 Before it happened, most of us thought about fossil fuels only when we filled up our cars. Then the whole extraction industry collapsed and we realized that something more important than transportation was completely dependent on these fuels. That was the food system. We never thought about the fact that from growing and harvesting to processing and transportation, our food was made using fossil fuels. This is the story of a family trying to cope with the loss of those fuels. We have to grow, harvest, and forage for ourselves in a new world. It's called foodmageddon. It's so close! Push! Push! Come on! Yeah! Another black one. That's what was last time I remember it was all black ones in the beginning. Yeah! We're gonna breathe it hard. That was so much work! Yay! You've got a friend now! Hi and welcome! It's the beginning of April and we're really enjoying spring. As you saw we have chickens hatching so that's really exciting. We are also working on the fence line. This time we're working on the fence on our property. We're planting out field peas. So we have to prepare those fields. I'll walk you through that. We're trying to make cheese and that's a bit of an experiment. And we have a couple other projects going on around here. So it should be a busy week. It's now the end of the first day of hatching. And we have four chicks, three black, one yellow. And the three black ones hatched early this morning. So they're ready to come out of the incubator. The yellow one just hatched. So he or she is going to stay for the rest of the night there. We have a couple more eggs that have pipped but haven't hatched yet. So their lungs are adjusting to air and all that. So they may or may not come on out the next 24 hours. And hopefully the rest of these will also pip and start coming out. So let's see as we move these black ones to their new habitat. So yeah we're really excited about the chickens coming out. Our hatch rate wasn't as good as we would have liked. We started out with 34 eggs but we only got 8 chickens which is actually pretty poor. Usually you can expect around 50% hatch rate. I think what the underlying thing was I kept them out too long before putting them in the incubator after they were laid by the hens. That's probably where I ran into trouble. So of course my big goal this year was to have the chickens hatch their own eggs. And the reason was it would save me all this trouble. I wouldn't have had to three times a day rotate all the eggs and make sure that everything is the right temperature and humidity and all that. I wouldn't have had to do that. And now I have another six weeks of babysitting these chicks to do that the mother isn't doing because none of the heads went broody. So what I have here is a box with a heat lamp and the heat lamp heats the space under it to about 100 degrees. 95 to 100 degrees. And the box is big enough that if they get warm they can run away from the lamp and if they get cold they can go under the lamp. And these are going to be their home for the next five, six weeks. So maybe I'll move them out into the garage if I can. But also, you know, super dangerous fire hazard in the house. A cardboard box with a heat source in it. Not a great thing. I have a smoke detector right here. But again, not ideal. Really wish the hands would win broody. Maybe next year. So as I bring each one into the new enclosure I have to dip its beak in water because otherwise it won't know to drink there. I mean how would they know? They don't have a mother to show them where to drink. And another thing you notice, there's no food in here. And that's because if I give them food they might eat a whole bunch of food and then they get what's called pasting up where all that food without water rehydrates in their intestines and then they get an obstructed bowel. And so we have to give them water for about 24 hours and then after they have water flowing through their system then we can feed them. So as long as one of them remembers where that water is and what it's for the rest of them will see them drinking. I also have some roosts in here. They might not use the roost. One of them is under the roost. They might not use the roost right now but if you don't have a roost in this area they never learn to sleep on a roost and then they'll sleep on the ground in the coop and that's a mess and a problem, especially in the winter. So you gotta have roosting areas in there for them to learn how to use. And now they get to hang out in here. The best part is they run around especially when there's more of them. They're all flocked together, run around and then they'll all fall down and sleep together. It's pretty cute. Why are you scuttling on the ground? Do you have leg problems? Alright, Yellowbeak might have leg problems so we have to watch to make sure that she or he stands up fully. I'm also spending as much time as I can outside still working on perimeter fences. This time I'm working on our property to get our permanent fencing in which is taking up a lot of time but it's again really important every night when I go out to the chicken coop I'm scaring away four or five rabbits out of our garden area so it's important that we get them out now otherwise they'll eat all of our starts. And now I'm on my fence line around our property. What I have here are some lines that need