Nobody Talks About THIS on a Homestead!

hey everybody welcome back to living traditions homestead well as you know we've taken two weeks off from posting youtube videos so that we could catch up on all of the spring things that need to get done on the homestead today that we're recording this video is one week into our two weeks off and we wanted to give you guys an update of how things are going now our spring to do list is like a mile long and most of it is not camera worthy but we're excited to kind of share with you the things that we accomplished in the first week including an awesome new mower that we've gotten from dr power that is just going to save us a ton of time and energy throughout the rest of the summer the first thing we want to show you guys today is a bunch of work that we did behind us this area is an area of the homestead you haven't seen in a long time let's go for a little walk and i'll show you what we've done a couple weeks ago we showed you guys that this area behind us where we had our original dairy cow hope was an area that we were kind of dismantling here on the homestead we took out almost 100 t-posts from that area all of the old electric wire we got that all out of there and this week we've actually moved on to kind of doing the same thing to the area next to it it's an area where you've seen us in the past raising pigs in the woods all of this area back here was done in electric fence and it was a big jog to take this all out because of all that old wire and t-posts and and fiberglass poles and everything that we had back there for the pigs it made it almost impossible to keep this area up now you may remember as well that about three or four years ago this area used to be completely wooded we had a company come in and actually use some some machines to clear this land for us so that we could get ready for the very first dairy cow that we had since that time because of having all of the wire up i haven't been able to get in here and mow or keep it bush hogged and keep all of the things from growing back which isn't a big deal when we had animals here because they took care of all of that for us they kept everything eaten down but since we moved all of the animals down to the farm and we're no longer raising the pigs back here in the woods you can see that it's starting to grow back and it needs to be mowed so we've taken all of this stuff down really so that i can keep this bush hog keep this area looking really nice so that when we sell this homestead hopefully in the fall uh whoever buys this will have a nice place to be able to start raising animals of their own back here in this area let's go for a little of a walk down the trail over here and i'll kind of remind you guys of how it used to be so we used to have three separate pig areas back in this area over here we had an area for our grow out pigs we had a pen for charlie our boar over on this side and then back here in the woods we had a big pen for our sows and some of the other grow outs that we used to raise before we got into the ipps and that went all the way down this trail and i mean it was a long pen so and all of that was done with electric wire so this week we had to pull that all out and we had to you know pull out all of the posts i counted and i think it was right around 80 more t-posts that we ended up taking out in the last few days and at today's prices that's almost 500 worth of t-posts so i'm glad to have those to be able to start putting up the new pig pens down at the farm so this was a huge project done this is something that i wanted to get done in the spring because if we wait until uh you know much longer into summer all of this is gonna grow up so much it's going to make it all that much harder to either get back here to work or to keep it under control and i really do want this to be a nice area for whoever buys the homestead from us so i think this is a big step in the right direction i'll be able to keep this nice and bush hog now and it's going to be a great spot all right we got some other things to share with you today as well another great project that we got completed on the homestead kind of also revolved around like just homestead cleanup and preparation for having new owners of this property you know we have lived here for about six years now and one thing about living in the country that's different than living in the city is that there just really isn't a good place to take stuff when it breaks or wears out or that kind of thing there's no bulk pickup for the garbage man so we've just had some like old broken down or unusable metal objects that we accumulated and took to the scrap yard you know we have ends of rolls of fencing that were just too small to use we had a broken down mower that wasn't usable anymore and t posts that were too bent and unusable an old freezer an old grill and so we just went around the homestead and gathered all of those things up like i said took him to the scrap yard we actually got over 200 by just gathering everything metal around the homestead that we didn't need anymore took it to the recycle scrap metal place and cleaned up the homestead a little bit definitely a good job done but not necessarily something that is camera worthy there was one major change that we made over the past week regarding our seedlings that we're taking to the farmers market we want to take you to the greenhouse show you the change we've made and also give you an update of the stuff that we just planted in the greenhouse that we took you along so let's go take a look well as you can see we moved all of our plant starts down here to the farm and into the greenhouse we did this really for two reasons the major reason is that it has been so windy here in missouri this spring that these plants just could not stay outside anymore our temperatures have actually been warm enough for them to just be outside we've been moving them outside of the sprout house on basically the same sawhorses but back at the homestead but the winds have been some days we've had almost 60 mile an hour wind gusts and it's just blowing these little seedlings way too much so that was the main reason that we moved them into the greenhouse here the other reason is