A false spring

Welcome back to another video, folks. Wanted to give you a little update. What's going on in the seating room with other projects as we get ready. Just a few weeks now until the homesteading team arrive and so a few.

Thoughts that are on my mind.

Well, after that snow flowing, it's all melted away again. As you can see. A few things about the natural swimming pond.

So you'll have seen in the last few videos, the dig went extremely well, but what you can see on the edges, maybe you'll make out, is that there is a little bit of subsidence. Now tomorrow, all of the bricks and mortar. I'm using a mortar mix to speed.

Up the process, working alone arriving.

So I'm gonna hopefully they're coming with a lorry with a crane and I'm gonna have them put them here and then I've got to make some kind of wooden chute to send bricks down effectively.

But this is okay as long as.

It doesn't subside anymore. What we don't want to find is lots of water pooling in here and lots of subsidence on the edges. That'll get dug out easily enough, but over time that could get a lot worse. And that's just going to create a lot of work doing by hand. What I'm going to do is get a straight line back up again, the string has been buried and start putting up the the base of the wall at least as quickly as I can.

Now, when the weather fairs up a.

Bit, we've been blessed by a week of beautiful weather and then it's just like this and that's the way it is at this latitude. And yeah, once I've done that, I'm going to put some 70 mil insulation outside of the wall. I'm going to use a hundred mil insulation, big foam boards on the whole base here. I've got to get in touch with the company that's putting together the Aderfelshaus for us. And they're using ground pins that drive into the ground, but high torque ones that you need a special machine to put in. However, I was intending that this pad would be lower down. It turned out this was a great idea to use some of the subsort and get the outhouse at the same level as the water. Imagine this beautiful decking all the way joining the two houses. It's going to be absolutely beautiful. You see the water line there? It's going to be quite extensive and.

A lot of reflected light.

So what that means is they need to use either very long Pins to get into the subsoil below what we've constructed. Or we need to think of a different foundation, like concrete or something.

But I'm hoping we'll get away with the pins.

This time of year is always funny. And we'll have a look in the lean to greenhouse because as I always say, it's really important to follow the seeding calendar.

So my whole process with veg planning is to lay out all the beds.

Of the things I want to get.

The harvest I want throughout the year.

And then put all that onto a.

Calendar so that you have seeding dates.

Direct seeding dates, hardening off dates and.

Harvest dates if you etc. So that you've got an action plan.

Throughout the whole season.

And it's very tempting when the weather's.

Nice and we got this glorious week of sunshine and we were off on the west coast fishing for sea trout. No luck there. I think the water is still too cold.

But in those kind of weather conditions.

It'S very tempting to put a sneaky early crop in. But you see what happens. And this happens every year. We get frost here up until the.

6Th or 8th of July, June, and.

It can even be snowing heavily. We've had pasture boilers out.

If you followed us for many years, and if you haven't been following us for many years, then you can look back at the archives as seven or so years fully documented all the processes.

And growth of the farm and the maintenance of the enterprises that we run here. So do check that out. There's a whole backlog of free awesome content for you. So one of the big jobs this.

Year is painting this house. Ever since I moved here, I've spent.

My time working outside. I have hated this red roof, these gray walls and these blue trims.

I've got a roof climbing gear and spray paint setup. So I'm going to paint all the barn roofs, all the house roof. And if you remember, last autumn I put in a color test on this wall and I wanted to do that before the winter to allow me to look at it in the snow, in the different light conditions. And it stuck with me.

I really like it.

It's subtle, it's fresh and it's going to make the house look a whole.

Lot more charming and beautiful when the weather fairs up. I'm going to hire one of these sky lifts, a four wheel drive one so that I can get up on the roofs and it won't be big enough. I'm quite limited by space here, so I can't get to the far side of all the buildings. But I can tie off my climbing harness onto one of those rigs to do certain bits of the roof that are hard to reach.

But my aim this year is because.

We'Re having quite a slow pace with the homest of just producing food for ourselves or for trading with neighbors. I'm going to have time to get all the buildings in tip top shape and make this farm really up to standard with how it should be looking aesthetically.

So keeping it about 18 degrees in.

Here and that's ideal.

You can see all the leeks, spring onions, green Race's artichokes doing fantastic. And you can see on the paper pots here just how beautifully they air.

Prune when they're raised up like that.

It's slow growth because it's not as.

Warm as it could be. But you can see kale's here developing very nicely. But what you do see is with.

These older seeds that I'm using is.

Some of the germination is patchy. Now if we were in a commercial situation, I wouldn't be happy at all with that.

You can see even some of the oldest onion seed that I had just.

Hasn'T sprouted at all. But I've got plenty of onion sets coming, so that's fine.

So got all our potatoes set. Someone was asking where we get them. Lars Vegan is a big supplier here of really good quality potatoes. We've got purple ones, pink ones, yellow ones, white ones, and then I've also got a lot of onion and shallot sets through. They're already starting to sprout, but it's a little bit until we can get them in.

