 Well, it's finally warm enough to be Working outside and it's not raining for once which is nice because all next week. It's supposed to rain, so I am making hay literally while the Sun shines camera is riding in a Wagonful of hay or I guess not technically hay. I'm taking a little liberties there. It's grass clippings Or more than clippings. It's long bits of glass grass that I cut with the side in the front yard and now I'm Taking them back to the compost and you're riding along so welcome to food McGatin So this week I am working To get as much done as I can before it starts raining at least outside and once it rains I'll be working just primarily in the greenhouse but Here we have What will break down to be probably less than one wheel bell full of compost And I need about two dozen wheelbarrows full of compost each year, so Even though it looks like a lot right now this breaks down Into a disappointingly small amount So this week on food McGatin, you'll see me mowing the lawn planting out corn making beds weeding and Generally just being as busy as I possibly can be Until it starts raining again, so that's gonna be the name of the game. I think for the next month I have to do a little maintenance on my side and It's something called peening P-e-e-n. You've probably heard of a ball peen hammer. That's what you do with a ball peen hammer. You peen things It just basically means hitting cold metal hammering cold metal to change the shape and This blade is really thin and when I hit something that's Woody stem or something that's a little bit tougher than it should It can bend and deform just a normal wear and tear it can crack and get micro fissures along the cutting surface And gets out of alignment yadda yadda yadda, so once every oh Once every eight or so hours of use I will peen it And I will beat That sharp edge back into shape So here for example, you can see How the edge is kind of beaten up. It's got nicks and it's uneven So I I'm gonna try and fix that and all I'm using here is a Narrow anvil and a broad Hammer I could use this narrow side and a broad anvil that takes more skill. This is a lot easier This doesn't actually make it too much sharper For that I have to use my My stone here. It's got rough sides and then smoother sides a lot sharper So this is a this is a 55 centimeter of Falkie blade from Italy and It's very different than an American style scythe So this is more of an American style scythe and you can see how the blade and how it connects to the wood are straight This is different than my Italian side Which I'll show you in a minute and basically the bend comes from the wood and so when you're cutting The blade lies flat on the ground, but it's because the wood has to bend for that to happen, right? This blade is also a lot heavier. This whole thing actually weighs probably twice as much as what I use and so you can see The blade sits flat on the ground at the handle straight Whereas to make this blade sit flat on the ground the handle has to bend This wood also like I said weighs significantly less which for my money is nice because if you're doing this all day then having a light scythe Is is much nicer all this side material at least my my modern stuff from one side revolution I'll link to their website right now, but look at one side revolution calm. They have all kinds of videos and Basically any scythe or scything accessory you could you could hope to have Botan Anderson the guy who runs that Also gets workshops and things about teaching people how to use a scythe properly and that's where I learned I'm not an expert on using a scythe, but I do like that. It's quiet. It doesn't require a lot of gas Nothing like that. It's relaxing quiet again just It's a more enjoyable way for me to mow the lawn I try and keep what I have to mow to a minimum and we're gonna reuse this as you'll see in a little bit I mean, I can have a little guy on my back and do this and it's Not that hard and it's Friendly to the environment. It's just great. I enjoy it Now I'm not an expert on this or anything else But most people think the side goes like this and you cut things by going across the blade But that's not really how it goes Really what it is it's going along the blade So this I you know it does cut things, but it's just not the right way to do it It's just it's not efficient way to do it It doesn't move things and it the blade isn't designed to do that. It's a thin blade. So you want to do is slide And barely move forward only a couple inches each time, but it slices The front picks up the vegetation then it gets sliced on the beard or the back This line is called a windrow So a couple of weeks ago I built this compost hutch and I have a pallet up here on top But I'm gonna put some shingles on it and these shingles are recycled cedar shingles that I tore off the house They're kind of rotted. I don't really care. It's not a big deal of water gets through if there's some drips I just don't want my compost pile to be constantly rained on So, you know, these will eventually just go right into the compost, which is nice And for those of you that know how to