 Well, things continue to move along here in the greenhouse. We've got tomatoes here and cucumbers here that you saw in plants in the previous video. And because they're inside, even though it is potentially sprinkling today, I need to water them. And I come in here every other day right now to water these plants. As they get larger and start fruiting, I may have to be in here every day. Right now I'm just using a watering can and water that gets collected. As the rain falls on the roof here, it runs down and drips off into these buckets along the side. A clever idea that my neighbor Phil has been using for years. It works out really well for me. These also have soaker hoses installed. And what I'm going to do to save myself the half hour or 20 minutes it takes every couple of days to water all these is hopefully rig up a system where I can use the soaker hoses and this rainwater to water everything in a much shorter time. So we'll see how that goes as I build it. One of the reasons I want to switch to the soaker hose is that spraying like this often kicks up pathogens and things on the ground and makes the leaves of the tomato plants a little wetter and more likely to get infected, bacteria, wilt, that sort of thing. So I really want to avoid or get away from this broadcast sort of watering that I'm doing. Because of the plastic mulch these really don't need all that much water. Much of the water is retained down by the roots. I don't have anything in these spots but I want to keep them moist so that when I do plant them the compost isn't all dried out. The last two here I've got some lemon. Now over here I've got a couple of... On this side I've got cucumbers, international pickling cucumbers. When it was hot last week they exploded and grew almost doubled in size overnight it seems like. And they're working their way upwards and soon I'll be able to attach them to these upright lines. We will have hopefully lots of cucumbers for eating and canning. My helper here likes to pull on each line as we go by. Just a test to make sure that it's still holding on and nice and tight. There's fish, right? Big helper here. And just on cue it starts to rain. Welcome to another week of Foodmageddon about planting beans. And this week we got another busy one. We moved the chickens around. We work on irrigation in the greenhouse and I accidentally hit a deal with my car. And so we'll talk a little bit about what happens when you hit a deal with your car. Luckily as fossil fuels become scarcer we are not driving as much. Which is really helpful in not wanting to hit another deer. And this month gas is just getting so expensive. I think we're only going to be able to go to the grocery store once. And even at the grocery store it's not like there's fresh produce anymore. Or even the electricity for running the refrigerators and stuff. That whole supply chain is starting to break down and become problematic. So we're getting pretty much down to dry goods. And things are expensive and hard to get. So we only get a couple of trips to the grocery store. I think I'm going to have to take my bike this month. It's getting too expensive to drive the car anywhere. Not to mention, like I said I hit a deal with the car. So it's kind of out of commission right now anyway. I think fossil fuels collapsing three or four months ago. People are starting to finally get into a groove of being home. And thinking about long term solutions to problems like food. And taking care of themselves. And getting some sort of stable situation put together for themselves and their families. The more dependent you were on non-fossil fuel. The more dependent you were on fossil fuel related systems for your life before. The more disrupted you are now. And the more you had some resiliency or traditional ways of growing and producing food. The less affected you'd be. That is, the more food of yours that you had a hand in producing. The less affected you'd be by the loss of fossil fuels. And now I want to just show you a brief overview of the beds that I made oh two months ago. That have the cardboard and then the mulch and straw on top. And then I plant through that. You can see there's no weeds except for here on the pathway. And this is what this whole area would look like, like this, if I hadn't smothered everything. And so that amount of time and effort I put into smothering all the beds has really paid off. And that I haven't had to fight this really intense weed load. And still I have a lot of plants that are able to come up through it. A lot of the beds are still bare because I'm about to plant out the, really the bulk. The last remaining plants out of the greenhouse. And then it should really explode and start to take over. In the last video I planted these cucumbers. And they're already coming up. And so hopefully within a week or two they'll be tall enough I can attach some of this trellis and they can be on their merry way. These are some of the first peas I planted out. And they're already on their second trellis, line of trellis. And these guys here are ready for their third. And we already have flowers and we'll have pea pods coming here soon. So I'm looking forward to that. So here's kind of a cool thing. A couple of years ago I had some mustard and kale planted too close and they crossed bread. And it came up with this delicious kind of kale mustard hybrid that tastes like mustard greens. So it's got that real sharp intense green flavor. But it's got the consistency of kale so it's a bit heartier. And it's one of my favorite things to add to salads. And somebody is ready to be done. Someone's ride is done so I gotta go take care of that. The chicks have really grown up and are probably about ready to be introduced