➡ The video is about preparing a homestead for winter. This includes mulching trees for garden fertilizer, using diesel to power machinery for heavy work, and caring for chickens in an insulated shed. The homestead also has a greenhouse for growing vegetables and a woodshed for storing firewood. The goal is to be self-sufficient and prepared for any situation.
➡ The author discusses their homesteading activities, which include using various types of axes, building a shelter, dealing with harsh weather conditions, and planting trees for future generations. They also mention their efforts to increase biodiversity by planting different types of trees and shrubs. They have a solar power system and are planning to expand their battery storage. They also keep bees and are preparing them for winter by feeding them corn syrup and wrapping their hives in insulation. Lastly, they plan to build a shop with passive solar heating and clean their solar panels, which have survived a severe hail storm.
➡ After enduring a hail storm, we’ve installed durable solar panels and set up a two-mile fence around our property for added security and potential future livestock. Despite the challenges of country living, like power outages and plumbing issues, we’ve made significant progress in 18 months. We’re learning from our mistakes and gradually adapting to our new lifestyle. Remember, preparation is key to thriving in any situation.

Alright guys, so today on the channel, we are winterizing the homestead. This is an essential part of having a off-grid property, getting everything ready for winter. So we’re going all around and we’re gonna show you how things look pre-apocalypse on the homestead. If I ever get de-platformed, this might be my side hustle. Mulching. I got tons of aspen, cottonwood, maple, trees on the property, poplar, and it’s not really lumber-worthy wood. But one thing you can use it for is mulch. So I picked up this mulcher. This is TMG Industrial. Pretty heavy-duty. I believe the recommended diameter is up to six inches.

You can go seven or eight, but they recommend six-inch girth. So we’re gonna be mulching some stuff today. Mulch is great for gardens because it’s a fertilizer, it provides ground cover, so it prevents weeds, and it also retains moisture in the soil. And so that’s gonna be highly beneficial to our orchard. Now a lot of these trees that we’re cutting are still alive trees. What I do is I thin out some of the smaller trees, and that allows those big trees that at some point we’ll use for firewood to get even bigger.

Some people will say that there’s tannins in the wood that might kind of seep into the soil. That may be an issue. I don’t think I’m gonna be using enough of this stuff, honestly, for that to be a problem. Anyways, let’s get the party started here. So a little bit of diesel will do the work of hundreds of men. That’s why you got to stockpile that diesel in SHTF. For this 120 liters of diesel, this is like probably hundreds of days of physical labor that I would do. And of course, that would require an immense amount of calories.

You risk injury, wear and tear on the body. The job doesn’t get done as good. It’s not as consistent. Like to put in perspective, it would probably take me hours. Scoop one bucket, scoop of dirt, and that’s like a few tablespoons of diesel. It’s crazy the amount of force multiplier a tractor is. So the drier the wood, the better the mulch. But the mulcher doesn’t like dry wood. So I don’t know if it’s like the green and the wood and the moisture. It really can kind of pull at it. It basically just sucks it right in.

But with the dry stuff, you really have to wrestle with it. And it’s kind of hard to handle since it’s vibrating so much. So you can see that we probably put about, I don’t know how many trees through there, probably at least 50. It doesn’t look like a lot of mulch, but that would have cost me probably a couple hundred bucks to buy that at the store in bags. So it’s a worthwhile pursuit if you get all the equipment and you get everything in place. But you need a dump trailer, you need a tractor.

Do you ever see the kids in the hall skit? It’s like the modern French fur trappers. The whole plot is because there’s no more furs to hunt in the city, they hunt suits. They use their canoe and they go down the hallways of like corporate headquarters and they’re like, hey, get that one. He’s got a nice hide. Let that one go. Every time I let a tree live, I always think, no, I’ll leave that one. He’ll be a CEO someday. All right, I think we’re good for a while. It’s just like when you think you have enough firewood for a night, you need to triple it.

The same is true for mulching. You think you’re going to fill up your trailer, but you’re probably not. Get some in place. Hey, Marshall. So guys, Marshall has been getting aggressively worse. So we’re enjoying every day with him to the fullest. He can’t barely walk anymore, but every once in a while he hobbles over and he’s a good boy. He’s been a real good boy to us. It’s going to be really hard when he’s gone. So this is the perfect mulch. It’s the perfect diameter, perfect length, and it’s still alive. So it’s going to mulch very easily.

