- Welcome back to the, "Epic Homestead".
Today, the machete boys are in town.
- Sing, sing, sing, sing.
(bass music)
(machete whipping)
- That wasn't that good. - [Jacque] It wasn't.
- You heard us right.
Both Jacque and I equipped ourselves with a machete.
Why don't you display yours.
Why don't you display yours for the people.
- It's honestly pretty good looking.
- Yeah, honestly, yours is a better looking machete
but yours is a golok. - Yeah.
- A golok.
Got a Condor golok. - Yeah.
- And let's just say it's pretty sharp.
- You didn't cut anything did you?
But I have a bushcraft machete here.
And why are we sitting here in front of you today?
Because this cover crop that we planted a long time ago
basically to improve the soil, but also to prevent runoff
into the pond, which there's been a lot of improvements to.
It is seeding.
You can actually see there's all this random seed heads here
from radish.
These aren't quite mature, which means
that if we chop and drop it right now
we're not gonna spread them all over the place.
It's a great time.
- Pretty good.
- Is it?
- Honestly better then a radish.
- Honestly, it's a little sweet.
- Yeah.
- Here's the other little wrinkle is we actually,
we planted like a hundred potatoes in here.
We don't see a single potato leaf let alone a potato.
- I waded through here and I couldn't find a single potato.
- So what we're gonna do is hack and slash this down.
We're using the chetes to chop and drop the cover crop
as well as harvest a bunch of other stuff out here.
Get away from me Jacque, because I don't think we need
to be anywhere near each other while we do this.
- I think we shouldn't be.
- I'm gonna give the inaugural.
(machete whips) (Jacque chuckles)
I mean, that's pretty good right.
- That's pretty good.
- I might do just like crazy style.
Just get weird. - Well gimme your best.
Gimme best shot.
- All right, let's see.
(machete whipping)
- [Kevin] What the hell.
- It's gonna get weird.
(machetes whipping)
Feels like I'm going through a jungle right now.
- There's those things called rage rooms online
that you can look up and you go in
and you pay like a hundred bucks
and they give you like seven plates and you can smash 'em.
- Yeah. (laughing)
- This is way better than a rage room.
- Way better.
- And it improves your soil.
What is that?
Is that Bab?
What's in Babka's,
- [Jacque] Did she catch something?
- Did she get a lizard?
There's a lizard in her mouth.
Babka, did you kill it?
She's she's in a different mental state.
- [Jacque] She doesn't even know you're there.
- Humane.
- No, but she probably bit it so.
- Oh!
Okay, well anyway, back to the task at hand.
This is why you cover crop, right.
You get this fatty daikon.
This one's actually chopped already.
But you can see how this pushes soil out of the way, right.
Like this daikon is slamming down into the soil
and actually spreading basically soil open.
And then when this dies, it will rot out and be decomposing.
And then that soil is more,
- Yeah. - open.
- It's gonna aerate it all.
- Yeah.
(machetes whipping)
All right.
I think you should try going into this thick area
and just.
- [Kevin] Oh.
- All right, get in there.
- One man, one machete.
(machete whips)
That wasn't that good.
- [Jacque] No.
- That wasn't that good.
(machete whips) (Kevin exhales)
That was pretty good.
- [Jacque] That was, look at that form.
- And look at that follow through, that form right there.
Let's do it.
- This is probably the,
- So fun.
- Something I never expected to do in the garden.
- No.
Another way you could do this,
besides this absurdity that we're doing,
is you could get big wooden planks
and fold and - [Jacque] Right.
- step and fold.
You tie rope to the plank and you step and fold it down.
This is more fun.
And what I think we're gonna do here, chop, level till it in
almost as our way of one tilling in organic matter.
'Cause we haven't done that here.
- Yeah, we've never done anything here.
- And then form and then grow a big mound of stuff in this
for the season.
Almost like a wild field.
- [Jacque] Yeah. - Yeah.
- It's gonna be,
- More productive edibles.
- Honestly, I think it'll be great
for like pumpkins watermelons.
- Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
I think I just found papa radicchio here.
(Jacque Laughing)
(Kevin grunts)
- [Jacque] There's so many pods on there.
(Kevin grunting)
- What do you think?
