NO DIG MARKET GARDEN UPDATE S4 ● E64

The interns are back and the gardens are looking awesome. I wanted to just give you a quick update and tell you about the Ricoh wing that starts tomorrow. So Ricoh is a consumer and producer run Facebook administrated selling club, buying club and it works by local producers joining onto this Facebook group. And in the beginning it's been us and a friend, Ulrike, who have administered the page. And ultimately it's about consumers administering the page. So any local good producers allowed to put an advert up a week before a planned drop off point. So it's basically the model that we've been doing the last few years really successfully and we've been inviting other producers to come and utilise the drop off points. We've cultured, but it hasn't really been working out. But weco is a organized thing that took off in Finland and it's taken over in Sweden. And I think the one that's being set up in Karlstad, which is our further selling point with a lot more people, is apparently the fourth biggest in Sweden and it's not even actually begun yet. It begins for the first time tomorrow and we're really excited about it because I think it will open up a very different way of selling for us. And what we notice is that a lot of customers are excited by the convenience of not subscribing to something for the whole year, which is how we've been running our eggs and chickens, etc. With prepayments and longer term purchasing commitments. And so I'm very excited people are willing to try out veg boxes. We sold a whole load of vegetable boxes and other products there and our farm has been very successful on the Facebook page. We are one of the first in.

And we have a lot of diverse.

Products so a lot of people are.

Sort of responding and we're getting a.

Lot of new customers from this format. So we're very excited. I'm not actually able to go because I'm with the interns tomorrow, but I've asked them to film a bunch for us so we can get a sense of the feeling and the products the other people have. There's a bunch of producers that we recognize on there, but I would say that we've started in a really great fashion and really had a great response on the Facebook page. And so you're not allowed to sell things there.

It's not a market.

You must put an advert out for all the things you're selling and the price beforehand and people have to order it on the Facebook page by a personal message. And so the time and place for the pickups pre organized and then people pre order and pay you by swish as a convenient form here or bank transfer. They can bring cash on the day but only for things they've already pre ordered. And that's the rules. And then all the producers clear the adverts on Facebook and you prepare for the next week's sale. So we're going to try it out weekly. I believe many Ricoh rings work every fortnight but for us it's much better to work weekly because we have a.

Short growing season where we want to.

Be putting product out every week. Fresh produce like vegetables etc and eggs.

So we hit the ground running.

I think it's going to become a really big part of our sales I imagine. So really excited and be able to show you some footage from that tomorrow.

Just taking some of the insect netting off and realizing the sheer abundance here and the overproduction, we've been growing this new salad mix and aiming for five kilos on a 28 day cycle for the first cut and a couple of kilos for the second cut. But we've taken five kilos off this bit which is less than a third of the bed and the biggest restaurant orders are 10 kilos a week. So we've got a huge overproduction here and that's not affecting the economy of our plan but it's, you know, overproduction is just as wasteful damaging as under production in a way. So we've got to find some more salad eaters. Looks really beautiful in here. Matt's just uncovering some of the kales and broccolis that have had insect net on them and they've just grown too much now that they need a bit more light and the leaves are all crumpled up. But we have a huge amount of kales to start shifting soon. And the broccolis are coming. These are small heads. Still some beautiful broccolis over in the south beds. Just an abundance of alliums and kale here. Nets have been super effective. No, we've suffered very little flea beetle damage and very happy with these nets. These are from a local Swedish company, Lindblooms and small enough for flea beetle. Very nice. Trials are going on on these beds and it'll take some time to really analyze what's gone on with that. But we'll keep you updated with that too. So over again in the old north beds and we're trying Romanesco here and I haven't actually come around to Looking at it myself, but it's coming up in there.

Very excited for this.

Fennels are developing nicely. And more kales, cabbages and the lettuces. Bit too densely planted in these beds, but worked okay. These are remains going off to the local spa. More fennels here and alliums in this block. And some beautiful lettuces still.

And we're eating in abundance every day from the garden.

