In this YouTube vlog, Richard Perkins provides a comprehensive May update from Richdale Farm, covering a wide range of regenerative‑agriculture activities. He walks through the nursery and bed planting progress, notes a heavy slug pressure, and explains compost moisture management. He details poultry operations, including a new 20‑foot freezer at the restaurant, 1,000 birds in storage, a brooder of 1,000 chicks, and upcoming layer‑feed logistics. The kitchen has been deep‑cleaned and restocked with biodynamic products from Sweden, while the greenhouse is being prepared for tomato and cucumber transplants. A brief promotional segment highlights his three books – Regenerative Agriculture, 3D CAD farm‑build plans, and a farm cookbook. He mentions delayed hen arrivals, recent plantings in the sand garden (sea buckthorn, driftwood features), and ongoing work at the Silligarden site. Sheep have been heavily grazed, are due for shearing, and will be fitted with virtual‑fencing collars for trial. Pigs are thriving in the forest, and he shows graphic footage of a home‑slaughtered cow (Big Mama) and two officially slaughtered cows now sold to a restaurant and a Stockholm retailer. Upcoming community events include fully booked concerts, a Regenerative Agriculture Festival with a planned whole‑ox roast and butchery class, and various training programs (internships, design courses, market‑gardening masterclass). He announces the arrival of a new international team, outlines his brief departure to climb Snowdon, and emphasizes the educational and networking value of his farm’s programs. The video ends with calls to join the trainings, purchase his books, and visit the farm or restaurant.
Chapters
Welcome back to another video, folks. I wanted to give you a little update in the season. We've done a lot already with just Nora and I here, even though Nora's been away a bunch of the time working in Norway. And our team arrive at the weekend, so it's fun to just catch up with what we've already managed to do with just two of us and sometimes one of us here. So besides running the nursery, we've got about half the beds seeded or planted out. Very big influx of slugs this year, and we're gonna have to just roll with the punches with that. But it's looking good. We've had pretty warm spring conditions so far. It's been very nice with a bit of overnight heavy rain. The surface of compost beds like this dries up extremely quickly. However, the beds retain a lot more moisture underneath because of the high carbon content. But we've left covers off. Normally we would have the whole gardens under row covers at this time, but given the dry conditions, we wanted them to catch every bit of rain possible. Well, the wheat field is coming up. It's a little bit of weeding to do, and my experimental plantings— you might just be able to make out— they're much wider spacings and they're only just appearing. There's different spacings amongst these beds, but there is some weeds coming up that I can see here. I need to keep attention of. These are largely stand-off beds, not going to put too much attention on these, but Very curious of the outcome. It's looking good so far. So you saw the recent video, perhaps Nora and I have already put 1,000 birds in the freezer, and we've got our new freezer space up at the restaurant, which is fantastic. It's a real benefit to have it so close. It's much easier to manage processes at the farm. That's a really big job under our belt, but we've also got 1,000 birds in the brooder. So day 10 in the brooder, and I've started to cool them off because it's warmed up so much since the early batch. It's a case of turning the lights out now, but they are doing very nicely. These are going to go out in the roller pens this year. The big job has been getting the kitchen that we use for serving meals up and running again. It's a deep clean. We clean it at the end of the season, but it's been sitting all winter, so we give it another deep clean, and we're all stocked up with biodynamic and organic whole foods that we buy from Biodynamic Products near Stockholm in Järna, and they were the first original organic or the only organic wholesale company in Sweden. So we buy pulses and grains and flour and things like that, and then we've obviously got vegetables and eggs and all the meat from the farm. We've got 6 chest freezers here as well as a 20-foot container freezer up at the restaurant, so So no shortage of incredible food here, and this is where a lot of the magic happens. So we've got a bunch of 25-meter rows of crops in the greenhouse, but this is really getting ready for putting in the tomatoes and cucumbers now. They usually— we put in end of May. It's actually good weather to do that now, and seems like the risk of frost is pretty much over, though it can swing. But we're going to wait till the team's here. That's good team bonding. Group exercise.
