Richard Perkins shows his farm transitioning between seasons: vole damage to trees, owl pellets signaling natural pest control, and preparations for a big tunnel crop of peppers, tomatoes, and cucumbers. He empties the freezer, sets up seed trays, tends livestock, and takes a family break at the beach.
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Welcome back to another video, folks. It's been going from snowstorms and winter to spring like weather and back and forth for the last few weeks now. But a few things going on at the farm. Just wanted to drop a video for you to see what's going on right now.
Okay. Historic day. We are emptying the freezer and this.
Is the last of Ridgedale stuff we're.
Taking back to the farm. This is for feeding the crew next year. We've got crates of little chickens, smoked chickens from the Gracie.
So you've heard, if you've been following the channel, that we've had a lot of problems with the voles eating trees. It's been real bad year.
Last spring.
I made videos about it last spring. But I've just been checking under every single pole that we put up in the agroforestry systems. We've got between one and three owl pellets with vole teeth sticking out. So whether or not it will be enough for the amount of voles that have been breeding in the last three winters that have been favorable to them, we don't know. But it's amazing to see that these simple solutions work.
Okay. It feels like spring. So we're getting into the lean to and we're just patching up some of the insulations falling off with the baton there. Grace is testing all the lights. We've got everything turned on. You get the odd bulb that won't function. So we're just checking all that now. It's a bit too cold at night to be planting out here just yet. But we're just clearing it up. And we've brought in some planting compost to get it thawing out. We usually have a bin under here and we've got our vermiculite. I always, since I was a teenager, I've covered up my seeding trays with vermiculite. Sufficient way to do it. Got my paper pot seeder and our dibblers for the 64 trays. Another thing I need to do is to see if we can piggyback off this fuse box and off the water that comes out the cellar that you can see here. I'm hoping we could piggyback off that to put on the house, the Aterfeld's house that I described. That's going over there. So nice to get things in order before it gets busy.
We're going to have a full big.
Tunnel with peppers like chili peppers, tomatoes, as well as cucumber. And we'll probably plant up all the old North. So it's a lot of veg. It's more than we'll need for the homesteading crew here. I think there's going to be like six adults, seven kids here all summer. And then obviously, if we get the camping going, there'll be a whole lot of visitors, hopefully. So it'll be nice to have that surplus to be able to feed people from the farm. So first seedlings of the year are globe artichokes. Grace was very particular about growing two beds of globe artichokes. Hey, hey. Snow again. What's up? Sheeps. So some people asked about watering in the winter. You can see I have stream flowing year round, but they won't drink from the stream. Sheep don't like going down their water anyway. And my cows are stubborn. They won't even get down on the little beach here, especially when it's icy. So I just fill up these buckets and as long as they're kept ice free, that's no problem at all. It's going to empty this one out. Fill her up again.
Hey.
Hey. That's a solution that works totally fine. And by law and out of what you want to do, you need to check the animals daily. And you know, of course with livestock you always want to be looking at the body condition of the animals, checking their feet are okay, etc. And so it's really no stress to just fill up the water like that. And I could have a automated running system with a pipe from higher up where the Ram pump filling station is. And if you've got flowing water coming to a trough that flows onto the stream, that would work and save having to fill it up. But it's not worth the effort to build in my mind. So I just never have bothered doing that. So I've been clearing snow. Snowstorm continues. It's pretty. I guess it's pretty typical this time of year. It's nice to be out doing little jobs as spring approaches it.
Back on the west coast, baby.
One of our favorite spots. Just love it here. So we've been meeting friend of a.
Friend who might live at Clutter in the sauna house and rent out or help renting out the other house on Airbnb.
That's really cool for me.
I really want that place to be lived in by someone nice and be available for us when we want to.
Come to the beach and go fishing, etc. Now Ragnar and I have got a.
Bit of father and son time to.
Be on the beach and see if there's any sea life around and have.
A nice time in the sun. It's gorgeous here.
So that's it for the video. Just a little update. We've got a lot of videos planned for this year with interviews with interesting people and also I'm away now for a week in Gotland and I'll be back and starting to plant all the onions and other greenhouse crops. We're going to grow a lot of crops this year and got an amazing crew of people coming. So thanks for watching the videos. As always. Don't forget to click subscribe and you can find out a whole bunch more in the links below. See you in a video soon.
