SPRING GROWTH AND NEW MEMBERSHIP SITE and a new house

What's up YouTube? Welcome back to another episode with my cute friends. I just wanted to make a video to update you on how things are changing and growing as the season starts to kick in and the sunny days are returning. As well as update you about the state of coronavirus here and how that's going to affect the farm like a hero tour. I also want to tell you about the membership site we'll be launching just a few weeks to enable higher connections and a lot more solutions focused value to come out of that tour. So stay tuned for that. Today I am going to put together and test the new tilting machine from Paper Pot Australia. Curly kindly sent me this to have a look at. It's not built up yet, but it's a tool very similar to the tilther that's available at Johnny's in America. So this tool actually comes with three different tillage attachments and I get a sense of what they will do. But it's going to be interesting to test this in compost. Now, we don't actually need to till, but it certainly helps in the very initial bed prep in the season where the frost has really heaved up the compost and it's got dry again after a few sunny, windy days just to give a really fine, even surface, especially for like direct seeding. That's what this thing looks like put together. Christian did a nice job putting this together. Now this is a tilther, but we haven't tested it yet. I'll do a video looking at what we think of this, but already I love the mechanism as opposed to the Johnny's version that uses a bit of string around your drill. This one has like a bicycle brake cable. Looks fantastic. So I'll make you a full review video of this in a video very soon. So things are really greening up in here. Beautiful spring onions. And you see we've raised them off the shelf here so that they don't create roots that tangle up underneath. And that really inhibits the efficiency of the paper pot when it's trying to pull out the chains. Newest plantings are fennels. A bunch of fennels in the 64 trays. More spinach coming up. And kales down here. Lots of lettuce. This is for the big tunnel. And then we've got leeks and more onions. First, salanovas. We'll be doing a lot of salanova heads as well as romaine lettuce and probably some of our favorite speckled trouts. Kale's coming on spinaches. They'll be going out. Some of the first things going outside. More kales over here. First, peas. Now, we did peas in the paper pot because they did extremely well. Now peas have aggressive roots, but you can see what's happening underneath. They're just not rooting through so quick, so they are matting up underneath. And we're gonna have to be careful when we unwrap these. But they should, if they've been watered well, they should still come apart quite well. So excited to get the peas in the ground. Just look at all these spring onions. You can see they're growing up four or five to the cell. It's gonna be a lot of onions. Plenty more over here. More kales Doing good. So everything's going smoothly in here. More mizuna and greens for the tunnel. And then the tomatoes that we potted on under these halide lights, they're doing great. Now these actually visibly grew just overnight when I potted them on in that video previously. Pretty amazing. Now they've got quite a strong manure based chicken and cow manure based compost and that seems to help. So these are getting to a point that soon we will put sticks to support each plant and tie them on and start spacing them out. But amazing how quickly things are growing at this time. Hey, little ones. Lambs are getting bouncy. Hey, Winston, how are you doing? No comment. Last days for the hens. Now as we prepare to get rid of this flock, these birds will be sold on and we've got the new flock coming pretty soon. They're going straight out into top field and the egg mobils are sitting up there ready to go. It's been great to see over the winter. A bunch more Ridgedale style eggmobiles have been put on the Internet that I've seen. So fantastic. Always check your context and design it for your context, as I've always said. Look at this cutie. So we've got two girls and we've now got a little boy as well who's not taken so easily to his mother. One of the new jumpy cows. These two are doing fantastic. Beautiful markings. This one is like very characteristically.

Color.

