Rethinking the Backyard Homestead – Epi-3814

0:00There's a better way to do this, let me show you a better way, and we are a lot, and I think that was exactly on time. I literally saw the counter go to one, bang on like a pro was running it, but trust me, that was just a coincidence because I might be a professional podcaster, but I am not a professional producer. Anyway, if you're tuning in today, there is a couple of ways that have won your regular listener to my podcast, and you're familiar with me, and if so, welcome back. If you are watching this on YouTube, though, and it's not while it's live, if like you found this in video search or associated videos or something, you may not have really been looking for a podcast. I ask you to consider sticking around anyway. We've been doing this for 18 years, and we're still here.

1:00This is episode 3,814, so if you're a new listener either soon after this was published or years later, check us out. Consider subscribing. Click the bell so you get notified as well, and check out our website at thesurvivalpodcast.com where you can find almost 4,000 episodes now, just about everything you can think of of. Self-efficiency, self-reliance, independence, and liberty, and I am your host, Jack Spirco. It's a privilege to be your host, by the way. Some days I wake up, and I really think, is this what you do for a living? And have you been able to do this for a living for 18 years? How crazy is that? I was just talking to a guy I reconnected with on Facebook who was a sergeant that I served with in the army. He wasn't in my direct chain of command. He was kind of in the same platoon, but over in a different spot. I didn't really work for him, but he was a pretty cool mentor, and his life's going pretty good. He's up in Idaho now, and we were, he was asking about what I'm doing now at all, and as I'm telling him, I'm thinking, this is crazy, really.

2:03I mean, every once in a while I sit and think about it go mad. So I also want to say some thanks to everybody over the years who has listened and shared my show, and if you would continue to do so, I would appreciate it even more. All right, so what are we talking about today? Well, last week for my anchor segment in the Expert Council show, I talked about why I think we're about to see a complete resurgence in home setting, similar to what we saw from about 2008 when I started this show up through the mid teens, but reapportioned over into more suburban urban settings. And the reason is that most of the people that live out in the country right now that want to do this are already doing this. But yet we are in a unique time in America where people feel more squeezed by pricing every day. You go to the store, it used to be the meat was expensive, but it was affordable, right? And the vegetables were cheap and really affordable. And now the vegetables are cheap and barely affordable, and the meat is ridiculous, right? It costs what?

3:03I mean, I was at the grocery store the other day. I don't usually buy my beef at the regular grocery store or would have you, except we want something like tonight, I might take up some stakes or something. I just look at ground beef, 899 a pound for like the shittiest ground beef you can buy. And I want to talk, I want to go off a different way with that right now because sitting right in the cooler was big hunks of brisket that were trimmed down either point or base and they were 649 a pound and I was looking at that going, boy, if I did need some ground beef right now, I have a grinder and that's a hell of a lot cheaper. But anyway, you know what I'm saying, like everybody's pushed right now. The other thing I think is there is a greater awareness now of health. I think the people are more concerned about their health now than they have been in the past. And I think even the people who were concerned about their health 20 years ago, the truth of what makes a good healthy diet was largely confused because you were supposed to eat, you know, 11 servings of whole grains and bread a day.

4:07And when you look at the old food pyramid before they changed recently, it was basically the exact macrochloric allocation as a bag of cattle feed and you are not a cattle. People want to eat fresher, better, higher quality food at a time when the shit food is super expensive. So there has to be a pressure release and that means that people are going to just look back and say, what a grandma do? What a grandpa do? What a great grandma, a great grandpa do, you know, what did my great uncles do? Like that's what we always do. When we hit time of crisis, we look back and figure out how to proceed forward. And then when we look on the top of that, where do most people who can do anything approaching growing their own food live? They don't live out on the farm, they don't live out in the country because again, the people that are out there that want to do this are already doing this. The vast majority of people that have enough autonomy live in a single family home and they average a lot between as tiny as a tenth of an acre up to, you know, quarter, three quarters an acre and some even have what you would call a small acreage like I do at three

5:08acres. But I'm not going to be running cattle, especially on my brother last land or anything like that. I'm not going to be doing, you know, a herd of, you know, 25 hair sheep or something like that. In fact, I produce food far more like somebody with a one acre yard than somebody with a three acre piece property. And so even the people with like the mid size acreage are going to focus on the type of thing I'm talking about. The vast majority of people in America is about a 110 million owner occupied homes in America and probably 70 to 80 million of them have enough space to do something. And then you have this pressure on them against what they want in their lives and you have more and more people working remotely where they can stay home. You've got more and more people reverting not by choice, but by layoff to single income families, that means somebody's home, right, or, you know, maybe the person that's home now can find a job, but it's part time from home.

6:09And that just gives a tremendous opportunity. So that's why, and I already covered why. So now today I'm going to talk about what, like if you want to do this or you're already doing it and you want to ramp it up, how do we apply smart design principles to growing food in the backyard? Because this is not the way I thought. If I go way back to like my first gardens, not as a kid with my grandpa, but as an adult. I basically feel like grandfather did except he had more land and more space for our garden. So I made little raised bed gardens and maybe planted one fruit tree like in my first home in Arlington that I ever bought all the way back in the 90s. I put one peach tree in the back and I put it just close enough to the fence that when it started producing the squirrel sold all the peaches off of it, right? And then even my second home, the home I had in Arlington, I started this podcast, Arlington, Texas, that is. It was a little bit more than it was a bigger piece of land. It was about a third of an acre, but I wasn't doing all the things that I talk about now. It was when I started this show that I discovered permaculture, the principles of smart design.

7:10And by the time I was ready to really roll that out, we moved to our place in Arkansas. So I never developed that suburban lot. Today I look back at that suburban lot and go, man, what I could have done with that if I knew what I know now. So I want to pass it on to you. So you have that opportunity. That's what you want to do. And if you're feeling this pressure, you want more food. So we're going to talk about that today. We're going to come at this from a standpoint of starting out and understanding tactics versus, you know, techniques and versus strategy. And though you need to be focusing on before you begin or extend what you already have a strategy first, then we're going to get into interviewing yourself like you're your own client for design. So you get honest answers from yourself because it's the only way you're going to do it. The only way we're going to do a appropriate design, not just for the land, but for the client, which is yourself, some advantages on a small property. And then I'm going to talk about some basic things that you can do to implement your design after you have your answers. So again, if you're not a podcast listener and you were on YouTube, just looking for some stuff people were doing in their backyard, you can find a million videos of people with

8:13raised beds going, look at all my food, but how do you design it so that it works for you? You know, some people are not going to want their entire backyard covered in raised beds because they have kids they want to play, right? If dogs need to leave out and things like that, some people are going to want chickens, some people aren't because it's another thing that ties you to your home. Do you travel? Like we're going to go through all of that today and more and what to do and how to do it. So please stick with us if you're new around here and again, please consider subscribing to my podcast. If you liked your content and audio form or you're watching a video, I'm on Spotify, I'm on Apple, I'm on Fountain, I'm on Value for Value, I'm on Pocketcast. If it exists and your podcasts are there and I'm not there, tell me and I will make sure we're there. I'm even on Apple, not Apple, Amazon, I don't even know what it's called, but Amazon has podcasts on there. So anyway, with that, let's go ahead and take care of our sponsors of the day before we turn into our main subject today. So do you know that it would probably be easier for me to tell you the people who aren't

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11:19The dog wants strong leadership and clear instructions. That's what you'll get from Joel is he trains you to have to change your dog at K-9 Academy.us where you'll enjoy every minute of your training and your training with your dog. And if you're like, I don't know, man, I just don't know if this is right for me. Is Joel any good at this kind of teaching? Sure he talks a good game, but when it comes to like a course, hey, won't you do this? Go to K-9 Academy.us right now. Register and sign up for the problem solving library. It's like a five or six lesson course and it's completely free. And that'll give you an onboarding experience. And then I guarantee you're going to want to move on over and take the basics course. And then you could decide if you want to do anything more advanced than that. But the basics course will make you a better dog trainer. And also people like, that guy's a dog guy. I can't guarantee you 100% but it'll make you more of that dog guy than not. All right, with that, let's go ahead and here and get on into this. I want to talk to you again today about the concept of suburban urban homesteading.

12:22And what I mean by that really isn't necessarily that you're in a suburb or in an urban environment or near a large town. Because most people will be, because that's where most people live. You can be kind of out in the sticks to a degree, but there's a small town and you still have the small lot homes all around it, right? We, anybody's driven across country, you know, it's just to get off the interstate. You know what I'm talking about. You're driving through a place and you're in there's probably a 13, 14, 1500 people living in this little town and there's a lot of conventional homes with small lots there. So anybody basically constrained onto a small lot, consider that, you know, mid-size acreage being one to five acres and then a small acreage being one and down and everything in that spread will work with this. But when we're looking at this, the first thing we have to do is develop some context. Everybody wants to know, well, where do I put my bed?

13:23What vegetables do I grow? How many chickens can I keep in my yard that's only a half acre and on and on and on the questions go? And this is fed by the YouTube machine with the constant content generation of things that are pretty and look nice in our Instagram worthy. And now we have a slew of AI slot bullshit B roll videos with always like a narrator that sounds like he's either irritated or British or some shit and it's all BS. There's good stuff in it, but the totalities BS because does it apply to you? And this leads to people looking at techniques and tactics as design instead of design elements. And what I mean by that is the first thing we need to do is form an overarching strategy. What do we want this to look like? Or one of my favorite questions to ask yourself in so many places, especially contentious ones, what does winning look like for me in this situation? If I had a magic wand, this is what I used to use in sales when I sold computer equipment

14:27I would tell the customer, but you have no budget. You now have a magic wand, you wave the magic wand and your network looks like whatever you want it to within the grounds of your building your campus, whatever, right? And that's what you have to do here. Like, what would it look like? Well, I would have, you know, a bridge and salmon swimming upstream. No, what would winning look like on the property you have to work with? If you could wave that magic wand, what it would look like. And that's just a thought experiment, that's not leading you to a strategy. And a strategy is what you want the overriding result to be, what the end goal looks like and how you get there, right? Where everybody wants to start with the tactics and the techniques. The technique is a raised bed, a keyhole garden, right, a herb spiral, a garden pond, right? Those are all techniques and the tactic is how we employ the technique. So we put the pond under the tree to put shade on it, but we need to understand that if

15:30we take that tactic, the tree is going to drop lots of leaves in the pond. So is that really the best place where there's a better place to find a place for the pond where it gets morning sun and afternoon shade and maybe that comes with structures basically open overhead. That's tactical. The pond is the technique, the placement and the intention behind it is tactical, but everything that drives it is the strategy. And if you have a true strategy, you should be able to verbally explain, in less than it would take to write one paragraph, what your homestead does for you or while you're building it, what you want it to do for you. And if you can't do that, you don't have clear design and that's where you have everybody going, I did the thing and it works sort of, but I don't like it now because they haven't thought through it that way. And trust me, we've all done it, I certainly have. So the way we get there is we interview ourselves like a client and I'm going to give you some questions that I would sit down with you if you could hire me to consult with you for

16:31your backyard homestead, which please for the love of God understand you cannot do. I do not do consulting work, okay? I need to take consultants off my bio. I haven't worked as a consultant for a very long time and the amount of money it would take me to do some sort of consulting is not the kind of money you want to put in your backyard. If you want a backyard design consultant, talk to Nick Ferguson at homegrownliberty.com and rarepointscore.com. He'll be happy to consult with you on that. But if I were consulting with you, here's some of the questions and not necessarily in this order. This is to give you an idea to create your own questions for yourself, but usually sit. I don't know what I would say. Do you eat meat? You know, are you a meat eater? Most people the answer is going to be yes, but then we're going to go down that rabbit hole. Well, what do you usually eat? How much do you eat? How often is meat a part of your diet? What percentage of your food expense is in meat? What type of meat do you prefer? I mean, the person looks at me dead in the eye and says, well, I eat red meat only man. I don't eat chicken. I'm not going to tell that person to get chickens from meat.

