Summer Storms and Busy Days

Welcome back to another video folks. It's been pretty non stop here. We've just come back. All 12 of us here went off to Cleta on the west coast for a little weekend holiday. It's been busy times before I head off to Ireland to run a regenerative agriculture training with Cattle Mooney from Heatherhill Farm. But a little update. What's going on on these sunny and stormy days here? It's. Look at all these jellyfish. You can actually see white lines with all the jellyfish. Super nice to have a holiday on the west coast. Unfortunately, no mackerel had showed up in the last two years. I've been there on my birthday at the end of May and there's been mackerel aplenty. Part of the aim of the holiday for me was also to fill up the smoker here at the farm with a couple of hundred mackerel to vacuum pack and freeze away for food. We've been eating a huge amount of the food supplies in the freezers. That's what it's there for. But it makes me wonder if we'll have enough food for the whole season. It's super nice though to get away, get a little headspace from the farm and super nice to be on the beautiful west coast. I'm not actually going to get to the west coast much this season, maybe later in the summer. But I am determined to go back for a short mackerel fishing trip very soon. Right up on the roof. So still not sure how I'm going to do all this because I can reach some of the barns on both sides. I had a roof ladder, but it only clips onto the very tip of that roof and that does not feel safe to me. I'm a little nervous working at heights. Nice view though. This is the paint I'm using. This would be smart for eggmobile moves. See the little spindle pushing the wheels? All right, good progress but run out of power. Some reason can't do anything. It's lunchtime too. I'm getting rescued. Gone fishing. Ragnar is on net duty. Whoa, Ragnar, he's heavy. You got him all right. He's. Tropical downpours. Thunder and hail. So I showed a photo of the collapse of this wall on Instagram and yeah, I've had some thoughts about it now. A lot of great comments, people having good ideas about construction or building. I've actually followed this from David Pagan Butler's manual of building these pools and I'm pretty convinced if it was full of water, this wouldn't have happened. The reason being I would have expected more to happen on this side. Nothing's happened at all. And what's actually happened is we had a torrential downpour. Basically you just have a huge amount of water coming in a very, very short space of time. And just think of all of water collection here going into that back wall. Yes, I should have had buttresses. Yes, there's a lot of easy comments. In hindsight, I'm totally convinced if it was full of water that wouldn't happen because the liner goes all the way up to the top of this wall. So even if we'd had torrential rainfall, it would have gone into the pond and gone out the overflow. As soon as water's landing on the top of this ridge, if you like, it's going away from the pond. So I'm going to rebuild. I've actually got the digger was going to come today and help dig away the old wall and rebuild a new. But because I'm not going to have a chance to rebuild it anytime soon, he's going to come when I'm back and dig that away just to make it easier. I'm too busy right now to be smashing up blocks and pulling them out by hand. So we'll get the digger back in before the Aterfeld's house comes. Now I've even bought replacement bricks to speed that up. We can salvage a bunch of this, but I can also use them for other building projects around the so I'm just going to make it quick and simple because I want this in before the summer is through. But I will be doing it fairly similar to before because I figured that even if I haven't got the liner in, I can put a big tarpaulin here leading into the middle of the pool. And I'm not concerned that that would happen again. Some people might say oh, or think that that's naive, but I'm pretty calculated around this and I'm pretty confident that that only happened because of such torrential downpour in such a short. This is pure sand. There's no expansive clay or anything like that. You can see we just had another one of these torrential tropical storms and there's only a tiny bit of water in the bottom of that. So that's my thinking and that's the way I'm going to play it. Well, here potatoes come up and the onions and garlic are doing good. In the far corner we've put in grain for grain trials, but that's slow to emerge. It's been cold this Spring, very hot days, but cold nights and I think that slows everything down. Those of you that follow the channel regularly will remember we had to raise a thousand broilers in here last spring. This place is not optimal for growing at all. It's very wet on this side, which you can actually see down in the corner here. We just filled it with squash and some beans and other just fun things. And we're watering it by hand right now because we only have aerial bordering in here. Not ideal for the squash. But you'll remember last summer after the boilers came out, we just filled it with pumpkins and it soon smothered everything and just kind of left it as a low intensity food supply. Okay, things are pretty empty in here. Just some replacement crops. We've got way more in the field than we need, although we do have courses camping coming up. A few microgreens soaking here, a couple of paper