to go there, it's a free trial. We'll see you there. But more free content here. We've talked about what we're gonna plant. Talk in the chat. Hey chat, speak up, what are you planting right now or in April? Maybe I missed it, or maybe it's the same. Baba says chicken dance. Um, also have him here. I want to say projects, but it might be too late. April might be getting too busy, but maybe not for you. Maybe you aren't getting really wound up. You know, chances are, last possible frost date— well, for us it's May 10th. So, you know, I see a lot of people rearing up and getting spring fever, and I think they're making a mistake, especially with ordering their chickens early. If you're getting chicks and you're just ordering one batch of chicks in the season, don't push it. Wait, wait, and have them here no sooner than 3 weeks before your average last possible frost date. So if your last possible frost date is like mine, Zone 7 in North Carolina, that's May 10th. So that would mean you don't want your chicks no sooner than, what, 3 weeks before that, so middle-ish of April, so that when those chicks are 3 weeks old, you're setting them out and there's not going to be any frost, it's even better if you maybe just wait till— not even get them as chicks until they're the last possible frost date. You know, it also depends on too if you're hot. There's some people here from Texas, uh, yeah, you definitely want to get them right there, right then, uh, in that early spring so it doesn't get too hot for them as they grow. So let me look at your question. Do we have any people talking about the plants? I don't think so. You guys are full of other questions though. Oh, somebody planted a peach tree. Oh yeah, here we go. Uh, I should probably mention your name. Janine, you planted peach tree. Night Trail started seeds from tomatoes, zucchini. Forgot to mention. Okay, so I was going to get to that too. Some of these heat-loving crops— zucchini, tomatoes, peppers— you're going to put them in your greenhouse for 4 to 6 weeks And that can— I might— we are live and Henry is needing me, so I might check and see what he's needing. Everybody feel free to comment other things you are planting or doing in April. Give me one second. Oh wow. It's starting to rain. We need that. Okay, let's see what you guys said while I was gone. Um, and who was I reading? You guys are blowing it up. Thank you. Okay, Night— Night Owl, sorry if I'm getting your name wrong. Uh, Peppers and Peas: been removing all the silage tarps and broad forking all the beds. Good idea. I would also say, yeah, I meant say I'm talking about building raised beds and rebuilding raised beds. I'm, it's, I'm also talking about building the garden beds, the, the soil beds. So in the crop gardens, it's time, if you didn't in the fall, to go ahead and add compost, reshape those, add compost to those, and get those going. I try, Nikki, Nick I tried cool weather crops and planted seeds last week in Zone 6 and nothing has popped yet. All right. Hey Sean, April is when I start tomatoes indoors, Zone 5A, Minnesota. Boy, you're jumping on it. I have a cold frame outdoors with kale, chard, lettuce, beets, kohlrabi, broccoli, and we're gonna plant onions and potatoes in a few weeks. This is good. This is good to see what different people are planting in different zones. Terrell, there you go. Sorry, sorry, Terrell, that's— I've been butchering your name. Here we go. Direct sowed cilantro and parsley. Five Browns has June 1st is last frost date. Whoa, where are you, Maine? Oh, that's fun. We are— Katie, Caitlin, we are mulching our garden with raw sheep wool this year. I like it. I've mulched my garden with chicken feathers after a butchering, but that'd be a good use for raw sheep wool, wouldn't it? You have to let me know how it goes. Okay, let's keep the show going. That's farm. Now let's transition to family talk. Let's talk about kids' jobs. So in the chat, tell me what your kids are up to. I've noticed one cool thing about this is we have been making content for 10 years now, and when we started Everybody was so young. I was thinking about— I was speaking to a 35-year-old man with 2 kids, but what ended up happening is the 35-year-old man's wife came along and saw the show and was like, oh, this is interesting. And then the whole— it ended up being a family-friendly show, so a lot of people got together and just watched it as a family. And it's evolved. I noticed when we did a Florida meetup this winter that a lot of the people are in the life stage we are. In 2017, when we're traveling on the Great American Farm Tour doing all kinds of meetups, so many people in our life stage with really young kids. But now, I don't know, many of you guys are maturing and growing up with me, and now I'm seeing a lot of families with teens. Now, maybe I didn't notice them before. It's kind of like if you get a— if you go