Left BBC's Planet Earth to start dream family homestead (full tour)

in Aroma it's a bit close there it is headband that's it that's them meat veg and eggs good luck could I hadn't been closer Henry which means welcome to hemban welcome to North Wales one of the things that's really exciting about here is like a little bit like beyond the lore or like like I feel like there's a whole of the UK the other side of these mountains and then this side of the mountains there's just this little bit between us and the Sea and if you look back over time like actually the Romans never made it down they put into their land here they got to hear they got to carnarvon they got to there they got to these like they said they never made it really this side of the mountains Pascal they just never made it into this last little bit they just kind of went you know what like you can have that bit like we're but I feel like that's a pattern that's gone over the same time the language is still here this little corner here is it's like 85 first language Welsh or something like that it's a really beautiful language actually though and it's one of the oldest like least change languages over time actually it's part of the understanding of the landscape really you know do you know any Welsh words that are not translatable or things that people say well there's there's which gets used quite a lot it's like a sense of belonging or a sense of her but a sense of looking back to something that can never actually be though so it's a really interesting word because it's like you're remembering something or feeling a call or a feel of home but it can never actually exist and it's a really beautiful kind of like this memory that's kind of calmness and feeling of the land around it well we're going to talk about this I mean why well this is our little Longhouse so I actually I fell in love with those little like Icelandic longhouses you know there's a there's a kind of shape and former building that they've got that I really wanted to build and we built we've built a few like we've built a few like round structures and they're all a bit randomly shaped and I really wanted to make one that was just it's kind of square as well you know with curves so I kind of crossed that traditional Icelandic Longhouse with almost like a grain silo you know like actually what do you have that's got to take a lot of weight that's cut into a hillside or taken to a bank so it's like grain silo meets Icelandic longhouse this is really buried yeah yeah kind of underground well it is I wanted it to feel completely ground but I like this little bit of it just popping up found this old window in some little old boy's shed down in the village and he said headboards hit like 60 years ago to put into his thing he was going to build in his garden wow so tell me about the top of this tell me about the roof so he did it in like two days and we just used old carpet little carpet oh look there's a bit of carpet here yeah literally just someone's house carpet though so and this is the best stuff we bought all these Posh membranes and actually we put a load of carpet below it and a load of carpet over the top and all the roots just met into it and the it helps hold the moisture and you just goes like the local recycling center do you know what he gets some lovely rugs at the same time and then how much dirt did you throw on top I mean we just did big chunks of sod just salt the salt just comes out of the field I mean it's had it's had quite a dry summer so it's just kind of surviving but then this will all back up into life again oh the fire's really going now you can really see it coming through then you have a skylight to the top here and uh another and a little window and a cat yeah this is Molly hey Molly it's quite important that that kind of balance of light in it isn't it it's a fully balance because people are really used to lighting Windows aren't they and like lights lovely but I still think there's something about that little kind of like cozy kind of smoky Fireside story that needs that a little bit of that Darkness as well so it's just getting that balance right yeah this is our massive pumpkin patch look at this we just put them in we had a bit of old manure that and it's climbed right up the trees at the back and everything this is our main veg patch in here we had the like dream was to be sort of self-sufficient and we always imagined buying like four acres in a derelict house and but then we bought this place and it was bigger than we ever expected we didn't really have we had enough money to buy a little field and then we found hen band and we felt completely in love with this space but it was way more than we could afford so we lived in here with no electric about signals well about six months it's just a static caravan but we covered it we just got a Turf roof we actually brought it in when we first came because we needed somewhere to live really quickly but I was really set on actually when we came to farm because you meet all these people don't you and they and they buy a farm or they buy a piece of land and they want to do some of that piece of land and they spend ages just work on the Caravan or whatever so and I was I was always like Jenny we've got one weekend so we've got 48 hours to do up a caravan and then after that 48 hours we have to work on the house no matter where we get to so actually it was I don't know if it's a good idea it's got a Turf roof it's got wool above it well to be honest I'm quite a big fan of this multi-layer foil stuff so these are like recycled bottles that get made into these little layers and then it's got like space blankets you know in a way so you have that underneath the cladding yeah and that is really effective because like our Winters they just get so windy nowadays and actually