It's Starting to Feel Like a Homestead

Hi I'm Harriet. If you're new around here this is our farmstead. I live here with my husband Mauro and our dog Tofu and now many other animals as well. If you've been here for a little while you'll know that in March this year I became voluntarily unemployed and every day I think to myself what a right decision that was and I'm so glad that I did it because this spring, well summer now really, is just bursting with life everywhere and I don't know how I would do this if I had to do a full-time job at the same time. I know there are people who do do this working and farmsteading, homesteading thing in parallel and that's amazing and I don't know how you do that because yeah this spring has just seen everything bursting with life. The field needs trimming every couple of weeks, the animals, the plants, the garden. In this video I'm going to update you on everything that's been going on lately. I haven't really introduced you to our new animals so I'll do that but first the fields. That is hot work. I'm dripping in sweat. Streaming isn't hard like it's not physically hard it's just really hot because you have to wear full body protection, long sleeves, gloves, long trousers and stuff all around your head and it doesn't seem to matter whether it's the summer or the winter when you're doing it you just always end up dripping in sweat. So I needed to stream this terrace because I need to get to the water deposit at the end. There's a bit of water sat in the bottom from the heavy rain lately and it's going to get mosquitoes in it so I need to sweep it out. I think the hole at the bottom of the is a bit clogged so I need to poke it out and get the water out of there but yeah I couldn't walk through this field 10 minutes ago so we had to stream it. I've got one more field that I want to stream and to be honest by that point I could probably start round again at the fields that I streamed like two weeks ago. At this time of year you turn your back for five minutes and everything needs trimming again. Okay let's go. I'm using the wire attachment on the streamer instead of blade because this field was mostly grass. I've lost part of it in there I need to get that out but unhelpfully when I was pruning some of the laurel trees and stuff last year when we were making space for the water pipe to go through I seem to have just left a load of branches in this field which meant that I had to be careful where I was going with the wire because it can't chop up things that are this thick. The blade would be fine but I was using the wire so that's why I had to go rummaging around in the grass pulling all of these branches out which was a bit annoying. I've learnt my lesson about that, don't leave branches on the ground. I do like to leave just a little border of natural vegetation, wildflowers, grasses and stuff like that at the edge of these terraces. I know they're competing with the vines that we've got growing along here but we haven't been tending these vines this year so I don't really care what happens with them this year. In the future we'll prune them and we'll think more about what's going on along this edge but for now I think it's just nice to leave some wildflowers and stuff for the pollinators and the wildlife. I mean how could I cut this down? Look at it! So this is the next little strip that I need to do. This isn't really a terrace, I don't think I can really call it a terrace. A strip of terrace I guess that is up to my waist with grass and flowers. I really love it actually but it is impossible to walk through here. It's not good to be walking through long grass with ticks and stuff like that around so it needs to come down. You know it's funny when we first bought this land and we showed people and we met our neighbours and they came down here the thing that everyone said was oh you need to stream this place, pelar is what they said, peel back and they said then you'll see what you've bought and I thought oh no I guess I mean I thought it'd be good to stream yeah sure for fire and everything but I thought I can see what we've bought and I love it but you know they're right it's so true when you take back that layer of vegetation and you can really see the shapes and the size of things it's just yeah they were right it's an amazing transformation every time you stream a field it's a lot of fun well I think I've got most of the muck out and with it a lot of the mosquito larvae that was in here unfortunately the floor near the exit in this deposit seems to just slope up a little bit annoyingly so the very last bit of water just doesn't want to flow out so might help to prune some of these trees back a bit and get some light on here to help the rest of the water evaporate although of course then when we do come to use this deposit the shade is going to be really useful to help prevent evaporation and prevent algae so but they will have grown back by then anyway but no I think that's it for today I'm tired I feel like I need another shower yeah I think I'm gonna sit down for a bit so we're gonna do this in order of arrival or birth and the first animal I want to introduce you to is our chicken who you saw a little bit in the last video like I said it was the only egg out of 11 that hatched so it's all on its own you're gonna be with a head dodge on your head yeah 1am in the morning what a time to be born oh my god when we get to six weeks we will be able to tell what sex it is so we will then go and buy from a local animal food store or co-op where they sell young chickens we'll buy another five or six chicks of the same age to go with it watching it grow up has been really cool on the first day it didn't know how to even walk or peck or drink or anything and without a mother to show it what to do I had to use my finger to demonstrate how to peck and how to drink water