get a new used Ford F-250, suddenly you see them everywhere. You know, you didn't notice them before. But, so maybe that was it, but I would like to think that y'all are growing with me. Yeah, see, Danielle, Danielle, been watching for 10 years. See, we were growing up together, aren't we? So thank you all for those of you who have been subscribed for so long and hung with us, and thank you even for hanging with us now. And, you know, with the way the platform is changing and our own family is changing the way we're producing content, which is fair enough to say that I mentioned earlier the new schedule on YouTube: Monday learning video, Wednesday live, uh, and then Friday the vlog. But it's a bigger, longer story, so generally from a week's worth of content instead of just a day. So I think, I think it'll fly good. I think it'll have a nice it'll have a better overarching story and have a nice payoff at the end. Of course, then I'm going in on Shorts right now. I'm posting a Short every day, an Instagram Reel every day. That's where they— what happened on YouTube 3 months ago is they changed the home page. Have you ever noticed now that you log into YouTube, only, only 2 long forms are there and the rest are Shorts? Okay, it used to be it was 10 long forms, so A lot of people were losing views, 30 to 50%, and we fell into that category. And it shifted. YouTube is now rewarding less frequent posts because it promotes what you do post for longer, so 2, 3 days. So if you post back to back, your posts are just competing with each other. So, so McNugget is saying shorts are the way to go. I've seen— yeah, I'm going— I don't necessarily like to consume shorts as much, but I think they can still be impactful and helpful. And, um, for example, we just did a short on the Amish, what I learned from them, and it got— it was popular. I think people are interested in that, and it's hopefully helping some people. So we're doing a short every day, we're doing an Instagram Reel every day. Posting quasi on X every once in a while. Oh, I went in on Substack, starting to write Substack articles, 1 to 2 a week, more regular notes. And so just like with the homestead, we're diversifying a bit and changing. It's always changing. You are always changing in farming, evolving, and in business and in content creation and just staying relevant, staying helpful, hopefully. Uh, I like a 45-minute video, she, uh, Terrell says. Yeah, and but TikTok has killed people's attention span. I still think there's a place for it. YouTube videos are doing well in the 20 to 30-minute range. And you know why that is? That's something that's changed too somewhat recently, is now YouTube has replaced TV. And people are watching it on TV, literally. So they want a 20-minute— that's what shows were. They were actually 20 minutes. They were in a 30-minute time slot because you had to listen to 8 minutes of ads. But people are fine now with a 30-minute, 1-hour show. And I think it's good what YouTube has done, as much as it may have hurt us temporarily, is if somebody doesn't have much time, they just have a few minutes, they could open the YouTube app and consume some Shorts. But if they want to— if they think about it, if they want to sit down for 20 or 30 minutes with your family, which hopefully you'll do Friday when our special comes out, you know, we'll put a special out each Friday, a story-oriented special of what we're doing on the homestead. You could sit down with your family and you don't mind pulling up the app and scrolling past the Shorts or even searching my name for the video and watching it, hopefully getting an in a habit. We're weighing in on the shorts. What do y'all think? You like them or hate them? Some people like them. Yeah, go find me, Rewilder. Go find me on Substack. I'm called The Rooted Man, or you could probably find me with Justin Rhodes. Do check us out. I could probably link it here if you want. Find it and link it for me there in chat. And those that are on YouTube could check it out, but those who are on Instagram The Rooted Man. That's easy to remember because I wrote a book called The Rooted Life. We had a show called Rooted, so Rooted Man. And that's gonna go deeper, you know. If the show is— if this public show is more educational, immersion learning, follow us along type of stuff, the— so it's the heart, then The Substack is the soul. Go way deeper there. Okay, some of you are no shorts for me. I, I don't really like to consume the short form. One thing tricky about is if you do learn something valuable from it, you got to watch out for this. If you learn something valuable, you tend to just keep scrolling and doesn't really sink in. So here we go, we got Jess Run likes shorts. I like Shorts, but full length will always be my favorite. See, so I think people will be mixing it. I think when they have short amount of time, they'll watch the