- What's going on everyone?
It's time for a epic homestead update featuring myself
and our ornery feral cat, Bobka,
who let me pick her up the whole day
until that very second.
So she knows we're trying to film a video for you guys.
The first thing you're gonna notice,
this video is really about kind of the infrastructure
of the homestead,
the different things that we have going on.
And the most exciting thing is the irrigation system.
So here's one of our little low round beds.
You can kind of see the way we did this.
It's plumbed up with PVC.
So we actually dug lines and then pop the PVC up.
And what we have here is a little system.
We'll do a whole video on this, if you guys we want,
but it's basically taking off from the PVC
into a pressure regulator, into a shutoff
and then you've got some drip line.
And then this vortex sprayer
that gives a nice amount of coverage
if you're doing some germination.
So these are the round beds
which is definitely the less common one.
But over here, I can show you what we've got
for a more standard bed.
This is like the Birdie's tall six and one.
The coolest thing to me
is this functionality where you can
turn on and off the vortex sprayers
and turn on and off the drip.
So if I was to close this right here,
you can see the vortexes stay on
unless I want them off.
So now the whole system's off.
The drip line's off as well.
I can turn the drip line on just like that.
You can kind of hear it turn on.
And then if I wanted to,
let's say I just threw a bunch of radish seeds in here
and did some direct sewing.
I can also turn these on
so I get adequate moisture across the entire bed
and you can kind of customize these.
So the biggest thing we've done
as I get absolutely sprayed here in this front yard
is plumb up every single one of these beds.
All I think 17 beds in the front yard are set up
and this one over here is the one
that I'm most excited about.
This is our strawberry bed that we put in
pretty recently on the channel.
And you can see with the strawberries,
they're gonna love this.
I think the vortex sprayer might also be good,
not only for germination, but for stuff like
lettuce,
cilantro in the summer
that you want to cool down a little bit.
So this is kind of the biggest improvement here
in the front yard.
Of course, there's some other things
as I take you around the property
and talk about some of these major changes
we've been making here at the homestead.
The next thing you're gonna notice is in our orchard,
it's very subtle, but those of you who watch
are probably going to notice something different.
There is a different fence.
There was this sort of,
it wasn't ugly. I got, I gotta be honest with you.
It wasn't ugly, but it just wasn't matching.
So this fence up here is this sort of horizontal,
cedar one by three fence.
We swapped the white vinyl fence that was over there
with the same style.
So you can see, not only does it look better,
but we actually gained about a foot
of our property line back.
So great conversation with the neighbors.
Totally all good.
We fronted the cost and we put that in.
So I think I could throw like a row of sunflowers
down on that backside.
They'll grow nice and tall, block things off.
And then of course we also stained this front fence
to match the flippers.
You guys remember, I did that whole video
on things that I didn't know before I bought the house
that the flippers did.
Well, they put in this fence
and they only did posts every eight feet.
And then they did like a horizontal,
or excuse me a vertical one by three
to make sure it didn't warp.
Well it warped.
And so we had some guys come in
and put in a post every four feet
and then also throw one by threes
that are stained down the line.
So I think it looks absolutely amazing.
The final thing I'm thinking about doing,
and you guys let me know what you think,
is I'm thinking about putting a two by six cap
down the line probably when lumber prices go down
'cause it's a little crazy right now.
In fact, you would not believe how much one of these costs.
It's $10 right now for one section
of this one by three, which is absolutely insane.
I actually didn't know that before I purchased it,
which was, let's just say a financial mistake.
Don't do that.
But what I wanna show you next
is some of the orchard plantings that we have going in.
And I'm actually curious what you guys think I should do
with all of this extra wood from the fence.
I think I might build a chicken jungle gym
but let's go ahead and check out the orchard.
So here is my collection
of plantings that I want to do next.
So there's a couple things that are going up here
in the front yard immediately.
First of all, I have a Meyer lemon.
It's a lemon that I've wanted to grow for a long time.
The only lemon I actually have over there in the orchard
is a pink lemonade lemon,
which is doing well and I'm excited about it,
but I wanted a more classic lemon
than something variegated like that pink lemonade.
So I have the Meyer lemon
and then I also have,
I have one other citrus.
I think it's a grapefruit that's coming.
I actually don't have it here,
but it's going to be the mellow gold grapefruit.
And this is the sad moment.
