REST, PLAY AND WORK

Welcome back to another episode, folks. It's glorious Spring returns. We're having some fun and relaxing times as well as a lot of hard work being done. So this is a mishmash of the last week. All kinds of different clips and culminating in getting our hot tub in action, which is a big milestone at the farm. What have you done?

So this is a three player chessboard. You have half of a regular chessboard on each of these three parts. So basically it's a bit distorted, but it's completely playable. The only thing what happens that the diagonals have two sides and yeah, it's a game we built here using all.

The nuts and bolts.

These are the new chess pieces.

But you have three sets of pieces.

Yes, you do have three sets of pieces and no colors.

And you're all playing same rules, but everyone's similar rules.

Like the queen would always be in the same position, so on the same spot. And then if one player is out of the game, the pieces remain there passive and the rest of the players will finish the match.

Today we are in the canoe in our little pond. Hey, Zaku, Canoeing in the trout pond looking for insects with your new net. Find anything? Okay. We have had this hot tub gifted to us by the digger driver. When we made the pond, he couldn't ever get it sealed again. I think it worked when it was new, but you can see now we've just taken the top off and you can see how the construction is. So it's like an old style boat. It's designed to swell when it gets wet and that causes the seal. But you can see like quite significant gaps that obviously aren't working. We tried to. We have a connection from the pond from the pump that goes up to the market gardens to fill this up from the pond. And yesterday we tightened it up and tightened these straps. But when we put water in, it was leaking from about here and that's as much water as we've ever got it to hold. But what we're doing now is taking this top rim off and we can really see when we've got all these touching. Now if we can get them all touching, it should hold water. Certainly. Even if it's leaking, it should. We should be able to pump water in quicker than water leaks out. And in that way hydrate the wood, get it soaking. And if we can get it sealed, we'll need to scrub this down. Last year there's a bird nesting in the middle of the stove, so there's a lot of debris in here. We'd empty it, clean it, and then finally, we'd be able to have a hot tub here on the side of our pond, which would be awesome. Okay, we've got. Now we've managed with three ratchet straps. Having the actual ratchets at different places, we could actually get these pretty much all together. There's a few spots that have a little bit of a gap, but there's still quite a bit of surface contact. So I think it's certainly better than it's ever been. It's not. These are the leaks from yesterday, and it's already higher than it's ever been, and it's not leaking out visibly yet. So that looks good. What we need to do is fill this up to get the wood soaking, probably. I'm just thinking because we need these straps on for now while it soaks up. But these bands should be in place before the wood swells just to take any extra swelling tension into them. There's a drip here, but it's bound to have a few leaks. But the question is whether we can keep it full, that it swells up, and then that should take care of minor leaks. First time ever since this pond was built that we have actually got this full of water. So that in itself is remarkable. Now could take two or three days to really swell up the wood. And we can't leave the market garden pump on the whole time, obviously. So at some point, we'll turn this off and then just come back and refill it and see how the swelling helps. It might be wise just to have a few ratchet straps on here permanently. But that's a milestone. Well, this is two hours after filling. You can see it's gone down maybe 10cm generally, but that's okay. And interestingly, the bigger leaks that we had on the sides have actually stopped already. So that gives me a lot of hope that we can seal this up. This is wet here where it over spilled when we were filling it, but I'd say that's pretty remarkable. A couple of days like this and put some new straps on. Oh, so excited for this. Looking out over the beautiful pond. Here's our ospreys. This is one of the breeding pairs on our lake, and they nest just around the corner with the short noses. That looks like a. There's nothing like you go fishing, you're sitting there for three hours, you catch nothing, and you see one of them come along and just pull up a pike. What a beautiful evening. Look how glassy it is. All right. First barbecue of the year. Ragnar wants to go swimming. Alex is climbing a special climbing tree. We've got beer, bows and arrows and meat. Perfect. Chicken hearts and home smoked bacon on the go. And we have pork tenderloin. Super nice. Okay. No one's brave enough. Except Ragnar and Saku. Wow. Ragnar likes chicken hearts. Good job, dude. You're warm now after your little swim. This is our back garden. Look who's here. Hey, handsome one. Press radishes. Oh, it's not so warm in here. I had to get down in here, pull a plug out because now it's time to scrub this thing. You can see it scrubs up quite nice. But we've got to give it a deep clean. Hopefully by the end of the week we'll have wood fired hot tub. Whoa. So many tadpoles. The millipede is the little black. Black millipede? No, black headed millipede. You can tell it's a millipede because millipedes feet are under their bodies and they have four legs for every segment. Whereas a centipede often it looks like they have far less legs. They only have two legs per segment and their legs come out their side sides. So you can tell a centipede from a millipede. PR Coming into leaf. Birds are getting big. I think it's next week that we start the slaughter. You see the grass is really starting to grow and they've been coming through doing the annual weed of the strawberries. Behind on the plastic roller. Things are jumping into life. But the birds look healthy and good. So I've been down here scrubbing. This is as good as I think I'm gonna get it. What a view. Alrighty. Now I came down here with a