Making Weed-Free Garden Paths With FREE Mulch | Homestead Projects | Garden Design

Welcome to Calico Cow Acres! We’re Mickayla and Taylor. We’re starting from scratch on a previously abandoned farm in the foothills of North Carolina, and we’re working to transform it into our dream homestead!

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Rutherfordton, NC 28139

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That is one big pile of Mold [Applause] this [Applause] go [Applause] f [Applause] oh my goodness you have multiple look at that thank you hey there Clementine hi Clementine all right have a good day guys need to get some duck eggs did you guys lay us some eggs look at all these eggs everyone laid an

Egg well hey there guys how are you doing feels like a minute since I’ve talked to you we are out in the garden today I started this project last weekend after we got oh it’s bright out here after we got our rooster CP set up it’s now the following weekend and I am

Going to try and complete a little bit more of it at the very least it is like 65 de out today the real feel 70 and it’s just an absolutely beautiful day it’s February 2nd today and it is almost 70° which is just insane my brain still

Has a hard time comprehending that I did film a little bit of this project last weekend while I was working on it so I’ll probably pop that in here in a second just to show you the full process but basically what we are doing is mulching Garden Pathways so one of my

Biggest goals for the garden this year is to have to weed less and to put that plan in action I need to mulch things primarily our Pathways that’s kind of where all of the the weeds creep in from at this point and one of the main goals

For our garden long term is to make it no till no dig a combination of those things so we’re going to try not to till this year if we don’t have to we’re heavily mulching things we’re going to have our roosters cleaning up these beds and fertilizing them for us having them

Covered up with straw but our wood chipper is still broken and we can’t really afford to get a new one right now however however over Christmas we had some tree trimmers across the street from us a little ways down the road and we went and asked them if we could have

Their mulch our neighbors got to it before we could but that’s okay we got their number and they said they’d come back to us when they were in the area again and had mulch so earlier this week they came knocked on our door and surprised us with a whole truckload of

Mulch and a whole truckload of logs too so we we’re going to cut those up use those for far wood for the most part cuz it’s mostly not rotten and I’m going to take you over there and show you how much mulch they give us it’s kind of

Insane that is one big pile of mulch it’s got to be probably about 10 yards we are going to mulch all of our Pathways with that as much as possible until we run out last summer we mulched this entire trellis path with thick Mulch and cardboard underneath and that

Did Super well so at most we had maybe one or two tiny little patches of grass that popped back through we’re going to REM mulch this so that it stays nice and Weed Free we’re going to the the winds here have been terrible so excuse the chaos that’s happening around here um

We’re going to focus on these smaller Pathways in between the beds here because those aren’t big enough to use the lawn mower in and I have to use a weed whacker and it’s not it’s not ideal this main path and this main path are big enough to use a

Lot more so I’m going to do those last if I have to just in case I end up having to ration in those wood chips it’s windy out here and I’m apologize this is the day that I have to work on things I can’t fix that I’m Sorry Oh [Applause] Oh I was able to get this pathway that pathway and that path pathway mulched I think I have 15 more to do now I could get the lawn mower out but I don’t want to get into it it’s a whole Fiasco trying to get the lawn mower out and usable at the moment and

Taylor’s at work right now so I don’t feel like doing that by myself I am just going to manually haul the dump cart and it’s going to be fine I’m going to get a little workout and it’s okay I completely forgot that I have to lay down cardboard first which is my Absolut least favorite part of this process well not the lay not laying the cardboard down I hate taking of the tape off all the cardboard for some reason that part just annoys me so much that I like don’t

Even want to do any of it the rest of it I’m fine with but the take taking the tape off of it I’m just like oh it’s the most frustrating task so I have a little pile here and then I put a pile out the other day we’ve had some ridiculous

Winds lately you can see our tarps are all over the place um we’ve have we’ve had a lot of wind lately so the cardboard I put out the other day is now just sprawled across the property into the woods and I need to go forage the

Cardboard as well when I run out of this little pile O since it is so windy I am going to just do these one pathway section at a time like I’m going to go get mulch now that I did this I should have gotten mulch first but I forgot that was my process last week because I’m worried that if I

Lay out more than one section at a time it’s just going to blow all over the place and I’m going to have to go pick it up and do it all over again and I just don’t really want to do that today Away baby I I shoveled up some wood chips with my Boot Am [Applause] M O Oh Okay today’s project is out in the garden yet again I need a break from mulching for the moment so Taylor is going to help me move our tomato trellises to here they’re going to go in these beds this year just trying to rotate things and I