pot trays of pea radish and sunflower. So boring. The skylift was great and I've managed to spray the filing red on this barn as well as paint the doors black. And I've even managed to spray the roof on both sides of the workshop. That's worked fantastic. But major problems with the machine. First a fuse went that we couldn't find and so we had to call them out and when they showed us, but we couldn't find it and didn't have a manual. And then the hydraulics seemed to give up and there was just no power in the machine. So bit of a pain because I had a very tight window. When I look at my schedule, I don't really have much free time between now and August when all the training schedule is over. So I'm hoping we get good weather late in the season and I can do more painting then. My aim is to paint all the roofs, all the barns, as well as paint the house and get rid of this horrible red roof, which I've not enjoyed since we ever moved in here. Things grow good in the Old North. Nadia has taken on the main responsibility of gardening, so we've actually sort of taken on different responsibilities just to see if we can ease up workflows, etc. We've been having problems with flea beels, as we always do up here in Sweden with the brassicas. And we've also had a problem with the deer, which I mentioned before. We've got a 10,000 volt string on top of here and I've also put a camera looking into the garden so I can see what sort of time of day. It's jumping in. It's definitely been in since the wire is on. And yeah, if it's a buck, we can shoot it. If it's a female, we're kind of stuck with it. And on to the second cut of spinach down here. And we've got lots of salads, onions coming on great, all brassicas coming on great. But now is the time when we get a lot of the caterpillars emerging. So gonna have to cover up a lot of this with insect net in the coming days. It. Had to eat these. So everything's looking lush here after the rain. I've had to do something I've never had to do before, which is cut the grass here just to make it a little bit more easy for the young birds to come in. They're doing fine. Just two pens, sands and pens. But you can see even with cows and sheep passing through. We're just passing through in front of the birds now. They're leaving very long grass that's difficult for young birds to get through. And so I wanted to cut that in. This year I'm actually going to have to use cutting as a replacement for some of the animals in the grazing plan. We just don't have the animal numbers right now. Here you can see where the layers have been. Grass is coming up to seed. All of the cock's foot here. Up above my belly button height, you can make out some chickens in the background. It's going to be a bumpy year for berry fruits this year. Here we've got all the honeyberries coming in. They're going to be ready soon. Quite rambunctious on this side of the tree lane here. All the currents developing in here too. A lot of berry eels. But the cows are on their way out now. You can see cows and sheep have been going through top field, front field. Sorry. They're on their way out back to top field where they started the year. Now a lot of flies and knots, the little midges that giving them a little bit of grief. These folks will be moving on in the morning. We're not able to keep up with the grass at this time of year, so we've just resolved to slow down the movement to ease up the workload because we're trying to have a restful summer and we'll use a machine to keep the grass managed. And I've got to make that grazing plan once the cutters here and decide how to use a cutter in place of livestock. We've got turkeys and obviously We've got pigs at the other end of the farm, but the turkeys are very small numbers and they're not really contributing to that whole plan. After grazing slowly through top field, we're coming back now to the top of the field with the cows and sheep. Tomorrow. Turkeys are in here gobbling away. And you can see Louise has actually put in guidelines on the inside of the fence to try and physically stop them rushing the fence. They're so big and there's so few places they get stung by the electric that they tend to like to just walk through the fence to hide in the bushes. And we were up here the other day when a predator bird flew over and their immediate response just seeing a silhouette 100, 200 meters away is to go for shelter. It's a bit of a trouble with all the trees we've got, but they're in right now and that's good enough. They're looking good. So it feels like a lot of delays for me. We're a bit late with the camping and I'm having to push back painting and the pond building, which I've been super excited to get going early in the summer, but reality is too much on lots in my schedule and I'm also trying to get away and do other things throughout the summer. So things are being pushed back in that the way it is. And I'm looking forward to being Ireland and Wales this year as well, to teach and help empower more farmers getting things together on their farms. We've still got spaces on our regenerative agricultural design training here at the farm. You can check the links below for those trainings. There's one or two spots left on the market garden course. Looking forward to meeting many more of you there. And in the meantime, if you want to check our books or other online offerings, you'll find all that in the links below. See you in a video soon, folks.