S5 ● E41 Work, rest & play....

Today's video is just a bunch of snippets. Had a relaxing few days and took some time out with my daughter Grace and went to a nature reserve and just a little view around the farm. You look ridiculous. You want to walk a bit? Yeah. It looks a bit like an accident. About late isn't it? Mama thrush is distressed. Her babies have just fledged. They've just left the nest and I just watched them crash land down here. Maybe just see two here. But that's a fish first trip out the nest and it didn't go so well. I fell with quite a loud crash actually. I shouldn't get here too long. I'm gonna. I'm gonna leave them be. But you see a little sprocket there chirping for mama and mama's up here giving encouragement. But I'll leave them be now and let them get acquainted. So that's egg collection technique. And we're putting the eggs pointy side up. Grace is a great egg collector. She's as quick as me. 36. 36. No one. No. It's 97. 97 eggs from this one. This is testing at 9:30 to 10:00'. Clock. So we're trying to find out when half the eggs are laid. But we do all the sorting and clean eggs pointy side up so we can just pack them really quickly in the evening. Now it's time to open the nests again and let the birds carry on laying eggs. We suddenly got a storm and we've been having the yurt roof off and so we're trying to desperately die down before everything gets wet down here. But we haven't had rain for over a month so we are super happy about it. We've been needing rain. We've had no rain for a month but this came a bit sudden. You see the ground can't soak it up. It's just totally flooding out right now. We've given up with the earth. It's just too strong a wind coming in gusts. We can't tie it down. So we've just unhooked all the electric and it's getting wet. Soon dry up again because it's back to 30 degrees it looks like. Well, you can't be unhappy with that. We have been asking for rain and we certainly got a good dose there. That means that we can probably fill back up the ponds and we won't have to do any irrigation tonight. So yeah, you've got to be careful what you ask for. Soggy chicken food. We really need this. Pastures are Gonna be just loving this. Chickens aren't loving it, they're all hiding. These things never really capture well on camera, but you can see how the leaves of the trees have been battered by that little storm. Some of the vegetables knocking down as well. Chickens are just coming back out now. It literally came and went like that. The first clip of the video was about five minutes ago. But these pastures are going to go wild now. We've had a bit of rain, pretty amazing thing to behold. And these clouds are on their way through and it looks like sun for another 10 days without any more rain. Again, just a 5 minute epic storm just to keep life systems going. Well, as I always say, it's a great time to get out and observe the land when something unique is happening. Often I used to do trainings in really dry climates like Spain, Portugal, and whenever it rained, which was happening a few percent of the time, my neighbors just shouting because they had some rain. But I used to always say, like, hey, this is the time to go and look at your land. And I saw so many erosion features, so much knowledge gained about the landscape by walking around in the rain. And in a dry climate where it really rarely rains or doesn't rain for eight months of the year, that's the best time to observe your land. And now, finally, for the first time, the roadway we've seeded, which has started germinating just on dew in the morning, has now been watered. So we've got to be careful heading over there. But things will have that really radiant flush now that there's a bit of water on the ground. Pastures and trees have been holding up fantastic. But this little bit of water now, with the heat and sunshine we've been having, it's going to produce some abundant results and really absorb some of the poultry manure. And we'll see some flushes in the next couple of weeks on the pasture that we'll get on film. So I'm actually taking Gracie camping now. I'm just coming up for last day collection feeding. It's about half past three and we're off to nature reserve about an hour and a half way. Do some fishing, camp out and yeah, have daddy and Grace time. Hey, Gracie. Little treats. We are in a beautiful place. This is glasgowgan. It's a 28,000 hectare nature reserve and we are gonna go fishing. There's salmon and trout in here as well as pike and perch islands to camp on holiday time. Gracie, the first solid food you ever ate was a mackerel that I caught off mackerel Point in the very north of Wales. I was with your mum and we caught this mackerel and you had never been eating solid food and we barbecued it and you just suddenly took the fish and ate two thirds of it all on your own. It's quite a lot of fish for a little baby to eat. Is this good? That looks perfect. Speed rod tip down when