you're also supposed to push the chick's beak into water so that they get the idea of how to drink that's apparently how it's done and it seemed to work watching it changed from one day to the next was really amazing it wasn't long before it had the beginnings of its adult plumage and was walking around and pecking and really behaving like a chicken which is really really cool to see and it was a really good experience learning experience to follow the process from incubation all the way through to hatching and growing up I'm glad we did it that way even though it's been a lot of work for just one chick but it was really good to see the whole process and I feel a lot more confident now if we were to incubate our own eggs in the future the second arrivals births again were three kittens so our cat coffee bean got pregnant very young the vets were quite surprised her sterilization was actually booked in already but she got pregnant before we could even do it we could have actually done the sterilization as planned and the vets would have taken out the developing kittens that was an option we had and we would have done that but it happened that our neighbor we have a neighbor who wanted to adopt a family of kittens like a brother and sister group so yeah the operation was cancelled the kittens have a new home planned already they'll probably go there between 8 and 12 weeks for the time being they're here with us and coffee bean is doing really well she's kind of like a changed cat after having the kittens it's really funny she used to be quite swipy and feisty and now it's like she just doesn't care at all about anything she's super chill she's really laid back I think she's quite tired the kittens are three weeks old now they're still not doing a lot so they've got quite a bit more growing and developing to do but they are so cute and actually watching the birth was amazing so because coffee bean was so young when she got pregnant she hadn't finished her first round of vaccinations so she didn't have the immunity to pass on to her kittens that she should have had so they've actually as ridiculous as it sounds they've actually all got chlamydia in the eyes which is actually apparently very common in cats and if and they haven't been like fully vaccinated so the kittens at the moment are on a course of chlamydia treatment which basically involves washing their eyes with salt water three times a day and rubbing a tiny little bit of antibiotic gel into their eyes which they hate but their eyes are looking a lot better now I know you don't like this so we've got two black ones and the one white one this one is probably a boy well definitely a boy the other two possibly girls but it's a little bit hard to tell I feel like this one's gonna be the troublemaker it's probably gonna have the same markings as coffee bean but yeah I feel like this one is a pickle yeah and then our final new additions to the farm are a slightly larger animal I've been streaming again you can probably tell I'm not sure what I look like probably a mess I feel like a mess um I've been streaming in a patch around at the top of this field behind me beyond our vegetable garden because I'm going to put a fence there I'm laughing because I'm always putting fences in places and they're always bad so but this one needs to be good because it's for goats so I've got some of these I've got electric fencing I've got one of these post bashes and we'll see what we can do so I'm doing electric fencing for these goats because I don't have the time or the skills or the money at the moment to get a proper fence put up I mean a fence of like proper tensioned wire and fence posts and stuff like that that is what we want to do in a more permanent location but for now we want to go with electric fencing especially since we can then move it around and have them in different places and see what works best and have them clear in different sections of the land that's the the aim so the other week we bought and we put up a net like a mesh electric fence which was specifically for goats and sheep and it was really easy to put up it was it was great and that was going to be the plan but the goats arrived we're getting them from some some neighbours who couldn't look after them anymore and we're looking for a home for them they brought them over and we put them in the enclosure but they didn't quite get the idea of the electric fencing I don't think these goats had ever seen an electric fence or any kind of fence actually before in their lives and they got their horns all tangled in it and they tried to run through it and they got their feet tangled up in it so it wasn't good I didn't film anything it was all a bit it wasn't really a moment for filming it was all a bit chaotic our neighbours took the goats away again and they're going to help us put up an electric fence with three wires instead and see if that works a bit better at least until the goats are used to how fencing works the good thing about getting goats from like our neighbours and people that we know and people that want the goats to go to a good home is that they're being really kind and lovely and helping us get this all set up and they've said as well that if it doesn't work out for any reason they can take the goats back that's no problem they really just want these goats to go to a nice place where they're going to be looked after so yeah hopefully we can get this fence up and we can train the goats to be within the fence and understand kind of how it and go from there I know you've got questions on your mind it's funny this is one of the things that I thought I wouldn't be able to do I thought the bash is too heavy the ground's too hard there's no point me even trying wait till my workshed group get someone who's a bit stronger than me to give it a go but I thought I'd give it a go myself anyway um