we've had so much rain now rain you know in small amounts isn't bad for these seedlings in fact it would be great for them but here in missouri we get a lot of rain and when it comes down it comes down fast so we've actually had a couple days where we've gotten over three inches of rain in just you know 12 hours which is way too much for these seedlings to be outside so here in the greenhouse we can control the wind we can control the moisture and they can still get all the benefits of being outside in the warm sun so this row all the way down the middle all of these seedlings these are what we'll be bringing to the farmers market starting on april 30th actually the day you guys are watching this video so we're excited it's great to finally be moving from spring into our summer plants and i think everything is looking great now while we're in the greenhouse i want to give you just a quick update about everything that we planted in here it was about 10 days ago that we planted everything in this greenhouse as an experiment because we've never grown summer plants in a greenhouse before so this year we wanted to experiment with that because if it goes well we can actually do more in the greenhouse over the summer and less in our big garden we can control the environment better in tubs like this it's less bending and stooping it might just be a great alternative for us as we get older now when we planted this greenhouse all the buckets some things we planted as you know seedlings these onions for instance were like onion set but there were some things that we also planted from seed and you guys everything so far is doing fantastic the celery the onions most of the beans and the seeds have sprouted these are the contender green beans five out of five have sprouted this one is still kind of in the ground a little bit but they are doing great everything has grown a ton the peppers have at least doubled in size in the last 10 days and oh my goodness look at how fantastic these tomato plants look they have at least doubled in size we started these from seed in the sprout house and grew them up and transplanted them and they're just doing great these are a bush variety of beef steak and some cherry tomatoes down here just look at the size of these and how gorgeous these are we're so excited we have some cucumbers bush cucumbers some zucchini and we planted some some squash seeds that are coming up as well these are the lemon squash summer squash and they're all just doing really well so so far the experiment is going really well we can't wait to see how this progresses throughout the entire summer so we wanted to take a minute to talk to you guys about a topic that really doesn't get talked about a lot on homesteading channels here on youtube in fact i think in a lot of ways maybe us as youtubers do a little bit of a disservice to those of you who want to get into homesteading by not talking about this subject more and that is just a lot of the day-to-day you know not exciting work that needs to be done on a homestead absolutely and one of the big things for us that takes up so much time in the spring summer and fall is really just yard maintenance right because when we had a small house and a small you know a regular neighborhood in the city and we had a yard too but then when we moved out to the country it just it's just huge compared to the yard sizes that we've had in the past so the amount of time it takes and the amount of work is just tenfold over what we had been experiencing in the city right and especially the last two years or a little over two years since we've had the farm and the homestead just mowing the lawn this doesn't include cleaning up you know making sure everything is picked up but just mowing the lawn every week between the two places is taking us about six to eight hours a week just in yard mowing and honestly in missouri in our part of missouri anyway in the spring it rains so much that when as a week has gone by the line is like already too long we should really be doing this like twice a week but we don't have that much time right so one of the things we got done this last week while we weren't shooting youtube videos is that we actually did our very first mowing of the lawns both lawns and you guys it's been yeah like sarah said about six days and they both need to be mowed again so hopefully this second mowing won't take quite as long as the first mowing because the first mowing of the year is always a pain because i don't know about you guys but on our farm or our homestead over the winter things just kind of get left laying around you're cold you're in a hurry to get back inside maybe that bucket doesn't make it back to the barn it just gets set down or maybe you know there were hoses that we used you know on a day when it was warm out and then they froze and we just laid them down somewhere so in the spring right we need to go around we need to clean up everything so that as we need to start mowing everything uh things are cleaned up and we can mow without hitting a bunch of stuff that's now hidden underneath the grass so that first mowing is always a much bigger job so we got that over with this past week right and then you know there's always the maintenance on all of those pieces of equipment you know we have two riding mowers we have hand mowers we have weed eaters we have chain saws all of that stuff needs regular maintenance so that's another thing that happens every spring on the homestead is i try to do all of that at the beginning of the season sharpen lawnmower blades and just you know make sure oil changes and all of that stuff that needs to be done so that uh during the course of the summer we can hopefully just you know have those things working as as good as they can and that's another thing that got done this week that we were off is all of that maintenance occurred kevin did a great job of that yeah we got all of that taken care of thanks to my new workshop uh it has been such a blessing because in the past i didn't have an indoor spot to be doing those things so i had to use nice days outside this year because i have the workshop i was able to do that indoors on a rainy day and just get everything knocked out which was super great