I promised you it'd be a very short experience. Goats make infinitely better camera animals when compared to chickens. Leave that camera alone, please! Oh, hey guys, and welcome back to the farm! Got a nice brisk morning here, and it's definitely feeling like Autumn at this point. I'm really looking forward to showing you guys what's going on on the farm lately. I've been making a lot fewer videos as I continue to try to recover from my injury, but look who we got here! We got some curious goatie otis coming over. "Good morning, boys!" I think I can see Abu dog coming way, way from the way, way back, but that's actually Toby dog back there doing his patrols. Abby dog's down here lower with us. "Good morning, Abby dog! How's it going, sweetie? Hang on, fellas, hang on!" Telemus, what did you just do? You just shocked yourself! The other goats weren't going to be as brazen, but Telemus, he's a brave little goat. "Hey, hey, hey, Telly, take it easy! It's just Abby! It's just Abby! Hey, hey, hey, hey, get out of there! That's the chicken food! Stop that!" Actually, one of my biggest battles in the mornings these days with the goats is trying to prevent them from stealing the chicken food as I bring it inside. I have to actually put it up on a high shelf so they don't try to steal it. "Yeah, Telly, you're all mischief this morning, pal!" Don't worry, you two, I'm going to let you guys out in a second. We're going to take the electricity down, we're going to open up this fence line, and I'm going to give you guys a new spot to hang out today. I know, Abby, they get a new spot, that's the rules. I try to change it up every day for them, and today they might even end up in the greenhouse.
So yesterday, I let the goats actually start working over here by the beehives. They've actually done some good work, but I think they still have more to do. We're going to let you guys go over here today. Yeah, you even have rocks to climb on, which may help keep me from having to file down your hooves as much. And yeah, in terms of Abby dog and the goat's friendship, I think it's getting better. See, you guys are becoming friendly with the goats. "Yeah, Abby, you're being very mindful, you're being very demure." It's actually really funny watching them try to interact with each other. They're not quite sure what to make of each other at all. Even still, they've been together now for about six weeks, and I don't know, it's getting better. Baracus is like a little bit nervous, and he's shaking, and Abby's like, "Hey, I'm going to be submissive and a good girl here, please don't let those goats be annoying to me." Of course, what I typically do is I'll give them some Alfalfa pellets in the morning to entice them to come over here, and then they will spend pretty much the entire day free-ranging in this space, and then come nighttime, I'll close up the fence again, and they'll be back on their other side. Other than Telemachus's little escape move that you just saw right there, they're usually pretty obedient when it comes to this stuff. But of course, today seems like the perfect day to test out the goat Pro again. So let's try to get it on Len. Going to get the goat Pro on you again today. Head through the hole. "Come on, there you go!" Alright, now let's adjust it. Take it easy, Toby dog, don't spook them. Now I'm going to go do the rest of the chores, but we'll see what sort of Mischief they get up to. Toby dog, you are filthy this morning! You're going to have to get brushed out again. Alright, we'll do that later. Alright, Toby, should we take everybody into your favorite hangout spot, which is the greenhouse, and see what's going on?
Yeah, the food plot in the greenhouse is starting to die back, but I do have a tremendous number of pumpkins, and I'm already starting to feed them to the other birds. Yesterday morning, I actually did a quick count and beginning to harvest of these pumpkins, and I think I got about 70 in there. Well, actually not in there anymore. I pulled out about 50 of them. There's probably another 20, maybe 25 that are still developing, but I'm also noticing that some of the vines are starting to die back too. "Morning, teenage chickens! How's everybody doing?" Now, I'm going to let you guys out in just a minute, but first, let's let everybody watch you sample one of these pumpkins cuz you will devour it. I'll probably get a couple bigger pumpkins very soon and start doing some pumpkin carving like I did last year. "Good morning, quacken! How's everybody doing? Got food for you!" I always love watching the morning feeding chaos. And for those of you guys wondering how's Abby doing with the chicken integration, honestly, quite well. Like I think I said in the last video, she has really settled down with all of the chickens at this point, and uh, I haven't had any issues with them at all. So knock on wood, seems like Abby might be getting better when it comes to working with chickens. Abby, don't run right into the hose! I didn't mean to squirt you, girl! I'm sorry, I'm sorry, girl! I didn't mean to squirt you! You got right in the line of fire, and you got some burdock on you. I know you don't like it when I have to pull the burdock off you. We got it in a couple spots. This is the downside to having kind of my free the weeds strategy of letting all the weeds grow this year. So yeah, this is what was actually stuck on her. She had a handful of these little stickers all over her.
