Preparing to garden at 59 North

Welcome back to another video folks. Glorious sunny days we've been having for a week now. It's really nice. I've been cutting trees down in the front garden, getting ready for the excavator coming in next week and we're starting digging the swimming pond. We've got a weekend trip to Cleda before we do that but today I want to give you an update on the seedlings in the lean to greenhouse. And I'm also preparing the beds in the big polytunnel. Now I didn't have chickens this year at scale and so for the beds in the polytunnel I'm using cow manure, chicken manure and peat based compost that I've bought in. It's an organic, certified, pretty powerful compost that makes a really good no dig bed for tomatoes, cucumbers that are going to need all that nutrient. So remnants of chicken gear because we haven't been keeping hens over the winter, haven't got a stockpile of good compost. These beds have been flattened. You can see the stalks of last year's tomatoes. I'm basically going to lay out eight bags on each of these 25 meter beds and that should deal with fertility this year. It's already quite good. Should be pretty weed free in here. Basically some amount of the last year's beds just flattened off. So we'll start unloading these and then bring another pallet for the other end there. In the meanwhile the kids and I went to Cleta for the weekend, had a beautiful spring sunshine weekend on the coast, getting things ready for renting out. I'm putting in a new heating system there, having put on a new roof from one of the houses last year and getting it ready to rent out. I've got a new friend who's living in one of the houses helping manage the place and the other will be on Airbnb. So that's fun. We are west coast beautiful weather. Ragnar, what are you catching on this beautiful day? Cucumbers, shrimps and little gobies. We have two gummies. Nice. I'll go to Grace. So progress in here. I'm just getting these beds ready now. I had chickens in here in the early winter. Still see the nest boxes down here. And so what I'm doing because these are on top of last year's beds and we haven't had much bedding added in, I'm adding some manure based compost. So that's a peat based compost with cow manure and chicken manure for fertility and that's going to be great for all the tomatoes and cucumbers, chilies, melons that were grown this year. And then I'm using the tilther just to tilth the top part of the soil, just to get a nice even till surface that I can put some salad crops in before we get going. So bear in mind here at 59 degrees north, we don't put out tomatoes until the end of May, typically around 25 May in an unheated tunnel. We get what's called the iron nights here, so you can have heavy frosts in early June, up to about 6th or 8th of June where we are here. We've even had snow at that time before, so you can never tell. It feels glorious right now working in the tunnel in a T shirt, but still freezing nights. So hopefully get this done today. Just got to finish two more beds and then I'm going to get my daughter Grace to help me move all of the drip lines into place. There's four drip lines on each of the beds. Get that set up and then I've already started some transplants of Asian greens and rocket and things like lettuce and we'll do some direct seeding of radish and other things in here so that we can get a crop. By the time the team arrive for the homesteading year, which is around the beginning of May, we'll hopefully have some crops ready for them to eat. There's going to be a lot of hungry kids here this year, so it's important that we grow enough food. But I've planned a garden that we should have plenty for our needs as well as for the camping people that are coming to camp up in the forest on the platforms that I built last winter. You can go back through as hundreds and hundreds of videos on my channel, so if you're new to the channel, you can look back and find video vlog updates of everything we've done here over the years, how to do all the different things we're doing the thinking behind the design work and going into details with economy and how processes work on the farm. So it's a lot of free content from there for you to go back and look through if you're new to the channel, so enjoy that. So you can see by the time I've tilled this, I will go over it in both directions twice just to get the bed level and in a nice working condition. And this is going to be perfect for direct seeding. Generally remains pretty weed free in here. We do get some Grasses coming in on the edges. This will be couch grass, but it's pretty easy to get them out and it's never causing that big of a trouble. You can see where the chickens have been pecking away at the edges. So we've always put this netting to protect the roll down sides to stop the hens pecking at that. Seen some wear and tear with the chickens in here. You can see I've been pecking through the plastic a bit. Got a bit of patching up to do. But typically you get, you know, four or five years out of a polytunnel skin like this. Commercially, we always change these out every five years because the light transmission reduces. So people don't really understand this, but plants, you know, are like photon meters when you used to have analog cameras and your