Wild Animal Caught Lurking Around Our Farm!

I never knew this about myself.

I always thought I was a dog person, but I'm really a cat person.

What about you guys? Are you guys dog people or cat people?

There's that, that chicken.

Really? The rooster? Yeah, the rooster didn't make the move with the fat hens for whatever reason. We tried to catch it the other day, couldn't. I'm surprised it's still alive. But let's get it, man.

All that brush—

that's our chicken sustainability, man. We like to keep a rooster just in case one day we need to breed our own chickens. Right now it's just way more efficient just to buy chicks. What if there's a supply or a supply chain issue? Jenna, we got the rooster. I think we should prioritize that. It's very important. We got to keep it out of the the weeds. If it goes into the weeds, we got to keep eyes on it. I've been making a mistake on this Kubota. It's a diesel, which is my favorite thing about it. Totally forgot about warming up the glow plugs by just holding down the trigger to that little orange light. I don't know, I count 30 seconds. Then on a cold day Let him go in there.

Grab him, grab him!

Jump on him if you have to. Did mom catch him?

No!

Rebecca's gonna take Teddy back because Teddy chased him into these— to this swamp. Hey, do you see him?

The reason he lives so long is he— look where he hides at night.

Whoa. Okay, I'm gonna set the baby down. I can get in. We need to surround this though. This is so thick. Hopefully he can't move. Go any further in. All right, you be there so he doesn't go that way.

There is a way out.

Didn't go get that way. Do like Mom, dive on this bird if you have to. He will get got.

There he is!

He's coming your way, Becky. Too far from over there to there. Okay, maybe it's the other side.

Oh my word, it's crazy.

I know, it's impenetrable. It is. This is—

this is— yes, it is. So like once you step right into here, it's swamp.

There he is.

I see him.

He's right— he's right— you can see his face right from there.

So I got him by his tail. I don't really want to drag him through the briars.

Oh.

Did you get him?

I got him.

What?

You could put the catch around this and leave it in here.

Wow, Justin, that's serious. You might be a crazy chicken lady if you go into the briary swamp to catch a rooster. Rebecca just said How are you guys doing today? She wasn't talking to me.

It might be a crazy—

definitely talking to the chicken.

If you talk to the chickens, you're much happier here. He just ran under the shed.

Yeah, right in the chick shop.

What's the matter, buddy? You ashamed? Are you hiding? This is right. How do we luck out and only get one rooster?

I don't know.

We ordered all—

all—

we ordered all females, and I mean, that's pretty cool.

It's the only other way you can get roosters like that is to order a straight run, and half of them or more could be roosters.

Yeah, look.

Oh, she took some of those feathers. He's kind of walking away from her. She's a naggy lady. She's giving him a big scold. Be a man for, uh, hiding out for a few days. We are gonna check Josiah's trail cam. Is the bait gone? Oh boy, put out a chicken carcass to see, to give it to attract the wild animal.

Um, that's the jack in my car.

Where did you put it? Right here?

Yeah, setting it up.

Oh my gosh, I think that is a coyote!

That is!

Oh man.

I didn't hear any coyotes.

That's cool. Just, uh, just so you're gonna re-trap it, rebate it, I guess. No, do it again tonight.

Well, do you got anything to do?

Hey, there's no guess though. There's do or do not. Yeah, more chicken carcass. Hey, remember kicking Flossie? Yeah, well, she hadn't kicked us in a very long time. I want you to see something. Her udder was jacked and now it's just squeaky clean. Absolutely no cuts. What we did was— this is not sponsored, by the way, it's just good stuff— this is just straight up vitamin E oil. We did that at first and then it started getting too cold and it gets solid, and then we just went to our trusty— it's called Superior Cow Cream by Animal Synergy Products. Organic udder cream. It's made with just like, uh, essential oils and herbs, and it doesn't freeze, so that's kind of nice. Here he goes. I wish you guys could— I wish we had smell-o-vision. I mean, look at that. No, come here. It smells, smells like peppermint. So we've been putting that on her after we milk, let it sit in before we give her calf back, and it's worked. I'm just so happy. I'm just so happy that there's like organic, natural options that actually work. Did you just wake up? You got sleepy eyes. They're pulling up the animal footage. Whoa!

Wow!

That's a fat coyote. What are you doing here, Grandma?

I'm done cream separating. Today we had 8 gallons and we got a 1 quart and 2/3.

All right, I think tomorrow we'll make butter out of that. We've been waiting too long to make our butter and it tastes a little weird, so we'll have to make it right away. We had been waiting until like a week later to see what we used for cream and kind of just make the rest of butter, but it tastes gamey or something. We got about an hour. Can we in 1 hour put together the pig Mineral feeder. We need bolts.

Okay, when you say— okay, so do we have two of those feeders? Because we have—

I know we have at least one right now.

We should have two because I was thinking maybe we need to like build a pig feeder that like screws to the post.

The problem is, I don't know, we're extra. And I don't know of anybody that's like making sure they're getting these minerals to the pigs. Oh, you—

it was— wait, hold on one second. We did it with charcoal, kelp, charcoal, kelp, and, um, charcoal, kelp, and NutriBalancer.

