The best Christmas gift ever!

Well, it's a beautiful day at last. First sunny day we've had in weeks and weeks and weeks here. And today we've had the best Christmas gift we could have ever dreamt for. That's going to boil a bit till.

It gets the internal temperature, then we're.

Going to roast it with a sticky glaze. Mince pies, beef stew for lunch. Love it. Everyone's down at the lake, so I thought I'd surprise them. Take down the camper to make tea, go for a swim. There's ice on the water. So we've told you in the past we've wanted to buy the forestry and the land that this market garden has been built upon. Now, it's been a long process with the neighbor because they weren't particularly interested to sell. It's more for our benefit, it seems. But today we've finally heard and agreed on a price to buy three hectares of land, including the market gardens and all this forestry. And so our farm has now grown to 13 hectares in size. And we're super excited, we've been dreaming the whole time to be able to turn this into a campsite and event space and put back this part of the farm that was once part of. At least this half over here was once part of our farm from looking at the old maps and topographic data. But we are so excited about this and that's what all the timber I got delivered recently is for. We got a bit of a swampy area down here and some streams. This used to be the biggest stream. This is what fills the market garden pond. At one time it was the biggest stream compared to the other one on the farm, but they blocked it off to divert water to hydropower. This is such a lovely space, but I've actually been walking around in here and whilst there's a bit of a swampy area in here, I thought what we'll do is make some maybe boardwalks through the swampy area. And then I would like to find the right places to put both our big yurts, nine meter yurts, and also put up the three tent teepees, the six meter diameter teepees, because we have the big teepees taking the place of our old yurts for the teaching space and dining room. We want to have the two big yurts up in here with their new covers for event spaces. And so I've been scouting out places to put event spaces and also to have Airbnb camping. I've identified two really great spots in the forestry. So the line of the property Ends just back here where the trees change and there's more birch. You can actually see a red property marker here. This would make a perfect yurt spot here. I would only need to clear four or five trees here in order to have the yurt up here elevated. And so it'll be shady and it will stay cool in the summer, which has always been a bit of an issue. Now, obviously, you can vent the yurts. This will make a really nice extra classroom if people want to rent it out and run different classes here and then across this little drainage ditch here. I was thinking this would make another really good spot for a yurt. So we would rent these out if people want to do yoga or any other type of class. Or we could rent them out to groups of up to 20 people that want to sleep in them. This will make a really good spot. And then for the teepees, I was thinking three in the line here, and we would put them up on the other side of the road here, Just running up through the woods. So this is going on to Nutfield and then the neighbour's houses at the top. There's a lot of water flow. It's been so wet recently. You can see it's a magical spot. And we're always up here in the autumn picking chanterelles and porcini hedgehog mushrooms. But I think along this strip would make three really perfect little teepee spaces. And we're thinking we'll make some kind of trail around the farm, so we could easily put new pedestrian gates into the hedgerows here and have a little trail that people can walk around the farm. And the idea would be to have people book them on Airbnb. And then because we've got a farm chef and our farm kitchen that's coming in the early new year, we'll be able to cater. People can come and hire a space, eat meals with the team, not get in our way as we're busy farming. But they'll be able to use bikes, go to the lake, have a look around the local area as well as, you know, get a sense of what's going on here. We get so many emails of people wanting to come to the farm and we've never been able to host them. And so I reckon these are the spots to do that. Might even build another tree house. We'll see how adventurous I get. But that's a lot of decking to build. I've actually invested in a small, quite a large, compact tractor that has forks and a bucket. So that's going to help with a lot of farm jobs but it will also help with moving things like heavy timber. Got several tons of timber to come out to put up in here. So it's going to be and really helpful just for that as well as a lot of the other farm developments. And these magical spaces are places we use on our training. We've butchered a lot of home, butchered animals down here in the shade. I'm so happy to have this part of the land back on the farm. So the neighbourhood never really wanted to sell because he's done all the work over decades to prepare the forestry. And so what we've done is come to an arrangement where we've given the forestry price and the land price. But then we speculated on the next years of percentage increase thinking it will grow by 4% each year because that was the neighbor's plan was to cut it down in a few years time. So we've come up with a deal where we're paying for guaranteed income. So it's a good deal for, for them because who knows with the bark beetle and the problems they might not have got out of the farm, out of the forest what they wanted, but it means we get to purchase the bit of land that wasn't necessarily for sale anyway. And it's just, it's a beautiful thing.

What a great way to end the year folks. It's been an extraordinary year for us and I guess for everyone. But it's been amazing to just get re energized, refocused on what we're investing in, what we're going to do to take this farm in a new direction and take it to another level. So exciting to be able to actually purchase the land that we've put so much time and energy into and has.

Become iconic in the market gardening space. And so it's really nice to know that we secured that for the future and be able to build on the assets and investments we got here. I'm super excited for the new year. We're going to be doing a lot of building with the platforms and getting the new kitchen in place. And I've got a load of videos lined up for next year to bring you with us on the journey.

And with that I need to sign off. It's Christmas Eve here in Sweden, people traditionally celebrate mainly in Christmas Eve evening. We're British, half of the family is British so we are celebrating Christmas day on the 25th which means we get to celebrate twice. So we've got a lot of feasting and preparation to do. And hopefully you lot aren't on YouTube. You're with your families and friends and celebrating in whichever way you choose to. So I wish you a very happy Christmas. Thank you everyone who's followed us, supported us by buying our book and online trainings, etc. It's such a gift to support each other in these ways and I can't wait to do that more next year. It's going to be an awesome year next year, so I wish you all the best. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year and I'll see you in a video soon. Bye for now.