#7 New Additions to the Farm!

We're Karen and Sarah and after a year and a half of long distance relationship between Canada and Norway we bought a farm and settled in the Norwegian forest. Since then we've been working hard on building a sustainable homestead where we can grow our own food, harvest our own energy and collect our own water. Subscribe and follow along on our journey. Okay we have to put it away now like we're just having way too much fun with this thing but we're just wasting gas and like the smell is really nauseating to be honest. I thought it was an earthworm at first but it's got a head and it's got a stubby tail. See how it's not tasting the air? Its tongue isn't flicking in and out like a snake's would. I think that this is a legless lizard. So I've been learning a lot about soil recently. All life on earth exists on the most one percent outer layer of the earth. In our modern time we apparently move more soil each year than the last ice age and I think for something that we depend on so much we don't know that much about it. I was at a talk a few days ago where the guy said that soil is like the last unknown frontier of science because we're discovering so much and it's really interesting. I always assumed that the nutrients and minerals that the planet needs were in the ground. The plant uses photosynthesis and sucks them up but in reality the plant uses photosynthesis and creates sugar and pumps that down into its roots and exchanges that with bacteria and the bacteria are the ones supplying the plant with the nutrients that it needs like nitrogen or phosphorus etc and so it's a symbiotic relationship between the plant and the bacteria. The plant also has a connection with mushroom mycelium and it creates a sort of internet in the forest where plants can communicate with each other through the mycelium and the forest has sort of a consciousness if you will. Yeah but the more I learn about soil the more I realize there's so much to learn. Seeing what we're doing to our soil is painful. Every time you till you're flipping the soil so all that carbon is being burnt off by the sun and going into the atmosphere. All the microorganisms are being burnt by the sun and dying. You're activating all the weeds because they are earth repair mechanisms. Whenever there's a disturbance there are certain plants that go there and try and heal that wound in the earth and those are the ones that we call weeds and we have wage wars against them. But interestingly those are some of the edible ones. Very healthy and very useful. So the most efficient way of gardening that I've found is called no dig and it's where you sort of make lasagna layers of material to keep all of the nutrients and the microorganisms in the soil and create more. So you can do it right on a lawn. You put down two to three layers of cardboard and then about six inches of compost manure something like that and then you can grow on that and it's super effective and from my experience so far every year there's less weeds and they're very easy to pull out. They don't have like a firm grasp in the soil yet and I feel that it is very worthwhile to learn about soil if you're a farmer or a gardener or have any interest in fighting global warming and there has to be a shift in mentality on how we treat our soil. Right now we kill everything and then put our synthetic fertilizers on there and we grow our crops but it's an artificial environment like every step is being forced and it makes sense to me to go with the flow of energy with nature instead of forcing it to do what we want at every turn and there's lots of alternatives coming out there. There's no dig plows so it cuts a small well a cut in the soil plop seeds in there and then pushes it back so there's very minimal disturbance and I think Sarah feels this way too on how important soil is to humans to the ecosystem to the earth and how mistreated it's being and how long we've been mistreating it like there's a plow culture. We are a plow culture and that started back in ancient Mesopotamia and it's very effective at short term but not very good for long term and if we look at what that short-term mentality has created in terms of nature it's not very good. We're just using up all the resources we're exploiting nature and we're not looking into the future and thinking like is this sustainable is this going to keep on working in a hundred years and it's not so I really hope that we shift our mentality oh I want to cuddle them I'm coming in just hold it hold it look look so Teapot the chick that just had chickens no all the way around Teapot the chicken that just had chickens she had chicks so Teapot the chicken that just had chickens yes very good um one night I forgot the chickens outside and then when I came out to lock the door um they were all inside and I didn't really count them I just assumed that they were all in there and then next day Teapot was gone yeah so we thought that she had been taken by a predator and uh yeah we were very sad I was a little grumpy and then like 24 hours after that she was just there in the coop and it was a bit of a mystery and she disappeared again like what's going on and just couldn't find her and maybe after like five days um we found the place that she made her nest like way in the back of the coop she dug under something and um uh yeah so we just let her be for about a month we've barely seen her for a month now and suddenly she disappears with four chickies I'm just in the back of the coop here and Kieran installed a window so we could look in before we shut this part underneath the coop off but she had dug underneath the obstacle that Kieran put up and she had built a nest like right in the corner in there we could barely see her we just saw some movement so we knew that she was in there and as she emerged 28 days later it's really feeling like a farm now yeah every day we have a tractor yeah chickies oh I'm so excited