A million jobs to do

Okay. Early morning opening the door for the first time. They're not freaking out with the sound. I don't expect them to be coming out today, but we'll give them the option. They seem quite relaxed with the noise. Hello, birds. Welcome back to another video, folks. You can see I'm having a bad hair day. I'm up at five, working till dinner on the farm, so I'm a bit behind with video making. I'm just going to show you around what's happened today and try and really make a lot of blogs this year. Following day to day progress even when I haven't got time to film little things throughout the day. Homemade bread for breakfast, some French stuff, some eggs, and this is my daily serving. Well, the other chickens didn't make it out at all, but there is a couple in the tunnel and a good 50 or so outside. So that's pretty cool. I think the way the door opens outwards, that's helped them see their surroundings and so they're much more quick to come out of here. Okay, last two planks. This is a mighty deck. We have some very patient mammoths. It's soon lambing season. Next few days we'll probably start to see lambs. Yeah. So in this eggmobile, the birds are just coming out to the tunnel. Now we put a little bit of feed in. See down the other end there's birds already out. But this is good progress. Now it's very obvious that when you have a door opening from below, the birds take a lot longer to come out. These birds were out on the first day, but only as far as the tunnel entrance. We'll go and have a look at them. They're doing fine in there. They're very relaxed. This is the sort of evening time when they get active. They're all really running around pasture at this time in the evening, getting their last feed before bed. But this is really good progress. So in the second eggmobile, many more birds out and they're venturing into the tunnel. But they're very relaxed. They've plenty of space and they're calm. We're putting feed and water inside the eggmobiles and then putting a bit of feed out in front just to lead them out. I expect in a couple of days they'll all be in the tunnel running around, but they're just chilling out, getting used to their environment. But they seem really calm, so it's been a really optimal transition. And if you look back at videos when we've introduced birds on pasture, they definitely take 4, 5 6, 7 days to start really all coming out and when they get into the rhythm of it they all come zooming out in the mornings when we open them. So they're actually ahead of schedule. But this eggmobile where the door opens outwards on the actuator they can see out. So immediately on the first day, within a few hours two or three of them were sitting under the door. And so that's interesting observation that you can consider if you're building an egg mobile. Salma has been clearing through the herb garden. Doesn't look like much but she's taken out a lot of the old dead material. But this place just. We put basically a bit of time into clearing it out and then leave it to be. And it's amazing. If you look at it now it doesn't look like much but this turns into an incredible array of herbs and insects and butterflies. It's always a beautiful spot around our sauna and yard. Still got a whole other deck to build over here but that's for another time. We've got brooder to fix up tomorrow. Sauna is on. Everyone is enjoying the sauna. Yoo yeah. Sauna is on every day at the farm and that's a big part of the social life and really enjoyable aspect. It's the most efficient way to wash groups of people and it's just such a pleasurable way to end the day. Okay, dinner bell has gone just in the nick of time. Look at that folks. That's 11 meter wide deck. It's huge. And we've got a massive teepee under these covers to put up on here. It's going to be quite imposing up at the same height as the tops of the oak tree there. Well that is a very nice job to tick off the list. You can see down the center here we've had to add meter long sections of board because the planks are not quite big enough. I'm taking my shoes off to try and keep this tidy because this is spectacular. I don't know how well the camera will pick this up, but this is an intimidatingly large deck. It's huge. And the teepee going on here can seat 134 people if you put eight to a table and just about a hundred if you have six to a table like these. So pretty amazing. It's a big upgrade for us. It literally doubles or triples our capacity which has been necessary. That's why we've done this work. But this is a really great job to have ticked off the list today. Look at the Size of that, I'm on the wide angle. And we found a happy medium where we didn't cut off any of the ends of our asparagus beds. We'll have to take out a quince or two if we want to be able to get around the path here and on this side because we had quite a wide area of wood chip anyway. We can just fill this bit back up with wood chip. Good to go. We're going to have to trim this blueberry bush. Sorry, blackcurrant bush, but you can just about get through there. Anyway, we just heard