It's time to let go.

Good morning guys. I'm getting ready to go to an event this morning. I've got a pack on my little couch here. I showed y'all last week where I was making a shawl. I took it apart. I started a hat. I know, I know. I told y'all though, I have serious analysis paralysis when it comes to my favorite yarn. So this is gonna be a cute hat, don't you think? Oh no, I'm just pulling it out. I'm gonna take this. This is just a little scarf. I'm bringing this in case anybody wants to try to learn to knit. I just started this like a day ago. This was one afternoon of knitting. Cowl scarf with some little green wool and doing a cowl, in my opinion, is like one of the easiest first knitting projects because when you do like just the basic knit stitch in the round, it makes stockinette, which is what this looks like. This is ribbing and so I'm bringing this. It's good size worsted yarn, good size needles. I think this would be good for somebody who wants to give it a try. So take that and then I'm going to take this, which is a sweater. Um, it's gonna be hard to show you what is going on here. You can kind of see the neck up here. I'm almost down through the yoke and then I'll tie off the sleeves and start on the body. But this is the yarn Maya gave me for Christmas and I don't know how well it's gonna do in the inside light, but it reminds me of a rose garden in the outside light. It's shades of green and pink and kind of like a cream. So three projects and then of course I gotta wear my crocheted. This is called, it's cardigan, but there's a word for it. I can't remember what they call these. Now I've got this bowl. I'm gonna try to sit in the garden and pick some cherry tomatoes, but it's kind of drizzly. So we'll see. I got a living room full of boys in here. Boys, Benjamin, Eli, Toby, Gideon. Good morning sirs. Y'all gonna have a fun day today? You go in the lake as long as it stops raining, which it's supposed to. You're on boy duty today? Yeah, all the boys. All the boys. Ezra did not want to sleep over in the living room. He is not. He never does. He likes his bed, his weighted blanket, his particulars. His story at night. Yep. I wonder where he gets that kind of particularness from. Turn the camera around? No, I don't think so. I don't think so. You don't travel without your pillow. Yeah, but I also don't fall asleep listening to stories. So he's like a pretty good balance. Okay, that's fair. That's fair. So today is our second stitch and sip event at Beulah. If you're new here, I own a coffee roastery in our town of Batesburg, South Carolina and we have open roastery hours. I don't call it a full coffee shop because it is first and foremost a roastery and we ship and sell roasted coffee all over the place. The link's always in my video description if you're interested in it. I know I'm partial but I do absolutely think we have the best coffee and I've actually had a lot of other people who are not so partial tell me that. It is very, very good coffee. It's all fair trade. We roast it fresh weekly. It's great. But I really wanted to have a fiber arts event because I love fiber arts. I have crocheted since I was, I learned when I was 16 or 17. I learned when I was in high school. A teacher taught me and I did it on and off. Never super seriously until I got really sick about four years ago and I had to stay in bed for the better part of two months and I was going crazy. I do not sit still well. Never have and I picked up crocheting again then and it has become such a passion for me. I learned to knit last year and I just really was craving some community around it and in my experience when you're really craving community and you can't easily find it, in my opinion, the easiest thing to do is make it. So I started the stitch and sip event. Our first one was last month. This is the second one. It's the last Saturday of every month at BUA and we go all morning until about lunchtime and it's really good. I'm excited to show you guys. But first, I want to stop in the garden. Unfortunately, the weather is going to make it a little more difficult but it's fine. It's not raining hard. Look at that. There's a volunteer sunflower in the middle of the field and Maya mowed around it. I thought that was really cute. Alright, you guys are getting left in here because I don't want my camera to get wet but obviously I have gobs of cherry tomatoes to pick. I went out of town last week. I went and visited my brother. The cherry tomatoes got really out of hand and I told Maya not to worry about picking them. He picked all the big tomatoes and stayed on top of that so they would stay in good shape. Half the plants are already torn out from sickness. That's just how it is in a really humid and hot place like this. But I am going to take a bunch of these cherry tomatoes up to BULA to share with the ladies who are at the stitch and sip. I'm actually gonna leave my sweater because it's hot out here already even in the rain. Alright, I'm getting too wet. That's gonna have to do. You know what you have