Living Our Dream Life on a Small Farm in Canada

[Music] never thought the day would come that our Dream would come true from yearnings and aspirations of growing some of our own food and knowing where some of our food comes from we can now say we are living our dream life as The Fall season winds down here on the farm it's time to get into the garden and put bed it's a lot of work maintaining this massive 100 foot garden but it was well worth it for our fabulous Harvest this year it's such an amazing feeling to be out in the garden and enjoy the absolute stunning Scenic views from all of the different colors in and around our property and that's precisely why fall is our favorite season here at our 90 acre property it was such a beautiful day to capture this spectacular scenery on our small farm be sure to stay till the end of the video for some trail camera footage one of the first things we did when we got this property is plant a mini permaculture Orchard and all together we now have 39 trees we have apples pears cherries some plums and we are looking forward to the day that we can Harvest a lot of fruit the weeds are always such a difficulty so I decided to try to put some landscape fabric in and around the crown area of all of our fruit trees in the orchard just to help prevent any of the grasses and the weeds from competing for nutrients with the root ball of the plant what are you guys doing you okay you guys want some pumpkins Bobby you want some pumpkins Okay who wants some pumpkins look at that guys growing up in the big city of Toronto Ontario Canada I never would have thought in my wildest dreams that I would ever own a pet mini pig and here we are a pair of them Billy and Bobby but that's What Country Life does to you it brings you closer to Nature where's Bobby where's Bobby Bobby there you are buddy you okay Bobby these are Juliana mini pigs and boy do they have a personality they basically bring a smile on our face every day they're full of character these guys and they really get along with our Old English Sheepdog Olive don't even think about escaping Billy I'll have stay here [Music] thank you every morning we let our ducks and geese free range in the permaculture Orchard to help keep the insect population down and to help fertilize the pasture and boy do they just love living out there anyhow [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] tough to get any work done in the garden with these dogs around but it just gotta love them eh Olive you're crazy you're really crazy it's a brand new bed and you're gonna get so dirty you don't care huh Olive foreign we decided to try to reuse the animal feed bags to sew together with our sewing machine these long tarps that we could use to cover our garden beds to prevent the weed seeds from blowing in my darling is a self-top seamstress and she really enjoys her singer it should also help in composting some of the organic matter but that remains to be seen foreign you guys okay Molly you okay earlier in the summer our Orchard was being attacked by Japanese beetles so I laid out the Japanese beetle bait traps and now it's time to empty them to get rid of all the dead beetles it was another horrible year for these beetles and they often attacked the cherry trees in our Orchard but these traps do wondrous things to keep these beetles under control as you can see by the Full Bucket fall is a great time to add fertilizer to the fruit trees in our permaculture Orchard and we are using this Vigoro brand their fertilizer spikes that you Hammer into the ground right around the drip edge of all the trees and these spikes are a slow release style so we won't have to put more spikes again until next spring since planting this mini permaculture Orchard here at the farm we invested in a steel pole pruner chainsaw and what this does is it allows us to keep the fruit trees pruned and trimmed accordingly this particular tree right here is a very old wild pear tree and it hasn't given us any fruits since we've been on this Farm so this year we decided to really give it a hard pruning to try to regenerate some growth and some fruiting for next year foreign it's really a lot of work to maintain this Orchard but well worth it in a few years we shouldn't be in a fruit abundance foreign the Woodland Mills wc-68 wood chipper sure does come in handy here at the farm that way we can produce our own wood chips just this little bit of trimming that we did on this pear tree produced a lot of branches and within 20 minutes we finished chipping it into tiny wood chips now that I've finished trimming out that pear tree I can jump on our lawnmower and mow the grass and pasture area in and around that pear tree I was never able to get to the base of that tree in the past but now that I've pruned it I'm good to go foreign we like to use our wood chips around the base of all of our fruit trees especially as we're coming in to our harsh Canadian Winters this wood chip mulch helps insulate the roots of the trees and will also turn into its own compost over time and add some nice carbon to the soil [Music] foreign [Music] this Garden is two years in the making and it's still not complete and it probably won't be complete for another couple of years this year we installed lots of raised beds and will continue with the raised beds next year and also laid down this geotextile landscape fabric material it's a polypropylene very durable and it's a weed block foreign we still need to install a lot of this geotext style and we have a ways to go before we're complete in this Garden [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] thank you [Music] ah ah this is our Chateau de pulley chicken house it's three-tiered and octagonal meaning it has eight sides it also means it has seven coops but not really because it's not finished so today I'm gonna finish the sixth Coop that way we can move Michael Jackson and his flock over to the other side I like to use these thick plastic milk crates as the nesting boxes so I just cut out a shape that I need in order for the chickens to feel comfortable when inside sadly our chicken house could use a little housekeeping but no time for that right now all right foreign foreign foreign [Applause] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] okay there you go guys welcome to your new digs hopefully you like it now that Michael Jackson and his girls are in their new Coop they're not going to feel the full brunt of the snow during the winter season as they did on the other side of the octagonal Chicken House The Chateau de pule fuzzy where you going bud Fozzie you're too far wow that was the fastest you've sprinted All Year bud