to the rest of the flock. I think we have three boys and four girls. Well it's an exciting day. Five of our seven chickens are going to meet, well they're actually meeting their parents but they don't know it. So these chicks we hatched out a few weeks ago. And I've got two of the chickens sequestered back in their brood coop where they've grown up. And I'm going to be giving those to some neighbors. Five of these are going to live here. We're going to keep two or three of the hens and the rest are going to butcher eventually. But they're about to meet the rest of my flock, my adult chickens. And these pullets don't know it but the rooster here is their father and these hens are their mothers. But because they've never met they're going to just interact as strangers which can be a little, can be aggressive. It can be very puffy. You'll see the rooster puff himself up and get very big here in a second. But I'm going to let them out. They're penned in their own yard and then my chickens are penned in their own yard. So they're just going to have to look at each other all day and not be able to interact for everyone's own safety. So let's see. When I open these guys up here they should come out. Come on. Here's a rooster or what will be a rooster. You can see his big comb and thick legs. That's probably a rooster because he has real strong black and white coloring and a stronger comb. Let's see who else do we have. Come on. Notice they're the first out of the gate. Also they're a little more aggressive, right? So also a key to rooster. There's probably a hen. This is probably a hen. Chickens love order. Chickens love a pecking order. I mean that's where we get the phrase. They want to know who's on top. I think the rooster has seen them. He's now freaking out. So let's see what happens when we let him out. There's Prince my smart chicken. Yeah that white one's definitely a rooster. See how he very assertively goes over and says hello. Who are you? So he was probably the top of my chicks. But he will definitely be the bottom. Over here because he is half the size of the hens. Who are again half as big as my rooster. So over here I've been doing an experiment with solarizing. Solarizing is when you use plastic to make a super greenhouse effect underneath. Where it's spread out on the ground and it kills all the vegetation underneath because the temperature is too hot and it's deprived of moisture. And I've tried two different methods. So over here I've just put the plastic down and I've left it for a week. And over here I put the plastic down during the day when it's hot to really kill the grass. And then at night I pull this back and let the water evaporate leaving it potentially to be drier. And I want to compare is it more effective to solarize and just leave the plastic down or to pull it up every night. And so I'm going to pull this plastic back and see if there's a difference between the two areas. And I'd say yes there is. There's definitely more green in the area that I have just left the plastic on. Whereas where I remove it every night it's definitely dead. I think it got drier faster. Yeah this is definitely moisture and wetter over here. There's even standing water from where I just dumped it out. But yeah this area definitely didn't get killed as effectively as back here. I'm definitely going to bring the plastic back and give this a couple more days over here. And I'm going to plant some beans back in this area. My polycrop steady continues. And back here are my beans that I planted last week. You saw that. So from here back at beans and beyond that where it needs to be weeded that's corn. And then from here over this is six plants or six mounds of squash each one has two squash plants. Over on this side is my polycrop. This is monocrop one of each one section of each. This is polycrop where they're all planted together. Four or five pieces of corn that will be trimmed down to three. Three beans that will be trimmed down to two. And then interspersed in between them are six mounds of squash two plants each. And so the idea with polycrop like I said in other videos that you can see and go back and look at. The idea here is the corn grows up. The beans crawl up the corn. The squash spreads out and suppresses weeds. We don't have that over here, but we also don't have plants competing for the same nutrients as we do over here. I will say these mounds are the same size. So they have the same amount of soil here as they do there per plant. These plants have the same amount of compost as these per plant. So I've kind of removed that as a variable. They all have the same amount of soil relative to each plant. They all have the same amount of nutrients relative per plant and space. That area is the same as this. They're just in a different configuration trapezoid versus triangle. The only difference is these are growing together and these are growing apart. So if these grow more or less productive than these, I'll have some sort of result to say polycropping is more or less effective. So here's a problem I was trying to find a solution to. This is a soaker hose. It's like a regular hose except it's porous. And so when the water pressure is turned on, water seeps out of it in a gentle way. Watering the roots of the plants and not broadcast spraying like a sprinkler, which hits the leaves and often hits the ground and splashes up microbes and things off the ground. So it's just a better for the plant. It's healthier and the nice thing about it is really that it just helps keeps plants healthy. There's less loss of water through the broadcast irrigation. You lose some of the water through evaporation. So I don't have a spigot over here and I can run a hose all the way over from my