Come Along for a Day on Our Homestead | You Never Know What the Day Will Bring

It's a beautiful morning isn't it? It is a beautiful morning. Perfect morning for picking flowers. The farm stand's open tomorrow so I gotta have some cut flowers for the farm stand. So remind me again why you pick them so early in the morning? It's just better for them in the morning. They have more moisture in them. They seem to last longer. So I get them in water right away and then when I get them ready for the farm stand I put them in water with like a food in it to keep them even fresher. Ah. And I'm shaking them because you only pick a zinnia if it's stiff. If it doesn't shake back and forth that means it's ready. So the old floppy zinnia rule huh? Yep you don't want a floppy zinnia. And these are starting to get some powdery mildew. That's not good. What the leaves are? Yeah. Zinnias are prone to that. I don't know why. And these have some ventilation. Ah he's borderline. You know I'm cutting real low to get long stems plus also get some foliage out of there so it does get more ventilation. So I'll pick zinnias and then snap dragons and whatever else happens to be blooming. So when do you strip these? After I pick them. You pick and then you strip. Okay. Now I never really knew that you they stripped flowers like that or I guess I never really paid much attention to flower shops. Yeah you don't want any foliage in the water that's what makes the bacteria start growing. Zinnias are especially known for being dirty flowers. Oh. So you strip them put them in clean water and you put clean water on them every day to get the longest base life. It's the bacteria in the water that will do them in. Is that one of my fishing nets behind you there? Where? I was trying to catch rabbits but they're too fast. So it didn't work out. No I tried. I love snap dragons. They're just beautiful flowers. I just want it started going to seed. I don't want him get him off of there. He takes energy away from the plant. When you pick them before they're open the whole way to the top you still want a little buds on the top so it'll keep opening up in the base. Your luffa tunnel looks amazing behind you. It is doing very very well. Has Tice been over to check it out? Oh yeah he checks it out. He wants to make sure he's gonna have luffas. They just put some made some with soap so we'll see how that goes you know. Okay. Already have soap in them. Okay. These are my favorite right here. I love. I just think the colors on those are stunning. Pink, orange, yellow. Oh that's my favorite by far. I mean lots of them are pretty but that's my favorite. White ones are nice because they go with everything. Do you need gloves for any of those or are they tender? They're not hard. There's none with jaggers or anything. I'm okay. Aren't they just beautiful? These are lupine. Aren't they beautiful? They're perennials. They'll come back every year. This is the first year for them. I didn't think they bloomed the first year. Guess I was wrong. But I didn't stake them up so next year I need to have something strings or cages or something to keep them from falling over. But they're just beautiful. Now it's time to pick blackberries. That's about the only fruit we had that wasn't affected by that late freeze. It wasn't really even in blossom yet so we're still getting blackberries but everything else got hit pretty hard by a really late spring freeze we had. So what do you do with the majority of the blackberries? Well we either eat them or we turn into something or I freeze them and make jam later on or blackberry syrup, blackberry everything. Okay. Oh so I see the scary snake. Well hopefully it's scary to the birds. Okay. I have snakes. I have owls. I'm trying everything because they love our blackberries and we want to get them before they do. Nice one. Well I know they're not for your cut flower displays. No. I love sunflowers. They're beautiful and when they're done blooming they give these beautiful seeds which guess who likes them? The chickens. So they're gonna have a feast today. They love it. So what do you call this again with all your sunflowers? Sunflower alley. And I think next year I'm gonna have it go the whole row. I love sunflowers. They are beautiful. They're very little maintenance. Just plant them and watch them grow and then the chickens get free food. So it's a win-win. Beautiful and productive. So we've had some crazy storms. Have you lost many? Like a few. Maybe two or three but most of them they must get really good roots. They hold up pretty well. You know they're tough. Tough cookies. There's a big one. There girls. All right. So how many times a day do you run back and forth to turn the irrigation on? Five. There's four quadrants in the garden and one in the tunnel. Oh plus the willow. So there's six different quadrant areas. So I wonder how many steps your golf cart saves you. A million. Yeah. Yeah I'm not gardening. I'm flying the house. I just fly out, switch it, fly back in and finish whatever I was doing. It works out well. All right. So I guess you can't do a day in the life of without showing you changing the irrigation on and off. It's every day. If it doesn't rain I have to irrigate. Except the tunnel needs irrigated even when it rains. Every day. Yes. Yeah. That's an everyday thing. Yeah. That's part of having a garden though. Yeah. Keeping things alive. Yeah. You get to see your beautiful flowers every time. Yeah I do. All right. We're in the cattle run here that comes out of the barn and they typically walk through here and head out to one of two pastures. Well sometimes they get the grass is greener deal and they poke their heads through here. And this happens to be the only segment of fencing that does not have the electricity in the fencing. So it's kind of teaching them bad habits. Anyway one got in here the other day. Got stuck halfway through and then panicked and started ripping. So I've got a couple of broken sections of the high tensile. Now I could fix this but with the wire. But what I'm going to do is transition it to a fence like this with the wooden rails. And that seems to work well because I'm not going to hook up the electricity to this section. So what I need to do next is go down to the mill in the forest and buy some one by six oak planks that I'll use for the fencing. And they're 16 feet long. And I just measured this section and it is 16 feet long. And I have two other sections at the end that are also just the high tensile wire and they're also not powered. So I'm going to put the fence boards on there. So it's going to look great and I don't have to worry about it not being powered. So here we go headed down to the mountains headed