We Can't Wait to Show You!

hi everybody welcome back to living traditions homestead well over the course of this summer and the spring we've started several projects and we haven't really shown you how they're doing or whether they did well or whether they were a complete failure so today we wanted to follow up with you on a couple things sometimes there's so much going on here on the homestead and on the farm that we may be able to show you guys things as we start them but showing you the progression of things all summer long sometimes there's just so much going on we can't do a video about every single thing so like sarah said today we wanted to take the time to just kind of update on some of those things there's just a few things that you guys have asked for updates on and those are the things that we're going to talk about today the first one is kind of an experiment that we're doing this year for those of you who have been watching us for a while you'll know that one thing we've really struggled with over the last few years is growing sweet potatoes our ground here is very hard we have a lot of clay soil and by fall time by this time of year our ground is just rock hard which makes it super hard to dig up the sweet potatoes we've tried amending a little bit over time but it just hasn't helped a whole lot so this year we tried to do something completely different this year we decided to use the big raised bed garden in one of our greenhouses we decided to try that because we used that raised bed for fall winter and spring planting but we haven't done anything in there over the summer because you guys just get so hot in there that we were afraid nothing would grow right so we thought you know what sweet potatoes they love the heat now we did put a shade cloth over it to help it not be like a total sauna in there and put some fans in there we put fans in there we laid down some drip irrigation so we could put it on a timer to make sure that it watered well and we planted our sweet potato slips in there just as an experiment some of you have been very curious about how that's gonna work because you're thinking maybe that would work for you guys too right so just before we go over there to take a look at them just to give you some idea the greenhouse that we're growing these in the greenhouse itself is 16 feet wide by 32 feet long and the raised bed that we have in there is six feet wide by 22 feet long so it is a big raised bed so let's take a walk over to the greenhouse and see how those sweet potatoes are doing well you guys look at the sweet potatoes they have gone crazy i can't even believe it they're like just bursting out you can't even see the raised bed garden in here they're just bursting out all over the place so it is safe to say that these sweet potatoes are doing fantastic in here now like we said before they are on drip irrigation so there are i think three or four drip lines in here and we have it on an automatic timer it's watering every three days for i think two hours the shade is perfect the heat is perfect everything apparently is perfect looking at least i mean the proof is underneath the soil it's too early for us to start harvesting we still need to wait yet we're going to be waiting for about 120 days after we've planted these so we've got a while yet we planted late but you guys if if this here is any indication as to what is going on underneath the soil it's going to be a great sweet potato harvest this year one nice thing about sweet potatoes is that you don't really have to wait until the sweet potatoes themselves are grown to start taking advantage of these plants because the leaves themselves are just packed with vitamins and nutrients so we have been cutting back some of these and basically cooking them like you would spinach and been enjoying them like a cooked green i know a lot of people will put them in their smoothies i'm thinking about maybe freeze drying some of these and using them as a powder inside of smoothies and in my soups and things like that so i'm definitely taking advantage of these and will continue to take advantage of these even before it's time to dig up the sweet potatoes the second thing that we want to give you guys an update on is our new idaho pasture piglets that we just recently got about two weeks ago we had two new gilts delivered down from wisconsin for those who don't know gilts are young pigs young female pigs that have not had babies yet once they be once they've had their first litter of babies they become sows but while they're young they're called gilts so we had two brand new gilts brought down from wisconsin from a great farm called duck creek pastures they delivered them about two weeks ago and these are registered idaho pasture pig gilts we now have three registered gilts and so in the coming years we'll be able to start breeding those with our registered bore and supplying registered idaho pasture pig breeder pigs to those of you in the home studying community who want to start raising idaho pasture pigs since they've been at our homestead for a couple weeks we thought you guys would like to see how they're doing if they've made themselves at home and when we brought them home they didn't have names yet right so we did come up with some names we're not going to talk about that just yet i actually think we have a watermelon in the garden that is a little bit too over riped for us to eat but the piglets are gonna love it so let's take that down to the piglets and see how they're doing well we're down by the pigs and you can see just how happy these piglets look i'm actually going to climb in here with them so that i can talk to you guys a little bit better about them now those of you who've been watching us for a while know we've been raising idaho pasture pigs for a few years now and we absolutely love the idaho pasture pigs mostly because their personality is so amazing so i know the one thing that you guys are waiting for is to hear what we've named them that way i can start calling them by their names too so we've named this little girl right here donna and this girl here is named linda those are two new pigs donna and linda yes and they are fitting in well and really getting used to us being out here with them and most importantly they're getting used to all