The more pressured crops, like greenhouse crops, like tomatoes you can see are doing fine. That's all from new seed, so you would expect that. But it's still a lot of really nice quality plants coming out. More tomatoes up here and today I've.

Just been seeding a bit more. We've got some lovely.

Lettuce.

The modestone is one of my favorite lettuces coming up. All of the year's cabbages are in these few trays.

Today I've been seeding a bunch of cauliflower and broccoli.

Then there's some Asian greens pak choys here.

So you can see there's a lot of different seed here and some of it's getting quite old. There's stuff from 2019, 2020, 2021, and.

I wanted to just use a bunch.

Of it up because there's no point with the homestead year. We're not commercially pressured and I did buy new seeds this year of some things, but I'm using a lot of old things and that's why germination rates aren't up to scratch. But that's totally fine. We're going to have an excess of vegetables anyway.

This is what the seeding calendar looks like this month. I've just caught up with myself here.

We've got kohlrabis and peas, more lettuce, chard, basil.

Starting for the big tunnel and then we start transplanting.

Hopefully not far from now we'll start transplanting the kales and later in the month we get all the squash going.

And the cucumbers for the big tunnel.

Also got to pot out all the tomatoes.

That's a big job.

They will go and fill this space.

Here and we'll be starting all of the melons. We've got watermelons and other types of melons as well to go in the big tunnel. Lots of other admin and things to take care of. Thinking about ordering firewood for the sauna and food orders to feed all the hungry mouths. Chicken feed grain supply for pigs so I've got some piglets coming. I'm really excited. We were going to have our neighbors who homestead just through the forest. They already have linderuad pigs and we were talking about getting a breeding boar the other day and it just struck me that they're not going to have any pork to eat for a year and a half because Linda Rood is such slow growing pigs. They're the pigs that we had in larger number. If you look back at old videos last year we raised just standard industry pink pigs, Yorkshire beefs. And that was really convenient to be able to buy weaned pigs in spring and just raise them up on veg scraps, broken eggs and a bit of grain and raise them in the forest and have pigs done by autumn and not have to carry animals over the winter. That was a real luxury. So I'm doing that again. It's my 40th birthday this year and I'm really excited to do a spit roast young pig and feed a lot of people and have a joyous celebration. So I'm just going to have a few pigs and raise them up for the freezer for next year. But I think we'll have a couple of feasts in there too. We've got nine sheep and two cows that will be slaughtered this year.

So.

So the freezer is going to be full as well as everyone being fed well throughout the year. But we're going to do broilers. Just ordered the first batch of broilers today. They'll be with us in about five weeks time and we're just doing one big batch and I'm linking that to a pastry poultry masterclass where people can learn all the ins and outs of that enterprise but also get hands on experience in the evisceration and processing process, which is really important. It's very few places people can actually go to learn how to do that. We're gonna have some turkeys later in the year and that's great for me. We didn't have turkeys last year and they're such amazing characters to have around the farm. And the hens are arriving this week. On Thursday I'm gonna go and pick up hens and I've ordered some extra ones for our friends that are homesteading across the forest here. That's going to be great. To test out the new mini ridge style eggmobile. I haven't fitted the automations in that yet, but I'll be trying to get around to that soon. I'm going to put them in the barn to begin with and then print them onto the eggmobile and keep them in electric netting in the barn because of the risk of things like pine martens and foxes when they're in a stationary setting like that. A lot is new for me this year it's going to be really different doing things on a homestead scale. It's not really something I can get my head around because I'm used to doing everything at quite fast pace on the commercial scale. I'm sure interesting observations and problems will come out of that because, for example, thinking about the hens, one of the great benefits of having large flocks of birds in the small space constantly moving is the deterrent for predators. And for me I've always felt like predator birds, which are a big problem here. It's just overwhelming to dive bomb 400 chickens in a small fence. But once we go down to a homestead flock now just say 25 birds, I think it's going to be really interesting to see whether the predator birds that have moved back onto our farm pose a problem. And there's actually four pairs of nesting predator birds that have moved onto the farm in the time that we've been here. And that's amazing to see if we can coexist with nature and judge the success of our farms on how fat our predators be are then something is going very well. Look at that. It's just Gracie And I are here tonight and we're having slow cooked forest raised pork in a beef stock. We're just going to pull the pork, Gracie might have it in the wrap or something. I'm just gonna eat pork and enjoy grass fed, forest raised, homemade, home foraged all the way.

Now, I mentioned in my last video that I drove with the roll cage of the tractor into the wooden bar that crosses above the doors of the polytunnel. And it didn't break the polytunnel in any way, but it did break the weld inside the roll cage. And someone suggested I should write to the manufacturer, see if it's replaceable. And that's exactly what I've done. I'm not totally sure if it's under warranty now, but it does make you wonder. This is the bit that's meant to save your life if you have a rollover. And obviously it's hitting it in that direction, not this direction. So there's a different strength in that direction. But it does make me wonder because this machine, I'm often lifting things on.