17:33And in a backyard situation, I'm probably not going to tell you to get chickens at all. It can be done. Some people do it. I'll get an email today about something. I tractor a flock of 25 chickens in my half, okay, that's fine for you. For most people, if you know why you're doing it and if it's your strategy, that's great. But for most people, the vast majority of the middle of the bell curve, the 68, 74%, I'm probably not going to recommend chickens for meat at all in a homestead situation. I might recommend rabbits or quail, but the person that wants red meat only, we're probably going to focus on other things because we're probably not going to put a cow or even some sheep in a backyard that's a half an acre because the HOA carons, even if there's no HOA, will act like HOA carons and make your life miserable. And it's a tough thing to raise an animal like that in a backyard. So there's a lot of ways we can compensate for that, but that's a good place to just get it understanding. How important is this to you and how realistic is it and would it be worth the effort to fill the gap?

18:34You can do that with all these questions. The next would be, do you want to care for animals that must be killed to utilize them? Because I get emails all the time, Jack, I've finally got a place. It's not that big, but it's three quarters of an acre and I want to do all the things. I want goats and I want sheep and I want this. No, you don't. No, you don't. But before we even get to cup carrying capacity of the land, how comfortable are you with taking a fluffy little bunny and breaking its neck, pulling its skin off, yanking its guts out, feeding them to the dog and cooking it? And it's okay if the answer to that is not at all, but then don't go down that road. Then if you're going to own bunnies, you're going to own bunnies for manure only. You need like one or two bunnies and they'll make all the bunny poop you need to do all the fertility stuff you want and they can be pets with a positive byproduct. But we're going to get an animals more in a bit about whether you really want to do this or not, especially in certain situations.

19:38But there's a lot of people, they are, I know people, they're fine going out in the woods with a rifle and taking a rifle and seeing Bambi stand there with his pretty horns and look at him and boom, and Bambi's dead and open it and I'm up with a pocket knife and yanking their guts out, leaving it for the coyotes, dragging his ass back to the ranch, hanging them up from a tree or from a rafter, skinning his ass, parked them out and eating them, but they don't want to kill an animal with a sister and look at you. I understand, it was an adjustment for me, it didn't take much, but it was an adjustment because I grew up hunting, I grew up when I killed an animal, I earned the right to harvest it because I've met it on its own terrain. And killing something that I fed by hand, that's a little different. And it's okay, but you need to work that out before you put yourself in the situation of having to do it and understand what things like chickens and stuff, a chicken lays eggs really good for a year, pretty good for a second year, a little bit in a third year, and then it goes through like henna paws and it lays an egg here and there and wants

20:38a wild. And so now if you have a flock of four chickens and they are no longer giving you eggs and you bring in four new chickens and you don't do anything with those, you have expensive pets. And you can end up with a very large flock that's very unproductive and eating a lot of food and outsized for your land. So we need to be thinking about the totality of the requirement that when animals come in, some will die and some will probably have to be made to die. And there is no chicken home. You can't adopt your chicken out, you can't put a net on Craigslist, I have four hands, they're kind of old, they don't lay anymore, they need a good farm to grow old on because they're going to grow old in a crockpot. That's where they're going to grow old, you need to know that. That's the reality keeping animals. Then you ask yourself, before what you can grow, what do you eat? What is your diet consist of right now in fruits and vegetables? And a great way to do this, and this project works for so many things in the preparedness and design part of our stuff, is a food journal, put a notebook on your countertop and you

21:43might think you eat the shit out of sweet pepper, but maybe you don't eat the shit out of sweet pepper. I mean, you use to a week. This is not even just what you're going to grow, but how much of it you're going to grow. And then once you have that information, like I said, each one of these questions opens up a book and then we can go through that book and figure out how to apply to us. So once we know what we eat and how much we eat, do we do that year round? If it was more available, would we? What are the preservation methods for that crop? What is the growing season and what is the harvest season? You can say the growing season for sweet peppers and Texas look, for instance, is about now. I'm waiting one more week because you got a dicey weekend coming up before my plants go out. So from about now, until first roast, but that doesn't mean that's when the harvest is. So when they go on the ground, you're probably looking at six weeks if you have well-started plants before your first production. And then in this climate, you're going to have really good production until about mid-jinn

22:45when it gets to be 1,000 degrees out. Plants will do just fine, but they're production because they don't really produce a lot of blossoms once you're up into our super high temperatures. You kind of plateau and you get a few here and a few there. And then you come into like the end of August, September, the day starts to shorten, even if it's still hot as shit, you have cooler nights. All of a sudden, the flowers come back and you get another big harvest. You have to go through the peppers, an example. You should go through like a tomato, eggplant, cucumber. When is their peak of production and when's their plateau and when's their fall off and when's their end? And then how can you save them? And do you like them in the form that they can easily be saved? Now you can start dial in, want to grow, but how much to grow of it. So it actually means your needs because you think, well, if we had more of them, we just eat more. And I would say, you know, maybe overshoot your need by 25% in your design and you can always add more.

23:45But that way you have an invested in space and things like that that you don't need yet. And don't be afraid to just get your feet wet a little bit first with that one better what have you. Then do you eat eggs? And there's so many people who are getting chicken for eggs and you go, but how many eggs do you go through in a week and they don't really know and they all think a lot and turns out they go through a dozen eggs a week. Well four chickens will do that easy during the peak of lay they'll they'll give you about four eggs a day. That's 28 a week. You're going through a dozen a week. That's twice what you need. The little water glassing and some other things. You can have eggs year round from a shot of flock of just four chickens. But you can only get rid of them when they stop producing. So are you okay with that? You're going to have to take care of them. We're going to get into more about what animals do to you, you know. I mean, the other way to skin that then would be about three quails eggs makes one regular chicken. And we're going to talk about quail later, but quail are much easier to deal with. I think than chickens and much easier to be able to get away from your property for

24:47like four or five or six days and automate the systems that care for them in that time. And they're a little bit easy. I'm going to do a hundred percent easier to process as a meat animal, okay. But they are emotionally to me so much easier to kill them chicken because they're done, right. And if you've ever hunted dubs, you know what that is, right? It can be pulling the pin on a grenade or the head off a bird. I mean, it's that quick. It's that simple. And then processing that into meat, there's a video of me doing with a dove. I can do it with a quail too, except I pull the legs out where I don't do that with a dove. I can process the quail by hand in under 45 seconds without even struggling for speed. That's not going as fast as I can. That's just... So we have to start factoring it. Like if you want eggs, how often do you eat them, how many do you eat, and what would you get them produced by, and then what does that do to your entire life? And is it worth it? Because if the answer is, you know, we use about six eggs a week, unless you have another

25:51function for that animal to fill, honest to God, you just go by the best eggs you can get or find a neighbor doing it and buy their eggs. We don't all have to do everything. How much time do you have? This is where I promise you you are going to lie to yourself. You're going to lie to yourself and you're going to say, well, I don't spend that much time, but there's nothing to do out there yet. So it doesn't really, you know, and you will spend more time in a project mode than you will in a maintenance vote. And what I mean by that is when you're building something and you want to get it done, and you're going to have to put in, let's say, you know, 24 man hours, so three full work days, there's a good chance you'll put in 8, 10 hours a day in a weekend for two days. And then the first chance you get, you'll give it all you got to get that project done because it's very clear in your head when I am done with this, it will be there.

26:51You can see the finish line, so you become very dedicated, but the thing like, oh, I need to pull weeds today. I don't really want to pull weeds today. That falls under my law of life. Do what you hate first, eat the frog first, that type of thinking. But you're going to lie to yourself. So whatever number you give yourself, I will spend 10 hours a week not building, right, because that's, again, we already covered that, but maintaining my homestead, put down five, design your system so it can be maintained with five hours work a week. And then if you really do give it 10, once you have it humming, you can say, well, I could add more production, and that will add another hour a week of maintenance. And you decide that. And that way you start to get a very clear understanding, what is the value of your time? What do you think your time's worth? It's not necessarily what you're paid. What is your free time worth? What is your non-job time worth? You're non in your business time worth to you.

27:52And are you getting that ROI that makes it worth the effort? And then you can throttle up intelligently, all right? Another question I would ask you is, do you eat fish? Because if there is a way to grow fish on your property, they are the least maintenance thing you can do, especially if you put in some level of backup on whatever keeps them alive. So on a property this size, you know, probably like mine as well, you're probably going to use some sort of pump or a aeratial system or something for fish. So if you were to do something like have an electric pump with a solar backup or an electric pump with solar backup for an air compressor and the air compressor on a discharge that dropped a certain amount of airation into your pond every day, whether the power was on or not, then you could go on vacation for a week. And literally the only thing you need is to make sure your pond level doesn't drop too much. That can be a little float valve, plumb to a reserve, or having enough capacity that you can

28:53make sure it's full when you leave and come back and maybe stand a bit and you fill it back up. Because if you're fish or not fed for a week, you know what happens to them, absolutely effing nothing. Nothing. They're fine. I feed my fish when I feel like it. I feel my fish when it gets warm enough out and they seem active enough that they're going to eat all the food. And they do find it. That fish when around some of my ponds that are literally 12 to 13 pounds, heads bigger than mine, some of them. And they're just fine if they don't eat for a week. Fish are close. They're not a reptile. They're closer to a reptile than a mammal in so many ways. And when they're not eating, as long as it's not in that heavy early growth stage, they just kind of chill until the food becomes available. Because when you live in a pond or a lake or a river, there's not always something to eat. Because that's how fish work. That's how they biologically evolve. So if you eat fish and you like fish, we're going to work at considering that design element.

