- So Kevin decided to take a vacation. I don't know if he really
deserves it, but whatever. Me and Paul here are gonna step in and give him a little treat
on top of the vacation. We're gonna get some stuff
done around this homestead, starting with fixing up this big bed. And you have probably
seen Paul around here. He helps out at the "Epic
Homesteading" all the time. So he's definitely certified
to help us today in the task. - Sort of, yeah, we've got a lot to do. This is only one part of the projects (Jacques chuckles)
that we have going on, so. - Yeah.
- I don't know. - It's gonna be a multiparter, so. - Yeah. - Let's go over to that whiteboard though 'cause we do have some
idea of what Kevin wanted and we're just going
to try to make it work. This beautiful drawing right here is the backyard in question. So the idea is that this is
the thing we did last video where we built that
little flower bed up front and Paul and Kevin were
talking the other day. I think you guys figured out that the idea is that we want two paths
coming in from either side? - Correct. Yeah, and then going out at the top too-
- Okay. - With a big area in the middle so you guys can do videos and whatnot. - Oh, okay.
- Yeah. - So we'll have like
a nice little circular kind of vibe area. Maybe we'll put a table
there, make cooking demos, things like that.
- Yeah. - We have to figure out how to connect these back beds over there. But let's go take a look and try to put this idea into action. So let's set the stage here.
Here's the big bed in question. And this is what we did last video where we put this flower bed. And I'm not gonna name names, but all I'll say is the person isn't here, but somebody broke this pipe, (laughs) so we fixed that today. Paul was able to get it all patched up. And so Paul, the idea is
that where you're standing is going to be the start
of the path, right? - Yeah, we're gonna be walking through. - [Jacques] So a little meander maybe, so it's not straight lines, but we're gonna come to the middle. That'll be like some
sort of circular thing. - Big circle right here. - [Jacques] And then that bed
behind you is probably going to be combined in, right?
- Correct. Yeah. So we'll have the two long
beds in the back, the one with peas right now, the
one that's unplanted. And then we should have two paths that are coming off the end as well. - [Jacques] Perfect, so one
path coming in that corner, one's sneaking around that apricot there. - [Paul] Yep. - And then it's gonna reconnect back here so that there's a flow way into the shed. So you can grab your tools,
come back out, hit the garden. So let's get this all shaped up. All right, so Paul's moving some of the transplants out of the way 'cause even though we just
put this bed in, we decided that we want to cut a
little bit of that corner into this build. So you already grabbed that start. So I'm gonna do now is just kind of try to create some rough
vision of what this path is gonna look like here. So I like the idea of it having
a little bit of curvature to it, some sort of flow line just to make it look a
little bit more natural, so it's not just straight
lines everywhere, like it was before. I'm gonna force a little
bit of my loose design into Kevin's backyard here. So I think kind of like that
is the rough path over here. And then like we said,
there'll be this circular kind of chill area. So we'll do this little
circular path then that's going to come out again and meander this way. So the path is gonna look like
this big circle over here. And then you could just walk
right on and out of the garden to go do something else. (energetic music) We already have this table
here, which is four feet wide. So if we build a circle
in the middle, we want it to be at least four feet
at the widest point, but probably closer to six. So what Paul has here is
a stake, another stake with a string on it. The string is about three feet in length, so it should give us about a six foot circle total in diameter. That'll be big enough to hold the table and also have some room for
a bench or a couple seats and it won't take up as
much space in the garden. So I think that'll be good. Once we have this sketched
out, we'll dig out that pit. We'll start moving the soil
around and I'll show you exactly how the paths are gonna come together. The circle's been defined. We have the rough idea
of all the pathways. Now what we're doing is
filling in all the low points where the old paths were. So we're just gonna be breaking
up some of the soil here, (rake thudding)
leveling it out. And then I'll show you exactly
what these paths look like. (energetic music) I think it actually looks really cool. I use some water to
highlight the pathways. Let's take a look. So here we are standing by the chicken coop. That is the bed that we're
keeping as well as this one. So what I've done is I've
reinforced this pathway here and then Paul and I carved in all these nice curved in pathways. So like I said, I got the ground wet here so you could see it more easily. You come into the middle
here and then you get to this nice big circular area where we could put a
table or something else. We're thinking maybe wood chips here, or maybe we could convince Kevin to build like a tiny round deck here. I think it would look amazing.
- I'm up for it. I mean,
(Jacques laughs) come on, you can't beat that. - I know that looks so cool. But so we have the pathway there, like I said, going to the shed. High convenience there. We have the flower bed
that's still in shape there. I just wanna show you
one other option here. I'm not gonna do this 'cause
I don't wanna do something like this without Kevin's
actual approval in his garden. But if you take a bunch
of these little boards and you cut 'em to tiny lengths
like this, it would make for a very pleasing looking
pathway in my opinion. It's almost like a boardwalk. Keep your feet a little bit
cleaner and make it very defined where the pathways are.