the treats that we bring them which is what we're doing today too so i did pick a watermelon out of the garden that we're gonna give to them let me grab it here just like people pigs love watermelon on a nice hot day here you go girls so that good watermelon so these girls are just a few months old right now we'll be able to start breeding them when they're about eight or nine months old we'll judge it mostly based on their size at the time but right around that age is when it's okay to start breeding them so that'll be sometime next spring so hopefully by next summer we'll be able to start supplying some nice cute registered idaho pasture piglets for those of you who want to get into breeding as well i've pricked two other watermelons let's take it over to the other pig so not everybody gets jealous charlie i brought you a treat come here charlie now this is charlie our boar carol you want a watermelon too there you go come on pigs looks like i'm interrupting their nap time come on girls you want watermelon come on there we go you guys want a watermelon too myrtle's got to go for a dip on the way i think myrtle's hopefully pregnant and we'll be having babies in about another month i think she needs to relax from the heat a little bit all right you guys want a watermelon too there you go i knew myrtle would figure it out yeah you gotta get nice and fat for those babies mama you gotta keep your girlish figure up now sometimes it can be hard to tell on pigs whether or not they're pregnant just by looking but she's looking a little wide these days we're hoping she'll have a nice big litter this time last time she only had five piglets but hopefully this time who knows 12 14 120 no one knows but i'm anxious to find out all right that's it for the pigs okay those are the things that we wanted to update you guys on here at the homestead by the house so let's go over to the farm portion of the homestead so we can give you some updates there we're down in the greenhouse at the farm and i wanted to take some time to show you guys the ventilation system in this greenhouse we've done a couple videos now inside of this greenhouse and we kept telling you that we aren't quite ready with the ventilation system we needed to get the electricity hooked up in here and we finally have all of that done so today we want to show you guys how this ventilation system works and show you what we'll be doing to keep this greenhouse at a nice cool temperature all winter long so we've really two different types of ventilation systems in this greenhouse now for those of you who haven't been watching for a while this greenhouse is 20 feet wide and 60 feet long and it's what's considered a high sidewall uh greenhouse so the sidewalls on it are about eight feet tall and then the actual top of the greenhouse is about 12 feet tall so the first type of ventilation system that we have in here is what i would call kind of a passive ventilation system and that is that we are able to roll these sides up and you can see these are rolled up right now so these sides are completely open we can do this on both sides and it will just allow really good airflow through this greenhouse if it's so warm that we want even more airflow than that we can also roll up these two doors at the front and the back these are eight foot wide doors and these roll up to about 10 feet tall so we can just really get good air flow through here that along with the shade cloth on top keeps it pretty nice in here even during the hot part of the summer the other ventilation system that we have in here is an automated ventilation system which is really more for the cooler times of the year and for over the winter and that's what i want to show you next so the first part of this ventilation system are these fans that we have along the top of the greenhouse there's four of these inside of the greenhouse two of them pointing in this direction and two of them on the other side pointing in that direction these are called flow fans and basically what these do is they keep the air moving kind of in a circle around the inside of the greenhouse now this whole system is for when the sides are down and the whole thing is kind of shut down so these fans are really just to help keep the air circulating so you don't end up with just a lot of stagnant air the heat caught up at the top this really keeps things just moving around these are actually controlled by a switch that we put over the by the door so here is where we have our switch for our fan and we can just turn that on and that turns on all four of those flow fans now again there's no real need to have those on when the sides and everything are up this is for when the whole greenhouse is shut which we are starting to shut this every night because we are starting to get cooler temperatures at night and we don't want critters coming in here now that we have all of our buckets planted the other switch here are for the lights that we have in here i'm just using standard shop lights along the top of the greenhouse all right let's go look at the second part of this ventilation system on this end of the greenhouse we have a shutter system now this is hooked to a thermostat so that this will open and close at certain temperatures this will open and let in some cool air and then if that still isn't enough then a big fan on the other end of the greenhouse will turn on and open another shutter down there we'll walk down there and i'll show you that in a second okay down on the other end of the greenhouse here this from the inside looks exactly like the other side but on the outside of this is a big fan let's walk out there and take a look at it so this is the fan that's mounted to the outside of that shutter the shutter on the first end of the greenhouse has a motor that opens and shuts it this shutter system on this end actually opens when this fan kicks on it's actually the force of the fan that opens those shutters let's go inside i'll turn this on and show you how both parts of these work so here's our main sub panel that we have in the greenhouse and then below it is where we have wired a thermostat that works these two shutters on both ends of the greenhouse so basically this is a two-stage thermostat which means that we can set this at a certain temperature like say right