If we look over there
to that beautiful, beautiful grapefruit,
that's what's coming out.
Look, it doesn't taste that good.
I have to be honest with you. It's crazy pithy
and it's super old and weirdly shaped
and way taller than the rest of the citrus in the orchard.
So what I'm gonna do is we are going to chop it.
We're gonna put in the Meyer lemon.
We're gonna put in the mellow gold grapefruit.
That'll finish out the citrus hedge
but I also have a Frederick passion fruit.
That's gonna go in front of the rainwater capture system.
And then lastly, there is some other stuff here
but the ones I'm excited about, I have two avocados.
One's Hoss and Fuerte.
If you guys remember,
when we put in the epic pond in the backyard,
which I'll show you in a sec,
we had to dig up the avocado.
It died.
And we are resetting.
And honestly there's a better place for the avocado now.
So why don't we head on back there
and I'll what's going on in the pond.
As we get into the backyard here,
still need to fix this fence.
On the list.
We actually ran into it with an excavator
when we were digging out the pond.
But you can see a huge change here.
The outdoor shower is nearly complete.
I'd say it's about 80, 90% of the way there.
So what we have are these out deco panels.
My friend Sarah Bendrick and I have been designing this.
This is just sort of a,
I think it's a compressed hardwood panel
and we sealed it because of course it's gonna be
in an outdoor environment being hit by water.
And then we gave it this water resistant paint.
I think it's blue, green.
I don't really know. I'm kind of color blind guys,
so why don't you tell me down on the comments
what color it is. But I'll kind of show you how it works.
You can walk in,
you get a little privacy,
you come in this way.
I think you guys can still see me in here,
which let's just say is not ideal.
But then as I'm in this system over here,
we'll eventually have a shower,
probably some sort of rainfall shower head
coming right down here.
And if you remember,
this actually goes out to the citrus orchard.
So we won't be wasting any water
and we'll be having beautiful hot showers
because I swapped out the gas water heater
with a tankless water heater,
which is more efficient.
It doesn't run purely on electricity.
It's sort of a hybrid,
but it it's way more efficient.
And we have a constant supply of hot water.
Why hello.
I'm actually finally hanging out
on a completed outdoor patio
that is permeable
that sinks down.
So if water falls, if it rains,
it's actually gonna go right down into the pond ecosystem.
So right here
is the pond pump apparatus
that I can go ahead and check the levels.
I can put my hand down,
boom, right there I touch water.
So there still is 3000 gallons of water
feeding the pond ecosystem.
So this has sort of become the outdoor entertainment area
here at the homestead.
But what's really exciting to me
is the life that we've added to the pond.
You guys remember we added some new koi,
but also I wanted to kind of walk you through.
We turned the fountain off right now.
I'll show it on in a second.
How much life is in here.
You remember when we planted the lilies,
we put some watercress in here.
Let's just take a look at exactly what's going on
but take a look at these lilies.
Remember when we put these lilies in,
I would say they were probably five or six small pads each
and now these lilies have creeped
and have really started to cover,
I would say about a third of,
maybe a fourth of the effective pond space.
And it's a beautiful, beautiful setup
because it allows the koi to hang out in the midday sun,
find some shelter
and also at prevents evaporation from the pond.
So in the heat of summer,
I was told by Ed Beaulieu, the pond professor,
that I might lose somewhere around 15 to 25 gallons
from this system,
which means of course eventually I gotta top it up.
Well, the more life that we put in the system,
the less evaporation I'm likely to get.
And so we have the water Hawthorne here.
That's really starting to fill in.
This guy has gone absolutely bonkers.
I went ahead and planted the dwarf papyrus
directly into the pond.
What I want to have happen here
is there's not much to look at right here right now.
So eventually I'm hoping by putting it into the actual pond
instead of having it root bound in a pot,
it's gonna start growing up like this,
might get to about this tall or so,
and you have this beautiful backdrop
that stops the eye
instead of looking back here
at effectively what is nothing right now.
But there's still a lot to do
because everything I'm walking on right here,
it's just bare dirt.
It's sort of filter dirt.
We kind of need to loosen it up a little bit
and plant some stuff.
But if you look right over here,
this is what I'm really excited about
'cause I'm about of course growing aquatics.
But if I can make it productive, even better,
'cause look at this,
I actually cut some watercress a little bit ago.
I put just a couple sprigs right here.