if I've got a Turf roof on I can just sleep through any wind can I so you lived in here for six months and then you moved on and then we moved into the house so when we came the farm had a house it was a really important thing to Jenny to live somewhere where people had been born and died and lived their lives you know there's that like history of kind of half but when we first came we like really wanted just to buy like four walls and a couple of acres of land you know and then we found this place and like no one had lived here for 50 60 so I had no roof it's like it's forgotten they're so beautiful he's building up there because actually the grass just came right up to the door you know it's like all just lost in this little like overgrown world it's just so nice to go to a place where where people have lived for hundreds and hundreds of years and so we kind of just a little part of that story so he came in we put a new roof on WE insulated the insides we did quite a good job of insulating it whilst also not really having any money and just kind of making it all come together didn't we yeah oh so we've been here 10 years I'd always wanted to be a farmer we make some we make some really sexy composts actually on the farm we make some real we make a really nice hot compost well this is more of a cold com this is just stuff shoved in you know it's doing its thing and it's good but it so this is our it's a no-dig Market Garden it's all about really healthy soil so actually what we've got is underneath this kind of layer of compost so underneath here there's a layer of soil somewhere we've built a lot of soil now underneath here there's a layer like the real soil and in that real soil is all the kind of seeds so it's full of all those weed seeds and they're just desperate for those little moments and they go oh look I can breathe and there's light and they get all these cues to suddenly grow up so farming with permaculture and gardening with permaculture we should never have exposed soil so healthy soil is always covered up so we've got a really nice compost that we make on farm that covers these beds up and so by keeping the soil with its skin on essentially with that kind of layer over the top it never gets chance to kind of come up and out so this is just a freshly made bedding and what I love about it is because these methods are growing I mean it's so productive actually we've taken the land piece of land that's it's an acre of land right and we take an acre of land I can see the mountains I can see the sea and yet from this acre land I can feed a hundred families although vegetables between June and December anyway and so it's a bit of land on almost any Farm scale it's kind of insignificant and yet I can preach 100 families worth of veg off it and it's all about these really really kind of working with nature looking at what nature does and then bringing that into the patterns in the garden we've got these kind of wood chip paths so all the beds are made they're 75 centimeters wide it's just like the perfect size for you can step over it easily you can easily reach amongst it and kind of dig in and and work it like that with good sized beds so we're not always like you know skimping along like this and actually it just makes it you know I've got I've got quite a big bum so it's quite just a good space for me to be able to kind of be comfortable in the garden and then with a wood chip it's really easy to pull any weeds out that are in it but it's not dead space so actually that wood chip you've got all the mycorrhizae you've got all the fungi and that's feeding always feeding those beds so if you look at these crops like their Roots just don't just go straight down to that bit actually like these roots are they going right way off so all this bed as well is also part of the growing space you know but you don't have to do any kind of tilling or any kind of I mean because you just leave the roots there and what's going to make that decompose the compost well no no no just nature so you know there's a whole soil food web down there isn't there so there's a protozoa there's the bacterias there's the nematodes there's different worms there's a whole big set of like the wood chip paths kind of give us this kind of space for all the mycelium for all the fungi to live because that's what they live on really they like that wood chip yeah so oh wow okay here we go more yeah two pigs here yeah so three years ago this was all Pig paddocks so we had pigs on here and they destroyed it and they trampled it and they make a really hard pan don't they to be honest so we had pigs in here and then we came in and we brought his palm and urine compost and we spread it over the whole all the beds and then we just started growing on top of whatever was there so we never Disturbed it we just started planting on top it did take a year or two to really start performing and then this year it's like it's like it's really singing and it's working for us which is nice as well this year we've had quite a bit of surplus and I think we can do 100 families is that commercially effective yeah no it is really it takes a lot of hours it does take quite a lot of manpower so I grew up like just desperate to become a farmer well to do that we had to take on a huge mortgage and so at first I was like no we're just gonna grow we're just gonna grow vegetables and just sell vegetables and create this landscape and they were like actually we kind of need to pay this mortgage and so we started the campsite so we've been here 10 years well no one had really touched place for about 50 years before we came so a lot of that is because you see we've got this kind of crazy kind of like Fairyland around us this little kind of you know it's mad landscape well that's because it was quarried so it's actually quarried for