Spring came fast up at 59 degrees north

Welcome back to another video, folks. I thought it's high time I gave you a little update of what's been going on. I want to just review a bit, uh, the context of coming out of last year and how that's affecting the plans this year. And I want to give you a tour of the farm as the season's kicked off quite early this year. So big transplant day today. Lettuces, Asian greens, beets, cabbages, broccoli, radicchio. I'm going to get these in the ground, hopefully. Bit of rain and some clouds forming. So this is the veg plan for this year, and targeted mostly around crops producing for the opening of the restaurant. And we've got flowers, potatoes, as well as extra crops over at the restaurant. And it's been interesting replanning the gardens for our changing needs. We've actually had the first rain today for weeks, and it's been a really hot start to spring. We've actually got dandelions in flower a month earlier than typical. So that's been great, and now we need a bit of rain to get the pastures hydrated. I want to start by just telling you a little bit of the context. So last year we started up Silligorn, the restaurant, And I just took on a huge amount more than I could chew, as it were. And that was based around the hope of starting up a collaborative business that wouldn't land upon me. But inevitably, if you're putting cash forward, it puts some of that, you know, authority onto you. And so it didn't work out quite how I wanted. And last year was very, very stressful trying to make ends meet with lots of expenses and investments and huge amounts of salaries going out, and in the end I had to lay off the farm staff a little early because I just couldn't keep up with all the expenses. So we decided already last autumn we would make ourselves a shorter, more intensive season this year, and we actually only have farm team here for 2 months this year, and we're only opening the restaurant for 6 weeks, but we are planning to open Friday nights, Saturday nights for concerts, and then Sunday for brunch. We're also holding a 2-day Regenerative Agriculture Festival. I know many of you have already got tickets. You can find them in links below if you want to come for 2 days, grassroots talks and celebrating together, networking. It's going to be really awesome at that beautiful venue. So we started just, Nora and I, my partner and I, are here at the farm, although she's away a lot in the spring because her father runs a cool company in Norway doing ecological restoration and survey work, so she works a lot away in the spring. So it's basically been me primarily setting up all the plantings and getting plants in the ground, Forest Raised Pigs, and dealing with the cows, the sheep, the lambs, and lots of things going on. So one thing to say is our season started early. Now it's been virtually impossible to get broiler chicks here in Sweden because of bird flu outbreaks in the parent birds. Now we actually were offered 1,000 birds early in the season, which is a risk with the weather, but it paid off for us. With the weather. So Nora and I have actually put away 1,000 birds in the freezer already. I've kept it off social media because I know a lot of people have been struggling to get birds even later in the season. I'm actually picking up the next 1,000 birds next week, but that's been an incredible process to process all those birds with just 2 people. Those of you that have followed the channel for a long time know we've got our on-farm slaughtery, one of the cheapest approved units in Europe, but it's built for 4 people at least, and 6 is optimal. So it was a very, very interesting process to do that with just two of us, and I learned a lot in the process. So I think I'll leave it at that, and I'm going to make a whole separate video about that because I know many of you interested in this will be doing it with one or two people, and we got pretty efficient, I would say, at doing that and did a really good job. So that's been an exhausting process to kick off the season, but I'm super happy, and I'll tell you a bit about what we're producing this year. As I said, we only have people here for 8 weeks this year, but we're producing a lot. We're going to sell about 5 tons of pasture-raised chicken. We're going to sell about quarter of a million eggs. The hens have been put back until June. And we're also going to sell about a ton of grass-fed beef, and we'll have a lot of lamb for sale in the autumn, and about half a ton of forest-raised pork. We're also doing a lot of cut flowers. So behind me, the south beds here have been put down to some potato, but a lot of tubers for cut flowers for the restaurant, which I'm really excited about. And yeah, it's going to be a lot of production in a short season, and then just us at the end of the year to finish up the productions. I want to just show you through the sand garden at this point in the year. So actually, this is one of the first jobs of the year, is cutting all the plant material away, and which has been left standing over the winter, to allow new growth to kick in and keep the organic levels low in here. It's the whole strategy in the sand garden. First flowers appearing, and you can see this little ladder here. This is actually a secret way into a new cat flap at the top floor for Monkey the cat, because we have Mira the dog living here, and they do not get on. So that's a little solution. But you can see we've been through. There's some weeding to do on the pathways here. We get a lot of things self-seeding seeding and some weeds coming in in the pathways, but we've been through and got this ready, so it's looking beautiful. If you follow through the season, you'll see all of the different faces and colors and textures that come up in this beautiful garden, which is just a wonder. It's been such a beautiful project, and it's going really well. You can see some of the plants spreading. And some of the grass is very rampant, so we've just got to decide how we intervene. But it's looking beautiful. So these are the beds that I just uncovered after 4 years with silage tarp on them. I posted on Instagram. If you don't follow me on Instagram, I post there on a daily basis. Not so much on YouTube, but I'll try and update you more this season. But I'm doing system of wheat intensification trials. So I lived in Southeast Asia for several years, and something that's spread all