Hens, Yurts and Ham...

Chickens are here. Should be easier to get them in than this setup because we've got easy access. Hoops are all ready, we're ready to go. So getting the yurts up tomorrow, I'm just going through the top piece and fixing up holes. Two strategies for that. Small little holes. I'm just gluing down with a sort of multi bond, almost like silicon and just putting a patch on them and then any tears in the seam. I'm just sewing up with my old Singer. Picked this up for €100 in the UK one time when I was back there. An old industrial sewing machine. Beautiful. I've sewn many, many yurts. I used to have a small word of mouth based business making these. These are very large yurts. They're not yurts technically. They're gers because they have a straight roof pole and that exerts pressure out into the wall. We use a 5 ton metal wire to hold the tops of the karnas or wall sections together. Now a yurt has a steam bent roof pole which puts the weight down into the wall. So along with the reciprocal roof, they're the only types of roof that actually put the weight of the roof down into the wall. Love this old sewing machine. The difficulty sewing a yurt with a machine this high is you need long, long tables to put all this cloth on and it's heavy. This is about 40 kilos of canvas. It's 12 ounce rock proof, fireproof, waterproof canvas, which I get from Mitco in Glasgow. And it's a very good textile. We've had this out for all summer for six years now. And pretty simple stuff. Now these are. I'm not the best seamster in the world, but these are double seams like you have on the side of your jeans. On Carhartts you have triple sewing. But I'm not pinning this, I'm forming this in my hand as I go in the sewing machine. So you've got to be quite nimble and quick and that's why it's not perfectly straight. I guess a professional would do it as fast and much neater at the same time, but it does the job. And these have lasted up well. The reason that they sometimes get little rips is because we have extreme winds here. So particularly on the edges, you'll get little rips where they're blown up against the wood with extreme force. And it's important to get the roof hatches on at the right time. Here's a little bit for example there. But I can patch that one Just with the adhesive. That's no problem at all. We've had them out in the UK for 10 years under trees. Which is like the worst possible place for them and no problem. So pretty impressive for a structure made of plants. And these are the bigger ones I've made. Johanna and I made both of these in about week. Before we ran the first courses we did in Sweden many years ago before we had the farm. This is where all the gear lives. So we'll be getting this out tomorrow. Here you have your straps holding in the roof. You can see here. The roof goes onto the wire in here and then there's a pin in there to ensure it can't pull out. Then it's actually bolted in at the top end. And here are the oak karnas, very beautiful knot free oak that we use for that. So we'll get that out tomorrow and set these up. Just getting the pads uncovered. So that's the teaching yurt and this is the dining yurt. A lot of amazing learning and unlearning has been happened under this roof over the last five years. And a lot of incredible dinners have. Well, incredible meals all round have happened in this yet. So big day tomorrow getting these up. That marks a big change in the landscape and a big change in the season. We got people arriving next Monday and it'll be Tuesday. We kick off our farm scale permaculture course. Get a sewing machine. They're awesome. And once you've sewn a few hundred kilometers, it's very easy to do things like make trousers or whatever. But it's a nice skill to have. Snacker is watching them underneath. Have a look under. You can see all their feet sticking up. Just watch the metal itself. Can you see? I'm not sleeping. They're not sleeping yet. Yeah. They're up on their roosts. Can you count them? It's not like that. There's many hundreds. Look at them. They're looking at you. Can you see? They're looking at you with their little eyes. Do you think they thought it was a chicken? So this time I didn't film the process of getting the birds in. You can see that in a video from about a year ago I think. But basically one of us was inside and one was passing in crates. And then we're quickly emptying the birds. And it works well to bring the crate into the middle of the eggmobile and sort of shoo them into the far end. And that way the door doesn't even need to be closed necessarily. We keep it drawn to with the person outside, but they basically all huddle into that corner. At this point, the birds are very frightened. We've put in water, just a simple waterer like this that we're filling up regularly and feed. And we've kept them here for the day. We're going to move them up onto the pasture tomorrow. You'll see as I open this, they will get flustered and start backing off, probably, if you've got to be really slow. There's a bunch of them sitting up on their roost already, but they're getting used to the space. And I think a lot of them will be sleeping on their perches tonight. They naturally found that, but the first time I came and opened it to put the water in, they were really freaked and they crammed into the corners and you've got to be careful. You remember that video a few years ago where someone didn't open the nest boxes and the birds, we lost 50 birds, birds, which costs about, you know, it's about 3 or €4,000 of loss of income. It's why we put nets around the