Some days are emotionally crushing

Perfect windy day for it. Okay, 40 meter tunnel going up. Can't really film it because I didn't bring my mobile camera. Now we're just bunching the ends to get some longitudinal tension. Then we can start the rope. So ends pulled tight, bit of rock. That gives us a bit of wind protection. Next step is roping. So we're just using a fencing wire dolly and we have one on one side pulling out the wire, looping it, throwing it over to the next person. And we go zigzagging across, missing a pole. And on the way back, we do the opposite. So we have that classic caterpillar shape. Then we tighten it all up. Good to go. If you're putting up a tunnel for the first time, you want to check the rope tightness carefully over the next month. Stretch a bit. And so you want to just keep that tight. You should have that classic caterpillar V in each section. Okay, so trick at this point is to have an easy way to undo the coil so that you're not throwing reels over. And you just start the end by going back and forth on the ending piece. Then we're doing every alternate carabiner like this. Get to the other end, do a loop on the other end and come back in the opposite fashion so that we've got a cross on each section. Then we just put a simple knot and loop it in and we start again, tightening it in a coordinated fashion, tightening each section one by one. Then there's solids. And good next steps after that are putting in the irrigation. You could put that in first, but we just wanted to get this up before the winds pick up in the day and while we had more people to help. And we've got the little clips that you put on the side that are used to hold up the plastic when we want to ventilate it. Then we're pretty much good to go. Tree planning continues, but we have seen devastating activity from voles. Someone asked about the wide baskets that they need to have a lot smaller mesh because the voles are so small. Just to give you reference, they are not small folks. These are big fat voles and they are just ramping through everywhere. It's bigger losses than I've ever seen. Actually. They are all through the pasture. There's just tunnels everywhere. It's devastating. We've had three or four winters where they've just had no freezing to slow them down. They can have a hundred babies in a year. And it's become an episodic problem. Again, it's devastating. I'VE just been pulling out a few of the tall oak trees on the avenue plantings on the road that are 6 meters tall. They've totally annihilated the root ball. It's heartbreaking because we've put so much love and care into organizing, designing, installing these systems. But we've only been protecting the more precious fruit trees because they typically will only take out things like Apple, etc. But I think rising populations and favorable conditions, they've just. And then the cold winter this year they've just started eating everything. It's unbelievable. It's. It makes me want to give up on days like this. It's too much. Don't know if you'll make it out, but all this disturbance in the pasture, it's just all voles crazy. They haven't been touching these nut trees I think, which is good. But look at all that damage in the pastures is unreal devastation. So what to do about voles? Well, I think we're going to take a multi approach strategy because it's just too much. It's good suggestions people had about putting bird T posts. We've always just relied on the fence posts and trees around the farm. But I think anything's worth giving it a go at this point. So I'm going to use some of the old poles that we had up for hops trials in the past. Maybe put half a dozen or a dozen bird poles up in the tree lanes and we're going to try castor oil and dish soap solution. Make it up in an IBC and pour it out. And the bitterness of that can as a root drench will give some deterrent for a short time period. I've got my rodinator, the tool that explodes and blows up the holes. And that will be in use when we actually know which holes are populated. Right now it's just the whole winter's tunnels are exposed and visible. So, you know, half of them probably aren't populated. Bit of everything, that's all we can do and continue planting into wire baskets. But yeah, that's the way it goes, folks. Last parts being made, Philip came up with a screwdriver trick. So when you're folding these over to make the the bottom, leveraging a screwdriver in gives enough tension that you can really folded over a lot more gracefully. Production line's on but the plant is done now. We don't need anymore. All right. Don't have any footage I'm afraid because while I was in town I'm picking up a quad boat For Cleta, they planted all the trees that need planting. So these are going to get potted up in our old root trainers that we made. Okay. Kristen and Selma have been busy taking off road covers. Keep cleaning up in the south and east and west. We put in rhubarb. You can just see popping up. So there are 10 rhubarbs to the 10 meter beds and we've got five beds of that. Gonna put the rest of the beds here into chives and strawberry. This is part of the normal veg rotation. See. Ice cream van coming. It's a bit cold for that. See the greening up on the willow on the hedgerow there. And the yurt's gonna do some no dig mulch in the paddy ponds. We've got rice coming up for that and so we'll rather than take out this material, we think we'll just give it a good mulch and compost because it's dry land. Rices we're growing, so a bit of water, but having the ability to flood. It's going to be super useful. Transplants hardening off, looking good. Ready to go out. This space is going to be full of broilers in two weeks. However, Johanna talked to Jord, the farming authority here, and it seems plausible that the ban will lift in two to three weeks. It's not. They can't say that obviously until anything is official. But it sounded hopeful because there's been quite a while without cases. Two weeks or so and certainly around here that fingers crossed will be amazing. Ragnar got a new bike. Whoa. What do you think? Good. Good. The ghost bike. It says ghosts. Stairs are done. Looking good. Very nice. Very nice. Very nice. Yeah. They. They work well. No. And you've got a beam here. I mean, we don't. We're not going to frequent it so much. So different ergonomics, but that's part of the. Perfect for space saving and that gives us some nice access up to there for storing even more junk. Day eight. Day eight. Day eight. And the brooder. Dave's been playing them sea shanties. I think they're quite partial to it, to be honest. They're growing. So yesterday's lambing. Bit of an ordeal. We had a stillbirth and the lamb was deformed, had a really big lump on its head. We had to intervene. The waters burst and the pregnancy or the labour basically ceased. And that's a worrying sign. Johanna decided to intervene and we got in there and Dave helped out. He's got lots of experience with livestock, so we had to pull the lamb. There's one leg not showing, so we had to reach in, get the both the front legs positioned right with the head. I didn't take any video because it was late at night and we were pretty engaged. But this is a quick image, not particularly pleasant, but of the sort of problem that we have with the lap. Big shame. First lamb of the year, not a good one. But we hopefully have a bunch of lambs to come. So look forward to the positive bleating of new baby lambs. So as it gets to the weekend, I'm hoping to take someone with me down to Cleta on the west coast to another farm there and take down some supplies and trailers and start planning the fencing mission. So we're planning to take the sheep once the lambs are ready and big enough, we'll take all the sheep down there and leave them there for the summer. And that's the plan for this year. So I'm hoping to go and get materials ready and a plan together and then we'll take a small crew down, have a festive weekend sometime putting up some fencing out into the ocean, which will be a first for me. I'm signing out, folks, just let you know that we're up to 296% funded for the Ridgedale Farm Builds book. Incredible. Thank you so much, everyone for your support. I really hope this will benefit a lot of people. Detailed CAD plans of how to build all the awesome things we use around the farm. It's a monster book. You can get it on a deal with my other monster book, Regenerative Agriculture. That's a wonderful package of information that's coming back through a lot of hard graft and record keeping for you. Thanks so much, folks. See you in the video soon.