over rice-growing countries is system of rice intensification. Basically growing single plants much further apart to allow plants to express their full physiology and photosynthesize down to the base of the plant, and you get much deeper rooting, much more drought-resistant plants that rooting in a deeper profile in the soil, so they're more nutritious and dense and solid grains that are of higher quality. And that allows the rice growers to only flood the paddies once in the start for weed control. And it's an interesting idea, and I remember visiting a farm in Belgium, probably 15 years ago, that were trialing out wheat on wider spacings, and that caught my attention because of knowing about SRI. I've always wanted to do that, and these beds have been sitting covered because we scaled our veg production down to our restaurant and farm needs. And so I wanted to just put these back into growth, and I decided this would be a fun experiment, and I'm just interested on my own account. So I've seeded most of this at conventional spacing using a Jang seeder, so about 8 or 9 plants every 10 centimeters and 6 rows to a bed. And then on the beds On this side of me, I've planted at multiple different spacings, really low density spacings of different combinations. And so I'm just very curious to see how that goes. I'm not really going to give this any attention over the year because we're going to get busy with new birds coming, layers coming, out grazing with all the animals, and setting up the restaurant again. But I'm curious, and I'll take you along on the journey as we go. Pause for a quick ad read. Most of my subscribers here and followers on social media haven't actually read my books, and this is the most condensed practical information and knowledge that I can share with you. My book Regenerative Agriculture is available on PDF as well as hard copy. We ship all over the world. The Richdale Farm Builds is 3D CAD plans of how to build all the farm infrastructure you see around on our social media. That one's only available as PDF. And our farm cookbook that's focused on year-round nose-to-tail seasonal eating is just a joy to use and preserve all the food we have at the farm as well as what we fish and hunt. You can find them in the links in the bio, check them out. So already done one brooding cycle but a new brooder setup. So we've got space for 1,000 birds here. So we follow the organic standards even though we're not certified organic. And you need about 10 square meters for up to 250 chicks when they are staying in here for up to 3 weeks. It's all weight to space ratio. This is the space we've always used, as you might have seen in the original build book, and excited to get the next batch of birds in here. So some of the plants that were up at Silligordon that we grew out from seed, species that are already in the sand garden, but these need to be washed and clean all the compost off their roots, and then they're going to be added to the sand garden. We also added a bunch of bulbs that were left over from the south bed planting, so it's going to be a whole new depth of color coming this season, which is beautiful. So these two ladies sitting on, I think, 17 or 18 eggs that are due to hatch hopefully in the next week or so. Proud papa. So we've been blessed with a lot of lambs, a lot of male lambs this year. I'm actually employing the lamb mower, just cutting the banks and the edges around the tunnel here. We've actually been clearing some of the windbreak. We wanted to pollard this to get it into a ramp shape for the wind, for ramping wind over the fields, but we're a little bit late. You've got to do that in typically January, February here. These are Gotland sheep, except for the white ewes, they're Ryefors, and we like them. They're very small, but they're very hardy, and they're good sheep. They do what a sheep's meant to do. They convert grass to milk and wool and babies. They've all had 2 babies without any help, any complications, and that's in my mind what makes a good sheep. So we've been really happy with them. You want to say something? So yeah, they've been clearing. It's a bit of a pain to cut around the edges here, but we're getting ready to plant some vegetables into here, so they're just cleaning up, stop the creeping grasses coming in. Hello! Very nice. They've been grazing in the field here. We are actually out grazing already in April, which is unheard of. We often aren't grazing till end of May here. These guys will get shorn in a few weeks now. Just— there's 2 ewes left to lamb and let the wool lift up a little bit, make it easier for shearing. So we get on the trusty surron and I'll take you up to see the other animals. Do check out the listings for Silligarden. We've got some incredible concerts again this year and we're open more often for food Farm the Farm, and excited to meet some of you there so you can taste the farm. And also really looking forward to the Regenerative Agriculture Festival, and the aim is to create a really grassroots event where people contribute with talks and workshops in all areas of regenerative ag, and everyone's camping together, pitching in together to cook food and keep the spaces in order, and that's It's really exciting for me. It's going to be hundreds of people there and it's a great chance to network and share together. We've actually got some wild ducks moving into the pond, it seems like. They actually landed in the natural swimming pool the other day while we were just sunning ourselves on the deck after a swim. And hopefully they don't move in because they leave a lot of muck. But it's greening up pretty fast up here. I mean, if you've seen the drone footage, compared to the neighbor's land, our land pops a lot quicker. And grows later into the year too. But we've kept the cows in for now because we've got some going for slaughter, and I want to let the grass get away before we really impact it with them. So currently the pigs have access to the forest directly behind me here, but we have 6 paddocks up in the forest. You can see up where they used to have the electric line. That used to be cut by the government. That line is now buried underground, which means we can rehabilitate that whole hillside. And half the farm is up in the forest up here. And I think once the cows are out, we will move the pigs around, but for now they've got about a hectare here that they're very happy with.