And as you can see, it is propagated itself like crazy.
If we pull some up here,
you can just see how this root system works.
Every leaf node, you get more root growth coming out
and what's happening here is first of all,
I can pull this out and eat it anytime I want.
Give it a little wash,
make some watercress soup.
But what I can also do is just let it creep,
cut it back as needed.
But what it's doing is it's sucking excess nutrition
out of the water
so this doesn't go toxic for our beautiful koi,
which will show you with a couple of here.
So that's, what's going on here with the pond.
I'm super excited about it.
Now let's turn our eye to what's going on behind us,
this empty wasteland.
So here,
(chuckling)
if you remember,
this is what Jacque and I chopped down
during our machete brothers phase of life.
We still haven't done too much with it yet.
We're still deciding do we run a mower over it,
break it down further,
till and level this ground and throw a big squash patch in,
throw a big corn patch in,
not really sure yet.
Let us know in the comments what you think we should do.
But what's getting,
oh, I almost just died in a ditch there.
What we are getting really close to here
is our winter wheat planting
is starting to get to the point
where I think we can harvest.
So what you wanna see is it drying out just slightly.
Now you can harvest it at like this opportune time.
You can also just let it dry
and it's not really the end of the world.
So for simplicity's sake, I might just let this dry.
You can see, we certainly grew it
better than we did last year with the spring wheat crop.
I still am not like super pleased with how this turned out
but I think we'll get enough wheat
to make more than one loaf of bread this time,
which you'll see pretty soon on the channel.
However, there is something behind you,
but I don't know if we've ever directly talked about,
the epic mural.
So I'm actually gonna take you all the way
from the hermit corner
down to the very other end
and explain every little element that's on this wall
'cause I think it really brightens up the space
and personally I am absolutely in love with it.
So let's start at the very, very end here.
And as you can see,
Jacque, let's let my shadow not block it.
Jacque's here.
The garden hermit's here.
He's got his mushrooms that he loves to grow.
We actually gave him a little hermit house
and then we have a beautiful chicken.
We have a peach.
Very fittingly, we have some wheat here,
some sort of beautiful soil down.
We've got some potatoes.
So every one of these elements,
we kind of custom did we a Nicholas Danger and Skywalker
who did some of those custom Birdie's beds
you guys might remember.
We got some lettuce.
Of course you gotta have a dragon fruit.
It's epic gardening guys.
We have some little bean stalk action going on here.
The koi.
Sky did this koi, looks absolutely amazing.
We're about at the halfway point now.
Let's go on down.
We've got this gorgeous sunset,
some sort of funky like prehistoric looking leaves,
the epic moms hanging out right there.
I'm hanging out here.
As we go on down,
beautiful sunflower.
We've got a passion fruit,
a little honey comb.
Spoiler, maybe we're getting bees.
Not soon, but maybe by fall.
No promises.
We've got an Opuncha,
which is a prickly pear cactus,
another chicken, an earthworm.
And then Bobka down in the corner.
So to me,
it's all these little elements that make the epic garden
little Easter eggs looking absolutely amazing.
We've shown you a lot of the epi-chickies.
Last episode you saw we put in the CoopWorx feeder
and we removed their feeder and water,
and as you can see, well,
they're not doing it right now
but they have learned
how to drink from the water bar
as well as how to eat from the feeder.
And so we have way more of a buffer
on food and water for the chickies
than we did before,
which means that I don't have to stress out as much
if I've got enough water or food for them.
So they're sort of self-sustaining now.
We're gonna build a little chicken juggle gym,
so stay tuned for that.
But as we walk out here,
huge leek harvest coming in soon.
But I wanted to give an update
on some of the energy systems,
'cause we've done a lot on solar on this channel
and I'm actually going to be putting in
14 more solar panels,
running the pond and some of the other systems here.
We're still doing well,
as far as our energy.
We're still generating roughly the amount
that we're consuming every single month.
Sometimes it's a little bit higher,
but I'm anticipating a little bit more energy usage here
and we still have that California solar rebate.
So I'm gonna put in 14 more solar panels up top
and I'll do a full breakdown pretty soon on the channel
of a years worth of solar here at the homestead
to help you guys decide if that's an investment
that's worth it for your homestead or your home.
So stay tuned.
There's a lot coming up here
on the Epic Homesteading channel.
Good luck in the garden
and keep on growing.
(soft music)