sand and gravel which is great for us to make we could afford it and what do you mean by fairylands when we first came we used to have this rule like we always go to the woods on Sundays and we felt so ridiculously lucky to have found this bit of land and it was almost like we kind of like on Sundays we used to like almost like tiptoe you know like through the woods like just as you slow down you kind of sink into the landscape a little bit more you just take a deep breath of it don't you and and you do kind of start to believe in these little 12 tag they call them in comrade in Welsh the 12th tag yeah means fairies yeah yeah maybe it's not fairies but it's kind of a little mischievous folk that we don't really understand you know and then over here we've got the roundhouse which is the first one we built wow that's so magical looking but we really wanted to work with what resources we had so as much of it as possible had to come from here so like all the stone all the timber literally just came from like the little bit of Woodland almost a bit of Woodland that we had to clear to make it but then it's got a strawberry wall and a lime plaster actually we made it in eight weeks we're in a bit of a rush to make it so so we went from like standing trees to the well to it pretty finished really in about eight weeks the grass is just growing right off the edge here it's really growing right yeah yeah yeah no I to be honest I spent ages trying to work out to make good fascia boards and then and then the grass just kind of did it for us which is which is Handy isn't it how fast yeah do you know what Wales is such a great country for that because it it just keeps on raining we get a beautiful mix all the time of rain and sunshine rain and sunshine and it just makes everything so green and so live you know it just grasps pretty much right no it's pretty much grass we did a few Turf rooms earlier on the thing and I bought this like Posh like Turf through seed mixture as used by his Royal Highness whatever and to be honest it was rubbish and then I've got another friend and he was like well just cut the grass out of the field but that grass wants to live there so we just did that and it's worked really well it's much better yeah and we kept on thinking about trying to tame it somehow like maybe we should get like a little goat or a little hamster or but I don't know anything that burrows you know like it can't go through the membrane so no we never we never have every now and then the cows come in so we do have some cows that run through the farm sometimes and they'll they have a little trim of this bit you know but now he just kind of does it so and you said the exterior is what it's a lime plaster actually so it's lime over straw bales I would love to cob it really but you just I just couldn't do that in that time frame so Wales used to be covered in round houses little thatch kind of Celtic prehistory kind of round houses but they all had all the Timbers coming together to one Central Point see this is more a reinterpretation of that kind of proper Celtic roundhouse you know when the smoke just leaves through the thatch and the roof structure is something it's a reciprocal frame roof all the Timbers just came out of the woods around us we managed to get all these Timbers are all kind of similar size and what's lovely is you build like a really strong frame to put those poles on you put the first one on the second one on by the time you get to the end you're like this poor pole underneath taking all this weight and then you take it away and they all just it's reciprocal you know they're all looking after each other and now I don't have a clue which was the first one that's so interesting because there really isn't nothing is no but when you build it there's one on the bottom and they all stack up on top and then you take it away and they drop together and that's it they just it's a solid building but it it is a really affordable simple easy thing I all had to come together in eight weeks so yeah so yeah and I would say building things on a time frame like that is just brilliant because because we get a few people to help then all you've got all these perfectionists and they start going oh look well I could just and you're like wait a minute we've got eight weeks so actually all the way through the build you can just keep going eight week roundhouse eight week roundhouse and I almost think it's something people need for life you just step back and take a little bit of ownership of it and see what you want out of it and realize that none of it's that complicated one thing I did which I don't know if I would do again is I was really into this space of just trying to build it from the woods around us and so actually these four posts that make like the bed space that actually they just trees as they were standing so we actually just cut it off here and just left them in the ground where they were so actually part of the site selection was just kind of finding forgeries were in that formation for the bit for the bed just to make this little end dip you know actually I don't know if it's best thing because they've stopped now probably but we did have a good few years they just keep on drinking water don't they I mean well they just draw water up don't they like trees are pretty well designed and engineered to to draw water out the ground don't they so it's taken a few years then to stop doing it yeah a little bit so I if I did it again I wouldn't just leave trees in the ground but at least he's lovely now when it stops so I'm just mesmerized about this window here where you find that oh do you know what I bought this window right but it was really cheap it was nothing it was like 16 pounds and I went to find to another one and they were like 500 pounds and I was like oh yeah but there's