YouTube Transcript:
the Brutal Years of the Permaculture Orchard

Skip watching entire videos - get the full transcript, search for keywords, and copy with one click.

Video Transcript

Available languages:

View:

Hey Pops, are you ready for today’s episode? Yes, and we’re going to look at the brutal years. You

had some of those, didn’t you? Oh, jeez, this was, it was a tough one to review some of the

information for this, even just thinking, oh my gosh, I don’t want to go back there. But if you’re

starting a project, if you’re planning to have a permaculture orchard, if you’re planning any

project, any business, true, you’ll go through this, there are going to be brutal years. So I

want to really help you understand that there will be brutal years, understand how you can go through

them easier, quicker, and how to lessen their brutality, if you like. So I’ll give you a few

tricks along the way, tips, and, oh, you’re going to go, wow, this was well worth listening to,

because, for us, our brutal years was about a 20-year span, 20 years of brutal years. I

think he’s actually being generous, I would say it’s probably closer to 25, but we’ll go with 20.

Twenty was the most brutal of the brutal years, and how I defined it was the whole period when

we had, uh, monoculture organic orchard, that was about 15 years, and the first 5 years of

replanting the permaculture, those were brutal. I like to say that era was kind of an era, I

remember feeling, this is like a black hole. Have you ever seen those black holes in space, where

everything that’s around it would just get sucked right into it? And that was really what that

period was like, any extra finances, in the black hole, and anytime we’d see him, oh, maybe we’ll

get ahead, black hole. Hey, Pops, I really want that hockey jersey, no, no, black hole had sucked

it up. But, uh, maybe a hot take, but I feel like where you are now, or where you’ve gotten,

wouldn’t be the same if you didn’t go through that, like, if you just got a handout, I’m saying,

no, absolutely, and, uh, I really did it, when you say handout, I turned down possibilities, we

could have had crop insurance, we could have had different things, which, to me, were just forms of

handouts to help make it easier. I didn’t want to be beholden to any government, I can’t, I wanted

to be able to look back and say, you know what, we did it, and we did it without, oh, here, you know,

here’s a, and I see so many of these programs, government programs, especially in farming, that,

oh, yeah, we’ll help you with this, and then what happens, you see what’s happening right now in

France, and in Europe, and Germany had it, where huge protests are happening, okay, I did see that,

where they’re, like, spreading liquid manure onto the parliament buildings and everything else,

why, because they’ve gotten so used to feeding from the government teat, and it’s, like, oh,

this is easy, they’re like milk cows, and they just keep feeding us, and they got onto it,

and now, when there’s even the suggestion that, well, you know what, we’re going to cut this

program, or that program, or that government incentive, hey, you can’t do that, we rely on it,

yeah, exactly, why, because their whole production systems have been geared to, not to be the most,

they’re efficient, I shouldn’t say not efficient, but they’re not profit-oriented, and they’re

certainly not looking at doing things in the least-cost way, or the lowest-maintenance way.

So it’s afforded them the opportunity and the ability to gear up, equip, get set up

with systems that are okay as long as nothing’s disturbed, but, hey, one thing we’ve seen is,

disturbances will happen, if you don’t think, you know, it’s going to be a bad year, well,

you’re dreaming, there’s going to be brutal years, and sometimes more than one in a row. And so,

this whole thing about looking back and not, yeah, I didn’t need it, well, not, no, I shouldn’t say I

didn’t need it, I didn’t take it, you didn’t want it, I didn’t want it, and it, yeah, like you said,

it really turned out for the better, because, I mean, just, I’m thinking, the maintenance course

in the Master Class, you know, that is golden, because you’ve been through it, you did, uh, how

many, how many mistakes, and you’re, like, well, a lot of them, all of them, almost, editing that,

and then living through it, ‘cause, yeah, when I was younger, I would see you, I always go back to

the classic, well, I want this, well, I don’t have the money for it, but we could make it,

so it’s different, I feel like you became super resourceful, like, I remember, I don’t know,

going through, you would get, like, let’s say, wood pallets, and we would deconstruct the wood

pallets, how many different things, I remember, you used them for, like, the pens for the animals,

uh, you would reuse chicken wire, you would, like, he would reuse all kinds of things, because you

just didn’t have, like you were saying, the handouts, yeah, there was just no budget,

so it’s, like, well, we have what we have, that’s what we have, and let’s make do with what we have.

And, like, I saw the evolution, ‘cause, remember that first chicken pen, oh my God, that was,

I think he used, what was it, like, cedar posts and chicken wire, and he’d be, like,

son, can you help me move the, and I don’t know, I was, I don’t know how old I would have been,

but I remember, like, that was a struggle, man, it was heavy, but that was a good lesson,

and, as you said, the evolution of it, because that was the first prototype, or first version,

and that was really using the idea of, let’s just start, we don’t have the perfect design,

we don’t have the right materials, let’s just start, because, after one season with that,

and we raised a bunch of really great chickens, and some guinea fowl in there, and it was, like,

okay, first, we proved that doing that, the chickens, the quality of the meat,

by being moved regularly, wow, bugs, and, yeah, they didn’t get preyed upon, that’s a second

thing that helped, that batch didn’t, okay, other batches did, and so it was proving, so I remember

a friend of mine, Paul Maloney, he used to say, just do a quick test, and that was really what it

is, just do, what’s the quickest test, anything in farming, you think, well, that’s a quick test, but

a quick test is one season, you only have about 40 to maybe 60 seasons, if you’re really fortunate,

to test things, or try things, and so, the more variations of a test you can do,

even in one season, the better it is, so that was the first proof, right away, the next year,

I knew already, I don’t want these, they’re way too heavy, let’s change it around, yeah.

And remember, you made them, you started adding, uh, wheels to it too,

yeah, but then that didn’t work, so you went back, like, that’s what I’m saying,

I was able to see the evolution, and that’s it, you would tinker, you would try different things,

but I remember, getting back to the reusing, that was, I think, the first thing you switched up,

you got rid of those big, heavy logs, and you went to, like, lighter wood, and then it was PVC pipes,

yeah, that was too light, so you can go to extremes, we tried the PVC pipe, and that was

okay in the summer, but over winter, with a load of snow on it, they actually, they just crushed,

so we went back to electrometallic tubing, which is electrical tubing, yeah, that worked great,

bent that, that’s super strong, and now we have about as simple a version as we can, which is,

basically, two 2x4s that are acting like skis, and hoops joining the two, and that’s it, no front,

no back, yeah, like, my mom, my mom’s able to move it by herself, pretty much, oh, even when we have

members come, and I have the little kids try, and it’s, like, yeah, a 10-year-old can pull them,

they’re really easy, not those first ones, no, no way, no, the first ones, even I would grunt,

I was, like, okay, I don’t want to do, and that’s good, to do something, and realize, note down

what you don’t want to do anymore, what I, you say, I’m doing that, I don’t want to do this,

this, this, this, because those are criteria for design, if you say, I don’t want to be grunting,

this has to weigh 30 pounds or less, that’s a good criterion, because, right away, well, you

can’t use this, this, and this, because it weighs too much, or even, as you’re getting older, like,

you, no offense there, but I don’t think you could do some of the stuff that you used to be

able to do when we were younger, yeah, I guess I can, but, you know what, I look at it, and just,

in reviewing for this podcast, I thought, wow, I mean, this is what the crux of it is, the

learning journey, as you do, and, unfortunately, that’s what contributes a lot to the brutal years,

is because you’re learning as you go. This episode is proudly brought to you

by my very own Master Class. Use code POP250 to save $250 off the Master Class bundle. Master

Class contains 11 different courses that you can buy separately; however, the complete Master Class

has you covered from A to Z, and it’s really my life’s work. Master Class is the ultimate

tool to help you start a successful permaculture orchard, replanting. Not sure about how to start,

or maybe you’ve already started, but now you feel you’re stuck? Purchasing the Master Class

gives you access to the VIP group, where you’ll be able to meet other like-minded, very interesting

permaculturists and bounce ideas off each other. The VIP group is where I spend most of my time

answering questions, and it’s never been easier to get in contact with me or ask me a question.

Want to learn more? Go to permaculture.study and start each course today for free. Don’t forget

to use code POP250; it’ll save you $250 off the Master Class bundle. And now, back to the episode.

