I turned my farmhouse lawn in a NATURAL SWIMMING POND for €8000

Welcome back to another video folks. I think it's high time I give you a little update. What's going on here at Ridgedale. Now? First things first, I'm not making as many videos as I have been in the past and I will be again in the future. But those of you that are watching that aren't subscribed, don't forget to hit subscribe and check the notifications bell so you get updates whenever we're putting out. We've got a lot going on over the winter that I want to keep you informed about. Now I haven't made any videos for the last few weeks. I've been super busy working outside to get the building and painting finished up around the farm. That's obviously weather dependent now and so it's been quite critical. But I'll roll on a few clips from the last few weeks to bring us up to speed. One beautiful thing about having the pond out there is in the evening we get all this reflecting light through. Sort of really beautiful. So it's been filled up to the brim and it's looking pretty ideal. I think what I'm going to do to finish the edges is put some of the topsoil from the excavation back over. Obviously I'm going to build a decking all along here but just to hide the edge of the liner. And the water is still pretty dirty. There's clearing up over time and I've just put on a base coat for the Atafar's house. Going to try and paint that up today with the green to match the house. And then it's time to get on with the paintings pretty much finished on the farm. So it's time to get on with the decking. I need to shave away some of the soil there. You can see where the windows and doors of the house will go. I need the decking to be level with that at the maximum them and then I'll probably have a step up to fix the levels here. Quite a lot of decking but I've got a lot left over from building platforms. Why not? In Sweden they say there's no such thing as bad weather, just the wrong clothes. It's all about Les Ragnar. Have you dressed for the evening?

1, 2, 3, 4.

Nice.

How many?

So I think in the last video I was still finishing up the painting. The painting's all done now, including on the house. It's been a major job as anyone that's been painting barns and houses will know. It's typically something that I guess people spread over Several years for a good reason. It's been an epic project, but it's been amazing to do that after many years working so hard outside on the farm and feeling like neglecting the house and buildings, which are obviously very important infrastructure. So it's been really great for me to just feel like everything is fresh and renewed.

I don't have what you think I have. Oh, it's even a cracked one. Get out of my way. Get out of the way.

Okay, decking going on and bit of decking over there. So it's going to be three levels. First level, second level. Reaching to this one. Down another step. Right now, just trying to do the awkward job. Got my waders on. And this is beams that are pinned onto the wooden beam. And we're just going to make a nice bridge for jumping in. Oh, first dive. What do we think?

It looks cool. Whoa.

It's fresh. I got my own little rock. We love it. All right. Making foundation. So main decking is going to have a step down from the house that's going to continue around the side. It's going to be another different layer here and that's going to connect in even lower to that layer. So it's going to be three steps. Just built the diving platform. Wagner's busy with his own project. Everyone's carpenting today. Nice.

Some people have been asking about filtration.

In the swimming pond.

This is a system of Aquarian air tank bubblers. And there is a ring beam of perforated drainage pipe that goes around the wooden larch ring beam. And the movement of bubbles is sucking water from that drainage pipe all the way around the pond up with the column of water that's moved. Another great benefit.

So it's a very low wattage.

I've got two air pumps running at 60 watts, basically.

And we'll see how they go in.

The winter, whether they stop it freezing for a long time. Still got the last section of deck that's going to cut through to the greenhouse here. And beautifully, they're actually the same drop down. So there's three sections. 1, 2, 3, to get to the Aderf house, who's really nice. But another great benefit of the bubble system is that the mosquitoes don't lay larvae in here because the water surface is constantly moving. And that is perfect.

Okay, Working on the last section of deck. Just got these funny angles. Get a couple more supports in. I've made this one at the standard board length. I've run out of decking boards now. This is all left over from platforms and things. But that means I've got a pretty easy process with no cutting to lay this square section. And then I've got a lot of off cuts I can use for this bit. So looking good. And I've left a gap where the turkeys are. And I was going to go right up to the greenhouse, but I think I'm going to leave that for now and maybe that'll be lawn. It's wide enough for the lawnmower, so that could be fine. And I might extend it over there afterwards, but I'm going to feel into this and obviously when everything grows up. Next summer. Summer, there's some nice rose bush here that I don't want to get rid of. I could have it coming out a hole in the deck, but it'll be easy to extend the deck to here if I want to, because I can screw a ring beam to the actual concrete wall and easily extend it if necessary. But that's where I've got to need to go out and get some more boards and then we'll be finishing it up. So we've been busy taking the last of the larger animals who process the pigs. They're in the freezer now, and that's the first time ever, actually that there haven't been larger livestock on the farm ever. So now it's just down to the laying hens and a couple of turkeys that they'll keep growing until Christmas time and farm's pretty much packed down.