nest boxes so they can't get behind them. Now, that's so cute, actually, to see them all sitting on their roots. So I've just come up for the third time today to add some more water and just check that they're doing okay. But they seem fine. They're a lot more settled. They're not so freaked out as when I came up earlier. So I think it's going to go really well to move them onto the grass tomorrow. And usually it takes two or three days for them to get familiar with coming out. Same with this lot. If I just swing you around here, be able to see. They're beautiful, healthy birds. So they're exactly 16 and a half weeks. So from knowing that, I am able to calculate precisely when eggs will come. And that's always handy to know. So a stressful day for the hens, but they're fine. They can deal with that. Important things now are going to be just getting them eased into the actual space and daily moves and getting them back in at night times. And the best way we've ever found to deal with that is to take a little portable light, hang it in the coop sort of 40 minutes before dusk. So it's getting on to 8:39 here, and that will encourage them all to go back in. We've had years where we've crawled underneath and retracted the birds and got them inside. But you see they're naturally sitting on their Roosts. You don't need to train them to sit on their roosts and you don't. Yeah, you don't need to do a lot other than get a light on so they can start coming in. See a lot of feathers underneath. The lights may be a little bit bad here but that's from them getting flustered and moving around a lot. But that's just typically the first day while they're, you know, a little bit spooked and getting used to the space. So yeah, we'll, we'll show you some updates as we go with the birds going, you know, know how they progress on a day to day basis. But very happy. We got the birds in pretty quickly, about half an hour. So pretty low stress for them. So I'm off to just fill up the waters and we'll be moving them in the morning and then getting the yurts up ready for the season. What's that? The peacocks. Feminine. This little bluetooth has been hanging around the mirror all day. Flying at the mirror. So it's a big day. Hens are up at the top of nutfield. So this is the first time we're going to set the nets up and let them out. So we've come up with a trailer with all the gear, 250 meter poultry nets for each egg mobile and then water is here. So we'll get this set up now and then we'll open the doors and put feet just outside the doors. But I don't expect them to come rushing out for a little while. So we're putting out fencing with poultry net because there's so much net down the bottom. It's a little heavy for some folks. I always start by putting the corner post in, essentially making 2L shapes like this. And I walk laying the fence down and then I come around putting it up. It's much quicker. I can move an egg mobile, set up the nets on my own in less than 20 minutes. So it's really quick and easy to use if you handle it correctly. That means keeping all of these pegs at the same level when you collect it up. And again when we take it down. We'll put it down first and then walk around picking it up. It's much quicker. And always using double pegged fencing so you can put this fence up without actually bending over, which is quite important for ergonomics. Let's just have a look. So when I put this up, I'm walking along and stretching the net with my foot at the bottom to get the bottom Tight and then just putting it in. And then now as I walk along, I'm doing this one handed, obviously, so it's a bit funky. But I can pick the net in my hand without having, in theory, to bend over. Should have a camera on my head. I'm always stretching the net. So you end up with this nice straight top to the, to the fence. So the tree lanes dictate the width of our paddocks. Typically nearly everything's between 10 and 12 meters around the farm. Here we're dictated by the width of this space. So we're just getting these laid up up here and we're good to go. So we come back to the beginning. Gustavo. And then we'll put them up from there. So attention to details with these fences is what makes them fast and very effective. But you should be able to deploy and put up a 50 meter fence in two or three minutes. So some feed inside for today. A little bit of feed around the doors. They are not going to be that eager to come out. They are a little bit spooked by their move this morning. But we'll leave it like this. Observe them throughout the day. So fences are up and are open. Feed inside a little bit, then feed outside and water inside and outside and we just leave them to it. I expect by the end of the day one or two might have come out. It's typical. And we start following a few days behind the cows. Now, cows will start moving a bunch faster than these girls. So energizer's on. Birds are just looking a little curious in this one, in this eggmobile. They exit from under, so I can't really see if they're scoping it out. But I don't see any on the steps yet. These birds see the light, so I expect they will come out relatively quicker. And just got to keep an eye out for predators because there are buzzards right here sometimes. So we just want to see how that goes. Someone asked about the pollen and whether the massive amounts of pollen that I showed in last video that have turned our market garden beds yellow, basically. Whether that's a stress response to the drought last year, I would imagine so, I don't know, but I would guess so. The cows and calves are