something I love about that kind of peasant casting their seed in the field you know like yeah but that's also the advantage of strawbell walls because you can just cut holes in them wherever you want it's like yeah yeah and made the door out of it so I made the frame and then I made a template off that and they made a door to fit that shape and as long as you get your hinges perfectly aligned you can have whatever shaped door you want can't you because it's just so curvy I mean it's not we don't see doors though it's what shape you know like what shape's a human you know like and I guess it kind of makes it slightly coffin shaped but we've got all this really beautiful Ash wood and so I was really Keen that a little bit of the house came from came from that tree and so we just plank this ourselves and yeah and made the door out of it so this is like a little single bed built into this little cupboard it's just built into the frame of the house you know so it is a structure because this is structural this is very structural so the whole structure really depends on that kind of ring beam you know it's like a big person and a good strong belt you know you need that ring beam to hold it all in and so the whole weight of the roof is pushing against this and this is just holding it together and tree pieces I'm like why bother trying to make your own wind brace you know when a tree's trees already done it so we we do have water when we first came the first like year of the farm we had no electric no water anything we were really off grid and I was like no wait a minute people invented pipes and so we had the solar system on the roof and it's got a battery system and it can still revert back to that if the electric goes down it's still got like a 12 volt system it's good so this is gas it's just got a little kind of propane gas hob these are old scaffold boards actually see it's just really quick easy wood to work with and you know and it's and I quite like that thought that someone's being sat the side of a big building with it and sat on their lunch on it you know and and stop their angle grinder in it and you know that kind of thing you know they've got a history haven't they and I you know and I think running water is really good it doesn't have hot running water and it does have a hot shower actually you know I mean you can have as much Wim Hof as you like but it's quite nice to have a have a nice hot shower underneath the trees you know just like look up and see the trees and outdoor that outdoor hot shower looking up at the stars and again it goes on that same you know like functional like kind of beautiful kind of functional but simple at the same time yeah yeah yeah corrugated yeah a bit of a bit of Wrigley tin and March yeah it works yeah you have to these forested patches that are beautiful and it's just yeah I think it is you know like you could almost you know you can look down this little paths can't you and you can kind of just think did I did I just see something off there I think actually though just being in the woodlands and waking up to Don choruses I think this is such an important thing isn't it yeah I well I really wanted to we really wanted to do the like know every bird's nest so I'd spent my life flying all over the world making films actually but but really looking at loads of different ecosystems and then there was this real want to to build a nest for us and we kind of went off looking for like you know four or six acres and maybe derelict house I also wanted to really build my own little house like I just wanted to go and live in the woods and build a little hobbit house something small and built my own hands well it's just like Den building isn't it so then on this side oh it opens out like it's not all under I mean you no I wanted just to come straight in off the shape of the land really so this is yeah this is its whole height yeah yeah so it only just bites into the hillside that little bit easier to build because you're digging so much you weren't really digging it right I think so we just dug the extra bit back into the hill and what we did actually is we dug out like an extra meter or so on either side so we had the workspace we cleared it out put all the soil to one side and then we we built the building and then we just closed it back in again which was a bit scary actually because it's like you design this thing don't you you think you've got it right and then all of a sudden you've got a digger driver like an inside it's going back as the ground comes in the ground wants to push in like this but the roof has got the weight of the turf so the roof wants to push out so where these two meet they kind of balance and it just keeps that balance yeah there's a lot of weight there and like I say we filled it in it did make a few groans and creeks and things moved a little bit but we kind of expected that and I was fine and it was fine more importantly yeah it's got these little joints above where the where the rafters meet there's like a little collar on that and you can see when we first built it it didn't have the weight on like it wanted to go one way and then the weight came the other way and they've done a little dance as it kind of settled into place but they're now they've now not moved the doors are they're not a standard Square door no no I quite like I liked either making things myself that are organic or just finding things that people being sat in people's sheds for a long time that people have forgotten what they were for or where they're from and these windows too are just not Square not rectangles they're they're yeah it's just a matter of breaking the break in the Square pattern isn't it really yeah come inside smells good yeah so these are these Oak and and linseed oil actually isn't it linseed oil smells blush so you know