now one big issue that we had last summer that something honestly that i never really gave a lot of thought to prior is mowing inside of our chicken moat area and a lot of you have actually asked how that's been going because you know with the number of chickens and ducks that we have they don't keep that area grazed down um the grass does grow and we do need to mow inside of that so last year uh i tried a number of things i tried just weed eating the whole thing but you guys it's almost up 900 feet long all the way around it's six feet wide by about 900 feet long so doing the whole thing with a weed eater isn't a good idea a hand mower i tried doing it with a hand mower but again it's it's hilly um well and the mowing you know length is so short that you have to like do it three times all around in order to get it at least three times right so that was kind of a pain i do have one riding mower that can fit inside of the chicken moat but going around the corners wasn't a good thing either so this year i think we finally have a great solution we were contacted by dr power about a new hand mower that they have i'm going to grab this thing out of the barn and show you guys it's going to be perfect for mowing not only in the chicken moat but all the other areas around the homestead where we can't get with a riding mower so you guys this is the new mower this is the sp 30 from dr power you guys this thing looks like a beast i'll be honest i haven't given it a try yet i was waiting to try it with you guys i think this is going to be perfect inside of the chicken moat i'll just real quickly show you i mean it has two blades it does a 30 inch wide cut it's self propelled this thing is going to be amazing so it comes with the bagger which i may use actually when we lived in phoenix we always just used our grass clippings inside of our chicken coops instead of bedding and it worked perfectly so i'm excited to have one that has a bagger again and also the side discharge and then also has the mulching kit all of that comes with it mulching is what we mostly do here so we're just going to leave that for today let's take this out to the chicken moat and give it a try we're in the chicken mo area about ready to fire this thing up and try it out now you guys i have high hopes for this because we have other things from dr power and every single one of them has been amazing quality so i think this is going to be just as good i think this is going to save me a ton of time this summer all right let's give this a try and see how it works turn on the key oh before i do one thing that i need to show you guys that i think is probably the coolest part of this compared to like other hand mowers that i have is the fact that in order to adjust the height of this thing it's just one lever you don't have to go around and on my other mowers you got to adjust every single wheel this thing just one lever and you got the whole thing adjusted so i'm going to go right in the middle because the grass is pretty long in here so we're gonna go right in the middle this adjusts from one inch to four inches so we're at two inches all right let's give it a try [Music] well this thing is awesome i just mowed half of the chicken moat in about five minutes you guys this thing is gonna be a game changer this summer here on the homestead we're so thankful to have it if you want to check this out we'll leave a link in the description of the video so you can check out the dr power sp 30 for yourself see if it might be a good fit for your homestead now that the chicken moat is all taken care of the last thing we wanted to give you guys an update on is quail this week while we've been taking some time off i actually made a big decision and that is that i ended up processing all of my standard kotornik's quail and i've now switched over 100 to just the jumbo quail that's something i've been wanting to do for a while just haven't had the time to do it but i had some grow outs ready uh that were at breeding age they were starting to lay eggs and i decided this was the perfect time so i butchered about 30 of my standard quail i've got rid of all the standard quail now and i've switched over to just the jumbos this cage here still has a lot of young males that will be processed in a couple weeks but other than that i have all of my other cages nine cages now full of breeders you guys i'm really excited because at the farmers market this year a lot of you guys have been turning out to buy quail eggs so i'm so thankful for that i've been selling a lot of hatching eggs but we've also been selling out of just regular eating eggs every week as well it seems like more and more people are starting to show an interest in quail that's something i'm excited about i know that you guys know i talk about these a lot but they are one of my favorite animals on the homestead they're so enjoyable to raise and they taste great too well you guys those are the things that we got accomplished on our first week off of youtube lots of things check marked off our to-do list that feels so great we feel very accomplished now remember by the time you guys see this video our two weeks will actually be over so we'll be back with you guys for another video this coming wednesday as our we get back on our normal schedule we have another week of hard work we need to get started on we're happy to have that second week off to get a bunch of stuff done it's always a great feeling when spring comes even though it's a lot of work it's nice to know that we're heading into summer and summer is always an exciting time on the homestead you guys if you are enjoying our videos make sure that you hit the subscribe button below and remember that the best way that you can help us here in the homestead is just to share our videos on your social media until next time thank you so much for stopping by our homestead take care and god bless god bless

Channel: Living Traditions Homestead

Views: 150,910

Keywords: Living Traditions Homestead, Missouri, Ozark's, homesteading, Ozarks, self-sufficient, homesteaders, unjobbing, DR Power, SP30 Lawn Mower, DR Power Equipment

Id: C7qmFUk0FXw

Length: 19min 23sec (1163 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 30 2022