that Wednesday our kitchen wagon will come. It's six meters long, two and a half meters wide. It's going here next to the slaughtery. And so it'll have like you see on the street, the front pops up and people will get food here, come and eat here. And we're going to build a washing up station here at the end of the magazine which is little accommodations. And so everything will be right in the front yard. And then for the first time, nothing is in our private house which is fantastic. Beautiful sunsets. Look at that sky. It's. It's really nice time of year. It's brisk and cold. But we've actually got one more day below zero forecast at night. Then we can get our water lines and water systems running again. It's going to be heavy rain all weekend. I'm going to hide away, hopefully get most of the book wrapped up. I've been talking with the printer. We're looking into getting spiral bound so that the Ridgedale builds book can be open on a worktop for ease of use. But it's challenging because it's such a big book. It's pushing the possibilities there. Second best would be hard copy because it's such a wide hard copy and in landscape that. That will lie flat on the. On the open table. And that's what the printer's suggesting. He thinks it'll be a much better finish and much longer lasting. The trouble with such a big book in the spiral binding is that it will easily start falling apart because it's so heavy. So we're in discussions, we're testing out and we will let you know. I'm adding further combos of both books and both PDFs someone requested and I think that's a good idea. I've also been tidying up the yard alone. It doesn't look like it at all, but I've been taking things to the dump and we have to get this yard clear to get the kitchen wagon into here. It's got to get around the corner there of the slaughtery. So we have to move timber, which is all going down to the other yurt platform that we have to still build. And more importantly, we've got to get ourselves sorted in the brooder and that's tomorrow's job. I think. It'll be quite dark in here, but you'll probably just be able to make out there's a lot of teepee gear and bunches of stuff lying around. So there's a thousand birds turning up here on Monday. Our aim is to get this space ready, get the lights on, get the bedding heated up. I'll make a video about that and have this place warming up ready for the birds coming on midday Monday. And because we've got both Selma and Elin here, who have been here before, hoping they can show the others around the neighborhood, take some nice walks in the country. I'm going to bury myself in the office this weekend and get up to date with emails and things. It's just been long, long days on the farm, so I'm a bit behind. I'm going to spend the weekend catching up there. Oh, and the other thing happening this week is we've got a massive tree order showing up, so that's going to be fun. I've ordered a lot of container or root balled plants so that there's less pressure to get them planted immediately. Although a lot are bare roots, which is the easiest, most economical way to ship plants, which is what we've typically done. But because of the fluctuations we've seen every spring, it's quite risky to do that. So that's going to be a whole other video. We'll be planting a whole bunch of trees. So much going on at this start of the year. It's the ramping start to the season that really, you know, suddenly a few weeks later you look round and a million things have happened and it's. Yeah, it's the way it is in such a short growing season. All right, we're going up on the roof. So that tepee is going to tower well above the barn and with the sides opening up, it'll probably be on the second floor of the magazine there. So it's going to be quite an imposing structure. Cannot wait for things to turn green, folks, this time of year. It has an impact psychologically when you see their landscape all yellow and olive drab like this. Can't wait for life to come back to the land. So amazing having a chef at the farm. Again. And so much food. Having three meals a day and food which is like coffee and cake here in Sweden. Johanna and I have been eating two meals a day max all winter, so it feels quite a lot. I'm actually skipping dinner to talk to you lot. And yeah, as I said, I'll try and make much more regular vlogs this year to just try and really show everything going on. Not just some of the more exciting things, but some of the background stuff that, you know, goes into daily life on the farm. I'll make sure I try and carry my little mobile GoPros with me so it's easier to film. That's it folks. Don't forget, if you want a copy of Ridgedale Build, check out the Kickstarter in the links below. There's different combos with my other book, Regenerative Ag. You will get a copy of this well before it's available publicly. If you get the PDF copy, it'll be in late April, hopefully, and then early July I would expect for the printed version. So check it out below. It's nearly 200% funded. Thank you so much folks. See you in a video very soon. Don't.