And they've been finding their feet good. Mama. This is Violet. She's a super beautiful calf. But her daughter sitting behind us here is hopefully having a calf very soon too. But she's also jumpy like Clover May's calf. And so we don't know how that's gonna go. Clover May's calf's a little boy and he needs a bit of Help to latch onto mama. You can teach us some tricks, can you? You gonna teach us some tricks? Maybe. Day 12 in the Brewdah and how these birds grow. Let's zoom in and we'll have a look at how they're doing in here. Wing feathers developing well. And the birds on big feeders now, they've actually dug away the bedding around it. What we do is bury these into the bedding when they transition to the big feeders here so they can reach down in it. But the thing is, right now they get so hungry between feeds that they actually dig a lot of the bedding over and they've dug the feeders out. They've gone down to four feeds a day now. Temperatures pretty regular in here now, it was quite cold in the very beginning, but they've got another eight, nine days before they're out on pasture. I bought a house, a little house by a lake with a mountain on the other side. Now, the reason I bought this house is that it costs less than my Hilux here. And it's a really rundown house, bought as seen. But what strikes me is that properties in Sweden are so cheap and they won't be for long. There's nowhere really in Europe with an economy like Sweden where you can buy houses for so cheap. Now, it needs a lot of work, but my goal is to renovate this, either to rent out or to sell on to someone who can enjoy it as a small family home. This is the sort of size home I'd be happy living in forever. So let's have a look inside. Now, the house has a bad smell and it was lived in by an old man who wasn't able to take care of things. You can see it's pretty grimy. This is the bathroom. There's a little entrance hall with cupboards. And then we come in here to a kitchen. It smells quite bad in here and it's pretty filthy. There's just one room in here. But what I love about it is that by the time I've smashed all this away and made an archway through here, I'll be able to create an upstairs that hasn't existed before. Now, the actual outside of the house is in pretty good nick. It's built quite high off the ground on this concrete plinth. So a little paint and it should be alright. But what interests me is when you come around the back here, you have this strange trapdoor. If we just climb up in here, this is the back wall from the kitchen where we just were. And you have this Nice little whole wooden staircase and a beautiful space up here. Now with a bit of insulation and some floorboards, this could make one or two, two rooms. And it's got a beautiful view right out over the lake. It only has a small bit of land here, a little garden. Maybe that shed will come down. But what a view. Now it's just outside Sune. It's a very small house and I figured I would buy it for renting out or using to accommodate guest teachers that come to the farm, etc. But it would make a really nice rental house that could generate €20, €30,000 a year, which is more than the house cost. Obviously there's some cost doing it up, but it's a small size so I think it can be done relatively cheaply into a cozy small family home. And so that's the project. The smell is the biggest thing and I know other people that have bought houses like this have said it can take years to get rid of the smell. The guy that was living here was old and had cats and it's. They've been indoors and they've been making a mess.

It's.

