Breaking Ground on the New Garden | Starting Over from Scratch

We begin the long and arduous task of starting our new garden. We prep the ground, gather compost and start sifting the native soil with our homemade screen. It may still be a long time before we can get plants in the ground but like the saying goes, good things don’t come easy. Moose fencing and building the future greenhouse are still on the agenda.

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[Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Music] good morning it is late April and we have mosquitoes already but we are making amazing progress so far today we’re breaking ground on the garden Eric is working on scraping up some of the top soil until he gets down to the gravel layer uh we marked out the perimeter yesterday and something I am working on is a little bit unplanned but we are kind of thinning I don’t know if it’s thinning out we’re just trimming up the trees so the the dead branches or the lower branches and we’re doing this for a few different reasons one it’s just good to kind of maintain your property and get rid of some of this downwood but also um we have had Fox issues so last summer we had a fox issue and just about two weeks ago we noticed that there was two foxes coming around the chicken coop I’m pretty sure they’re checking each other out like it’s their breeding season and they’re not truly interested in the chickens but um I’m sure they would eat them given the opportunity and we like to free range so the reason we’re liming them up is because we can see a lot better into the forest now and the foxes usually take advantage of the fact that they can kind of come in and sneak in without the chicken seeing them same with the grass they kind of sneak in in the grass and the chickens don’t really know what’s going on probably hard to tell but it’s already a pretty big difference right behind me um this is what we did yesterday cleaned up the brush still a little bit more to go and then I’ve got to do that side over there got to get to this tree I’m basically going to this snow patch where things kind of open up naturally and we can see really well but this all has to be done over here [Music] w a [Music] [Applause] oh that’s that’s nothing that’s nothing yeah was oh I think they written me too they’re not even It’s the funniest thing they’re not biting me in the back Forest they’re actually biting through my pants yeah through my sweatshirt through my gloves look at your shoulder get that shoulder man watch how many you can kill look at that there’s like four in one SWAT it’s insane it’s the craziest thing I’ve ever seen in my life it’s actually pretty good soil to sift though oh no it’s great soil to use it’s just where do you put it in the meantime yeah oh yeah they’re worse over there by that pile for some reason it’s like the grass I mean it’s just I think they read over there last year but they’re super slow like you can just grab them and well it’s late April and going into May is supposed to be like the best time up here in Alaska because the sun’s out the snow’s gone you have the long daylight hours and there’s like barely any mosquitoes but for about a week and a half now which is in April I don’t know what is going on this is some of the worst mosquitoes I have seen and we’re doing a pretty good job out here it’s a little early in the season so there’s a little bit of mud and I’m getting the top layer of like the native plants the grass and the soil off and we’re scraping down to the gravel I have a little hole over here let me show you what I’m talking about it’s a little easier to see and the reason we’re doing this right now is we’re going to put the garden here and these plants will kind of just grow back and they will take over the garden so we’re getting rid of them and I dug this hole to see how Frozen our ground was it’s still a little Frozen deeper down but you can see right here from there down is all gravel and our gravel here looks like that it’s like a mix of like sand small rocks sometimes we have big rocks about that big but this all right here up I don’t know what that is maybe 6 or 8 in that’s the soil we have here so it’s not much and we’ve been living here for for a little over a year now we’ve had some experience with the land and I got to tell you we absolutely love it at our old place we’re always Trucking gravel in this place has a insane amount of it just below the soil already with just a couple hours of work we are building up a huge pile of this dirt so I’m going to have to find somewhere to put the rest of it because we’ve got a lot more work to do [Applause] [Music] sh not bad for about two and a half hours worth of work we’ve got this massive pile of dirt behind us and I think we’ve got like two three six of these around the property so we’re going to try to take care of a couple those a little bit later on and I’ve got about half of it scraped down it’s turning out really good we just hit 200 hours in the Branson or 202 so I got to look in the manual see if there’s any maintenance I got to do on her anytime soon and the next thing we’re going to do is move the greenhouse so it’s