Spring On The Homestead | Starting 200 Seeds + Planting Plum Trees + Canning Chicken

Hi guys, welcome to today's vlog. Phoebe's joining me today. Hello, hello. Yay, there's the smile. So this weekend we are going to be planting all of our seeds that need to be started early in the spring. So a lot of tomatoes and peppers and herbs and all kinds of stuff. So Luke is more of the gardener so he is going to be doing the seed starting. We're also going to be planting plum trees that we got from a friend nearby. She just gave us some plum starts, some of the volunteer trees. So Luke went and dug them up and we're going to plant those. So yeah, I wanted to take you along on this weekend and show you what sort of things are going on on the homestead. So I hope you enjoy and let's get right into it. Hey guys, just starting some seeds for the spring and just thought I'd show you along on the process. I got this deep pan here for mixing up the soil and we're going to be using these trays along with some Red Solo cups. Got all our seeds. So let's get started. So I like to pour a little bit of water in here just to start and just dump in some of your potting mix. This isn't exactly the right stuff but it should still work. All right, of course I got our helper here, Vivi. Get that stirred up. You want it to be wet but not drenched so you can squeeze a little water out. That might be a little bit too wet but I'm going to err on the side of too wet because I'm not going to be adding any water afterwards. Gonna get our seed tray here. Fill it up with cups. You don't want them completely full. Leave a little room on top. Pack it down lightly. You don't want there to be tons of air pockets but you don't want it to be compact all the way down either. Before I forget, I forgot to show you. I drilled some holes in the bottom of this. We'll need a big stack. I just used this long drill bit, quarter inch hole. Drill them down like that. It's really fast and easy. All right, now that we got that, we need to punch some holes. I just got this pan head. I'm just doing two holes for one. So I'm doing four cups for this tray of herbs. We got lavender, spearmint, sage, and thyme. Got a sharpie. It's looking right on here like so. Got a tiny little bag. They're really hard to plant so you normally put in way too many but they give you like 300 seeds in this packet, 500 in that one, 1,000 in that one, so you don't really have to be too conservative. Dump out a little pile. These are much, much bigger. You can actually pick them up individually. Yeah, just sprinkle a little bit more on top. Gently pack it down. The last thing I like to do, I just throw some plastic over the top just to help hold that moisture in, help with germination, and then I go stick it on my tea bag. That's it. All right, got them all in. Took a couple evenings. 200 cups should be plenty for us and plenty extra to sell and give to friends and family. I'm just going to throw some plastic on here and heat it up in here for germination. Got them all covered with plastic. It'll help keep the moisture in. Turn these off. Get some little bit of extra heat. They don't need the light right now but the extra heat will help. I'm doing a little bit of canning. I'm doing some chicken. I roasted eight chickens and then I pulled all the drumsticks and thighs and the breast meat off and I put the whole drumsticks and stuff with the bones on in the jars and then I packed the breast meat around it. I put water in it and a teaspoon of salt in each jar and we're canning it right now. So I'm really excited for how this is going to turn out. It's really nice to have canned chicken on hand for easy meals, snacks, whatever. It's just nice for saving freezer space because we're having got a lot of animals come in so it'll be nice to make some space. Okay, just planting some plum trees today. Got our water, got our hole. Get to it. It's pretty good chunk. You want the ground level to be about what it was before. You don't want to bury it super deep. Third is a little clumpy. It's going up straight. That's all angled. Pack that down. Get rid of any air grabs that are in there. I kind of like to make a moat all the way around for rain and extra water. Just fill up the bay and there you have it. Plum tree transplant. All right, where were we before we were rudely interrupted? Oh dear. Look at that beautiful black soil. Well, the chicken is finally canned. That was so difficult to can. It took so many times. I was having issues with the seal, but I didn't know it at first because it was such a weird issue. I would get it to, I was having to can it for 75 minutes and I would get where I had 30 minutes left on the timer and then all of a sudden the pressure would just shoot down, which is really, really weird. I took it out and I oiled the seal and I checked all the gaskets and the weight gauge and everything. Then I tried it again because I wanted to see if that worked to oil it. It did the exact same thing. It got to 30 minutes left on the timer and then it shot back down to zero. I was like, that is just so strange. I just thought I'd have to use up the chicken right away and not be able to can it. But then I found a new seal and a new of the emergency valves in the back of the cabinet. So I put those on and then it worked perfectly. So apparently it was the seal. But what's so strange to me is that it made it to 30 minutes left both times, the same amount of time. And then it stopped working. So it takes a certain amount of time of having it heated up and pressurized to stop working. But anyway, the chicken is canned and it looks amazing and it didn't siphon very much, which is really great because it went up and down in pressure so many times. I thought for sure it would. All seven jars sealed. I'm very happy with it. So I want to do some more of that soon, make some more room in the freezer. And it's nice to just not have it frozen, just ready to use right away. So I'm going to end the vlog here. I hope you guys enjoyed seeing some of the stuff that we did, all the seeds starting and planting more trees. And we have some really, really exciting things coming up in the next vlog. I'm not going to give it away yet. You've got to subscribe and turn your bell notifications on so that you know when we post the next one. So I will see you in the next video. Bye.