to be tightened up a fence to keep out deer and then a lower fence to keep out rabbits. Obviously not installed well this is loose, I need to dig it in this is all loose, I kind of threw it up last year but I need to get this in place and tight to keep the rabbits out of our grow beds. Accepted wisdom is that you're supposed to dig down a foot and then put down your barrier and cover it back up to keep the rabbits out. Well, something I found online that I found has been working for me your experience may vary is to dig down six inches and then bend it out the idea being rabbits and other burrowing animals are cute I don't want them in my garden but also not the sharpest tools in the animal shed and so what happens is this being buried like that they come to the edge of the fence covered in dirt they start digging and they find this and they start to dig down, down, down and all they hit is this and they don't think or can't they dig all the way under and then back underneath to get under it it's just not in their mental repertoire to dig around it they only dig through or under things they can't dig back and around and so this seems to keep the diggers out where it has in the places where I've installed it so I push this down about six inches and then I bend it out and I do that along your whole fence line one change I did have to make though was I had to make this a little higher rabbits can jump higher than I thought so I have to have at least two feet off the ground or they get over we're also working on getting beds together and that's an ongoing process because we let the chickens into the garden area on the off season and they really tear it up but they also deposit a lot of nitrogen this whole area has been picked over by the chickens but it's actually eight different garden beds I've got to whip them into shape and they're pretty cute so this mound here the humation of the mound that I'm leveling particularly this was pushed over by a bulldozer at some time in the past and now I have to human bulldozer it out but luckily it's all topsoil so I can just dig it out and put it right in my bed it's kind of a gift but also a lot of work I also spent a good chunk of time this week planting peas and we're talking field peas out in the back 40 to do quite a lot of work to prepare the field and get the plants in well I'm here for the day and the plan is is to plant this whole area with field peas and I grew peas over here last year but this year this is my pea plot and right now as you can see it's covered with vegetation it's just kind of comical I've got to clear it all out dig it all up and then get the peas in the ground okay so here's what we have right here that I'm walking on is a pathway and this is going to be open all season and then I have a foot of grow bed and I'm going to be doing a hybrid pea growing method that I just kind of made up usual field peas what you do is you plow the whole area up you sprinkle the peas across and then you run your goats over it or you run hair over to turn them into the top inch or two of soil that's like the old way of doing it in the middle ages today obviously tractors with cedars come by and it's a different high tech thing but in the garden usually what you do is you grow a strip of them and then you give them rope or a trellis to crawl up and to trellis themselves up on and that's when you're going for a lot more work and a lot more yield of snap peas and other green peas but I'm going for seeds because I want seeds to eat this winter I want split pea soup and the like so what I'm going to do is I'm going to do these strips kind of like in a garden and I'm going to run a string across for them to crawl up to trellis up but I'm doing it in the field situation so I'm not going to be as assiduous as I would be in the garden but that's what I'm going to do is make one foot strips all the way across what this field is going to be and then I'm going to leave all this mulch that I'm raking up in the space between the pathways and that will hopefully keep the weeds down there once the seedlings have emerged and are tall enough I will rake this mulch, rotted mulch onto the bottom to help keep the weeds down there and then I will hoe and keep the space between them open so basically I'm using a line as a straight edge and I'm making stripes across this whole area stripes now every 2 feet in a wall 1 foot wide in between I've got all this compost and this will break down it will smother weeds hopefully and then after about a month I'll start coming through and I'll hoe this all down and push it to the sides to smother weeds on the peas themselves so this has been my morning's work so far and now to plant the peas this is a pretty awesome cedar donated to our tool library by Mark well the technology institute has a tool library meaning our neighbors can come and borrow this anytime they want for free and what it does is it has a wheel the front wheel drives a belt that belt rotates a little cupped disc and that disc picks up a set number of seeds each revolution dropping about 8 seeds per foot on each pass so if I pass by twice I have approximately the seeding rate I want which is 16 seeds per foot length per foot wide so it's about 16 seeds per square foot so what I'm setting up today are the trellises for the peas these will be the end posts