The mineral feeder we already have is the easiest.

Okay, yeah, let's do that. Let's go and see which one.

Let's first get going. That's what we could might do in an hour. The two ladies, because there's two of them.

Okay.

And their mamas. Okay, Jonah and Josiah finally are making another Rhodes Bros video, this time a biking one. They said the lighting was good, so I just let them. Well, this might just turn into finding tools, but I would really— if we could make this work, because we will never use these bolts, we just I ordered too many bolts on another build. We could make those work.

Okay, we can probably make it work.

I don't know if they have nuts. Why don't they have nuts? Bolts, washers, nuts. We have some lock washers. See if we have lock washers down in the tool cabinet.

Hey, by the way, my reactive arthritis is feeling so much better.

I kind of just got— felt like I was just getting back. Oh boy, the lens. There we go. I felt like I was just getting back to normal, and then I stepped on a staple in a cardboard. Now I'm limping again. These are our sheep hides.

I had salted them.

We're gonna—

I need to hang them. We need to hang them up.

Oh, do we?

I'm trying to find out.

That's what's next. Okay, we've just been airing them out here on this grate, and it's off the— it's off the ground. You can't tell in this video there, I don't think, but it's so air can get all around to it. We hosed them off and then we salted them and we left them elevated. They're in the furnace room, so it's dry and dark in here. Turn off the light. Just dug through all these and found some good size washers, lock washers, right here. Thank you. Boots.

Boots probably couldn't will himself—

that's my late father— probably couldn't will himself to throw those away 45 years ago.

After a couple days of them draining, then hang them somewhere where they can continue drying. They will start to get stiff and no more moisture is coming out.

I don't think we're keeping the feet like that, are we? So we can tie the feet and hang them up. There's all our stuff. It actually looks like we might be able to do this. There it is. While we're here, we decided to pick up the old pig stuff. Are you opening up the seats?

I'm trying.

Good idea. Now this should be easy. Yeah, it's easy. Alright, ready?

Oh God!

Are you guys alright? I'm alright. Oh man, that was a good— I'm glad you fell onto that side and not the mic port side. You alright? Are you all blurry? Oh, you're still seeing clear. Okay, good. Cut the biggest, heaviest pallet I could so the pigs have minimal movement on it. I want to line up the holes so that they're not going off the edge. Okay, that's it. Just bring me the biggest drill bit we got. You can do the next one. It's already got these screws in there, I guess, for this kind of purpose.

Nice.

I couldn't set that up better myself if I tried to plan it. We were working and started smelling smoke. And sure enough, there's like a lot of smoke coming over the mountain. What the heck?

Should you drive up over there and see?

Well, we're gonna get the drone up in the air because that's what happens.

Well, I mean, I feel like we're pretty wet overall.

Maybe— well, we haven't had rain in a while.

We haven't had rain in a while. It's supposed to rain tonight.

Jonah's got the drone in the air. Let's see what we can see. It's probably really far away. It's probably further away.

Swine NutriBalancer.

Kelp.

Charcoal.

I cannot wait. Once we get done with the pig minerals, we're gonna set up one for the chickens. Long overdue. That'll be another day though, next week. Let's calm them down with some feed. Now once we feed them, we need to do this.

All right, let's do it. Yeah, yeah.

Well, they're not interested in the minerals, of course, because they have feed.

But there they are.

Pigs, I've noticed, aren't quite like cows and sheep. They don't need it quite as bad. But only the best for our breakfast— well, lunch.

Breakfast for lunch. I gotta go.

I gotta leave it. Can you guys deal with that for me? I'm so sorry, I have got to go. We do not— we are not a people with margins, are we?

Well, bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

I gotta go.

Fourth day audiobook.

Nighttime.

See ya. There's a chance I could get done today. We'll see. I don't even have time to change.

I guess I'm going to my farm, duds. A goal without a plan is just a wish. So each time you want to try something new in the Rooted Life— a winter harvest garden, for example, or creating an instant chicken garden— you need to match that goal with a plan. Oh, real talk here as we drive home. I just finished. Such a good feeling to get chapter— like, to finish, like, chapter 10, and then, then the acknowledgments. Like, this is a first. There'll never be another first time reading through my own audiobook ever. So that was a, that was a neat moment. A little bit of, what do you call, housekeeping, just updates, being real with you guys. Many of you have been following us the entire time we've been on YouTube, 6 years. We made a little change in what we're offering as pre-order bonuses in the Rooted Life, just till we can get a little more sure of what is appropriate to give away as a pre-order in working with the publisher and what will work well for the overall scheme of things. See, the reason I want this book to do well is I want to reach the masses. We are doing fine financially with YouTube and Abundance Plus, and that's our baby, so to speak, you know, that's our bread and butter.

This book back though.