whenever you're cherry tomato rich? Cherry tomatoes because there is no way we could possibly get through all of these ourselves. Alright, I've actually been here for a couple hours. I'm gonna take you guys around. It's settling down a little bit. I just sat down and started knitting and got caught up in it. Here's my BULA. There's baby Ellie. Nice baby. Maddie is my sister-in-law. They live with us right now and Ellie was born in my bathtub a couple months ago so that was kind of cool. Alright, here's my cherry tomatoes. Make sure everybody gets some of these. Ladies. What are y'all working on? Can I show your things? Farrah, why do you look sad? Because this is an embarrassing project. No it's not. She's doing really good on it. She really is. I'm attempting to make a beanie. Nice. Yeah, it's the first project ever. Your first project ever? There's nothing embarrassing about it. I started it two years ago. Oh, look at you persevering. Good job. It's a rib project for your first project. I'm just saying. Yeah. Some of my beginners can't do the rib. But you're doing good. You're doing excellent. We got knitters. Been knitting, you said, since you were 11? Yes. Making some socks. Very nice. And you've got a really beautiful project started here, huh? Just started. Gonna be a sweater pullover. Very cool. It's got a really neat bear pattern on it. You got a blanket going? Going with a blanket. Nice. This is soft. So soft. It's gonna feel so good. It's already feeling good. Yeah. Well, with the AC on. Otherwise, you can't work on it. Oh, well, hey, you're working on it. This is gorgeous. I'm trying to remember where. So pretty. Yeah, this is awesome. I love y'all's setup. Hers is better. She never actually taught me to cross stitch. She gave me this and was like, this is what you do. So you just had to figure it out. Like cross and not up and down. Oh, I always do the X too. Okay, but she's like, you're supposed to do all of the ones this way. Yeah. Go back and do all of the ones that way. Oh, but that's only if you're only doing one color. When you do to like mix colors like this. Oh, wow. Shading works out better if you do individual exits because of the way that the two colors together twist. Wow. So when you do that. What you just said is way above my cross stitch skill. But your back looks better than mine does. Absolutely. Like mine's a hot mess. Like they all look great. Don't ever look at the back of my cross stitch project. Yeah. I actually made a little dress out of this exact yarn. It's so pretty. This is for my daughter. That's beautiful. Funny story. I started this last Christmas. Oh, nice. A few people have been talking about their projects have been a few years in the making. I have put down and picked up and put down and picked up and now I'm like, okay, it's time to finish this. I'm getting tired of putting down. Hey guys, it's actually a couple days after the beginning part of this video and I am about to head outside. I want to take you with me. Ben has got the incubator set up here. He has started a little side hustle and we had a go getter come out last night. Can't say happy birthday. That was yesterday. So he had originally wanted to start hatching chicks to sell, but our hatch rate was only maybe 50%, which is pretty low. And usually in that incubator, we get much higher hatch rate, but it's a lot of the eggs weren't fertile. And I think it's just, my flock is very, they're old. And, um, some of my hands are like eight years old. So I'm, I'm not surprised that there are issues with that, but, um, I was going to have him hatch me new chicks first. And then I was going to tell him he could sell anything that came after that. But then I ran a detractor supply. A few weeks ago, and they were closing out some of the chicks that they had in there. They had a bunch of little chicks in there that were, the ones were basically like the males look different than the females. So, you know, that they are indeed pullets and they had like a type of hybrid marrons that are going to be dark brown egg layers. And I ended up buying a bunch of those are just a couple dollars each because they were closed out. Uh, so I have my new flock brooding out in the barn and he's hatching these. And this, this, he's got quite a few in there that at this point we've candled out all the ones that aren't fertile. We just set a whole bunch of them. So he would have some to sell. So he's got his first client, uh, lined up that wants three dozen and we're hoping we'll get three dozen out of this hatch. Hey guys. Getting rid of the biggest weed ever. Yeah, that was a big weed, huh? Poke grows fast. Hey, don't forget to set that brooder up because you got that little chicky in there. Can you just be my pet? Can you what? Can't he just be my pet? Well, he still needs a brooder even if he is your pet. Can we just get a box and some... I would not keep him in the house, no. Because our cats are stone cold killers. He needs to be in the milk room where he's protected. And then when he grows up he can be my