giving each other some grooming. Very nice. Great to have the poultry and cows back in the tandem together. Still haven't made our grazing plan officially, which we'll talk about in another video. But yeah, I think the high amount of pollen could well be a stress response right up at the tips of the Spruce here, you've got these beautiful deep crimson flowers. And it's just been absolutely wild. The amount of pollen, like I've. I've not just been reacting in my nose. I've had like big rashes flaring up on my leg, which I, you know, I generally have very few ailments or issues with anything. And it's. Yeah, I assume it's something to do with that. I don't know. But even just taking a screen out here, just on my phone, within about 30 seconds, it's totally covered in film. You see, I can wipe it off here. Everything is just totally thick with pollen. It's definitely unusual. I definitely feel like sore in my eye. All these little ailments that I think my body reacting to a slight allergy that I've never experienced before. And that seems to be the case for a lot of people having allergies that they didn't know they had because of the unprecedented amount of pollen. So smoking ham today. New picnic benches, little upgrade. Yurts are going up. Busy morning ahead. I'm gonna make some ham. So this is some of our forest raised pig ham that's been brining with a little bit of sugar, 10% brine. And now we are getting in here. This is getting very saturated with smoke. After all the chickens last year. A lot of fat on these tables. So I'm just basically going to hang these up on the roof and we're going to set the smoker for about 75 degrees and get that started up. There we go. So ham's on with two hooks trying to get through some of the fascia. We're using alder spawn, not 2 millimeters. I'll put about half the bag in. So in classical Swedish fashion, we're using birch bark to light the fire. Just a small fire. This place is totally full of fat now. Nicholas was doing a lot of smoked chicken last year and that's where you get all this residue. That's. This is what these plates are for, is collecting the fat. Ideally, I should let this meat hang and dry and develop a pellicle, basically a dry skin that allows it to soak up the smoke better. But time is of the essence today with the yurts going up and everything else we got to do. It's delivery day today, so it's always a bit logistical with managing our sun, etc. So quick fire in here to bring the temperature up. And then we'll let that smolder away, the hot smoking. So it's cooking it at the same time. Important Things are meat is all at the same level. So we built this specifically for 50 chickens. And it's got a old sauna heater. So this guy that's been smoking meat for you years along the big lake, the freakin. He does fish smoking mainly. But he basically showed us a simple technique and helped us. He gave us this heater and we just made it up. And it's a way primarily to take like birds that have scratches from the plucker or whatever and just turn them back into a premium. It's just got a bunch of insulation like rockwool. And so what we're doing now is lighting the fire to specifically warm it up to save energy on the thermostat because that's using a couple of kilowatts and it ignites this and this will just smoulder away. We've worked out that it's best to have it in like a little S shaped curve, about half a bag and that gets the best. Like you smoking is all about even heat, even smoke. And if you just have a big pile it will burn hotter at some points and you know, so it's to have a little trail seems to be the best. We have this one here to stop the door getting burnt. And these fat trays are really important so you don't get fat in the fire because that creates really acrid smoke and so they help. How does that heater work? At the back it's got a thermostat so we've got, we can see temperature here. So now I've lit the fire, I'm going to close it down. Why does it run off electric? Okay, I'm closing that down with oxygen still just to get the temperature going up in there to save electric. And then the electric is here and plug it in here. And I've lost my little pen mark but I think it's around here somewhere. 70. But I'm going to leave this for 24 hours. So I'm going to. Once it gets to 70, I'll fiddle with that if I need to and put a new mark on it. So basically now once the meat's in and all good this will. Once the fire is like dying down and the temperature's up, I'll close it up completely and then you can't open it again until it's done and the temperature will drop back down again once the fire goes out and then the element will pick it up and then my job is just monitoring the temperature. There'll be smoke coming out of here for the next 24 hours. Okay. Lovely sunny day yurts coming up. So I fixed these up last night and we're now in the position. We're working in pairs, getting the teaching yurt up at the same time as getting this eating yard up. So they're just watching what we're doing and then catching up. None of these guys have been putting up yurts before, so it's always a little bit of a interesting scenario. But basically once you we assemble the dragon posts and the toeno, the center wheel, you can see this is quite a heavy duty one because it's holding up hundreds of kilos of roof. So we bolt every roof piece in and then we have six pieces of kana or wool. This is not free oaks. Beautiful stuff. I spent about €4,000 building these two in about a week and a half with Johanna. And most of that money went on oak for the walls because you want thin, lightweight