And that’s really why I did the Master Class, because I think, wow, I would not want to

go through that again, all over, and if you could have a tool that I could help you with,

and that would really reduce that whole impact, and I mean, it always comes back to that, I mean,

we’ll see this on other episodes, and how, you know what, the Master Class was done for me,

of what I would have loved to have had, because I know, living back, those ideas of,

I was trading time, time for money, it comes back again and again and again, it’s, you know,

learning costs money, or it takes time, well, we see it all the time, right, like, we’re in Canada,

so it’s a little different, but I see the education system over in the States, and

you go to get a piece of paper, and you end up in a crazy amount of debt, hoping that, by the time

you finish, it’s still something you’re interested in, because, imagine, you go through all that, you

get your diploma, and then you’re, like, you know what, I want to do homesteading, not to say that

that piece of paper won’t contribute to anything, but that’s it, it goes back to time versus money,

right, whereas there’s so many online courses that you, or not even courses, just YouTube now, like,

the internet, if you’re really into something, or interested, you can find a way to find a lot

of useful material that’s out there now, yeah. I think the easiest is, just review, what are you

watching, or listening to, or learning, whatever you’re attracting your interest naturally, chances

are, that’s something you’re interested in, and there’s also chances that you could actually make

an income off of it as well, yep, like, I see it now too, with, like, my friends, there’s,

or the next generation, there’s going to be a lot of trades that they’re just not going

to be able to fill, and there’s so many people that, when I was growing up, it was computer,

computer, computer, but now they’re stuck behind a computer, and they don’t like it, they want to

be doing a job that they’re using their hands, but now, you’re what, you’re going to go back

to school to get your, you know, I think of it in terms of a trade, I’ve touched on electrical, I’ve

touched on plumbing, I’ve touched on renovations, those are just things you’ll go through, machinery

repair, uh, small tools, small tools repair, but probably the one that I could hire myself out as,

equivalent of a trade, is irrigation, so I’ve worked in irrigation for the 30 years we’ve got

the whole farm on irrigation, and that’s one that I’ve done, I’ve done it pretty well, all, and,

yeah, I could go in and see, okay, yeah, that’s the problem here and there, and just fix this,

or change that, but a lot of the maintenance, and, you know, you said the evolution, as I’m

getting older, I was always thinking, hmm, how could I do this 10 times faster, mhm, how could

I do this 10 times cheaper, and with constantly focusing on that, and looking at, okay, can we,

and it’s avoided certain things, I mean, there’s, I remember, I can really remember being at that,

uh, it was actually, like, a junction in the road, where it would divide up, and I thought,

do I want to spend time learning how to spray, do I want to learn about the sprayers, learn about

calibrating sprayers, learn about mixing sprays, learn about, and I thought, you know what, that is

so much learning to me that, first of all, doesn’t interest me at all, and I’m thinking, I could do

that, I could spend the time on that, or I could take that time and spend it into, what can I do

to not have to spray, and, in the end, that was, you know, that was that fork in the road,

and I didn’t, I still do a little bit of spraying with whey, but I have such a rinky-dink setup to

spray, that, you know what, it’s so forgiving, it’s such a great thing to use whey, which is a

cheese byproduct, and it’s, like, that’s all, I don’t want to know anything more than that,

and it works for what I use, and most of what we do is avoiding having to spray, and, in the end,

that’s paid off a lot, because, once you solve those kinds of problems, I always look at it as,

okay, what’s spraying, like, the characteristic of it, in maintenance, well, it’s every year,

it’s several times per year, woo, that starts to add up, that’s a lot of time, calculate, on a big

year, I’ll spray six times, and that’s way under even the recommended amount of sprays in the year,

but that, to me, that’s a lot, that’s plenty, and each one of those takes me about 6 to 8 hours,

depending if there’s any kind of breakage, so 6 to 8 hours, let’s say six times six sprays,

that’s 36 hours, that’s a week’s work, just spraying, that you could allocate to something

else, that you could do something else with. Then comes insecticide, well, we’ve replaced,

probably, the equivalent of an insecticide spray, or two or three, with traps, so each of the traps

takes us a day to set out, and bait, and so on, so that’s probably a one-to-one replacement, well,

not each trap, each trap type, ‘cause you have two, like, this trap, which is the trap for apple

maggots, and these, which are the codling moth traps, and, for those of you that can’t see it,

it’s, basically, an oil can and a yellow piece of plastic with some red spray paint,

spray-painted on, to look like an apple, super easy, I mean, this trap here, this has had, uh,

this is probably version, I’ve stopped counting, but I guess it would be eight or nine, like, yep,

‘cause that’s, like, your pens, I remember, that’s like the pens, yeah, first ones were, was yellow

buckets cut into squares, I do remember, at one point, I guess, I don’t know if that was a grant,

but you had, like, made ones, like, those big ones with the 3D-looking, those weren’t made,

those were bought, that’s what I’m saying, so you had money at one point, and you were, like, okay,

that’s an important thing, so I’ll use money on that, or did you get a grant to do that one, no,

those were just, I got to try these, and so, sometimes, it was, like, okay, you know what,

the budget was low, but do some things, so, even after spending money, you still thought that,

I could make, I could make that, and I could make it better, well, not that I could,

or you couldn’t reuse those, I had to make them, because the traps that he’s talking about were,

they were larger, uh, yellow cards, and the cards were so flimsy, I remember thinking, this, yeah,

you’re going to have to be careful, ‘cause they were really, the yellow part was a very thin,

it was almost like a little bit thicker than paper, yeah, kind of like the cover of a book,

it was about that thick, it’s really thin, and then they were these two half, uh, plastic globes

that would click together on each side, so it was, like, a 3D effect, yeah, and they were $8 U.S.,

if I recall, $8 U.S., I thought, I want to put one per trio, we have, I don’t know what, I don’t even

know how many we have, but we have, uh, so, what, you, probably, a few hundred trios, okay, so it’s

a couple thousand dollars, yeah, there would be a lot of thousands, and they were so cheap, that

was the main reason that it pushed me to develop these, ‘cause I said, those won’t last, you know,

I like to take the approach that, if I’m going to spend time designing and building something,

I want it to last, ideally, my lifetime, like, I won’t need to make another one of them,

that was the idea with these traps, so the card itself became way thicker, this is an

eighth of an inch, uh, plexiglass, hard yellow plexiglass, and you want to make them yourself,

they’re really easy to make, well, really easy, relatively easy, and these, actually, this one

is an older version, which we did, we simply cut out a template, yeah, fire-engine red spray dot,

so we spray a dot on this side, and a dot on that side, and that’s supposed to represent an apple,

I’m assuming, and when you hold it far, it stands out, and that’s the nice thing about these,

you can’t miss them, because we’ve used just the plastic red spheres, which was the other highly

recommended one, that they had for scouting, and what got me thinking, no, this won’t work,

was, maybe for scouting, where you’re doing two, three traps on a farm, whatever, okay,

uh, but I was looking to mass-trap, and if you’ve ever tried to clean this stuff that’s put on it,

which is tree tanglefoot, there’s no way that you can easily clean a sphere, so I said, jeez,

this doesn’t work well, and I saw that, when we used the plastic square, flat, with the circle,

we’d always get some of the glue on the yellow, and the insects would get caught on the yellow as

much as they would on the red, so I thought, hey, they’ll get caught on the yellow, and that’s flat,

that’s not curved, I thought, I wonder, so we did, what did I say, quick test, so we did a

quick test, look around, what do we got, we got some yellow buckets, and we got some red buckets,

so we just cut the red bucket and the yellow bucket, matched the curvature, ‘cause they

were both curved, and just glued them together, put the wire on it, and set it up in the tree,

and tried it, and I think I found one, two, three years ago, I still found, we had one of them,

I don’t like using them, because they’re curved, and they’re really rough, so we went to these,

in a few variations, and these have now been, actually, the beginning, we even made them with

a metal wire, ‘cause metal will last longer, but it’s not, ‘cause it’s way too hard, these,

the nice thing is, you take a branch, and you bend it around, and you just wrap it, like,

it’s easy to wrap, and easy to unwrap, and I’m assuming that wire doesn’t break that easy either,

this one breaks easier than metal, okay, but it’s, I’ve never broken one, yeah, but I mean, we break,

maybe, out of a few hundred, maybe we break three or five a year, okay, so, for that, I’m, like,

okay, you know what, I’ll just change the wire up on a few, for the difference on the metal, which

is harder to bend, and it would rust, so, like, no, this works way better, uh, and we’ve done all

the variations on it, we actually wrapped them now with one layer of Saran, or a clear cellophane,

mhm, so that you see through it, and then we put the glue, the tanglefoot, on it, when we’re done

the season, we just peel the cellophane off, garbage it, ‘cause the dirtiest job of this is

cleaning this, I mean, you don’t want to dress with your good clothes when you’re doing this,

whether you’re applying it or taking it off, anyway, these are all examples of, over the years,

just, do a quick test, try it, I’ll do, look, what you’ve got, you don’t have to go buy something

fancy, just try it, if it shows you, and it showed us, with the bucket version, that, hey, these

work, then let’s try, how can we do it better, longer-lasting, the perfection of it, that’s fine,

if you can imagine the most perfect one, then great, just imagine, and do that, if you could

do it right away, quick test, try it out, because you really don’t know, until you actually try it,

is it going to work as well as you’re thinking. So, like, even trying, uh, when you replanted the

orchard, um, how did you choose, I guess, which apple tree you wanted to plant, or which pear

tree, because, again, you didn’t have the money to go out and buy, yeah, we, all kinds of trees,

we did our own nursery, uh, we basically grew everything we could get our hands on,

so it was, like, it’s not complicated, if it’ll grow here, and the priority was,

ideally, having them disease-resistant, the quantity, or the durability, or how well it keeps,

those weren’t important, the important point was, could we get some, and, sorry to cut you off,

but where would you, I’m sure everybody wants to know, where would you get them, it’s not like you

just go and dig them up and find them, we dug up our own rootstock, so those, we had them at the

base of the trees, there would be rootstock coming up, so you’d have your tree, and then, beside the

tree, out of the ground, there were places where branches were coming up, that was rootstock, so

we would just, it’s called striking, we basically pull them off, or break them off the root, ‘cause

they grow up from the root, so those were the rootstock, but this is apple you’re talking about,

right, yeah, for, I remember, we had, we had all, we had was apple, so what, you wouldn’t,

you had had the organic orchard for how many years again, before you started to, uh, 15, before

we replanted, so I guess 15 years, you could kind of see, okay, this kind of tree is good,

but then you have, now you have, you have plum, so I guess, from what I’ve known, I never knew you’d

have enough money to go to a nursery and pay, I don’t know how much it is, per tree, but, so,

how did you get the other ones, the other ones was nice too, because you realize, if you buy a tree,

and it costs anywhere between, let’s say, if you buy by the hundreds, you could probably get them,