and it's actually so much easier than I thought it would be I mean it's it's hard work but um it doesn't take that long it's only a few like bashes and it's really surprised me how easily these stakes actually go quite far into the ground definitely as you can see this is where I've been strimming along the edge here so that when I put the wire in the wire is not touching undergrowth and grass because that just detracts from its efficiency and these posts are really not going anywhere which is kind of a shame actually because I did want this to be a movable enclosure but I guess it's not at the moment oh and here's the little enclosure that we've made for them with pallets it's just something really basic for now we've got an idea about how to make something a bit more attractive and a bit bigger in their permanent enclosure when we build that but for now this is going to be fine especially for the summer goats don't like to get wet but they don't need to be completely inside they like a bit of breeze and a bit of airflow through their shelter they've got a bit of shadow here as well I think what we might do is put a couple of posts maybe out the front and put some shade material across to give them a bit of extra place to get out of the sun so the couple that I'm getting the goats off came around last night to inspect my fencing work and yeah I've done a few things wrong so they helped me get it right and show me how to get the wire a lot more tense I had to put these things on upside down counter-intuitively the notch is supposed to go at the bottom and I had also wrapped the wire around the bits that look like you're supposed to wrap wire around them but you're not supposed to do that either you get a lot more tension if you just run the wire straight through the hole and then when you get to the end you can pull it and it'll tense up all the way around so yeah I'm just fixing the line that I did yesterday they helped me with the other two lines so yeah these ones are nice and professionally done there we go there's the three lines done and this fence is looking a lot stabler than the mesh one did here's the piece of aluminium cable that joins the three lines together so the current can run through so a few months back I planted a very small patch of alfalfa here it was really just a test to see how it grew I don't really know why I did that because it grows wild everywhere so this was a really pointless thing to grow in a prime spot where I could have been growing veggies but never mind here it is I'm cutting it down now and I'm going to give some of it to the goats because they love it so when I feed them I rattle this cup with a fork in it and that's the sound that I'm trying to use to train them to come when there's food seems to be working we've got here a mother and a daughter pair so the whiter one is the daughter she's a year old and the darker one is the mother she's two years old for the time being we're not going to be using them for milk or anything like that we do have a neighbor who's more than willing to bring down one of his male goats and get them impregnated but uh so I think at least for this year we just want to learn about having them and get used to yeah caring for some bigger like livestock animals it's the first time we've done that what we want to do this year is get used to moving them around on a regular basis and using them to clear land and keep the undergrowth under control in different areas the electric fence that we've got here now finally works really well the three cables is the standard configuration for goats but before the winter I would like to build a proper enclosure somewhere else with a milking stand and everything ready for next year when we potentially do have milking and stuff like that to do and then we would use the electric fencing for moving them around different locations for like their daytime grazing a couple of other things that I do for the goats on a daily basis is I come up here a couple of times and just angle the solar panel which charges the battery which feeds the electric current in the electric fence I just angle it towards the sun as the sun moves around I also change their water give them fresh water and the old water I throw it onto the earthing rods in the ground this little device has earthing rods that come out of it they need to be stuck into the ground for the current to actually work dry ground has very little conductivity so the grounding rods won't work as well if the ground is really dry so I chuck the old water onto the rods and that helps this is what's providing the power a little box with a battery in it and a little solar panel on top which is connected to the fence just here with this little clip so another part of my routine now that we've got the goats is every morning and every evening I go on a little circular walk with Tofu and I just collect some branches some leaves that the goats like to eat and then I take it to them as their morning treat I do plan to take the goats on walks twice a day so that they can forage and browse for themselves that's the plan I'm not going to be bringing them their food forever but until they're used to being here and their enclosure I'm leaving them in there and I'm going out myself it's good because it also gets me in the habit of going out on this little walk twice a day because it's as much me as them who has to get used to this new routine so yeah we've got a little bag of tasty leaves they love vine leaves and they also seem pretty fond of carob they seem to be their favorite so far of all the things I've tried but they pretty much eat anything I don't think you want to come across here Maudie you're gonna get your feet wet what are you doing come on you're going across or not come on yeah I know it's wet yep back you go come on you're nearly there come on jump come on hey well done