At this point in the video, the audio has cut off, so I'm just going to have to narrate what you see on the screen.

Sorry about that.

I'm explaining here the neighbors very kindly helped us dig out the compacted layer of manure and bedding that's built up over the winter, and I've put up these metal gates because we've got 3 animals getting picked up this week to go for their one bad day, as it were. We've got too many animals on the farm, and we're looking forward to selling our heritage breeds, mountain cows, at the restaurant, but also to Leaves in Stockholm. And so I wanted to put this fencing up to get them used to coming into it and feeding within it, because cattle are very curious, they are very intelligent animals, and they don't like new things in their environment, or they're very curious, and they don't like loud things clanging around. So I wanted to get them used to this for some days so that it's much easier to partition off the animals that are going. But we've only got 4.5 hectares here of grass, and we've got a few hectares at the restaurant, Silla Gordon, but we cut that for winter hay. And we've just got too many animals with all the lambs coming too. We're overstocked, and it's not clear if we can graze the neighbor's land like we did last year. They've promised it off to another farming friend, so we have to just reduce our animal numbers at this point. While we're up here, you can see something I've documented over the years on YouTube. If you look at the neighbor's land, it's thick. It was monocultural spruce that's just been clear-cut and allowed to regrow with 2 or 3 species. And you see the stumps at the base there, it's still got blueberries and other forest species, not very much forage under that. And then you turn to our land, and the cattle have really been grazing the lower branches allows more light through. It looks very barren now after the winter, it was quite a wet winter, but as soon as the cows go out now that will green up and there's a lot of light comes through to the forest floor, so it's a lot of forage growth, it's pastoral species with all that timber up above and you can really see through the landscape. And animals driving ecology in the direction that we decide to steer it in. This is This is land that's utilized by pigs as well as herbivores, and we're just shaping the ecosystem in a way that suits our pattern of land use better and is more productive. Look at the size of these trees through the animal fertility to the trees over there. So pretty amazing.

Well, that's all I got time for today, folks, and I'll make another video soon to explain the chicken process. I hope some of you will find that useful and interesting. Don't forget there's courses on, on market gardening and also our regenerative agriculture design training. There's still a spot on the internship too. You can find all those in the links below if you're excited about regenerative agriculture, human scale, real food for real people in local communities. Thanks for watching as always, folks. See you in a video soon.