Putting Earl to the test...Will he still till after 70 YEARS!!

hey there folks this is Josh Tony rich farmer it's another beautiful day and it's sprinkling rain on us here in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina and we're gonna take Earl the tractor today and we are going to put him to work for the first time in several years so Earl has a tiller on the back we're gonna till up the garden and we've got all our garden plants sitting on the back of the Kubota right there forgive my voice it's a little scratchy I've got bad allergies this year but we're going to get busy with Earl the tractor put him to work first time he's been to work in years let's have some fun today on the farm we'll show you how we plant our garden all right wait free too [Music] that's my freedom I tune as well as you confuse so for those of you who are new to the Stoney Ridge farm channel this is our farm this is 150 acres here in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina and this was a briar patch five years ago so we have been taking this farm back and this is our garden plot we put a whole lot of amendments in there our chicken coop is right here and has a little door where the chickens can go out in the garden this is premier one poultry netting that we surrounded our garden with and our chickens have been eaten all the volunteer plants that came up so we tilled this somewhere in the neighborhood of maybe a month ago and we've had the chickens out here putting down that good but fertilizer that we like so much and we're ready to start putting seed in the ground so some of this today we'll be putting seed in the ground and some of this will be putting plants in the ground our other garden if you follow the channel if you don't follow the channel follow us be sure you hit that subscribe button and jump in here and follow us click the notification bell down there so you get notified when we post a new video but our other garden is row bedded up this garden we're not going to row bed we're actually going to use the tractor to bed up our rows so I haven't used Earl for anything like this I did a test run yesterday to make sure I wasn't going to have a complete failure so hopefully Earl will hang in there Earl is a circa 1957 58 something like that model 65 Massey Ferguson tractor that we pulled out of the bushes it wasn't running it was locked up the gears in the rear end were locked up we got it all fixed up in today's the first time we're really gonna put Earl to work so let's get busy all right here we go mr. Earl he own touchdown we're in neutral yep start here we go contact all right girls all fired up man this tractor runs like a sewing machine listen to how quiet it hurt a lot of folks have been really concerned about smoke so Earl has a bit of an exhaust issue let me take care of your and show you Earl's exhaust pipe is a cherry bomb and the girls exhaust pipe is quite loose we've got some work to do on mr. Earl I haven't decided whether we're going to keep this tractor whether we're going to sell it for the next project but it's a good-looking raid man it's got character it's got style come on toss the drone up we're gonna finish up this garden [Music] [Applause] [Music] why is it the rain always comes when you don't want it to come it started pouring down rain on me a little bit but we were able to get the garden all tilled up Earl kicked butt man the only problem we have here is that the tiller on Earl isn't quite as wide as the footprint of Earl so this is better suited for a little bit smaller tractor but it's done great this is the everything attachments PR 62 tiller roto tiller right there so what I'm doing instead of row bedding because I don't want to hook the row batter up to that machine is I'm just going to drive through the garden and this is going to be my walking path and that is gonna be where our veggies go so we're gonna have probably nearly a three-foot section for our veggies to go in there and that'll be good that'll give them room to grow room to get plenty of sunlight and I've found out that I will work myself to death if I try to square foot garden this garden in other words if I try to use every square inch of this garden it just absolutely kills me let's go over here and I'll show you the plants that we're going to be planting today so we've got roma tomatoes we have better boy Tomatoes and we have big boy Tomatoes and we have bell peppers and cucumbers and a few different types of melons and stuff like that so we should have a pretty awesome garden I anticipate about 30 days from the first Sukeena we're gonna get lots of squash lots of good stuff to freeze and all that stuff we'll show you how we plant the tomatoes after our zip roll back and forth here and make my rows up oh man look at this garden soil look at that absolutely awesome guys we've worked so very hard to have our garden soil like this this was one of the roughest hardest rockiest places on the entire farm and we don't have any topsoil so our dirt does not look like this this is three this is four years maybe five years is five years worth of soil amendments put into this garden it's gonna do awesome first thing we're gonna do we're gonna plant sunflower seeds and all we're gonna do is basically just go in the ground and these are decorative these aren't for really a purpose the birds might eat them or whatever but they won't be ready for harvest until late and then we're gonna go right in here and we're gonna put zucchini and yellow squash then we're gonna have tomatoes then we're gonna have cucumbers so that's how we're gonna do it basically what we have to do here when it comes to seeds is plant our seeds according to the packet let me talk to you about that real quick before I get started these are our larger seeds so this is our this could be a good instructional for your garden if you're gonna plant your own garden get some soil amendments get them into the soil and these are seeds for our cucumbers okay they're a little bit larger seed and I typically do not start larger seeds like this in these plant tray so a tomato seed is a tiny tiny little seed and these plant trays these are the little jiffy peat pucks that you've seen me use in the past if you haven't seen any videos with me using those that's what they are now the jiffy peat pucks people ask me lots of questions about them how do I plant them do I leave them in the bag well this is what you're gonna have you're gonna have a little baggie and this is a I guess a synthetic material in this bag and inside the bag is peat and this is your little seedling okay I'll post a link to how we started these seeds at the end of this video but basically all we'll do is we'll take this entire little peat pod or bag and we'll plant that entire thing okay and we'll plant it up to about right here with our tomato plants because our tomato plants will sprout roots no matter