FIRST SEEDING, NEW LAMBS AND A NEW CHAPTER

So welcome back to another episode. It's time to really start the seeding off now in our lean to greenhouse. I want to talk a little bit about our strategy for vegetables this year and then give you a big update on the farm like a hero tour. So as you can see, it's only really tomatoes that we've got going so far. We haven't been back so long and we've been up to the neck in catching up with digital stuff, having been away for a couple of months, but sitting at a nice 18 and a half degrees in here, that's perfect for me. We have this little supplemental heater fan that comes on on the thermostat, but otherwise it's heated by the house. Now we put in a new ground source heat system system in the house over the winter after much deliberation. I always wanted a fire based water system, but judging on the investment costs and then the resale value, if we ever sold the house, we decided to go with ground heating and that's turned out really well. It's. It suits us really good. And it's been amazing to have really warm house even though there hasn't been much of a winter this year. Outside it's just gray and there's not really been much snow at all. It's been sitting at 5 to 10 degrees most of the winter. So quite an unusual year that I gather a lot of you are having. So thinking about seeding, I've got down my paper pot trays, but we're going to go back to doing a lot of crops in 64s and 144s now. That's because we had some trouble last year at the start of the season where we got everything out in paper pot and then we went into a cold snap and lost a lot of crops. Plus a lot of Brassica crops really suffer going out in these paper chains because they're basically such young, you know, they're basically sprouted seedlings. They're very vulnerable. So much better strategy in my mind to go back to our reliable standards. These wonderful quality 64 trays that we get here in Sweden, really rigid trays and certainly get all the main Brassica crops and things going in there because bigger plants means less problems with any flea beetles, etc which is the main pest that we have here in Sweden. However, paper chains, we do love it and we've got both our Japanese paper planter system, but we've also been sent Curly's planter to test out and we didn't get time to do that properly last season. So I want to give that a good testing. So I've got some of his trays which are similar to your paper pot trays, but they have an open end. The standard paper pot trays being closed end like this. So plan is we're doing all the spring onions and all the leeks in paper pot trays because we do multi sown spring onions on a 5 centimeter spacing. So there'll be three or four onions in each cell, 5 centimeters, three rows in the bed. So we do those in the 5 centimeter trays, 5 centimeter spacing paper pots and then leeks. We do three rows with the 10 centimetre spacing pots. So that's the plan for those. And then I'm seeding also today some of the first spinach and some of the first kales which I'll be doing in our standard pots I think this year, basically because I'm away a lot and we don't have someone that's been in the market garden before. We will work with old trays. They're much more reliable. You get much bigger, stronger transplants which is beneficial in this cold, short growing season. The paper pot is great, but it's fiddly and it needs really careful eyes and monitoring. So I don't want to risk anything when I'm away with new people at the farm do, however, love the really rapid way you can seed with the drop seeder for the paper pot. So I'm going to be doing 50 trays of spring onions today. That's most of our spring onions, 15 trays of leek and a few trays of kale and spinach. Right now we are getting more fence posts, more fence posts for putting up new shade cloth around the marquee gun. The windbreak has just totally collapsed. We've had quite a few years with the windbreak, but it's just totally ripped apart now after being exposed in the sun and time to replace that. It's really important to have low windbreak even if it's just a meter. Tall vegetables are very small, so it makes a huge difference. It is the case that Market Garden does use a lot more plastics than we like to acknowledge this stuff. You can see after three years it's just brittle and it starts to easily rip. Now we put in this with free timber. You know, we get a lot of free timber from our local timber yard and so we put in these posts using free timber. But the downside lacks are not treated so they started to rot out. But this stuff has, you know, potentially a little bit longer lifespan, but it does get a lot of wear and tear. I don't like people stepping over electric nets or wind weights, but it does happen and sometimes things get bumped into them. Like all things in the garden, the, you know, fleeces, they tend to have a lifespan of a few years. The thing that's lasted the longest actually for us is these non woven geotextiles that we use for bed covers. Now you can see around the garden we only put a few on. We decided not to bother covering the beds up this year. But