All in a days work...

Oh, welcome back to another video, folks. It's that time in spring where there's just so many things to do. Onions and garlic to plant. Oh, my gosh, this is a lot of onions. I'm triple planning these three in a clump, three rows on the bed. So 600 plants per bed. So six beds of onions, two of spring garlic. I've got picnic benches to build. I've got sea buckthorn forest to plant. I've got an egg mobile to automate. I've got accommodations to get heated up and rearranged, ready for kids as well as adults. We've got more seeding to do, mess to clean up all over the farm, grass to seed, Atafal's house to put up. I can tell you it's gonna be really nice next week to have the arrival of the homestead team and there's gonna be plenty to do, even if it is a much lower level of production than normal. And like always, more beds to prep. I prepped these eight beds for onion and garlic and the rest of this is gonna be put down to potato. So I'll leave that for now. Just been going over it with the tilther. These will get planted up this afternoo. We've got a wall to build. So we've been trying to get this lower wall level. It's level within a few centimeters and that's probably good enough. It is just a swimming pool after all. And we're just trying to get a ring of blocks around. Every time the soil is freezing and thawing, it's dropping down. So having this wall is a good start and then I can just build on at any time. So going for three layers of bricks today and then let it dry up good. Really starts to shape like something pretty good. Pretty neat. Little frog. Hello, mate. You're a bit eager. You haven't got any water here. Hmm. There's a few toads and frogs. Maybe they've fallen in three layers up. That's where we're getting to today. And four more layers to go. I'll give you a sense of it. It's going to be up to here. Then we'll put insulation boards behind the wall. And I've got 10 mil 10 centimeter insulation boards to cover the whole floor here. Then I'm going to have to come along by hand and sort of grade this soil and pack it back down to make a nice transition from the top of the wall to the edge of the pond. It's going to be steep on this side and this side and shallow on that side. Then we put down underlay. Then we put down the liner and do a special fold to get it neat in the corners. Then we'll put wood along the tops, the walls here, just to define the edge of the swimming zone and hold in the gravel. Then we'll put another geotextile on the graveled area. Then we'll put the gravel, which we're gonna have to move in by hand, which is gonna really suck because we can't get the machine close enough. Then we'll plant it out. I'm gonna go for washed gravel, but I can't get round like sea shingle around here because we're nowhere near the sea. But I'll get washed gravel to minimize the cloudiness and nutrients coming in. And then I'll probably plant potted plants into the gravel. That's my thinking now. I'll put in a bubble system. Put in a nice bit of decking. Dilly D. Put in a jump board from the roof. It's gonna be all right. It's steamy in here. Got the cauliflowers, broccolis coming on super nicely. Some fennel there. Leeks and onions need to go out. These will go out next week. Hopefully all the cabbages are ready to go out. Spinach, more spinach. We have a lot of vegetables still. 12 miles to feed soon and then camping coming after that. Tomatoes are doing incredibly well. Nice strong growth. Don't want them to get too big because they're in here for essentially another month. So perfect timing for those peas didn't germinate so well. Maybe they were a bit old seed. I'm trying to use up old seeds, so I sowed a replacement bed. In case you can see. Maybe only half of them germinated here. It's plenty of peas for us, so no problem. Some nice lettuces coming on. Kohlrabis. I'm looking forward to gracious Jerusalem artichokes. Sorry, Globe artichokes. More onions. First of the chard. Oh, first little microgreens, sunflowers, mustard. Very nice. Okay, so that's where we're going to get to today. And that is good enough. Pretty straight. Pretty good for amateur builders. I like it. So three rows in. And we just discussed at the end of the week, we'll put another four rows in, and that will complete the wall build from up here. This vantage point you can see. Should just have enough space to get the insulation behind. Needs to shave off the wall a little bit on that side, maybe a little bit on this side. And then it's going to be a lot of hand digging to get this edge nice. But this is going to be gorgeous. It's going to be such a beautiful pool. When you're down in there at ground level, you can really feel how deep it is. It's going to be 2.4 meters deep. So this orange mark on the edge is the waterline. It's pretty deep. You'll be able to do double mega backflips off the top straight in. All right. This time of the year where so much to plant out. We've got onions plants planned out. I meant to have direct seeded radish and carrots today, but that's going to have to wait till tomorrow. Today we've got two beds of garlic, six beds of onions and shallots. Garlic, super simple. This is going to be spring garlic. I'm planting three rows on a bed and 15 centimeters between the plants. Onions. We'll plant them in threes and we'll plant three rows of onions every 25cm. It's going to be a lot of onions for storing to see us through till this and next year. Okay. Onions. Loads of onions. In fact, we're gonna have enough forever. I think three of these together. Got