you're spinning down near the water. Yes, perfect. Do you think I'm gonna catch anything? I think if you keep at it you will. If a little perch sees that, hopefully he'll get a little perch for the pan tonight. That'd be really nice. Good cast, Gracie. Not bad for a seven year. Perfect. You just got to keep that rhythm. Yes. Takes some work, doesn't it? Do you feel like you understand how to steer towards where you want to go? This is breakfast at the Biolite stove which is running on fir cones and teeny twigs. Making electricity to charge this phone while we cook bacon. Oh, do I have something? I got something. Is it the fish? I think so. Keep reeling in. I'm trying. That's all right. And keep the rod up. It's impossible. It could be a pike. A pike? I've got the net. Just keep the pressure on. I think I got something. Good job, Gracie. So just stay nice and relaxed and bring it over the net. So we had no luck fishing last night, but Gracie just got a beautiful perch on a spinner. Gracie got the first fish but we can eat it for breakfast. Good job, my darling. That's a beautiful perch. Yeah, it's not too screaming either. Caleb's going up to the top of Nutfield. You can see how the recovery looks after the chickens have been through. How long since birds have been here? Two weeks. Two weeks? Two weeks. Recovery in May, now June. Not bad. So both yurts up now and that's our teaching yurt in the background. And we've got a farm tour coming up at the weekend and then we've got internationally renowned farm scale permaculture design course and people coming from all over for that. So we're really excited for the first trainings of the year. New shade mobile for the cows. Tomatoes have taken well and we've been through doing the first pruning and getting flowers setting now. But yeah, they took really well considering what they went through. Quite leggy plants in the beginning, but I think we're going to have a bumper crop of tomatoes this year. So after the rainstorms everything's got that flush of green and not much rain but much Needed. Here we are in front field. We finished mulching all these berries, etc. It looks pretty overgrown, but down at the base all these berries are nicely protected, which is wonderful. It's a nice good job. So very little maintenance to do in all these perennial systems. Hard to make them out. You'll see them better in drone footage in the coming weeks. So a cacophony of chickens, up to 850 eggs a day now, still 300 off maximum, but they're coming fast and egg packing is going really well. For me to do about 1100 eggs, it's going to take less than an hour. It's a much bigger difference than I was anticipating. Using this tray system, sorting them in the eggmobiles and then flipping them and stamping them in the egg packery. We're not handling individual eggs anymore, we're handling 30 eggs at a time, having done pre sorting in the field, which is really quick and easy to do. So very happy with the development of the ag enterprise. So broilers coming through the silver harable, silver pasture lanes. I keep saying that. Look at these strawberries. A lot of fruit set. We've just come through and weeded these. After the hens have been down through here, you can see there's chestnut every 4 meters with walnuts down the bottom of the field. No irrigation, no work, just abundant crop of strawberries coming along and a few varieties. So we have different harvest times throughout the year. But broiler is doing very well. So it's day 31 for these birds and they're growing really well. We've had I think less than 20 mortalities out of nearly a thousand birds. So doing very good, growing well, doing well. In the heat, it's been unusually. It's the hottest year, hottest may even for over a hundred years, but birds are coping fine with it and enjoying the shade in the evening now. So still another few weeks till we get into processing these. But yeah, very happy with the progress of the birds. And the birds in the brooder are doing really good too. Having weather like this now, it's kind of like July weather will bring up some interesting things, certainly in agricultural crop terms, but also things like having enough pollen and nectar for the bees. Have a close up in here. Well, that's it for today, folks. It's just a quick video montage. Busy days don't have time to always put time into making videos. Really looking forward to the upcoming new chapter at the farm with trainings coming on and a couple of new team members joining us to really ramp up the service of all the amazing systems that we have here. Thank you so much for watching our videos, all your comments, the likes and shares, etc. Really appreciate those of you that really value what we put out on this channel. You can find out a lot more in our book Making Small Farms Work. It's a manual of pragmatic manual of how to do all this stuff. And open day this weekend. Hope to see some of you down here. See you in the next video. Sam.