there's enough light yeah I think so and then there's just that balance so you don't feel like someone's just about to peer through either you know it's cozy enough to sit down and tell a story around the fire isn't it but it's light enough you can also read your book and you don't feel like you're in a little cave the long house even like what was it used for was it a home I think I think long houses did everything didn't they I mean people probably had they always have that balance didn't they they would have lived anywhere between these little Candlelight dug in little long house shapes that are made of turf and it's a really economical way to build that's one of the really nice things about building those old building styles is actually they're really economical kind of easy ways of building because they had to be so I think people used to use long houses for everything they would have been born and died in these spaces they lived the whole family life in them and they probably had a big like kitchen one and you would have had a bigger one for storytelling and feasting and then you'd have had these little ones that you know you'd have had grandma and granddads and you divide your nephew and you know you know like the whole family would have been in one of these spaces wouldn't they and the beds are built in yeah they're built in their solid it's one of the things when I started looking into the Icelandic ones I just really loved that you had all these families living in this space but at the same time they had their own little like their own little space you know like like nowadays we've all got our own bedrooms haven't we but actually going back a little bit this is probably about as private as your space got and so but I love these they're almost like little kind of if you're taking an overnight train aren't they like little kind of cabins in the little in the little space yeah actually like you know so much of the northern hemisphere Scandinavia here there were Viking boats in this Bay out here as well at some point yeah and so one thing I love about this actually because I was thinking about this Viking part of it is actually it's quite a lot like a ship turned upside down you know when you kind of look up and think about it like you could be lay the wrong way up in a ship couldn't you you're saying it's really economical why just because I think that you know you've got that Earth there for the insulation you've got following those kind of traditional building patterns they were quite easy on Timber they were quite easy on the kind of joinery methods because these resources were much harder to get hold of what are you doing for Joiner here so it's really simple each rafter comes in and then it's just got a collar that ties in and then they've got Oak pegs that come through and what's really important with the pegs is they can't be in alignment if they're in alignment the whole plate can just come off but as soon as they're skewed to each other it's locked in place isn't it or straight away that's kind of locks into position yeah in here so that just stops them from spreading so if you see it here like behind us you're up to that bottom of the window with Earth right well granddad's about here actually isn't it yeah this is the ground height around here and is that good insulation it's really good insulation it gives it a really stable temperature doesn't it all year round which is what's lovely about being in the earth and being in the ground just a little wood burner I think it's really important for I think this is one of the things I realized is I love that fire that kind of sitting down and that half the whole point of the space is to slow down and think about what matters they're pretty wild round here in Winter we used to have a Year too and like you constantly just terrified you blowing away things like a slightly underground Turf roof structure it's just brilliant it's not going anywhere like the weather can be absolutely terrible and the two freeze means it's very quiet in here and even if it's absolutely tipping it down it stays very quiet and it's it's just a nice safe space like that it feels lovely why rabbits have got it right I mean all these animals all these bears and rabbits and things they all burrow down into that Hillside don't they vanish for winter and and you know like we're supposed to be a permaculture farm so we're supposed to copy nature yeah so you know let's dig some holes and snuggle down so this is this is the polytunnel I guess you could call them hoop houses so what we do we got managed to get our hands on loads of secondhand like water pipe so we made it out of these well it seemed like a really good idea it was really strong and it was lovely but actually when it gets hot and the tomatoes weigh so much so when you get that full crop of tomatoes and they get sort of it all went a bit wiggly so I had to put these little supports in and we built these really nice big walls you know like I really wanted this kind of that kind of thermal mass of the walls to kind of keep it warm it does it tomatoes and the Cucumbers for the veg box for the CSA scheme in summer and then in Winter actually we fill it with chicken so we've got 300 chickens and they come in for winter so it's a chicken house in Winter and it's a tomato house in summer it's a really good it's really good for soil because it gets for any of any weeds and bugs or anything that are left over from the crops and actually kind of Vice Versa actually it works as well and the chickens love it because obviously like we're in Wales and it's a bit wet isn't it and it's a bit you know it's not always perfect and and chickens are like well they're from like they're like little Southeast Asian jungle Birds aren't they so actually bring them in the polytunnel and they love it and they