SPRING PROJECTS as we get into the rhythm of farm life

What's up, YouTube? Welcome back to another episode. Just doing these little day vlogs at the moment. Just showing you behind the scenes what's going on day to day. As we get started now in the spring, It's busy days. We've got lots of little projects to roll on. People are just getting familiar with the oper of the farm and I'm trying to learn to take a back seat and not jump in and organize stuff because it's just how I've been for the last six years. Just always manically thinking and organizing, planning to be as efficient and productive as possible. But it's been a bit of an exercise so far, just trying to relax and not jump into that. And I'm obviously here available to consult with everyone. But it's really tough trying to shift gears to put my brain in a different perspective that we're changing the way we do things and you know, your hana needs to lead in that way. So big changes. Very interesting. I'm quite stressed, to be honest. I've got a lot of work going on in the background to get these sites in order to launch Farm Like a Hero Tour, as well as new online training that I hope will benefit thousands of new young farmers, people that are coming into farming or looking to diversify their farms that won't be out till the middle of the summer. But it's a huge amount of work to prepare these things and a lot of careful, detailed thinking. And I'm not sleeping very well since we've been back from Southeast Asia and I was quite sick before and I think ever since then I've just. I don't sleep more than a few hours a night and I need to be sleeping a bit more than that, so. So, yeah, that's the way it goes. Projects to do, things to get on with. We've come up. Okay, time to get the wash pack station up and running. We're not using it yet for a while, but it's good to have an HQ for the gardens. We have a big map the gardens and a whiteboard for operations. This is where all the harvest tools and cleaning benches are. And our new chiller now, which should change the workflow quite dramatically this year to have this right at the end of the wash station and then we pack along our bench which is coming in here shortly. So we'll get this up together. So pack station coming together. This is the basic setup. You notice it's quite dark and keeps the sun off things. So standard harvest tools. We're not going to Be using this for quite a long time, but it's nice to have it up. We've got this door that we can close in to really keep this space shut over the winter. But that's nice to have this up and running so early. Some progress. How do you feel about it Akash? Ready for tin sheep Been sitting up on there. Looks great. So next step, roof sheets. That's a quick process. And then we've got the digging machine here. So we will probably start to move this material straight into here. Even if we have to just put up temporary backs on here because it's going to save a lot of work. Look, you can see what's been going on down in our compost now. Look, this is amazing. Already you can see just the incredible amount of worms at work there all the way along this stuff. Now they're going to retreat back into there as quickly as they can because they're exposed. See a little centipede there but this has got worm tunnels and castings all the way through it. I suspect turning it now will accelerate that process and we're going to end up with probably, well, 15 cubic meters already just sitting here. It's going to look very different once we get it into these bays and getting this place organized. This is going to represent an upgrading facility. So as I said, I'll be putting the chicken bedding out the back of the big tunnel. But this is where we're going to make much higher quality compost. And this stuff last year just didn't really get taken care of. But you can see it's composting down beautifully. I expect we're going to see a lot of very nice results. Look, here's the paper pot paper chains so they haven't rotted down for any of you interested in that. But this is what we're talking about. It's a finished result. It's a friable, lovely, forest floor smelling material that can go straight back on our beds. Closing another little loop at the farm as far as we can. So this is what our beds are looking like after the winter. We've just cleaned up the row covers that weren't put away well, but this is our strategy this year. These two beds are ready to go. Now this is putting on 100 liters of compost and a bucket of chicken manure on each bed. We're going to do that as standard. We're not going to broad fork again this year. We're just going to rake over compost and chicken manure, tilt it if it needs it and then bed roll it. Ready for six, row C. They're coming on here soon. Now, why are we using the tilter? Well, here, for example, we decided to test it out. I was just showing Selma how that works because, look, here's a bed where they've dug over carrots that were left in over the winter. So there's a lot of bare soil here and it's just hard. You can't break that up with a rock. Now, I think that was a bit of a bad decision in that normally I would choose to just pull the carrots before the winter. Now it's circumstantial because we were just late in packing down. But that does mean these beds are likely to become very weedy this year because they've been dug over. As soon as you dig the land over, you're exposing a huge amount of seeds to the conditions that they are designed to pop up in. So beds like this, I expect we'll use a tilther just to break up lumps and then put down a few hundred liters of compost just to get it back into the optimal mode again. But if you take a look around, you can see the, you know, everything's in primo condition and the ground's thawed up now. So pretty much 90% of the beds will just be done with a rake. You can see, like, beds like this. It's ready to go. It doesn't need anything doing. This is absolutely beautiful and why I recommend people do no dig. It's just such a luxury to come out here and it's ready to go. Not a lot to do. Okay, day 21. This is how the birds are looking. We've turned all heat lamps off at this point. Now, we've been looking at the weather and it seems like now it's going to be above zero for the next four or five nights and then we might get a frost. So this is pretty much the maximum limit. Now we have the option because there's not a new batch coming in straight away. We can keep the birds in here for a little bit extra time if necessary, weather wise. But this is maximum space wise. These birds will start getting stressed if we don't take them out of here now. So we're planning to put these out in the morning and we'll make a video just about that process. I've