29:54If you're like, no, we don't eat fish, we just don't. I'm not going to say we might not do some aquaponics or something like that. And in that case, we would probably throw the most bulletproof, easiest, highest among you producing thing for the cheapest that we can get in that system. Old fish from PetSmart or Petco, they'll cost you 20 cents a piece. You can throw a shitload of them in there to cycle the system. And you'll expect half of them to die as the sequel, cycle peaks and they won't and you'll end up having to probably call some out anyway and bury them in the ground as fertilizer spikes. And if any dude died or in cycle, you can do that. But I wouldn't tell you, hey, let's go out and get some finger-linked catfish if you're not going to eat them. What's the point? So, be honest in your answers. Again, really be honest with how much time do you have and then do you travel? Do you like to travel? Are you a person that wants to take two vacations a year, you know, 10, 14 days each? Bro, it's difficult when you have animals. You don't need somebody to come get your male, make sure the doors are locked, you know,

30:58every other day and make sure the cat's bowl is full. Now, you need somebody to understand your animals. You need somebody to let them out in the morning if they get put up every night and then put them away at night. You need somebody to make sure they're fed and watered, make sure nothing's wrong. If you got aquatic systems running on pumps, you need them to check that every day. When you start bringing living things, and I mean things with a face when I say that, not living things like a tree or a grass on your property, there's a whole new level of responsibility and what you end up with a lot of times is yes, you can get somebody to do it, but generally you need somebody you're going to pay and that's going to add to the expense of your travel time. So if you travel a lot, if you like to travel and I don't just mean for work, I mean if you just like, you know, every so often to just get away, if you like the freedom, hey, I could take one vacation day this week and we already have Monday off and that's a four day weekend.

31:59Let's get in the car and drive three hours away and go have a, you know, hang out in the state park or get a hotel room up in the other place or whatever it is. You have, man, you have a hard life ahead. If you haven't designed something in there to mitigate the fact that those things are going to depend on you and while you're gone. This is one of the reasons I like fish and I like quail. You can put quail on a stack system, you can put a feed hopper in. You can put a plumb in a water with drip and all you come home to after four or five days is a shitload of eggs. They'll be fine. You try to do that with chickens. There's some ways to do it, but it's a lot more work. It's a lot more work and it takes a lot more thought to get it done. You do it with fish. Again, the fish as long as the water stays full and air stays in the water, fish don't care. They'll be fine. Throw a bunch of minutes in before you leave and that'll feed your fish until you get back. Then what else can you come up with? I mean, really sit down and get into the third party imaginary mode.

33:04Think about it this way and I tell people to solve problems this way all the time. You have a person that's a problem or a question in their mind. Do I take this and it doesn't have to be gardens and homestay? Do I take this new job? Do I fire this employee? Do I hire this employee? Do I promote this employee? Do I try for this promotion? Whatever it is, right? Do I cut this toxic person out of my life or try to repair the relationship? Don't care what it is, it's that diverse. You have to sit back and say, if I wasn't me, if this was my friend and it would be better like my associate, somebody you like but you're not emotionally as much attached to, very dispassionately, but I want this person to have the best experience possible. I care about them enough to feel that way. What would I tell them? Come up with an answer, all these questions is though you were a third party interviewer. I would also tell you you can use AI to help with this but don't never 100% trust artificial intelligence.

34:05That's why we do courses on artificial intelligence, so you don't have to use it responsibly. By the way, we're probably about a month from reopening registration for the next round in the AI entrepreneur class on how to build business, just a mid-show announcement there, right? The best thing you can do with AI in this situation is help it figure out how to interview you. Here's all the questions I came up with myself. Here's all my land. What other questions would you ask in the capacity of a homestead design consultant? Then you can pick and choose from those questions once it applies to you and it doesn't matter what its suggestions are. It matters how you answer them. Then you can compile all your answers and you could dump that back into AI, Gemini, ChatGPT, Cloud, whatever, and say what are your recommendations and then they'll just take them, go through them and formulate your design with as much information as possible. That's how you can integrate this new technology into this ancient pursuit of growing food in your own backyard.

35:05Let's also real quick hit some advantages of small property before we go through some of these individual elements. Number one of an advantage is it's very easy to irrigate. If you have a half acre, you can irrigate every inch of it. If you have the money rather than the time, you can design your system and even in fact it would be better if you did it before you put it in. You can go out with some paint and paint like the outlines of all your beds and shit like that. That's a good thing to do anyway. Just go get a can of white spray paint. The stuff that's designed to spray upside down for marking, like for marking cable and stuff like that is best. Your color wore a few white works really good though and just measure everything, figure out kind of your master design, your mind, rough sketch it and then go out and paint it and then sit back and look at it and then say I like this, there's plenty of room. Make sure any place there's going to be grass that would ever use to cut the grass fits in there and not barely.

36:05So it's like one and a half the width of your cutter, I learned that the hard way. That's a pain in the ass when you're weed eating your ass off, right? You keep down the lawn and you can't just mow it, but it's so it's good for that. But once you have it all designed out and if you don't already have a irrigation system installed and you call up an irrigation cup and you want to come out and put sprinklers in, what there used to do is just to grid, keep everything grass alive and happy so everybody looks like a little on a golf course. But none of those guys are in capable, all of them that are sizable anyway. They're doing work also for like apartment complexes and stuff. So even if it's not vegetables, they know how to put an irrigation for shrubs and bushes and flowers and shit like that. And even if it's not there yet, what you can tell them is go ahead and put the irrigation in or if the irrigation would be in the way, stub up this right here, cap it off and I'll extend it. And the beauty of that again is if you have to even 10 acres, it is a fortune if you have

37:06enough water availability to irrigate that, but every other home in the suburbs has an irrigation system and there's someone to put it in. So if you have more money than time for that, you can make that call. Now your lawn is green, but you also have irrigation for all of your productivity and it's something you cannot do on large scale. That is an advantage and it should be in price. And even if you do the work yourself, I mean half inch PVC pipes gone up in price, but it's not that expensive, a little bit of PVC glue, by the way, I can't think of what it's called right now, but they have at homey polos, etc. now this PVC glue that does not need primer. It's an all in one and it is fantastic because you don't look like you did bad things to pop a scarf when you're done working, okay? And it's, you just won and you're good. So I recommend that. You know, you can put in some timers and things like that, none of that is hard to do. The hardest thing to do usually when you're doing your own irrigation is if you need

38:07lines to cross like under dry ways and things like that. And there are probably some irrigation companies you call up, so I'm doing my own work. What would you charge me to have a guy come out here and this called a missile usually is what they use on a long driveway with a side walkers waste to do it with just a pipe in a piece of a garden hose, right? But on a driveway, they use a thing called a missile hooks up to a air compressor. You dig a hole, you drop the missile in it, you hook it up to the air compressor and it's pneumatic and it's just, it's fine if there's nothing in the way and it's for straight shots only, but it works pretty good for that. And you could, you know, one pass through and it's probably worth paying the guy and you can do it yourself and you can do it as complex or as simplistic, you can do it when you go out and throw a valve or you can do it where nature does it, you know, the automation doesn't fool you, which is better if you want to travel. And it's a huge selling point. Let's say you do all this to your suburban lot and you make it this beautiful back yard homestead, but you don't redneck kill bill yet because you always want to extra strategy

39:09with real property and you make it nice and beautiful and somebody comes like, I love this but I don't know if I'll be able to maintain it. Make a book, this is good for any real estate thing, by the way, all the systems and how they work in your house, even if it's plain Jane, even if you're listening to this and you don't do all this stuff today, you're waiting for your new home. When you sell your house, who do you call one water heater breaks, all that shit, but add to it the stuff for your homestead. And then the ability to understand that, hey, you don't have to do anything for all this stuff. These are all the things that just takes care of itself. And if you don't want a vegetable garden, you can throw bagonies in there and everything will be fine. That way it remains, it becomes a selling attribute rather than a selling detriment. And I don't care how sure you are, you're going to die in the home you're in, you don't know that. You don't know when you may have to back out. And a lot of times what happens is you have a couple and one of those members that couple pre-deceases the other, sometimes quite young in life.

40:09And that other partner is like, this doesn't work for just me, for whatever reason, and they want to go. So preserve that. You should have life insurance. We should also have property insurance in the form of an exit strategy. So that property remains liquid. Just a little business advice on top of all this. It's also very easy to manage small properties. If you do things right, you raise beds when there is a weed, it's literally two fingers and it just pulls out. If you asked me what would be the one thing that you would do differently, because I have a lot of things I just wouldn't do, okay? This is a hard property I'm on. For those that are new, I have a lot of my property, I have four inches and then limestone. I don't mean chunks. I mean slab, right? But if you said of the things that you did that you would still do, what is one thing you would do differently? Every raised bed I put in, I would have gotten the heaviest way woven geotech boybucker fabric there is so that it would lay out with a footprint of at least two foot beyond the edge

41:14of my raised beds, I would have put that on the ground, leveled that out and put the raised bed on top of that, and I would not have the problems I do with the mutigrass crawling into my beds today. I'll have an update for you soon on what I'm doing to deal with that this year. I have some beds that that's not a really a problem and I have some of my best beds. It's a big problem. It's a big problem and that's what I would do. So if we take these mitigation approaches in advance and we have small properties, we take one walk around the property a day, we harvest whatever is there, we prune whatever needs pruning, we pull the weeds out, we throw them on the ground and let them be compost, we throw them to the chickens, we throw them to compost, but whatever our system is, we should be able to walk a property of that size and honestly we should be able to do most of the things that need doing that day in 15 minutes and then you have your scheduled things that take longer like once every two weeks spraying certain plants with compost, extract or something like that. And if you do that, if you do that, you have a very easy to manage system and then you

42:17can make a little video of how you measure system. And then if you do need the exit strategy that Nick is asking about right now, if he comes again more at selling out, oh look, this is all we have to do and we have free food, yeah I'm in. Right? I'm in. And you can't, like you should have always have an exit strategy, you absolutely should. But you can't overthink that because if you do, then there's, you can't do anything. You go to put a pool in, well some people want to pool, but some people don't, but some people want one, but so I've heard that for most ages when we've sold houses, we have a pool and that's really not the advantage you think it is for the people that want one. And in two instances, we know the pool sold to house, so don't give me that shit, right? You have to think, is there a large enough market that this attribute actually makes the house more sellable? I don't care if it sells to Frank or Tom, I care that Frank or Tom buys it with my exit strategy planning. Next, it's easy to shade some spots.

