A permaculture pickleball kombucha winter

hey welcome back it's been a while since the video it's winter time uh kind of taking the season off but I thought you know maybe I'll take you around show you what a typical day is out here at the food forest in the winter time so one thing we do all winter long is uh keep making kombucha so we're going to uh make another batch of that so add 14 tea bags and two cups of sugar now this sugar is not for me this is for the scoby the symbiotic culture of yeast and bacteria bacteria and yeast uh for your tea bags it's really important don't get tea bags that have any kind of um Plastics in them they'll break apart and you get be drinking microplastics that's the last thing you need and trying to do this onehanded uh we're going to do a second ferment so we're taking some of our fruit from the Food Forest that is frozen and we're going to do a second ferment with this now depending on the sweetness of the fruit I'll add a little bit more sugar uh because it needs a certain amount of sugar in order to actually um have the actual second ferment go and create the Fizz that I need for the taste again not a lot if any of the sugar will be left over when we're actually drinking it this is going to be consumed by the um microbiology inside this the kombucha all right go get the actual kombucha I put these down so it doesn't slide and this we keep in a dark cool spot not super cool but just somewhat cool this is a nice looking batch going to check for for mold at the top and it looks good that is a nice peliso okay so we're going to let this frozen fruit kind of thaw we're going to cover it so nothing gets in it like fruit flies or anything we don't need fruit fly larvae in our uh kombucha definely don't want that you can recover from that um you just have to kind of remake it a whole bunch of times in a row and then this is going to Steep and we'll go outside and shovel the driveway all right okay so that that's done obviously didn't uh show you shoveling the driveway that's not super entertaining but we got that done we'll go check on the chickens so we got our helpers out here always loving to come help us out uh this is just what uh permaculture looks like for four months of the year in Canada maybe five maybe less going forward uh climate change and everything we haven't had a really good snow and winter uh for a long time but the doggles love coming outside love coming to check on the chickens come on Lucy come on sweet girl and I'll show you what we do in the winter time with our chickens now chicken breeds depending on the breeds they can withstand a lot of low temperature so like even right to minus 25 C so we wrapped the bottom in plastic so they can get at their food and we don't have snow blowing in uh anything like that um I threw this bag in here so that my mom can um or my sons can easily feed the chickens so I'm going to be a away for just a brief time but they're going to have to come in so I topped up the chicken food uh we got the water uh usually just rinse the water out cuz they're filthy animals and they like to make messes this is a heated water so it stops it from freezing and the girls will come and drink from this and it's funny as soon as they hear me they all come out uh see what's going on I usually I'm the source of treats for them so maybe we'll go ahead and do that we'll show you the inside of their Coupe I've got a shovel here I like to keep the coupe um a little cleaner we do do the deep litter method but I like to keep it a little cleaner in the winter time um I do it's okay to have a little bit of you know manure on the ground because it actually provides the heat for them so I like to add more wood chips in and make sure that it's well covered so it's h composting and then we come over and we're going to give them some treats um the other thing we do is we close up the windows and we kind of bag them up but you do want to have air flow so on this side we've just got a solid window that gets closed up on this side we bag around with Vapor Barrier um just up to the side and we make sure that there's some you know gaps and then especially I'll move the camera I don't know if you'll be able to see this but underneath here there's a gap right up into there we want to have good air flow uh because uh we don't want it to you know just be a ton of ammonium out there that they're sniffing and smelling so we go to our shed um this door got damage I've a meaning to fix it for a while I picked up this door off the side of the street something that I can just like screw in this is just a storage shed for all of our chicken stuff know a little bit of extra grit and stuff like that for them but in here we've got some black soldierly larvae for them this is really good um micronutrients for them mineral content uh and their feed is actually enriched with calcium you know so that they can uh get calcium back for their eggs they are still young so they are still producing quite a bit of eggs almost an egg a day still even in the winter time so I got to make sure that we're replacing that uh with um with more calcium so we grind the eggs back up and then we also give them little treats here hey guys come on come on so we're at four chickens we're going to add a few every uh every little while U maybe like a two a year we had uh what do we have 10 last year and then the weasel or The Mink got them all and uh I I think it was a little too many eggs so we're going to actually just go down to four this is plenty eggs for us for our family we don't have to worry about selling them and then as their production comes down We'll add a couple a couple more uh layers maybe each year uh there's much much better chicken setups um if you have more time and space and that's sort of thing I definitely recommend edible Acres on YouTube for everything chickens he's got some really really good setups with green houses and composting so a little more high maintenance um than what I'm able to do right now being at work full-time and not really being home much with you know kids sports and stuff like that in the winter time so for me I just want to make sure that my chickens are warm they're surviving the temperatures well they're comfortable they're having a good life and they're they're well fed actually just going to go throw this cut back uh one other interesting thing let me know if your chickens do this too but they've started laying in the corner in the winter times and I think it's just because these nesting boxes over here are just a little bit too cold I think just you know the crack there some drafts come in and it's little colder so they've actually started laying eggs in the corner here which uh is totally fine by me they had about six eggs in there this morning that I picked up yeah so let me know if your chickens do that um our dogs are outside pretty much all day uh we obviously let them in whenever they want to um but anytime we're working from home or anything my wife and I kind