you can see it's looking really ready to go now. As always, we leave the stems of crops that are suitable in the ground. Things like kales, cabbages that can rot down and provide a lot of nutrient to the soft food web like that. So you can see maybe a few beds in the background that need to have those just cut down to ground level. But basically this is the benefit of no dig. You can see like the odd little weed, like here's some grass that's come through. But this is just superficial. And I can see worm activity going on in there. A lot of worm activity in here now. The ground is just above zero. You see they're insulated in here and they're busy working away. Lovely. So many. Beautiful. Anyway, this isn't a video about the market garden so much. I'm going to make some videos before I leave on the tour, hopefully. But I've just come back and we've heard that we've had the first lambs of the year. So first main seedings, first lamb and a new start for our family here at the farm. It feels like this year. Look at that, first two lambs of the year. So these guys have been in the forest all winter with the cows. Sorry, Mama, I'm not going to stay here long and disturb you. They've been up with the cows in the forest. We brought them back in anticipation of lambing. It's about 155 days for sheep, their pregnancy and it's easy to monitor. Here we're right next to the tunnel where the chickens are that Johanna is looking after this winter. Here's Winston. So those of you that follow the channel, remember Winston is a pure Suffolk and that's the sheep that I always wanted. And then the ewes that we have are Texel Suffolk Cross. They're both good meat breeds. But we decided when we last got rid of the larger amount of sheep that we had some years ago that we would only ever do Sheep again as a homesteading element and really to use the neighbor's land that we've been grazing. We're going to be having more cows. So the cows are also due to give birth anytime in the next couple of weeks. So we'll make some videos about that as we go. Very exciting to have new baby animals on the farm. The sheep are a little bit dirty looking after their winter in the forest and we haven't actually shorn them. That's usually a good idea. Typically most people will shear at least the belly and horse pine quarters for lambing to make sure the lambs can reach the udder, but we haven't done that. And when it gets too close to lambing, which it was when we came home, then that's too stressful for the mama. So better to let her do her thing in the way that she's designed to do. And these lambs seem to be drinking and their tail wagging in their cute little way. Winston is the cutest. Both our ram and our bull are the softest animals on the farm, which is really nice because our old ram used to throw you right across the barn and if he bumped you. So I've just snuck into the greenhouse to have a look in here. Look at this. It's looking good. Now I haven't actually been taking care of the hens this winter, which has been really nice. Johanna's been doing that with some help from local people too. And Carla, when we were. It's looking good in here. Smells good and fresh. Some nice bedding this time this year we've used the tour of the peat moss bedding underneath, but we've actually gone to this fibered like powdered up straw on the top, which seems to be working really good. I'm interested how that will make different compost. And you remember we took all this out to make windrows to then put onto the market garden next year. So we still have some left out the back here. And we'll be making windrows with this lot very soon. We're actually selling these birds to householders that want like 10, 15 chickens. So we're actually, we're not going to process the birds for eating, we're going to actually sell them alive. And this place will get planted up in a few weeks time. Pretty exciting to think about. So in many ways this trip we had away has been very pivotal in our experience and life feels quite different now. We're moving into a different format on the farm where Johanna is going to run the farm. This year and I'll be away visiting past students and interns and people in the field of regenerative agriculture for the Farm Like a Hero Tour. Something that's really profoundly possibly going to change my life is I finally found someone to collaborate with and I'm not going to say too much now, but an amazing woman from Denmark who pitched me a year long plan of how to overhaul the digital offerings that I put out in the world to empower them and make a lot more benefit from this tour and our online training, etc. Now, I've been doing this as a sort of one man show, albeit supported by the team here in Johanna especially, but it's been far too much work to make videos and put on online trainings and manage the whole thing whilst running the farm. So now we're going to collaborate around really making this Farm like a Hero Tour work really well. What we're going to do is offer out short, concise videos of every farm we visit. There's about a hundred stops on an all summer tour which I'll show you on the map