those will be steaks and I'm going to run line like this for the peas to trellis up but today I'm putting netting over it because I don't want the birds to eat all the peas when the peas shoot sprout they're delectable little treats for birds I had to actually scare some birds off of here when I was coming in today and they're full of protein, they're tender, they're delicious so they'd be favorite food birds so I'm going to cover with netting and hopefully that keeps the birds off I'm also taking my first crack at making cheese and I am not a professional cheese maker I've never really made cheese before except once I tried to do it with a friend over New Year's and it turned out well it was a spreadable cheese type paste it was good but I'm actually trying to make cheddar cheese now which requires a lot more work so we'll see how it goes I'm not going to walk you through every step because this is my first time doing it so I'm really just here to show you what I'm doing and if you want to learn how to do this there's lots of great resources online and I'll link to them here as I go along today I'm making cheese and cheese is great because it's a way that people before industrialization well even now were able to save excess dairy and a lot of this information again comes from Townsend's which I linked to in the last video and I'll also link to in this video maybe it's there, I don't know, one of these two corners and so what I have here is two gallons of milk plus a pint of buttermilk and now I am adding a teaspoon of calcium chloride never mind my assistant over there who's banging pots and pans together I'll link to the instructions I used for this from Cultures for Health but right now I'm just about to pitch the cultures that cause the milk to ferment and then we'll have a whole step by step through the whole process and hopefully by the end of the day I'll have a check and my goal is to find a local kind of goal is to find someone with cows locally from whom I can buy milk and make cheese for the winter because we're not going to be able to buy cheese, transportation so we're going to have to go back to making our own cheese so this is so this is just an experiment to see if I can do it what I'm going to do now is mix in my mesotheliomic culture this might be overkill because I already put in buttermilk but again, if there's too much culture it's not going to hurt anything it's just going to fight the bad bacteria faster so now I have to wait one hour for this to ferment or to culture so I'm going to put a lid on it and wrap it in a towel ok it's been an hour so now I've brought the temp back up to about 90 degrees and I'm going to now fold in after I stir and homogenize the milk the culture so now this is all cultured milk a half a tablet vegetable rennet diluted in a half cup of water and the rennet traditionally would come from the stomach lining of a baby calf because that causes the milk to coagulate in the stomach of the calf or here at the calf body temperature of 90 some degrees right so we're basically recreating the inside of a calf stomach cut the curd with a knife the last stir and then it sits for 20 minutes the next task is chattering and I'm not very good at this so I have 100 degree water here so it's a water bath the curd sits in and every 15 minutes I have to take it out and try and flip these curds as a unit oh it's finally starting to stick together it hasn't been sticking together for me on previous turns and this is what gives cheddar cheese its particular characteristics I don't know the exact reason why but this is the chattering process I don't know the underlying chemistry I also got a little time to work on some random projects like making a net for sucker fishing and I also got to work on a cart that's going to help me move things around the garden a little better than my wheelbarrow sucker season is also coming up and so I need to make a net to catch a whole bunch of these fish so I got some mason's twine so I'm building a little cart to help me move things around wheelbarrow is great but a cart has a different purpose so let's get to work on that here's something fun from last fall that's starting to creep up I've got little garlics poking through to the way down garlic, garlic, garlic, garlic so hopefully this fall we're going to have some big old good garlics put some keep some mulch and other weed protectors on here we have our garlic already coming up thanks for tuning into another week here on foodmageddon we are enjoying ourselves and spending a lot of time out in the garden but you know it's because of kind of a bad reason the collapse or the crisis that we're all suffering through isn't great for everybody and we're really lucky in that we have the time, energy and space to do what we're doing so we are absolutely appreciative of that fact and as always don't forget to subscribe click the link below and remember next time on the next episode I'm cutting down the introduction so if you've been skipping over the first minute I don't blame ya I'm going to cut it down to about 10 seconds so you can just let it play and you don't have to skip ahead so don't forget that we'll eventually be working on another podcast you can also follow along on the blog and different types of information and yeah thanks for watching take care and stay safe