So it's been about a week since I recorded my last video. I just decided to take some time off because, you know, I'm still healing from the broken toe, and I'm supposed to restrict how much time I spend outside on the farm doing farm work, and it's been really difficult for me. And what's even harder is like trying to think of stuff to talk about with you guys when I'm in Ed in a video. So I just decided to take like a whole week off, which was kind of nice, and it really had me itching to like talk to you guys and give you updates about what's going on around the farm here. I guess a couple of farm project updates that are worth giving you guys updates on. I know I talked about this in a recent live stream, which if you guys don't know, every first Wednesday of the month, or pretty much every first Wednesday of the month, I try to do like a live stream Q&A where I just hang out for an hour or two answering all your questions and talking about all the stuff and the details that I wouldn't typically be able to get into in a regular video. And so one one of the things I was talking about is the fact that it'll probably be another two or three weeks before I fully get back into doing the farm work because I've been taking it easy on my foot. It's actually healing very well, and I can feel like I can walk around a lot more, and it's a lot less painful, but at the same time, in the behest of my wife, I'm also not going to push it too much. And so I'm feeling pretty good about getting the cattle yard done. It's really only about a day's worth of work to get that finished. I also have the project of turning the old duck house into a goat house, which I think won't be too bad to try to tackle. I think trying to develop the spring so that it can feed my pond as well as provide winter water for the cattle is something that's going to still take even more time. It's going to be a project that I still try to get done, but if there's anything that's at risk of not getting completed this year, it's going to be that project.
Oh, would you look at that, freshly laid duck egg! Abby dog, this just might well go into your dinner tonight. Actually, where's Toby dog? Cuz he's the one who really likes to have a duck egg on top of his dinner. Where did he go? He was here. You know, it's funny with Abby and Toby, when I'm out here, Abby dog is like velcro dog, and she's always just at my hip. But when it comes to Toby dog, he's usually like out doing detective work, like sniffing around, or he's out peeing on stuff. I don't know, it looks like today he decided he wanted to go hang out in the goat area, and he's peeing all over where they are. So one new weird development with the weird chickens that I need to share with you guys is somebody just volunteered recently to join the weird chicken. So Barry White, who's actually our American breast rooster, and he spent the last two years with our main chicken flock, the other day he actually just hopped into the weird chicken clucky dome, which is this geodesic dome structure where my weird chickens all Live. Well, ever since the death of Mr. Frizzle, we haven't had a mature rooster, and it seems like Barry White decided to step up and fill the void and find some new ladies, even though the rest of his flock is out here, and we still actually have our other rooster, Dorian Gray, who's that gray coachin over near Abby. Abby, please don't eat the food. Come on, you're developing a bad habit, girl. That gray coachen right there is like one rooster I have with my main flock, but then Barry White is actually the other rooster I have, and he is actually starting to hang out with these girls. And to me, what's really interesting about all of that is an American breast chicken is actually considered a meat bird, a breed of chicken. I mean, some people call it dual purpose, but I consider it a meat bird. And so to like think about crossbreeding him with the weird chickens would be a really interesting experiment. I'm not sure if I'm going to do it or not. He's actually supposed to end up going to the freezer Camp when we have our C day, I think at the end of this month. Part of me is wondering, should I keep him? And so uh, drop your comments down below. I'd be very curious to hear reactions cuz the tradeoff is, and this is a cost, and this is why you guys got to recognize there's a uh upside to that decision, and then maybe a downside. The upside is, yeah, he would live another year, and he would probably procreate again, and who knows, we might have some weird hybrid crossbreed type chickens pop out of all the experiment. The other thing though is maybe number one, he's too big to breed with the silkies, and number two, if we did that, I wouldn't get a new silky rooster, and so he would be like the breeding rooster for the weird chicken flock next year. And so I don't know, I'm curious to hear what you guys think of that. I'm still undecided. I'm trying to figure out what to do with him. I didn't move him in here. He just jumped this relatively low fence wall that we have here, and he volunteered himself as tribute, and I don't know, he seems relatively happy. So I don't know, tell me what you think, guys.
