You've never seen a tractor work like this! Grow a better garden every year!

guys remember gardening is about community this is a community so if you guys have any kind of comments or suggestions please put them in the comment section down there YouTube is our biggest gardening community hey there folks this is Josh Stoney Ridge farmer welcome back to the farm today we're going to be working in the garden we're going to be prepping the garden for spring planting so we're going to go in we're going to take down all the old lattice work we're gonna mow down all of this debris and all this mess and push up the stuff that we can't tell into the soil we're gonna fill up the soil will rake everything up we're going to show you a little bit about deer fencing and how we keep the deer out of the garden we're going to talk to you about why our chickens are placed where they are close to the garden and why our honeybees are right there close to the garden and the gardens above the orchard all sorts of fun stuff today here on the farm blog so come along and learn a little bit and have a little fun in the garden with me all right woo [Music] [Applause] [Music] first things first let's show you what we've got going on in the garden so this is our okra and it kind of came in late last year the trellis system that you see back here we're going to show you how this is destructed and how it's constructed so we did gourds on here last year got a gourd hanging right here most of the gourds are sitting on top of the chicken coop drying so that we can build a Marten colony over by our pond to keep the mosquitoes down so really the first order of business is to get these trellises down to pull all those old gourd vines out of them there are some old gourds laying here basically we just got to take everything down and mow it to the ground this is our corn we're going to be using the tough cutting here on the ventrac tractor we're gonna mow all this stuff try to pulverize it put it back to the land if it cuts up and bust up good enough we'll run the tiller right through it if not we may put the landscape rake on and rake it up into a compost pile either burn it or compost it we also have to take down some of our deer fence I'll take you over here and I'll show you how our deer fence is designed and we'll do more videos on this later in the year but this will give you some good idea how to keep the deer out of your garden first thing this season so let's talk about our deer fencing for the garden we have two rows of fencing they are three feet apart this line is 18 36 and 54 this one is 3 feet from that one and this line is at 18 inches this provides some sort of three-dimensional barrier that a deer can't seem to figure out so maybe one out of 200 deer we'll figure this out jump the fence then freak out because all his buddies aren't over there and jump right back over this fence system has proven effective year after year here on the farm and we have a lot of deer on any given day there'll be 40 deer in our upper field in the evening time so you'll notice that the chicken coop is right here close to the garden so that we can use the manure from the chickens right here on the garden and not have to transport it too far I guess this is going to serve as your a tour of the garden for the year here so the chicken coop is here the outside run is there we take the poop from the coop and we're going to compost it later on in the year we're going to show you how to build a composter so that you can start composting all your food scraps and all of your vegetable scraps from your own table and your eggshells which is very important for stopping blossom in right so your garden needs those minerals and your chickens need those minerals too but I don't suggest that you feed your eggshells back to your chickens it might inspire them to start eating their own eggs which is not a good thing so over here we have the garden down below the garden is the orchard so we have the orchard down here with about 60 or 70 fruit trees and as you can see the honeybees are here we are expecting the bees to swarm any time so we may get a special treat later on today with the honey bees swarming we have them directly above our orchard and these are all dwarf type trees in other words they won't grow to like 30 feet tall that's good because the bees will come out of the hive and land on a tree in the orchard and we can capture the swarm and put it back in a bee box so guys a lot of thought needs to go into how you plan your little homestead so that you don't have to move things so that your honeybees are easy to catch so that they pollinate your fruit trees and they pollinate your garden it's all a symbiotic relationship and it all works together so as you may have already guessed the most tedious part of this is just going to be cutting zip ties and laying this cage over to the side these are 6 or 8-foot these are let's see there are 6 foot panels that you lay inside concrete forms you can get them at your local Lowe's or Home Depot or whatever hardware store but they work great as lattice work or trellis work for your garden and you can use them year after year after year after year now these are t-posts and we put t-post in and we only put them in about this