43:18It really, it's one of the greatest things in the world, especially if you live in the south, the deep south, the heat, the intensity where you get these days where it's not, you know, when I lived in Pennsylvania, we got some days in a hundred degree weather. We got a lot of days in the high 90s. But we never got, though, was 12 hours of freaking temperatures above 95. Like the temperature goes up and about, it goes back down July, if you're, you know, a little bit up in elevation or whatever, eight, nine o'clock at night, it's really nice to see if it was humid and sweaty as shit during the day. And then by the time the sun goes down, you might be putting like a long sleeve, you know, a flannel shirt on or something, it's full of jelly. Feels good. How did it happen here? I have seen it hit 105 here at six o'clock in the evening and it's hotter at 738 o'clock. And now those days, I've seen it still be 99 degrees at one o'clock in the morning.

44:22And so when you have that, you need a certain amount of sun for that plant to photosynthesize, but then you need shade for a direct, especially in a later part of the day. So that can be accomplished with things like 30% shade cloth. That just mitigates it and you can easily set that up or you can use structures, trees, fences, make shadow masks during the peak of that time and figure out what should I plant where? That's really easy to figure out. There's one negative on these smaller lots. If you have too much shade, it can be really difficult sometimes to open it up. But if you have four neighbors or three neighbors and they all have giant, high canopy trees, you probably don't want them cut down and they ain't going to do it. And you don't want to be the dickhead that asks them to anyway. And if that just happens to put your entire backyard in shade, then there's real no option there to open that up and you have to think differently.

45:22I won't get an exactly what to do. Who would be like, grow mushrooms? You have to, you'll like mushrooms grow mushrooms. You can almost always find some places to grow some things. And maybe that's more of an animal-based system that you have there. With more of a forest garden approach, plants that do well in dappled shade, forest herbs in medicinal and things like that. There's always something you can do. Another thing is because of all the buildings, the shade, the open areas, the wind blocks, right? The fact that there is microclimates galore on an urban or suburban property. One of the coolest things you can pick up to learn more about your microclimates, and I have these for available on my website with an Amazon link, is an E-Tech City thermal gun. And it's a little temperature gun and they sell for about 20 to 30 bucks depending on what the price is that day because they go up and down. And you point at that something and you should a little red laser beam at it, bounces back

46:24and tells you the temperature. And it is amazing. You go from one place and you shoot the ground and it's 107 degrees and you go four feet over and it's 92 degrees. That is still warm. That is a massive difference. And you go around behind the back of the tree, it's 78 degrees. Shady, cool, sunny, warm, sunny, blazing hot, different tactics. What might go there? And you've got to get this over time too, is it changes, right? But if you know that's an average, maybe a plant like a tomato is going to do real good in that sunny warm area and herb like rosemary will handle that scorching heat and something that likes the shade and coolness and it gets enough sun back there like maybe some greens that normally bolt in your heat might do well there or something more of like a fart like maybe you put a little, you go into the woods and find ramps and you plant ramps in that area and then you get one harvest a year and you have wild ramps growing in your

47:27backyard. There's always something but the microclimates are only an advantage if we identify them and we make them part of our design. So when we have that kind of map of the property, the idea where beds go and everything we should also then look at solar aspect, how the sun tracks throughout the year. You can get an app for free on your iPhone, Android, etc. called Sunseeker and you can set the dates and you can see on June 21st, which is the longest day of the year where your sun tracks, December 21st, when the shortest day of the year and everything in between and you can also just do simple things like put some sticks in the ground and map your shadows and understand where everything changes and then when you put all of that together you get a much more holistic idea and you don't have to get analysis paralysis with all this. I'm just saying to think about it and you're just going to make smarter design decisions, smarter placement decisions in that design and you're going to make them appropriate to

48:31your lifestyle by interviewing yourself first. See this is what a consultant is going to do and you can either pay the consultant whose chief job is going to be to act like a prosecutor and make you not lie to yourself or you can be honest with yourself and you can come up with really great design on these small properties and if you put design elements in and you always think, but what if I decide I don't like this here? How would I move it? You're going to be a little more careful before you implement it or you're going to implement it away and when you go, yeah, I don't like that bed there. It's kind of a pain to ask but I guess this fall we'll pull all the soil out of it, we'll move it over here and we'll refill it. If you don't think that way in advance you're going to do things that are completely permanent that you have no choice about and you're going to call that what? Like what I do with my bets without the bottom blocker, a type one error. And that means different things to different schools of thought but in the world of permaculture or generative design.

49:31That means a decision you made that you regret almost from the moment you made it forever. It's either impossible or cost not effective to go redo. So you want to avoid those. If you can change something it's easy to change, great, you can do that. If it's hard to change and you get it wrong, you'll wish forever you didn't do it and someday you might even bite the bullet and do it anyway even if it's expensive. So avoid that. And that's another good reason like the higher a Nick Ferguson. If you're putting a lot of money into your design even on a smaller property, higher a Nick, you know, a couple thousand bucks can save you tens of thousands of dollars because even on small properties, sometimes these landscape projects and all kinds of, there's a reason in those landscape guys and on the companies drive those $80,000 pickup trucks. They didn't pay for it with their daddy's money, they pay for it with their clients' money. Just keep that in mind. It can get very expensive very quickly, especially today's day and age with all the hard escape work.

50:33But those microclimates are hugely advantageous if you identify them and again, I'll make sure there's a link today's show notes over on the audio side. There's a link down there in this video. You click that link, you go over to my blog, you get to, there'll be a copy of the video there but all the audio stuff and everything else will be there. But if you're listening to it live, it won't be there until about an hour before we're done with the live, an hour after we're done with the live. And then the other thing you really have in true suburban environments where there is kind of a larger city town, not your, like I said, you can be in a small town of 1,300 people and still have this type of house. But if you're near like a Dallas, a Fort Worth and Atlanta, a Jacksonville, a Tampa, a Philadelphia, a Harrisburg, a San Antonio, Seattle, San Francisco, any city that you would hear and kind of know in your head where that is on a map even if you'd ever been there, then you have people and people create resources. People plant trees, trees have leaves that fall off.

51:33Now you have mulching and compost material and source of leaf mold, which is excellent fertility. People prune trees and a lot of times in suburban environments because it's what it takes to get the people to remove it. You'll have like certain times of the year because you can't just what you have city garbage and city waste and a lot of times you can't just pile up debris and they'll take it. But you know, once a year they'll take away your tree prunings if there are no more than three foot long and placed in bundles that are no more than, you know, whatever that is. And you know what I see? Resource. You know when that's going to be if you live there? No one gets mad. It's to be disposed of. You drive around with a pickup truck and you can get free wood for making my O'shark. Or fuel with it for building things. Not everything has to be built out of two by force and square, right? You can build fencing out of that ship. You look, they've already made it a perfect length for you and made it convenient. You can, you know, work with neighbors and say, hey, if I give you a five gallon bucket

52:36with a lid, will you throw all your coffee grinds in it for me? And anything and you can just say, these are the things that I'm willing to compost and I wouldn't do this everywhere. But if you have four or five houses doing that, you can make a hell out of it. A lot of compost. And you can rest on the compost you made out of your own stuff, right? There's a lot of things like that you can do. Home setting, he then said, he hired Pete from Green Dreams and he helped a ton even though I'm good with design. He's, that's Pete Canaris, I think, is his last name. He's very good too. And I think he's out in like the Florida area. So if you're out in that southeast area, that's another person that you can talk to. It would be happy to help you with your design work. But those resources, waste streams, people, you know, you can, if you need a really big, like, you just need boots on the ground. You need people, right? You can take just your grunt work. You can go to all your neighbors and go, look, man, I got a project.

53:36I'm doing it. It's going to be really cool. We're going to be putting these garden beds or whatever in this weekend and I could use a hand. I'm doing pizza and beer and some barbecue or whatever it is in the backyard. We have some music on, hang out. What we do this, if you want to come and, you know, do a little one-pager of when it is and what it's all about. Go hand one to everybody that's been walking this into your house to see who shows up. Now you have cultivated relationships and you also could tell those people, hey, man, I'm glad you came. I know that you guys are, you know, basically working for barbecue and beer and I appreciate that. Your property that you want to do, I'm happy to help back. You can create an entire community off of that. People are a human resource. Human resources in a company exist to protect the company from the humans, okay? Human resources in real life is how we commune as beings and get more done, right? So you have all those resources next. Let's talk about some things. Honestly, I just want you to think from a permaculture perspective and for those that

54:37are not permaculture, I'm going to do a very brief understanding of this zone-based design. Zone-based design is usually caught as zones one through five and some people instructors and I do this as well when I'm going deep into the subject also talk about zone zero, which is kind of inside your house and how it relates to one, two, three, four and five. But the overarching thing is zone one is probably a place that you almost always step foot on every day. Unless you're sick and laid up in bed, just walking around your property, you put a foot within a foot of that place every day. And then zone two is a little bit further out. It's something that requires maybe maintenance a few times a week. This is where your small or church, your intensely pruned stuff would go on a larger property and things like that. Zone three is kind of like your main cropping if you were on a farm like that would be your corn, your sorghum, your potatoes, all of that. Zone four is going to be your farm forestry where you have managed forest and zone five is wilderness that you don't touch.

