Chickens, Voles and Building Stuff

Hey, little one. Oh, you're waiting for green grass, aren't you? I know. Just to shoot it a bit more. Okay, Wide baskets. Full control. Boys have got production line going. This is 1.2ft, 5 meters long, this way, a meter high. And we're trying to work out the best way to do it. We've got this little D rings or O rings, to join them in as few places as possible, rolling them over, stomping them down with a little stompy stick, and then clipping them together. And hopefully this will provide quite a bit of vol control. So this is a nice way to make baskets. It gives you about 40cm diameter, and we'll be digging that halfway down into the ground. And this tool turns out to be quite good for the job. Just putting in a little O ring binds it together, and three of them tends to be enough to hold that together perfectly. Auchspung Dirk technique. Isn't that so? Remaining potted plants are mostly Aronia, blueberry, a few thornless BlackBerry. Then the majority of the bareroot plants are in now, and it's just apple. These Antonovka rootstocks are quite big trees, vigorous growing, and once we get them in early next week, that's all the bare root trees taken care of. We're planting these into the wire vole baskets to protect the roots. What's the Easter feast? Tell us about the Easter feast. So it's Easter in Sweden. Yeah. Yeah. And we eat pretty much the same thing in every holiday, but there's some lamb and then there's posmus. This is like. It's broods, it's malt and hops, and then there's different spices in, but it's like a cola. It's like a soda drink. Right. But a bit like beery and spicy. Yum. Lamb, cabbage, mashed potato. No. Rotten fish. Perfect. Ragnar wants the skull too. No, he just was drinking. You're so close. You're so close. That's it. Yay. So a little teepee update. We're hoping to keep this open nearly all the time, but to prepare for high winds, I've had to come up with a solution. Now, the canvas doesn't actually reach the ground, and so the best solution I've come up with is putting down little webbing straps that you can tighten it down to the decking. And I've just put them in with pretty thick roofing screws. Seems to do the job well. We've had 15 meter a second winds with the sides up, and it's been no problem at all. Don't know if I like the fact that the canvas is up off the ground, but I can't imagine this going anywhere in strong wind. So that's the solution I came up with. I looked at boat fittings, like eyelets that sit down flat so you don't trip on them, but you're looking at about €10 apiece and there's 50, so that's obviously cost prohibitive. This was a cheap solution and I think it will do the job pretty nicely. What I'm going to do now is lift it all back up again and take out these supporting poles. These are just loose and they hold the canvas out when. When the whole teepee is up. But when we've got the witch's hat up, we don't actually need those. And that clears a lot of the ground space for putting down tables, etc. Okay, so opening it back up, you can see what I mean about these inner support posts and I can take them away like this. That opens up a huge amount of space for tabling. So I'm going to do that. Open it wide open now. Like many small farms, we are maxing out electricity. We have bodge setups all over the place. I'm sure a lot of people can relate. We've got a 32amp power cable going to the slaughtery here, but the kitchen also runs on 32amps and so it's been a bit of an issue. Every time we've tried rearranging the plugs, fuses are tripping. But we've got a thousand birds in the brooder, well as lights on in the nursery and a heater that we can't afford to go off. What I've done now is piggy backed off the front of the slaughtery and I've managed to get the fridges and freezers and lights on without the fuses going. Deep freezers on. None of the fuses have gone, so that's success. Every year when we add new tools or anything like that, it's becomes a little bit of a hodgepodge and yeah, it's difficult. We are maxing out a very small rural property's electricity to run the commercial farm. With loads of chillers and a slaughtery and a commercial kitchen, etc. It's pushing it, but there's not a lot we can do. We can't get much more power to the farm than we already have, but we seem to have got there. Another thing that's really pushing the electrics is we've got heaters in all the rooms for accommodations and at this time of year because we've got people here quite early and it's still cold. That's obviously drawing thousands of watts of power, but seems to be working today, which is fantastic. So I'm going to get the kitchen leveled up on some blocks. We'll get some gas for the burner tomorrow and hopefully we can transition over and start using that as our main kitchen. Oh, Johanna's been taking photos of Sacco because we have found two or three potential suitors so she can have puppies this year. Saku, what do you think about that? You smell some deer or something? Ah, interesting. Imagine little Sakura's running around the farm. Everything goes good in the brooder. Definitely the temperature's got up okay. It's still cold and below zero every night. But birds are doing great. They're growing some very nice. So everything goes well with the chickens. They're definitely out and about and adventuring. We're gonna go minimal on the bedding