deep just deep enough to support the plants this is the organic material will be chopping up with the tough cut and as you can see these gourds basically it just turned into paper we also have some stalks down here and I'll pull a stock for you some of these stalks are compostable and some of these stalks are really woody and this is a Goliath sunflower seed and you can see it's almost like wood so we can't tell that we need to chop it up first whatever we can't chop up fine enough to use the tiller with we'll push up into a pile we'll either burn it or we'll compost it most likely we'll burn it and then we'll push the ashes out on the garden all good stuff for your garden first order of business is pulling up these stakes Josh why do you have steaks at the end of each row because I have them labeled mammoth sunflower 1/2 cantaloupe 1/2 watermelon so basically I just go get a pack of these steaks and they'll last probably two or three years and I'll label them what they are now this year I'll paint over top of it with some white spray paint and then write it again cool and I also put the day that I planted them guys let this be lesson number one in your garden keep records pay attention to what you do and keep records row after row seed after seed write down what type of seed you use get a little notebook and take notes on your garden and you'll improve every single year now we've also got to think about rotationally planting this garden so in other words where our tomatoes were last year is not where our Tomatoes will go this year corn beans all that stuff where those things were will not be where they are this year we want to rotate the crops to reduce the load of bugs and also to reduce the chance of disease cool now here is how we have our trellises setup basically just zip ties and I got a bucket over here I'm going to throw all the little zip ties in we just zip tom to a tee post that way it's very easy to remove for next year and you can set all these to the side and we get ready to build our garden we'll build these and put our plants in the ground what a lot of folks don't realize is that gardening is growing as a person as well as growing as a garden so get out and work in your garden pay attention to what you do and you'll learn something growing as a person alright guys we've got about 30 feet of our trellis work down already don't forget if you have any suggestions or comments please leave them down there in the video description this is all one big community garden YouTube is one big community garden we can all learn from each other cool so here's how it comes apart and we just need to clean all this debris out of here this takes a few seconds get it done get it done right do a good job awesome stuff folks a lot of people get into gardening and expect to just do super awesome the first year and when they don't do very awesome they just give up you know to me that's not the right way that's not the way out you need to keep trying you need to keep working at it you need to learn you need to educate yourself go to your local USDA office or the County Extension Office and speak to a Master Gardener send off some soil samples and learn how to treat your soil and it'll treat you good and get your garden growing great so the secret to making these t-post easy to remove is to only knock them in the ground to where about that much of the little Spade is sticking up so only about a half inch of that little Spade is up and when you grab them to pull them out on the ground they just come right out but they're in the ground far enough to support your plant there we go [Music] so we're about halfway done with the trellises we got the other half of the garden to go we'll see you when we get done guys remember everything is related to everything on the farm even the chicken coop is related to storage now we're on the other side of the garden you'll notice tomato cages and you'll notice trellis so trellis is for a non determinate tomato which continues to grow and grow and grow and grow and grow and grow and grow and that's the ones that put out the little suckers and a determinate tomato we put in a cage so our Roma tomatoes were determinate in other words they only grow to be about this high and they Bush out will teach you a lot more about this stuff later on in the vlogs so be sure you pound that like button subscribe the channel and click the bell icon down there to notify you when I post a new video you just never know what you're going to get here these are aroma tomatoes from last year you can see if you just leave your garden alone if you can stand it all of your vines and stuff will go back to the land and they'll feed the land very nice we just stacked the tomato cages just like this all of this stuff is reused and recycled and reused and recycled these are five years old our new year's resolution this year for our family was to eat out of the garden much much more and preserve a whole lot more so we'll have some pretty awesome canning videos this year now we've gotten everything out of the way that we need to to bring the cutter in here and mow all this stuff down before we till it but first I want to talk to you about soil and what your weeds are telling you not what your weed is telling you but