Rocket crop was just going over. It was harvested for last week's box, but we've got a new bed sitting next to it that's perfect for the taking. And that'll be cut on Wednesday. So lights are on and brooder's warming up for fourth batch of broilers coming in. 800 new day old chicks arriving tomorrow. It's got to lower the lamps down, warm this place up. So the peas in the south are doing a lot better. Won't be long till we have flowers now and soon there'll be an abundance of peas coming through and things doing okay in here. But broccoli, some of these are bolting. There's some beautiful broccoli heads developing and most of them are okay, but you see one here that's bolted already and there's a few I've been noticing. These are insect nets, not row covers, so they're not heating the plants up. There's another bolting one here, but we've had a few very hot days with very busy open day and things going on. That's meant we haven't been able to manage getting enough water down. And so the strategy is to deep water leaves so they minimize bolting. But I've just found the first pea flowers, which means peas are coming very soon. And we'll pick these every couple of days and keep them in the fridge to keep them in optimum condition. And you see we need a bit of tying up in here. Just come in with some blue twine and tie these up because it's been incredibly windy.

The weather shifted today and we had some rain late this evening.

It seems to always rain when they uncover a new piece of roof to start roofing over here. But we need to tie these up and soon start harvesting peas. How's the microgreens doing, Matt?

Well, microgreens are growing really well. We're growing sunflower peas, radish and beet. The beet is the most, the biggest learning curve. It's got these bald patches, but still getting a decent harvest per tray. We're getting, if I remember correctly, about a kilo and a half harvest of the sunflower and peas per tray, which is really nice, actually.

That's a meter by 40 centimeter. Yeah. Starting to grow some outdoors now as well.

Yeah, we have a good demand, like a weekly reliable demand for multiple restaurants and we don't want to max out just with them, you know, I want to grow more and sell to more buyers. So we're trying in one of these 10 meter beds, seven and a half square meter beds. We're going to do half sunflower, half peas and at the same time continue in the trays indoors and just to compare and see how they go.

Super nice.

Yeah.

It's moving time. Maria's made a little pen of fresh ground to encourage them all to move out so she can take the big fence down and make a new padd. Very nice. And it's a big paddock. It's two and a half thousand square meters for the next couple of days and they're going down to about 1800 square meters. And the reason is we're trying to get through this field really quick and get back around our farm really quick once recovery is kicked in, to then get off our farm by August time. So they've done some good trampling, but not enough animal impact here. There's a lot of standing ground and they've been around just taking the tips off plants. And then the sheep are nibbling down lower on some of them too. But if we look, might be hard to pick it up on the camera. If we compare to where they're moving on to, they've had some impact. Thinking of scaling up the sheep enterprise next year and possibly getting rid of the cows. And a cow is equivalent to about five ewes in terms of grazing, probably in our case, four sheep's equivalent to a cow because this is a very small cow. But either way, we're going to have possibly eight cows by the end of the year, which is up to 40 sheep equivalent. So we're thinking to invest in a flock of 80 ewes and possibly start a brand new flock of really good sheep and run that as an enterprise. I calculate if you had 80 ewes lambing each year, it's potentially about €25,000 nets. You could run off that. And now we've got access to more land. It's a good option for us, I think. And the cows have been more for our own pleasure and to give people experience with handling big animals and having milk on the farm. We don't like to buy milk. It's a bit funny, the stuff you get in the Store, but we'll see. I really like these cows, though. I'm not going to get rid of them anytime soon. But the sheep are a bit of a motley crew. Different meat breeds and now some wool breeds in there too. And it's worth us starting again if we want to seriously consider lambs as part of the enterprise. So I haven't been up to the pigs for a while. I've certainly made an impression out here in the woods. See a group up there, we've got some more fencing to build. Now. We've been hearing them, they come in big teams with chainsaws and brush cutters and they cut the line, you see, of green there under the electric lines. And it sounds like they're coming our way. So we might wait for them to do that before building the next piece of fencing. And it might be the team starts building that while I get busy with the interns. I'd say it's good time for this lot to move on. Some impact here, you see on the roots here, these trees are all growing on very shallow soil. But that's okay because these are going to get felled. Now we've got three new piglets from a young mother. Hello, Molly. It's breakfast time in the farm. Curious to see what they've done down here in the young forest here. There is no ground covers, Evelyn. Blueberries, etc. It's quite soft ground. And down here is a lot more trees and a lot more residue from the old forestry. So you see they've had a bit less of an impact here just because of the nature of the terrain. They've been in here. I don't even remember how long they've been in here. I guess you could look at old videos and see some weeks now. But it feels like it's a good time to start putting up the next piece of fence now and moving them on. Here they come. So for reference, this is where the pigs were. This is the first paddock they came in. This is where they were sleeping in the snow, if you remember the old videos. But just showing you the regrowth that's taking place now with a bit of rest now, Reuben the big boar is still in here, but he doesn't dig so much. He sits around missing his girlfriends at the moment. But you see there's a lot of grasses and forbs come back and there's places where you start to see new species such as thick patches of dandelion, etcetera popping up. But it's regreening and this Will give us a lot of extra grazing for cows and sheep. Getting more of the forbed species and give it another month or two and it'll totally have recovered in here. Young birds are doing great and we have a new batch of 800 chickens coming in today. And so the brood has been warming up over the night and they'll be back at midday, same as the interns. And we're going to spend the afternoon getting to know the interns, hearing about their learning objectives, etc. This is the new. What's this prototype 2.0 rabbit run. Rabbit runs. Rabbit run or rabbit runs. A rabbit run for males or mamas? Some males. So we've got two males that we.