I don’t know today what the prices are, but last time I saw, the cheapest you could get, in bundles

of, whether it was a hundred or a thousand, was $7, okay, a tree, grafted, ready, or, let’s say,

$10, and goes up to, you buy one tree of a certain cultivar, you’ll probably be paying 30, 35, 45,

sometimes $50, you realize that the rootstock that that tree is grafted on probably costs

you between 50 cents and $1.50, maybe $2, if you’re buying it from a really small nursery,

so the rootstock itself is not the big cost, the cost comes from putting a graft on it,

letting that tree grow for one or two seasons, that’s the big cost, and just profit,

so the cost of a nursery being able to grow that, and making enough money to resell it,

or resell it, ‘cause sometimes they’ll sell it to a garden center, that then resells it to you,

customer, yeah, so everybody has to make their margin, or their cut, in the whole process, so,

by us growing our own trees, and the only thing we bought was some pear rootstock, even for plums,

we were able to get the ones that we use a lot now, Mount Royal plum, that were on their own

root, so already, they’re trees that act as a rootstock, ‘cause we could graft over them,

but if we don’t graft, they’re already a really nice blue plum, uh, that you don’t have to graft.

And now, if you could go back, knowing what you know now, yeah, um, how much quicker do you think

you’d be able to do that, well, there wouldn’t be that much of a learning curve for the nursery,

so that’s, that would help, I mean, we could, if we ordered rootstock right now, for example,

we could have them first thing in the spring, and by August, we would graft, and then we could have

our tree, a one-year whip, by the next fall, so if we started now, not this coming fall of this year,

but the fall of next year, so within two years, jeez, we would have our trees, so let’s say we

were planning on putting in, ‘cause, last nursery we had, we had about 7,000 trees,

7,000 trees, when you figure, what’s that worth, even if you, seven, yeah, even if you put them at,

on average, ‘cause some of those would have been expensive, just because they were so rare,

the cultivars we had grafted on them, you couldn’t find them, no, no, you looked in any catalog,

you looked online, nobody’s got them, so we were able to get them from collections,

as just a piece of scion, a piece of wood, so those went a long way to producing a few trees,

so let’s say an average of just $20 per tree, uh, times seven, do the math, so you think, wow,

I could pay $140,000 to buy enough trees, mhm, or I could just get on the phone, get on the email,

and order some rootstock, and the size, the space, remember, the first nursery, it was,

well, that’s kind of what I want to bring up too, the fact that you’re saying how you do iterations,

how many times did it take you to redo that nursery, yeah, that was the third time we had

to redo it, yeah, so imagine, each time, with thousands of trees that we had growing, ready,

yes, and then, that was, that was brutal, that was the brutal part, which I guess we should give

a little bit of context, because, going back with time versus money again, you didn’t have money to

hire somebody, right, so I remember, when we were younger, almost every year, or every other year,

you would have, like, a new apprentice that you would introduce us to, and I remember, one of the

ones, even for me, that was really impactful, was Jean-François, yeah, who was one of your students,

yeah, and he just wanted to continue learning, so I guess you guys came to an agreement, where you

would teach him, and, in return, he would come and help you, yeah, the deal with Jean-François was

simple, I said, look, I don’t have money to hire you, he says, I’m not looking for money, he says,

I just want to learn from you, so that was the first thing, so if ever you want to be an intern,

or you say, you know, I’d like to learn, don’t look for money, because you don’t realize,

but the information you’re getting, 100%, is worth, you should be paying the person to intern,

if it’s a worthwhile internship, I’m not saying, and now it’s funny, because I get all kinds of

emails from people wanting, like, from all over the world, wanting to come and do this with you,

but this guy, Jean-François, was, like, I don’t know if he was your first, but, like I said,

the first one that I remember, he wasn’t the first, but he was the first who I would,

I’ve had interns before, to me, an intern is somebody who does at least two months, okay,

and two months is where I just start, I look at it as, like, it just stops being a cost for me, okay,

I’m no longer having to subsidize, ‘cause, in the third month, most interns should be enough, uh,

self-aware, and know what’s going on, and they can just save me time and money, they just go and do,

Jean-François was an intern, he wasn’t, he started as an intern, but he really became an apprentice,

so an apprenticeship, to me, is at least a year, and Jean-François was there for parts of, jeez,

parts of five years, but he was there really a lot for two and a half years, so he, what happens is,

to apprentice, you do the whole cycle, so you do from spring to fall, which is semi-normal,

but then he’d come back in the winter, when we do pruning, and so, we did that cycle at least two

times, complete, and then he came back at least doing the nursery part for a few years, mhm,

so that was, we started off, and the deal with him was simple, I said, look, I can’t pay you,

but I have the space, I have the rootstock, I’ll show you what’s needed to do a nursery, and, if

you want to put in the work, we’ll split all the trees, half-half, okay, so what he wanted was, he

wanted to end up, in the end, with enough trees to plant his own orchard, and that was, like, that’s

his long-term goal for being and helping me, mhm, and he left with, uh, well, the last orchard, in

the end, we had 7,000, so about 3,500 trees, jeez. And I remember, when he had, he was putting in

some proposal, and it was, like, well, what are you bringing to the table in this proposal,

and he says, well, you know, 3,500 trees, at $20 a tree, I come in with $70,000 into the project,

mhm, and it was, like, where do you, yeah, he says, you don’t realize, but there’s a bunch of

these trees that you couldn’t find anyway, and so, that was the start for me to replant the orchard,

and it was the start for him to replant his orchard, to start his orchard, which is actually

pretty impressive, really, yeah, even his, I’d love to go and actually film, and do a YouTube

episode on, we should do that, ‘cause that orchard now is well advanced, unfortunately, Jean-François

is not with us anymore, but his orchard remains, so it’s, yeah, it’s something, so that, that too,

then, goes back to the time versus money, if you don’t necessarily have the money, there’s always

going to be a way, so, for you, it was, okay, come, I’ll teach you, yeah, and, on top of that,

to sweeten the pot, if you’re really dedicated, I’ll split 50/50, yeah, for the, and I did that

with Jean-François, and I did it with Antoine, he also wanted to have trees, and he was in a really

interesting condition, because he wanted to plant trees, basically, at the furthest north you could,

in Quebec, and it was zone three, uh, it was, oh, no, zone two, ‘cause he’s in Abitibi, uh,

it was a really tough climate, so he grafted 250 cultivars of apples, he wanted to just do apples,

because it’s, like, I don’t know if anything else would really grow, so he did, I don’t know what

the results of that are now, actually, a lot of these, going through, I thought, I’d love to do,

we should, you know, do some trips to follow up and see, because there’s different stages

of how far advanced they are, mhm, like, James is probably the one that I’ve been in touch with

the most, he’s in, uh, Missoula, Montana, and his orchard, last I saw, was doing really well,

flowering, so it’s producing, and, yeah, so there is, and that’s what makes up part of the

brutal years, is, in the beginning, it’s money out, ‘cause, as opposed to a lot of farming,

where you plant it in the spring, and you harvest it partway through the summer, if you’re doing

vegetables, you plant in the spring, and sometime in the summer, you’re already harvesting, or, at

most, in the fall, not many crops are a two-year cycle, but then you get into two years, and then

it’s things like raspberries and strawberries, you could plant the first spring, and harvest already

by the next year, so that’s a two-year cycle, that’s already kind of, wow, that’s long, ‘cause

you’re not getting money coming in for those two years, it’s money going out, and when you get into

trees, if you don’t already have trees that are producing, that are already producing you some

cash flow, then you’re starting from scratch, and trees, it’s 3 to 5 years before you’re

really getting some crop that starts to pay the bills, so that’s what makes up the brutal years.