pet. Yeah. Wanna go to the garden? Hey, dad. Hey, Ezzie. Hey, Will. Hi. What's up, Jess? We're talking Bitcoin. Nice. He said, we're talking Bitcoin. All right. A wild garden. Wild. I'm gonna turn the water on. A lot of drooping here, but honestly it's hot and that's not unheard of. Look at all this holy basil. Just volunteered and I left it because it's tea, you know. So, Maya asked me to change my plans a bit from what I normally do. Normally, towards the end of the season, I would come in and plant more in these spaces. He asked me to just leave it. This corn is getting pretty close. Not quite. I'm gonna let that dry a little more and let this come away a little bit more and I'll know. He wanted to be able to get out here and work and obviously there's still a lot of stuff growing, but he's just gonna pull things as they die off. And then the thing is, if I plant a full garden in this space, it won't be empty until like mid-November, likely. So, I'm just gonna leave this. We'll keep harvesting. He's wanting to address the irrigation. We're gonna add more. It needs more tape because there's not enough lines and the soil is just getting too dry. And then you want it. Yeah. And you're wanting to do like the fencing and, or not the fencing, the roofing on the pavilion. There's just like a couple of projects that. We got done a lot this year on the stuff that we intended. Yeah. Roofing on the pavilion, fixing the eave, the lighting on this portion of the garden. It'll just be easier to work when he's not having to worry that he's gonna like damage my plants and then I'm gonna be sad. And also just the maintaining and harvesting. Right. I mean, when it's this hot, it just takes a lot out of you. Yeah. You know, Maya, these places, if we're not gonna replant, we either need to do like a cover crop. Like, I have some cover crop that we could put in there and just let grow or mulch it really heavily. But yeah, we need to put something on it or the weeds are gonna grow up. There's holy basil growing everywhere. Have you noticed this? How much has come up? Those Japanese beetle traps have helped this rose. This rose was getting just absolutely decimated by Japanese beetles and we put some traps along the fence lines to pull them away from the garden and there are none on here now. That's nice. Oy, things are getting wild out here. So when I mentioned the idea of taking these raised beds out, people either really, really loved it or really, really hated it. We are gonna do it. We've discussed it even more and actually what Maya is saying he's gonna do is fence here and essentially where this is an in-ground garden on the off-season, it'll be an extension of the chicken yard so they'll be able to come in here and clean it out which will be really nice and it'll also give the chickens covered protection during the winter because winter is when we have the most hawk. So we can kind of multi-purpose this space and make it a good in-ground garden space for rambling things and space hog things during the summer season and it also just maximizes the structure and the garden space but then in the winter it gives us a safer place to extend the chicken yard. We just got to find a good source for wood chips which is difficult here. Mama bee landed on me earlier. Oh must have thought you were a flower. So the guys are back to work on the chicken coop. It's gonna be right here and this is why I think having this as an extended chicken yard during the winter would be good because this is stationary and I think that they'll be more prone to hawks here not being in an electric fence but I think this is gonna be really neat to have a chicken yard right here. We can throw the waste and then I think it's gonna look really cool. Yeah we have more tomatoes out here. I'd like to do another big round of salsa. I think it would be really cool to have the in-ground garden here. I think it'll be good. Plus then you can see through here like from the cottage garden to the chickens. That'll be neat. Hey boys come here I saw something. This. A banana. Funny. Is it good? Cheers. So I was talking to a friend of mine the other day just about this last year and kind of how it's felt for me and how it's been with content gardening and all that and they said are you burnt out and I had to really think about it because I wasn't sure. Like am I burnt out? Because this garden has thoroughly handed me my butt this year. We've harvested like over 700 pounds of tomatoes this year. Like I've harvested a lot of food and that's without even planting some of the spaces. This has been a very prolific year. Jeremiah's help has made a really big difference. I think the conditions have been good. It's just been a number of things that have made it successful but I thought about it and I was like no. I know myself and the height of July is never the time to decide really what you're going to do in the garden next year. Like we're throwing around these ideas but we won't start you know disassembling those beds until this season is thoroughly over. I