of Alternate which days we work from home cuz both of our jobs allow us to work from home two days a week uh so there's usually someone home with the dogs they want to be outside pretty much all day which is really nice because they keep the chickens or they keep all the um rabbits away from the trees so that's a really handy thing if you've got a lot of rabbit damage and brows on your trees here here's the pond can't really see it what I usually do here is just to check to see if we've still got air flow and it looks like it might have been covered up you'll notice all the food forest and Gardens I don't tidy up it's really important to not tidy these things up in terms of providing habitat for beneficial insects we really need to protect the insects so try not to clean up your Gardens until uh the spring let it just be wild all winter long uh I even do that in my annual Garden beds uh one drawback of that is that you know when I have something pop up it'll go to seed and that seed will kind of get into my bed but that's fine as long as I control during the season what grows here so this is all lamb's quarter and orach that popped up kind of volunteered in the beds um the orach anyways the lambs quarters I was intentionally spreading from other areas and then we've got a bunch of kale in there that we've been sprinkling in but even stuff like this this is just tomatoes uh that have kind of they finished up last year and I don't clean them up yet because uh the microbiology can eat it uh even though there's not a lot of microbiology activity right now uh but you know insects that want to stay in the soil uh it's really important that we don't just have bare soil for them so um you will get some uh non- beneficial insects taking advantage of that but I think the benefit to beneficial insects out ways that and if we just kind of clean up everything and make everything look tidy um then we really really do a disservice to the natural world so I'm really trying to promote um servicing the natural world as much as I can when I'm gardening well that's it we'll head back inside now I get back to work bit of a lunch break clearing off the snow and checking on the chickens and I guess we'll see you on the next one hopefully um we'll get you cleaned off let's go inside just finishing off the kombucha second ferment adding a little bit of Kombucha to the base going to add some seabuckthorn berries um world's healthiest Berry one of my favorite plants and super high in vitamin C which is obviously really good right now with uh the uh everything that's going around out there with uh cold and flu and Co and everything I give it a little blend with a hand mixer I like to blend it uh just to get the flavors out of the fruit really well and ingrained right into the drink and then I just put it all all in there I don't strain it or anything like that just fill it up I just fill up the rest of the thing with some cold water took out the tea bags and this is the next Brew so we're full back up and now he goes back into the cupboard for about another 3 weeks do this every 3 weeks to four weeks so total cost of all of this is about 2 cups of sugar and 14 tea bags plus I guess the fruit but we grow that for free here it's a pretty nice cheap healthy drink and these go up in the cupboard for about 3 days and then into the fridge and then I've also just been uh kind of decompressing from you know the US politics climate change stuff um and really kind of just focusing on taking a break from all that for the during the off season so uh my wife and I have really been focused on pickle ball lately so I don't know I'll just throw some clips here of us playing uh I think it's a great sport for uh you know building bonds in a community permaculture is so much about that social contract and building those Community bonds and one thing I've really noticed about pickle ball is that it's becoming so popular Now with uh you know such a wide range of people that you go down to your local recck play and you meet people and you know within a very short time of about a year or two playing pickle ball now I've really met almost everyone in my town it feels like I I see them all throughout uh you know grocery stores and shopping and you'll run into them you know in unexpected places and it's been really really nice to get to know people that I wouldn't have normally met and then also you know the physical activity especially when you kind of take it on a more competitive level like my my wife and I have uh been doing and uh Drilling uh playing as much as we can you know almost every day sometimes for three even upwards of like 6 hours a day uh just it's really hard to keep any weight on to be honest I'm eating like a little piggy and trying to uh trying to keep my weight on uh because it's just burning everything off my body being that active uh and what a great way to spend a winter downtime than you know you know a competitive sport getting that competition out of me I really really working on you know keeping my athleticism from when I was in my 20s and and kind of competing at Sports and really trying to push myself as far as possible uh in training and drilling sessions and then competition and tournaments and stuff like that so that's been really fun I've been doing that a lot meeting a ton of people around the community and it's been really really enjoyable um so anyways I I would say give it a try um it's also a really good way to get the word out to other people about permaculture like there are so many people that I've met through pickle ball that I found out you know they Garden or they grow their own food and you know it's an easy little entry segue into discussing permaculture with them you know having them think more about just a garden and and maybe more about their ecological footprint on the planet and you know not in a way that they should do it but you know this is the stuff that I do and you know it's something that I'm passionate about and and really working on especially in the winter season you know when I can't grow food and everything my focus really is on how do I be the best human that I can be and how do I minimize my footprint on this planet and uh you know be the best example for my kids and best example for my community that sort of thing so pickle ball is kind of like a a really neat tangent to uh the permaculture stuff especially the more Community Centric permaculture stuff and uh I I can't uh recommend it highly enough people really go there you see the best sides of people everyone's always so happy to be playing pickle ball it's uh pure joy and to me permaculture is that exact thing it's pure joy it's how I connect uh with my community and to do so through pickle ball is kind of really interesting and fun so anyway give it a go I I really enjoy with my wife and it's a great way to spend time together anyways I think uh this is long enough video I'll leave you and uh hopefully I talk to you in a short while bye 41 [Music] [Music] C