It's pretty nasty right now, but I'm up for the challenge. It's a nice size house. This is what I think small families need to live in. That's where we're going to smash a hole through the wall, hopefully. But basically today's job, I just want to start clearing out rubbish, those old beer cans and I'm just going to smash up all the old furniture, rip out the floor and I'm hoping there will be nice wooden floorboards underneath. I was originally inspired to get this house because I wanted to do mud, plaster everywhere and do some natural building because we get access to a lot of free timber that we could essentially make this up for very little money and make it really cute. But I don't know, I'm gonna see what it's like once I've pulled the floor out and done a bit of deep cleaning really and get a sense of where it's at there. But there's nothing like old beautiful floorboards. This is maybe 1930s, I think it was built and it was owned by the council at some point, but the electrics and water are working. It's got its own well and sewer and yeah, we'll start the smash down and clean up. Okay. Been here half an hour and I am just smashing stuff up. That's the aim of the game, is to get down to bare components that we can rip up the floor a Bit of a gnarly. I'm hoping this is actually a chimney that goes up. And I'm curious if there's a way to get a fireplace in the living room here. So this room is just becoming a depository for now. But I hope there's an existing chimney. It doesn't have a cap on it, so it may well have been cemented up. But that would be lovely to have a wood stove in here. But basically it's time to rip out all this stuff. And sadly, it looks like it's just got chipboard. Now. Underneath the chipboard, there could be wooden flooring, but I'm not sure if I want to start ripping that up yet because I could lay a wood floor on top of this and get an extra layer of insulation, as it were. So that's how it's looking after half an hour. Very excited to smash through that wall. So not much done on the house yet. But it was just a couple of hours over the weekend. I didn't actually expect to get into that house until next winter. And I was thinking a lot about how I would fit that into my schedule. But I think if I'm going to be at home a lot more than planned with this virus situation, it's a project I'll get done in spare time over the summer. And so excited to share that process with you as it goes along. And just wanted to share that with you because it's. It still blows my mind that you can buy a house that would be adequate for a small family for just next to nothing in the country with an economy like this. 44. Only another six to go. Nice haircut right now. All right, Good to go. It's okay. We can go around the side. Good job. Nice. So one project that's been going on is replacing all this windbreak. Now, it's quite a big visual element of the farm because this is where you come into the farm when you enter. But this has got damage from the heavy storms that we get, as well as people resting tools and jumpers on it over time. And it becomes a bit brittle even if it's UV treated. So we've been putting it up with much stronger posts. These are treated posts, so they'll last a lot longer. And also just rethinking. So one thing we've done now is put it back a little bit off the bed so our lawnmower fits in perfectly. So it's no hassle cutting the grass in there. And we've got a nicer color. It's this Greener color. It's quite a heavyweight weave and that feels good. And we've got more gateways so that places where people have logically wanted to have gates in the past are now all installed. So a lot more access points. We haven't put up any actual gates. You can see that's gone on over in the new north here. Very first beds of radish are in these four beds that you can see here. And the beds look fantastic. After the winter, we can just go in and have a look, but very clean. And this stuff just needs a little bit of a rake over. It's good to go. This is lovely. Really nice to see. Now, we did a pretty poor job of clearing up last year. We left a lot of things like kales in the ground, but actually that was quite interesting. I was actually planning to take my hunting license this year. And what we noticed is that we left a few rows of kale in the back here of the new north. This is old north and what we call new north over here. And I would come out in the mornings, there'd be 15 deer standing, munching on that row of kale. So from a homestead perspective, that's perfect. I don't ever want to join the hunting clubs here in Sweden. It seems like a bit of a boys club and I'm not interested in that. I would only want a hunting license to put food in the freezer for the family. So that's my plan, is not clean up the gardens because actually what you found is that the deer have cleared it up really good. There's basically a few stalks of brassicas and that's it. I mean, it was pretty full in here. There was a lot of vegetation at the end of the season that we would normally take away and put the row covers on. You can see a bunch of these that have just blown around in the wind because we just haven't been caring for it. We didn't put them on last winter. Normally we'd cover all the beds up, but I don't see any negative effect of having them uncovered, which saves us a lot of work. And that bonus with the deer could fill my freezer with wild meat every year. You're allowed to shoot deer on your own land at that time. So that's the thoughts I'm going to think if that's the way I'm going to do it. So I've always said it's really important to have windbreak for. For vegetable crops. Now, vegetable crop is only, you know, 20, 40 centimeters high. So just these little wind baits, they do make a difference. I would naturally want to establish this and then put a living hedgerow. Way better for diversity of birds, insects, amphibians, etc. But we're not allowed to plant trees here because this is all the neighbours land. The Old north and New north can't put any trees or permanent perennials here, so we've had to go with replacing the old fabric. But if you can put a living windbreak in so way nicer aesthetic and much more functional.

So here in Sweden, it seems like the government has been quite slow in their response to the coronavirus situation. A lot of people seem to be adhering the social distancing, but most things are still open and daycare has been open.

So we've been on a bit of a.

Quest thinking about how best to deal with this because currently Ragnar's been at daycare and we've got people coming to the farm. So Christian has arrived back from Southeast Asia, that's Christian that was here last year, and Akos from Hungary, who's been here a little bit longer. And we've got a couple of girls arriving very soon and in the next couple of weeks who are going to be helping out in the market garden. So it's an interesting time to consider the risks of people coming in and out. And we're in a pretty amazing situation in that we can actually isolate ourselves pretty well. So it seems like Ragnar is actually the biggest risk and so we're trying to find support so we can have him out of daycare and see if there's other people locally that want to collaborate or people that want to come here and help out because it's. It's pretty hard when we're both working now. We obviously have a much more easeful situation than huge amount of people stuck indoors in cities all over the world. We're blessed to have amazing food and fresh air and physical, meaningful work to do. But it's really been interesting just thinking about it, especially with, you know, day to day updates from the news and different sources of what's actually going on. And. Yeah, so we're not sure. What we do know is that we've had to put in different rules and regulations for the Ricoh rings. And what we basically proposed is that we spread the Ricoh collections over a longer period of time where basically people.

Come in alphabetical order or whatever, and.