So we’ll do that one first. I just want to say something about lithium battery tools. They’re really amazing. I have a bigger steel chainsaw for the big stuff, but this is my go-to. I mean, to not have to do a pull core thing and just do that. And it runs on batteries. It lasts a long time. It’s interchangeable with all the other implements. I mean, for off-gridders, homesteaders, electric tools are really the way to go. If they made one more powerful with a longer bar, then I would certainly go for it. Definitely a worthwhile investment.

We got into chickens this year and we got these guys as little chicks probably a few weeks ago, and they’re all doing pretty good. We only lost one out of the batch of 25. So we built this insulated shed and we just got some sawdust down here. And so it’s ready to go for winter insulated floor. They’re not really liking it outside. They prefer to stay inside, it seems. Thank you. Who wants to be a victim here? No, you. No, I have that effect on women. Yeah, so we’re hoping they start laying eggs in the spring.

They might start laying in the winter if it’s warm enough in here. So these are not meat birds, they’re just for eggs. So we should be getting dozen eggs a day from these 25 chickens. So we have all kinds of birds of prey around here. We have hawks, we have bald eagles, and we have gray owls. Big mother effers, right? And so these chickens likely wouldn’t do too well outside. So for now, until we kind of get established here on the farm, we’re just keeping them in this fully enclosed space. Next year we’ll do some free roam stuff, and we might even get into some chicken tractor stuff next year.

I can’t say enough good things about a greenhouse. I mean, it’s been frosting probably 10 nights now, and everything in here is still alive and flourishing. We just have so much green peppers, tomatoes, all those kinds of vegetables. Everything is still growing in here. We’ve probably uprooted about half of it, but come on in and I’ll show you what we got going on. So here we have some green peppers. And as you can see, I mean, these green pepper plants will keep producing. So when we first got them, I figured, you know, there was a few on there, but you pull some off and they’ll just keep on producing until wintertime.

So we must have gotten probably hundreds of pounds of just green peppers off of these plants because they just keep coming. Now these are Carolina Reapers. So this is the world’s hottest pepper. So we got a few of those on there. We got some red peppers. Honestly, we have so many peppers that I can’t even keep up with them anymore. I’m not sure if you guys remember the cucamel in patch. This started off as a little rinky dink sort of thing. Now look at it, just like taking over. We probably put about 30 strawberry plants.

And as you can see, it has completely taken over. The only thing we need to get going in here is airflow, just to make sure that things are getting pollinated. Now the real star of the show this year was these tomatoes. We’ve gotten so much tomatoes, so much salsa, so much spaghetti sauce. They are just growing and growing and growing, and they ain’t stopping. These cherry tomatoes are producing so much. I mean, I’m just blown away because we got these plants that were this big. And now look at this, it’s a jungle.

Think about how much a little thing of cherry tomatoes cost. Probably like five bucks. Here we could probably make, I don’t know, a hundred of those with what we have here. This is all celery and I think it’s probably about done. It’s not really good anymore. Let’s see, that might still be all right. A little stocky. Probably past its prime. I can’t say enough things about a greenhouse, man. It’s night and day for gardening. So I built a 12 by 8 by 6 wood shed, which holds about somewhere between three and four cords of wood.

And this is birch from a guy I know locally. And you know, I could harvest firewood from my property, but the thinking is, you know, if shit hits the fan, I’m going to want to preserve as much of that as possible. Even though we got about 70 acres of woodlands, but it’s not the densest and most firewood ready wood. So in terms of the amount of dead fall out there, probably enough to get through a few seasons. So I figure why not bring in birch, which is the best type of wood. And so I get it brought in and then we chop it up.

Birch is great because it’s got that birch bark on every piece. So very easy to light. Yeah, it’s been working out really good. And basically this is just treated wood. There’s a tin roof, pretty straightforward on the patio blocks. And I got my, I think this is an Adler axe works really well. So we have our felling hatchet. We have our chopping axe. This is also Adler. This is our halter force splitting axe, which you don’t really like because it doesn’t really have a wide head. And then we have our halter force splitting, which is my go-to, which has the guard as well, which is very useful.