Alright, dogs, let's go! We're going to go do the heers. These days, as I'm still dealing with foot recovery, this chore is actually the hardest chore of the day, where I got to go walk up the hill and make sure the heers are okay. This is the second time this has happened in a week. Got another whole clutch of duck eggs down here. These ducks love to make their nests and then hide their eggs on me. Oh gross, ew! Oh oh oh oh, that was so disgusting! Oh, and that was an old stinky egg. Oh oh my God, the smell is as bad as it got! Oh, those are not new eggs. Woo! I thought I cleared out all the nests, but that that is easily two, three weeks old. Woo, that is unquestionably a rotten egg. Oh, I'm going to have to clean that up. That is disgusting. Oh man, wo! Just be grateful they still haven't invented smell a vision yet because wow, that is horrible. AB, come on, come on, get out of there! You do not want to be eating that. Come on! Oh, I'm going to change my sweatshirt. Oh God, that is brutal! I feel like I'm going to vomit. Oh, you know, over the few years of doing this far, I feel like I've developed a pretty good stomach, but yeah, that rotten egg that explode smell is oh absolutely wretched! And I am back after a wardrobe change. That was gross! Let's check in with our chickens and see how they're doing with the pumpkin, huh? Yeah, they've made some real progress in just a few minutes. That's really good. Anywhere where there's like a scratch on the main part of the pumpkin, that's always the first stuff they attack, and you can see they really went to town. Now I will let them out for the day though, but before I do that, let's grab one of them, and we'll mount a camera on them to see what sort of Adventures they get up to.
So when I attached the cameras to like the goats and the dogs, I usually use a GoPro, but actually, when I do it to like the chickens and the Ducks and the geese and the cats, I usually use this insta 360 go 3 camera because it comes off as just like a tiny little thing that I can put in this little collar that I also have that I bought, and it works great, or I shouldn't say it works great, it works pretty good. I think some people get annoyed that sort of imperfectly points the camera at the ground sometimes. You don't want to do it too tight though. You got to be careful that you don't hurt the bird when you're doing this. It actually should be able to get a finger underneath it, and that actually makes it okay for the bird, and plus she's only going to wear this thing for I don't know, 20 minutes, 30 minutes maybe. And what's cool is it's already pre-mounted on a gimbal. You can already see like this is what the chicken sees. I don't know, I always think that that's kind of a neat parlor trick, but hey, we're going to let this bird roam free and go join its brothers and sisters. There's always like an adjustment period too for it. I know it's a little weird, it's a little weird. Alright, now we got to go take care of the heers. Come on, Abby. Got another duck egg over here. So that means both Toby dog and Abby dog get eggs for dinner tonight. And this one I can still feel it's still just a little bit wet and a little bit warm. So this was laid I don't know, within the minute. For now, we'll just stash it over here by the chicken eggs. So you can see baby b and Alice B toess up the top of the hill there. And yeah, walking uphill like this is actually one of the hardest things to do on my foot right now, but it's getting better, or at least I keep trying to tell my s that. "Morning, girls, how's it going?" I think baby be knows what time it is. That's right, baby be, it's brushing and getting treats time. Take it easy, girl, take it easy! Don't get over excited! I know it's your favorite, it's your favorite! You love these so much! Every day I come out here, dump out the remaining water, which I usually try to give them just enough, which I think I did today, and then I rehydrate them. Leave that camera alone, please! Oh, those heers can be really bossy and really pushy, so you got to be very careful. That's a good girl. Now Alice is a lot less interested in this sort of thing, even though I've been working on her pretty much the same way for the last four months, five months. She just doesn't seem to want to get brushed or even take treats out of my hand, unlike our girl baby bee, who you know, I've been doing this with her since she was a baby, and so it makes all the difference. Plus, one of the other things I've noticed is the