Shorts. They're going to be easily accessible on YouTube now. And then when you want to go longer, you don't mind scrolling a little bit and looking for what it's recommending you or searching. Shorts are the toilet, long form is the couch. Yeah, I like that. I can relate to that. You red flagging that phone? Okay, what are your kids doing? We got a lot onto the shorts. So what do you, what are you putting your kids to? My kids, that you can hear it, they're drilling. Somebody's drilling downstairs. They're making some sort of bench. Jonah was running the, uh, oh, he was, he was, uh, they had more free time in the afternoon. He was fixing up his soccer field. You know, the hurricane washed away our soccer field, but we've built it back with animal power, with putting some grading in, planting seed, planting cover crops, running the animals through it. Now he just went out there and mowed it and he's filling in some of the— there's some divots. I like to, as Joel Salatin would call them, commas on the farm. You know, that's probably one of our very premium pieces of pasture, but we're sacrificing it for the soccer field so they can have fun and can also have fun on the farm. Jonah, also, it's fun having teenagers, isn't it? For you young people, maybe I'll have to do a Substack on this sometime. But you can— you don't have to accept this notion that the teens are going to rebel. You don't have to. That doesn't have to be your family culture. You're— see, you have to opt in to the culture around you. It feels like you don't. It feels like you're just immersed in it, but you actually do have that choice. And one of those things you can opt out as is the children rebel and the teenage years are the awful years. No, they can, they can be the best years because when a child is young, they take more than they give, don't they? When they're little babies, they can do absolutely nothing. They can't even hold their own head up. They can't even— you gotta bring, you know, you gotta bring the, the lady has to bring the child to the breast to nurse, to feed it. Can he, you know, he's getting changed. And then as the child gets older, they become— they, they— there comes a point where they're giving more, uh, about the same as they're taking. I don't know, 8? Depends on the kid, depends on the kid. And then all kids are different. And then there comes a point, 12, uh, and it may— firstborns, you might get a lot sooner. That's the case with Jonah. 12, maybe they, they are giving more than they take. And so the teenage years can be the most wonderful years. Now they're the most complicated and giving me the most stress for sure. I mean, I get stomach pains from all the, you know, um, the arguing they do and talking back and all this stuff. It's a different kind of stress than when they're little, and it's more of a physical stress, isn't it? You're just exhausted. You're not sleeping through the night. You're having to do everything for them. Teens, they can do things for themselves, including think for themselves, which can sometimes be difficult, can't it? But we want our kids to question authority, don't we? I question authority. I don't want them just to succumb to anything. Here we're talking about questioning the norm and the culture. We want them to question authority. So who's going to be the— how are they going to get some practice? I mean, you're their first authority. So I have to let that go sometimes, you know, just being a stringent leader, no talk back, you know, because I do want— I do appreciate them questioning, but it can be stressful. Uh, Robin thinks, uh, most firstborns always rebel. I know I did, but I came back. Good for you. I'm glad you're back. Hopefully it can be different with your family, and hopefully you don't automatically assume that culture in your family, and you assume and strive and change, uh, the way the child is raised and make change because it doesn't have to be. I'm not saying there's a guarantee. And who am I to talk? I only have one 18-year-old and they go 18, 16, 12. And I'm fully aware that I have so many that could still rebel. So I've learned the more, the more I age, the less I know. All right. For example, Jonah, In his teenage years, we had a manure spreader breakdown this week. I had no idea. It's just not my wheelhouse how to fix it. And if I probably— I could figure it out, but it would just stress me out. I'm working on this greenhouse project. We moved the greenhouse from where it was all the way up to the front yard. It's been intense. I wanted to get it done this week so I could have a good one vlog then, and that, that will come out the end of next week. Next Friday, finishing it. You know, I don't want to have one of these endings where it doesn't get finished. I want a nice bale. This manure spreader broke down and Jonas just went to town fixing it, and he just— he, he thinks different. He's got