eyes aren't adjusted to depict changes in photons. But even this plastic is cutting out a lot of light. Like a greenhouse glass cuts out 20% of the light. So these are typically best changed every few years. Here's Grace coming to help, but that's important. So we're going to get going tilting now and get the irrigation lines in and then I'll take you up to the seed room. Okay, that's working good. We're just pulling two pairs at a time and attaching them into the header. Then Grace is getting the slack out and putting a ground pin at the other end. Soon have this done, ready to plant. Grace is just finishing up the ends. So three folds like so, but try and get them exactly the same length. Yeah. And then we squidge it in half. That's the tricky bit. Not strong for that, I think. You hold this in, you're gonna fold that, increase it, slide this way. A bit of luck over there. That's a cheap end blocker. It's tricky, isn't it? But once you get it on them, it starts to follow itself. Way to go, Gracie. Perfect. Well done, sweetie. So, looking good. Now I've got to test the drips because often when they've been a bit creased, crinkled, they can develop little holes that obviously they won't function if they've got any leaks. But it's still freezing at night time, so we're not going to test that just yet. It'll be two or three weeks till we get some crops in here and we'll test it all out. Then we've got a whole reel of drip tape so we can replace any out if they need it. Looking forward to seeing green growth. Nice. All right, great job, love. That is sorted. We are ready for crops. Another thing we're growing this year is watermelon too. So homestead year opens up possibilities for lots of more experimentation and growing things just for the sheer pleasure of it. Which is really enjoyable for me to bring back some of my passions and enthusiasms that have got a bit worn thin the last years. Just being on repeat and not really pushing or learning anything new for myself. So I'm excited for that. We've opened up the TCP space. We've been having lunch on here in the sun to catch the most of it. And that's one thing you really notice here in Sweden when the sun does come back, you know, eight, nine degrees, people are out in T shirts. Certainly we are and enjoying the sun. It's going to be a while yet until the asparagus behind me starts browning. But it's nice to just spend time outdoors. Someone asked a bit about these teepees. These are from Tent Teepee in Sune, so the closest town. They ship all over the world and they do small ones like we have up in the forest. I invested in these two. I got a very good deal because they were used. They were kind of show pieces that they used in exhibitions or whatever. So the canvas is a bit aged but totally fine. And what I liked about these is they really opened up the carrying capacity of the farm. So previous, if you remember old videos, we had nine meter platforms here with our yurts which are now up in the forest for rental. And we could have about 40 people in that comfortably. But you can easily have. They sell tables that go with these structures slightly thinner and you'd fit eight on a table and you can have something like 90 seated inside with the sides down. And if you open the sides out and have a slightly wider platform like this, you can have like 120 people. So I thought with the kitchen wagon could do pop up restaurants, et cetera. And I just really like this open feel. It's really nice when the gardens it's got full of flowers and it's just beautiful to be out here in this space. Very simple design, but good design. You've got a vent there with strings that come down that I can pull on to open the vent up there and that works on a elastic, very nice. And then essentially it's just a load of slow grown spruce from the north of Sweden. And with these clever designs for opening up the sides. But what's really nice is the canvas is extremely good quality and that's really what makes this structure functional and Usable throughout the year and it's been new for me to leave these up over the winter, but they seem to have fared the winter no problem at all. It will cut down the lifespan of the canvas, but it's going to last many years and it's a very cheap structure, you could say. So I've been very happy with them, have yet to teach a training in them. So this is our teaching space and I do like yurts for their straight walls and something about that circular shape is important, but I think we'll make it work. Now in other news, hens are being picked up next Thursday. I'm also picking up some extra for my neighbors who are homesteading just through the forest over here. They've been helping me look after the farm and I've been away over the winter, which is super generous and we're up for working together, help each other out. We're also going to have pigs again, but it might be that our neighbour who already has Lynda ood pigs raises the sort of pink pigs that we had at the farm last year. It might be we do a trade where they raise them for us because they're already feeding pigs twice a day. But we might decide to have some at the farm. Just a few for homestead purposes. We've got boilers to order in a month's time and yes, exciting times. We're going to have a look in the greenhouse. Okay. So