charlet cows, which is that white breed of cow that I have on the farm, they are just much more skittish and less friendly when compared to Scottish Highlands in general. I'm sure that's got something to do with a little bit of how they've been raised because they grew up in a little bit more of a wild context where they weren't handled nearly as much as I handle my cattle, but then also, I've had other people say that they've always found charlay to be kind of more skittish and a little bit more wild and unpredictable. And so I'm curious for folks who are watching these videos and more experienced than me, what you find. Alice, I don't know if she's ever going to be a friendly cow. As I start to think about what sort of things do I want in my herd of the future, having friendly cows that I can easily manage and work with is definitely one of the things that I put as a priority. She sees baby b, and she's a little bit jealous that baby b gets the bucket, and so I'm trying to get her comfortable with seeing that the rewards come from the bucket, but she's just very spooked, and like even if you just saw right there how she kicks, like I feel like I need to be exceptionally careful when it comes to that sort of thing. Here you go, Alice, have a treat, see if you can take that treat. And as for you, my dear, here I'm going give you one of those, and we're going to continue to brush you cuz this is our special time that we do once or twice a week. You are going to make a great Mama someday, I have no doubt about it. Oh yeah, you like that, I know you do. Here you go, have another treat. Yeah, can get you under your neck, you know you'll like that right in the brisket. Yeah, just remember, not all animals have the same personalities, and you just always have to keep that in mind when you're working with them. Boy, I just saw a duck just hop up. Is she Keeping a Secret Nest too? Is this going to be another set of exploding eggs? Oh shoot, I have actually two nests. Can you see them? There's one right there, and there's one right there. I think I'm still traumatized from my earlier experience this morning, and I'll I'll deal with that later. It's actually times like this that I miss having the pigs because if I found a nest like that, I would just give them to the pigs, and they would do their thing with them. I don't like to give it to the dogs because I don't want the dogs to get sick. Just the digestive systems of pigs versus dogs are very different.
Alright, let's see what we got for chicken eggs this morning. You doing your work in there, girl? Anything else? Just three chickens are starting to slow down. They laying three chicken eggs are going to end up being my breakfast, and the two duck eggs will be the dinner for the dogs, or part of the dinner. I usually like to put some sort of topper on top of their food, and a duck egg is a perfect example of a good dog food topper that gets both dogs really excited. Alright, we can see the juvenile chickens wandering around doing their thing, but where is our camera chicken? That is the real question. Has anybody seen the camera chicken? Hey, Pablo, barncat, have you seen the camera chicken? I got you, I got you! We're going to just pull this right off you. I promised you it'd be a very short experience, and now you're able to go free, and now we have the camera to look at. Okay, so that wasn't very good. Sometimes camera chicken is a little bit Hit or Miss. Like sometimes it's really interesting and fun, and other times it's totally boring it all. I think actually has to do with how the chicken responds. Like I've had examples in the past, actually Alexander hamlen, who was a rooster I had a couple of years ago, he was outstanding with the camera on him, and he would just go on all sorts of Adventures. But then other times you'll have a chicken that's just kind of freaked out by it, and they're not all that active, and that's actually what I think we had in this example. And so it was kind of like a boring 15 minutes of footage. But one animal that I know probably didn't give us a boring 15 minutes of footage is our good friend Lauren, and I wonder what sort of Mischief he and his other goie Otis have been up to. Good job, Lauren! That is everything I would hope for in a goat pro segment, and you just did a wonderful job. So good work on you, buddy! And if you guys are playing along at home, I'll just say that goats make infinitely better camera animals when compared to chickens or really any birds for that matter.
