 We've been visiting our neighbors to collect some composted goat manure. Even the boy came along to meet some goats. So I wanted to come on and just do a real brief video really shortly just to kind of address something that is going around which is COVID-19. Obviously when we plan to do this web series, which we started thinking about last November, December, we had no idea that COVID, the COVID pandemic would be going across the world and shutting down a lot of the economy. Actually paralleling a lot of what we plan to do and some folks have said, oh, why don't you just change to a COVID diary? The reason is, number one, we're all living that. We all know what that's like. This goal is to look at fossil fuels because when this pandemic is over and it will be over someday, whether or not we have a resurgence in the fall or not, it's going to be over at some point. That's what history tells us with pandemics. We're still going to have the problem of fossil fuels and we're still going to have to figure out how to live without fossil fuels. So that's why I'm going to continue along the no fossil fuels line and not change over to a COVID video. I appreciate the thought behind it and it's not a bad point and a lot of the lessons that we learn while converting off of fossil fuels can also be used in any time of disruption including COVID. But even when COVID's gone, we're still going to have to deal with the same problem that we're dependent on fossil fuels. So so that's my little spiel about why, why we haven't switched over to a COVID diary. This is supposed to be a window into an alternative reality where fossil fuels collapsed and I don't know if fossil fuels it collapsed, perhaps this would have spread a lot more slowly, huh? Okay, I gotta go. Thanks. One thing that's clear during this whole crisis is that we can't just be thinking about ourselves. And so what I've done is I've talked to my neighbor who used to be a market gardener who has a pretty big space here and a lot of extra seed potatoes. If he would volunteer the space and the seed potatoes, I would volunteer the labor. We're going to put this whole quarter acre, fifth of an acre into potatoes. So literally grow tons of potatoes this year. It'll be 2,000 pounds. It could be more. I don't know. And what we're going to do if this crisis has passed is donate them to food banks. If the crisis hasn't passed, then we're going to share them with our neighbors. We're going to need them. I'm working on the community potato plot again. And I'm taking my neighbors to the soil. Yesterday we planted 360 potatoes and we'll do another 300. So now each row gets compost. Some of the other potatoes we did a different way where we put the potato down first and then the compost on top. That was the rows that we did yesterday. Now we're going to compare them to the rows here where we dig the compost in first and then put the potatoes. To see if it makes a difference. A lot of times people ask me for gardening advice and my advice usually is do what you usually do for half of your, half of whatever you're trying to test. And then do the new way for the other half and see which works out better because you need some sort of control. If you don't have a control then you don't know if it actually worked. And now after the potatoes are placed by my neighbor Phil, I'm going through and covering them up with mulch. Well, it's been kind of a quiet week because we have three days of rain. So it's probably going to be a short video today because I just don't have that much material. I've been inside working on office projects rather than outside working on garden projects. The few things that I have gotten done are planting potatoes with my neighbor and working on garden beds trying to get things planted before the rain even though I didn't get it all done. One thing that has changed is we've started to really feel the pinch at the grocery store and we are having a lot less variety in our diet because the garden hasn't fully come online yet. The next thing we're looking forward to is a whole bunch of salads. And that's going to be great because lately we've been living on dried beans, rice and the rest of our canned goods, which gets slightly monotonous and it's just the spring now. Because last winter we didn't plan for this crisis to happen. So we didn't have everything stockpiled that we needed to have a wider variety of diet. So this is kind of what's called the hungry time, which is what happens between when your winter stores start to dwindle and the new crops start to come in mid-summer. So we're in what's called the hungry time. The one thing about this time of year is that it makes us think about next year at this time. How are we going to be eating? What are we going to be eating? So it's just thinking in the right mindset already. And as you know, we've been able to go to the grocery store a lot less for only one price a month and as things become scarcer, they're also becoming more expensive. So we're able to buy less each time. We are really lucky though in that we have fresh eggs and we have a fair amount of the staple store as you saw in previous episodes. But again, as you can hear in the background, I have to work in here on lunch. And even though I haven't been showing it every week, I have been making new starts. Every week I've gotten more and more starts put into the oven, sprouted, and then put out into the