Good morning.

Look at bird. Wow, they are massive. They're so big. How big is.

All right? Beautiful afternoon. Grace and I are fishing and in the background, just above these trees, there's a pair of breeding ospreys circling around. Hopefully they'll come and give us a show, teach us how to fish. I've been out here many times where they've. We've been out for a few hours just cruising around and then they'll come down and just catch a fish in first try. So there's been a lot of preservation going on. Interesting and different techniques with the different crops that we're growing, as well as meat and eggs. And I've been glassing eggs and pickling and doing all kinds of things that will be feeding into the Ridgedale Cookbook, which is a project that's finally starting out that I'll tell you more about. But the tomato situation is crazy. There is so many tomatoes and it doesn't matter how many I pick and preserve, they just keep coming on strong. You see how many yellow and green tomatoes There are around. I'm going to do another big pick of 30, 40 kilos today to start sauces. But I've already frozen down so much. It means I'm not going to have to buy tomato sauces or tomatoes for making kids food for probably several years from this point. Now they've really had time to ripen on the vines like this. They're so incredibly sweet. These little cherries are particularly incredible. So I'm going to be focusing on taking the best ones first. I've got so much food preserved anyway that I'm not going to be able to take them all. Might have to go gives them away. I think so. It's getting cold now. We've had the first heavy frost this morning. We've had a couple of lighter frosts. You can see I've packed down the teepees, packed away all the gear and drained all the field lines. And there's water pipes all over the farm using water in the slaughtery, the different kitchens, washing machines that are outdoors to dry and clean down. And all of the lines around the field need draining. I put intelligently placed drainage quick release points throughout the farm. So you can just go around opening up the ends of pipes and quickly draining as well as gathering all the field gear for animals and just now finishing up. So pretty much all the outside jobs are done and it's time to just enjoy these beautiful display of autumn colors. My favorite time of year is right now when all these colors explode. I want to show you what's been going on with the pool and the decking and the aterfaul's house build. Alright. So this is where it's at today. I've had a lot of fun putting in this decking. It's pretty much finished. I would like to put some vertical wood down the front perhaps to cover the liner where you see it sticking out on the vertical sort of edge. But that's going to wait for now. We're not going to see this come to life fully until next year when all the plantings are done. I'm in two minds whether to put another sauna here just to be able to have sauna access right outside the house. I'm going to use it a lot more. And a smaller sauna. Now obviously we've got a sauna here. That is how we wash hundreds of people that have passed through the farm over the years. But it's too big to heat up in the depths of winter. Just for me and the kids. It's not really worth the wood use. So I'm thinking small sauna here. Something that's just really fast to heat up right next to a plunge pool. We're going to use this for ice bathing, cold water exposure. It's going to be used a lot more and it's going to be super nice with the option for a cold plunge like this. So firstly, it was a really nice move to cut out the surrounds around here. Really opens this up and it feels so much nicer as a space now. The decking was basically free to build. I bought a little bit of the thicker timbers that support this. But this is all leftover timbers from building the deckings up in the forest. That's a lie. I had to buy this section too. Obviously timber prices have gone up a lot recently. So I was lucky to have a whole stock of that from previously. And it's worked out really nicely. I've got this on three separate levels. Equal height difference between the three levels. And that's how I calculated and planned it. But it's nice when something actually works out in that way how you planned it. So that's really nice. I'm thinking I'll build an outdoor kitchen here and really make use of this space. So the pool worked out about 10% over budget. Cost about €8,000 to build. And that's pretty good. I'd say. Very attractive feature. The air bubblers are working really well. I'm gonna have to see how that helps with freezing in the winter. And I'm also going to skim out all these leaves. I don't have a skimmer in the pond. I could easily add a solar powered skimmer but don't really plan to do that this year at least. And so we're just going to scoop out leaves. There's obviously going to be a lot of leaves coming down from the oak trees now. And I can't wait to just plant this up and get it looking beautiful. Really landscape it in. It's so nice. With the house painted. It feels super fresh. And we've been using this every day. We're