Feeding our family on our farm...what it takes to build a garden

hey there folks this is josh stoney ridge farmer welcome back to the farm it's another beautiful day here spring is in the air and we've got to start working on our upper garden so this is what we call our corn garden or our upper garden we rotate crops from our upper garden to our lower garden that's down by the house so today what we're going to be doing is spreading a lot of manure so that is probably somewhere in the neighborhood of i don't know 15 tons of manure and that's buddy the dog he's a good boy unload unload good dog what a good dog man awesome so what we're going to be doing today it's kind of going to be a two-part or a two-day series um we're gonna combine it all into one video but what we're doing is taking some of this black gold right here that's been composting for about six or eight months and we're gonna spread it out on our garden that we've already spread wood chips and compost and all sorts of stuff so we're putting soil amendments in our garden all right come along today as we have a little bit of fun with the skid loader and we have a little bit of fun with the tiller and some poop all right [Music] buddy is a good dog hold up load up watch this load up good boy he just chills out man what a smart dog i'm not gonna raise him up too high but he's liking the bucket you like the bucket buddy let's play with the dog before we get started you like this bucket do you like it he said i'm not supposed to be around you when you're filming daddy come here yeah good boy he's a good dog man so what we haven't we have pups right now by the way guys so we're going to be getting rid of those puppies pretty soon so this garden has been tilled for and turned or dissed plowed for the last two years the first year we did nothing and we put chemical fertilizer down and we grew a garden of silver queen corn it did okay not really good last year we tilled in some mulch okay so some wood chips this year along with the wood chips that are rottening along with the good soil that we have here we're going to be adding these soil amendments and what we have here you'll see a little bit of rock dust in this because i mixed in a little bit of rock dust for mineral quality and this is the composted manure and that is composted horse manure right here okay it's been turned i'm gonna say four times now over the winter and it's not hot anymore in other words when i bump into it with the skid loader when i roll it it doesn't get hot anymore so it's completely composted it's loaded with earthworms it's loaded with nutrients and micronutrients and that's what we're doing is feeding the garden later on the video after we do this it's going to take me probably two hours to spread all this maybe longer i always underestimate but later on we're going to hook up to an everything attachments tiller on the back of our 240 massey ferguson tractor and we're going to till this in okay now i know a lot of folks are real big on the no-till no tail you gotta no kill that you gotta i can't spread this on this garden plot and not turn it into the soil this is a soil amendment it's not something that i'm adding to the top of the soil it's a soil amendment so we're gonna build this and eventually we'll get away from tillage but for right now we can't no-till plant our garden this size or we could but it just wouldn't make any sense so what we're going to do is build the soil again this year and we'll probably build it again next year we'll probably put some more amendments in the soil next year the garden down by our house the other garden i call it our vegetable garden this is the corn garden we're probably going to swap we're going to rotate around where this might be the vegetable garden and that might be the corn garden and that's to keep the bugs down in other words if we got squash bugs at the bottom of the hill hopefully we won't have squash bugs at the top of the hill we got to rotate our crops to keep the vermin down so let's get busy let's hop on a little john deere 250. i need a name for the little skitty right here dude you guys help me name the skid steer and that's a set of grouser tracks on that skid steer we installed those they're loose i know they're loose we got new tires coming for the skid loader i don't want to tighten them up on old tires i want to tighten them up on new tires that's what's up let's get busy unload good boy come here boy come here boys [Music] oh man look at this holy cow man look at what this garden's gonna be like so we basically raised the entire garden about three and a half maybe four inches and i actually moved the garden out it was right here and now it's right there so tomorrow because it's getting dark on us it's supposed to rain just a little bit and i wanted it to rain just a little bit it's going to sprinkle a little bit tonight it's going to wet this down just enough to keep the dust down and we're going to kick butt on this maybe get the ventrac out and smooth it over just a little bit it's a little bit rough and then we're going to get on it with the tiller tomorrow so we'll see you guys in the morning the sun's shining it's the next day man it's going to be almost 80 degrees today i'm going to be busting a sweat so what we did last night after i got done with the camera and the drones and all that is i took the ventrac tractor and i raked all this out smooth with the landscape break reiki bobby right there and the rake on the front of the ventrac now first thing we have to do is get our big tool rack off the back of our massey ferguson 240 tractor i want to talk to you about it real quick and then i'm going to drop it so the big tool rack has four sets of casters on it it's what we use to keep our chainsaw stuff that way when we get ready to go out and do some chainsaw work we can just grab the rack and roll out so we can put our firewood on it and we can also use it for storing our tools so what we're going to do is drop the big tool rack and push it over to the side we'll pull out the massey ferguson hook it up to the tiller and get busy tilling that answers your question will the big tool rack roll on gravel if you store it in a gravel area absolutely right there it sits we're gonna back up hook up to our tiller and get busy tilling so let's talk a little bit about what we have here and i'll tell you where to get it so this is the everything attachments er062 tiller rototiller it's around a five and a half to six foot tiller i think it might be 62 inches so the unique thing about this everything attachments tiller is that it has a kickstand on it so we had another tiller here on the farm and it did not have a kickstand so whenever you disconnect a rototiller from your tractor it inevitably wants to fall over either this way or that way typically not back most likely forward so everything attachments came up with this little critter right here and it's fairly unique there's a pin you pull out and you flip up right there so you flip up your little kickstand slide your pin back in and you're in good shape you're ready to rock and roll what we're going to do here i'll take you over to the garden and show you and then we'll put the tractor to work i know a lot of you are probably like ah hurry up get get to work let me show you what we're doing so we're going to go over this entire garden spot four times with the tiller what i'm really trying to do is work this manure into the soil i want to work it in and work it in what we did last year was we put wood chips on this garden the soil is getting better it's a little bit acidic right now so we're putting more manure on it which means more acid okay we've got to give our manure time to compost and time to break down so it's not so acidic that it kills everything that's planted in it so what we've done with our manure is we've let it age right about a year maybe a little bit longer than a year and we're going to till that into the soil will this garden explode with growth this year i'm not positive whether it's going to explode with growth or whether it's going to need to age just a little bit longer you can't just drop seeds in the soil and expect your plants to be successful and expect your gardening to be successful so stay tuned to the channel please jump in and subscribe there'll be lots more good gardening information for you in case you want to raise your own food for your own family and that's what this is all about oh baby that garden looks good man holy cow look at that super awesome i just couldn't help myself you see this light area right here this is newly tilled land and this is the land that's had amendments put on it stay tuned for a future video we're going to be using the row better this is the everything attachments row better it's super awesome it makes a bed for you to plant in so we'll take all this loose dirt and we'll make beds individual beds all the way up through there if you want a link to all this stuff in the video description there'll be a link down below this is from everything attachments and so is that stay tuned for a future video we're planting gardens we're getting spring fever and we're having some fun here on the farm we'll see you next time all right [Music] you