55:39And people try to sometimes teach cramming all of this into a suburban design of an acre or less. And sometimes they even put a little homage to nature in the corner where all the things grow and they don't mow it and they don't whatever until they have to because it needs the fence. The reality is for suburban design, almost everything's zone one and a little bit of zone two. And zone two might be where we keep things like if we burn wood for heat, that's where we keep our wood pile because we only need the wood heat during the winter. So then we have a staging area in zone one we bring it to. That's kind of what we're thinking, right? But that's that zone one, two design. And so that's your fruit trees that are intrinsically pruned, that's your garden, your herb garden, your, you know, your bird bath, whatever it is, right? It doesn't for you. Your little garden ponds, whatever. That's all zone one, two. Here's the secret. Even if you have a ten acre property, you should have a zone one and two and the majority of the food your home consumes should come from that one and two zone except if you're

56:41using like your zone three is like grazing, okay. And then the meat coming from, okay, that's different. You're not going to do that in a suburban lot so that's out the window. So when I'm talking about some things you can grow and you intensely manage. So everybody should do this anyway because you're in a small property you're going to because you don't have a choice. Because what happens is people get a big property and they worry about all the things way out there and they don't start with the design where they live. So when I teach people a design, what I say is walk outside of your front door, look down at the square foot you're standing in, look at every square foot that touches it and design that, then keep doing that until you design all the way around the house. And move out to your next circle and move out to your next circle and design each square foot. You're never going to do that on 100 acres or 10 acres you can't. It's not possible. You'd spend two years before you stepped on every square foot and thought that way.

57:46In a suburban lot you could make that walk today. You could think about it that way today, go down each fence line. Design your fence lines, come in, go back around, design that, determine where you need open space for the kids to play or the dog to run or whatever. You want pathways. If you think about it that way, you're going to have a much better time doing your design work. Gardening is for everyone, but what are you going to garden? Well, for that, see answers to your questions. Your main question is, what do you want to grow? You know something to say that? What do you want to grow? What do you eat? What will you eat? How much of it do you eat? And so there's when you, once you have the garden beds in and you go to the box store and all they have are peppers to made as eggplants and herbs. And those don't rate high on your list. You got to start thinking what else can I grow? You need to think about if you're going to really make a difference here, calorie crops. What are your calorie crops? Your best calorie production is eggs in meat and dairy.

58:48You're eliminated and what you can do with that. Now I have seen people with a couple little dairy goats or so in a backyard. It's cute. They stink. If you're going to get milk and babies, you're going to have to have a stud and billies really stink. So that's going to have to be an arranged encounter. So you probably all want to do that you can, but you probably don't want to. So your backyard production, most of your caloric production has to come from vegetation. And a lot of the things we like to grow are great for nutrition. They're great for flavor. They're great for taste. And they're great for saving money, but they don't put a lot of calories in the belly. So what can we grow for calories? Well, tubers are probably your best bet, potatoes, sweet potatoes, things like that. Or high dollar items that we now don't have to buy. So now we can buy the calories from the store. That's the reverse engineer approach. So if you are finding lots of your calories in vegetation form and you live in the south, I recommend sweet potato.

59:49One ten foot by four foot better sweet potato. If you do it right, you can produce a massive amount of calories in there. There's no way you could ever match the caloric output with peppers and tomatoes and cucumbers. A cucumber has very little fricking calories that it's in to get with, right? They taste good. I like them. And for me, I like that they're low in calories. That makes them low in carbs, but I don't tell you what the grow based on what my diet is. I want you to grow what you grow. So think about the calorie intensive crops that you can grow in those situations. If that's your goal or if you eat a lot of salad greens and peppers and everything else, you can grow that and then you can take that off the food bill to a degree. And then you can reallocate that portion of the food budget over to your meat for lack of a better time. There's also things that I don't really think are worth growing, especially in these

1:00:53environments. And I've had some people, they've come up with ways to do it and it makes sense. But for instance, I wouldn't grow wheat. I would grow wheat in a backyard. You want to do it? Why? Because I can buy the best organically grown wheat and I can buy it as spring wheat, winter wheat, red wheat, white wheat, hard hard meat, whatever I want and have a giant bag of it shipped to my house and have wheat. And I can grind it whenever I need it and it'll pretty much store forever until I grind it. So why would I go through all the labor intensity required to grow something that I will always end up growing at a loss. Now there is a, I had somebody email me and say, hey, you don't understand how little work you have to actually do if you put this little wheat area in. If you want to do it, go ahead. I'm saying for me, okay, I don't think because then I got to threshold the wheat and I got to do all that other shit. You want to do it? Go ahead and do it. I was going to grow a grain and I did a whole show on this.

1:01:53You can go to the survival podcast.com and put sorghum in the search bar. I'm sure you'll find it. I would grow sorghum. I would grow sorghum because I can start it really early in the year as soon as I don't worry about it freezing. I can get it up. I can get it head on it. I can harvest that grain. It has as much nutritional value as wheat does, even though I have to do different things with it. I can cut that stock further down and I can either, I can use it and extract sorghum sap from it or I can just compost this extremely valuable compost material because it has so much nutrient from that sorghum sap and all that sugar. What will happen then with most sorghum, especially things like men and I, giant white African things like that, it will grow back and it will put heads on again. Usually when you cut it down, when it grows back in the second time, it will grow actually multiple stocks the second time. Now I'm going to get smaller stocks, a little bit smaller heads, but more of them. I have a second harvest. I'm going to cut all those stocks.

1:02:54I have beautiful mulch and let that mulch with all that sugar in it be feed for soil organisms. I'm much more likely to do that because I'm looking at it from a standpoint of ROI. I only have so much space available. Probably I could grow a ton of it in that suburban backyard, but you might and small yard is subject, right, because two people can have a half acre lot and maybe you have a lot similar to what I had in my property or I was only a third of an acre, but my front yard, I literally could mow the yard faster and I could fill up, if the lawn mower was empty and I could gas in it, it took longer to fill up the gas tank in the lawn mower than it did in the motor front yard. I'm talking push mower because the front yard was a little postage stamp and this is part of what we bought the house. It was a coldest sack. The backyard went out like a parallelogram and like it was all the acres is back there. I had a lot more space than I had a neighbor up on the corner and a square lot.

1:03:54He also had right out a third of an acre over half his land was a front yard on the corner. A lot of times it's difficult in certain neighborhoods to do a lot of these things in the front yard. So it's always relative with bigger nuts. So if you had a one acre yard and let's say three quarters it was fenced back yard, you knew what you want. Yeah, you could grow a lot of sorghum in a week, but think from the standpoint of what you're producing. Flutter trees, if you're going to be a meat producer, may give you a better ROI than fruit trees. No, that's hard to understand, but let's go through it. We just had an icon about this. Let's say you have that half acre or more backyard and you take something like white mulberry, which is very palatable, flutter. And you plant 10 of those that you manage in a cop, coppest situation, you know, toward one property line, again, leaving enough room between it and the fence to work behind

1:04:57it. Don't grow them up against the fence. You'll hate yourself. I promise you. You're getting that fodder and you're feeding it to a hutch system of rabbits and you're feeding rabbit pellets and some of the fodder because black soldier fly like just to black soldier fly. Now you're going to process that black soldier fly frost, which is a nice way of saying maggot shit. All right. You're going to put that into a worm bin. The worms are going to process it further. Now you have a fertility aid that goes to your garden and back to the trees, okay? All right. You also have a building material, fast growing. You have biochar material. You get all that out of it. A fruit tree, you're probably not going to get as much out of. And if you're not really intensively managing a fruit tree system, you don't get a lot of production either. And in some climates, it's difficult to get good production from your fruit. One of the problems I have in this climate is we get very warm days usually in February.

1:06:03And we get very cold days in February and we get very warm days in March. We get some pretty cold days in March and we often have a situation that we're set up for perfectly this year, but it looks like we're going to skip it. We're going to hit 36 to 38 degrees this weekend. I have plum trees in flower everywhere. That happens to mulberry. I don't care if I'm grown up for fodder. I'll give it shit. So if you're in certain climates, like fruits really easy and in other, it's hard. So all I'm saying is stink really about that design element heavily before you use it and before you commit to it. And if you're going to be growing rabbits or even if you were growing something like whale, they're not really going to eat mulberry fodder, but your mulberry fodder can feed your black soldier flies and your black soldier fly wilders can be fed to your quail. You see what I'm saying? You got to think that way. And you can also make hay even in a small property.

1:07:06There's plants you can grow that make good hay and grow a little patch of that. Go to YouTube search for mini hay balemaker and you can learn to make one out of a few parts of some plywood. And then you can be feeding them that stuff fresh when it's available and you can make small hay bales and you can have hay for your rabbits through the winter. If you want rabbits, jack did not just say you should have rabbits. He said you should determine if you want rabbits and then you should think of how do I make my land feed my rabbits. And again, worm farms and black soldier fly composting. But Jack, I hear what you're saying about a white mulberry and fodder. I don't want rabbits. I don't want to grow trees just for black soldier flies. They need other things anyway, but I'd like that compost, but I guess you're not for me because I don't want to do it that way, bullshit. If you want a worm farm or a BSL bin or both, you can feed them with nothing from your property and create inputs for your property with other people's waste. We just had a covered a guy from the audience wrote in and he is growing black soldier fly

1:08:09larva. He feeds his black soldier fly larva to his quail and then the quail make manure that can go to the worm bin or back to the black soldier fly bin. So the manure really needs to go to a worm bin or a regular compost pile because it's going to heat up too much and I'm sorry, I need to go to a worm bin. It really needs to go to a very calm post because it can really overheat a worm bin because it's too much nitrogen and carbon together, but like he's doing that. He feeds his black soldier fly solo success only coffee grinds. That's like 99% of what they get is coffee grinds. He gets his coffee grinds from his break room at where he works because nobody cares about that. Like in most break rooms, if you have like 50 people working, like how many plus coffee you go through a day? I mean, we fill up a third of a five gallon bucket a week just with coffee for me and

1:09:10my wife, just dump in the filters into it. You see what I'm saying? So a break room, a Starbucks or any coffee shop and you might have to go to two or three before somebody says yes. But I found most times when you go to coffee, you go to Starbucks and go ask them about grinds or whatever. Yeah, we do that once a year with her. But do you have any grinds now? Hold on and a drag I have, yes, wet bag or coffee grinds out and just give it to you. There'll be paper filters and shit in there. It doesn't matter. It's all compostable. It all can go into your worm bins and into your back soldier fly bins or job a juice or any kind of juice bar or something like that because they're constantly juicing all that stuff and they end up with all of the fibers, remains of those plants. You feed that to your worms and your black soldier flies or just throw in your compost. And so there's ways to do all of this and that's why you shouldn't do one thing only because you want to do the other thing. You should figure out the things you really want to do that have the outputs that you really want and then figure out how to make those work. And if they work by adding an element better than bringing in from somebody else and outside

1:10:14input, then do that if they work better for you. If they don't figure out how to get what's needed to support them at little cost of time and money as possible. Next, you really need to think about as many forms of composting as possible here. And what are the ways to compost the work best for you? The traditional way that most people think of making compost is we get a bunch of material together. We make a big pile. We wet it down as we do it. It heats up for three or four days and we turn it and then heats up for another three or four days and we turn it and then heats up for a couple more days and we turn it and we keep doing that until it's all broken down. To do that kind of composting right, we need about a cubic yard or cubic meter of material to begin with. Those people in back yards are not going to have a cubic meter of material to begin with. They're going to have to compost over time or they're going to have to store that material in a way that it doesn't begin to compost itself before you're ready for it.