in pieces and it’s spread out right where I need to scrape so we’re going to try to move it somewhere so it’s out of the way we don’t have to worry about it again then I think we’re going to stop scraping for tonight and we’re going to start uh picking up some of the brush erol’s got quite the collection back there [Music] [Music] [Music] e peasy huh it’s probably the fifth time we dumped it we haven’t had to charge the battery it’s still really powerful so day two we have a massive amount of native soil over there that ER has collected um which is pretty cool he’s about 3/4 of the way done with the garden so he will have finished that in just two days which is neat and I put these little totes in front of our plants because Eric’s concerned that the chickens will get in there I think that they kind of are more interested in the dirt and the bugs but if they were to get in there that’d be pretty disastrous so it’s probably a good idea and we’ve had to open up the plastic for over a week now because it just gets way too hot in there and cook the plants and we are starting off to a very hot spring so far looks like the chickens are enjoying the summertime out here too and we have been working a lot this morning the Branson can’t say enough good things about that tractor it’s been awesome and this whole area is about 105 or 110 ft by 80 ft and then I went a little further than that cuz we want a little bit of room outside when we’re putting the fencing in I did notice something kind of interesting this morning when I scraping where the high tunnel was sitting the ground was almost completely Frozen there still so just having those pallets there and the metal and then also the spot where our rolls of metal fencing was that was frozen too so it’s still very cold we’re going to be kind of switching over to haul and more brush with the dump trailer and we found a place there’s different ones throughout Alaska where the Forestry Department will set up these sites where you can come dump your brush and they do that to uh help prevent wildfires that are started by people burning brush on their property I personally don’t really enjoy burning brush it’s always kind of nerve-wracking you got to be there maintaining the fire you got to have your hose and I don’t want to be responsible for a wildfire and this actually works out really well for us cuz we’re going to load it in the dump trailer anyways instead of dumping it here and burning it we just drive and we dump it so it’s working out pretty good it doesn’t cost anything the dump trailer that we picked up over the winter we have been using this thing like nonstop brush compost dirt you name it we’ve been hauling it and we put the sides on it we can fit if we go up to here it’s like it’s like four to five yards of uh material and then I also made a modification on the tractor I did it a couple weeks ago it cost me $24 to buy a drill bit that big but I put a hitch for like a trailer hitch in there and you can just screw it on and screw it off and then you just bring the forks in here you grab the trailer any trailer you want and you can move it around it’s super easy to steer it back it in places it beatss pulling your truck up and uh you know lining it up and hooking it up and all that so we’re flying we’re getting pretty efficient out here and our pile of dirt is growing this is pretty much like the last section we have to do maybe like an hours worth of work to get all this top soil off of here we have one more big stump that I got to rip up with the back ho and then we’ve got like a bunch of stumps and brush and stuff in there and we’re going to try to load that up first with the tractor into the dump trailer let’s get it okay can I fil my chickens real quick [Music] time solid I’m laughing at the mosquitoes I’m laughing at the mosquitoes what the mosquito on your head yeah I got to put my net back on [Music] [Music] just past 5:00 a.m. we’re heading to Fairbanks and we can’t seem to drink enough coffee kind of hard to wake up this morning we’ve seen 10 moose so far a few grous and we’re heading on a supply run we’re going to pick up a lot of things but we are going to be getting some metal for the garden some projects out there and hopefully picking up some manure on the way home oh my gosh it’s hot [Music] [Music] at an angle yeah I put them all at an angle and I run to strap I was thinking I was going to stand up on their sides these things are huge funny looking load look we got to ride home with this hope that’s going to hold put some I’ll put some try to bend it over a little or something no well we made it back from Fairbanks with our load and that was a really good example of what the dump trailer can do I’m a little bit messy for sure we don’t typically do that but we have used it a lot for Supply runs like materials for the quanset Hut and it works so well with the forks and we can just get in there and get our materials out um it’s obviously very useful for moving um compost and manure that’s what we have behind this is a mountain of we’ve got some aged cow manure we have horse manure that’s a little fresher and then we have actually some spent barley that we got