garden. So I'm still working. It's just kind of repetitive and monotonous. So I don't want to have to make you say through that every week. Thanks for tomato sauce and cheese. Yum yum yum yum. Bed building continues. It's a never-ending process in the spring. And so here you can see a whole bunch of beds that I have to whip into shape so I can get them planted here in the next day or two, but there's tons of invasives and invasives are frustrating because they are very rigorous and they spread so easily. That's why they're invasive. They also like disturbed soils and context usually. So the more I disturb them sometimes the more they spread. That's not always true, but it can be. And so here we're dealing with a couple different things. There's wild parsnip. There's garlic mustard. And then this is Siberian squill, which was introduced to the neighborhood and looks really pretty because it has this blue flower and the bees like it early. But the problem is it gets on everything and it spreads so prolifically. It's a real invasive problem. Now that I have some beds prepared, it's finally time to get actually planting. So I have some onion starts that my neighbor gave me as well as some some sets here that I have to get in the ground before it rains for the next three days. And this is a good lesson for myself. Always put your tools back where they belong because I cannot find my planter, my favorite planter that I use to plant the peas. So I'm having to use the back claw of my hammer. And because I have put a straw over cardboard and the cardboard is a weed barrier, I have to use something to puncture that weed barrier to set each of the onions in. Right? So I make a small indentation and slide that onion right in. About six inches apart. Now the rows, rows of foot apart and we should be in business. So what I've got going here are a couple of rows of carrots. And the carrots, carrots aren't as vigorous as other plants that would push up through a lot of mulch. So I've had to leave this area open and I'm gonna get weeds and I'm just gonna have to weed this area because that's about all you can do for carrots, but I've covered between them and I'm gonna mulch and hopefully that'll suppress some of the weeds that are here, but it won't get all of them. I know that. Tomatoes. My neighbor who used to be a market gardener still has this high house, this hoop house, and he's letting us use a little bit of space in here. So today, all these tomatoes into a couple of rows next to this trellis. And this will be a good chunk of our tomatoes for the year. There's a rainstorm coming and so I want to take advantage of this moisture. These are currents and two years ago my friend Greg gave me cuttings, which are basically just, you know, sticks of currents that he cut off of his bushes. And I planted them all over the property, but I also had a big mound of soil here. So I stuck them into park them and let them at least grow for a couple of years. Well, I waited to see if the rest of the currents took or not. And I do have a couple places where the current bush that I tried to plant died. And so now I'm going to take these things out of storage and go plant them. Dry before rainstorm so that they get a lot of water into their newly planted root system. Well, that's all we have this week. It's kind of a short episode and the reason is, as you just saw, it's been raining and I lost three days to rain. So I've largely been working inside and on other projects, frankly, because that's what I do when it rains. Also, I've been making beds and kind of doing a lot of repetitive stuff. Some people have a really romantic notion about living out in the country and growing a lot of your own food and all this stuff and that's great. But just know it's a lot of repetitive, repetitive, repetitive work. So I listen to a lot of books on tape and things like that. So I wanted to spare you watching me make garden beds again because that's what I've been doing. I've been planting, I've been hoeing weeds and just doing the kind of repetitive stuff that I need to do every week, especially in the spring, to really get a good bed and grow area established. Hopefully, in the coming week, we'll start to jazz it up with new and exciting tasks. We'll probably go into the bees and check them out, see how they're doing, as well as move the chickens, which are now, the chicks are now growing up and fledging. We'll move them outside to an outdoor space because they're starting to stink in our living room. So we have some stuff coming up. This week was just a little light because of the weather and, you know, that's kind of how it goes when you are constrained and working outside. That's just how it goes. I hope you guys enjoyed the episode anyway. Don't forget to share us with a friend, subscribe, post us on some forums. A couple of people have posted us on different forums and that's been really fun. So thanks, please consider doing that to help share what we're up to. Subscribe, like, visit our website. We've got blogs coming out, sometimes related to food and we get in, sometimes related to other things. I have a blog post coming up on Compost. Who doesn't love Compost? So anyway, check that out at lowtechinstitute.org. You can find me at Scott at lowtechinstitute.org or any of our social media outlets, Instagram, Facebook, all of that. So thanks again for watching. Hope you're doing okay out there and take care.