1:11:16We can do a continuous ad, we can use static pile, there's a bunch of composting methods. But one thing inherent to people is we produce waste and not just P and P, right? We produce all sorts of food waste and organic waste that all needs to be managed. And then remember, you are surrounded by resources. So if you do want to do the large high turn 21 day, 21 to 28 day compost method, you can probably arrange a time to pick stuff up where you can put that together. If you don't want to do all that shit, you can probably build something like a bio reactor compost, which I really recommend that yes, you go ahead and you put everything in there at one time and you run my system that takes about a year to make the best compost possible. So you can build one and you can just throw stuff into it as you get it. You can do that. Just keep it, keep it wet. Be better. You take my course homefoodsystems.com, you can learn more about how to make this kind of compost. And when it's all the way full, you put another one and fill it and by the time you fill

1:12:18the second one, that first one's gone. Or if you're an MSB member, you can go into your MSB account and there's a video in there from like 20 years ago, almost now of me showing you how to build a system like that without a cheap garbage can to come from home to your home loads. And it's the same kind of concept. You fill one up and when it's full, you go to the next one and you fill the next one up, you go to the next one. By the time the third one's full, first one's compost that you use the compost and start filling that one. There's a lot of ways to do this, but you need like compost is the number one friend you have in intensively managed systems. And you might want to bring in some like Dr. Earth organic fertilizer or something like that in the beginning, but if you do this right over time, about five years into it, you have no need of any outside inputs. Learn a little bit about IMO and IPMO, which is using indigenous microorganisms both for pest control and for fertility, build good compost, use lots of mulch, make yourself, make use the available resources that are in an area and if you live in a suburban area,

1:13:22you should have to bring in almost nothing. Number five years of intensive management and you should bring in probably the most of your first year and it should be declining all the way through. Now, if there's real deficiencies and you need to constantly address them for a longer or it takes a little longer to get there, that's okay, but that should be what you're looking to do. Dennis Allen said, I made that trash can bin system, I still use it today. I bet you know how long he's been on, he probably made it back when I released the video and he's still using it. It's just basically a piece of pie, certain places you put holes, rubber, the tough garbage cans that are about 30, 40 bucks at home, deep on lows and the beauty of it is you don't have to make them all at once. I did in the video, but really all you have to do is put one out, make one and you don't need to make a second one until it's almost full, so you can spread the pricing out over about eight or nine months depending on how much waste you produce. Again, I really recommend that you focus heavily on composting systems no matter what,

1:14:27but especially in intensively managed systems. You can also, you should really think about aquaculture and aquaponics and growing aquatic plants both for fertility and feed for humans. There's a lot of plants that do really well in aquatic or semi-aquatic systems. What I mean by that is, for instance, APS Americana, which is the groundnut. It's a really great tuber crop, super easy to grow, shallow root system. It needs wet soil. If we have an aquatic system and a pump, we can move things through a large wicking bed system that never dries out. That is from experience I'm telling you, you can grow more groundnut than you know what to do within that system. There's duck potato. There's water cathrops. There's water chestnut. There's so many things. IPamera aquatica, which is a Chinese water spinach or cancong. There's so many things you can grow in aquatic systems.

1:15:28It's really worth considering. Aquatic systems in backyards bring in frogs, toads, lizards, and other predator species that are your allies in your garden. I'm going to talk a lot about that today just wanted to hit on it. If you told me my number one goal is meet and I don't want to deal with rabbits, what should I do? Quail. You can put in, let's say, two cages of quail, two grow out cages. I would put in one more cage, keep a couple of spare males because occasionally females get pissed off at kill a male. You can, whenever you want to, whatever time schedule permits, you can take some of those quails eggs and you can hatch them and you can grow them out and you can, from the time that egg hatches until you're ready to pop the lid off, right, pop a top and process that quail into something delicious to eat. I recommend stuffed with jalapenos and wrapped in bacon is about six weeks.

1:16:30In fact, you want to start your meat harvest at about six weeks and get it done by about eight weeks because your cold birds, which will be your older layers, once every year and a half, they all get, they all get popped to top because they're laying and their production is going to slow down and you bring in your replacements, seven weeks before they're going to get their pops topped and they get their pops topped and your placement girls go in and they'll immediately start laying. It's never ending perpetual meat that way and how much it's up to you. I mean, you can take it to the extreme. I know a dude named Brad Davies, we worked with him in the past. He has a single stack of cages in his garage in Detroit, Michigan. So cold climate, unheated garage, everything's automated. He can easily leave for a week at a time. His best production year at the last time I interviewed him, he did 1200 meat birds in one year and something like 14,000 eggs.

1:17:34That's a little more intensive than I want to do, but it does tell you what's possible. I want to say I only have one question so far, so as you see, at the bottom of the screen, I'm getting toward the end here, if you have a question, you're in a live stream, go ahead and hit me up with it. If you're listening after the fact and you have a question for me, check at thesurvivalpodcast.com is my email, put TSPC in the subject line, all capital letters, like it's a word. It means the survival podcast and that way if it goes into the spam filter, which you're for your first time emailer is a high probability it will, I will find it and I won't miss it and I will try to respond to you. Anyway, quail to me are the easiest meat and egg formula on the planet. They're easy to produce at least some of their food for them, like I said in the form of black soldier fly or some other things that you can grow, they're pretty and they have a really great feed utilization curve and because they can happen and they do live, if you don't over stock the caging, they can happily live in small caging, you can automate systems

1:18:36and if you even want to do something kind of more like a coupon run environment for them, as long as you completely close them because everything needs to quail, like a mini aviary, you can do that and you can automate everything. You can easily set quail up and I mean, all you have to do is think about it, kind of walk through everything they need, maybe do everything manually at first and then start automating it, you can easily set it up to where you can walk out of the house on a Thursday morning because you took two vacation days plus a weekend, be gone for four or five days and come back, your quail are happy, you just have a bunch of eggs to pick up. The guy that I mentioned that did it in the garage, he would do that while he had eggs in an incubator, not after they hatch, but eggs in an incubator and because you can go four or five days in the quail eggs, I think take 18 days if I remember right to hatch, so if you just put them in today and you're gone for five days, it doesn't matter, incubator turns them in all and you have a little brooder at the bottom of the stack where all the puff balls, little golf balls would go in to grow out until they were ready to move into

1:19:39grow out cages and without you. Very, very simple, very, very reliable and would you like quail? Do you like chicken? Yeah, then you'll like quail. It's really that simple, you'll like quail, you just might have to do a little bit of learning curve on cooking them so you don't overcook them. Oh, chickens, easy button, but some real issues, can be noisy, can be a bit of pain in the ass, a little harder to deal with as far as automation to take care of them, some people do it, but it's a little bit more work, a little more noticeable by Karen's that look over fences and a little actually a lot more work to process and something that people, I don't know what it is, people, some people, when you have, if you have a flock of 25 chickens on a property my size, you don't get attached. If you get attached, you get attached to like one, like I had a really cool rooster, he used to come up and lay his head on me like a friggin dog and shit, I was never going to kill him. Like I ended up when I got rid of chickens and I went to all ducks for reasons

1:20:44that I won't get into today and I literally found him through this audience, I found him a home where he could live out his years because he was a great, friendly rooster, very protective of his girls and I wanted him to have a home. Yeah, but everybody else, no problem, you got to go. So, but when you have like a small fly like four chickens, you know, everybody has a name, you get to know everybody and then they're two and a half, three and a half years old and they're not productive anymore, you got to turn them into stew chickens and that can be a hang of for people and I understand, you know, I make sure upgrade got a home. Yeah, but the other 25 didn't really matter, but when you have four kids get attached to them and stuff and they're just more work and they are not a good meat animal in a backyard situation unless you've optimized for that. In general, the chickens we use for laying do not excel as meat animals, they're fine as a crock, crock, bird at the end of their life, but they don't excel for that. You're looking at hybrids and specifically your cornish cross and things like that and using some sort of like

1:21:49a tractor system or something, if you want to do that fine, but I wouldn't build permanent infrastructure for it. I would build a temporary chicken tractor, I would raise a dozen of them and I would process them and put them away and then I would be like, self, do I want to keep doing this? And you may very well come to the conclusion that you do not wish to, okay? Rabbits are probably the most sustainable meat animal. The quail will be the easiest, but if you live in a place where grass and herbs and forbs and a couple fodder trees grow, I would always keep a bag or two of pellets on hand for emergency purposes, but you can grow rabbits with no outside inputs and their pee is caustic and you need to learn about rabbits to deal with that so it doesn't like, you know, corrode and destroy their caging and

1:22:49things like that. So there's ways to do that. That's not hard, but the poop is gold. It is one of the few maneuvers, this is what we call a cold maneuver. In other words, it doesn't, you can compost it, you can feed it to worms, you can feed it to soldier flies, you can do all that shit with it. You can also take that shit and just put it on the ground in your garden and it'll let nature take its course. If you do that with like chicken manure and things like that, it's what's called a hot manure. It's got too much nitrogen, it's too hot not to touch at that point and it can burn your plants. So rabbits are like the output is fantastic, the meat is fantastic and the inputs can be minimal to zero, but the rabbits and there's some challenges there like I can tell you that I have a lot of people I know that keep rabbits in this part of Texas and none of them are the happiest people I know in the middle of summer. And plenty of like my rabbits make it, they're fine, but they're always doing extra shit. They're putting ice bottles once a day in the cage form,

1:23:54they have fan systems, they try to keep them in the shade or whatever. So it does it work. If you have an air like the best things I've seen people do, they have like rabbit trees like an aviary and they only say you have to bring the buck to the doe or the doe to the buck I guess because I've never kept rabbits one or the other because what happens is your doe can castrate your buck if you do it the wrong way and all, but that's in the confined small space. I've seen people put in like a 10 by 20 rabbit tree and then it's much easier, but do you have a space time and desire for that? That would make automation a lot easier and what I've seen people do that is really freaking cool for being able to manage their rabbits in the ground. They just take cheap igloo coolers. Now when I say cheap only 30, 40 bucks like your standard size beer cooler, they bury them in the ground. Okay, they bury them in the ground and then they can like they're outside the actual footprint