go it's all kind of warm and dry and this is what I was thinking of when I popped up my egg not some windy where it feels yeah yeah right and then they fertilizing the so they fertilize the soil a lot I mean a lot so actually we actually have to take some out and that's what goes down to make these big compost heaps actually where you saw all the pumpkins and stuff before look at these tomato plants how huge I don't know I mean they get they they produce a lot of crop so you could in a way you could have a tomato plant that you didn't didn't prune as much and didn't like look after in that kind of that kind of commercial way I guess really and that's it might help like that so these are super productive they're really productive yeah yeah yeah yeah a lot of chicken over here enjoying myself so they're allowed in no no no no this one's called strawberry and she just refuses to be a chicken so all other 299 chickens go on rotation behind the cows and they go around the pastures and this one just refuses to be a chicken oh well we'll kick around a bit James yeah and then the barn well we just built the barn this year We Built This Barn actually there's not a single screw in the hole in the structure it's all wood like the roof screwed on with screws and the cladding but the actual building itself is entirely made just without pegs and joinery just lovely to have parties and weddings and we've started doing a lot of courses and the kind of stuff in the way we Farm we also pack up the veg boxes in here so it's like six o'clock Thursday morning and we get all the badge boxes all laid out and we started out kind of a bit more self-sufficient so we started out just growing veg for us and then what I really want to feed people I don't want to feed people the whole diet so actually we do we do the market Garden for the veg but then actually we've got a beef herd we've got a chicken flock because we wanted to use those natural patterns and that so actually if you go what's the most productive ecosystem on earth right Savannah grassland well no one had really touched place for about 50 years before we came well that's because it was quarried so they came in and they took off whatever top 10 15 20 meters and left this landscape behind so there's a lot of the Agro forestry rains in a way so when we bought the farm like half the farm was Woodland half the farm was pasture and what we've done is we've come in and we kind of broke that pasture up into 35 like little Fields because if you think about nature the most exciting bit is that it's that kind of Woodland Edge isn't it it's all about those edges and if you think about if you went back four thousand years the place to be would have been those Forest Glades and that's where all the fruit and the currents and the nuts and everything came from those spaces and so actually what I'm going to do is create the whole farm so we've got loads of these Forest Glades and it's all broken up with these three rows so these are all fruit and nuts and things like this are all grow in these fruit rows and so in the end we'll have an incredibly productive diverse system and it's really good for moving the cattle around every day we can just open the gate and the cows go into the next space it's a really nice kind of container to move the chickens through it gives that same really good kind of spacing and layout so we've got 300 chickens and they get moved every every other day actually I'm too lazy to move it every day but every other day they move on to a fresh patch and they kind of follow the cows so basically you have chickens that are making compost yeah yeah yeah yeah is it cows or next to them is there sort of part of a cycle uh The Story Goes that the cows come in first and the cows go in and they eat the weight of the grass and then they poo and then two days later the insects come in then you've got all the insect larvae and the chickens come in and eat that in truth on a small farm that is almost impossible to recreate because the chickens go at one speed the cows go another I live in Wales which means I live on the side of a hill so I can only take my chicken house you know my eggmobile on so many of the fields but it works beautifully for us even if it's not that perfect Savannah system you know I sort of it just took me a minute to realize that the house a chicken a Cooper oh yeah yeah yeah with a tractor attached so you don't even attach the tractor no I spent like two years like every morning reversing the tractor up to the thing and I was like oh wait a minute all I'm doing is parking the tractor over there so why did I just leave it attached yeah so now it just burns the summer attached to this and it works really really well yeah and this is our mark four chicken house that we've built so we've built all sorts of weird wonderful little shaped ones but actually this one it it's basically got the maximum number of roof space that you can get in that space and so we can get 300 chickens quite happily can live in that space and because of the shape of it it's quite good in the wind as well so it's really windy I can just turn it across the wind and it it like pushes it into the ground rather than rather than it blown away they're in a beautiful place you know I mean it's yeah I don't think they know it is they see the view don't they they sit there and go oh yeah yeah no I love the chickens and what they do for my soil and they're great animals actually this uh productive I mean are you able to sort of really we can probably make 12 13 000 pounds off that kind of 300 chickens which actually if you look at conventional farming systems 75 or something a conventional livestock farms in Wales run at a loss actually pre-subsidy so to actually have all these little things that all genuine I mean you know 12 13 000 is that anything it's not