I've missed you guys - I'm coming back

I'm missing one. Is she in here? It's all gross. Weird looking. I'm missing a chicken. I've got more eggs. Alright, so these right here are ceramic eggs. Called trainer eggs. You can tell that is a real egg because it sounds different. And actually we've got two. Look! Aren't those pretty? For the last several years we've kind of had this desire to have land and space and like the whole idea of like homesteading and all this stuff was kind of trending a lot during the whole 2020 thing but not to be like hey we had this idea first but you know and we certainly didn't have it first but we've kind of been feeling this way and moving in this direction for three or four years. When we moved to Utah that was kind of one of our thoughts was like let's figure this place out and kind of get the lay of the land and let's buy some land and kind of settle in somewhere. Of course it ended up being too cold when we moved back to Florida but that's another story. So now we've got three eggs since yesterday. Last night, I came out here and checked last night. You can tell from the sound that those are not the real eggs. Nobody's really laying in here. Alright, let's see what we've got here. One, two, three, four, five. Let me bring these inside and I'll come out and count you ladies in a minute. Nope, we're still missing one. I've only counted eight Earlier today we had we had one of the chickens. So this fence is not really intended to keep them in. It's kind of intended to keep them in. It's more intended to keep things out. They can fly over and they do. What we are hoping that they do is just stay in. Anyway, a couple times, there she is. You're missing out on the action. This is the one that was out in front of the house today. I mean, she was so far away from here. Let's go. You already missed out on the snacks. I'll give you some if you come back in here. Uh-oh. The sprinkler system came on. There we go. When I was a kid, I used to go up and visit my aunt and uncle and my cousins up in rural Illinois. Mulberry Grove, Illinois. And I used to marvel at the whole farm lifestyle. You know, like having animals and food crops growing. I mean, this is back when homesteading, the term homesteading wasn't really a thing. I guess the concept behind homesteading is really, it's not really commercial farming kind of stuff. It is self-sustainability. But my family in rural Illinois, they were commercial farmers. Actually, if you go back six or seven generations, they were commercial farmers. And the idea of having I don't know, land and space and stuff like that to do something with has always been kind of fascinating to me. Never really had the space to do it in. She just loves getting into cameras. She loves getting into cameras? Uh-huh. I don't think she likes getting into cameras. For some reason, whenever I'm holding the camera, she's scared of me. Watch. Razzy, come! Maybe she's... What's the matter? It's okay. It's okay. You're just camera shy. That's what it is. That's what it is. That's a good girl. Oh. So I've got this little crate right here that we've been kind of stashing the eggs in. I actually don't know where we got this thing from. Right now, we've got almost 12 eggs. We've got 11 eggs in here. We've got a few inside, which means we've got a little more than... Dad, I can see you. We've got a little more than a dozen eggs. Can you see me, baby? So I bought this hoop house greenhouse a few months ago, and I've kind of slowly been getting it put up. I had some... I had a friend that was in town, Ben. Thanks for your help, by the way. I don't know. Maybe a month ago or so. Might have been more than that. He helped me get the support structure up. I need to put some other reinforcement things on and get the plastic tarped over it. But what I'm wanting to do with this hoop house is I'm wanting to use this to be able to grow actual tropical stuff. So it might sound kind of funny, but it's not warm enough here in the winter to grow actual tropical things like coconut palms. I can't actually grow a coconut palm in this. Coconut palms grow too tall for the structure. But I can get dwarf coconut palms, for instance. And there's a few other things that I've been kind of researching that I would need a hoop house for. I also have talked a little bit about aquaponics. I would want the aquaponics set up inside the hoop house as well so that I could have controlled water. So it didn't get rained on. Anyway, I had to move some of the parts and pieces of it because they were in the way. I literally have not mowed over here in months. This is like so lush right here, but it's dying over there. I think it's because I've got a lot less sun here and more sun over there. This is going to be fun. This is going to be interesting mowing through this today. It's going to... Oh, look at the bamboo! Look at how tall this is. Look at that. Look at that stalk. Look at that. It's taller than I am. Way taller than I am. Look at this one over here. This one's shooting straight up. Look at that. This guy. It's so tall. Probably 10 feet tall. Look how thick the stalk is at the bottom. Right here. So this is Seabreeze bamboo. And I planted this all along, right along back here. And the reason why is because I wanted to have a little more of a natural wall. This will grow up and it'll kind of just take over. It's not a running. It's a clumping bamboo. Everybody always is like, yeah, it's got to be everywhere. This is not a running kind. This is a clumping. And then over in front of the coops and over here, over in front of the chicken run and over there, I've got giant timber bamboo. It's going to get big and thick and awesome and I'll show you that in a little while. Everything moved out of the way so that we can... Well, almost everything. Abraham, she's waiting for you. All right, so pro tip. Don't run over a shovel with a mower. The shovel actually did pretty good. The lawnmower blades did not. Ouch! And they're sitting in the sun. Really hot. Yeah, that's hot. Look at that. So let me show you. This is my banana circle. So the idea behind the banana circle is to have a circle. I dug about three feet down and used what I dug out to create a berm around the outside and I planted the bananas in the berm. I planted five bananas. Each one had a couple of pups coming up. Now they've all got several pups coming up. Some of them are big. In the middle, you put compost. So we put all our compost stuff in the middle and then I planted lemongrass around the outside and then these