actually bought myself an electric motorbike that I've started using for farm checks because. Because it's very nice. It's more of a motorbike than a push Bike. I'll give you a look at it sometime. But I wanted to bring the old quad up just to get it running, get the engine warmed up because it's not been used all winter. Boy. Depends. Ready to go. We're going to get the birds in here tomorrow. Bit of damage to some of our trees. We had bull on the rampage and look, he's just done some catastrophic squashing of branches. Winston, the soft giant has been been at it. So, yeah, pen's ready and good to go. We've got the plastic down on these sides. As you remember from old videos, we always have two sides plasticked in our climate. And we always turn the pens around tree lanes and come back based on our prevailing wind which comes from the south down here. So for each configuration of tree lanes around the farm, we have a precise direction that the birds travel in. Tested up the dolly. Dolly's all good, ready to go. So this will be first batch of birds and the new hens hopefully will be coming in about 10 days time, I believe. We always tend to start the birds up here at the top of top field because this is the driest bit of land. Each field around our farms, very different soil types and up here is actually pure silt. We've got very heavy wet clays in a couple of the fields and it's, it's very different all around the farm due to the fact that this land was underwater not that long ago in geological history. And it's all deposits from glacial and water bodies. So yeah, this is a great place to start boilers. We'll do the second batch probably over in Nutfield. That's always easeful in there. Three pens that fit one of the alleys. Exciting to have birds out on pasture again. Hello. This is the little bull calf, Skansen Mini. These guys are waiting to get out on grass, but can't do it yet. So this is the calf that had some problems. And Johanna put a bunch of time into just feeding him for a few days before leading him to the mama so that she got used to it because she was so jumpy. But they, after about three days they bonded up nicely, so that was worth the effort. Beautiful little boy. Hey, Clover. May. Hey, little one. So, darling, Clovermay's being a bit protective, huh? Look at you, so pretty with the pink nose. That's the only one with a pink nose except for Violet. Okay. Eggmobiles have been sitting, so pre season checks about to start. Basically want to get down, check all the wheels are pumped up now because our ground is so wet We've made our own double wheels because of the way caravan chassis work here. So we've drilled out our own double rims. They do the job, but just making sure the tyres are up to the right pressure and then putting back in the nest boxes. You can see how that double wheel works. It's much more preferable in our ground conditions to have wheels side by side rather than a hay wagon with four tyres. Whilst that spreads the load, they're in line so it's easier for it to sink. This is where we put the nest boxes on top of, so they were able to lean them if we're on steep slopes. And then we just give it a spray down with a pressure wash. Just clean it up. This is chicken wire that we have to stop birds getting behind the nest box. Once we had an intern forget to open the nest boxes and we lost 50 birds and about €4,000 right there. And then from birds piling behind, squashing each other. So always stop them getting behind. And yeah, got the pro sheet. Stop the chicken ship getting on the nests and basically once the nests are back in, it's good to go. So we've got the modular nest boxes in the polytunnel right now. Three sections that will go back in here. We've got standard 40 x 40 millimeter grid with 4 millimeter metal. That's ideal in my mind. And you don't really want any bigger than that. It doesn't support chickens feet. You don't want smaller holes than that. All the shit doesn't fall through. So pretty useful. Tires seem good to me. It's just putting the nest boxes in this one and then in Eggmobile 1. This has got the nest still and it just needs the flaps putting back on. Similar sort of wheel construction in this one. Obviously every trailer we're building is unique, so we just build it to that. But they're pretty much good to go. Christian's gonna be on Eggmobile moves this year. Super nice. It's been amazing seeing how many Ridgedale style eggmobiles there are in the world. It's been so cool. I really should start making a collection. It'd be super cool to have a site somewhere where people can upload their own image. Maybe I'll get around to that this year. Who knows? Are you driving? So it's out with the old, in with the new. Now it looks very dry on top because we've been using this powdered straw. But it's quite dense underneath that and it'll be moist as well. Now we Were using peat moss during the winter. So you can see it's actually quite nice material already. So we're going to let this compost down. Now it's four o' clock but because it's a sunny day, it's hot in here that I think I will actually go take a beer and wait for the sun to go before getting in here because that's going to make it a much more pleasant job. Now I could wet this down to make it less dusty but to be honest I think you would need a huge amount of water to do that to really penetrate it. You know like on a hot day if you're just watering on top of the soil and then you dig into the soil, it's only gone a centimeter down. I think it would be a bit like that. Now people all over the world are wearing these. I actually brought these back from Thailand. But I'm going to be wearing this for chicken dust instead of coronavirus. So I didn't actually get started with the digging. Just wait until the evening because too hot. And I figured that it's way nicer to pull a all mitre. Thanks. And work in a greenhouse in the sun covered in dust. That's really itchy. Chicken dust is super itchy if you're not familiar with it. So I think I'll pull an all nighter starting after dinner. So that's it. Just a little update of what's going on. I thought it would be nice to just get a glimpse into so you know, day to day stuff and how things progress in the spring as we start up before regular production is going on. That's the hope of putting out of videos like today and yesterday of just little snippets of what we're up to. And yeah, looking forward to catching you in a video very soon. I'll put a video up about putting the boilers out and there'll be more on the new layer flock when they arrive. Don't forget you can find a whole bunch more in the links below in our book Regenerative Agriculture and online training etc. See you in a video very soon. Bye for now.