this mechanical mind. And so it is about tapping the, the youths and the people of your families, whether you're in business or in your family, tapping everybody's strengths and weakness. So, and Jonah didn't really love it, but he didn't hate it as much as I would have. So we put him on that and he probably would have hated what we were doing on the greenhouse, which was a lot of different kinds of thinking and technical work that he wouldn't have been into. And a lot of times it's good when these kids are this age that you do let go of, oh, we all got to work together and you start saying, hey, it's farm project time. What would you like to do to advance the farm? And it may not even be what you would choose for them, but you're letting them take ownership and have autonomy, and they'll appreciate you for that. And then that's when work feels like play, doesn't it? I like working now, but I remember when my dad made me work when I was a kid. He worked— he worked— why do we say work like a dog? He worked like a dog. No, no, dogs don't work hard. Chickens work hard. Dawn till dusk, chickens work. My dad worked like a chicken. And so he's out there working and I'm thinking, and he seemed like he's having a good time. I said, Dad, you like working? He said, yeah, I love it. You always have? Yeah. Now, did he always love it? Well, maybe his parents let him have autonomy and he could do the work he wanted to do. Because I think now that I'm an adult and I love work now, maybe it's because I matured and I see the purpose and I find meaning in it. When you're a kid, you find more purpose and meaning in play, don't you? And then, but now as an adult, if you choose it, it really is fun. I mean, this week I feel so privileged to be able to go out there and just work on moving this greenhouse, you know, make the beautiful one smile. She wants it up from where it was. I'm going to make that happen. And it's been a week-long project working in the mornings. It's not full, full days. Our basic work days are, you know, work in the morning, have lunch, and then do office hours in the afternoon. Some people were asking earlier, how do you, how do you make an income on farm? That's not a terrible idea, and it's never been easier. Okay, we were just on the verge of it 10 years ago, and I was able to get on it at the beginning with my content creation business. But now with the tools available today, it's never been easier to have that sort of lifestyle where you're working on the farm half a day, a quarter of a day, and then you put in some office hours. And if you do the right stuff at both those increments, you'll get towards your goal. Now, if you do silly stuff, it's not going to pay off for you. You have to— you have this big list of all these things you want to do. You do have to prioritize the most important things and then go from there. So Uh, where was I going with that? That's not even on my notes. I should probably take a little few questions and we're going to get more into a spiritual slash faith aspect of things, and then we'll jump over on Abundance Plus here in about 7 minutes. So if you're not on Abundance Plus and want to give it a try for learning videos, access to me— if you're at the premium level, you can DM me. I'm in the community every day answering people's questions. And we've got inspirational shows you can watch on TV. You can cast them to TV from your phone, or you can get the Abundance Plus app on TV. It's coming to Samsung Smart TV, and it's on Roku and Apple, whatever that one's called. Is it Apple TV? How do you deal with burnout? Yeah, that's good. That'll transition us to the faith spiritual aspect. Thank you, Veracy Humphrey. Um, I've got 6 minutes to cover that. Um, let me do— you know what, I'm gonna give you the short answer and then we'll go deep with that in the after hours. But let me first answer anybody else's questions here as we're wrapping up the public hour. Uh, livestock guardian dogs, cattle dogs work hard. My poodles, life of lazy leisure. That's right. Uh, somebody agrees with me to question authority. If we think about it that way, we're all, we're all kind of like, yeah, question authority. I got a thumbs down, I just noticed. I wonder what they thumbs down. Maybe that part where I talk about questioning authority, because I know people, sure, some people really don't like it when they hear the kids talk back to me on the vlog. But you ain't heard nothing because, uh Uh, oh yeah, look, Rewilder, the kids were— your kids were kids when you started watching us. Yes, we've grown up together, haven't we? Oh, you're going to sleep, man. You must be in Africa. Yep, good for you. Full day in Africa. Okay, always using— okay, so let me answer, um, Varsi Humphrey's question, and we'll go more deeply in Abundance Plus. So short answer, how do you deal with burnout? It's, it's of course on the surface you, you