Turning Wool Into Food!- Off Grid Homestead Potato Experiment

Hi, we're Chantal and Mark. After Chantal went from being a fit and healthy forensics officer to suffering a stroke, retraining facial muscles and learning to walk again we decided life was worth living so we put on our boots and decided to move off grid. Spring is here which means good weather and walks around the local neighborhood. Chantal is easily distracted by animals so we had to stop and feed the cows. Time has come for spud planting. So I've just redone my rows and had a bit of a weed out because they were very very weedy, full of stinging nettles actually. So something must have gone to seed and spread all through the place and we've got our berries growing here. So these are I think black currant. I'm not 100% sure. We got these from the neighbor across the way. So thank you very much Tracy for those ones. So they're growing there nicely so I've got to start watering. So my little water slide that I built up here has been catching a bit of water but I need to build a decent trough system in there so I can catch a lot more water because a lot of it goes to waste when we when it does rain. So the plan with this spud patch is different this year. So last year I had some cardboard and then I lay straw. Yeah it was straw from the from the paddock so grass from the paddock on top of that and a little bit of chicken poo and then I lay the soil on top which was the soil that we had piled up in front of the house here and that was the soil that was dragged across from when we leveled out the ground there for the tiny house to sit on. So that ground is now since being all leveled out and pushed up the hill to make the driveway not so steep. So this year I didn't have the soil. So my plan this year was this was the area where the chickens were. So the chickens had messed all the ground up dug it up pooed and pooed and pooed over on it for six months or so and left me with some nice fertile soil. I've since moved the chickens to this spot so they're doing that which was last year's spud patch and then so we're on a bit of a rotation and now obviously the chickens are in here during the day and then I put them back in their house at night time so at the moment I think they've spent about six days in total in here turning that stuff from that super super long grass into some nice fertile soil so the plan with that is to be moved over again and that hopefully will be where I grow a heap of pumpkins because pumpkins here in New Zealand are crazy expensive. So you're paying like nine ten dollars for a pumpkin they want four dollars fifty to six dollars fifty for a quarter of a pumpkin and they're not even big ones. So we really really want to get on to growing as much of our own produce as possible and that's the whole plan of the homesteading. So let's see if we can get stuck in and then I've got a little bit of a treat for you and a little bit of a trick for what's going on top of the spuds this year to stop the weeds coming through. So a bit archaic but I've dug a little trench just in the top because I don't want all this water just falling down the side of the pile. I want it to try and penetrate in too so it looks a bit stupid but this is what you do when you've got limited water supply So it is due to rain over the next few days and hopefully this will fill back up again excuse the color of the water but it doesn't matter it's only food for the plants. Look at that and it's all going to soak down to where the potatoes actually are instead of into the middle of the in between the trenches because there's no point watering in between the trenches and then when it does rain rain it can soak all the rest of the the rest of the pile. So for now I'm focusing on getting water into the actual mound and the rest of the soil is a bit dry at the moment but hopefully the rain over the weekend will get everything else looking a bit more wet. So one day I'll have a tank up the top of the hill that I can fill up but for now we'll do what we've got to do. All right the crew's at the barbers ready to go as you can see. Cloth can't see much. What will it look like after your haircut mate? Whoa whoa you're naked mate. Look at your massive head. Time to plant some pumpkin and some broccoli and on a bit of a whim I decided to make a trellis for my beans. I've got snow peas and I think they're broad beans. I can't remember but hopefully this holds up in the wind. I don't like my chances but we'll see how we go. We had a bit of rain the last sort of day and a half and I want to keep this moisture in there in the ground. I heard this is a thing. I don't know if it's a thing but I've got all the wool, oh there, that was kindly donated by our sheep and I'm going to chuck it down here and see if I can keep this moisture on the ground. Use the wool like you'd use pea straw for instance. So give it a crack and see how we go. Look at that. It looks like a car seat cover. Is that one sheep? That's one sheep. Oh my gosh. Look how much wool that is. Wow. It's in like one piece. A few woolly jumpers in there. Are you sure it's not gonna... Check it out. It's covering way more than I thought it would. So it's organic obviously so it's gonna break down over time. I can't believe how big they are. Yeah. So I might just try in between the rows for now and I know that's not where the water is but if you can just try and keep a little bit of the heat off the ground and maybe just on the top of the row with it as far as the growing because the heat's going to stay in there anyway but I just don't want it to bake off too much because obviously we're off grid. We don't want to be wasting too much water and... Wow. Wow look at that. I mean I was there when he did it but I didn't realize he did such a good job of getting in one go. Look at that. And it's also quite windy here. I'm making an absolute hash of this. So I can try and keep it together. If the wind does pick up it's not going to blow away little chunks. I'm going to have to cover that bit there. As I said I don't know if this is going to work but it's all an experiment and if it does blow it's only going to blow up into the long grass up there so it's not the end of the world and our trees will stop it from going into the rest of the town hopefully. I'm up in the land. A little one. Give the garden a nice woolly jumper. That must have been fluff. That's fluff for sure. It's got a big bum on it that one. Yeah let the experiment commence. We've come such a long way from taking our first look at our empty land. First of all it was clean up time. Then setting up the foundations. All the while living in our 1986 old caravan. We eagerly awaited the arrival of our bedroom pod and then not long after was the arrival of the house. All the while I was teaching myself how I was going to put together our solar and our water systems. Chantelle in the meantime was planning on how she wanted to make everything look pretty. Now we are living comfortably in our tiny house on wheels with many more projects to come.