This is our opportunity to reach a different audience, a broader audience, to have a powerhouse that is Sachet Publishing behind it. And so we want to be real careful to be super collaborative there. And it's a whole space I have no idea about, you know, not wanting to, you know, wanting to be fair to all retailers and, and things like that, I guess, without web presence and stuff like that. So We are having a meeting about that on Monday. You know, I'm just ready to go and get this thing promoted and out there. So what I'm gonna say is there are gonna be bonuses. Well, one, we've said we're gonna sign 5,000 copies and the first ones, and they're gonna be digital bonuses. There'll be some content from the book. Hopefully we can get some of the audiobook content. Hopefully that will be, I don't know, maybe that won't even be done by the time the book is gonna ship, which by the way, it looks like that will be, the book updated ship date will be March 1st. There's some supply chain issues, surprise to no one, and so we're shipping, we're printing in Canada now instead of China, which I'm cool with. I know you guys will be fine with it. It's just 2 weeks, and who knows, I mean, it may get extended more, we don't know, but it is coming, guys, it is coming. And I noticed, in the audiobook reading, there were some, uh, content mistakes. Slight. It's not gonna just mess anybody up. There was a point where we said you harden off your plant. I wanted to say you harden off your plant, but somewhere in the editing process it got turned into harden off your soil block. So it doesn't matter, the, the step and the process is there. A little bit of the theory is jacked a little bit, and I think we, we might have time to correct that. Surprisingly, there was only like 1 or 2 of those things. So anyway, I encourage you to pre-order because you will get pre-order bonuses. And listen, if we get enough of those, you know, we get the, the publishing world's attention, we get the retailer's attention, and we get this thing out there and it goes to so many more people than we could ever imagine. Why is that good for us? Because we all have experienced this. If you're watching this, you've, you've most likely experienced homestead joys in your life. Well, guess what? Sharing completes the joys of our heart. When we, when we hear a funny joke, we laugh and we want to look over at the person next to us and laugh with them. If nobody's there, we want to tell them about it. If we find something good, we want to tell them about it. The engineer today told me about the two YouTube channels he likes. You get something good, you want to share it, and that completes your joy. You and I, we're in homesteading and we are so happy doing that. But our joy isn't complete until we've shared it. So we're gonna do this together. And we're gonna come up with a plan. And we're gonna do our part, me and you as an audience. And we're gonna make this hap— we're gonna blow this up. And we're gonna show the world this is totally legit. You know, gardening's totally socially acceptable, right? Martha Stewart has a garden. Oprah has a garden.

Well, guess what?

If you got a garden, it makes total sense to get a chicken. And once you get a chicken, you've taken the gateway drug to homesteading. So chickens for everyone! And that's what this will be about. There's a gardening chapter, of course, you know, ease in with the socially acceptable stuff. Then there's chickens, and then there's how to work with gardens and chickens. We slip in the permaculture there, and we have some design chapter again with the with some simple permaculture principles. And a lot of it is lifestyle. A lot of it is just getting motivated to do this, being productive, productivity talks, talks of how to get the spouse on board and how to keep your children involved and those types of things. It's different than anything that's out there. There's jokes in it, we have fun, we make mistakes in it, you know, we share our mistakes. It's like the vlog jumped into a book form. But what's so cool about books is they're so timeless. I imagine books will even outlive YouTube. Books are here to stay. It'll be so cool to have just something that you can hold in your hand. And if the power goes out, you just take your book out there with you, open up the pages, and plant the garden. It's that simple. It's that in touch. You know, a lot of people are wanting to stock up on these kinds of books anyway just to, in case type of thing, but also what would it hurt? What would it hurt to do and live this way? It wouldn't. It would be great. So this is something different that's not out there. And I feel a sense of energy and excitement, and the publisher's getting behind this and excited about it. And this could be— no, not could be, this will be really big. Like my deepest desire for this, I can't believe I'm saying this, because it's scary to say this. Scary to say this because, you know, what if we don't? But like I always say in the vlog, let's aim for the impossible and extraordinary things will happen. So I'm going to say New York Times bestseller because that means the book, the message, our joy being completed, it's gone to the masses. All right, well, that was quite the real talk. Thank you for bearing with me on that. Thank you for listening to this. Please check it out at therootedlife.com. It's not much, it's like $28, and it's A world changer. Books are so undervalued because it's like 15 years. How long did it take me to write this book? 15 years. It's 15 years of blood, sweat, and tears. And then it's a heck of a process. Like we started writing and started negotiations late 2019, started writing January of 2020. And now I'm doing the audiobook a year and a half later. So it will be of 2 years— it will be a 2-year process by the time it's printed out. So get it there, check it out, therootedlife.com. And the value that you guys get out of it, like $28, and you can, you can build a garden that will generate thousands and thousands of dollars of produce. So therootedlife.com, or link in the description, guys. Thank you, thank you, thank you. As my granny would say, Thank you, thank you, thank you. Looky here, my oldest and my youngest. Hey! Oh my goodness, I can't even get out of the seat belt. Wow, Pop goes away for a half a day, gets this kind of greeting.

Here, let me see. Henry!

Oh, Henry!

Josiah!

Teddy!

Teddy!

Oh, where— no, don't get in Grandma's car! No, don't get Grandma's car!