soon. But we're going to release a short video summarizing each one and then the long form video will be over at my new website, the details of which will be launched in the next few weeks. They will be free for access for a limited time and then we're going to have a subscription package and that's where my collaborator wants to bring a whole lot more value. So that will give lifelong access to the long form videos. And then at the end of the tour there will be a summit where we have a big online summit that I'm hosting that will be included in that package. There will also be audio versions of all the farms that I visit so you can listen to them like podcasts. There will be PDF transcripts of all the texts and there will be PDF booklets made summarizing some of the do's and don'ts and the data of some of Europe's most interesting unsung heroes. It's really facilitating me to step up the game somewhat because I just haven't got time to do any more than I'm doing. It's a mammoth task just organizing the route for this trip because it's very complex and I need to come back to the farm a couple of times too. We'll have a look at that on the computer screen. But this is going to be really amazing. I'm excited for all the content we can produce. We're going to hopefully make some live events in most of the countries that we visit so we can meet people and I'll do presentations, etc. Hopefully we will reach out to you folks so that you can help to set up and host events in your countries if you're interested in that. And there'll be more details on the summit over the summer that will be released later in the year in October time. And then we're doing a big overhaul of our online trainings and creating another training especially for new farmers who want to be able to go in depth, looking at all the different enterprise options on the table and really making a concrete plan of where to put their energy. We will also have my signature online course which is perhaps the most broad and diverse comprehensive small scale farming online training out there. But we're going to rebuild that and basically rebuild all our websites into one cohesive whole and we'll tell you more about that as it goes. It's a bit above my capacity, but I'm letting my collaborator do her thing. That's her specialism. So I'm really excited to be able to bring a lot more benefit through the work we do online. It feels really worthwhile and important and a big part of this year for me is really reflecting on where to put my energy to leverage the opportunities and support that I can bring to people around the world. So that's super exciting. Let's go and have a look at the route. Well, it feels there's like a million things I can make videos about right now and I feel like I've been a bit out of touch with the digital world as we've been on such a long break. But I want to take you through the plans as they stand right now for the Farm Like a Hero tour. It's had a little bit of a name retweak and we are renaming most of the websites and things we do in the coming weeks as I explained. So I'll try and walk you through a bit the process I've been through. I've got a calendar here for the year and I've actually divided the trip up into four parts and I've been using this cool route planner software to help with this. But I have to be back at the farm at several points throughout the year. Now I'm going to be in Montpelier in April for a boat show as part of my moving along the dream to do this epic world sailing tour. Now Johannes Cousin happens to own the largest private charter company down in the south of Spain and is willing to take the boat on as A charter boat. So I'm actually going out looking for a boat that will suit my family to then rent out the next couple of years while we're working on the farm before going on a possibly extended, well, tour. That's a whole nother story and I'm happy to take you on that ride as that develops. But I'm putting in place some of my longer life goals as well that surround the farm. That will give me essentially a short amount of time to train the team up with Johanna. And then while I'm there, I'm gonna do the southern leg. I will hire a vehicle for this and then hop over to Madrid and do the second loop around here. I only have a few weeks, then I've got to be back at the farm. Joel Salton's coming for a four day masterclass. Excited about that. Don't forget, you can bring books if you want them signed by myself or Joel Salatin. I'm looking forward to that so much. It's going to be an incredible training and probably the most exciting event we've ever run at the farm. There's the third leg now, as you can see on the route planner here, which is really cool. If you plug in all your addresses, it works out the optimal route and gives you the drive time between places. So on the third part of the route, the first part happening in April and May, is the Joel Salatin course. And I'll be back for processing chickens come end of May. I'll be going down to Holland and every orange, sorry, pink thing is an event that we might run. So