into cold water exposure. So quick dip in here every day. It's perfect. And this is coming along too. Let's have a little look inside. It's still got a lot of work to do. This is turning into an office space. It's going to have a simple bathroom that's going to hopefully get started next week. Got the internal doors coming to put in here. And so it looks pretty similar to last time you saw it. But now you really get a feeling I think the doors and windows were not in last time you saw this. So you've got this as a bedroom looking straight out so you can wake up in the morning and just jump straight in the pond. That's perfect. So obviously this needs skimming, painting. I'm gonna have just a simple sink here and table desk for working at. It's gonna be a lovely space for riding. Obviously we've got this cookbook project on. It's gonna be a collaborative effort. This is going to be a lovely studio space for working on things like that. Storage or sleeping loft up here, I think you'll agree. Pretty nice little space. So pretty cool. Took a lot longer than planned. Everything this year seems to just drag on a bit. But I feel really good the last few weeks it's just been myself here, kids are back at school and so I've just been focused on just getting all this stuff done and really enjoying uninterrupted workflow. It's kind of meditative for me to just get knuckled down. I'm sure a lot of you can relate to that when you can just get into a flow state. And yeah, I feel super happy to finally have just got the buildings all painted and up to scratch and have built this. I think that's a great achievement whilst maintaining the farm and storing two or three years worth of food supply at the same time. So it's a bit dark in here, it might be a bit grainy. You can see we've got all different types of potatoes in here and all the different types of onions stacked up, shallots. And I think you've seen images of this before, but all bone broths and tallows. We've got fermented tomatoes. We're going to have a whole load more pickled tomatoes coming in. We've got pickles, ketchups, tomato sauces. We've got a lot of food supply here, which feels great. With all that's going on in the world right now, with rising prices and even just going to a store around here where we live quite remotely adds up in fuel costs, etc. So it feels really nice to be hunkering down for the winter with an incredible amount of super high quality food right here in the basement in the freezers ready for use. So those of you that follow the channel over the years know of the two rather large manuals that I've put together, both about regenerative agriculture as well as the accompanying book, Rich Dale Farm Builds how to build all the infrastructure that you've seen on our farm over the years. It's now time for the third book. I've talked for years about starting the Ridgedale Cookbook and it's never really taken off. So this year I've decided I've got to really head that up and make that happen. I'm going to be collaborating with some incredible chefs who've been here over the years, who are incredible chefs in their own right, running their own companies and doing incredible things. So it's going to be a farm to fork, nose to tail, catering as well as home cooking, preservation, foraging. It's going to be another 750 page manual. By the looks of things, we're fleshing it all out and I've started working on it almost full time now and certainly come November to March, we're going to be working a lot on creating this resource. I think it's going to be an incredible book and a brilliant way to sort of wrap things things up with this trilogy of epic manuals from this far. I'm really excited about that, so stay tuned and we'll be posting all about that over the coming months as it comes together and we'll run a Kickstarter to get the funding to get that printed. Once we've got that done, hopefully. All right, well, this front lawn is about to change. The dig went extremely well. Lastly, I want to finish up by telling you folks that the online regenerative agriculture masterclass that that I run every winter is opening. The cart is opening from next Monday the 17th till Friday the 21st only. So that's next week if you want to join me on that training which runs January to March next year. It's an eight week super intensive lifetime access training. You can find out more on the website, but you can also right now sign up for free downloads and a free mini series on profitable regenerative agriculture. It's the top link in the links below, so check that out. Join us in there. Look forward to meeting many of you farmers around the world who are looking to plan and design your landscape and farm businesses. And those of you that are looking to transition what you're already doing to better models of regeneration and profitability. That's the flagship training that I can offer. It's the best value for money training that I could personally ever offer and I'm super stoked to meet hundreds of you from all over the world in there. Check it out in the links below. Thanks so much for watching as always, folks. See you in a video soon.