If you guys want the schematic for building this super easy, I will post it in the description section below. I believe I got it from the US Department of Agriculture or something like that. Really standard design. So a bunch of two by sixes, two by fours, treated wood, one by sixes, and you’re pretty much good to go in some treated plywood up top with the tin roof. So super simple, looks nice. Hopefully it’ll last a while. So one of the downsides of living in the prairies is hail and thunderstorms and tornadoes. We get some real nasty storms and plow winds.

And this year we got some massive hail, which really did a number on our orchard as well as other things. So you can see, I mean, this is a very thick plastic. Those hail broke this. Our cars were fully damaged. One of them was almost a write-off. Tractor had a big hole taken out of it. So this hail is nothing to mess around with. So there’s always pros and cons. Here we got about 18 inches of topsoil, but you get hail. Out there in the east, they don’t have any topsoil. They just got rock, but they don’t have to worry about these kind of storms.

So one of the downsides of living where I’m at, where it’s kind of pre-transitional zone, is we don’t have a lot of conifer trees. So since I’ve come out here, I’ve probably planted 500 conifers all over the property. And here behind me, you can see we’re building what will ultimately be a bit of a conifer shelter belt. So effectively I’ll grow a hole and then we put this mulch down. We’re going to add to it. So it just is going to prevent that encroachment of that crabgrass around the tree, which could potentially choke it out.

It’ll give these trees an opportunity to get very well established. And hopefully at some point, we’re going to get some regen. That’s going to take many, many years. But you know, when you’re building a homestead, one thing to keep in mind is that you’re doing this for future generations. And you almost have to have a vision of what could this property look like in 30, 40 years. And what I’m trying to do on the property is bring more biodiversity. So I’m bringing in willows. I’m bringing in different types of maple trees.

It’s easy to want to be impatient with things, you know, start putting things in the ground and then you forget about it. And then you find a tree in the bush one day and you’re like, Oh, I planted that a few years ago. And now it’s, you know, pretty big. So it all kind of adds up. And once you get in in the ground and it gets established, everything is just going to keep growing in tandem together. And you just have to keep doing that year after year, every opportunity you can.

This is Zeus. Zoosie looks like Baxter. He’s getting so big. Do not piss on this tree. You probably pissed on me. And just for the record, I think these are black spruce and pine trees. You know, this is my favorite time of year. If every month could be late September, October, there’s no bugs. It’s not too hot. It’s not too cold. It’s really the perfect weather, man. The older I get, the more I appreciate fall. So these trees seem to be doing pretty good. So our conifer shelter belt in the orchard, I’m actually thinking that it’s probably only going to take a few years to really start to establish itself and provide some good wind resistance.

So we have juniper pine, and then we have some black and white spruce, Colorado spruce also all around the edges. So that’s going really well. If you guys want an update on the state of the food forest, we planted about, I don’t know, a hundred fruit trees, a hundred different shrubs in here. We got maples, cherries, apples, plums, apricots, the whole nine yards. It’s all doing pretty good. We had a bit of hail damage this year, but by and large, everything is starting to get established. And I got my fingers crossed next year.

We’re actually going to get some fruit, but our mids, like our raspberries and our hops and all of the kind of mid tier cherry shrubs are just exploding. So no problems there. This is what we’ve been doing with the mulch takes a long time to build a good mulch layer. So you just got to keep adding to it. Like this is probably, you know, seven or eight inches deep already. And it’s not like that through the whole way, but we got lots of invasive grasses here, which are very hard to contend with. So you’re always battling against the weeds.

So any type of synthetic material, landscape fabric or mulch that you can exploit while the grid is up, you got to seize on that opportunity to do so. It’s one thing we lack out here in fall is our reds. So, you know, we got some reds now because we got some nice sugar maples. So hopefully in 20 years or so, we’re going to be able to tap these trees and get some good maple syrup, hopefully at some point. So we’re about to do the winter wrap on our bees. As you can see those pails up top, those are called feeders.