it’s in the middle tucked in there and a little bit of wood shavings we’re not able to really Source the spent barley up here um but we are able to get a lot of manure which is awesome because we need a lot this Garden is significantly bigger than our previous garden and that just means that it’s going to take us a lot longer and we need a lot of uh compost or amendments for it this is a sh full of some of the horse manure a little fresher you can tell it hasn’t really broken down yet and then some of the Aged cow or steer manure which is like beautiful that’s what you think of when you think of compost or age manure it’s absolutely gorgeous and if you give this enough time it will eventually to look like that we’re super grateful for this um it is basically what we use to get our garden to grow so successfully so um yeah I’m just really excited that we were able to find some new sources up at our uh new place if you’re unfamiliar with um composting this is all pretty much green material there is technically the shavings or any sort of straw would be considered Brown material so we use a lot of nitrogen in our rows or what we’re going to be doing the plan for today is to relocate this pile utilizing the dump trailer and the tractor into the garden so air can kind of mix it up in the future and we can have more of a blended array for the garden [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] all right we’re utilizing this opportunity to collect all the hey basically get all the manure that we have collected since last fall or last summer into that pile that Eric’s working um the cou need to be cleaned out I know I’ve said this before but I love the uh vinyl flooring we call it lenum but it’s vinyl someone told us about that a long time ago and I have no regrets putting that in it’s amazing to clean I have had to clean this c a little more than I anticipated probably just because of the amount of chickens that we have only thing I would do differently if you’re putting this down is I would make sure to do a lot of that glue and roll roll the actual vinyl out so sticks where we have some like little ripples it’s not a big deal but aesthetically you know there’s a little bubbling going on since we didn’t do the whole thing and I would have run this up the walls that’s pretty smart don’t know why we didn’t do that so you can kind of see how things build up it would have been smart to run it at least like a foot out but we didn’t and I’m glad that we at least have it on the ground something else that Eric moved into that pile was our own compost from the winter and it just has an enormous amount of like food and things like that that that we generate scraps and we do put meat in there or like carcasses we have never had an issue with Bears um it’s just where we lived and where we’ve lived in the past um they’re not an issue I’m sure they would be in some areas of L that’s why I don’t hang out in the chicken coop so we’re going to head back outside well there it is that’s about 20 to 25 yards of compost all mixed up and pretty much ready to go and the dump trailer let’s see it took us seven loads of up and down and that was on just the one battery I didn’t have to charge it and it’s still got some juice left in her so I was pretty impressed with that and this is just the compost part of the soil so we got to mix in some dirt and over there we have a huge pile of dirt it’s how many yards you think that is 100 yards I don’t know say 60 80 okay 50 to 100 yards it’s got to be somewhere in there it’s a lot the problem with that soil is we just scraped it off the top it’s got grass bushes moss rocks different things like that so we’re going to try to screen it or sift it and then we’ll be able to mix it with our compost and we will have our garden soil so let’s go build our soil sifter STI I got wrong size you got a 10f footer that’s okay I’m sorry use those ones later com let’s go sure like 53 in well there it is that’s our soil screen and we built it out of the metal we picked up the other day so the steel on there or the angle iron is 2x two angle iron quarter inch thick this thing is extremely heavy duty and heavy it is going to be moved with the tractor and then they had this really nice metal there and I think they sell it for like laying concrete if you need some really thick like welded wire mesh and this is 4 gauge 4 in squares and let me show you kind of how it’s going to work you’re going to come behind with the tractor you’re going to grab that soil with like the roots and stuff like that in it and you’re going to dump it over the top of this and it’s going to roll down and the stuff that’s small enough to fall through is going to fall through right here and then you’ll be able to grab it we’re going to leave it with the 4in squares right now if we feel like it’s letting like too much material through that we don’t want we can take the second half of the sheet of this 4in Square metal and we can layer it on there and we can get like 4X two squares so a little smaller squares we’re going to test it out and see how it works I am going to weld something on here I think I’m going to bring the tractor in and I’m