what your weeds are telling you dandelion you need iron moss you need iron iron is needed on this side of the garden we've got a little mossy area it stays really wet so we're getting too much moisture and we need iron let's take a quick look at the soil in the garden right here in the most healthy area where we had our tomato plants growing last year so here is what you want your garden soil to look like it's a mixture of clay a little bit of wood chips that are composted littleroot material this is what drives worms and microbes crazy and this is what you need your garden to have we're on our third year here on this garden spot and we're just getting it close to where we want it with the organic material guys don't be surprised it takes years and years follow along on the vlog and we'll show you how to build your soil year after year let's take a second and tell you about the tractor this is called a bin track they're made in Ohio it's a 24 horsepower little diesel tractor and on the front of this tractor we have what's called the tough cut it's basically a six-foot bush hog or brush hog to go on the front of this tractor and we're going to clear out all this mess with that brush hog then we're going to go get the landscape rake hook to it which takes like two seconds we'll come back down here and we'll dress all this up and we'll push all that organic material over to that clay ish section of the garden and then we'll hook up to the tiller it's a front attachment tiller and we'll till this garden up I cannot wait I have not got to use the tiller yet so it's gonna be fun that's a fun tractor to drive [Music] [Applause] [Music] the garden turned out absolutely beautiful the rake raked up all that debris it did a super job I have a big pile of compost I imagine that will be hot in a couple days so that'll be good to put on our tomato plants and stuff as the summer progresses now this is the ventrac tiller it's a 48 inch tiller the ventrac is a little bit wider than the 48 inch tiller and this is my first time using it it has adjustable feet down here and we're going to get down in the ground and we're going to turn this soil up I'm not too sure how it's going to do with the extra set of tires on the side so most of the time when you're running the ventrac you don't have this extra tire out here but I think it'll do okay we're gonna till it this first time and let weeds take over we're going to let the chickens on to it let them eat all the weeds and dig through here and then we're gonna till it one more time before we plant the garden and we'll run through here with it row better to bed apart rows nicely so we'll have an awesome garden so let's check out the tiller that machine kicks butt I continue to be impressed by the ventrac check this out actions speak louder than words can you believe what we started with looks like this now now you can see my compost pile right here I got a long compost thermometer I'll stick it in there and see if it's heating up we've got another compost pile up by our other garden we have not tilled it yet we're gonna put the ventrac up against the rototiller behind the tractor and see which one we think is the best but man he did a great job the only thing different I think I might do next time is take the outside wheels off of these and it's a pretty simple procedure you just pop them off and that way the ventrac will be the same width as the tiller pretty awesome guys I hope you had a good time today on the farm vlog I hope you learned a little bit about gardening got a lot more teaching to do a lot more work to do we're just tilling this up now to kill weeds it's gonna grow weeds again we'll kill it up one more time we'll bed it up and we'll plant our plants in it and that'll be awesome we also have a big old pile you look way back in the distance of woodchips and we've got a lot of woodchips as time goes on we'll weed our garden and we'll put woodchips in there to keep the weeds down and defeat it again this year we'll just keep weeding and feeding and weeding and feeding and not using chemicals and having an awesome garden thanks for joining me today guys please pound that like button subscribe to the channel and click the bell icon down there and I'll notify when I post a new video and we can see the ventrac versus the Massey Ferguson 240 with the tiller on it should be fun beautiful see you next time we got one final thing we need to do well we had birdies go check it out go check out the garden first thing we're gonna do your garden this year and get the job done this is a jump turn for springtime here did you pass hit it hey there hey there hey there folks this is Josh Stoney Ridge hey there folks this is Josh don't orig former prepping our garden to get it ready for get ready today we're going to be prepping this area right here we're gonna be prepping this area what is this area we're gonna clean up all this old mess and we'll talk you through the thought process of what we do with our garden so maybe you can learn up a little bit with a raised voice with a little it is get our garden cleaned up all swept up drilled that was the best one welcome back to the farm today we're going to be working in my truck and the attachment on the front of it [Music] my zipper is undone