Caterpillar tunnels and farm life

Put the 30 meter tunnel up.

It's raining.

Just testing the irrigation. Needs a little bit of evening out. Couple more tunnels to go. Frosty morning, 6:30. So we've got the small tunnel seeded up and we're hardening off in here now We've got some cuttings and things in here but no cucumbers. This is going to be for salads and faster crops this year. Might be a bit weedy. We haven't put any new compost in here but it's all seeded up. Mescaline, turnips, radishes, etc. So I've got a caterpillar tunnel up yesterday. There's a bunch of crops in sitting out in the cold. This is just under insect net. First turnips. They seem fine but we're getting touches of frost in the morning and it's popping back. Things seem fine. So Eric who's been digging our ponds has been charged with fixing all this up. Not quite enough topsoil but it's becoming a little bit back to normal. We'll go and take a look up there when he's done for the day. Lot of grass to see. Magna's being very patient. We've just bought a sailboat stroke fishing boat. It's a beauty.

1980S Dreammobile.

What do you think Danny?

Go around the world in this bad boy?

Yeah, this is where the dream to circumnavigate starts. Just going to start with baby steps. Beautiful. There's no boats sailing on our local fishing lake but I reckon we will start it up. Pretty good deal. Got a trailer. You're not allowed to drive it on the highway so we're going to have an interesting time getting it home. But we've got our own boat for the first time. 40 meter tunnel going up. 7 o' clock in the morning. So plastic on. Pretty easy. Just leveling the plastic out, straightening it up. And you can use the creases in the plastic. Here's one as a guideline for where it should be sitting leaving equal overlap on each side as we tighten it up. Now we'll just bunch in the ends and tie up the ends. Then we'll come and start putting the string on. So first you put the string, it'll be coming from this post up to this post up.

To that post and.

Then on the way back we'll go crisscrossing the other way. These tunnels are really nice because you can start stand up right against the edge. You see they're built to go over four beds. These are the tunnels that we designed and sell through the farmers tools around Europe and we've sent out a bunch of these all over the place. But they're really nice caterpillar tunnels. So 16 beds under here, 40 meter tunnel up before breakfast. So to put the string on, we learned the hard way yesterday when the folks packed this one away last year. They wrapped the string around their arms to make big loops. But that is not a good solution. You definitely want all of the rope on a reel that you can pull out, otherwise you'll cry. So coming back again with a zigzag so you end up with this configuration. Always good to loop out. We've got the rope uncoiling at this end and I'm looping out a rope with a bit of slack here on the ground. Eight or so loops, arm's length. And then throwing it over to Gordon on the other side, just clipping it in. It's good to have a bit of slack at this end too, so that the rope just flies freely. So we put all this on there and then we come back from the beginning and tighten everything with one person on each side. Get it nice and snug so you get that caterpillar effect like you see on the other tunnel there. So digging is nearly finished. We'll go and have a look at how he's healed up there. That's Eric, the guy that dug our pond. Got two of the caterpillars tunnels up today and the boys are pulling the third one out. So we'll have all the caterpillar tunnels up today. We're building a new wash station. So. So this used to be old intern bunks and it's had a few iterations. But we've built a kitchen in here or started building the kitchen. This will be our wash station using the sort of Thai bucket style. And so things are moving around on the farm. Making a little bit more boundary around our house to have a bit more space. First micros in the air. Mustards, peas over here. Sunflowers. Mickle showed up.

We just loaded up a load of.

Lamb and our sausages to go fishing. Have the afternoon off because we got all the tunnels up. It started hailing. Look at the size of these little hailstones nuggets. Tomfoolery is going to be full of ice. But time we get there, still afternoon off. Can't complain.

All right, we're going fishing. So Tom Fordu is coming out on the water. Saka's following us down. Miko's here and we're having the afternoon off.

We've done some fantastic work.

So we're having a barbecue and Dan is leaving to go shearing alpacas. So he's off around Germany and it's something he does every summer. So we're having a nice farewell barbecue for him tonight and hopefully we'll catch some good fish. I caught a couple of bikes. So a big part of this year was to create more balance and something that's unknown to me is taking afternoons off and having weekends as downtime is really nice. We've set up a really nice social setup this year and we're really taking time. We're all having naps after dinner, which is super cute and I think part of our life for long term working, you know, if you work as hard as we do for 70 years, it's what people used to do is have a nap after dinner and it's good to just refresh it, just 20 minute power nap. But it's been really nice, just like getting big jobs done and then deciding to have the afternoon off. I'm sure many of our viewers do the same, but for us it's quite a new thing. We're down at the lake now.