1:24:54of the aviary and so without even going in the aviary they can check on their doves that are in there but since they have these these buried down in the ground spaces, they have places to get out of the heat and that works really well for them. You might have to do a little subterranean with your with your fencing to keep them from digging out but if they have a lot of places to go, they don't tend to burrow out. So that if I was going to do rabbits, I would take that approach personally. Again, I think they are the most sustainable regenerative meat animal that we have available on small holdings. You should also think beyond your property though. Is there a park with relatively clean water that has catfish in it? Okay, then I don't need to grow catfish. Is there a park that's overpopulated with catfish, especially something like a friend, the bullhead, which is actually a great eating fish, no matter what anybody tells you, but all the fish come out of there are about seven inches long like they are the little Karen pond that I call it down here and because they they think they're healthy, I tell them people not to harvest and they

1:25:58really need like a shitload of them harvested but I can throw that into a garden pond and feed it some pellets and minnows and at the end of the season it's a perfect harvest size. So I can either be direct, you know, hunting, gathering, foraging into my mouth or my freezer or I can be getting a free stalk that way and that includes things like, you know, if you have a place nearby where you always go to pick blackberries and you have a place where blackberries work on your land, you know, maybe you dig up some wild blackberry cane and plant it on your land. Just be careful because it's a bramble, it spreads, do everything else you would do with the blackberry, but we can either forage, hunt, fish gather from local resources for the people or to then further grow out on the property and we should not ignore that because it's again, you're usually close to some resources when you're in these environments while we're in another. Don't forget herbs are the hidden hero.

1:27:00Herbs are freaking expensive. Go look at what it costs to buy a little jar of dried basil or oregano which is shit quality by the way. Work that out to the pound and it's like buying a freaking dope it's so expensive and then think about, you know, it wasn't really that much and think about how easy they are to grow. So we grow tons of her parsley, basil, oregano, rosemary, thyme and again this is back to your client intake you do on yourself. When you cook what herbs do you use? And what herbs are best used dried? What herbs are best used fresh and then that helps you determine what to grow and when to grow it and to not overgrow things that really you just want to use fresh and you're going to end up with just a massive amount but there's other things we can do with that massive amount we'll get there in a minute. But don't overlook those things and a lot of things that are more like a flavor thing than a calorie thing, garlics, onions, leeks, ginger, turmeric, all these things can be grown in most of the United States with proper timing. They're

1:28:05very expensive to buy. They don't fill you up. I don't know anybody that lives on onions, boy you would smell if you did I would think, but I don't know even it lives on the calories from onions even though they're actually one of the higher calorie things like I'm talking about. Certainly nobody lives on garlic or turmeric or ginger but when you start looking at if I'm going to include this stuff in my cooking and sometimes just becoming aware of what you can do with it makes that happen and then again every time I take that thing from the garden that's dollars that don't go out and I either have more money to invest in my life, my homestead, my goals or I increase my food budget because now I can buy other things that I can't produce and you also want to look at trade and barter as well like if you're doing this and you have a neighbor doing this don't do the same things. If you have a neighbor and they're already doing rabbits and they're like bro I could get you some but you could do rabbits too be like bro I think maybe I would want to

1:29:08do quail would you like quail and then you do quail and he does rabbits and then you have an over-the-fence barter is better in a lot not all situations but in a lot of situations that would be an ideal situation. Why would I grow rabbit even if I like to eat rabbit if I have a neighbor walking distance from me that's growing rabbit why would I just say hey bro what would it take to expand your operation by one more doubt even if I don't have quail all right what would it take oh it would take this much and how many rabbits do that produce yeah okay if I promised to buy all the rabbits that no produced how much would you need me to pay per rabbit to make it worth your time to add it to what you're doing. If he gives you a number that number works out done I'm not doing rabbits he already's doing it he's already got a system he's already maintaining him his rabbits are not going to die while I'm on vacation I can automate my quail then and say hey when you take payment of quail if not I will not scale my system to meet that barter to map I'll make it just for me and now I got two forms of me coming into my household I'm only working for

1:30:12one of them directly anyway you have to start thinking about that a lot Hendrick says zone six should already be thinking about indoor ginger right now man I got I got a bunch already force sprout and I'm gonna do a video for you guys on that too I know I talked about this with the show yesterday about how the ginger will modulate you could pop those nodules off like if we would take a slip I got a couple ready to go I just need a time when my wife's available and I'm available at the same time to do some video because I can't do that one handed I'm going to show you exactly how to do that because again you can make five change your plants off one piece of root instead of one with some very simple stuff but the other thing I'm going to be doing I drop dead will get it done this weekend is building a bubble-cloning box like I talked about yesterday as well for rooting cuttings and I'll get that out to you guys several of you asked me about that on Facebook and stuff like we're gonna actually find one of these last don't be afraid to make some money along the way like as you're designing this are there outputs that you can make

1:31:14beyond your needs and desires and are they monetizable in some way you know biochar if you're gonna do a fodder-free system would be a perfect example of that there's only like you can use a lot of it on a property that size there's going to be a point where like I can sell this compost is extremely valuable extremely valuable can you do value added product under the cottage industry law that most states have which if you're growing things like you know your gingers and your tumourics can you do a product with them can you make a product that's maybe a canned product that's half grown in your backyard half sour somewhere else and have this like a unique boutique product there's I don't want to get it there's a thousand ways to monetize stuff you know so if you make it fantastic enough people might pay you know quarterly to have tours of of your property and stuff like that who knows it's up to you but don't be afraid of money don't hate money and and and just know this though a lot of times people are really good at

1:32:17monetizing in their head but not monetizing in the world I'm gonna make a bunch of this and people will buy it really are you sure to ask the people you think are going to buy it if they'll buy it before you put the time and effort money and developing it if you can pre load a customer base and on a property thing like this size it doesn't need to be big if you have 10 20 people that buy stuff from you every year what you really hope to do there is not make a bunch of money but if you can cover the cost of all your inputs then your food is actually free the only thing you have into it is your time and if you systematize it enough you can minimize the time personally I work really hard this time of year this is when you know weed blockers are going down plants are being produced stuff needs to be planted things to be hardened off things to go in the timing has to be right and then you know a month from now my work is pulling a few weeds when I walk

1:33:18out there picking some needs to be picked and once a day going out to the garden and going yeah it needs water today it needs 30 minutes and turning all my timers and walking away so that's that's how no Jake I'm not answering your questions anyway let's get into some Q&A here this is your last shot at Q&A I got about six questions I just saw another one come up I'm not going to add to my presentation because Jake asked me to but Jake you're all right man before I do answer your questions I'm going to do our item of the day which fits today's show perfectly so if you have a question this will be your last chance to ask your question now so do it if you think there's a possibility I might have missed your question you can re-ask it if it's duplicated I'll just do more and I won't give you a numerate for it unless you name Jake anyway item of the day today and you can always find my items of the day by going to tspaz.com that's tspaz.com you see all the

1:34:20products that I've reviewed over the years and some of them are gardening based and some of them are lifestyle based and some of them are kitchen tools and some of them are for food preservation and some are full on prep or stuff or outdoor gear it's all by categories and alphabetical so you can find what you're looking for very very easily but today's item of the day is a micro-risal inoculant for your plants it is called dino mico and it is the best product I have found like it from a standpoint of value and in the right up that I have on the website today which again you can find at the survival podcast.com or tspaz.com I tell you exactly how to use it because the quantities given in it are more than you need per plant and if you use about 25% of that quantity which is what I recommend it gets super stupid affordable so what are micro-risal fungi? these are fungi that live in our soil they put this hyphae out and they can only actually

1:35:20live and grow in combination with living roots of plants they literally attach themselves to the roots of the plant and they have a symbiotic not a parasitic relationship so some fungi it's truly an infection like you see a certain fungi you're on a certain tree like that tree is going to die it is it's at the end of its life cycle and the fungi is there to help it die basically that is not what these do these are completely symbiotic they work with the plant and they get nutrient and and and resources from the plant but they give back nutrient and resources to the plant and they in effect make the root system of the plant bigger and make the plant more resilient so they can reach maybe water where the plant is struggling and they're happy to give water to the plant in exchange for exodates back when a new seed germinates in soil as I said yesterday it seeks association with soil microbes right that's what it wants association and micro-risal

1:36:23fungi is the first association that it seeks and there is nothing you can do that gives your plants more advantage in my opinion if you have a decent system to begin with then adding this to it this is the one input I will probably always add and all I do is take the recommended amount and a lot of times I'm starting my plants I'll include some but when I put my plants into the garden so I've dug the hole I threw a little bit of compost in the hole teased out the roots it's going in I put the recommended amount I give you my article into the hole usually I'll hold the plant sideways so the roots are exposed in my left hand and I'll drop it into the hole but it let it the roots of the plant directly so whatever sticks to the plant sticks to the plant the rest falls in the hole plant goes in a little bit of compost on top push the dirt back and it is night and fricking day the resiliency of that plant especially since I've added things like bio reactor compost and biochar to the guards but the resiliency of the plants with the

1:37:27inoculation of this stuff and the reality is after a few seasons you may not need it anymore because it becomes endemic in your gardens but I use it every year anyway because I look at the the way I do when you use what I recommend to use instead of the manufacturer does it's stupid cheap now why do they recommend so much of it these products by and large at a consumer level where you're not doing this for you know crops on acreage or whatever were developed specifically to serve the cannabis market so if I have one plant that's going to produce me $200 worth of the sacred herb right the sacred buddh and I have to spend 50 cents to inoculate that plant bro I don't care economically that's a rounding error if it's a tomato it's different so about a quarter of a recommended amount is plenty because it's a fungi it's a living thing it when it gets wet

1:38:28it comes out of its little capsule and it wakes up and it starts to grow so I don't need a huge amount of it and to get a good result all right I got seven questions lighting around style fixing to come now here we go Joshua any plants for a property tour this spring there shall be many they will focus mostly on the garden area though I I've said this over and over and I think people maybe don't believe me I have given up on food forestry here I grow a lot of herbs and I get a lot of benefit out of the kind of food forest area but the fruit production is brutal the land is not right for it I have accepted that there's even some places where I have some things I've planted that I thought about you know bring out many eggs in and just putting it back to more typical of what there is there are some things to do well still for me my my edible dogwoods Cornelian cherries in good years do fantastic beautiful delicious fruit some of the mulberry does