structure that's very strong and this will last a lifetime. And then we're just using spruce for the roof poles. These get lashed together and then we put in this five ton metal strap that holds the roof beams in. And we line everything up with the door here gives us the approximate height. And then we just go around wiggling the walls till we get them even height as close as we can all the way around. Now we're at the point to have a cup of tea. We need all four of us to lift this up and get the first six roof poles in to keep it stable. And then it's a two person job passing up roof poles. And what we do with our roof poles, because it's such a heavy yurt, is we have them like this. So there's one on the outside clipping these onto the wire. And then a bolt goes through to hold it onto the wire. And then we bolt it on in the middle at the top so it can't possibly fall out because these structures want to twist and drop down if they didn't have the good support there in the middle. Looking forward to getting these up. It's going to be beautiful. So we're up in the tono. Basically it takes four of us to lift this thing up because it's so heavy. Balance it while we get the first five posts in like this. And then it stands up on its own. Then we get the posts over the door because they screw in so that secures it. And you can see there's not a lot holding it up, but that's enough that we can all let go and split back into Pairs and we just go around putting these up. So in the initial stages you just get through five up to hold this heavy structure up in the middle. Then when you get your door ones lined up, then you count round and make sure you've got these poles in the right place. And now we're good to go. So it's coming up for midday. I didn't have the fence on. That's very poor show. It's not such a big risk today with the birds staying in. So I'm just coming up to see if they're edging out at all. They look like they are. Not. A little bit startled. Still. Great outdoors. Too scary. So I'm just filling up their water. And the same will be for these microgreens. Just gotta add sunflower. Just getting rid of seeds. Checking the quality of these. And we're learning to bottom water. So we're using the microgreen trays and bottom watering after a couple of days. But still gotta get this thing dialed in. It's how we serve them. We're selling about 90 grams for 35 crowns with a mixture of pea, radish and sunflower. So last of the wood chip. This is to finish the old north beds in the last corner of the new north. Last time they dumped it on the road. This time we've got them a little further back. And we've been wood chipping here again. This is the path that gets us to the wash station. But it's a smaller amount this time so it shouldn't make too much of a mess. And we'll have this moved in the next days. She's teaching the other lady how to drive the big truck. So hope she does a good first time. Definitely going better than last time. Beautiful. So it's about 60 cubic meters will have put down and we pay about €400 for a 40 cubic meter load. So it's pretty cheap. That's mostly the delivery cost. The actual wood chip is. Some people thought that we get this wood chip free. We can get wood chip free but not fine graded wood chip like this. We would get the spoils at the bottom of the pile with some dirt mixed in. And it's not the nicest or it's unsorted. And then you have big chunks that you can't lift up with the pitchfork. But this stuff is really much nicer to work with. And it compacts down nice to make a really good pathway. But if that's her first time driving, she did a much better job than her colleague. Maybe she should Be teaching her colleague how to do. That's perfect. So it's dinner time now. We've got all the yurts up and we will be moving a lot of stuff around, filling them up tomorrow. So time for cows to move on in the morning and look, some of the birds are out and so we're going to just have a look and see. So this will mean, I expect most of them will go back in themselves, but we will make sure we put in lights tonight to encourage them back in. Hello girls. This is what happened last time too consistently. It's been our experience. Lots they in but they, they get, as the sun goes away, they get a little bit more interested in being out. So the bravest girls are out hiding away under there. So we come up with lights as it gets dusky, maybe 8:30 and we'll put the lights in there to encourage them to come back in. This has been our experience the last couple of years where they will be inside very timid all day and then in the evening when the sun sort of dips behind the trees, they'll come out and start wandering around. It'll be a few days till they start streaming out like you see in the start of the video, the little intro there. But then that becomes this river of chickens every morning. It's very lovely to see. I think that's it for me. I've got to take care of Essan Ragnar now, so I'm signing off. Very nice to have birds on the pasture again and new chicks arriving in a few days into the brooder and we've got the yurts up, so it's great. We're really on target now for inviting people to the farm and getting underway with one of our renowned farm scale permaculture design trainings which has been the starting point for many people in this journey. A great epic overview going deep into all aspects of regenerative land based and enterprise design managed holistically. So stay tuned, don't forget to hit subscribe like the videos if you enjoy them and we'll see you in the next video. Don't, Don't.