S4 ● E98 Digging a level pad for a big polytunnel

The dig is here and we're making a pad for the new polytunnel. Oh, it's a beautiful morning, isn't it? Ducks? Geese. Sorry, geese. Digger just came time to put a pad down for the polytunnel. Here's the fiber optic cables. Not deep enough, but we decided to bury this a bit deeper by hand. It's a bit of a liability but. But it's the company's problem really because they didn't bury it deep enough. So we're going to cut a trench and do it by hand. Pad is coming along nice. We're going to shave this edge off, put the drainage along the line that's cut now and we should have enough soil to level the whole thing off. We had a 75 centimeter low point over there, lower than this point and about 60 centimeters here equals the level over there. So it's working out well. Not too many rocks. This is now's work. We like it a lot. So some smoothing off to do and then we'll shave the banks and put in the drainage around the outside. It's going to be very nice. It's going to really change the landscape, but a good starting point for keeping the hens. I'm thinking I'll put possibly the TOR of the peat moss as the winter bedding on top of this and hopefully that will because it's more likely to compost down. I've been using wood shaders but they, you know, it's not compost down quickly enough in the winter so I'm using it for the tree bedding each spring. But I think I would like to try with torv even if it's a bit more expensive to have it composting on the ground that we can plant straight into a weed free medium would be very nice. So the driver's now just track rolling the ground. We've got to firm this up and compact it to make sure it's a stable base. Track rolling is the way you typically do that with earthen dams and, you know, pads such as this. It's. So we've just got all the course participants starting on their design groups. Some very nice projects ranging from small holding stroke farms to large farms. And drainage is about to go in. Very nice. Very happy about this pad. It's really going to be a pleasure to put the tunnel on and work with the animals on fresh mitsuna to go in the salad mix. No flea beetles. We like it. Happy with it? I'm very happy with it. Yeah. And I think it'll we'll get a nice regrowth on it too. Yeah, we will. It keeps going nice. Next week we have the rocket coming up and then the week after that we have the scarlet frills coming up. Fair enough. Yeah. Lots of things being produced. So dig is just taking a quick break and we're just measuring up to check that the widths are correct because we want this drainage just on the outside of the tunnel to prevent water seeping in. So just measuring up and he'll continue with the drainage down the sides. Every Swedish digger has one of these ankles which makes them incredibly dexterous. Maybe €10,15,000 piece on the end of the digger, but it's what turns this machine into a sculpting machine. And it's amazing to watch. It's all about this little piece. So I just got my new bow today. It's a beautiful longbow. This is made by Flagella Dye in Hungary, one of the best European bow makers. It's a light poundage bow, about 55 pounds. But that's, you know, that's enough to take down a very big animal. I'm not. You're not allowed to bow hunt here. I'm just doing it for fun and keeping my senses shut. It's trilaminated with Osage orange and yew. These are a medieval style arrow that they make too. And then I really like my little horse bow, little recurve bow. Very nice bow. Really nicely crafted birds and it's really nice to shoot arrows. I'm learning actually to shoot quite differently from when I was taught as a kid, where I'm shooting with the arrow on the right hand side of the handle and learning to shoot without aiming. So more instinctive style of just pulling, draw, fire and most modern archeries with the arrow on the left and you're looking down the arrow, but I'm learning to shoot without looking down the arrow. Just more instinctive feeling. And longbow's familiar, from England where I come from and you know, up to 180 pounds. I've been watching a guy pulling 180 pound bow which frankly I couldn't even bend to get the string on. I guess even a bow like this, it's, you know, up to about 75 is as far as my muscles would allow me. Really, I think beautiful craftsmanship. Very exciting little hobby. This is the drainage pipe and we've exposed the slippy here, we've exposed the fiber optic and we're going to put a little half pipe over the top of that. So all the fiber optics within a sheath. But we'll never be digging in here. But just for extra precaution, if we cover all these pipes, it will just, you know, give a bit of surety. And then we got drainage going down here that the digger driver's just gone to get a trailer from the village so we can move the gravel in one go and use the digger to move it. It's looking really nice. It's going to be a really nice space for the tunnel. So the pad is done very nice and a nice touch. Here the drainage comes out. There's some big boulders from the dig that they're trussing up. This was the lowest point. Some nice apples coming here and it's pretty good. It's flat. Drainage is in. Drainage sticks out at this end, but we think this will do. Very nice. We're going to put gutters on the roof to divert all that water. And he smoothed off the entrance, which is nice. So we have drainage here. Also drains up around. But a nice flat entryway from the field and from up here. Very nice. Thanks as always for watching our videos. Really appreciate the comments and thoughts, etc. And you can find out a lot more in our book, Making Small Farms Work. We'll see you in the next video.