1:39:29really well and all but most of the apples and the peaches and the plums and stuff like that are spotty production a lot of it died so I've had to reformulate I've had to accept what this land has given me a feedback and and what really sucks as a designer and somebody so into this is if I had two feet of dirt before the rock layer 99 percent of what I did would have worked but I don't and what I've been in a lot of you have seen it work over the years but what you didn't see is the background of the absolute madman intensity it took through our summers with manual irrigation and what have you to keep everything alive and so I'm just not pushing that spring anymore so there'll be limits to like the broad acreage type thing but the garden intent the intense guards and the intense aquaculture that's what's worked and so that's what I'm going to focus on is what I advise you to do not do what I did find what works for you and what

1:40:31the most productive things are focus on that question you responded to my baby fish pick on Facebook is there a show in the archives on pond stalking I would just go to the site the survival podcast.com and put in aquaculture you'll find all kinds of stuff on that I in almost every instance I've talked about the subject I've talked about stalking if you're talking about stalking like half acre one acre little mini lakes I really haven't covered that a great deal but if you have something specific email me jack at the survival podcast.com.tspc in the subject line I'd be happy to take a shot at that I just don't have time to do it right now but if you give me specific like how big it is what you're trying to do what your goals are what you want out of it and your climate where are you how deep is the pond things like that I can do that it's just a very diverse topic and if you have a pond in Florida this 12 feet deep maximum and I'm talking about what you need to do in

1:41:36upstate Montana in a pond that's twice as big and 25 feet deep you're tuning out and falling asleep but if it's a more you know one off general how to think I think I would work better than a full standalone show so please send me more specifics on what you're asking if it's beyond like the small ponds I do and I'll I'll take a shot at it for you I'd be an expert you know what if you get it to me today I'll make a commitment to you I don't have one pick for tomorrow for my expert council segment if you whoever you were that asked that question I'm sorry I just deleted it if you will send that to me today and I have it by tomorrow morning I will in fact make that my anchor segment for tomorrow XB Hendrix dig a hole line a hole with clay burn a fire in the hole could be something like this hold water like a large voila and voila is a unglazed clay pot that we put into the ground it's been fired but not glazed and we pour water into

1:42:39it and the water weeps out the size of it dig a hole line with clay burn a fire in the hole and maybe I wouldn't I wouldn't just to be honest it's not what I would do not say it wouldn't work but if you can't find anybody that's ever done something it could be because they haven't discovered the opportunity yet which is good but it's often because it doesn't work uh Kristen Byer says will black soldier fly work in Colorado or is it too cold they'll work just the season that they will work in is much shrunk um I guarantee though if you go to youtube but at black soldier fly Colorado I bet you'll find somebody doing it and then you can find out like is it worth it based on what you'll get out of it um and then you know Colorado is not all the same there's places in Colorado that are far more mild than ones that are far more cold are you in the high desert are you in the high alphines are you in the low plains are you down to southern Colorado are you

1:43:43up by the Wyoming border or what have you yeah yeah right so that's going to have a lot to do with it as well uh most things will will work everywhere but they may not be worth it everywhere is a way to look at that home steady heathen first of all thank you sir for the 999 super chat I appreciate that question how can I keep toads out of my pond my wife gives me a pushback of the pond because toads make her insane it's about 40,000 gallons I plan to stock it with bass or other native fish what's the problem with the toads what is the what is the opposition to the toads why are we upset about toads why are we upset about a creature that causes no trouble for anybody and eats tons of pests this is my best guess the toads have invaded in force the toads are not the problem in and of themselves the toads make lots of baby toads and then the toads are extremely loud in the spring because there's so many toads that the toads are taking over if you stock the pond

1:44:53nothing tends to eat poofus americana the common toad because they have a bufo toxin that comes out of their body and even if it doesn't kill it doesn't taste good every dog I have ever owned and I've heard people say they have dogs die from this cane toads one friend of mine in Florida said the dogs lowly their dog got really sick because it got high on the toad and it will it kept holding the toads mouth longer and longer my experience has been every dog I've owned eventually they see a toad they're very excited it hops it moves I want to see they pick it up and they spit it out and they look at it and they're like oh what the hell is that and then usually there'll be one more time that the temptation will tell maybe that was a bad toad right and they take the second to out and then you show them a toad and they're like yeah bro that's cool you pick it up I'm not doing it and so the toad is highly predator resistant now there are specialized predators you know what likes to eat toads pognos snakes why probably wouldn't like them any better and

1:45:57I don't know how to get a huge population of them around but they actually eat toads their teeth are actually designed to pop a toad so it because I want to tow a snake try to eat a toad it pops up it pops up so it's the snake can get his mouth I found one a few years ago I posted pictures I went outside and there was a plain belly water snake it was a year that we had a lot of rain because there's no service water within two miles of my house so it's a plain but big plain belly water snake and the dog her ears are up and she's like it's something there and I look down it is the snake trying to eat the toad and the toad's like not today Satan man he was a big old uh big old toad and he puffed up you know and he ended up some bloody and I'll like I pick the snake up and set the toad free and I'm like that's Fred the frog he's a toad but I call him Fred the frog anyway leave him alone and he went back to doing his thing and I relocated the snake but there's not a lot of things to eat him but my whole point is that's not true under tadpoles so simply stalking the pond we'll have a dramatic impact on that

1:47:00total population um the other I guess you can go to toad relocation and you can create a toad trap that's not really a trap you just have to make sure you're managing it or it will make more toads so they make the whole toad houses and the toad house is usually like a on lace pot with a hole in the bottom and it's like a little cave and toads go in there um but you can make them like I'll tell you when I was a kid in Florida we used to catch them for something to do on your board and all the apartment complexes had the drains things that came down like the drain spouts and they had those concrete troughs that the walk so the water doesn't dig a hole and it kind of spreads the water out every trough you pull up and there'd be toads under there and we stood like a water out a little cage and see how many toes we could catch today and then let them all go in the woods you can do that set up habitat for toads and then raid the habitat you know every couple weeks to reduce the population uh and but that again that can backfire because here's why I think I know your problem I had a friend named Byron and they lived in a suburbs

1:48:02and had a nice pool and everything in the backyard they put in a garden pond coy and all that and they were so happy yeah and uh then uh he likes quirky little things so his wife finds a toe house so they put the toe house in and the toes move in so it becomes a thing like when you go somewhere if there's a cool toe house you know some people collect shot glasses and whatever Byron collects toes buy them the toe house and then that led to you know manufacturing his own little toe structures and then all of the sudden the backyard in the spring was like it's all night long and they had an in-ground pool they go out in the middle of the night and there's a hundred freaking toes cruising around in the pool now they're not going to reproduce in there but they don't know that and so that everything got ripped out trying not to do that the toe is your ally get your wife some if that's the problem get some ear plugs if you have any follow up on this uh let me

1:49:02know and maybe there's something else I can do I'm gonna see if there's any follow up on it yet uh noise no questions today just a comment for the algo thank you yeah that's about all I say I did see another question though the noise is like nails on a chalkboard yeah that though that's the advice that I have I really don't know anything that eats them because of that move-o toxin eco-mass where are you been where the hell are you man eco-mass I've seen you forever glad you're back question grasshopper control trying wood chips lasagna mulching hungo culture wallopin 80 and pay potato tire columns well those will all help I'll tell you some things about grasshoppers number one they generally don't like to eat really healthy plants they do like healthy grass but they generally eat plants when they're stressed so the point where if you have a tree this really stressed that literally girl eating the cambium because it's producing extra sugars in that attracts them so most of what they're gonna go after tends to be uh stressed so everything you do

1:50:07to reduce the stress of the plants would be better I think you live where you can do a little bit more with the whole livestock thing if I remember right if I'm wrong I'm sorry but if you do I'll tell you the number one destroyer of the grasshopper the turkey the turkey views the grasshopper like you view creme brulee sitting next to filet mignon I mean it is the pinnacle of what the turkey wishes to consume and turkeys are fricking for racist predators uh so whether you had full-time turkeys on duty or you bring in a meat run of pulp every year and that way they're gonna grow right through the grasshopper season then you have food for the I don't have grasshopper problems at all because the other thing that destroys the grasshopper is the duck now you need enough to balance the volume but ducks are just they see grasshopper I must say there's no grasshoppers we have grasshoppers

1:51:08popping up here in there see them in the garden and stuff like that but when we moved in the first summer you walked through the field it was like it looked like quail taking off but it was grasshoppers and the ducks knocked them the shit chickens would eat them as well the other thing you can do is learn about ipm-o ipm-o though is a contact killer it is basically a way that you train bacteria to feed on Titan and I can't get into how to do it today but if you were to the beauty of that is when you see a lot of grasshoppers if you spray them with it a couple days later they look like mummified but if it's on something and then it dries and your ladybug or whatever walks across it it won't hurt them at all so that would be another thing grasshoppers you know every predator eats them basically until they get to a certain size and then they're hard to kill so you have to think about that but my number one biological control for grasshoppers would be

1:52:11turkeys or dogs and if you have any other thought on that another ecamouse question I'm going to give you two because you've been gone so long and I've been missing you ecamouse why no 100% like smash the like button or face my fiery wrath like foamy the squirrel yeah ecamouse is pretty big that's why part of why I've been missing you're always lashing everybody for not hitting that like button please do that please hit the likes I even used that I used to have a custom banner just for ecamouse they said something like hit that like or ecamouse wrath will be harsh or something I had to lead it because you've been gone so long I'm so glad you're back I think that and other people are yelling out to ecamouse there I think that's all of it for the day we're at an hour and 52 I wanted us to be an hour 30 so we're over by 20 minutes I really enjoyed it I enjoyed this whole week guys you can't tell I'm kind of on fire with presentation this week as my wife says goodbye to me I'm gonna wrap it up there thank you so much for tuning in today tomorrow I'll be doing that expert council Q&A show got a great lineup already for you again the person to ask the one

1:53:15question about stalking ponds if you get me a detailed question I'll do that tomorrow otherwise I'll do something else take care guys I will catch you tomorrow what is jack's email come on it's the most public email on planet earth jack at the survival podcast.com TSPC in the subject line guarantees that I'll see it doesn't always guarantee that I'll respond but I respond to probably 90% of the emails that come in still to this day after each of your take care guys catch you tomorrow