(Paul laughing) Here's where we're at right
now. I think we're gonna leave. We might plant a little bit, but we do have a couple
other projects to do. There's one over here
that we're gonna have to pick up tomorrow. But let me go show you
what we're going to do. So this area you might recognize, this is where we did our
tomato growing experiment. And this is actually going
to become an important part of the epic garden. It's going to become a
massive test garden bed. We're gonna be running a
whole bunch of trials here. We've expanded the area
out to this white flag. It's roughly, I think 24-by-24 feet. And we might divide it up
into different sections where we try different things, but we do need some more
materials to finish this project. What we were thinking is that we would actually
get some two-by-fours or maybe four-by-fours and basically build a
gigantic wooden raised bed around the entire perimeter of this area. I think it would look really cool. It would make it very contained and sort of defined in the garden. And if we're going to be
doing a lot of experiments, we might as well have a
dedicated permanent setup. So that's the plan. We'll see you guys tomorrow
when we get that lumber. (light music) Paul and I are back for
day two of building things around Kevin's garden while he is away. Today, we are working on
this experimental patch. So like we said last time, we need to build a frame all the way
around this to make it legit so we could break it
up into separate areas to run all these cool
experiments for you guys. So let me walk over the
plants with you guys first and then we'll get right into it. All right, so here is the
big patch from a distance. And the basic idea is that we have this giant
24-by-24 foot square. And what we're going to do here is we're going to be using four-by-fours. These are just regular
construction grade four-by-fours. Nothing that's going to last that long 'cause again, this is experimental garden. We might break it up again in the future, but let me show you what we're doing here. Basically, we aren't professional
carpenters, right Paul? - Well, I don't know.
(Jacques chuckles) Backyard for sure, but-
(Jacques laughs) yeah, not professional. - We keep it natty.
- Not professional. (laughs) So I tried to do, yesterday was a joint, I already forgot the name
of, like, a slip joint where you carve out the little chunk and then you overlap the
two boards did not work. What we ended up doing
instead we're just cutting a 45 degree on the miter saw. We're gonna join these
two with a bunch of screws and then every board's gonna
get at least one rebar hammered into the earth to keep it anchored. We're gonna just work our way around. The basic premise here
is that we're gonna start on this corner, level these
two boards to each other. Once these two are level,
we'll tie them together and then we'll build off the
rest of the bed from that. So let's get into it and
see how long this takes us. What do you think, Paul?
- Its gonna be awhile. - [Jacques] Is there gonna be a problem? - [Paul] Huh? - Is there gonna be a problem?
- There might be. - So I think the basic premise that we're gonna do here
is start on one corner, level these two boards to
each other and like that's it. - Yeah. - 'Cause we can't, this is too much to level basically. (chuckles) - Yeah, I mean it's over 200 square feet- - Yeah.
- To be leveling. (laughs) - So we're not doing that-
- Not about do to that. - We're not that professional. But we do want the board
to actually meet up with each other nicely. So we'll go ahead and level this. We'll just dig this out,
drop this a little bit, tie this into itself, work our way down, hit the next corner. So obviously, I think we
need to start digging here. - Yeah. (laughs)
- Unfortunately. So let's get it done. (light music) The moment of truth here, did we make a square or did we not? - I don't think so. (laughs)
- It's okay. You know what? I don't think any of our cuts were consistent this whole time. So it's probably not directly our faults. - You know what? We're just
keeping it natty, right? (both chuckling) - That's where we're going here. (Paul chuckles)
Natural lines. Natural mistakes. And here it looks like we're off by- - Three inches, right?
- Yeah. Maybe. - Two?
- Maybe two. - Yeah.
(both laughing) (energetic music) - All right, now we got the corners in. Everything's kind of done. So let's see what this looks like and what we need to do next. Actually, we do have a special step next. So all the boards are
screwed into each other and it is now one long square, basically. - It's a big bed.
- A big bed. (chuckles) - A really big bed, but there is nothing to stop these boards from
literally just moving around. I guess Paul's on it
now, so I can't move it. But technically, we could slide
this whole structure around. - Yeah.
- So to stop that, what we're going to do here is
put a two foot rebar section on every single corner piece. So this piece here, that
piece there is gonna get one, the middle section's gonna get two 'cause that's gonna be
where the most force is pushing outwards. This should keep it all in place. And we were just talking as we built this, that the cool thing about this
bed is that it's also going to stop all the runoff of
mud and dirt into the pond, which is actually
something we struggled with in the previous year when
we had a bunch of rain. - For sure. It's really bad last year.
- Really bad. Like the whole pond turned brown. (both laughing)
So like not exaggerating. So this is actually a multi-purpose thing. It's going to frame up the bed
nicely, allow us to split it, and it's also going to protect the pond. (energetic music) All right, Paul, what do you think? - We got it all in and-
- It's all in. - It was perfect. (chuckles) - [Jacques] (laughs) It's pretty decent. It's pretty decent.
- Pretty good. - [Jacques] Look, I mean, we're talking about a 24-by-24 foot
raised bed essentially. And this isn't bad. So let
me show you what we did here. As you saw, we have the corners with two lag screws going
into the other timber. And then every single one of
these end boards has a piece of rebar hammered into it. You get into these middle
sections, you have the joints like this where we cut the 45 and then each one of
these gets one, two rebar. So every single wall basically
has four rebars in it to hold it all together. This whole dimension
now is all squared up, actually, honestly,
that's pretty straight. - [Paul] It is. - [Jacques] Like.
(both laughing) It's actually quite straight. So I'm very pleased with that. So basically now the last
thing we're gonna do here is level this area. We're going to just move
all the soil around. I mean, perfect? - No.
- No? (laughs) - Close. Maybe.
- Close. Maybe. We're gonna just try to at
least fill in these gaps, try to get it at least visually level. And then we're thinking
about putting a cover crop. But first we need to level this up. (light music) I think we're done. - I think so.
- Honestly. Thoughts? - [Paul] Looks great. This and the other area that we did. I mean... - I think he'll be happy.
- I think so. (Jacques laughs)
I hope so. - I mean...
- He better be. - He better be.
(both laughing) So here's what it looks
like. We did get it. Honestly, pretty level on
the wood here or on the soil, I should say. I'm surprised it wasn't
that hard to do this, but basically this whole
patch of the garden is now devoted to you guys. We'd love to hear what you guys think. We'd love to test out
whatever you guys want. So keep on growing. Good luck in the garden and
we'll see you guys next time.