are sweet potatoes. So I figured out how to make sweet potato slips or grow sweet potato slips. So I've got sweet potato there, there, there. They're all over the place. Right there and right there. I put them all around. So the idea is, hopefully, in a couple of weeks, whenever it totally takes, and here's my little irrigation sprayers and I've got drip irrigation for the banana and for the lemongrass in each one. But the idea is, in a couple of weeks, once those roots kind of take, they kind of explode and the idea is they'll be ground cover around all of the base of it. So right here is going to be a bamboo grove and then I've got giant timber. That's sea breeze. I've got giant timber up there. That's going to grow up real tall and give the chickens a lot of nice good shade and it'll grow out six to ten feet per cluster. So this will grow about six to ten feet out this way. This will grow out about six to ten feet this way and then obviously towards the outside and it'll create, I think, maybe a fifteen to twenty foot nice bamboo wall barrier and so when that's done, I'll put a bench right here. It'll be in the shade. It's going to be really nice and cozy and it'll provide some good shade for the chickens and everything on this side. Look at the size of this stalk right here. This one right here. Look at the size of it. It's the size of my thumb. This one's come up since I planted all this and it's about four feet tall. Here's another new stalk that's come up. Look at this one. This one's just come up. So this giant timber bamboo it's going to grow a stalk six to eight inches thick and it'll grow sixty feet tall. It's clumping. It's not running. It'll grow out a little bit. Actually, it'll grow out a lot of bit if you don't tame it. What happens is the root ball grows under the ground and it just keeps growing. So I was asking him how you trim it and he said just get a reciprocating saw and just as close to the ground as you can and you've got these big bamboo canes that you get to play with. What the heck? Hey, get back in there. What are you doing? Why do they do this? Have you seen this? They do this thing where they squat and I don't know. It's so funny. Whoa! All right, get back over here. Get over here. And then right here are blueberries. I got these on a really, really sweet sale. I need to get these things in the ground though because I've got rosemary here. These are rosemary plants. I've got, I think, eight of them. They were so tiny when I got them. Actually, I would say they've outgrown these pots. One of the big jobs that I've got to get done here and the next, I've really got to get it done soon. I've got to get rid of this temporary fence and build a permanent fence. I'm going to build a permanent fence about the same size as this but I'm going to come out about 10 feet to about right here. The fence I'm going to build is going to be taller as well. I don't think it's going to change anything because they can get on top of the coop. Those are Omelette USA coops. Nothing wrong with them but they're not going in them and that's something else I've got to figure out. If you happen to know why they might not be going into their coops at night, let me know in comments below. This is giant timber as well just like I have up at the front with the chickens and the whole idea here is to make this a bamboo grove and so I planted them kind of in a diamond shape here. Holy crap! Wow! Can you see how big that stalk is right here? I don't even know. I can't see. It's so bright. I can't tell. Wow! Look at the size of that. Look at the size of that. Wow! That one's going to shoot up super tall. This is amazing. Okay so the whole idea here like I was saying was it's going to be a bamboo grove and the way I envision it is it'll grow out and I'm going to keep this center 10 by 10 foot space or 15 by 15 foot space cleared out and that way I might put a hammock in here or I don't know just a cool place to kind of hang out literally and it will be literally cool because I'll be covered in shade. Have you ever been in a bamboo forest? It's so peaceful and tranquil. That's kind of a miniature version of what I'm doing here. You are a stinker. You are such a stinker. You got out again. You just want to come hang out with us don't you? She's going to be the movie star. So one of the bottlenecks that I had for expanding into the field here was an irrigation project and now that I've gotten that irrigation project done I haven't done anything. If you look way down there you can see all the other posts and so what I did about every 40 feet I put a post and then I ran the irrigation all the way from the other side of the property in three quarter inch pipe all the way down here and believe it or not I still have quite a bit of pressure right here at the end. We'll see from a practical perspective how much pressure I end up having you know like can I bring water all the way to the end here? I don't know. We'll figure that out at some point. Look what I discovered. Found a melon down here. Actually looks in really good shape. Oh I found another one. But some of these are dying. I don't know why. I think I'm not, maybe I'm not getting in enough maybe there's not getting enough water. Here's another one. This looks different. This was honeydew and that must be cantaloupe I bet. Pulling this stuff out. I'm getting ready to get in here with the... So I mean that's pretty much it. I just wanted to update you on the whole homestead thing. I also wanted to let you know that I'm actually making a concerted effort to make a comeback. I get a lot of emails and messages on Instagram and comments and where are you? We miss you videos and please come back and I want to come back. I've been trying to find this balance. I've edited actually five videos including this one. I'm uploading this one. You're watching it right now. And I have four more videos following this and I've made a concerted effort to get into a consistent habit of editing every single week. I've edited a video every week for the last four weeks and so yeah we're going to get back on this. Expo West. Overland Expo West is this weekend. I will be there. If you're going to be at the event maybe we'll see you at the event. If not, we'll see you in the next video. The next video we're going to actually go back to the story of the new camper. The new camper. The AT Overland camper that we put on the back of the pickup. The next video will be video two which will be a little bit of a camping adventure in that and then we'll go from there.