silver skin onion, a couple of rows of yellow onions, couple of rows of red onions and shallots as well. Planting in clumps of 3, 3 rows 25 cm apart. So nice having my daughter in the garden. She's listening to music. But these are practical, tangible skills that will embed in memories some of the most impactful moments from my childhood. Being exposed to nature, to ecosystems. Reading a lot. Grace is an avid reader and reads pretty much a book every second day. We've tried to limit kids from screens so they have extremely limited screen time. And it really plays out. I see it from my own childhood, but also for my children, just seeing how much willingness to contribute there is and this natural engagement in the world around this stuff is fascinating for kids, you know, to be playing with bugs, using your body, producing something valuable. Seeing direct results of what you're doing on the ground brings a lot of joy to my heart to just, yeah, feel like we're producing our food together. And that Grace knows she's an integral part of that and beautiful. Makes my heart melt. Now you may see that I'm coming back with quite a lot of space onions. That's because when you order onion sets, they give you a rough estimation of the size and the weight, but you can't be sure how many in There. Look at the size difference in a tray like this. If you've got the selections coming like this, it's very hard to understand how much you actually need. So based on the information they gave me, I ordered the amount I did, and I've actually been increasing the space density a little bit just to make use of them. But none of these will go to waste. I will take these to our neighbours that are homesteading through the forest. They're a very thrifty couple and maybe a little bit behind with their garden plants because they've had pigs, linderwood pigs, turning over an area of land that they want to cultivate and use for production this year. So I'm gonna go around. They've been super helpful all winter, whenever I've wanted to leave the farm for a few days or a week, 10 days, they've been taking care of everything. And just recently when I was in Gotland, they've been having quite a big job taking care of the greenhouse and the chickens and the cows and sheep. I pay them for that work, but I think they've been exceptional with their help. And so they'll get a gift of hundreds and hundreds of different onions, which I'm sure they'll put to very good use. So no wastage here. Look at those beauties. Shallots going in, Sam. All right. Delivered the onion spares to the neighbors. They're very happy about it. I'm very happy to be on the Siron. Now. The roads are not icy. The Siron is back out. Best toy I ever bought. 80km an hour on this thing makes you know you're alive. Okay, it is a wrap. Full day's work today. And this space behind me is where I'm going to be growing a lot more flowers. One of my secret life ambitions is to be a flower grower. And I've never really expressed that, especially in the days of running a farm. Hectic snow, no time to think about flowers. There's no market for cut flowers around here a little bit, but we're in the middle of nowhere, so there's no one to buy flowers. So that's something that I want to do. We've got perennial flower beds. The east and west beds here are all perennials and there's a few beds of flowers. But I've been putting in a lot of bulbs for beautiful flowers, and it's something I really enjoy having cut flowers on the table, around in the landscapes. Really beautiful. That's something I want to do more of. Busy days now. It's one of the busiest weeks of the whole year, just getting everything ready for people to arrive. There's a hundred different things to order and I really enjoy this time actually of visualizing through the whole season. Normally I do this in the autumn or early winter so everything's prepared and done, but it's a bit different context this year. I'm doing it all on my own and I'm also doing it in relationship to the people coming with children. So it's a different year in every context. This year it's going to be a lot of fun and a lot of learning. I think I'm on top of everything that needs ordering and it's just a week now till people arrive and it's going to be so much fun. I'm so looking forward to this summer. Thanks as always for watching our videos. I hope you find them useful, insightful. There's going to be a whole lot of videos this summer. I'm going to make sure I take a lot of footage and a lot of aerials and just really capture some of the magic that I haven't had time for. Even in the vlogging process I've done over the years, there's over 600 old videos on YouTube. You can look back at all the processes around the farm, decision making, finances, how to run all the different enterprises, etc. This year I'm going to take a more artsy form and try and capture some of the beautiful moments. I sometimes wish I had a camera in my head because sometimes the things I see with my eyes are just breathtaking and so special and cameras never capture that in the same way. But I want to capture some of the beautiful things around here as I move around the space in a slower pace than normal. Don't forget, Click, subscribe, hit the like button, diddly diddly, all that stuff. And you can find out about all of this stuff in detail in my books in the links below. As well as online trainings. We have free online trainings as well as the paid masterclass class that we run every winter. You can find about all that stuff below. See you in a video soon.