it's a good workout for you mango what are you doing mango hello get off the fence what do you think you are a monkey thank you foreign cats spend their evenings protected from predators we have a whole team of barn cats here at the farm we call them the clock crew we also have the claw crew Juniors which are Maggie Mays for kittens fuzzy I got some dinner for you they have a job to do here on the farm and their role is to defend the farm against mice rodents and other pests overall they do a great job and they protect us against mice moles voles Chipmunks small squirrels small snakes even some insects like crickets but the truth is all of these Barn cats are part of our family here at the farm and we treat them as such with a lot of love and they pretty much put a smile on our face every single day with their Antics around the whole property winter is long and harsh here in Ontario Canada and the cats will be spending a lot of time in their cat house and catio foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign you're all covered in leaves they're all covered in leaves oh yeah shake it off baby yeah these little cat hammocks that I purchased off Amazon didn't stand up to the test of time the cats jumped on them too much and they broke so I'm gonna bastardize it a little bit and put my own Spin and Shore it up to make it real tough and strong so that the cats can't break them again foreign [Laughter] also installed a wood plank catwalk all around the perimeter of the catio at different levels because cats like to jump and climb it'll keep them busy and entertained funny how mango just sits there supervising my work it's like he's in awe of what I'm doing he's very interested [Music] mango and Tango are investigating their new surroundings just giving my work a little inspection to make sure it was done up to their standards [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] five [Music] whoa whoa whoa [Music] [Music] mango you watching those crazy dogs these little improvements to the catio are just gonna make the barn cat's life a bit more enjoyable come the winter season our Kawasaki Mule is integral to our 90 acre property because it just allows us to get around everywhere foreign we have 15 Acres of good old hardwood Canadian Forest but unfortunately this Forest has not been managed properly for decades and I consider myself a steward of this land and I really want to leave it in a better order than when I first got it that means thinning out the forest for unwanted dead trees all they do is get rotten and fall over so it's much better in my opinion to harvest the wood for firewood before it gets to the real rotten stage where it's funky and it's no longer usable it's always so peaceful and quiet in our forest and it's just makes this dream a whole lot better captured this shot of a white-tailed deer it's probably a doe when I was up in the woods there it was at a very far distance it's the best shot that I could get but she was just staring at me and then once she realized I wasn't gonna do anything then she just pranced the way very beautiful very tranquil very Majestic [Music] foreign [Music] is generally 16 inches long so I like to just Mark out my logs before I get the chainsaw going the main chainsaw that I use around the farm is a steel Ms 362 and it does basically everything I needed to do with more than enough power um [Music] foreign [Music] is a new tool that I picked up and it's just really a big pick that's supposed to prevent me from having to bend to physically pick up the log and it works like a charm [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign before I can get started doing any wood chipping I have to fix my wood chipper because I busted it this cast piece right here is broken off now this piece right here is supposed to sit in there and then that covers it but there's nothing holding this in and this is the mechanism that pulls the machine on and off this is a Woodland Mills wc-68 wood chipper it's PTO driven and mounts onto the back of the tractor it chips up to six inches in diameter and that's fine for me because anything larger than six inches I would use for firewood anyhow and this company Woodland Mills is based right here in Ontario manufactured right here in Ontario also and they were kind enough to send me out this little part they didn't even ask for any payment they paid for the shipping they paid for the part very good service and I'm very impressed foreign foreign [Applause] foreign [Applause] [Applause] foreign thank you [Music] this property sure is our own little piece of paradise [Music] we're really enjoying what we're doing here on the Farm building it up setting it up and it's a lot of fun [Music] we've built an amazing duck house an incredible chicken house cool bunny Barn a goose Caboose we've built a garden we planted a mini Orchard we've planted a blueberry patch we have so many more plans that we want to see come to fruition on this Farm we just love being outdoors I love getting close to Nature our property is very Scenic and idyllic we couldn't ask for a better life we've accomplished a lot in the last two and a half years building up our Dream Life on this small farm in Canada [Music] thank you [Music] all sorts of different types of wildlife here on our property there's plenty of wild turkey lots of white-tailed deer and this is a spot that I put all of the chicken guts and feathers from when we harvested all of our Birds eh and the coyotes came out sniffing around wondering what's going on the deer were all over the place very beautiful very Serene and there's even some kind of a weasel here or maybe some kind of a Martin or a fisher cat I'm not sure but it was sniffing around and it grabbed a piece of chicken wing I guess but the turkeys they're just looking for seeds and bugs and whatnot very beautiful whole flock of them [Music] anyways folks thanks for watching this video we really appreciate the support and if you're not already following our Channel And subscribe why don't you click that subscribe button and we'd really appreciate it and it'll go a long way into growing our Channel thanks so much for watching and if you can check out this other video that we have it's our garden was abandoned last year and we basically put it all back together this year we built some raised beds we put landscape fabric and we really sowed a lot of seeds and got a really good harvest so this video is an amazing transformative episode

Channel: Hidden Spring Farm

Views: 81,628

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Id: tawSWmZxPBA

Length: 45min 24sec (2724 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 17 2022