down in here it's pretty warm, but we've got some great growth since I last showed you in here. Grace's artichokes already attracting ladybugs. Perfect. And we got leeks just popping up here. Lots of spring onion. That's all the spring onion for the year. Didn't get very good germination on our chili. That was a packet from a garden center that Gracie picked up. But they're not professional grade seeds. I guess this is the wheat trials. So we've got Kamut and then Emma wheat at the end here. And I think this is another kamut. Possibly it's an unknown strain, but the rivet and einkorn didn't even germinate. So that's good. Tells me what to do. Now these are all in paper pot trays. It's really important if you raise in paper pot trays to lift them off the ground. See how the roots are pruning under these, that's really important. Otherwise these would become so root bound you wouldn't get them out the tray. So here on the wheat, for example. There you go. It's very hard for it to actually function as a paper pot. That's just test germination, so I don't care about those, but these I care very much for and that's doing a wonderful job. You can see the leeks are much thinner because they're singly planted, as opposed to multi sown spring onions. Oh, yeah. And in here we've got kales doing nicely. I've lowered all the lights down now the plants are growing lots of kales. More onions. First load of spinach. We've got all our tomatoes on these two racks of six different types. And just got to be careful in this setting. They get quite dry along the edge walls. So you can see germination can be pretty poor on the ends of the trays if you're not on top of watering. No pressure this year because we're just homesteading for ourselves. So it's all good, nice and relaxed. Lots of lettuce. There's cabbage coming up here, more cabbage here. We've got pak choys just breaking through here, so it's going good in here. So seed calendar is going on. I've got a simple plan and as I said before, I've got so many hundreds of videos here on this channel. Those of you that new to the channel, this has been like a vlog, basically documenting the whole journey. This year I'm homesteading, taking it easy. I've invited other parents and children here this year to homestead and just farm our kids, essentially, and make all of our own food needs as far as we can too. But if you want to look back to when we were in higher levels of production, you can see all these processes every year. That can be a fun way to compare what's happened here over different times. This year, the market garden calendar is pretty similar to normal. I make a bed plan and then I transfer it to a calendar. So it just tells me what to seed, harden off, direct seed, etc. Throughout the year. I've only got one last thing to do this month, which is to sow some more spinach. And then we're into April and May, where the main planting season is really going. Whilst the productions of most things are going to be very low this year, the garden is still going to be operating at quite a large scale and we're aiming to do that to be able to feed people that come in for the camping. We've got five platforms up in the forest that I bought last year to offer glamping where people can eat from the farm. And I'M employing someone this year to help run that as an enterprise so I don't have to think about it too much. All of my 2022 training opportunities live on the Ridgedale website, which you'll find in the links below. Right here at Ridgedale, I'm doing a two day pastured broiler masterclass, including a full day in the slaughter facility. Because there's nowhere you can really go and learn this in an effective way at a farm like this. Raising pasture raised poultry. I feel like that's an important duty that I have, so I'm offering that training. There's also a four day no dig market gardening masterclass that's an epic training that many people have come for that short training and started their operations based on the information and resources that we share in that time. And then there's also a nine day farm scale Permaculture Regenerative Agricultural Design course. That's my signature on farm course. If you want the broadest, widest ranging introduction to how we do all this stuff, that's my main course that I can share everything that I've learned in a concise, structured way. It's what many people have used as a springboard to reboot their own projects or to design and plan for their for their new projects. I'm also offering two of those workshops abroad in Ireland at the beginning of the year in June at Cattle Mooney's Heatherhill Farm. That's going to be an excellent course. And then in August I'll be over in Wales at Henbant Permaculture with my friend Matt. That's going to be awesome too. And that's a family friendly event. Matt's got a lovely family there and there's other families that camp on that land, so it's a great opportunity if you want to come with family. And yes, look forward to meeting a lot of you this summer. It's going to be a really easeful and social summer for me, so I can't wait. Happy days. Thanks so much for watching as always folks, don't forget to click, subscribe and give the video a thumbs up if you enjoy it all. Helps with the algorithmical stuff. See you in a video soon. Bye.