And so many lessons, like, to have torn out the organic orchard, to replant, while the organic

orchard was fully mature and producing, that was a big mistake, I can imagine, because, again, how

old would I have been, I would have been pretty young, you, that was, you were in high school,

‘cause, remember, the last year, yes, I helped you replant, then you were especially there the

year we were pulling out, so, yeah, clearing out, pulling out rootstocks, so, again, for context,

when we were younger, we never took vacations, like, my friends would go to Disneyland, and,

uh, everybody would have, like, I don’t know, we did go on vacation, no, no, we can get to that,

everybody had, like, the game systems and everything, and us, we never had that, so,

even out of high school, I started working, so, at least, at that point, I had my own pocket money,

but, for you, to decide, just on a whim, like, you know what, I’m done with this black hole,

I want to go, ‘cause you didn’t know that the permaculture orchard would work, no,

so, I’m done with this black hole, I want to go, another black hole, yeah,

what was the thinking behind that, because, again, okay, you had me, and I’m pretty sure Eli would

come and help you, and I remember Frank, Frank Teuton came and helped you as well, again, so

I’m assuming that was another, he liked to just get out and wanted to do something, so you were,

like, look, I have this land, if you want to help me, here, it’s your playground, so, again,

you recruited, slash, forced, um, some, I guess, never forced, but some labor, ‘cause you couldn’t,

I never got paid, so I guess that could be a thing too, if somebody, let’s say, has a property,

I’m sure, you know, somebody in your circle, or around, that is interested, maybe entice them

to come and, I don’t know, pick, or whatever, that could help you out, and, in return, they

get produce, or an experience, or whatever, that could be another thing, yeah, there’s several,

I mean, as you say, there’s so many requests for people coming, so many wanting to help,

and I really don’t, yeah, now, and it started, it probably started about when the film came out,

‘cause word was getting around that, yeah, and that’s when I remember, one year, that I was

getting the emails, now you get them, but I was getting the emails, and I think I counted 50 CVs,

people sending in, wanting to come help, want to come help, and, last year, we didn’t have anybody,

through the COVID years, we didn’t have anybody, we had the end of COVID, which was Sebastian,

that was, he was the last person who was there. So, for anybody that wants to do an internship

with him, this gentleman, Sebastian, okay, he’s from, no, no, don’t tell him how to, I have to,

he’s from Germany, yeah, he’s from Germany, so we went up to film one day, and it was summer/spring,

and, uh, there’s a tent in the ditch across the street, I’m, like, hey, Pops, um, I think there’s

a homeless person camping outside here, outside the gate, so we went, and we had gone in, no,

we were unlocking, yes, and so, when we get there, that guy comes out of the tent, and he’s, like,

oh, Stefan, so I don’t know who this person is, I don’t know either, long story short,

he ended up flying from Germany to the orchard, I don’t even know how he got there, ‘cause he

didn’t have a car, he had a bike, he biked, yeah, he had worked someplace in Kingston, so he biked,

uh, like, three days from there, okay, and then proceeded to camp outside, because he did not want

to go into the orchard, yeah, or disturb you, or anybody, until he saw you, yeah, I remember

seeing him, and it’s, like, he says, oh, I’m here to help you, uh, yeah, I said, did you call, you,

I didn’t get an email, I said, uh, he says, well, I’m here, I’m here as long as you need me to help,

and I thought, yep, mhm, and I was, like, I wasn’t expecting it at all, we were there to film, and I

said, okay, listen, Sebastian, actually, he said he didn’t want to bother him, so he’s, like, look,

I’ll stay here, if you’re coming back tomorrow, I said, no, you’re not camping in the ditch, uh,

first of all, I said, you could bring your things in here, and my understanding with him was, look,

you want, I’ll be here on the weekend, help me out for the weekend, I’m pretty quick at judging how,

whether they know how to work, and I mean, right there, it’s striking, how many people don’t know

how to be useful and valuable in work, like, I remember telling you guys, ‘cause I learned it,

and I thought, that’s a really good way of seeing it, and it was the story about the three brothers,

so, three brothers who were working for the same company, but all three were getting paid

a different salary, and the story went, the first guy, he would do the job, he was paid the least,

and the conclusion was, to the employer, that he doesn’t even do what he’s asked, like, he does

less than what he’s asked, so that’s why he got the lowest pay, the second brother, he would do

just what he was asked, so he would do, you ask him, he’ll do, and the third brother would do

without being asked, and he would, basically, look for problems, and he would solve them before they

became a problem, before they were really known by the owner, and I thought, yep, that’s absolutely

it, ‘cause, if you really want to be useful and valuable to work, you have to, the easiest way,

I mean, by far the easiest way to stand out, is, if I wouldn’t even, or maybe I noticed, oh, gosh,

I’m going to have to do that, and then, next thing I know, I turn around, hey, and he’s doing it, or

it’s done, it’s, like, that, you notice, because you go, oh, wow, he’s saving me time and effort,

and he’s learning, maybe he doesn’t know he’s learning, or, at most, he would just ask me one

question, and say, hey, is there a quicker way to do this, I know I would do it this way, and

then I’ll just say, okay, yeah, do it like this. So that is the three levels, are you not even

doing what you’d be asked, are you just doing what you’d be asked, or are you doing without being

asked, and that’s really, all employees fit into one of those three categories, and you definitely

don’t want to be the lowest one, if you’re the middle one, strive to be the one who does without

being asked, because compensation will follow, if you, you know, in a job where you’re paid,

if you say, I did that, but I wasn’t noticed, don’t do it to be noticed, just do it, word will

get around that, gee, that person, and if you’re not appreciated by that company, I’m sure, yeah,

another company will hear about it, and you’ll end up getting some offers, yeah, so, or if you say,

look, I got another offer from this other place, true, and then the boss doesn’t want to lose you,

they go, hey, you’re not leaving me now, ‘cause now they recognize you’re valuable, I don’t want

to lose you now, yeah, and all of a sudden, now comes this big raise, how come, well, ‘cause

sometimes they figure, maybe they can get away with not paying you well, if that’s the case, then

maybe it is time to go look for another one, and I remember, Sebastian was a very hard worker, yeah,

a lot of stuff that he did is still there, and it looks great, but, um, yeah, don’t show up in

a tent, show up, that’s already been done, you’ve got to come up with something more original, yeah,

in fact, I don’t, actually, we’ve got it set up so low-maintenance, the whole farm now, yeah,

that’s true, that’s why that maintenance course is golden, because we’ve put the years, I mean,

30 years of thinking, how can you do this, not just a little better, but, like, not do it at all,

that’s the best, or do it a lot quicker, and it just ends up, it’s, like, yeah, we can go off on

vacation, doesn’t matter, it’s going to do well. And I’ll circle back around, so this vacation

thing, yeah, we ended up, just, again, he had no money, all the money just went back to the farm,

and I didn’t know, because we were still young, so, for summer vacation, I don’t even remember

what kind of van it was, but it was this really old, an Aerostar, I think it was called, or,

not red, no, it was a green, green, yes, but that, and he would load it up, like, load it up, load it

up, and we would go, I remember, we even went to Newfoundland, and we’re in Quebec, so we went all

over, we went to Manitoba, yeah, so, basically, every summer, we would go to a different province,

but it would, in a van, it’s me, my dad, my mom, my brother, my sister, so we’re five,

and a dog, ‘cause we had a dog at the time, so five people, loaded up, and I remember,

he would be, or my parents would be, like, okay, so we have, let’s say, I don’t know, man, $50, no,

our budget was $100 per day, so, if we went for a week, we had $700, okay, yes, but all-in, it’s

all-in, that’s the thing, so that counts for gas, you’re a kid, you don’t know how much gas costs,

so he, they would say, okay, well, we’re going to take 40 for gas, so now you’re left with 60 bucks,

I’ve got to eat three times that day, you’ve got to find somewhere to sleep, so I remember,

even that was, that was your first lessons at understanding how to budget, 100%, ‘cause it was a

very distinct, it was, look, I remember, we’d give it to you to decide, because we didn’t go saying,

we want to go to, we never had criteria, we just, we’re going there, like, we’re going to Manitoba,

or we’re going to, wherever, this is your Disney World, this is your Disneyland, kids, like, here

you go, here’s, uh, and everywhere, there’d be these guidebooks, and I remember, I remember Emily

going through the guidebook and going, oh, look, there’s horses, we could go horseback riding,

yeah, it’s, like, $100, yeah, so, so the tradeoff was, look, we could do that, if we did that, then

where are we going to get it from, the other days, yes, that’s what I was getting to, so we would

kind of, like, have to, ‘cause towards the end, we started to learn a little bit, so, if we would

go to a campground, back then, I don’t know what it is now, between, it was either, rarely, rarely

was it free, but it was usually 15 to $25, okay, so, sometimes, we would just tell them, look,

let’s stay here an extra night, because that gives us, let’s say, $60 or $70, to do something, like

an excursion, that’s close by, so, again, I never realized this when I was a kid, but I’m assuming

that’s what you just did with the orchard, like, you didn’t have any money, so you’d be, like,

okay, I’m going to prioritize things here, I’m going to cut this, and whatever I don’t use here,