We have three males.

We have three males. So three males that will have their own little breeding pens. They're going to go in Bucky field I think. And we're using the recycled corrugated plastic from the neighbor's roofing project over there. And this stuff is awesome for boiler pen lids. It's much lighter weight than the plastic proper roofing or metal roofing obviously, but it's really expensive in Sweden for some reason, so we never used it. Day one for batch four.

And it's getting warmer in here.

And we removed the bunch of the bedding and put a nice cap of new bedding in here because it was getting too high up and they can.

Jump over as they get bigger to different pens.

So we've lowered the level.

And I've.

Forgotten how small baby birds are.

Intern's back from their holidays. They had a great time and they've been sharing a bit about their holistic context, their learning objectives.

We've done half of them today to.

Really give it time and we'll do the rest tomorrow.

And turkeys are arriving tomorrow. We have 120 turkeys arriving tomorrow. We're going to brood them for a week in the old cow barn and this will be done tonight. I expect these boys on it. It's just got a roof going on and all the roosts and we'll put a little dolly wheel on the front and then it's good to go. We're taking it down to camps.

Yeah, yeah.

Peas are all trained up nicely now. The first flowers are coming on the lower beds there. Just coming in a couple of days here. Really looking forward to good peace. Almost just working on the drip which.

We have some pressure issues with this drip setup.

It's really old setup that someone just.

Gave us that just happened to fit the tunnel well.

But we use a lot of water in different areas at the farm so.

It can be problematic to be highly measured with it.

So we're just putting a pot down to measure the leaders power that's coming out through there. Lots of flowers coming now. Very strong plants. Watering penis. How do you like cooking with fresh garden produce? Couldn't be better. That's the ideal there should be like that.

As always, thanks so much for watching our videos. Really appreciate your views and comments and you can click subscribe if you haven't already to follow the season. Don't forget to share and like the videos to help build the channel and spread regenerative agriculture to a wider audience. Really amazing what's happening at this farm with all the incredible people here and it's super exciting to share in this way. So many things to share that it's just finding the time to put little clips together. So I'm doing my best to keep you updated. Thanks for all the support and comments. Really appreciate that. Makes me want to keep doing this thing. I know it's a benefit to a lot of people and yeah, see you next time.