if we can because we wanna. We're hoping the birds come out pretty soon and that we get to planning this up as soon as we can. So we're just gonna go easy with the bedding and keep it light so we can till up beds and just plant straight into it. But they've got used to the routine and. Yeah, they're doing well. It's not too hot in here so it's working out okay. Our little tunnel seems to be holding up so ground is starting to thaw out. It's been very windy so we've got a lot of row covers blowing around. Next we've got to get the 40 meter caterpillar tunnel up in here. Beds are looking great. Nice clean start to the season. We've got a few things to come out soon and some direct seeding as well. So let's task for next week. Get this tunnel back up. Brassicas hard enough. What's gone up to the tunnel? Brassicas, kale and some spring onions. Nice little herb cuttings. Spring onions and leeks. Here's some of the rice germinating. Summer, when are the first transplants outside? In a week, week's time. Oh, exciting. And direct seeding when we put the gasket on tomorrow. Summer's doing a great job managing the temperature. We try and keep it around 18 or so. It's challenging in here because in the daytime it heats up really fast. We've got nets we can put over the doorways to stop cats coming in. Because they like to dislodge plants at night time. The challenge is keeping it warm obviously, which has been interesting. Fuse is going we had one cold night, but we seem to have worked out the electrics now. First tomatoes. Little sungolds. Crazy seeing everyone's veg growing on Instagram. We're just getting started with tomatoes. So lastly, I want to talk a little bit about the Ridgedale Builds book that's running on Kickstarter for seven more days. It's up at 260 funded, which means it's going to print and people have been asking about the binding. We're going for hardcover binding which will allow it to sit flat on a worktop. Spiral binding just won't work for a book this thick. People have asked if it's in Imperial or metric. It's in metric. We use the English system. I was brought up using inches and feet and yards, but metric is much easier now. In the days of Google it's very easy to convert measurements. Maybe it's a little bit painstaking, but for having the cut list and CAD design plan step by step, it's a small ask if you want to build any of the structures featured in this book. The final editing is now complete and actually editing finished when the dinner bell rang last night. So this book is ready to go to print. The printers have just finished up printing a new edition of regenerative agriculture, my 750 page manual that's helping redefine the small scale regenerative agriculture movement. This is another monster book and it's next on the printing list. Can't wait to see it out there and see people's builds. I think we'll run some competitions around some of the buildings in the future. It's going to be really fun to see. If you're not aware what's in this book, have a look on the Kickstarter in the top of the links below. There's 22 detailed projects. Everything from our low cost hernia free boiler pens to our roller pens to the dollies to our slaughtery, our smokery. There's all the market garden infrastructure we've built and all the layer infrastructure, eggmobiles and nest boxes, etc. It's an invaluable guide. If you're starting up with low cost, low tech diversified farming, this book will save you its cost many, many times over. Even if you were to build any one of the structures featured in this book, it's going to be a really good investment. I've had great feedback from the people who have been looking at it, who said it's extremely clear and easy to follow, and we've chosen nice big illustrations so that you can see it from the workbench without having to go up really close. It's got beautiful images of things being built and in use so you can get extra details from the visual images of that. I'm really excited about it folks, and there's only a week left on the campaign now if you want to get a copy well before it's available for sale publicly, I'm hoping to make a transition over to FedEx so we can have tracking and better shipment times around the world. Shipment of books has been an absolute nightmare over the last year with the COVID pandemic. Lots of lost books, books taking three months or more to get to their destinations, which is just crazy in this day and age. So we're waiting to get onto FedEx to be able to ship this one. It won't be shipping till much later in the summer. If you want an early copy you can book the PDF. You'll get that in April time ready for this season and we're hoping to start shipping hard copies as early as July. They won't be for sale publicly till we've dealt with all of those orders and set up the back end for the sales. So if you want a copy, get behind the Kickstarter and if you can't afford the book or you don't want to buy it, please share the Kickstarter link on your social media. That really helps to support us if you want to support us like that. And I'd like to say thanks very much for watching folks. Lots of exciting video content to come up in the coming weeks as we really ramp up the season and I look forward to staying in touch with you through our updates. Check out the links below. As always, don't forget to hit subscribe. We'll see you in the video soon.