I can put towards there, like your traps, like you were saying, yeah, but that’s real life, I mean,

that is most people, I kind of cringe, because the education system does not train people,

or does not teach kids, how to manage their finances, no, because, whenever I was with my

friends growing up, no, nobody thought about that, no, you guys were very attuned, early, to, well,

that’ll cost me this much, and especially, it was really driven home, once you started to work,

you very quickly realized, I don’t want to spend $20 on that, whereas our other buddies were going

out and buying new cars, yeah, at 18, 19, they were going and getting a lease for a car, that,

some of them actually still have them, that I remember, I remember you saying, you know, yeah,

he can’t put gas in his car, he can’t afford the gas, it was, like, wow, yeah, that was, those were

tough lessons, but better to learn them early, than to then have to make up that education later,

so, regardless of where you start, it doesn’t matter, if you say, well, my parents, look,

okay, whatever they did or didn’t do, don’t blame them, they did what they did, it’s up to you now,

if you’re, I’d say, if you’re over 15, look, you’re starting to be aware, you could learn

anything that you need now, you say, I don’t know how to, I don’t know how to deal with these

credit cards, just start doing some YouTubes, and there’s enough people teaching you the basics,

and, like I always say, go to three teachers, go with three people, don’t jump on the first one,

just get one point of view, a second point of view, a third point of view, and then meld them,

or blend them, take a little bit of each one that you like, yeah, yeah, ‘cause not every, and that’s

the whole thing, like, I may not be your kind of teacher, and I agree, there’s a lot of people, I

don’t want to, that’s, see it all the time in the YouTube comments, yep, that’s fine, I understand

that, because maybe you learn better from a woman, or a girl, maybe you learn better from somebody

who’s your own age, which often happens, ‘cause I see, in our YouTube stats, that most of our

audience is likely younger, yeah, so it really doesn’t matter, go with whoever resonates with

you the most, but that’s why, have three, so you can balance, and not take one point, having one

point of view is never a good idea, I agree. Like, even me, in my law enforcement job,

career, um, I remember training with different officers, and different age groups, different

trajectories, different whatever, and I would take, and I learned that from you, but I would

take, like, okay, I like how he dealt with this one, take it, like a tool, put it in a toolbox,

completely different call, get on scene, different officer, training officer, oh, I like that,

take that little thing, third officer, doesn’t go well, okay, I don’t like that, so, even if it’s

a negative, I was constantly learning, and just tailoring it for how I deal with situations, and

now, I get on scene, and, um, for those, I’m not a very big guy in stature, but I’m good at talking,

so I talk my way out of a lot of situations, where most people, they come to me afterwards,

and they’re, like, how did you do that, yeah, and even the guys who are much bigger than you,

like, you handled that, it was, like, you totally diffused that situation, but it’s just picking up

those tidbits from every person, even if I know how to do something, and you’re coming to me,

and offering to show me a different way, the first way I did it worked, but maybe the way that

he’s going to show me is even better, why would I not, I feel like so many people, myself included,

when I was younger, I knew everything, but when you take a step back, and you realize,

like, oh, this guy’s been doing this job for 25 years, like, I just started, I’m two years in,

why would I not let him explain to me how he does it, and then just adapt it to the way that I,

you know, like, I feel like every day, we can learn something new, regardless of what it is,

I don’t know if you’ll be proud of me, but I learned how to hard-boil an egg yesterday,

I YouTubed it, yep, but I’d never done it before, so I had to YouTube how to hard-boil an egg,

yep, and I looked, I actually looked at three different videos, that whole learning journey,

I mean, that’s where we’re getting around, and we’re saying about time versus money, so know

where you’re at, know, do you have lots of, like, now, nowadays, I’m still, I’m buying trees now,

because, you know what, I can afford it, and I’ll trade the money for the time, I don’t want

to wait two more years to get that tree, ‘cause I want that tree, and I want to start growing it,

and getting, seeing the results from it, so you have to know where you’re at, uh, it isn’t

a bad thing to have replaced money with time, it wasn’t for me now, because a lot of what I learned

was just because I didn’t have the money, so I had to learn, how can I do this on the cheap,

and the one thing about doing things, I’m not saying being cheap about it, but doing things

in a way that is really economical, or low-cost, because there’s always a more expensive solution,

there’s always a way, hey, look at this, you know, for this amount of money, you’ll have that

solution, but it’s pretty common to say, okay, that solution costs me $100, but, you know, there

is a $10 solution, because what I’ve seen, and I’ve seen it in my own life, I’ve bought things

that I realized, yeah, that’s not really, that doesn’t really work, or it doesn’t work for me.

And so, now, what I do, especially, and this is a good lesson, if you’re thinking

about doing anything relating to farming, or even in a homestead, or big garden, you say,

oh, yeah, I need this tool, or I need this piece of equipment, or something,

go and rent it, go rent it, yeah, I agree with that, always, because you may rent it, and go,

yeah, that’s not a great idea, or you thought you would use it way more than you actually would,

when, in fact, instead of dropping, I don’t know, thousands of dollars on one thing, you’re able to

rent it, and you use it for a couple days, and you’re, like, well, I don’t need it anymore,

yep, that’s, and what people, I mean, I’ve always been focused a lot on the tax consequence,

but if you rent something, you deduct 100%, if you buy something that costs over, depending what item

it is, but let’s say it’s over $500, you can’t deduct the full $500 this year, it’s depreciated,

so it’s, like, well, if I rent it for 50 bucks, I deduct the full 50 bucks this year, and so,

renting versus buying, on a short term, as a test, to know, is this going to be good, or then you go,

you know what, it’s kind of good, but it’s just not enough, it’s not big enough, then, at least,

you know, well, okay, now, to buy the tool that I really would need, yeah, that’s a lot, and so, it

helps to clarify things, quick test, quick test, if you’re learning, and you’re doing quick tests,

it’s always going to be beneficial, I mean, that’s what, like I was saying, in the maintenance course

for Master Class, it’s so much of it is results of quick tests, trying something, refining it,

and the evolution of it over the years, yeah, like the traps, you know, it seems so simple, and this,

actually, I haven’t made any for years, and we do sell them, uh, but I haven’t sold any for,

many people have asked, and if you’re somebody who’s asked, I’m sorry, I haven’t made a batch

of them, I think I sold a few times, used ones, used ones, because, to make a batch,

I would have to make 500 in a go, you sell both of the traps, or you just sell the, I just sell

these, ‘cause those, honestly, shipping used oil containers, it’s, like, yeah, okay, okay,

but, yeah, it’s just, try it, adjust, refine. The other thing is, uh, observation, you know,

if you’re learning, observation is probably the skill that can save you the most time, or, yeah,

most time, and one example was those, when we used to paint the trees, ‘cause we get, we get snow,

and when the snow hits, and reflects off the, when the sun shines, and reflects off the snow,

basically burns, it’s, like, a sunburn, it’s a sunscald, so it scalds the bark, and the bark

dries up, and actually splits off the tree, how did you ever think about painting them white, just

‘cause that’s what people used to do years back, they would paint them with a lime wash, so it was

a dual purpose, so it reduced the sunscald, and it reduced the amount of insects, ‘cause insects

didn’t want to walk through the lime in the spring, and you could still do that, and it would

still be okay, but, for us, it wasn’t so much the insects as the sunscald, and that was just, while

painting, you know, while you’re doing something, you ever do something, like, you know, the grunt

work, you’ve got a long time, you’ve got time to think, and it was about four days a year to paint

all the trees, so that was, like, four days, and, again, maintenance, four days a year, it adds up,

it’s almost a vacation, almost a vacation, yeah, there’s more vacation time that would go,

that’s why I’ve got so much more time nowadays, it’s, well, at least one of us does, yeah, and so,

it was through painting, and observing, that there was one tree that I never would paint, because it

was all caught up in a couple of shrubs, and it was, like, yeah, I can’t get in there anyway,

so I’ll just leave it, and if it sunscalds, well, and, after a few years of painting,

and realizing, okay, here’s a tree that I forgot to paint, or whatever, but it would get sunscald,

and the tree right next to it, that was protected, and surrounded by the shrubs, I thought, how come

that one never gets sunscald, so the observation is, how come that one doesn’t, and the one next to

it did, what’s the difference, well, this one’s in the shrub, and the shrub provides a little bit of

shading on the bark, and thinking, hmm, that was just, it was a red-osier dogwood growing around

it, and it was, like, it’s not a crop shrub, but it was just a shrub, and I thought, what if we

planted shrubs that we would want, which is part of the permaculture orchard design, put shrubs,

and put them southwest of the tree, which is the absolute orientation for the worst sunscald,

so we call it southwest disease here, because that’s where it happens, on the southwest side

of the tree, as the sun’s setting, and it really warms up the bark, and it was, like, I could put

black currant, or I could put a red currant, or I could put a gooseberry, at the base of the tree,

shading it in the afternoon sun, and then, after a year or two, when the shrub has grown up enough,

