Pastured Poultry, No Dig Market Gardens and Stuff

Welcome back to another video, folks. I've had a wonderful weekend away with the kids in the Stockholm area, attending a wedding, seeing a sweetheart and also just getting out the farm a bit, getting some perspective. And I've come back to my summer family. We've got all the birds out on pasture now, so a little update of things that are going on as the whole landscape transforms to summer. Now. We are on the way home. Don't tell Belda now. So things progressing nicely. We've got plenty of crops to be eating. This is radish that's already ready. Lots to get through. Some are coming on still, but nice carrots. All the brassicas coming on. We've got more food than we need at this point, but we're planning on the schedule for courses that are coming up. But we're having a problem this year with deer. And so Nadia is actually just replacing beets that were pulled out in the night by deer. We've actually put up mesh. We've never had deer problems in the garden. We've put little mesh gates on each of the entry points, but it's obviously hopped over. It's taking out lettuce and it's lifting up beets. It's been a bit of a problem. So what we might do is put an electric line. We've got some of these long 15cm fence post attachments that we could put a string. It's a bit logistical because of the forest. Obviously they can hop in at any point they like. So in a way we need a electric string all the way around. It is buck hunting season, but unfortunately I've seen it on the cameras and it's not a buck. It's a young male that's obviously full of energy and hopping over, but things coming along good considering how much time is being put into this. It's a homestead garden this year. I want to keep it clean and actually do the work to put things back as they should be. Because of the problems with management last year, there's a lot of patches of tenacious weeds. Things got out of control last year and so I want to put it right again. I'm actually at this point thinking I'll tarp the whole lot winter because I'm not sure what's happening next year. And turns out it's been so far a lot of work done to run this in a homestead way where I think it's making me consider different options, but I'm not sure what I'll do next year. So as the blocks come out of Use this year I'm thinking of putting silage tarp over the whole lot to just not have the stress of weed seeds blowing in, etc. We're growing a lot more than we would need to for the people actually living here and I don't think we would necessarily do that. Again, lots of different ideas and thoughts and it's. It's early in the season still. It's a really lovely experience to be here with families and parents. It's definitely a very different dynamic to normal. And we're putting very little time into the gardens compared to running this as a commercial market garden. And I'd say it's pretty bountiful for the energy we're putting in. But departure from the way things have always been run here. Deer problems. Never had them before. That's an interesting one. Seems to be going well with slugs, snails, all those kind of pests. But deers can take out beds very quickly overnight. So we'll have to think about that and see how it goes. Okay. Freedom time. So these birds are on day 20, so a little bit early and it is actually raining today. But it seems like an opportune time to take them out. They're getting a bit stir crazy in here because of security issues. They've been in the dark with red lights only and it's time to get them out on the grass. Okay. Just two sellers and pens that will fill farm freezers. Cleaning up a lot around this landscape. Also going to get the turkeys out. Okay. Haven't had turkeys at the farm for a couple of years. We've only ever done 150. You could have run 200 with this gobbledygo. It's very heavily built. Obviously when you get up to that many turkeys, you've got a thousand kilos of turkeys on there. I miss seven turkeys a lot. I really enjoy turkeys character as well as eating turkeys compared to chickens. I've said this many times, but I never even ate chicken till my twenties and never expected to be a poultry farmer in the middle of nowhere in Sweden. But it turns out they are such a critical tool for small scale farmers being very quick to regenerate land and the most profitable of all the animal enterprises on a small scale. We've only got 25 homestead chickens this year, but I'm very happy for that. We'll be doing two 50 meter nets, moving them, probably moving the structure within the net and then moving them on every few days or whatever. I'm gonna get the old Quad bike out and see if we can pull it up to the field with this. We're separating the turkeys from the chickens because of the risk of diseases like Blackhead, etc. So we've got the boilers down in front. Field layers are still in there right now and we'll be putting them out into. These guys will be going out into top field on the way to top field. Super fun getting the turkeys out. I think I'm just going to back up a cage trailer to the barn and we'll try and get them all coming into that. It's very hard doing certain things one handed. We're going to have these up in top field to not cross paths with the chickens. And I'm going to start them in the middle of the field away from the trees because young turkeys often do not want to stay in the fence and they're big enough that they can just walk out of the fence and they might go to shelter in the trees. So I think we're just going to start them back in the middle of this row up here. Something like this up amongst the berry bushes. It can be that we need to put guy ropes with blue string or whatever from the inside of the pen to stop them physically pushing and walking through the fence. It's going to be hard to get a really good shock on this fence because the grass is getting quite long now, but we'll see. We'll maybe just put the fence up, get them in here, observe them and if we need to, we'll really put the guy ropes up. Strong birds. Okay, mini eggmobile boilers out. Now we've taken the gobbledygo up. We're gonna just pick up this trailer and back it up to the barn. See if we can get this working. It hasn't been used a couple of years. Probably it's got flat tires. But this is an easy way to move turkeys because we can hoddle them into the back on that big gate. Haven't shown you around in here for a while because things are a little bit busy, but bathroom is developing very nicely. And so this has been a little project to get new water heating and put the new hardware in here. So we've got a nice little stand up washing machine, got new liner. I gave up on the mosaics because just too much work. Got to finish the lining, but that's pretty sweet. So a lot of rubbish removal to do and cleaning. Make this place look stick and span and build a deck on the backside. So the aim is to come in Here, with a chainsaw, cut all these trees down. Use my spare decking to build a lovely deck out the back. Pretty nice, right? With a beautiful view over the water out here. Look, you can't stand there. Okay, turkeys