just it's not it's not a good time to decide when you're going to quit when you're in the height of it. It's good to push through in the height of it but because we are thinking about kind of goals and what we want to do we are discussing how we're going to approach next year already and we're going to really really heavily focus on making the high tunnels as efficient as possible. Guys are working on the chicken coop today just because we do have chickens brooding and you know more chicks coming but the next order of business is going to be resetting this tunnel and this is going to be where my early fall garden is. All of the brassicas and the cool weather things which a lot of that is going to start from seeds this week. I'm going to start my seeds and I'll turn the camera on for that but this space being very efficiently planted one of these tunnels which is what 60 by 26 this is enough space for me to pull out fresh and us eat fresh all fall and since Maya did ask me not to plant any fall stuff in the raised bed garden I'm actually glad that I have some unused space in the pepper and tomato tunnel next door because that's where I'll plant some more cucumbers and another wave of like summer squashes and stuff like that so between these two this is where my entire fall garden is going to be and then over here I will you know as this all dies from the frost this fall this is where I'll reset and this will be like the winter and early spring cool weather garden and then we'll switch so we we switch every year so now there's tomatoes and peppers in here last year they were in there and next year they'll be back in there. Bear you supervising? Ben said bear is your left-hand man. I'm sure Maya's left-handed. I am. What are you doing here? Teaching our boys to be men? Yeah it's a kind of a three-fold attack. I need to build the chicken coop. Yeah. I need to teach my kids how to do stuff so that way even I told when I sat down with them I said hey I need you guys to do this with me I told them not because I need you to have a career doing what I do like you don't have to do this you don't have to be a carpenter you don't have to be a mechanic I was like but you need to be capable. Yeah. I was like so that way whenever your breaks do go out you don't have to spend six seven hundred dollars changing them you can spend 150 on the materials and go do it yourself. I got a new used van that needed new brakes and Maya took the boys and um they changed them and Ben bless him is 11 and he is earlier in this video when I mentioned that I do have a difficulty with sitting still he comes by it very honest and there's always noise coming out of his mouth fake farts yeah so he was dancing the whole time and Jeremiah was like Ben you need to pay attention and he's like I know how to do this I've listened to you and Jeremiah said well I said you can do one by yourself he said yes I said fine do the next one by yourself which was the front passenger side brake pads and rotor change yeah and he literally went over there got the little stool sat down started breaking bolts loose took everything off I'm just like oh crap I'm about to eat crow and took the caliper bracket off freaking took the set screw out for the rotor banged it off with a hammer the only thing he couldn't do by himself was put the tire back on because it was too heavy yeah but he basically the same exact way I did it yeah did the brake change on the front some kids don't learn sitting still he definitely does not learn sitting still so after the brake lesson that's when my uh you know he's been the chicken coop's been in process for a little while and he's wanted to involve them and he's like okay this is what we're focusing on next she's wild some years ago I wrote a poem about the august garden and I always think of it when we get to this time of year this is the point where historically I just let it go um you know the volunteers are going crazy everything's trying to go to seed the fruit's getting pretty gnarly in most places I mean there's still a lot to harvest and eat and I still water and I still harvest but I don't try to tame really because it's pretty futile at this point look at that beautiful zinnia I don't know if you're gonna be able to see the color it's really pretty this is all the also the time of year that all the weird stuff pops up because it's all the crossed things that have crossed and volunteered this season and I think it's actually kind of beautiful you know like the the end of season garden where it is kind of wild and you have given up the effort to tame it you're just enjoying it for what it is and you're finding cool colored zinnias and weird okras and there's holy basil literally everywhere and you're eating but there's very little stress involved and honestly a lot less work involved and really you're just looking forward and working towards the next season there's something very poetic about that anyway thank you guys for hanging out with me today the other day all the days you do I bless you until next time