Pause for a quick ad read. Most of my subscribers here and followers on social media haven't actually read my books, and this is the most condensed practical information and knowledge that I can share with you. My book Regenerative Agriculture is available on PDF as well as hard copy. We ship all over the world. The Richdale Farm Builds is 3D CAD plans of how to build all the farm infrastructure you see around on our social media. That one's only available as PDF. And our Farm Cookbook is focused on year-round Nose to Tail Seasonal Eating. It's just a joy to use and preserve all the food we have at the farm as well as what we fish and hunt. You can find them in the links in the bio, check them out.
So a little bit of delay with the hens, they're not coming till early June, which was a couple of weeks later than we were hoping for, but that's the way it is. So everything's about dates and calendars and timings and making sure everything's where it needs to be at the right time at the right place. And so we've got dates in the calendar for when we need feed, when we need supplies of different things, etc. So next up will be layer feed to go into one of the silos here. So we have put in a bunch of transplants from beds in Siligarden, plants that we seeded last year from the seed stock when we originally planted the sand garden. So we're just filling in some gaps, more at the top where it's a lot deeper sand, a lot drier. So we've added in plants there this year. Lost one of the nicer elaeagnus that you see at the back there to a vole this year, and obviously if a vole tries to get in, then it's very easy for them. But it's looking beautiful at this time of year. We've got driftwood that we actually carried back from the West Coast, one of our favorite spots, and we actually carried all these heavy logs miles to bring them in as features in the sand garden, which is very nice. It's looking beautiful here. These ornamental sea buckthorn, beautiful. And we've got all the south— there's some of the bulbs popping up. It's hard to see anything from here. And potatoes in 10 of the beds, so that's all planted up and prepped too. And if you're following along on the Instagram, you'll have seen that we've been up at Silligorn. We've prepped the micro ridge style no-dig beds up there, as well as Nora's been pruning the trees. We've been cutting the grass and doing all the flower beds, beautiful flower beds all around the grounds, and getting that ready. We're not open till end of June, but it's— yeah, we've got all of our concerts fully booked now. So if you want to come and eat some of the food from the farm and see amazing concerts, then here's the flyer, and I hope to see some of you there. It'll be fantastic to have you. Then some of the spare plants that we've done from seed last year and overwintered them in the beds up at Sillgorn, we've dug those out. They're going to fill in my little perennial garden under the oak trees here, just coming into leaf. and there's quite a lot of beautiful perennial plants and grasses. It doesn't look like much now, but they really come up over the summer. But I want to complement that with a bunch of the plants we have here. So nursery is getting pretty empty. It's mostly peppers that we've potted on—padrons, chilies, and shishito. There's some flowers and a few veg trays, and then all the cucumbers and tomatoes here. I'm actually going to give these guys a deep soaking because the foliage is so thick now it's hard to get enough moisture down in the bases. But they're growing really well considering their density. They're getting nice and tall but not too scraggly, and that's nice because it will allow them to get away over the Asian greens and salads that we've got in the tunnel. If I see flowers now, I want to pinch those off. I Take away the first sets of flowers always so the plant keeps concentrating on growing. And same with cucumbers, try and manage that as I've written about in our book. But pretty steamy in here after the rains and the hot weather we're getting. We're getting a whole week now of 20-24°C, which is lovely for this time of year. And these rain squalls that come in, it creates a steaminess in the landscape. It's really wonderful. So we've already grazed the sheep fully, quite heavily through front field here down below the big tunnel, and the grass is recovering quickly with the sunshine and the rain. Now some of these nut trees put out leaves and then got hit by a late frost, but you can see now they are setting out their second set. That's greening up along this alley here. Nice to graze through the silver pasture system, and that's exactly what the sheep are doing now. So they've all lambed except for one of the ewes, and in our book, a good sheep is not anything to do with the fattest, the quickest growing. It's about an animal that can give birth consistently to two lambs without needing human help, who can raise them good enough and turn sunlight to flesh and wool and milk, and that's a good enough sheep. And we've had to have no interventions with this gang. And if they don't have births, then they are the next to go. So we're actually grazing around the bottom of the farm. This is what we call medicine cabinet, seronia and American