pressure washer. I'm gonna fill this up now. I came down with the pressure washer and my YETI pack. This is a lithium ion powered portable generator that I bought for the European tour. However, it cannot handle this pressure washer which is 2 1/2 kilowatts. This thing is good for 1500 watts with 3000 watt surge. It's a sign energy thing. And the reason I got this is I need to be able to charge laptops, drones, cameras, all kinds of things on the road. So I'm really happy with this tool but not strong enough for the pressure washer. So hand scrubbing, but we've got it looking good. So I'm going to fill this up. Okay. Things are getting serious. Tank is nearly full. Just going to put the rim back on and then it's probably a good 5 hours to heat this up, we're letting the sheep out just to get them used to the grass, because any animal coming on to rich grass after winter haylage will likely get the run. So it's good to just give them a bit of access, get them enjoying some fresh greens. They're really wanting it. Right now it's time to get them up together with the cows. We've done the ear tags and I'm a bit worried the cows will harass them when they first meet. So what we'll tend to do there is move them onto fresh ground so that the cows are busy eating and introduce them in that way. Now, you can see Winston has got a little apron and that's to allow him to run with the sheep, but not impregnate them. Now, we had one that he just broke, basically, so we've used yurt canvas to make another one up. But he's got a marker blue paint mark on his front, so if we see any of the sheep with signs of blue on them, we might have to remove them straight away. Super nice to see them eating grass. So maybe we'll do a bit of grass cutting around the yard here before we actually get them out. So here in the big tunnel, first herbs are in, as well as lettuces there. And we've already been eating mitsuna in here. We've got scarlet frills doing really nicely and we've not seen too many flea beetle problems. Lots of salad now and we got more mitsuna and giant red, which is a really lovely spicy mustard. Look at these. We'll be able to sell some of these now. Beautiful. I often get big flea beetle problems, but it's doing okay now. Just debating when to get the tomatoes out. It's always a bit risky and you never can tell. We've got all the strings down, so spend a bit of time just getting all the strings up. Ready for tomatoes on 22 centimeter spacings. We have five beds of that, three beds of cukes over there on 45 centimeters, but I think we'll start bringing them out mid next week. You never know. The main weather forecast we look at says no frost for the next week, but frost can come till 25th. And if we've got the strings up, it's a lot harder to protect the tomatoes. We could put them out and cover them up, but they're very fragile once we take them out of their trays. Remember, they're in trays with all the pots, but they're holding together against each other. If we took them apart individually, we need them immediately on a string. So then it gets really hard to put fleece over them. So always a risk. But I think we'll get them in the ground quicker than we ever have this year. Solar powered lawnmowers. Thank you, girls and boys. So it's a historic moment. Can't believe we haven't got around to this sooner. But you know what it's like life on the farm. It's pretty busy usually. So now I've got a bit of free time here and there. I'm just excited to do something I've wanted to do forever. Now this thing has got a chimney sitting over the stainless chimney. So it's actually gonna start sucking the air through. And it's got a hole in there that helps increase surface area. I'm gonna get this loaded up. It's like 4 o' clock in the afternoon. I don't have a thermometer on me. It'd be nice to take the temperature and see how long it takes to get to what temperature. But I just want to get it to bath temperature. It could take five hours. I want a hot soak and I don't care if it's late at night when it does it. So we'll see how it goes. Therehere we go. Two minutes in, it's got the rocket on. I'm going to learn how to vent this. I guess you're just vending it by pushing this back and forwards. Bit of experimentation, but fun. It's been on for two hours and I reckon it's up at 40 degrees. We mixed it up with the panel of the canoe just to get the water more evenly distributed. It's lovely and warm. Look at it steaming over there. And it burns very efficiently. You might just be able to make out on the top of the chimney. The heat wave coming off it. It's burning good. So to get it this far, we've used two grey crates worth of wood which are not particularly big. I reckon you'd use one to fire our sauna. So pretty good. I reckon we'll need one more crate though, to make an evening of it. But I think it's going to be time to get the crew down here and have a beer. Relax after a good week's work. First one in the tub. What a dream. What's it like, Alex? Fucking awesome. After reef's hard work. This and a beer. Perfect. Ragnar's ready. Hey, Ragnar. I'm gonna scoop out some of this detritus. I don't want to eat that. Whoa. Good. Is it like a big hot bath? Yeah. Wow. Next to the lake. We have lived here how long? Seven years. How long have you been alive? How old are you? Three. Three? Nearly four. And we have not had a hot bath in that whole time. Do you like having a hot bath? Yeah. No weeing in the bath, please. All right. Super good. This is like just for perspective. Look at that. See our trout feeding in the pond? Now, it does take quite a lot of firewood to heat this up. More than the sauna. So it's not an everyday activity. But once a week I reckon we can do. Look at this. Six and a half. Christian's not coming in. Chicken duty. This is a beautiful thing. Next level. All right. How's that cold? That feels like the Arctic. Pretty much. Is the attic. All right, that's it, folks. The verdict is you should get a hot tub. Sauna is epic. Hot tubs. Next level. Hope you have a great weekend. Whatever you're doing, hit the like button. Subscribe, buy our book, check out our online training. We'll see you in a video soon. Bye for now. Don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't.