a lot but if you take that compared to most Farms I actually run at a loss whilst building grass like this and building soil that's really it's really powerful so one thing I made this stupid mistake when we first came I was like I really want to build soil and then I went to visit someone who said they built a lot of soil and and I was like well you can't drink because your fence post they still end here so surely your fence paid and and it was really and it took me ages to realize that you don't build soil like because he's going to build 25 centimeters I was like come on like look at your fence post like then same length as mine but actually you build it downwards and we took a spade and dug in here that beautiful rich dark organic Earth is every year he's just creeping a bit deeper and a bit deeper and that is the best resource the farm can have it's much better than money in the bank yeah the Savannah so the Savannah is that most productive system and it you know it built like 15 meters of topsoil but you used to support like I don't have any but millions and millions and millions of Buffalo we could never imagine so you've got this really productive systems and we just we're just kind of mimicking that we've got two house cows that we milked for us it's such a different product to what you get in the shop like it's just lovely having that milk and then these guys really for beef really and do you sell that yeah no we sell that we sell that actually dropped this Summer's the first time we kept a cow back for us because we always it sells so fast we just got rid of the sheep this year so we used over 80 sheep as well because they kept on eating my fruit trees to make the aggro forestry work we have to have really low-cost fencing systems because we just can't really afford to fence it all out using you know big wire infrastructure and everything else whereas this I can keep the cows out perfectly well so we got rid of all the Sheep just while all these systems established you know can really see how dense it is in here though it's savannah-like I guess no or I don't well that's why that's what we try to create like just imagine because then you've got these nice little clearings of really productive grass but then in the middle of in Breaking the whole system up you've got these little incredibly productive little Woodland edges but the idea with these tree Lanes as well is that they're like linear Forest Gardens so like we've got the whole full diversity so that you've got your apple trees but then you've got your understories of fruit and then we're trying to put in all the support species as well because apple trees don't want to grow just stuck in the middle of a field they're designed to grow in a woodland so we do a lot of wood chipping as well so we would chip all the tree Lanes which again builds this sort of fungal bacteria which you can swap the trees like and actually without losing any crop from the grass we've got a whole extra crop and loads of other benefits from the agroforestry and is this I mean how many trees have you planted significant amount yeah yeah hundreds and hundreds right well a thousand across of all different types of tree tens of thousands the way the grass has behaved because when we came this grass was just like it was just like moss and cats here and it was really just showed that we had really dry really abused really over extracted from soil and now now we've really got a good holistic grazing program I'm going over the cattle like it's so productive now and it's like it's on we had a guy around the other day we did a we did a tour for like the Welsh government like technical Farm advisors and he was going well this is like Dairy quality grass so actually without putting in any inputs without reseeding without plowing without damaging the soil in any way just with good rotational grazing we've gone from like something that a real farmer we just wouldn't look at twice and to completely walk past so there's like Dairy quality grass like it's it's really amazing it's like everything we do on the farm I think in a way what we've done is and I never realized it through permaculture you go well that's copy nature and let's bring that pattern onto our farm what you don't realize is we've also brought the patterns that humans are supposed to be living with as well and actually because like what are humans supposed to do well we're supposed to live in a little Community we've always got people on Farm you're supposed to grow your own food will we do that you're supposed to go around and make little shacks and little shelters well we got really into that like we're basically just doing what humans are supposed to do and that makes them feel really lucky it's like what we designed for isn't it or are you yeah good yes yes perfect I think we're yeah well basically so well there is so in the middle of the campsite if you're in the middle campsite and you went just forward there's a little compost toilet off to your left down there but there is also if you went down this path and there's normal flush toilets and hot showers down at the farm down here well maybe sounds completely at home like get lost yeah wander round yeah okay

Channel: Kirsten Dirksen

Views: 425,965

Keywords: regenerative agriculture, agroforestry, no dig, no dig farming, no till method, woodland edges, composting, soil fertility, celtic roundhouse, turf roof, sod roof, turf roof caravan, woodland roundhouse, viking longhouse, fairy cottages, family farm, rotational grazing, irish sea, wales, savannah grasslands, northwest wales, henbant farm, permaculture farm, hobbit hideaway, family homestead, wales homestead, snowdonia, full walkthrough, full tour, best homestead

Id: Ul2kfTpZBw0

Length: 40min 59sec (2459 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 26 2022