I wouldn’t have to paint, and, sure enough, long story short, there it is, I didn’t even know that,

we’ve done that, and that’s one of the reasons, using shrubs, but it was, it’s, like, a dual

purpose, we get a crop, but that shrub, because of where it’s placed, it’s actually saving a whole

bunch of time, and that’s four days every year, so it’s, like, okay, we plant the shrub once,

it actually gets better with time, because it gets bigger, and then we prune it, but we actually

prune shrubs after the snow melts, so that it’s the fullest at the critical time, and then

snow melts, and then we can prune the shrub, so it’s, like, okay, we get both, we get the shrub,

we get the production, we get the protection, so that’s where observation can really save you time,

working smarter, not harder, yeah, I like it. And it’s part of that whole learning, I mean,

learn, if you really want to speed up your learning, and really save at every step,

because we’ve got it, if you’re just thinking about this, it’s a dream in the future, to,

I’m in it, I’ve got all these trees planted, we’ve got you covered in the Master Class, and there’s

11 courses that cover it, go, just go check it out, you could start any of the courses for free,

just start them, see if this is something, see if I could help you in this, ‘cause my goal is,

what I would have loved to have had, if you’re thinking of this, even if it’s something that,

yeah, maybe in five years, boy, if you’re ready, when you need to be going, I mean, it’s not going

to be a 20 years of brutal, no, and that’s why I say now, uh, I really recommend that people

have annual crops, so annual could be vegetable crops, which is annual, you plant in the spring,

I mean, there’s a few that are biennial, like kale, you could get over winter, and harvest

the second year, and so on, but most of them are annual, you plant in the spring or summer, and you

harvest summer or fall, or you put in animals, or, and/or, so, having chickens with eggs,

having broilers, raising some ducks, whatever, there would be a market for you, that’s an annual,

you could have it where you don’t have to keep any animals over the winter,

you get them in the spring, raise them, we used to do a lot with lambs, you could do that as well,

and I wouldn’t put lambs in a young orchard, but you could, depending on what land is like,

you could start with annual things, and the nice thing is, the brutal years are made up by a lot of

time and money put in to get your orchard, to get your trees going, while they are not producing,

so you’ve got this drought, where you’re putting money in, mhm, and nothing’s really coming out,

or never enough is coming out, but if you bridge that gap with annual things, and then put in

some perennial things, plant some raspberries, plant some strawberries, around your trees, and,

in two years, those are already producing, your first trees may be producing in the third year,

not, it’s not going to be a full crop, but it will be something, and then, as it goes on, when

you hit 5 years, you should have your first full crop on some of your trees, at least, and so, that

will help bridge the gap, and get you started, and you start your marketing, and you start selling,

I’m expecting, and I really recommend, unless you’re really not in a good location, and we touch

that all in marketing, if you could direct-sell your produce, starting with annual things is a

great way, because, like, especially nowadays, I feel like there’s so many higher-end restaurants,

or markets, that are looking for that kind of produce, in particular, and now there’s just so

many more people than when you started, that are willing to pay for that quality of food,

because that’s another thing, I remember the dark days, we used to go, and you’d have people that,

maybe it just wasn’t as accepted, but, like, because you’re growing organic,

the fruit wasn’t perfect, so, not only when you’re producing, but then you had to deal with those

kinds of people too, and I remember, that must have been an extra headache, that was, and, again,

it was a headache, but that’s what shaped the whole thing to going back to membership, yeah, so,

this way, I know who the customers are, and they know what to expect, and we’re in communication,

it’s not just, show up and pick, no, I don’t want just, I did that, and that’s where, you know, I

remember those, yeah, people would come, oh, this isn’t perfect, like in the store, no, it’s not,

you know, it doesn’t mean organic can’t be higher quality, but we were still learning, and it was,

sometimes, I remember buying apples, ‘cause we didn’t, we didn’t have, we had, well, at that

point, we probably had 3,000 trees, but we didn’t have enough eating-quality apples, we had all our

apples would go for juice, ‘cause it didn’t really matter, the quality, but the quality for eating

was just not there, and we would buy apples, I was, like, we’ve got all these trees, and we’re

buying apples, that’s pretty sad, but that’s the learning curve, if you don’t know, you don’t know.

Another really important thing too is, you’re talking about, like, the learning curve, um,

just learning how to, I guess, work with that amount of, or that budget, or lack thereof,

now that it is successful, it’s kind of a blessing in disguise, because he doesn’t really spend more,

necessarily, than you did back then, so now you’re making an influx, but you’re still spending,

pretty, I would say, pretty much the same as you were, okay, with a couple of exceptions,

but I mean, in general, you’ve, because you did so many years with such a low budget, I mean,

you guys, if you’re watching the videos, you’ll see the way that he’s dressed now, because we buy

him his clothes, otherwise, like, there’s no, I go out and I buy this, I go and I buy that,

you’re very, I don’t want to say frugal, I just want to say, like, you don’t flaunt, or you’re so

good with the amount of money that you need to spend on your essentials, as you call it, that

there’s no need to go and buy over that, well, one of the things that those brutal years helped

shape was being comfortable with less, I mean, we just learned to get comfortable, you could want,

but you can’t afford, so it’s, like, okay, what do I need, and that was an important period, to,

I can remember meditating on, you know, that, understanding that distinction between, do I

need that, or do I want that, and then learning, gradually, okay, what does it mean to need it,

like, what do we really need, when we come down to, let’s say, bare bones, what, what do you need,

food, shelter, food, shelter, and something to dress, that’s what you need, oh, no, I need a

new pickup, I need a, no, you want, and there’s a lot of things we just want, and we think, no,

I need that, well, no, you don’t need a new one, and I mean, for years, we had every used vehicle,

yep, and I bought two, over all those years, just because it was the absolute cheapest,

when you get into financial, not us, but the whole economy goes into a nosedive,

dealers would be begging people to buy, and there would be all kinds of manufacturer rebates,

I remember buying one brand-new vehicle, the buggy, which was a Geo Metro, a yellow Geo Metro,

yellow Geo Metro, $7,000 cash, because I wouldn’t buy it on financing, and that saved, because then

I didn’t pay the borrowing cost, but, which was weird, because now it’s completely changed,

like, my brother and I, because we just learned from him, will go into a dealership, and want to

pay cash, and now it’s changed, they don’t want me to pay cash, yeah, they want me to finance,

so that they make X amount on the financing and everything, so, in that regard, it’s changed,

but growing up like that, you mold, ‘cause it wasn’t like you were telling us to do something,

and then going and doing the complete opposite, you would explain it to us, but then we grew up

seeing it, yeah, like, you weren’t saying, son, I don’t have money to buy your shoes,

and then go out and buy a new TV, you know what I mean, like, you really, you talk the talk,

and you walk the walk, yeah, and when I did buy something, it was ‘cause, actually, like you say,

a lot of times, it was bought for me, ‘cause it’s, like, you need, you need, his shoes are

falling apart, or his, yes, so it was, I would, I would forsake what I thought, I would forsake me,

to be able to put it into the farm, that was, that’s why I called it the black hole,

because money was going in, everything was going to, and we would make money every year,

but it was never enough to cover all the expenses, ‘cause you’re learning, and learning is expensive.

And that’s why I think, like, even the Master Class, some people would say it’s expensive,

it’s only expensive if you don’t know how much learning will cost you, yeah, and, in that sense,

and when we were talking with Billy Bond last time, on his podcast, he said, this is the

best deal, yeah, because you don’t realize, when you’ve done it, you realize, wow, this would cost

me a lot, and we spoke about it too, like, the pricing for the courses, because you sell them

individually, um, we decided to come up with a figure that it’s not an exorbitant amount, because

we could charge a lot more, but we needed you to get everybody to have, like, skin in the game,

yeah, because, if we’re just going to hand you the keys to the kingdom, you’re going to watch it, but

you’re, I don’t think you’re going to act, because I’ve done that too, where I’ll pay, I don’t know,

$20 for a book or something, I don’t even read it, I don’t even read it, or I’ll start it,

and I’m just, like, okay, but if I have more skin in the game, I’m going to go, and I’m going to

read it twice, because, but we, you know, one of the things was that expression, are you going to

pay attention, and it’s interesting how you pay attention, and why is the word ‘paying,’ because

you’ve paid, now you’re going to pay attention, and I’ve seen it, because I’ve done, I’ve taught

this stuff on three continents, and I’ve done courses for all different levels, and I’ve seen

that the places where, and I would say the most extreme is, a lot of times, in Europe, where there

are so many subsidies for farmers, where they didn’t appreciate, like, they don’t appreciate,

‘cause the course was free for them, they had no skin in the game, they did not pay, so they didn’t

pay attention, and, as you said, they probably, very few of them actually implemented what they

had learned, so what I’ve realized is, you know what, make it that it’s a little bit of, for some

of you, it’s a lot, it’s too much, maybe, of a sacrifice, but, on average, I think there would

be enough of a sacrifice to get it, so that, now, you’re invested, yeah, now you’re going to make

sure you get value out of that course, mhm, you’re going to go to the monthly meetings, when we meet

up with everybody, you’re going to, yep, yeah, I agree, 100%, and that, to me, that’s it, ‘cause

I know that it’s a long journey, it’s not, I’m going to do this, and it’s done in a month, no,

even if you planted it in a month, it’s not over, are you going to maintain it, are you, so it’s a

long journey, and if you’re not going to do what you need to do, then maybe don’t even start, yeah.