Spain, Portugal, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Switzerland, France, uk, Ireland, Scotland. Then I'm coming back again. So this trip is happening in May and June till the beginning of July and then I'm back for a month at the farm. Now what's important to state about this tour is that we will not be able to visit all the regenerative ag farms in Europe. Some people have already commented on little updates I've made in the past that there are very few farms in Eastern Europe. And that's true. Now I'm going on the leads people have given me. I'm visiting past students and interns, people who have been through the farm and other farms that people have sent in either on behalf of someone else or their own farm that seem to fit the bill of what I'm looking to film. I'm looking for people doing all types of mixed farming. We have an amazing array. There's nearly 100 stops on this tour. It's going to take me till the end of the season here. But we have micro farmers up to huge scale farmers in every aspect of farming, plus a bunch of tool makers. We have people that have set up innovative ways of selling who aren't necessarily farming themselves, people that collaborate between farmers to set up online distribution, etc. Epic stuff. We've got an amazing array and it's literally full. My calendar is on a day to day schedule with not very many rest days. I've chosen to prioritize rest days where I'm passing friends, family, etc. But it's going to be a pretty full on schedule. So here I'm going to be taking use of ferries as much as I can and taking a trip. I've got the last part of the journey takes this part of Europe. There aren't so many things past where my hand is essentially. So I'm doing a big loop and taking the ferry over to the uk. See my family take a ferry from Wales to Ireland, then up to Arran, the Isle of Arran, into Scotland, back down and take the Newcastle ferry to Amsterdam. This whole trip in total is about 25,000 kilometers. So it's a lot of driving and anything I can do to save the mileage is going to really help. Now, after the PDC that's back at our farm, I'm going to leave again in August to do this route and this is really exciting for me. It's a big loop all the way through Norway, up past the holistic management hub in order and right around the top of the Inland Sea. And we'll be meeting up with the pioneer and founder of the Ricohrings, coming back in through the bottom of Finland to Stockholm on the ferry. And then I'll be going down through Denmark, Germany into Austria, Italy, Croatia, Hungary, Czech Republic, Poland, etc. And I will in theory get back to the farm by the 10th of October, which gives me a little bit of time to help pack the season up. This little thing came and this is a mobile global WI FI access point. Now I'm going to be traveling to a lot of weird places and this thing for a subscription service gives you unlimited data upload and download for a month at a time. So this is what I hope will power the uploading of videos from remote locations, works on phone networks and we'll see. I'm going to test it all out as well as the camera gear before we get going. So it's a pretty packed schedule. It's pretty exciting to think of all the incredible places I'm going to see please don't send me a load more farms that I should have gone and contacted because it's just not space in the calendar now. Now the next step for me in the planning process is to email all of the farms and tell them the date I intend to go by. But it's going to be a tight window so it's not going to be much room for error. It might move her day here further or backwards, but it's very hard to know until I'm really on the road seeing how it's going. But we're going to be putting out a huge amount of content. I'm super happy to be collaborating to get a lot more benefit out of this trip because I feel like it's going be truly epic. I know like a lot of people have really loved the Farmers Friends videos that have come out and it's going to be like that, but about a hundred videos, long form videos up to an hour long like I've put out on our channel in the past with some of our previous students etc. Super excited for the collaboration. We'll give you updates as soon as we know them for all the new web addresses and everything will be under one place. Whether you want to buy our book digitally or in print online trainings, become part of our online digital community or subscribe to this tour package and summit. There'll be full details about the whole thing and we look forward to telling you more about what's going on at the start of the season here in the next few weeks. We've got team arriving in a few weeks time and I'll be on the farm for a few weeks before I leave for the tour. So excited to share with you what goes on in the next six weeks or so with you on the channel soon. Don't forget to hit subscribe. Make sure you click the notifications bell if you want to keep up to date. We're going to be pumping out videos again very soon and excited to share with you in this way. Don't forget you can find our book or online training etc in the links below and we'll see you very soon. Bye for now.