install cedar shingles, this is not the correct way. I'm not overlapping them properly I'm not spacing them properly. I'm not even gonna line them up proper because It's a compost hutch. I don't care You want to learn how to install cedar shingles go to the cedar shingle bureau of America's website and have a manual For those of you out there that are watching for tens of viewers You know, one of you knows how to do single cedar shingles. Yeah, I know I'm doing it wrong. I don't care And now I just have to add some shingles to the front and now through the magic of editing It's done. So now what I'm gonna do is just add a lot of my carbon here The freshly cut grass Into my hutch and to balance it out. I went ahead and got chicken droppings. I'm just gonna do Couple shovel pulls of ammonia holding chicken poo and a whole bunch more grass and vegetation And To get this to heat up I need to give it enough oxygen. So I got to be out here every couple of days Pulling all this out. That's why I leave the front off. I don't have a front to my compost bins I can just pull it right out and then do this again. I lift and separate Toss it in Last time I did this it was already warm. Oh Yeah, it's pretty hot. I would say Easily a hundred degrees but I want to get it up to 160. I really want to get this cooking and burn it up the Seeds and the bad microbes in here. I want to get it as hot as I possibly can This might be something I do in the winter in the greenhouse to add a little extra heat. It's an idea. I'm touring with I Try and make everything go in a circle So my lawn clippings become compost my chicken poo becomes compost That all helps me grow more food for the chickens and ourselves which There's one big cycle Couple weeks ago on the blog I published an excerpt from one of my favorite series. That's the Discworld series by Terry Pratchett and in it They have a compost pile that becomes Alive and tries to eat people and I publish that Under the headline of compost goals. You can find that at lowtechinstitute.org and have a read of that yourself Looks like it's overflowing now But give it two or three weeks It'll have settled down to half this size in three months It'll be a quarter and by one year from now. I'll be lucky if it's a whole wheelbarrow full So this summer I was hoping to do a study But we didn't get funding and then this whole crisis happened anyway, so that's fine Basically what I wanted to look at was something called polycropping and polycropping is the opposite of monocropping monocropping is when you plant an entire field full of corn beans squash, whatever and Many native and even permaculture and modern planting Ideas it's not that some plants are complementary and when you plant them together They help one another and the oldest polycrop that we know of More or less is corn beans and squash the so-called three sisters that were really common across North America before contact and Corn beans and squash were grown in such a way that the corn would grow up Making a trellis for the beans to crawl up them and the squash would spread out and suppress weeds And the beans would provide nitrogen to the soil So they were a symbiotic system helping one another Now my study wants to look at how that affects yield And so what I've done is I've split these two equally sized areas. This one's a trapezoid This one's a triangle, but they're the same area and what I'm doing is I'm planting corn beans and squash alone on this side and I'm planting the same amount of corn beans and squash together on this side They'll both get the same amount of compost those same get the same amount of growing area They'll get the same everything except these will be grown together as a polycrop These will be grown independently as three separate monocrops at the end of the season I should be able to count up and weigh the different amounts of food grown on each of them to see if there's an actual Difference between what's grown in polycrop over here and what's grown in monocrop over here So what I've done is I have hod up 12 inch mounds every three feet for corn here that each have received five kernels of corn and two quarts of compost and that will get dumped in here and Then I will thin them down to three corn plants per mound on this side. I've grown I have 18 inch mounds at four foot spacing they get a gallon of compost and they're going to get both corn and Beans at the same amount that we do over here, but these are going to be separate and these are going to be combined So today I am busy Howing up these mounds. It's a lot more work than some other planting Which is what I prefer but in terms of doing this study. This is probably the best way to do it The corn field is planted Both the Polycrop and the monocrop The oats are beginning to come up as are the weeds But there are oats the turnips are sprouting nicely. I Need to weed between the rows The beans have been a little slow to germinate and something got in and started eating my delicious peas So I had to find the short in the fence and fix it and now I have to reweed and trellis all the peas Once a day, I pull the plastic cover