now we set it at 80 degrees if it's below 80 degrees in the greenhouse both of those shutter systems are going to be completely closed but once it hits about 78 degrees that first shutter is going to open and start to allow some some fresh air some cool air to just kind of move into the greenhouse if the temperature in the greenhouse continues to rise and it gets above 80 degrees then the big fan is going to kick on and that's really going to cause air to move through here now again this is a system that we're mainly going to be using in the winter time because in the summer we'll keep this completely open during the winter the the thing with a greenhouse like this is that you're going to get a lot of temperature fluctuation between day and night when we have this completely shut in the winter if it's say 35 degrees outside but completely sunny it may get up to 85 or 90 degrees inside of the greenhouse for wintertime plants that we're going to be growing that's way too warm so we don't ever want to get that hot in the greenhouse during the winter it may feel really nice and it may be like a nice place to come out and feel like you're kind of in the tropics but as far as the plants are concerned that's way too hot so what this system will do is when it starts to get too warm again in the winter we'll probably set this at about 70. we probably won't ever want this greenhouse to get above 70 degrees in the winter so when it gets above 70 the system will kick on it'll pull some of that you know 35 degree air in from outside and it'll bring this down until it gets below 70. then both shutters will shut again and it'll stay off until it starts to rise again and this will keep a much more constant temperature in this greenhouse so we don't have that big fluctuation between day and night now in this greenhouse we're not having a heating system to keep it warm overnight in a greenhouse like this you really don't retain any heat overnight the soil and the buckets may retain just a little bit and it may help just a little bit one or two degrees but that's about it so this greenhouse overnight time when the sun isn't shining is going to be just about the same temperature that it is outside all of the plants that we grow over the winter all of the lettuces and spinach and turnips and all of the other things that we grow in here can take those cold nighttime temperatures so that's why this system will be great it'll help keep it cool during the day but overnight uh you know this greenhouse is still going to get just as cold as it is outside so let me show you how both of these parts work we'll turn them on and we'll show you exactly how they work first we'll start with the shutter down on this end all right i'm going to turn the power onto the shutter [Music] so if that shutter alone isn't doing its job and the temperature continues to rise [Music] so that is how the ventilation system in this greenhouse is going to work not only now while it's still hot out which it's almost 90 today but also over the winter we're excited to have this all automated so that over the winter we can grow some awesome veggies in here well the last thing that we want to follow up with you about is these trellises that we put up here double trellises to grow shade type plants over it to provide shade for the chickens i'm standing here in the chicken moat that goes all the way around a one acre piece of property for our orchard and for growing gardens and in the future berries we wanted a way to provide shade for our chickens because it's really sunny here so we thought if we brought some of our big buckets that we plant in we could plant fast-growing plants that would climb up and over here and provide them with shade while the plants that we chose to put in here we thought would be great because they're vining they grow pretty quickly but it ended up not working for us and there are two reasons why this system didn't work for us this year the plants that we chose even though they're pretty fast growing plants they just didn't grow fast enough we thought that planting them in the beginning of may they would grow big and lush by the time the chickens needed them and we thought that the chickens wouldn't need dense shade until later in the summer we didn't realize that it would be in the 90s already by the end of may and so they just didn't provide the shade that the chickens needed fast enough so the other issue with this system this year for us was water now we put these buckets around here we knew that there wasn't a good source of water and easy access to water in these locations and we thought it would be okay we'd bring our buckets out here to water all of these or our watering cans and at first we did a pretty good job but as the summer got busy as the summer got hot the watering just didn't happen as often as it probably should and so the plants just didn't thrive as well as they probably could have so in the future we hope to either do better or find something else we love the idea of having these trellises here we love the idea of having plants growing here because it's such a pretty thought hopefully we can make that happen better in the future but we just wanted to come to you and let you know that this was a failure but we think that there are ways to make this work so there you go a few things around the homestead that we've been meaning to give you guys updates on for quite some time now but we just haven't gotten around to it most things around the homestead are doing absolutely great but there's always those one or two things that you hope will do really well and sometimes the idea is just better than it actually is in reality you guys want to thank you so much for stopping by today remember that if you're enjoying our videos the best way to help us here is to share them on all your social media and with the good love if you would hit the subscribe button below until next time thank you so much for stopping by our homestead take care and god bless god bless

Channel: Living Traditions Homestead

Views: 128,654

Rating: 4.9809141 out of 5

Keywords: Living Traditions Homestead, Missouri, Ozark's, homesteading, Ozarks, self-sufficient, homesteaders, unjobbing

Id: AKN8msRNGN8

Length: 21min 14sec (1274 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 18 2021