Think that I want them just a little bit closer to where I frequent but first we got the chainsaw out he’s going to going to be chainsawing today in general but this tree is a rad Pur pair we’re not going to cut it all the way down cuz we

Like a little bit of shade in the garden yet we will be cutting it down eventually but for now it just needs to be heavily pruned so we’re going to cut off some of the trunks you can see there are a bunch of them yeah I mean I’ll take these three little trunks

That are all kind of coming this way those guys oh I think I might just do those for now okay and then I’ll actually cuz the rest of the like big trunks I want to take out I can fall get to go the other way I think even this one that

One’s kind of leaned this way yeah so I think I can probably I’ll it’ll they’ll both have to well I’ll have to take that one off first but I can probably get both of these to fall that way [Applause] A Yeah Well I’ve been mulching and working on the garden Taylor been working on clearing up our Orchard so it looks super good right now but we have some trees that still need to come out so he’s about to cut that one and the one next to it down and I think at some

Point we’ll be doing more but for now it’s just those two [Applause] Yeah Did you guys see how easily that just got turned up with the rake in the hoe the amount that I had to till this last year was insane we just covered it up I’m trying to switch to to no tail if I can for as much as I can

And this is such an improvement this was like make a mug out of it clay last year it’s so fluffy it makes me really excited to see how much better our growing situation is going to be this Summer all right I had to move you out of the sun it gets really hard to film at this point in the day because the sun is like feels like it’s directly in my eyes like parallel to me we got these at our local Nursery this fall and the intention was

To plant them this fall but as you can see we didn’t get around to that we actually planted one of the bags out of the three I think we planted our red onions these are onion sets and they were like really really cheap so we just figured it be get them

And try it as you can see some of them are starting to sprout um and some of them might not be good anymore but I’m just going to plant them because we have them figure we might as well throw them in the ground and hope that they actually grow so we have white

Onions I have yellow ones that bed that I just Rak up I dug a little I dug a little trench we’re going to plant these onions the extra onions in this trench and they are going to be companion plants for our Tomatoes I’m just going to pick a bag

And start plopping them in the Ground As you can see with the garlic beds back here we are going to try putting straw on things to mulch them this year because we finally found a source of not sprayed straw and so we’re using that as our bird bedding from now on and that means

They’ll fertilize it and we’ll be able to put it in the garden or turn it into compost depending on who it’s coming from I’m going to take the straw that is the duck bedding put it right on these beds because duck poop is not hot compost you can use it right on the

Garden you don’t have to wait for it to age chicken chicken poo however needs to age or else it’s just too much for your Plants now I need to go replace the bedding so they have a cozy place to sleep tonight and then I think I’m going to call it a night and go edit this video for you guys I am exhausted hey bud come see Mama come here oh you need some packs [Applause] see if I can get it on camera why do you like kicking yourself in the face he literally jumps into a somersault we’re just cutting all the stumps off as close as we can to the ground basically so I don’t hit him with

The lawn mower um so I just cut him off like within an inch of the ground usually and then we are going to attempt to kill them with white vinegar so we’ll come out here some night this week and drill down into the stump and make like a little vinegar cup hopefully that’ll

Kind of kill the root system so we don’t get a bunch of trees coming back where these ones were but also since they’re cut so low and I can mow over them you know like any fresh shoots that come up now will just get mowed over yeah overall we’re

Just trying to clear down here yeah we’re trying to get the center cleared out um and then once the the Middle Run is clear here then we’re going to bring the tree line back to the uh old fence line and further down you can see there’s another BM there so we’re going

To try and open that BM up for us to plant things rather than whatever is there right now it’s mostly toilet popper but there’s some other random stuff there’s pairs mixed in too so yeah I mean overall this is just it was extremely overgrown and we

Would like to prep it to be an actual Orchard and and the poison ivy down here gets kind of crazy and so do the ticks in the spring so we are going to try and keep this nice and mowed and cut down and everything we don’t want a bunch of

Trees growing in the middle of this for that reason um and it will just be easier to maintain it until we can get the goats to keep it maintained and also trees in here to actually start our Orchard yeah I mean it would be great like next

Fall or this fall 24 if we could maybe start planning a few trees in here and get the actual Orchard started so we have blueberry bushes we’re going to plant raspberry bushes down here and it would be cool to get some trees but they just haven’t been in the budget so

Hopefully soon we’re going to be able to get some of those but for now we’re just kind of prepping it and trying to make our lives this summer easier when it comes to Mowing and maintaining this area we’re going to clean up and then go

Eat some dinner and sit on the couch and edit a video I hope you guys enjoyed this video and we will see you in the next one by bye Guys