And I remember Shawn, I don’t know if you remember Shawn, came with Alex, that year,

that’s two interns, and Shawn was there, and he realized, you know what, he said, the best thing

about this internship is, I thought I wanted to do this, and now I realized I don’t want to do this,

this is way more work than what I thought, he had a desk job, he was good at what he did,

but he just thought, you know what, I’m going to do this, and that’s good, if it helps you know

that, you know what, I tried, and I realized it’s not for me, and that’s why I always come back to,

just start, and just start with two trios, because what you’ll learn by putting in two trios,

and if you don’t know what trios are, dig into our other YouTube videos, and it’s really just,

you’re going to put in three trees, and then another set of three trees, and two fruit trees,

and a nitrogen fixer, or fruit tree, nut tree, different combinations, but just put two trios in,

and you’ll learn as much with those two trees as if you did hundreds, but it will cost you a

lot less, probably, you have room to do it in your yard, if you have a yard, or if you’re, you could

do it at your parents’ yard, and if they really don’t like it, hey, you could cut them down,

you don’t have a lot invested to do that test, but you will start learning, and you’ll start seeing,

and you’ll start experiencing the cycles of the tree, and how it grows, and everything,

so it’s, it really is that whole learning journey, because it’s not just, I learned, no,

because a lot of it, unless you apply it, you just know it, but you didn’t learn it, and there is a

difference in the depth of how much you know it. And that’s why it goes back to, like I said in the

beginning, hopefully it’s something, like you’re saying, less skin in the game, but it’s not like

you’re going to school, paying a ton of money, and then you get your piece of paper, and you’re,

like, I don’t really like this, it’s not for me, and it’s a lot less than even a semester

at any kind of school, so, um, being comfortable with less, there’s a couple other things on that,

uh, we, for years, I remember doing taxes, and it was, like, wow, we’re actually living below the

poverty level, and, for years, it was like that, and it was, like, hmm, but what does that mean,

well, with the farm, we always had a garden, so, in season, and we’d raise some animals,

some years more than others, so I remember eating lamb, for, eating, I want to say,

over a year, it was two years, we had lamb, I don’t like lamb anymore, yeah, we used to say,

hey, it’s lamb burgers, yeah, no, I’m good, I’m going to Matthew’s house for something,

yeah, so I mean, that was part of it, so we had our own food, it was great food, and you think,

well, how much do you need, and if you have a yard, start a garden, if you have a sunny spot,

that would grow, if you have at least eight hours a day of sun in the yard, put in some vegetables,

learn growing some vegetables, even, or, if you want to do more, use that space to start your

nursery, ‘cause you’ll learn, you don’t, I don’t know anything about it, well, watch some videos,

if you get to the point where you, you know, you really would benefit from the propagation course,

that was, it’s for, it’s to get you set up in your nursery, and being able to grow anything,

uh, that you would need in a permaculture orchard. So one thing you tend to do is, when you get used

to living with less, you tend to keep those habits, it’s a habit, I don’t need to, but I

still do, does that mean I’m cheap, no, but, one thing they pointed out to me, when we went to a

restaurant, what was it, last year, two years ago, it still blows my mind, yeah, shocked you both,

and it was, like, so, I ordered a lemonade, no, no, no, no, that’s not what shocked, well, that

did shock me, but the thing that shocked me is, he turned to me and my brother, and asked us if we

also wanted a lemonade, and I’ve never, I’ve never seen him offer to buy anything other than water,

because it’s normally free here, yeah, and that’s not being cheap, it’s, like, it’s, like, are you

going to have a pop, I’m not saying anything, that you shouldn’t have a pop, but it was, if you want,

we’ll buy some cans, and we can have them at home, but we were the family that would sneak in the

snacks to the movie theater, because they would, oh, yeah, that’s true, they would, like, upcharge,

I don’t know how much, I agree with you now, but when you’re a kid, you’re, like, what do you mean,

like, I can’t just have a popcorn, and you’d be, like, no, I already popped some at home,

treat you to anything, I’m sure you did, but, actually, maybe not, ‘cause I feel like, probably,

ice cream, that’s the one place I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t skimp on, was getting ice cream,

but all that to say that I’m very fortunate now, looking back at how I was brought up,

versus, yeah, if I got everything just handed to me, so, in some weird way,

your dark times ended up being my bright times, and I think I’m doing pretty good because of it.

Couple last things I wanted to touch on, one was the mindset that you need to go through

the brutal years, uh, it really will develop a mental toughness, because you’re going to know,

are you going to be able to persevere through this, is this something, and you will hit moments,

if you want, go see my “I Want to Quit” video on YouTube, and that was a moment,

and there’s moments, just thinking of that time, it’s, like, whoa, yeah, that’s tough,

and I can even understand why, in farming, there’s such a high rate of suicide, because

it can be those brutal years, and they’re years, they’re not just moments, they can be brutal,

like, things don’t work, and they never happen isolated, it’s not just one thing isn’t working,

what they say, things come in threes, they come in bundles, and it’s almost like they’re

coming to attack you as a pack, and so, that, you’ll have to know, are you, and farmers are

a unique breed of tough, like, there’s a reason why they’re the ones who were the pioneers, and

homesteaders, and the newest, uh, movement of homesteaders, I just see some titles of videos,

you know, we’re quitting this, or we’re stopping this, it’s not for everyone, everybody thinks,

oh, yeah, we’re going to go, that looks fun, yeah, we’re going to go live in the country,

it’ll be great, we’ll grow our own food, yeah, it’s a reality check, a reality check, and I,

and we have a program here in Quebec, that allows young couples to check out regions,

and this is outside of the metropolitan, really out in the country, in rural areas, and they were

telling, because a few of my, uh, interns have been through that, looking for land, and looking

for places, and new regions to set up, ‘cause it’s so much cheaper than anything near a city,

and those people would always tell them, we know, very clearly, that there’s a two-year cutoff,

if the new couple that have come into a region, if they can make it past the two years, chances are,

they’re going to stay, because the first time, they go, hey, let’s get a takeout, no takeout

around here, let’s order out, there is no ordering out, let’s go to the, there is no restaurant,

I mean, there’s places Uber won’t even let you download their app, yeah, there is no Amazon

deliveries, you know, you could be in a place where, no, sorry, you’re outside cell reception,

you’re just, you’re away from it, and a lot of times, people, yeah, homestead,

well, what do you think homesteaders, go back 150 years, you know what a life of a homesteader was,

I was reading the history of our region, uh, at the farm, and, wow, homesteading was brutal,

it started off, the person would go in the spring, ‘cause they had no place, no,

they would actually go in the late winter, where they would just set up a tent, and they would

start cutting wood, ‘cause it was all forested area, so they would cut wood in the winter,

they would cut enough logs that they could build a little house, and they would cut enough wood,

often, in that area, it was to make potash, and you think, well, potash, it’s mined, well, no,

it’s called potash, because they would cut trees, they would pile them, they would burn them, and

then they would shovel the ash into barrels, and they would sell barrels of potash as fertilizer,

so that was kind of their economy, that’s how they made any kind of money, and, in the meantime,

then they’d have cleared enough land, that, in the spring, they could sow a first little crop of some

grain, enough to, hopefully, make some bread, and feed a few animals over winter, and they would,

all summer, they would be building their house, so that, hopefully, by fall, or by the next winter,

they would have a shelter, that now they could bring the wife and the rest of the family to live

in, yeah, I mean, this was not modern-day homesteading, where you come in, and now, let’s

film our journey, and we’ll make our money from YouTube, um, no, this was a very, very different,

and I mean, the number of people who died, if you got injured, if you got pinned by a tree,

‘cause you’re cutting everything with an axe, maybe a saw, and people would just get pinned,

you know, like, the tree falls wrong, and comes back, and pins your leg against a rock,

or against the next tree, now you’ve got a 5-ton tree pushing you against the other tree, and

people would just die, nobody, it’s not like, oh, yeah, my neighbor’s going, there’s no neighbor,

you’re out there, and so, it’s a real reality check, that, today, if you want a homestead, it’s

still so much easier, at least you have a road, probably, to your property, maybe you don’t, but

most places do have some kind of road, there’s so much that’s already easier, but I feel like

that’s why, like you were saying, with the YouTube thing, that’s why there’s so much interest for it,

because you have people that, maybe that’s something they want to do, but they know,

deep down, like, I don’t know if I’m, it allows them to live vicariously through the

adventures of someone else, exactly. I mean, I’ve always told you guys,

if we ever had, whatever, crisis, I mean, we’re just, go to the farm, we’re fine,