Good ship. Tomfoolery. First fish of the year. Sprightly little pike sitting in the gill. I used to have another boat called Tomfoolery. It's a narrow boat so I thought rename this little beautiful sailing deed. So we picked this up in Karsta, but it's actually perfect for rowing. Perfect for a little motor. We use an electric motor on me fish to not scare the fish. And it's got a beautiful mast and sail. It's a winner. Beauty number two in the bag. Beautiful. Good eating size.

All about the build up.

Go on Antelope.

You got some one with the multi stick.

Putting topsoil back on. So we just gotta seed this up. Should come back to pass it this year. Very nice.

So this is the.

End result of.

What'S been quite an arduous ideal for me. You can see we just tucked in on the end of a strawberry lane here and I had to remove a few berry bushes and tree there, which I'm not sure if they'll make it now. You can see actually they're quite stunted. The berry bushes, they've just been dug up and left as a root ball. But the digger driver's done a great job leveling this off. My biggest concern was that we wouldn't have a smooth transition to get eggmobiles over. You can see it's a bit Of a slope here, but I think we'll get the egg mobiles over that. And it's a bit of a mess.

It's subsoil and topsoil mixed together.

But it could be worse and I'm okay with that. It's, you know, after seeing the mess that was left after the forestry, this is remarkably soothing to my mind. It's a bit tragic. I mean this was very nice, improving pasture, but you know, it's not going to be any time again in our lifetime that we'll be needing to bring big machinery in here. And we made it through without destroying too much of the strawberry lanes and nut trees that are behind us here. And they were, you know, the drivers were really careful of our tree lanes here, which was great. It was really nice to see, you know, a bit of respect for what's going on on the land after the original idea which was just to plow through the easiest way for them. But it's. Yeah, this year, I've said so often this year is about cleaning up for us. It's about, you know, cleaning up the mess after the timber, cleaning up the pasture, cleaning up the fencing. And it just feels like picking up a lot of pieces this year. And that's, that's just the flavor. Every year we have a different sort of flavor of what we're trying to do. And this year for me feels like cleaning up. But it's great. They've put some topsoil down. They had to bring in quite a few lorries of topsoil to level this off. So we need to seed this back to grass. Now. It's going to be hard because this is just hard pan clay that's been pressed down by a 14 ton digger. So it's, it needs a bit of work to get this seeded up and obviously when weather's wet it's going to get quite muddy. But it's been funny. Spring, we, you know, you saw that we had a couple of weeks with plus 20 degrees and now we're getting a bunch of rain and it looks like it's becoming a more normal year. Today was funny, just going off for a barbecue and it started snowing and hailing and then it turned out to be a glorious evening again. But the weather's, you know, that's, it's choppy and changey in spring like many of you folks will get. But it's, it's definitely becoming more extreme here. But we move on and we keep rolling on. So we've got a week and a couple of days now to get the yurts up, get things ready, organize spaces for people and all kinds of little jobs. I feel like my days are divided up between like 10, 15 minute, you know, running around, looking after lots of different things. And it's interesting times, but it's going to be a whole chapter change. I'm trying to brief the team because it's just a few of us here and when people come for training it's, you know, brings a whole boost of life into the place and the whole load of different, you know, inputs and stimuli from different areas. So it's, yeah, I'm looking forward to it and I think everyone is going to be great to just roll on into summer and see crops develop and have the pastured poultry back on the ground. So it's basically the day before people arrive here for training is the day we pick up our first boiler chicks and on the 14th of May is when we get the layer flocks in. And so it's been great to have this start to the season without all of the birds to deal with. Normally we'd have, you know, a thousand birds out on pasture and the three egg mobiles running. And it's just a blessing actually this year that we've had a bit of space to just deal with things and sort of patch up areas that need attention after the winter now. So I'm just off to see the cows and it's time for bed. But thanks so much for watching folks. Hope you enjoyed the little glimpses as we go through the season and see start ramping up production. It's going to be very quick before we are into full production mode. So thanks so much for watching folks and we'll see you in the next video.