High Tunnel Prep and Spring Work at Our Off Grid Cabin

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] perfect that's wrong it actually smells bad dude that's nice just wherever yeah we're outside in the high tunnel on this brisk morning today we've got some projects planned and over the course of the next few days this is kind of an interesting time it's a transition from winter to spring into summer so we have some things that we are setting up and things that were taken down we're first working on our high tunnel we've had it for two years it was its second winter and a lot of the gravel that we put along the bottom has actually kind of settled down or washed away with rain so we are going to be adding that back up filling it in and making sure that we don't have drafts coming in the bottom of the high tunnel let's head outside and i can show you a better look of what i'm talking about so we were designing this this was kind of our first time with a high tunnel it's definitely not like a perfect plan although we are really happy with it and we put this pit fill is what it's called so it's a mixture of smaller rocks with big rocks we put it all along the edge it's worked out pretty well we've decided we're going to push it through to the inside of the high tunnel and make sure it's all covered with the new gravel we have these rocks are a nightmare with our snow blowers so i have to be super careful not to hit any of those plastic is still holding up good i had a few little nicks this winter so there are a few little few little teeny tiny holes that eric and i are gonna be taping up but otherwise it's looking really good water in the ground [Applause] uh [Applause] oh well this is coming along pretty nicely the high tunnel should settle down a little bit too there is a little bit of like frost heaping that happens with it so it does get squished out of the ground a little bit in winter originally when we designed this we left this whole back area for some sort of heating component and we've given a lot of thought to that and i just don't think that's something we're going to be doing anytime soon maybe even not at all in the future so we're going to build a cute little raised bed here a small bed for some of our basil and then we're also going to be adding a little bit of dirt so i can grow a little bit more with the rose this side just needs a little bit more gravel and then we have some work to do on the front post we're all done putting the gravel around the inside of the greenhouse and we're moving on to working with this post right here and as you can tell it has frost heaved and what that is is when the ground freezes it kind of pushes things up in oregon we were just completely used to putting everything in with concrete here slowly we've learned not to use concrete now we just put our poles directly in the ground and we don't get any frost heaving so we're gonna fix this one with the snow melt off we've been having and this thing raising up there was like a tunnel of water just going down in this thing so i think what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna take the sledge hammer i'm gonna try to knock off some of this concrete kind of dig it out underneath and then fill it in with some gravel and we found here digging holes especially when it's still cold out the frost actually or the ground freezes like four to six feet down into the earth so if you don't want to get frost tv you need to dig really deep but uh yeah this concrete came out of here really easy so hopefully we'll get this thing to settle down in there a little more it was kind of cockeyed a little and the door wasn't really closing the way it should well it's not perfect but it's a lot better than it was i think we had like a six or eight inch gap up there and hopefully as the ground thaws out this thing will kind of settle in a little bit more it's kind of hard tail just by looking at it but this greenhouse is sitting up a little bit higher than it usually does it's kind of crazy but it'll actually when the ground thaws it'll actually kind of sink down into the ground so we're gonna get some gravel put in this hole gosh how heavy do you think that is that looks good man we're done with the high tunnel for now we're going to see if we can get our water tank set up for the year and we're going to relocate this little bird house because it's in the way right there good that ice is like slipping right it did help with the gravity though sure okay [Applause] it's around and it's not meant to be like moved just stay stacked with you there it's good right there it's good center this way i mean centers got the water tank over here it's hooking up our hose and it's time to fill her up i think this is 325 gallons so it takes takes about 50 minutes i think to fill this thing up [Applause] it's dirty our water tank is almost done filling up we are bringing out our plants to the high tunnel for the day we still have freezing weather at night so it is not appropriate to leave all of them out quite yet so it does make for tedious work bringing them back to and fro as you can tell behind me the new gravel we put in is already working it's nice and steamy in there so we're gonna head in oh it's way moist in here can you tell the difference yeah it's like a lot better oh you're doing that so last year we invested in about i think it was 60 yards of gravel and it made a huge difference around here we haven't had really any mud we do have a couple spots like this that we need more gravel obviously but we're gonna grab a couple things and we're gonna head over to the chicken coop so the inevitable happened we have chickens that have gone broody we went like a full month and we're like they're they're not going to go rudy this year right because we've been pulling all the eggs this is what a broody chicken looks like we're adding back in our we call them kind of like brooder boxes they were really for the moms when they had when we wanted to hatch out some chicks but we also found that they're useful for breaking chickens really all that means is you put them in an area where they don't have nesting material and eventually after like day three with food and water of course you will break [Applause] so we're bringing that box in and it fits right here underneath the nesting boxes i didn't think it took up the whole space well we have more than three broody chickens so i'm gonna pick or we're gonna pick the three that are most pretty because we got three cages got some water in there for him we're gonna get him some food i know that that one has been a real problem so we're gonna grab her okay sorry little lady get in there get in there get in there and we're just trying to make it sounds kind of cruel but we want to make it uncomfortable for them in there we don't want any nested material so there's just plywood there's obviously no eggs in there and hopefully that's going to snap her out of it we'll get her a little bit of food this one was the one that's coming in she's one so this one is definitely pretty this is one that had shot chicks last year she's really puffing up on us she's she's a screamer she's gonna go in there hey come on you're going in sorry oh maybe not so it's not too big of a deal having to break the chickens is more of kind of like an inconvenience but that's