So that we can have a couple of traffic cones and some people allowing people into the space because currently they're recommending you know, no more than gatherings of 50. But that might really change in the coming weeks as more cases are emerging in Sweden. They're not really testing other than people that are in hospital in critical conditions. So the number of cases and deaths in Sweden is quite low. But I suspect that far more people have it than have been tested for and so we're likely to see more stringent measures. So what we're going to do is immediately start enacting a plan in the Ricoh sale so that people are coming in just five at a time for now to the various producers and everything's already pre packed and there's minimal contact and we've told people like, hey, you know, it's not the best time for small talk, etc. Just come pick up your stuff. All the producers have a table that physically separates them from the customers, so should be able to maintain our distance now. We'll see how that goes. I really hope that through the network we're building this summer that we'll be able to really connect and build the community around solutions. I know a lot of farms have already had to radically change the way they sell things because restaurants have closed and for some people I know Mikael in Denmark, that was the majority of their orders. So they've had to set up a drive through farm shop and it seems to be going extremely well. But this is a great time to connect together, build community and double down on best practices. And so I want to tell you a bit where we're at with the farm like a hero experience.

So I want to talk a bit where we're at with the farm like a hero experience. I really want to go on this tour. Like I said, I've been planning it for a long time and I just think it's going to be an amazing resource and opportunity to connect people. It does seem, however, that it's becoming increasingly unlikely. I'm obviously staying in touch with the news, etc. And I'm not going to put myself at any risk. But because my trip had been split up into several segments, I was hoping that if things clear up later in the summer, I will go on the later part of the tour. However, what I think it is important about this tour is not just spreading the voice of amazing regenerative farmers in Europe, but also connecting the community together. Especially in times like this where people need to innovate and find solutions for different tools and resources and ways to deal with the local regulations and ways to innovate with sales as things get tight in different countries, different measures being put in place. So we've decided to create a membership site and we want to really hunker down with the people that are following us that really want to stay engaged now. It's going to be cheap and affordable to all. It'll be like the price of a coffee every week to join this subscription site and we're going to bring a lot of value to the people that join us there. It's going to be a couple of episodes, long form episodes, every week for the next six months at least. And hopefully this is something that will continue into the future too. We're also going to have a dedicated private Facebook page and all of the producers that we interview along the tour will be in there too. And hopefully they will get engaged and answer your questions. We're also going to be writing a book which is going to be quite different from the videos that we create throughout the summer. We're going to ask everyone to that we interviewed to write a few thousand words and supply images, etc. And we're going to create two PDF volumes with all the farmers that we talked to this year. And so we're going to launch this membership site in the coming weeks. There will be a discount and extra bonuses for people that jump in and sign up for the rest of this year straight away. So we're really excited about that. We're going to be putting hundreds of hours of work this summer into producing that and I want to be able to pay my collaborator also. So for a low cost membership, we're hoping that a lot of you that follow us here will get engaged in a much more concrete way. We're also going to have a space on the website where you can ask questions on the different videos that come up. And I will do weekly questions and answers for members of the site. It's going to be a hub for connecting and networking and hopefully through those questions and answer series and on the Facebook page, we will be able to connect people up to deal with specific local regulations, where to buy the best tools and resources, ways to get around selling things in this time of crisis, etc. And really create a strong community, especially for Europe now. It's not excluding anyone further afield. I know a lot of you follow us from the States, Australia, Canada and other countries around the world. It's open to anyone, but it's a time for really doubling down and supporting each other and we're in a great position to be at the forefront of that. So we want to create the most value we can and really focus on the people who really want to stay in touch in that way. So more details of that will come soon. In the meantime, we're building brand new websites. Everything we do, our book and online training, the Farm Like a Hero experience, as well as future online trainings and activities that we get up to. So that's all going to get launched in the next few weeks. I'm super excited for it and especially to have someone professional collaborating with me to really leverage and enhance everything that I do because I just don't have time to do more than I've been doing. So stay tuned for that. I'm really excited and hope to see many of you in there. I okay, that's all I've got time for today folks. I've got a lot of background work to be getting on with before we start really ramping up production outdoors. Weather's getting nicer. I hope you all stay safe and manage to get outside as far as possible to get fresh air and exercise. If you're interested in joining us on our membership site, it would be great to have some feedback at this point. Don't forget you can let us know by saying yes. Come on in the comments below. Hit the thumbs up button. And don't forget, you can find out a whole bunch more in our book and online training in the links below. Look forward to seeing you in a video very soon. Bye for now.