I mean, we’re, when we had an ice storm, for two weeks, where there was no power, no nothing,

and people were leaving their houses, because the house was freezing, and the pipes were bursting,

and everything else, it was, like, we’re good, but I feel like that too is kind of a generational

thing, like, I don’t know, you don’t know if you would, I really don’t, camping wasn’t enough,

yeah, I’ve seen, and I feel like I’m better suited than a lot of people my age, definitely,

a lot better, but still, yeah, a lot of people have, I think I’m surviving, maybe, two weeks,

I just look, if your freezer, it’s, like, you’ve got nothing stored, I mean, you’ve got nothing,

we’ve got, probably, enough for, yeah, for two people, anyway, six months, at any one time, like,

absolutely nothing, we’re okay, bachelor fridge, I’ve got some water, and some condiments, and that

came from your grandparents, on, you know, your mother’s side, but also from my parents, they went

through the war, and I remember, growing up, the biggest thing was the cold room, it was a 13-foot

freezer, or 12-foot freezer, and then there was bins of potatoes, that would be, usually,

two to three tons of potatoes for the year, and then, on the back wall, was about five shelves

of everything canned, pickles, and tomatoes, and whatever, everything from the, excuse me, from the

garden, and, yeah, I remember, my job was picking strawberries, and, you, oh, yeah, strawberries,

I mean, a burp like that, that would have been every day, because I’ve eaten all the strawberries

I could eat, but now I still have to pick, and it was picking mountains of strawberries, that’s it,

it’s just different generations, you want to talk about the dark times, that was the dark times.

So now, yeah, for me, it was just, the goal was, can I go a whole week without having to

get anything other than what I catch, or find, and it was, like, yeah, I could go for a whole week,

just what I catch, and shoot, and dig, so, yeah, I got used to, surviving is not a problem,

so the mindset is important, do you have any bit of tools, do you have that resilience,

you will hit brutal times, you will hit hard times, you only know when you’re in it, 100%,

but when you’re in it, yeah, it’s make-or-break, and what I found was,

I didn’t imagine how brutal that could be, but I’ve learned that, you know what, it’s almost

like you’re not submitted to the full impact at any one time, you’re submitted to steps, it’s,

like, this is brutal, you do go through that, and then the next one is, this is brutal, but you’re

already, your baseline, so you start off, you think, this is, and then you go through something,

and that’s brutal there, and then you go through, and, next thing you know, this one is brutal here,

and then, you know what, like, so now, I’m okay with, tornado would go through, fire would go

through, vandals would cut the whole orchard, whatever, it’s, like, that would suck, but,

you know what, it’s not the end of the world, you realize, what wealth is, not what you have, it’s,

well, what you have, a lot, in terms of, are you healthy, uh, how are your family relationships,

do you have good food, I mean, if you have those three, think, well, I don’t have the fancy car,

or the fancy clothes, or this, or that, but I get what you’re saying, because, even me, I see it,

let’s say you inherit all your money, and you go broke, one snap, or you grew up with nothing,

and you built it all, and then you go broke, it sucks, you’re both broke,

but having done it the first time, you’re going to get back, if not more, than what you, you learned

that the hard way, your first business venture, where you, I lost tens of thousands of dollars,

and I was faced with the same thing as you, do I quit, or, you know what, it took me, let’s say,

five years to make that, I worked all kinds of hours, lost it, bad business deal, that’s on me,

I could have been there, and everyone was telling me, like, oh, you should lawyer up, and do this,

that, 100%, could have been ruthless, or, this is on me, I did it once, I know now how I got it,

let’s take all of that, and get it back, and I did it within, what, a year, I think, yeah,

I sacrificed, for sure, but because I had already done it, and I didn’t just get it given to me,

I was able to, like, exponentially make that back, whereas it took me years the first time, yep,

that’s where people underestimate what you learn on that journey, like, see, it was the nursery,

what we learned in the nursery experience, the first time, the second time was, like,

yeah, it still sucks, but it’s so much easier, and each time, what you’ve learned, you don’t lose it,

and that’s one of the keys, is, you’ve learned it, and your baseline’s gone up,

your tolerance has gone up, your tolerance to pain, your tolerance to harshness, your

tolerance to the brutal parts, yeah, it goes up, it goes up, so you grow, as your project advances,

so that it’s, like, well, you know what, let’s start something, that, maybe,

there’ll be a few more brutal things, because you feel like you need a little bit of harshness,

you need a little bit of tough times, ‘cause you know it now, things are very easy, and, like, what

could we do that makes it a little harder, or a little uncomfortable, uncomfortable is a good one,

yeah, because, gosh, you know, I was thinking of that, what we have, that we don’t even,

like, we don’t even stop to think twice, oh, you have running water, think, like, who doesn’t,

we all take that for granted, who doesn’t have running, you have hot running water, oh my God,

that’s a luxury, kings, in the past, they didn’t have that, uh, what do you have, you just touch a

button, probably, and you’ve got heat, what are you talking about, I order food off my phone,

you can order food on your phone, yeah, you have a, you have a phone, I have a phone, like,

so many things that we just take for granted, take for granted, that, stop and inventory, just, like,

stop and think, what can I be thankful for, ‘cause a lot of times, you end up, you’re complaining

about something, that you don’t even realize, how minimal, how privileged you are, and how, like,

there’s safety nets in society, meaning what, they won’t let you starve, in the past, look,

you don’t have, you may, starvation was a real, present threat, uh, you get sick, you’re going

to die, well, chances are, you probably won’t die now, and things that people took very seriously,

I remember, my mother would be super concerned about getting blood poisoning, because, in Europe,

when she was growing up, people died all the time, well, all the people died from something,

that’s as simple as, if they, her biggest scare for me was that I would step on a rusty nail,

when I was building my treehouse, and it was, like, you’re taking all this wood from our barn,

that has all these rusty nails, you could step on a nail, and get blood poisoning, and, well,

now it’s, like, oh, what do you, you just go get a course of antibiotics, yeah, but antibiotics

is not something that’s always been around, people would get blood poisoning, and it would kill them,

so many things, you’ve got an appendix burst, that used to be a serious cause of death, so much

has become easier, that, you know what, having a project like this, that gives you some harshness,

maybe, in your life, that gives you some brutal things, that raises up your mental toughness, is

important, and physical toughness, I mean, jeez, people, a lot of times, you use the gym a lot, but

only because that’s your biggest form of exercise, and it’s, like, a forced exercise, in season,

I don’t need no gym, I mean, I get plenty with the farm, I’m starting now, with pruning season,

and it goes on through the seasons, so, that’s something, you think, well, yeah, your physical

fitness, and take it for granted, but if you’re not, if you’re injured, you realize, wow, I had,

three times, a rotator cuff tear, and the third time, I was out for 6 months, I mean, I couldn’t,

I had one arm, basically, the other arm was not useful at all, and that’s where you go, wow,

there’s a lot of things I can’t do now, you know, try pruning with one arm, it’s not obvious, yeah.

So, if you have your health, and stay safe, that’s why, in the pruning course, we have, you know,

that’s from experience, lessons on pruning safely, because safety, and avoiding injury,

is really important, you only notice, when you’re injured, how important this is, so it’s a lot of

lessons learned along the way, but I think that’s a good place to wrap it up, basically, ‘cause,

like I say every time, he’s just going to keep rambling, but when you go through the dark times,

because everybody has it, no matter where you are, like you said before, it’s important to

just take a step back, I think, and reflect on how far you’ve come, and the fact that you’re able to

get over it, that being said, thank you so much for listening to this episode, good job, Pops.

Click on any text or timestamp to jump to that moment in the video

Most transcripts ready in under 5 seconds

One-Click Copy125+ LanguagesSearch ContentJump to Timestamps

Paste YouTube URL

Enter any YouTube video link to get the full transcript

Most transcripts ready in under 5 seconds

Get Our Chrome Extension

Get transcripts instantly without leaving YouTube. Install our Chrome extension for one-click access to any video's transcript directly on the watch page.

Add to Chrome — Free

Works with YouTube, Coursera, Udemy and more educational platforms

Get Instant Transcripts: Just Edit the Domain in Your Address Bar!

YouTube

←

→

↻

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc

YoutubeToText

←

→

↻

https://youtubetotext.net/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc

YouTube Transcript:the Brutal Years of the Permaculture Orchard

Video Transcript

Paste YouTube URL

Transcript Extraction Form

Get Our Chrome Extension

Get Instant Transcripts: Just Edit the Domain in Your Address Bar!

YouTube Transcript:
the Brutal Years of the Permaculture Orchard