The edge of its width and vehicle stability.

You could say, you know, it's a very strong machine, but it's very small and narrow.

So we'll see about that.

But I just want to say about this tractor, it's been such an incredible investment for me. Now, it wasn't cheap, it was about €30,000, but the way I factored that was cheaper than a new back. Now, we started this farm with €20,000 cash in our pockets and, and it was a struggle. We built everything with free timber and carried stuff up into the forest. I remember some of the crazy missions we did that I just wouldn't be physically capable of today. This tractor is incredible. It's like having three employees who work whenever I want them to and things just get done really well. And I'm really, really grateful for this purchase. I haven't had a bad back for a year and a bit. So since I bought it.

Now, for those of you that don't.

Know, I used to have a really big back problem. I was a high level athlete when I was young and I was running for the England Youth and I could run a 5 minute mile at 14. I was competing against fully grown adults and whooping them basically. And I could have been a professional athlete if I had gone down that pathway. Teenage years kicked in and I wanted to do other things and party and.

I lost my focus on that.

But I had a big problem when I leant back into a crab where you lean back into an arch. And I was very athletic and very fit at that time, but my lower back just clicked out and I was in bed for three days. I couldn't move my neck. I just had my knees bent up and my head on a book and I just lay still for three days. And that would just go every six to 12 months.

And when we started to farm here years ago, it would go a lot.

Because of the paralyzing lifting I was doing and just using my body really stupidly. And over the years, like I would go to chiropractors, I've done everything to do and there's nothing you can do to really heal this problem. It's a herniated disc and it's triggered by particularly weird lifting or twisting. And farming is full of that. You know, we all know how to technically lift correctly, but farming doesn't work like that. And so there's always been times anyone that's been here on an internship will have seen me hobbling around for a few days after doing heavy fence jobs or whatever. But I gotta say, since I bought this tractor, I have not had a bad back. And I'm also actively trying to manage that in my life. Like sitting for a long time. I hate sitting in front of computers and so I do very minimal edits on videos I make and I try and delegate work so that I'm not sitting sitting on a computer all the time. And long drives also are not so good for me unless I have extremely well built seats. And so I manage that and it's fine. But I can definitely attest to having a quality, compact, powerful machine.

I used to pride myself on running.

The farm with the atv and that's all you need really. But as we've started constructions and moving tens of tons of timber into the forest to build platforms, etc. This thing's come into its own and now it's just me on the farm. It's, you know, it's amazing to be able to just move pallets of books.

That I ship out to you to.

100 countries now, all over the world and whatever it is we're doing, this machine has been invaluable. So I'm really a big fan of it. Kyoti a great brand for lower end but very high quality machines. And yeah, that's what I want to say about that.

Now we have some farmer homesteaders coming this year. This old smoker is going to have to get back in use. We've got sausages to make come my birthday. It's mackerel season. I can see a whole filling of smoked mackerels and hams and bacon. I left the bacon over the winter so that we can do that together. It's going to be great to get this smoker going. It's just amazing now and again to smell in here.

Mmm.

And we'll probably do some smoked chicken too.

We'll bring you along with all these things.

So some fun. We've got our team for the year sorted now and there's going to be five adults, seven kids here. It's going to be really fun to farm kids as well as all the amazing food that we produce at the farm and to set up the camping business and just see how that goes. At the same time, I've got my place on the west coast on Airbnb and I've got a lovely couple who are living there who run a really cool business in Grabberstad right next to where my place is. They're going to be busy running their business and helping look after the place and managing it over the summer for me. We'll be heading down to grab a stad for mackerel season around my birthday time, as well as for vacation throughout the summer.

And maybe I'll make a little film.

About their business because it's really cool. I think some of you are really enjoy seeing what they're up to over there. Anyway, that's for future editions. Thanks so much for watching. For now, I'm going to give you updates on the natural swimming pool as I start building and my aim is to just follow that whole process here on YouTube for free so that you can follow and learn. And hopefully some of you will get inspired to create your own pools too. Here in the short summer season is not just about having a great place to swim. It's about the aesthetic of the farmyard. But it's also for winter bathing. For me to be able to have somewhere to go under cold, icy water in the winter is part of how I train my body and mind and it's something I've done for years here. But having something right outside my back door is gonna encourage me to do that a lot more often. It's gonna be super fun. Thanks so much for watching as always folks. Don't forget you can find out a whole bunch more in the links below. There's both my book books on there, there's free online trainings, you can sign up for our paid masterclass which comes out once a year in the winter time and you can see everything you need to know. Below there. Thanks so much, folks. See you in the video soon.