It Finally Feels Real

[00:00:00]Today I'm going to be answering as many of your questions about our upcoming move to our new farm as I possibly can.

[00:00:06]We're also going to be doing a big harvest in the garden today. And what's particularly exciting about this harvest is it is the first step towards the products that we're going to be selling in the farm store that we're opening on the new property next summer. See that it is a little bit smoky today. This is actually so much better than it was yesterday, which is why I'm out here early this morning to do this harvest.

[00:00:30]Obviously, you don't want to be working outside when it is super smoky if you can at all help it. So, I was really happy when I woke up this morning and the skies were clear enough for me to get out here and get this project done.

[00:00:41]This is the north side of my garden and this year I have some squash growing up on the far side. I have cabbages and cauliflower growing here underneath the bug netting. We have our garlic and that's what we're going to be picking today. And then a potato patch over on this side. This has always been my least favorite part of my garden. I don't know why, but this year it is one of my favorites because it just I don't know, it just turned out really well and everything that's growing in here has done really well this year. So, we're going to be picking all of this garlic.

[00:01:12]I planted 600 cloves of garlic back in October of last year. When you plant your garlic, you plant it the year before. I have planted seed garlic in the very early spring and have ended up with some garlic, just little tiny heads of garlic. So, it can be done, but planting it in the fall before the ground freezes is what is recommended.

[00:01:33]So, that's what I have done here. I did h end up with some chickens digging around in here as I usually do in the fall. So, I don't know for sure if we ended up with 600 actual bulbs of garlic in the end, but we should get a lot. So, why this is so exciting getting this garlic pulled today is because this garlic is going to be the seed that I used to plant. The garlic we'll be harvesting next year that we will be selling in the farm store. So, it feels like the first really concrete step outside of buying the property itself that I am taking towards the goal of the farm store and I'm super excited about it. You'll notice here that we have a couple of leaves that have completely died back on here. it. Ideally, I would like to wait until three or four of these have died back, but I checked the weather forecast and we have 5 days of rain coming up, which is absolutely fantastic for all the fires that are burning in our area and for the air quality and for the fact that we've had drought and it's going to green everything up. For that, it's fantastic.

[00:02:32]For garlic that is just about fully mature like this, not so great. Because what can happen is that the bulbs, excuse me, can start to split. And because I really want this at as prime as I can get it in order to save it for seed to plant in the new at the new property, I don't want it to split. I don't want to end up with any rotting or anything like that with my bulbs. So, I have made the decision to pull them out now. There's lots of them that are fully ready, but most of them are like this where probably could go for another week before I pulled it, but we are going to do it now just so that we don't risk ending up with rotted bulbs. So, I just wanted to show you the difference between a hard necked and soft neck garlic when you actually pull it out of the ground. So, a hard neck garlic, which is this one here, grows escape, which looks like this.

[00:03:25]So, it is recommended to grow hard neck garlic in the north. It just tends to do better. But I have been doing both, and we're in a zone 3B here with around 110 or so frostfree days. And I have been growing soft neck garlic the last couple of years, and it's been growing great.

[00:03:40]Um, so I for me, at least in our growing zone, in our situation, I think that you can grow either quite successfully, but it is kind of the standard recommendation to grow hard neck garlic in the north. The other thing about hard neck garlic is it tends to not store quite as long as soft neck garlic does.

[00:03:58]I have been growing the hard neck garlic for years here in the north and I've just been storing it in my cold room inside and I've had it last all the way till the end of winter, early spring before it starts to really go soft. Uh so I don't really think it's that big of a deal for most people. They are probably not going to grow enough to store if you just have a kind of a backyard garden to to worry about the storage ability over a long period of time with garlic. So I don't think it matters that much. You also have the option of chopping it up and freeze drying it or freezing it or dehydrating it. So, if it does start to turn, that's what I usually do when I check in February. I um that I'll I'll chop it up and just freeze it that way. And that works great. But the difference between the two, this one is a soft neck garlic.

[00:04:44]And there's a few things you'll notice.

