THE FINAL PROJECT At Our Off Grid Home- DIY Sod

Anyone who has built a house will tell you the finishing touches take the longest, but stick in there and the result will be so worth it. Oh my gosh. It worked. We are trying our hand at something new in hopes of gaining instant gratification for little monetary costs. But Erin had the best idea. It's another drop of sweat equity in the bucket with fingers crossed that it will work out as we push to reach the final product of our self-built home. Success. Huge success. Yeah. As long as we can keep it alive. We'll see. Only time will tell on that. We're in mid June and our pasture grass is incredibly tall. It's standing well over six feet in portions of the pasture and other portions. It's anywhere between like four, eight and up. So it looks like we're going to have a great hay harvest this year. We do two cuttings. There's one in the spring and another one in the fall. And the hay that we get in our field is what feeds our animals throughout winter. All summer and spring, we are rotating them throughout the pasture. So our feed costs for our cows and for our sheep are non-existent because they are solely pasture raised and then fed the hay from our pasture throughout the winter. And then they're supplemented with minerals, but we're not feeding them any grain. So we have no feed costs or hay costs associated with keeping those animals going. You can move next to the silo. Yeah, I think so. That way she'll have some natural shade and we can keep everybody together. Yeah, she moved this place down pretty good. She did a good job. Oh yeah. She'll be happy to move though. This does mean that we spend a good bit of time rotating the animals throughout the pasture. The cow gets a little annoyed at us sometimes when she's been on it too long. When the grass gets this long, she likes eating the tops only. And you can't do that. You gotta eat it all. So we keep her in that paddock and now she's mowed the entire thing down. She's getting mooed and she's going to be extremely happy. So if you take a look at the pasture that our cows have currently been sitting on, you can see that she has done a fabulous job of mowing this down. That means that she is ready to move to fresh pasture, which is going to be nice and tall and have lots of the seeds up top, which she especially loves to eat off. That's always what she picks at first is the top parts. And then she works her way down to what is not exactly her favorite snack to have. So today we're going to be getting her moved down to a new spot. And then this evening, once all of our poultry are back inside of their mobile coop and the doors are shut, it's dark. We're going to go ahead and hook them up and tow them down behind her and move them to their new spot. It's hot. It finally feels like June. Oh, it feels like August. All right. Really hot. You did. Oh, it's dry too. The way this works for us in the warmer months when the pasture grass is so tall is that the cows go first and they're able to eat everything down to a manageable height where the poultry can come in behind her. They don't like the tall pasture grass. So they appreciate having her go through mow everything down first. And then they're able to enjoy the shorter pasture grass. And they also pick through all of the manure that both she and the calf leave behind. This is beneficial because as they scratch through all of that, they are cleaning up bugs, which feeds them. And they're also spreading out the manure to fertilize the pasture as they move down. Did you show up to help move the cow? Good. And you brought your egg basket. Are we collecting eggs? All right, let's go. To wake up next to you every morning, a kiss out of the blue. You ready to go get the cows? Yeah. You think they're going to like their new pen? Yeah. Me too. I think we can eat all of the grass. I think so. That's her job, right? Yeah. Come on girl. Taking a shortcut. Some of the guys that do all the work right in the back of the truck. Right Hayde? Yeah. Guys don't do the work or drive in the truck. So it's all right. Kind of used to that right here. You know, just joking. Aaron's a farmer, not me. Josh is getting all of the forms off of the sides of the concrete. And then we have a little bit of cleanup that we need to do because it did spill over mostly on my side. So we need to go back through, clean all of that up and get it out of here. But it turned out beautifully. Like it just turned out so well. And I mean it makes a huge difference walking down off of these steps and then stepping down onto a sidewalk. We got the sidewalk completed. We didn't grass seed that entire area. The reason why is we had a concrete truck going through there. We knew it would probably destroy the entire thing. But Aaron had the best idea and it involves that thing right there. So it's not going to seed anything. We are going to lay sod. And no, we didn't buy sod from anybody. We rented this for 125 bucks and the entire garden area, we're going to be doing a raised garden beds. We're actually going to mulch that entire area, but we don't want to kill all that grass. That's good high quality grass I can use right here. So we're going to take this machine and it's going to be trial and error, but hopefully we can get a bunch of patches of sod to pull it out of that pasture over there, set it down right there. And voila, we instantly like that have grass. So we ready to make some sod? I think I got it. Yes. Did it work? Yeah. It's literally cut up, isn't it? Oh my gosh. It works. So I think I'm at a good depth, you know, what do you think? I'm excited. Good depth, right? It's fantastic. There's nothing underneath this. So I actually, you know, I just got to keep it alive. I got this girl. So it's a success. It's a lot of work though, but it was, it was tough at first. I guess we weren't going low enough at the very first section when it's, the grass is obviously a little too long. So we cut the grass and we have a system down and we're moving and we're rocking and rolling. Yeah. So Josh is going down each strip and using the sod cutter and cutting everything up. And then the kids and I are falling behind him, chopping them in like what, like three foot sections. Yes. They're very, very heavy. Oh yeah. So we don't want to go too big. So we're cutting them up into sizes that are manageable and rolling them up. So the sod's like, that thing's like two inches thick. So you're rolling it up and it gets heavy. So real quick, but we're moving. It's a success. Huge success. Yeah. As long as we can keep it alive. We'll see. Only time will tell on that. So the last task of tonight is moving the chickens. I would say that we could do it in the morning, but that's going to entail being up before the chickens are up. And I don't think that's going to happen after the day that we had. I think that we might want to sleep in a little bit tomorrow. So we need to do it tonight instead. And the reason that we need to do it is because it's important to stay on top of moving them regularly. There's a lot of nitrogen in their droppings. And if we leave them in one spot, they'll end up burning out the pasture. And since we moved the cow earlier, we need to move the chickens. And tonight's the night. You ready for this? Carter, Haiti, open the fence. See you tomorrow.