to the sawmill. I'll be back in about an hour and a half. All right see you then handsome. All right bye-bye. Okay I'm doing an experiment. I'm going to plant carrots today and I want to do it with a cornstarch slurry. This is an experiment. I saw people doing it. I soak my carrot seeds overnight and then you mix water and cornstarch. I just mixed a little bit like maybe a quarter cup with the cornstarch so it makes a little paste slurry. And then what you do is you have a total of two cups of water and it's just one tablespoon of cornstarch. I'm going to get the water heating up pour my little cornstarch slurry in and then you gently boil it until it gets thick. Then you have to let it cool down and once it cools down you stir the carrot seeds into it. Mix it all up. I'm going to put it in a baggie cut a little tiny hole in the corner and basically pipe the carrot seeds into a row. They're supposed to spread the seeds out so they aren't so close together. I'm going to see if it works. It makes sense. Plus it said it also helps keep the seeds moist because they're surrounded in that little bit of cornstarch slurry until the cornstarch washes away. But hey it's worth a shot. Time for the great carrot experiment. Here's the gel all cooled off and ready. Now I'm going to put the seeds in here. They've been soaking for a day. It didn't all come out so I'm going to put a little more water in to get them all out. I want every single carrot seed. And these are hopefully carrots that'll be in the fall. They'll store really well. But I'm going to experiment. I'm going to pull some into the root cellar but some I'm going to leave out here because the ground in the tunnel doesn't freeze. So theoretically I can let them in the ground some winter day. We don't care so we can just come out and pull them. That's the theory. No in the by the edges it does. In the middle it doesn't seem to and see I can put a fleece over it. That'll keep it from freezing. So we're going to I'll pull most of them probably for the root side but I want to experiment and see if it works. Okay now we'll see if this slurry works. I've got a tiny hole in the bottom and start piping the carrots in theoretically far apart. Crash your fingers. You can't really see the seeds so I don't know how fast they're coming out. I'm trying to go at a pretty clip so if there is seeds coming out they're not close together. This is a total experiment. Now tell me this isn't cool. You know aren't you glad I did this? Amazing. I think this is just I wanted to be able to walk in have a big arch to walk under but it's going everywhere and it's nice because our shade cloth doesn't reach the whole way down here. The loofah is presiding from shades down here so it's yeah I love it and it's got some honking big loofahs. Look at this. Oh my gosh yeah it's doing great so I'm thrilled. My loofah tunnel here in my tunnel. I'm making a couple arrangements. I make some a couple arrangements ahead of time people just want to grab them and go and the rest I just put in big floral things floral bins and people can just make their own bouquets. May like doing that you know but some people just need to grab them and go but I have a couple bouquets just ready for people want to just grab them. So there's two. I'll do two more and the rest will go in the big bins. So is it level? All right I think that's pretty good and our post is is good. All right I'm going to put the go ahead and sink it. Okay good. All right it's hard to level because it's not straight. Okay are we good? Yeah. We're just finishing up for the day. Now we have a physical barrier fence the whole way between the two walk areas or runs for the cattle. This section does not have the electric so as you saw before they got all tangled up in it and I think this will be better for them. They won't get confused. You know the funny thing is is that these boards while they're oak they could push right through them if they really wanted to but they don't. They see it as strong and anyway hopefully this will be the last fence repair for the year. So it's getting later in the day. We just finished dinner and it was nachos with my new salsa. It was terrific. I loved it. Yeah. So we tend to eat a bigger meal in the middle of the day and a lighter one you know at the end of the day and that also reminds us it's important for us to prepare after a busy day to begin to slow down and have a rhythm at the end of the day so that we're really ready to rest. Especially me so I can fall asleep. Yeah. If I do too much and hurrying around right before bed now I have trouble going to sleep. Yeah. So I have to have a little bit of downtime but we do still have a few chores to do today. Yeah we just have to close the tunnel, close the garden and make sure the chickens are all closed in. Yeah but that's really pleasant you know we go out together. Yeah. And do it. I really look forward to that every day. Not bad. Yeah. So a good day. The other thing I did today worked on the tractor. We put a overhead canopy that'll keep me out of the direct sun. So I was in trouble with my my dermatologist and I was supposed to go every year and it turns out it was four years and then she said you're way out in the sun way too much you need to get some cover. So we're going to do that the tractors and even the mower. So how do you protect yourself? I use sunscreen pretty regularly and I sometimes wear hats but I probably should wear hats more often. Yeah yeah she said there were a couple other patients that she had that were in her early 80s they were really struggling with you know skin cancer and others. So anyway I'm getting serious about that. He's doing good. Now you also mowed the grass around the equipment where you keep where you store a lot equipment on back. Yeah I had used the trailer today so I before I put it back I wanted to mow the equipment yard that's where we keep the trailers and some of the things that don't have an inside storage place. So I think we're pretty well set up for that. Well in our days all year round have a certain rhythm we do the animals every morning every night that doesn't change. But then there are other things that change with the season like the garden there's different things in the season of the garden but there's always things that pop up like the fence. Yeah and sometimes you get a storm will knock down a tree or you get some attack of bugs in the orchard or whatever and you gotta you know charge and go right after it. So the it's different that's what makes this lifestyle so interesting. So many different things to learn and do it never gets stale. Never. Well thanks for joining us on the family farm. We'll see you in our next video. Bye-bye.