[00:04:46]One is it's a little bit more irregular in the shape of it. There's way more cloves in this than there is in this one. As you can see, this one is a little bit smaller. I us I find that the soft neck garlic does tend to grow a little bit bigger. And this one is kind of uniform and there's fewer cloves in the hard neck than there is in the soft neck. And you can see this one is all lumpy. There's tons of cloves in there and they kind of overlap. This is an artichoke garlic. So it kind of looks if you can picture how art an artichoke looks that's how this growing or the growing habits of the soft neck garlic are. And um the other thing too is that soft neck garlic generally has a softer neck and it's easier to braid and a lot of people will braid soft neck garlic. I have braided the hard neck garlic too and it has been fine. So I have planted both um varieties here. Fortunately it is easy to tell them apart when you pull them out of the ground. I just threw I had a whole bunch of garlic last year. I just threw it all in a tin and planted it all here. So, I will be selling them as soft and hard neck garlic, not as distinct varieties. I'll get better with that as the years progress if garlic sales go well. So, I did water my garden a couple of days ago. So, the soil is quite wet or not wet, but moist. And the garlic is super easy to pull out. But I would recommend letting your soil dry out a little bit when you pull it out cuz it just makes your bulbs a lot cleaner. Um once they have a chance to cure and dry, you can just rub off that extra dirt. But while we are pulling out our garlic here, we are going to chat about the upcoming move and I'm going to answer some of your questions that you've been asking over the last I don't know 3 or 4 weeks or so. These are coming out so nicely. And that one's pretty tiny, but most of them are really nice size. So that's great.

[00:06:42]So, I am going to be answering quite a few questions that I have already answered. But because we have lots of new faces here and welcome to everyone who's new and also of course not everyone watches every video, I've been getting a lot of the of questions that I have already given answers to. So, I want to answer those ones again in today's video as well. Oh, this is a great example of a clove that is starting to split here. Can you see this? How it's kind of splitting. And this is right here, too. So, this is not ideal for storage. So, I'm glad I followed my instincts here to get these pulled today. So, I'm going to give a little bit of kind of background context to this move because one of the biggest questions I get is why the heck are you moving? That's the big one. Why? Because we have obviously done a lot of work on this property. We've been here for I think we're into our 11th year now and we obviously love it. If you've been watching my videos, I've been sharing videos on YouTube almost since I think it was we'd only lived here a year when I first started filming. So, you have watched our joy and our excitement.

[00:08:02]There's a mosquito right in front of the lens over there. Can you guys see that?

[00:08:06]Anyway, um so we have been building up this place and you have watched us talk about all of our dreams and our goals.

[00:08:13]you've watched us bring a lot of those dreams and goals into reality and do a lot of things here that that we've talked about doing and build it up to what it is. So, I can totally understand why it might seem strange that we would have done all of that work and then decided to sell it. The biggest reason that we are moving it has to do with the needs of our family which I think for most people when they move that's kind of the driving force behind it outside of needing to transfer for work or whatever. So that is definitely the number one reason that we're moving is for our family and because we feel like the f the needs of our family can be met better met in a different location. This is so interesting. There's a lot of inconsistency in the size of these bulbs. So, we have some really goodiz ones and then we have some little tiny ones here. Uh the smaller ones will be the ones that I just keep for our own use for eating. And then the really nice big beautiful looking ones. Those will be the ones that I save for seed. When it came to picking where we were going to move, we wanted to have access to resources and amenities for our kids.

[00:09:32]And we wanted to be close to a university um preferably a good university that so that the kids of ours that are wanting to pursue that path would be able to stay home and live economically during their university years. So that obviously ruled out a lot of places that we could have chosen, but there were quite a few good options here in BC that way. So initially we had been looking at the Okonogan Valley. Dan and I both grew up there and we love it there and there are good universities there. We have friends and people that we know in the area. So, we had made an offer on a property in the Okonogan and up until about 4 weeks ago or so, that was the plan. That was the goal. That was the direction that we were going.

[00:10:29]That sail fell through and darn it, didn't pull that one out. Um, that sail fell through. So when it did, we kind of went back to the drawing board as far as our options of where we wanted to be.

[00:10:47]Again, keeping that sort of we need to be in a big enough center, resources for the kids, university, all of that. One of the big factors, of course, is economics always when you're looking at properties. And we um for what it is that we were really hoping to get, which is a little bit of land, the ability and to be in a good location for opening up a farm store in the future, the Okonogan Valley is pretty prohibitive that way because it's one of the most expensive places in BC to live. So when we had to go back and start looking at properties again, we uh decided to look a little bit further north because obviously a lot less expensive to live a little bit north when we had originally started looking cuz we have been thinking about moving for just about a year now. And when we first were looking at it, we actually had decided to go further north. So, we had spent a lot of time looking at the area and looking at real estate. So, we decided to revisit that when the sail in the Okonogan fell through. And in the end, we found a place that we absolutely fell in love with. Great location for some road frontage, but still private and quiet, which is really important to me. I love the peace and tranquility of the country and of nature and the property that we found.

[00:12:24]Definitely um ticked all of those boxes.