off of this box of Straw with my psyllium which you can see growing through in the white and I give it a spritz of water Hopefully before long we'll see pinning which is basically little incipient mushrooms Growing right out of the my psyllium. We don't have anything yet But once that starts happening it'll fruit for a couple of weeks And I'll be able to flush it again, and it'll fruit for another couple weeks and maybe even a third time So we'll see how many pounds Of oyster mushrooms we get out of this cube of straw which then gets composted full circle All right now we got lettuce Now you might be thinking hey This looks like a lot more work to plant lettuce than I do I just till my garden and then plant Lettuce seeds and Then I just send them to the distance in space. I want you seem like you have to do a couple extra steps here And that's absolutely true. This is more work There is a inverse proportion between efficiency and Production the the more time you put in the more Product you can get out of it often up to a point. Obviously there's diminishing returns at some point but You know these nine plants came from nine seeds. I'm thinning them out now, right? So I get more plants per seed packet But I spend more time so it's a trade-off Cheat packets are or worse see cheap I'll probably have way more seeds than I need next year and maybe I won't do this, but It's just a different way to do it It's less energetically efficient. I have to do more work, but I get pretty good results at least so far We'll see how that goes throughout the season. You'll get to see that as We go along That time for more peas So next to my fava beans, I'm gonna grow cucumbers, so they'll grow up and over as the fava beans Peter out, so Cucumbers will take over after the fava beans are done. Okay, so essentially remember I have cardboard smothering all the weeds and so I Could either put a lot of compost on top of this which I don't have or I can poke through a small spot So that the roots of the cucumber plant can dig down into my nice soil And I can use that existing fertility. I Can plop down some growing mix there and then in each hole I'll put two seeds and then I Will thin it to one if both emerge. I'll pick the best-looking one and snip the other And so then I'll do this for all of them and then I'll give them a bit of a drink and Hopefully then we'll have this trellis full of cucumbers in not too long. Now I get to make Similar planting of beets so they'll grow in a clump I'm going to take advantage of having lots of mustard seeds, and I'm just going to disturb all of the All of the weeds that are growing here already so that they die And I'm just going to top seed it with a whole bunch of mustard seeds and just rake them in not even in rows Not even anything like that and just let hundreds of them come up Mustard and I'll pick those out between what are going to be rows, and I'll leave the the rows to grow bigger Peas I do plant them directly this way I pull a six inch wide trench and then I drop them in and these are Langston's progress number nine shell peas I probably have enough for two more rows, and that'll be the last of my peas for the spring Hopefully it doesn't get too hot too quickly and these have time to bear fruit. Well, not quite fruit, but you know what? I mean and gray out the nice thing is It's not going to stress the plants out and they'll have a day to establish themselves before They really get Hit with Sun I'm gonna put these tomatoes as deep as I can Because their stems will send out roots. So right now this one's roots are only That long what if I bury it up to there? It doubles the effective root depth These are German Johnson tomatoes. It's a beef steak style Tomato So I'm planting them by the house Because these will be something we'll be slicing and eating On a more regular basis then say the paste tomatoes, which will wait until they're fully ripened a Whole bunch of them all at once to harvest Now tomato cages are not really my favorite way to Keep tomatoes And I'll show you my other trellises when I get those going But I had them and they're here. So I'll use them Week in the books and Boy, I got tired just watching all this videos again It was a really productive week, which is nice because next week it's gonna rain and so stick around for that We'll be working the greenhouse and doing some other projects that we can do inside and really this is important Please do share us. Please reach out send this video out to friends family Anybody share on your social media anything like that. It's it's really helpful for us to get the word out about this and To talk to more people reach more people about the the project we've been carrying out So feel free to reach out send me an email scott at low tech Institute.org or just leave a comment below in the video And I'll try and respond. Maybe if you have a question or something like that. I can respond to it in the video I'm happy to do that Don't forget to check out our blog low tech Institute org Subscribe all those things, you know the drill by now Please do that and stay safe out there. Take care of yourselves