coming out. Gonna need a bit of encouragement. First time on grass. Now, turkeys are ferocious foragers. They can get 40% of their diet from past it. It's going to take a little bit to get them out of here because it's a lip on the trailer. So I'm going to do it something like this. Okay, look, they are straight into the greens. Little dinosaurs. So simple systems, but devil's in the details here on this farm. Predominant winds coming from the south. So the adaptation we've made to these salatin pens is to always have two sides with wind protection and they move with the wind protection down a tree lane, skip sideways and come back. So they always have wind protection in the same direction. We have three quarters of the roof covered. Feed always goes under a covered quarter. Water goes in the edge of the open section. These birds are moved every day and then the last week they will be moved twice a day. They'll be substantially bigger there. And yeah, nice to see birds back on the pasture. So we've got turkeys that we've just put out the broilers here, layers here. Very nice. Small scale this year, easy peasy, but nice to have all the creatures of the Ridgedale ensemble, you could say. Summer season. One of my big missions was to paint the buildings. I've got a professional spray rig that's going to make painting the red Fallu red, the traditional Swedish paint that you can find out about. Always people have questions about this paint. You can read about the history of it online. I'm looking to hire a skylift suitable for reaching the top. So I'm going to paint the roofs, I'm going to paint all the walls, paint the white trims as well as paint the house roof. And house is changing colour that I've talked about in other videos. Looking forward to it. But it's hard to get a skylift into the right places. So I think I found the machine that will do most of what I need. And then I've also got a climbing harness that I've got a roof ladder attachment coming that I'll be able to climb up on any roofs to access strange corners. I was planning to do this after the weekend I've been away with the kids in the Stockholm area. I was planning to spend this whole week painting. However, it's raining tonight and tomorrow so that's getting delayed a bit and probably it'll be next week that I spend a lot of time painting. I want to spruce the farm up, get it looking ship shape and looking well cared for, ready for the autumn and winter. So tomatoes are coming on nicely. They've settled in now. They were a little bit shocked I think because of the cold nights, but they're putting on good growth at this point. We're leaving the flower heads on now. Just planting cucumber nice and there's melons going soon. But at this point we're coming through, just wrapping them up to the growing tip and we're coming through taking off the very lower leaves and suckers and then we'll tighten up the strings and do a little spot weeding. There's little tomatoes self seeding actually from last year as well. But that's looking good. We'll be on a every three or four week fertilization plan and I think there's some flowers and herbs still to go in here and pretty soon it'll be a jungle. So that's the process. Tomorrow we'll buzz through and finish the other roads. But happy with the development of the plant so far. That's fine. As I said before, we're not putting anywhere near the time that we were typically in the garden. So things are very nice considering this will soon be bouncing up and by mid August we'll clip the tops of the plants here. At this latitude in Sweden it's a very short season. Very excited for cucumbers, just growing English cucumbers and then we've got two rows of watermelons and melons, a few chilies to put in there. Get this place looking great. We've got basil already under the tomatoes there. Something beautiful about the landscape here is typically historically you get rain evenly throughout the summer and so you get these glorious hot summer days. Now we're getting thunderstorms and a bit of rain, a lot of rain tomorrow. And that puts, you know, difficulties on some jobs like painting all the buildings. But it means that we get by on very little watering often throughout the summers. Obviously we've had super dry years where we're watering constantly and the drought year in 2018 where we had problems, but grass is really kicking in now that we've had a nice bit of rain and some hot weather. You can see where eggmobiles were standing last summer. Yeah, landscapes looking lush. And summer brings a different energy to the people, to the landscape around here in a way that you just don't experience further south. Summer is short and intensive and I've always said spring and autumn kind of a tiny shoulder seasons here. It's why I say if you live in Germany or the UK a little bit further south, you kind of double the growing season that we have here. It's only three months without frost typically and there is no shoulder season. It's winter, a couple of months of summer, back to winter. And that's how it goes around here. Well, here's a simple solution for the deer. It's obviously hopping over these fences and so I've just put these long extendable posts on just to give a bit of extra height. It's a young female, I believe, but I think if we just have a row of this, it's going to have 8 to 10,000 volts going through it. So if she puts her nose on that, she'll get the message. But we've definitely seen a little bit more intrusion into the garden, even despite putting little gates on. So hopefully this will do the trick. Never had to do this before. Okay, this energizer is out of battery. Need to get that charging up. That's one of the new Apollo 3000 that we use for double poultry nets. These were the original from the farms and they're the only one on the market at the time that can power two chicken nets. But I've got the string all the way around the gun. Eight and a half thousand volts, that should do the trick. Now obviously a roe deer can jump this if it wants. That's probably 160, but hopefully it will reach up, touch its snout on that, not come back. And in the meantime, we just hope the kids learn their lesson pretty fast too. Super fun. Really nice to feel like summer is really here. Little birds of bees. Looking forward to upcoming trainings and going to Ireland and Wales this year. Excited to meet many of you there. Look at all these cherries coming along. That's it for the video folks. Don't forget you can find out all about everything we've ever done on this farm in the links below. The books they sell Regenerative Agriculture as well as the Ridgedale Farm Builds, which is a compendium of how to build low cost on farm infrastructure. All that's in the links below as well as other online offerings that we have. Look forward to meeting many more of you this summer. We've still got a few last spots on the market garden training as well as our world renowned farm scale design training. And so you can find those things in the links below and I'll see you in a video soon. Don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't.