So walking up to do the heers is probably the first hardest chore each morning. Moving this thing is actually the second hardest chore these days. You know, it's funny with Abby, she's actually the same vest size at this point as Lauren, and so so I can just swap it off and on between the two of them. Tell me in the comments who you guys think is the better camera animal. This also has an added bonus of this vest will help identify her to folks who might be hunting. It's time to put another fresh Trace mineral block out for the cattle. And if you guys are wondering what I use, it's this stuff. It's mostly salt and copper and selenium. Got some zinc, iron, manganese, Cobalt, iodine. What do you think, Joey rone? You seem to like the taste. Somebody tell me what it is about Cals and knocking over cameras. They just seem to love to do it so much. Alright, everything looks okay. In case you guys are wondering what camera I usually use when I'm shooting these videos these days, it's actually this one. So we have two Highland heer Cals. We have Betty Rubble, who's this one right here, who's actually pretty sweet and gentle, and then we have Belle, but I've started to nickname them Rubble in trouble because as you just saw with that camera, Belle can be a little bit of a Mischief maker, so she's developed the nickname of trouble. Oh boy, I know this is your favorite. This is how we get you clean. We're going to brush you out. You've been rolling in the dirt in the mud, I can tell. You got so much mud on you. Oo, and you got a Burdock on you too, pal! I know you don't like the berock. Nobody likes getting berock pulled out, but unfortunately, it has to be done. What did you two do? You two both went into the berock patch somehow last night because you are both covered in it. And now if you guys are wondering, I no longer try to save Toby dog's fur to make a sweater. I think I've given up on that that Quest. Even though actually, somebody just sent me a pretty great video of somebody doing the exact same thing, which it's kind of cool. He transforms that hair into thread using simple 3D printed equipment, the result wool that's ready to be turned into something extraordinary, and the grand reveal, a beautiful sweater for his beloved companion.
So I put out that video a few weeks ago of my friend Jess and I making apple cider, and some folks were asking about what was going to be hard cider, and how do I make the hard cider? And well, this morning I also have to go do a step to the Hard Cider. So I just brought these up from the basement where they've been hanging out for the last couple of weeks. I guess it's almost it's almost three weeks, two and a half weeks. So I use this little thingy to help uh let the air come out so that it doesn't like seal up and explode, but then also at the same time, it keeps like the bacteria and dust and dirt from getting in. Like the first year I ever did it, I actually just sort of slightly vented the bottle from the bottle cap, and a couple of them got like moldy and gross, and so that wasn't great. Another time that I did it, I actually used like balloons, which is actually a pretty good method if you're in a pinch where you put it into either bottles or car booys, and you have like a balloon where you poke just like a little tiny hole in the balloon, and what will happen is the gas that gets released from the fermentation will go up and fill up the balloon just a little bit, but because you have that air hole that you poked into it, it never fills up the balloon, and so that's a pretty good option if you're in a pinch. But because I'm really into making cider and it's it's just a fun activity that's an annual thing, I invested and bought like the fermentation buckets as well as these little plastic vent thingies, which you can get for a couple bucks online. They're not bad at all. And you can see inside here, it's already starting to do its thing and ferment. You know, typically when people are doing Hard Apple Cider, when you're leaving like little bits of the apple and like that sort of junk in there, it's known as Apple scrumpy, which is the type of cider I like to make. I mean, you can buy the filtered Ultra filtered type of stuff at the store anywhere, but the good apple scrumpy is really hard to come by. So that's why I like to make that the stuff that I make here on the farm. And by the way, I know a number of folks commented on this in the video where Jess and I were making cider saying that we seemed like we had already dipped into the hard cider, and that was definitely not the case. It was like 11:00 in the morning. I think what it really comes down to is we were just so giddy and happy and giggly to be with each other hanging out making a video because we like never get to do that. But we're really good friends, and so yeah, we did have a case of the giggles, but it wasn't induced. Now the reason I actually brought these up here today is actually this one is just I wanted to check on it and see how it's doing, and it it looks like it's actually doing really, really well. But this one, which is slightly less full, like this is probably only about four gallons of cider, I want to try doing something that I have never ever done before when making hard cider. I just added like I don't know, I think it was about a pound of Ginger, and I just blended it up in the blender, and now I'm just going to dump This Ginger into there. I'm just going to give it a good stir around. I'm just going to continue to let that stuff ferment for I don't know, a couple more months. And so probably around like mid-December is I'll pull it out and put it into bottles, and I can give it to people as a holiday gift, or I can drink it at parties we might throw, and uh yeah, I'm really looking forward to an enjoy it, and I'll be curious to see how the ginger experiment turns out. I've never done that before. So if you're watching this at home, you might want to try this or you might not. I will check back in with you guys and give you a review, but that'll probably be a few months from now. Hang on, you Vultures! Here you go, food for you, some food for you, and also please stay well hydrated.