I think that's pretty good for now.
- It's pretty good.
- That part is done in the cleanup and spring prep.
What we want to do now is a little bit
of clean up in the beds and kind of walk you around
and show you what's going on at the homestead.
(Kevin exhales)
Okay.
- That was work.
(jazz music)
- We're back here in the beet bed.
And if you remember from, I don't know, five, six videos ago
we did this sort of scatter in sea method.
And as you can see, we have done pretty well with it.
I've actually harvested most
of this row Jacque, and you actually did too.
- Yeah, I took the beets.
- You took some home.
Let's go ahead and do some harvesting.
- I don't even remember what we all planted in here.
- No, I know there was a lot of golden beats.
- I'm gonna find out though.
- Yeah, I mean, these are some smaller beets
because we didn't really space them out at all,
we just put them in.
But there are gonna be some honkers in here for sure.
- I mean, if you look around
you'll see that there's plenty of nasturtiums here.
- We got too many nasturtiums
so we'll take that out for now.
Oh boy!
- Yours is better than mine.
- Oh boy.
Oh you got like four solid guys right there.
- Oh yeah.
- Yeah.
Now what we won't be doing, personally at least,
is I'm not gonna be using the beet greens on this pull.
It's first of all, too many for me to use
- [Jacque] Yeah.
- and I'm just gonna eat the beets and that's,
there's nothing wrong with not using every single piece
of the plant, especially when you're just
gonna recycle these nutrients back in with the compost.
It's not really the end of the world.
Yeah, oh look your favorite,
- [Jacque] Earwigs.
- earwigs.
Oh disgusting.
- Oh my God.
- I'm starting to stand up.
Well, I'm doing-
oh they're on my-
- Yeah they actually got, (laughs)
- Get.
Honestly all bugs have a place in the ecosystem,
but there's too, you know there's too many.
- Gotta balance.
- And they look like that, it's not.
Oh!
Yo!
- Those are perfect.
- That's all golden too.
- Yeah.
Like baby golden beets.
- Oh, this is called $15
- Yeah.
- to a fancy restaurant right here.
That's probably 15 bucks.
Money does grow on trees and in the ground.
The stack, just like the cabbages
we're gonna do a little process and chat.
Why don't you start out with this.
- Oh yeah, yup pretty easy, pretty easy.
- Honestly, no it's fine, it's fine.
So here's what I'm gonna do.
I'm just gonna chop like this and I'm gonna toss
and we'll just give the beet greens to the chickens, really.
- There you go.
- So this is just a pre-process because really
in a perfect world, what you do is,
and I'll use a bigger one probably, is you'd chop.
I'm leaving the,
- Little stem there.
- the top stem on
but really what you do at this point is do the scrub, right.
You do a scrub and then you'd remove this
and then you remove this.
And then if you're processing it that day
what I found really good as we keep on going here is,
here's what I did.
So basically did a wash, right.
- Right.
- And I did this process.
I told you, cut the tail, cut the top just a little bit
to get the sort of the base stem off.
- Yep.
- Then I pressure cooked it.
- Oh, okay.
- For 15 minutes, high pressure.
So that basically full cooked it, right.
- Were you doing golden or red?
- Both.
- Oh, okay.
- And then the, what happened is the skin. (exhales)
You let it cool.
The skin comes right off,
'cause you've cut the bottom and the top right.
- Right.
- So now there's a path for the skin to come off
and it worked really, really well.
And then what I did is I diced, I diced it,
I chilled it.
Feta, arugula, lettuce, salt, pepper, beets, problem solved.
Yeah.
- I think that all checks out.
- It was fantastic.
- It sounds really good.
- No, it was really good.
Especially, but here's the thing.
You have to chill the beets
before you put them in the salad.
- Right.
- Otherwise the cheese gets weird.
- Oh I can see that.
- So, you know.
Yeah, there's a lot of ways to enjoy beets.
For me personally raw is typically not my way,
but with golden I can see it.
- Yeah, golden is the one that I prefer
'cause it doesn't have that kind of iron flavor.
- I'm not coming in on this one raw,
I'll just say that. - No.
- I'm not going to, but golden,
- It's too much iron flavor.
- Golden, ah, that one's gonna go.
