What Life is Really Like on a Small Farm

Well, it's been a rough, uh, 15 hours here on the farm. We just lost one of our roosters after a very, very quick and intense bout of fly strike. Chris is outside right now. I imagine he is digging a hole and burying Dwight. I think this is the third time that we've had to do this on the farm so far and it does not get easier and it does not get better, but it does happen. So this was the large rock that I dug out of the hole that I buried Dwight Jr. in. So I figured we could paint this and use it as a monument for him. Dwight Memorial. He was quite large, just like Dwight. Large and in charge. He was especially more in charge lately. On the bright side, these guys all seem to be doing well despite the heat. All snuggling over in the cool, coolness of the coop. Hi ladies. Come on in there. Hi. Hello. The barn cats definitely know how to make everything a little bit better though. They're so cute. Come here. Hi. You guys are so friendly. You're so friendly. You guys are a little warm. Yeah. Hi. Hi. Got a hose, faucet in my hand. I'm not going to water these guys though. So farm life isn't always all depressing and sad and hard as what you just saw and what I've been talking about. It's also really beautiful to think about dinner and decide let's do curry and let me go harvest my cauliflower and my broccoli and a pepper and bring it inside with some yummy seasonings and, and some Thai basil, which I have. And let's make a delicious meal with food that we've grown ourselves. So it is lovely and beautiful and delicious too. So let's um, let's go see some of that stuff and I will, I will take you with me into the garden. Got my little garden hod here that Chris actually built for me for my birthday. And let's harvest my first ever beautiful head of cauliflower. So lovely out here right now. Hello beautiful. It's so beautiful. My first successful cauliflower and that is incredibly rewarding. And my favorite part about this farm life is seeing the fruits of your labor. I'm also going to harvest some fava beans real quick for our dinner. Fava beans are just such a cool bean. I don't know if you've seen them before. I'll show you how they grow real quick. So they grow in this plant right here and they send off flowers off of the base and the flowers produce these cool beans and you use the pods on the inside. Go ahead and harvest some of this Thai basil. I'm here in the kitchen. I've got pepper, this beautiful cauliflower, Thai basil and some fava beans. Okay. So we've got this red curry paste and yellow curry. We're gonna go with the yellow curry and can of coconut milk. First things first, let me chop up this cauliflower and get it steamed and then I will start sauteing it with the fava beans, the pepper, some onion, something else. Um, tofu, get some tofu in there with sauteed. So I got this steamed just a little bit and then I'm going to saute it with the fava beans and the peppers and onions and garlic and I am steaming some sweet potato right now, which we're going to add in. I'm going to chop up some tofu and saute that and then I'll get the coconut milk and curry ready to go. Our own herbs. And then, I don't know, it's exciting. I'm not using everything from the garden and it's not all 100% homestead grown, but every little bit matters and it's very encouraging when you have meals where some of the stuff you grew yourself is included. We're going to eat this Massaman curry over some quinoa that I made earlier. Super excited to try this cheddar cauliflower and the other yummy stuff from the garden. It looks so good. It smells really good too. We are going to get the garden watered now that it's a little bit later in the evening and then I'm going to go run inside in just a little bit and moderate a YouTube live for our friend Morgan over at Gold Chef Farms. Just for reference, our garden is about 6,000 square feet and while we don't water these main big beds, all the containers, these little containers that you see, and we have a portion of the garden called our berms and swales that we water and we also have some raised beds over there that we also hand water. Quick tip for gardeners or aspiring gardeners, never water during the heat of the day. It can actually burn the plants and you might think you need a water during the heat of the day because the plants look sad, but as soon as the evening comes, they'll look fine again as they bounce back after all of that midday heat. So water in the morning or in the evening. Morning's the best, gives the plants water before the heat of the day. Evening is the second best. One down and what, like eight more to go. Eight more to go and then we double water some of them. So we end up doing 12 to 13 buckets sometimes. Got our three remaining roosters in here to clean up the next garden area for us. Sorry about your lost friend guys. Think you'll be fine though as a trio, huh? No, we'll be rude. We're mostly done for the day. Now you just got to do the chores. Yeah, this is what happens. We hit nine o'clock at night and we're both pretty wiped and ready for bed, but there's still more to do. Yeah. It takes care of the chores mostly. So you're going to go out in about like 10, 15 minutes once it's dark enough. Yeah. Checking out chicken butts. Yeah. Just looking at chicken butts over here. We don't have any. Just making sure we don't have more fly strike. Yeah. You see, you told him about it already. Yeah. Okay. Sky looks really cool. Got to feed these guys for the night. They just get some more hay before bed. Hi. Uh huh. Tell him again. Okay. You told him. So the roosters are a pain to put away at night because they don't go into the coop on their own. And so I have to go and manually put them in. But if it's too light outside, they will run away from me and cause all kinds of chaos. So since it's summer, it gets dark around nine 30. We then have to wait until nine 30, 10 o'clock to come out here and do and do all the chores because of the roosters. You're normally like half asleep by the time you come out here. It's not my favorite thing. Obviously it's different in the winter because it gets dark really early. So I can do the chores a lot earlier. But yeah, this time of year, we just have to stay up a little bit later in order to get the chores done. Yeah. Okay. What's next, mister? Um, we need to, well, basically I'm going to go feed the cats in the barn and they give the goats some more hay so that Noelle stops yelling at us. And I'll check on the horses usually if they're around. Oh, and you change up their feeders too. So is it easier to give them feed now? It's very easy. Throw some hay in the feeders. You can enjoy your dinner. Enjoy. Hi. Hi Noelle. Hi Basil. This is the bin that the raccoons have been getting into the most. Yes. The cat food bin. So now what are you doing differently? Oh, right now I'm bringing the cat food bin into the garage at night. So I tried a couple of different things to foil the raccoons plans and none of them worked. So now I'm just blocking things in the garage and eventually, hopefully we'll get everything locked down enough to where the raccoon won't have anything that you can get into. And then we'll be discouraged from coming back and they'll just like leave. Sounds like the raccoon is opening up other feeds. So we're going to get some bungee cords on these three feeds. Bungeed. See if that's effective. Hopefully no chaos. Maybe it'll be the first time. I'm sure there'll be chaos. There are fireworks, so they might be a little bit more skeptical. At minimum, some of the cabinets will be open. We have one chicken who is on a medication right now and has been for a year now. Yeah. So I have to give her one milliliter of a, of a medication every morning and evening. So that's kind of the last thing I do for the tour is before I wrap things up. Okay. Finally done. What it really looks like on our farm on a kind of normal day. Yeah. Not super normal, unfortunately. No, but it happens. Good night friends. See you soon.