property, but it's kind of a pain. So I was trying to think how can I use this soaker hose often. And we have five gallon buckets here of water that get filled with the rain. So I have plenty of water, just no pressure. And I thought, well, I could suspend a bucket from the ceiling of this greenhouse and that would build up enough pressure to probably run the soaker hose. So I could have a pulley system. I had this whole idea in my head. And then the other day it got really hot. And I thought, well, we've got this black fabric down here. I should probably try and cool it off because it gets real hot in the greenhouse. Maybe I'll pour water on this fabric. And what I realized was there's a slope. This greenhouse is on a slope. And so when I poured the water out, it basically formed a canal between these two rows of plants. These are my neighbor's plants. These are my plants. And that got me thinking, I used to be an archeologist and I thought back to the irrigation style of the Southwest US where people would have canals and check dams and that would deliver water to corn. And I thought, what a great idea. I could absolutely do that. And so what I did was I took this ground cover that was stapled down to the ground. I pulled up the staples. So I staked this up out of the way. And then I used a hoe to dig a canal just a few inches deep. And then over here I put a berm of wood chips because I have them available. And then I graded the whole thing with a concrete rake. And then every two plants I added a check dam. Basically I added one of these pieces of wood and that would create little places where the water would pool and this fabric is not very porous, but it will weep if water's standing on it. So basically I created a canal with controlled check dams to water all of these tomatoes. And I watered them this morning and you can still see it's damp here and hopefully the roots of these plants will start working their way over towards the moisture. That's the goal. So I still water them a little bit. For the most part I just water down here and trust that they're going to find that moisture. And so here I take my five gallon bucket and I slowly pour it over the edge. The water begins to pour down. And if you follow us on Instagram you saw this posted a week or two ago. So if you're not following us on Instagram go ahead and head over there and find us at low tech institute all one word on Instagram. And occasionally I post little videos and pictures of things I'm doing that day so you can be ahead of the curve and you don't have to wait for these episodes to come out. So as I pour in the water you can see how the check dams go to work. So this water is pooling here it will soak into the ground and water this plant. And a little bit of water gets by and it goes all the way down just that way. So a single bucket of five gallons will water all of these plants and then it will soak in which is about how much water would take me if I used the watering can so they're getting a similar amount of water which is great. And here it comes just slowly seeping down here at the very end and that's just fine. I don't want it to go too fast. Canals that were too steep would wash out their banks in the ancient world where they used a lot of canals so they wanted just a one or two percent slope which is about what we have. This is actually perfect for canal-fed irrigation. So on one of our few car rides recently I hit a deer and it was completely unavoidable. There was a guardrail there was just no way to avoid it. It ran down the road in front of me after it was just unavoidable unfortunately. And well I can't look a gift horse in the mouth I deer hunt in the fall and so this deer was freshly killed and someone's moving the camera hey don't move the camera you little guy and this deer was freshly killed and so I harvested it I harvested the meat and this is some of it I have soup cubes I've got stuff that I'm going to grind up I have a few roasts and some other cuts out of it I'm going to spare you I'm not going to show you the whole deboning and butchering of a deer although this fall I will probably have an entire episode on deer hunting and butchery and all of that because I know some people don't like to see that I'll contain that all in one episode so those of you that want to watch it can but suffice it to say we ended up with probably about 10 pounds of meat which isn't going to be an insignificant part of meat because we can't buy meat really at this point we have our chickens and we have venison and that's really about it so this was unfortunate for the car but fortunate for us I suppose well there we have it another week and somebody's about to tip over my camera hold on somebody wanted to come say hello next week we'll be going back into the beehives because we have to split them into two we'll be working out in the garden and that's pretty much what we're going to be doing all summer luckily we're on the down slope we're through the big spring work time and so now we're going to have to start thinking about other things like building a wheat thresher and winnow where that can work with bicycle power among other things so maybe we'll get going on that next week so stay tuned like and subscribe the video as they say to be kept up to date when we have new episodes out every friday you can also find us on lowtechinstitute.org you can listen to our podcast the lowtech podcast on most of the podcast carriers and you can always get in touch with me scott at lowtechinstitute.org is my email or you can find us on twitter low underscore techno etc etc etc so we hope you're doing well out there and staying safe and staying cool as it's starting to heat up here even in wisconsin thanks take care