So they’re actually fed corn syrup because of course we humans, we steal all the honey and we want to keep them alive throughout the winter. So they get fed about two big buckets of corn syrup that they are likely putting into their hive. That’s going to keep them for the winter. What we’re going to do is we’re going to take three of those and another one, and we’re going to put them together in a cube. And then we’re going to wrap it with insulated material. And that’s going to basically be it for the winter until next season.

But we got a lot of honey this year, probably 35, 40 gallons. So it was really good. What I’m going to do here is build a bit of a shop. It’s a pool shed. So this is the pad that we have laid down. There’s going to be windows on the south side for passive solar heating. And that’s going to be right over top of the solar system, which we’ll talk about right now. I decided to add to the capacity of the solar system in terms of our battery storage. So we added about 100 kilowatt hours of storage.

And that’s about 20 more of these lithium batteries here, as you can see. And unfortunately, the shop at the time was out of these bigger containers that we built the original one out of that has insulation and all that good stuff. And so all these batteries are communicating with one another and kind of self-regulating based on the temperature. The solar panels actually add a bit of a canopy. So they provide a little shade. You always want it in white. So it reflects the sunlight so it doesn’t get too hot. The solar system is working really well.

We’ve saved a lot on our electricity bill. With 150 kilowatt hours, I could probably run everything in the house in wintertime because we have a pretty aggressive heat pump for a couple days. And that doesn’t seem like much, but that’s just if there was no sunlight. So it’s a nice backup with only 50 kilowatt hours. Sometimes we’re pulling a lot of power and that might only get us through maybe three quarters of a day. So I decided to up it a little bit more. This is a very high-end system. If you want information on it, you can go watch our videos where we give you a step-by-step how we built this and go to the solarpowerstore.ca and make sure you tell them that Nate sent you.

So I really got to clean up these solar panels. But one thing I want to say is that hellish hail storm we had, where we had hail that was easily golf ball-sized hail and real golf ball-sized hail, as you’ve seen with the massive chunks taken out of our pool and our tractor and destroyed the cars, not a scratch on these solar panels. I mean, isn’t that incredible? So we have 36 of these panels and they all just performed marvelously in the worst of conditions. Really aggressive plow winds. We got a really sturdy mount that these things are on.

And it’s only going to get better because we’re going to have a building on the backside of this because the winds predominantly come from the north, from behind. So the wind that comes at the front, that’s just going to aerodynamically skirt right off. There’s going to be no wind in the back. We’re just going to have to worry about a little bit of, you know, potential hail. But after the hail storm that we endured, if these things could survive that, they can survive anything. So kudos to the solar power store for providing us with some of the best solar panels in the business, I think.

We fenced the entire inner perimeter and the exterior. So we fenced about two miles on the perimeter and then we fenced another, I don’t know, probably about a mile all told around here on the inner. So we have the inner and then we have the external. And that’s just to, once we do get ruminant animals, if we do, then we can put them out there. They’re not going to come on to the main area where everything is done. And so it just creates that separation, one extra layer of security as well.

This is just your standard mesh wire fencing. Yeah. And then we’re just going to have cattle gates at every junction. We got about four of these gates around that I still have to set up. All right, guys. So that’s basically season two of Nate’s acreage. Really, we’ve only lived here for about 18 months or so now. And I think we’ve accomplished quite a bit considering all that was here when we got here was a house. So slowly and surely we’re making it work, making a lot of mistakes along the way. But that’s a day in the life, probably a little glamorized because we don’t show you all of the crappy parts of living out in the country.

There’s a lot of challenges, you know, you got plumbing issues in the winter time, you got power outages, potential flooding issues, issues with your septic tank. So there’s a lot of challenges, but I would say that if a person was committed in 18 months, we went from being mostly urban to getting a little taste of everything out here. Thanks for watching, guys. CanadianPrepper out. The best way to support this channel is to support yourself by gearing up at CanadianPreparedness.com, where you’ll find high quality survival gear at the best prices, no junk and no gimmicks.

Use discount code prepping gear for 10% off. Don’t forget the strong survive, but the prepared thrive. Stay safe. [tr:trw].

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