- I mean, the other classic, of course, is borscht
- Mm-hmm.
- which honestly is really good.
We just made some borscht the other day and I'll say this
I wasn't expecting to like it
but - Really.
- I was really into it.
- Does borscht have a Bulgarian counterpart recipe
that's like kind of similar, or no?
- Ah, not that I know of.
It's definitely, you know, in Ukraine it's very popular
and it's just a classic kind of eastern European.
I don't know who claims to own it.
- Yeah.
- But it's just, honestly, it's just really good.
It could get really savory.
Finish it with like a little sour cream.
It's wonderful.
- What I think we'll do is just feed
at least some of that pile to the chickens.
- Yeah.
- See what they think.
I'm gonna take just a handful of these beet greens
and see what the Epic chicks think of them.
Not all of them, it would be way too much.
So let's go ahead and see them.
You guys haven't seen them in quite some time.
They're a lot bigger, a lot chunkier.
And we made some modifications to the coop as well.
The first thing we did here is I gotta remove these blocks
but basically we put the predator apron down,
which is just a basically hard wire cloth.
I think it's two by three inch cloth.
When I say cloth, I actually mean metal though,
it's just a weird name for it.
We stapled it to the actual coop
and then we stapled the other end down
so nothing can get in here.
I also put carabiners on all of the latches.
So I have to physically use this carabiner to get it off.
So no predator, that's not a human at least,
can figure this one out.
So let's go on inside, they're getting pretty excited.
Okay girls.
Let's just wait and see what they do.
So here's our Rhode Island Red right here.
Gucci, the Golden Laced Wyandotte.
We have Silver, which I don't know,
that's not her real name,
but she's a Silver Laced Wyandotte.
We've got Lavender right there,
that's the Lavender Orpington.
We have the Buff Orpington who usually is a little bit solo,
she's a little like, I'm doing my own thing.
And then what's quickly become actually one
of my favorite little hens here is the Cream Legbar.
You can see this little Mohawky type of of vibe
that she has going on.
But you could see, they absolutely dominate the greens
when they're thrown in.
Anything new they tend to really like.
But I mean, you see that the remnants here,
there used to be a huge cabbage here.
There used to be huge Brussels sprout
and they've actually dominated it.
Now you still have to give 'em their normal feed
'cause this is what's basically formulated perfectly
for chickens.
But adding some of this extra
they've really, really enjoyed.
So this is a little update.
We'll do a full video soon on the chicks
and some changes we're making to the inside of the coop.
But this is a way, if you're not gonna use your beet greens
or something like that, toss 'em to the chickens
they'll still make a good use in the garden.
Pretty big harvest today of beets, certainly,
but also of this cover crop here.
There's a lot that we're gonna do in that spot.
I'm actually curious what you guys wanna see
down in the comments.
But I wanna tease you with a couple things
that we have changed.
First of all, look at this artichoke, absolutely popping in.
That's gonna get harvested pretty soon.
But also if you look over here in the orchard,
you'll see that we have changed that fence.
It used to be this old white vinyl fence.
We're actually rebuilding the fence out here
to have it be cohesive.
And the biggest, most exciting change really is,
let me show you right over here, the irrigation systems.
So we finally have irrigation here at the homestead
in these raised beds.
And the coolest part about these,
which is actually a kit that will be available soon.
But the thing that we really like,
we, Jacque and I designed this.
We went through like 10 or 12 different rounds of this
is number one, it comes up into the bed.
Now you could do it with the hose for sure.
But what happens is you've got four drip tape lines.
So you've got those on six inch emitters.
So great coverage of drip.
But then you see these right here.
These are called vortex sprayers and they actually
spray this perfect mist right over the bed.
So let's say you were direct sowing instead
of transplanting in.
If you're direct sowing,
you'd be limited kind of to where these drip lines are.
If you direct sow with these vortex
you can plant things anywhere you want,
run the vortex and it has a perfect mist,
so you get good coverage.
And then you switch over to drip when they mature.
So we're switching that over pretty soon here.
You'll see a video on that, but anyways,
hope you guys enjoyed the, "Epic Homesteading" videos.
More videos coming out twice a week now this season.
Stay tuned, good luck in the garden and keep on growing.
(gentle music)