[00:12:28]And so we just sat down and went, okay, like I I'm the only one who really doesn't want to live really super far north because I find the short days of winter, the snow and the cold very depressing. So Dan and I sat down and had a conversation about how we could mitigate that for me and um came to the conclusion that a four-season greenhouse combined with maybe some travel in the winter would be would make it doable for me. And so that's what we decided to do. So we made an offer on a property that like I said we're absolutely in love with. I'll give you guys a few little sneak peeks of it.

[00:13:13]Um, right here. It's beautiful. It's on a lake. It has a fabulous barn that we want to convert into the store.

[00:13:23]And the house itself is big enough to accommodate our family. So, it really did tick all the boxes besides not being south. That was the only box that it didn't tick. But like I said, we have come up with some ways that we think we can mitigate the fact that it's in the north.

[00:13:41]And once we kind of made that decision to do that, everything kind of fell into place for it. And that was really good cuz we did feel like we were pushing against the tide for a while with everything. And now it feels like everything's really flowing and the doors are opening. So, that is a nice feeling. I missed some scapes on these garlic back there. Um, the reason that you want to pull your scapes off is because the plant will put a lot of energy into creating the seed instead of into bulking up that root, but I think I only missed four or five of them. So, that's not too bad. So, that's where we got to where we are now, where we have an accepted offer on a property. Our subject removal, the final subject removal is just in a couple of days.

[00:14:30]We've done the inspection and everything seems to be working, which is a really good feeling. Been a lot of people that have mentioned in the comments that I seem to be handling this whole entire thing and the stress of all of this really well. And I feel like for the most part I have, but yesterday was not one of those days cuz we had got the report for the inspection. And there were some things that we needed to have dealt with. And I was just feeling Oh, shoot. And I was just feeling super stressed that it wasn't going to work out. And I had messaged a couple of my friends just saying that I was not handling it well. I was not. And I was having kind of a feeling sorry for myself kind of day. But I had some good advice from one of my friends and she just said, you know, it's it's okay to just feel stressed out about this situation. It is a super stressful situation. It's okay that you're not just, you know, skipping along singing a merry tune. Give yourself a day to just have a moment. So, I did that yesterday. I didn't do much. I did a little bit of watercolor painting and scrolling on my phone and just chilling out, shutting my brain off. um which helped and I felt much better this morning, especially because everything worked out as far as the inspection goes. But overall, I've really been just trying to be super grateful to have lived here and had the experience and gained everything that I've learned living here and to have the opportunity to move to another property where I'm going to have enough acreage to do what I want to do and all of that.

[00:16:14]Just just feeling really grateful for all of that. So, I have been in that state quite a bit, but yesterday was not that day, that's for sure. So, as far as the selling of the ranch goes, we had uh an offer from some really wonderful people that we really wanted and we still do want them to buy the ranch, but because their property was not selling.

[00:16:38]It's kind of a hard market right now for certain types of properties, especially farms. And their property was not selling and there was Oh, shoot. I'm going to have to bring a shovel over here and dig some of these out that I'm missing. So, even though they still really want the property and we really want them to buy the property, they uh because their house was not selling and they didn't have an offer on it or anything like that, the market is really difficult right now or a little bit challenging and slow for larger properties that have acorage. So, we all decided not to extend that offer. So, right now, as it stands right now, the ranch is back on the market and we are hoping that it sells quickly because obviously that would be best. We are able to buy the other property while this house while the ranch is on the market and for sale, which is fantastic, and we are super grateful to be able to do that. But we obviously still want to really sell the ranch. So, there's that. That's a little bit stressful, of course, but we're just trusting that it's all going to work out the way that it is supposed to.

[00:17:57]And then what else? Oh, yes. You guys have asked a lot about whether we're going to be keeping the name Little Mountain Ranch. So, Little Mountain Ranch is the name of my channel and it's the name of everything that I run kind of off of the channel. Um, but it is the name of our business. It's not actually the name of the ranch. Although we do call it Little Mountain Ranch, it's not attached to the property um in any way except through us. So, we are going to be bringing that name with us, at least while we're kind of figuring everything out. I I know I've heard from a lot of you that nobody really wants me to change the name because everybody identifies Little Mountain Ranch with me and the channel and all of that. And so, our plan is just to keep the name and yeah, decide what to do in the future. We'll probably do like little mountain something if if we do change it at all. So, we really only use on kind of a daily basis for our own kind of farm use like with our milk cow and our gardens and our chickens and stuff around 5 to 10 acres that are right around the farmhouse. The other acreage cuz we have 160 acres here. The other acreage is our hay, which of course is wonderful to have, and then our forested and our pasture areas that are up in behind up the mountain. So, as far as the kind of farming we're wanting to move into, 16 acres is more than enough. I'm so excited because I'm able to have a couple of cows, so we can bring our cow thistle. We've sold the rest of our livestock, which in hindsight was kind of important, but we thought we were going to be moving to an orchard, excuse me, an 8 acre orchard, which wasn't going to accommodate cattle. But now that we're going to be on 16 acres that is actually all fenced and cross fenced and everything for livestock. Um, we could do a couple more cows. So, we're probably going to get either another dairy cow that's hopefully bred to a beef cow or a couple more beef cows. So, that is beyond exciting for us. And we're going to be able to bring all of our animals and all of that, which is wonderful.