how deep we plant them the deeper we plant them the more roots they will sprout so we'll probably leave that much up and we'll probably bury it up to about right there that will ensure along with this huge rainstorm we're supposed to get that will ensure success with our tomato plants same thing with our pepper plants with the exception of you can't bury them up to the axles and you can't bury them up so these are our pepper plants and they're looking a little bit sparse okay so hopefully they'll do okay again we're supposed to have rain for the next three days straight so this is a boogie down type thing right here man I got to get it done today there is no holds barred on getting this thing done so I brought a yardstick out just so you guys would understand the length of the distance of the road now the row is a little bit wider than this 3-foot yardstick so we're gonna zip out here and we're gonna start planting our plants in the garden something you need to think about rotation rotate your plants okay so if last year you planted squash way over on this side of the garden this year you need to plant your squash over on this side of the garden you need to rotate these things around because if you don't vermin will get in there vermin vermin meaning you will get cut worms you will get squash bug squash beetles you'll get all sorts of stuff on your plants if you don't rotate them so you want to rotate your plants through and again that's why we had the chickens out here we just cooped those chickens up this morning so I cooped up the chickens so they wouldn't bother the plants you can't leave your chickens out when you plant these new little baby plants because chickens see that and that is ringing the dinner bell man so you can't leave them out there like that until later on until the plants are a little bit bigger and I honestly don't recommend running chickens free-range in your garden for pest control I don't recommend it because what you're going to do is find out that chicken will develop a taste for that plump juicy red tomato you've been watching and they'll Peck one time on that tomato and move to the next and move to the next on the move to the next one so I recommend putting your chickens on the garden over the winter letting them put down the but fertilizer you need and the amendments that you need and then doing just like we're doing here plant your garden coop up your chickens until fall time or until the garden has petered out this will be enough food to feed my family for two or three years so we want to stay at least one year ahead on in our canning in case we have a bad year the next season so we want to stay ahead and typically it takes about 25 cans of tomatoes per year for our family now we share our tomatoes and we also do a lot of food donation here on the farm so in the fall time once I've gotten all the tomatoes and all the vegetables I won't I'll call the local food bank they'll come up here and they'll pick a pickup truck load of tomatoes so that's what this is all about let's get busy I'll show you how we plant a tomato plant these are our Roma tomatoes this is the bread and butter for the man what we do is we plant these about 16 inches apart I'm just going to stick this on the ground real quick and we try to Center them along the row I know by feel what 16 inches is so we're just gonna dig a little hole and we're gonna stick these guys in the ground one per hole will bury them up and we might find some parts from the manure we got some manure from a local horse barn and inevitably a horse barn will end up with a piece of matting or something like that a glove or something like that once in a while so all right now we're on our third tomato plant already and I just been rambling stick this guy in let's get you a close-up of how I plant the tomato plant so I'm about 16 inches from my last tomato plant I'm gonna plunge my hand into the soil right here nice tilled up soil and we're gonna take our tomato stick it in the ground right there bury it up just like that and pack it down and make a little ring around each plant I like to do that so that if it's raining it holds water in right here and waters our plant we would typically water these plants as soon as we planted them especially if it was really hot outside but it's cool outside today and the rains gonna set in soon so here's the next one again about 16 inches apart about this is not we're not building a space shuttle here we're planting a garden so then have to be absolutely perfect but you will have to look at it so that is a nice little tomato plant now we have to go all the way up this entire row right here and that is that's a lot we have 72 roma tomato plants we have around 70 better boys and around 60 big boys so we'll plant this entire row aromas and we'll plant the next row of better boys and big boys [Music] all right I just crawled on my hands and knees all the way through and got all those tomatoes in the ground it's going to take me today about two and a half hours to plant every seed we need to plant and every plant we need in our garden and that's going to provide food for us again for years to come and food to share with the neighbors you just can't beat that so that's how we put our Tomatoes in the ground typically with our squash and zucchini I'll put three seeds to a hole I'll just basically put three seeds in and take two fingers diplom in put three seeds in separated about that far and I'll pack them down and they'll come up and as they come up I'll pull the one that looks the weakest and I'll go through and pull the next one that looks the weakest typically just having one plant in a little hill is just fine you need about I spaced them out close to six feet basically arm length apart for our zucchini we are not planting melons this year I think I misspoke and said planting melons but we're not going to do melons this year it's just too much work for us to do melons and we can't weed the garden so when we're tilling up like this if we tried to do melons what that does is just draws deer to the garden tomatoes don't really draw a deer and having this premiere fencing around here will keep most things out like groundhogs and stuff like that pretty cool guys I hope you enjoyed this video oh let me grab the camera Earl did fantastic I've got a lot of work to get done before it starts raining but super proud of Earl Earl kicked butt Earl got the garden done man can't beat that guys let me know should I keep Earl I don't really think I want to restore him I think he looks awesome just the way he is and we're gonna have a wonderful beautiful garden so hopefully you guys will follow the YouTube channel and follow us along this year as we grow our wonderful garden will show you how to can when it comes canon time all right we'll see you next time I'm a stony real bring-bring [Music] here in sweet that's ways those Denise Tony Reed