 Unfortunately, I don't have a horse to pull a plow, so I have to be the horse. It's September, but I already have to be putting in the wheat and the rye for next year. So what I'm doing is, is there a little potato patch? I am scratching the surface, I'm not plowing, I'm just digging up the surface a little bit so that I can plant the wheat in, in rows, and then pack it back down and cover it with mulch. And hopefully, next year we'll have a really good bumper crop of, of wheat and rye. So this is about a quarter acre, it took me three hours to turn over by hand. Obviously it's not a full plowing, it's more of a, just a light tilling. So this will be my wheat field for next year. I'm going to plant in different densities to see what works best for the type of wheat I'm growing, which is a heritage breed of wheat, it's not a modern wheat. And now over here, I still have to plow this all up or till this all up so that I can put my rye in here. And I'm going to till it up today so that my chickens who are on vacation back in this area will have time to dig in and eat bugs, kind of turn things over a little better. There'll be my assistants in this area. Hey, Sid, how you doing? What's the deal? I'm going to grow out and plant wheat, but a cedar, traditionally or not traditionally, but modern wheat is sown by having a big cedar that gets towed behind a tractor and it has, you know, dozens of rows that it drops seeds down at a regular interval and it'll do a wide swath at a time and you go back and forth. I don't have that. So I have two options available to me. One I could broadcast. And broadcast is literally just walking with a bucket or a apron full of seed and throwing it as you step and each step you throw a handful. That way it gets spread out evenly or somewhat evenly. The problem with broadcast is it doesn't get incorporated deeply and evenly into the ground so the seeds emerge at different times. The birds get more of them. It's just a less efficient system than a direct seeding. And so what I have is this cedar, but this cedar is built for garden vegetables like squash or beets, carrots, things like that. And what this does is as this turn, and I use this in an earlier video, last spring planting up peas and flax, this turns, turns a little hopper, turns little cups and it picks up seeds and drops them at regular intervals. They drop down this chute into the ground at an even depth and then are covered over. So it's basically what is pulled behind a tractor but on a single scale rather than dozens and dozens of rows at a time. The problem is they don't make these for wheat. They don't make these discs that spread out the seeds for wheat. So I have to use the existing ones, but I need to figure out how many seeds this is dropping per inch because or per foot because I want to have a uniform distribution of seeds that is closely conforming to what is recommended. And I'm going to try different planting densities to see what works best. And to do that, I'm using the one foot tiles on our floor in our kitchen to gauge seed distribution rates. I'm out here planting wheat using my little cedar. Like I said, a tractor usually can do 12 rows at a time, but I can only do one. And what I'm doing, because I like to experiment, and there's not really literature out there for small scale growers, is I'm planting at different densities. So here, I'm planting at about 20 seeds a square foot. There, I'm planting at 40 to 45 seeds per square foot. And over there, it's much less. It's 10 and even four seeds per square foot. So we'll see how the different densities stack up next year. It's said that when you plant 11 pounds per acre, that's ideal for this type of wheat. But it seems really low with this weed load. I might need more to plant. I might need some more to crush these weeds. And just to be as friendly as we can to pollinators and other insects, this strip here is where I put all the wild milk weed and other seeds that I've had to pull to make this field. This year, we had them crop up around all the potatoes. And it was really hard to avoid them when we're weeding the potatoes and things like that. So this year, next year, we're going to try and have them in a nice defined strip. So fingers crossed that works. And now after sowing, I have to knock down all of these high points because the seeds are in between them. So when I knock this down and get rid of this vegetable matter, when I knock this down, it covers the seeds. What I've done recently is I built a chicken coop. And now the chickens are living back in the, what I call the back 40, this is where my corn, my potatoes, flax, and other things were trying to grow. I took them all down with a scythe last week, which I think I had on the video. And now I put the chickens in it. What the chickens are doing is they're digging through all the soil. They're flattening everything out. They're eating a lot of the seed heads from the weeds, which is good. They're pooping on everything, which adds nitrogen to the soil, and generally just being chickens. This also gives them fresh things to eat so I can feed them less because right now I'm into feed that I'm making myself and I don't have free access to as much feed as I need. So it's good to supplement their food with as much green stuff as I can. And right now, you can probably see some of the roosters, the new roosters, the white ones, running around chasing the girls. They've gotten old enough where I just saw one of them mounting, one of the hens. And that means they're mature enough to butcher. So probably in the next video or two, at the end, I'll put it at the very end after the credits. So those of you who don't want to watch, you don't have to. But I'm going to butcher those roosters and keep one rooster, Sid, our rooster from last year, their father. We're going to keep him around because he's a big nice boy. But the others we raise to eat. So we'll be, I don't want to be feeding them all winter anyway. So we're going to butcher them. I'm speaking of feeding, I'm giving the mosquitoes a bite. So I'm going to get the rest of this rye in right now and then be done for the day. And this electric fence over here that I've put up with netting to get the chickens out of the rye field is live. So if you watch closely, maybe you'll see me get shocked. Let's hope not. Notice that I'm dragging one of my feet. So with the foot on this side, I'm knocking the furrow. I'm knocking the dirt into the furrow so that I don't have to walk by with the rake one more time. It's a little slower, but then I only have to go through once. There's something about plowing and planting a field and then crossing your fingers that in almost a year you'll have enough wheat that you can grind it into flour and make enough bread to last you another year.