have— you can get into homesteading thinking your life's going to be better and you make it worse, for one. Let's talk about that, because you're just tacking on one other thing and you're going to become more stressful. And de-stressing has got to be the most important thing. And that's the life lesson I'm, I'm learning right now as I kind of underlying stomach pain, I believe, from stress. So we have to learn how to manage that. And what am I doing to do that? And what do people do? First of all, you have guardrails, you have time boxes, so you don't sacrifice sleep. You make sure you get an 8, 9 hours of sleep, more sleep in the winter than the summer. You are making sure you have meals with your family. What is success other than just enjoying the moment that is a meal together with the family? If you're always stressed out, what's the point? And how you live your days is how you live your life. But you have these guardrails, you have these things that you need to guard for sure. A day of rest once a week. A night, enough sleep, shutting down at night. So after supper, we're pretty much on our way and we have an early supper at 5. Then we're walking after supper and starting, we take turns bathing and then sauna and then in the bed by 9, 9:30, and usually honking our shoes by 9:30 or 10, you know, snoring. These are good questions. And then, uh, there's a possibility of downsizing. But this is what I would say: don't blame homesteading for the stress that is your life, that is your busy life. If you want to pick up homesteading, cut something else out. Cut out individual sports for the kids. Do something together instead. All of you go hiking. Put a soccer field on your farm and invite kids over, or you guys play together. Do everything from home, get a job that you can do from home, whether it's working for somebody else from home or being entrepreneurial. That might be what you do first is explore that and get the side hustle until it can be a more fuller hustle and do that home. So in the immediate burnout, it could be that you need to downgrade. And don't just look at the homesteading. Like I said, don't blame it for the stress that is your other life. See what else you can downgrade across the board. See how you can cut bills. You don't have to earn as much if you don't spend as much. And lastly, and what we'll talk about in the after-hours as we dive deep more into the spiritual matters, we're going to talk about changing your why. So Joel Salatin was asked once, how do I deal with burnout? And he didn't give all these things I'd give, like make sure you're getting rest, cut some things off of your list, this type of thing. He said, you need a new why. And so as I've been dealing with burnout myself the last year or two, I've been digging into a new why. You know, we first started because for health reasons, Rebecca did. And then I said, well, if we're going to be buying organics and stuff, I'm going to need to grow this myself because it's going to be a lot cheaper. I mean, I can buy 100 seeds in a seed pack for $3 when a bundle of lettuce is $3. So that's 99% saving. Howdy, Rayleigh Creative, glad to see you here. And so yeah, you need to change your why. I'm leaning, I'm finding more of a deeper reason when I fasted for 28 days and healed myself. I found myself without purpose because for so long in my life that had been my purpose, is to heal my chronic Lyme disease. And it was my identity, and I was losing my identity. This is why I'm homesteading, guys. This is why I have this content creation business. It was something I could do with having Lyme disease. So who am I? And I realized I needed a bigger reason for doing this, not just one project to the next. I needed a purpose and I— it came to a head at a recent trip with the Amish. You might read about it on my Substack. I think I touched on it in a YouTube video, but we'll go deeper here in Abundance Plus. So take a minute, guys, and thank you for coming to see us publicly. Hopefully you got some value out of it. We have over 200 comments. Thank you for sharing. Over 100 likes. I think at some point we had 200 live across the platform. So thank you for taking time without notice. Hopefully we'll do this again. Let's plan on doing this next Wednesday. Go to abundanceplus.com or get it in your app on your Android or Apple, or get it on your TV, Abundance Plus with Roku or Apple TV or Samsung Smart TV. And let's continue the show. Let's continue the after-party, and we'll talk about what I learned from the Amish, getting closer to the soil and finding meaning there and finding that higher purpose. And then we'll get into some fitness, what Rebecca did recently for an injured foot, how she dealt with that in a natural way. And then we'll go deep with Q&As. I don't know, 30, 40 minutes, just depends. Let's get, let's get a party going over there. Thank you guys. See you there.