going to line it up and figure out how we’re going to lift this thing so when we’re going to be using this we’re going to have the bucket on the tractor we’re not going to have the forks on so I’d like to be able to move this with the bucket thinking maybe put like some angle iron coming down or something to kind of hook on the bucket so we’ll see what we can do and we’ll see you out there [Music] [Music] that worked way better than I even thought let’s check it out let’s see what we’re left with no it worked way good got a little root that’s just a thing yeah it’s like really like no look at that that’s like top soil that’s like dirt right there that looks good I mean look it’s letting little tiny things through but I’m I think I’m cool with the 4 in squares this is what it’s not letting through huge [Music] rocks big like big pieces right well this is great guys we spent a lot of uh energy time and some money building that thing and it worked I think a little better than we expected we actually have like some nice fluffy top soil that we’re going to mix in with our compost now and it looks like I have a few days worth of work for me I don’t know how much we’ll do we got a huge pile over there but we need a lot of soil for this garden and it’s coming together out here it’s looking good we put 15 hours on the tractor so far with all of this out here which I don’t think is too bad at all and we’re getting hungry I’m going to dump this last little pile and we’re heading inside for dinner we’re making nachos oh yeah she still works might look like we’re eating a grous or something but this is actually one of our chickens that we took down uh yesterday we’re trying to thin out the flock a little because we got some more on the way and and uh it’s pretty delicious though I spatchcocked this one so I took the backbone off kind of spread it and I was able to rub it with like some butter garlic some seasonings these always turn out really good when we do it that way so we’re putting Chicken on the nachos man this mosquito’s getting me he’s where is he he’s just buzzing me got quite the works tonight for our nachos we’re pretty excited that we can now make our own top soil and we are even more thrilled that we are going to be gardening again we’ve been kind of desper for vegetables this last year uh sourcing a lot of things from the grocery store as you can tell right here but some of this is our own salsa and I was able to get a teeny tiny bit of some cilantro we soaked some beans last night and we’re going to get these nachos in the oven we’re going to we’re going to do multiple layers here on this bad boy two layers yeah some chicken okay now hit it with some corn maybe corn and olives and maybe cheese on top this like an oversized spoon that corn is extremely good it makes me realize how much I love corn yeah Corn’s really good more chips chips yeah awesome yeah we never have it till next year oh my gosh this has like all the top ends oh my gosh there get a little bit of everything on there look at that oh my God Peppers actually don’t really like I’m not a sucker for baby animals you know that like baby puppies and kittens but for baby fluffy chickens look at that oh wow that’s good whoa whoa we’re eating nachos and the mosquitoes are eating us pull babies out let’s pull the babies out babies where the heck are they I feel you under there little baby here you need to take a break mom SC got to teach them young that we’re friendly what are you doing oh look at him it’s m see if he can make it back oh yeah he runs back [Laughter] personally I was thinking straigh like this you can run straight what’s right [Music] got it up this is going to be probably the coolest run we have put up for the chickens this one comes off the high tunnel and then it’s like a lot of forest land there’s a lot of ants and bugs out here they can scratch things up we’re going to go put in the electric defense charger the solar panel the battery get it hooked up and the girls are coming out it’s really tight set go she almost got me she’s lying it works it’s on no it’s off we shouldn’t have it on okay we’ll leave it off for now let see if they want to come out one today little stone rock that’s it I think that the chickens definitely approve of their run uh like Eric said I think it’s going to be a really good future area that will probably just string the fence back up every uh spring I just kind of realized that their tunnel that we built them in the fall is going to be extremely useful we have never had a run like that a covered run um for the summer month so I was just thinking like their food can go in there we don’t have to worry about it getting rained on um obviously if we have baby chicks that’s kind of a cool area for them to hang out they have shade in there and you probably can tell that we have baby chicks so it’s kind of hard not to hatch out baby chicks when you have Broody moms and lots of fertile eggs we hatched a few out we have a few more on the way things are looking really good around here we’re getting a lot of work done there’s still a lot more to do so we’re going to pick back up probably with the garden next time we see you