the thing about the icelandic burrito chickens they do go broody which is good if you want to hatch out your own chicks we have more than enough chickens right now so we don't want to hatch out any chicks this year so we're getting a little fermented chicken feed keep them happy stay in there girl there you go there you go we're trying to decide which other chicken we want to put in the cage i think it's either this one or that one this one's this is our meanest chicken she is just extremely mean she attacks you i'm going to put them on the ground and a broody chicken will kind of lay there on the ground or one that's not pretty we'll kind of get up and walk away so let's see what they do i think we're i think we're going to take this uh the black jersey giant she's she's definitely broody she's the one she hatched out um little chicks last year so she's trying to do it again that one is too but we don't have an extra cage all right girl going in there you go so hopefully in a few days these chickens will be broken and if we have some more birdie ones we'll throw those also in the cages give me those eggs god you're mean oh there's none under collecting the eggs a few times a day seems to help because the chickens don't have anything to sit on but we found the same chickens that were moms in the past have a really strong instinct to continue to be moms in the future while we're out here we're implementing a few changes to the chicken run a lot of the snow has melted so it's opened up a lot for them they can now go back there and scratch around in the leaves and all that stuff we've got their waters out here we don't have to worry about those freezing anymore we're also going to spread some of the hay that we use to protect underneath the coop we want that to get some better ventilation and address any sort of mud issues we're having in here this chicken never gets dirty she doesn't look at those mold spores oh no that's fast look at all the cool stuff they have to like forget oh they love it they're ungrateful but they love it so i think having these chickens here for two years we've pretty much nailed down a really good kind of safe easy setup for them the poultry netting we put up has been awesome we didn't have a single hawk attack last year compared to the first year where it seemed like we were having at least one a week it's been great so these chickens are living the good life out here they're excited for summer [Applause] so any good still got a bunch they're still half full that's half full i just wait on them then good just wait are they eating it oh yeah this one needs some our three beehives are off to a really good start this year it's been unusually warm and working out very much in their favor they've been collecting pollen and all three queens are laying so i'm thinking it's going to be a really good summer for them so still frozen a little huh we're out in the orchard this morning and the snow is just about gone it's actually hard to believe that there was about this much snow out here just three weeks ago we're just going around and we're fixing a couple broken branches on our little fruit trees unfortunately a few of the trees broke some entire limbs which is never good a few of them actually broke off right at the trunk so that's kind of a bad thing because then the tree itself we have to worry about infection and now that they're breaking out of dormancy they're going to be coming alive a little bit more and have their sap flowing through them so eric and i went ahead and covered them up with some beeswax we called the place that we got our trees from and that's what they advised us to do and it'll most likely work other than that the trees we have seven fruit trees in here they actually are all looking pretty good they're forming buds so i think they did all over winter no vole damage from the protection that eric set them up for so that's really awesome what had happened was i was getting in here getting a lot of the snow early in the season but in march we had some heavy snow and we did not come in here that last snowstorm so the snow like eric was saying was up really high and it it was above these branches and as it got wet and heavier it just kind of broke a few of them sad to say the whole row along the back is where we had some perennial flowers and herbs and those are looking really good i think a lot of those are breaking out of dormancy already so i'm thinking that those are going to be pretty good i want to plant quite a few more flowers for the bees this year there today we are headed off to pick up some compost for the high tunnel [Applause] we made it back with our compost we picked up some aged manure or partially aged horse manure which is totally fine because we are not ready to put it in our garden yet we still have quite a bit of snow and we actually want to mix this with some top soil before we put it in our high tunnel this is awesome stuff we're happy to have it and we just have one more thing planned for today [Applause] [Applause] so [Music] [Music] we've got the six wheeler loaded down with some firewood and primarily our wood shed is stocked with white spruce and this was really good because there's a lot of it here and it is standing dead beetle kill and what that means is you can basically cut this stuff down you can burn it it's super lightweight burns pretty good we usually always use this but mostly what we have in the trailer is wood that we cut down when we're clearing the driveway at our other property and about 90 of it is birch and this stuff is not dead so it's very heavy it has not been seasoned it's been sitting since about the fall you can already tell it's kind of split in there and it's starting to dry up a little bit for us was sitting over by our conex and we finally have the room in here that we can bring it over here to finish seasoning it and hopefully we can use it this winter we probably have about a quart and a half so we're going to be stacking that in the woodshed so the difference between burning the birch and the spruce is the birch burns a lot longer and a lot hotter it's pretty much the hardwood that we have up here so this is like the best wood you can get where we live up here in alaska our woodshed holds about eight cords maybe a little over and that side's completely full so we got four cords over there we've got about a quarter and a half over here so i think we burned about six and about five cords over the winter so it's gonna be nice having all this birch to burn next winter [Applause] [Applause] this [Music] [Applause] [Music] did we start running it long ways against these ones yeah yeah right about now [Music] i guess [Music] [Music] do [Music] you

Channel: Simple Living Alaska

Views: 209,653

Rating: 4.9729729 out of 5

Keywords: off grid living, living in alaska, homestead alaska, cabin life, tiny house alaska, off grid cabin, daily life off grid, off grid in alaska, solar system alaska, living in a tiny house, cabin in alaska, winter cabin living, homestead off grid, tiny dry cabin, solar off grid cabin, cabin winter living, tiny cabin alaska, life in alaska, alaska outdoors, garden alaska, high tunnel garden, greenhouse alaska, gardening alaska, chickens alaska, raised rows garden

Id: kl7rzmUMPmw

Length: 28min 1sec (1681 seconds)

Published: Wed May 05 2021