elder. And Saskatoon medicinal berries. And we are trying to stay off the top of the field. We're working around all the strange edges, working our way up to the barn. So on Monday we are shearing sheep, and at that point we will be putting on collars for virtual fencing. And we're testing out that for both the sheep and the cows this year. We will be taking them to Siligordon, I think, at that point. I fixed up the fence over there the other day, and we're going to test out that system. That's going to be really interesting to take you along with us. So pigs are doing fine in the forest. They've been loving the rain. You can see they've been digging away happily. They're growing fast now. Our savannah field is starting to wake up. Nut trees coming to life, and we've already grazed down through about half of it now. So there's some graphic images about to happen. Some of you will have seen on Instagram that we home slaughtered Big Mama. Now these are graphic images, if you don't want to see that look away or tune out, but other people find that interesting and important to connect to for how food is produced. So it turns out Big Mama's hanging weight, that's without head, skin, guts, feet, was 380 kilos. She was a big cow. Now we've also sent 2 off for slaughter at official slaughter because we're selling those in both the restaurant and to Leaves in Stockholm. So if you want organic, 100% grass-fed, they've never eaten grain in their lives and moved daily onto fresh pasture, then that's your chance. Come to the restaurant or go to Leaves in Stockholm. And those two cows were smaller, so 280 kilos and 230 kilos hanging weight. This mama here, you can see she's really skinny after the winter. She's had twins, so she's very happy to be out on grass, and that's fine. She's doing fine. She's just had two thirsty calves during the leanest part of the year, so that's the way it is with mountain cows. They were— they They used to put them up in the hills and let them fend for themselves, and they lose a bit of body condition, but they gain it back pretty quickly. And talking with Torbjørn, who helped us with the home slaughter, we've actually got him excited to come for the Regenerative Agriculture Festival. And what we'd like to do is do a whole roast ox, and it's something I've talked about for over 10 years now and haven't had the chance to do. But there's going to be a couple of hundred people there at least, and that's a good excuse for some epic over-the-fire feasts. And hopefully we might take one of the smaller beasts, this one perhaps, and do a butchery class too, so people can see the entire process of cutting and packing a cow. I think that could be really interesting. So two more animals to go this year. And that's important for us because of our limited space. We've only got 3.5 hectares of grazing here. We do have about 6 hectares if we include Silligordon, but we cut winter feed from there and the sheep flock is growing too, so it's pretty important. But very happy. So we've put away 1,000 chickens and a lot of beef, and that feels great. And the farm is up operational again, and so I'm excited for the team to arrive now. The exciting thing is I'm really throwing them in at the deep end this year. We've got 2 from Australia, 1 from Scotland, 1 from the UK. But 2 of those were people that were here last year, Kyle and Mitch, and so it's great to have them back. And that's often the case here, people come back for 2, 3, 4 years. And I'm actually leaving 4 or 5 days after they get here to go to Henbandt in Wales, and I'm actually leaving on my birthday, aiming to climb Snowdon, uh, with a school friend, and then straight into the training there. And I think that's a really nice way for the team to bond and find their way around the farm. And, you know, the ones that have been here before to show where and how things are done here. And it gives me a little chance to have a break after what's been pretty intense spring. We've been working really hard and also managing all of the backend administration and planning. And so ironically, the sort of life I lead, going and teaching an intensive week training is kind of a holiday for me. So that's my update for today, folks. Next time you see us, there'll be the whole team here, and we're looking forward to having people from all over the world for our internship, our Regenerative Agriculture Design training, as well as our 2-day Market Gardening Masterclass. There's spots on all of those trainings if you still want to join us. Check out in the links below. That's an amazing chance to join myself and the team at this incredible place and really deepen your knowledge and experience in regenerative agriculture, as well as your network of colleagues and peers. And some of the friendships and work collaborations that form here, some of the most powerful things I've witnessed in my career, which has been amazing. You can also see all my books in the links below if you want to catch up with how to design all this low-tech, low-cost farm infrastructure. My main book, Regenerative Agriculture, as well as our farm cookbook. And yeah, hopefully I'll get to meet some of you at the restaurant this year or at trainings. See you in a video soon, folks.