[00:20:20]So, um that's as far as the size of the property goes. So, it's very exciting for us that we're able to bring um our animals with us. It's starting to get hot now. It's supposed to hit 33°, which means more like 37 40° uh today. So, that's another reason why I really wanted to get out early.

[00:20:40]Fortunately, the smoke is really clearing out right now, which is my lungs are grateful for. There's been quite a few questions about the cabins, the little cabins we have, um, our equipment, like all of our tractors and backhoe and bulldozer and all that kind of stuff. And our wood cook stove that's up in the kitchen, Martha. and we have decided that we're going to be bringing um a tractor with us for loading and unloading hay. We're going to be bringing the backhoe probably at least shortterm. We'll sell it eventually, but because we want to put in a root seller, the house does not have a root seller. And a root seller is something that I do not want to live without. So, we're going to be building a root seller um right away, too. And or maybe not right away. We're hoping to get it done this fall, but we have a big list of stuff that we want to get done before winter. So, that might not happen until next year. But the backhoe would come in very handy for that. But Dan said too, if he does decide that he's going to sell it, he can just rent a mini excavator or something like that to do the digging that we would need done.

[00:21:55]Um, but most of our big equipment we're going to be selling either with the ranch or separately and I've already covered the animals.

[00:22:04]So, the sheep are coming with us.

[00:22:06]There's actually the perfect area that's already fenced for small livestock there, which is awesome.

[00:22:13]And my wood cook stove will be staying here because that's obviously a selling feature of our property, kind of the self-sufficiency of our property. So, the wood cook stove will be staying here. So, we have looked at a lot of houses, as you can well imagine, in the last little while. And what's so cool about this particular house that we're buying is that there is the perfect place for a wood cook stove that's actually right in the kitchen. So, where my cook stove is in this house is it's there's my kitchen, there's the table, and then the wood cook stove is kind of in the living room area, which is fine.

[00:22:49]I just have a wheeled little countertop that I wheel over by it. But to have a wood cook stove actually right in the kitchen is so exciting for me. So, we are going to be purchasing a wood cook stove potentially this winter. I am trying to not be overly ambitious with the amount that we're going to be able to get done because we don't get possession of the new property until the end of August, which only gives us a couple months before the snow flies. So, lots and lots of questions about the growing zone. So, this is something that actually surprisingly excites me. One of the things that I was excited about about moving to the Okonogan Valley is that you can grow tomatoes and peppers outside there. You can grow grapes and soft cherries and peaches and nectarines, all that soft fruit. And that excited me, of course, obviously as a gardener. But I have to say that growing in the north, and I've learned this through having a channel and hearing so much feedback from all of you about growing in other climates, has its advantages. One of the biggest is the fact that we don't have a lot of bug pressure here outside of the cabbage moths, which are easily mitigated through the netting that you can see there. But outside of that, we don't have squash bugs. We don't have tomato horn worms. We don't have cucumber beetles. None of that here, which is a huge advantage. We also have really long days in the summer and that gives our plants extra opportunity to put on growth and some I know a lot of you comment on the size of Oh, I'm sorry.

[00:24:27]One second. Nala, I am so happy. So Nala is one of our cats and she nobody has seen her for the last 24 hours which is really unusual because she all of our cats come inside at night and she just didn't last night but she's right there in the forest garden. So that's a relief. I am the kind of person who when I have to switch gears because something comes up and and it's just I can't go down the path that I thought I was going to go down. It's really easy for me to focus on the positive of that and be able to focus on all the things about it that are better than the other option. And so in this case, that's exactly what's happened to my brain is I've just been thinking about all of the wonderful things that I've learned here growing in the north.

[00:25:21]I started growing down in the Okonogan and it was quite the transition when we came up here, but I've I've adapted to it. I've been doing it here for a long time now. and the fact that I get to take all of these skills that I've developed here and transfer them onto a new property that even might have a few more challenges. So, I am I'm in a zone 3B here with around 110 frostfree days.

[00:25:42]And we're going to be u moving to a zone three. I don't know if it's an A or B or a three, but but very very similar to what we have here. and we're up in the mountains here, so we get quite a few more weeks of snow than they do down in the river valley or down in town by us.

[00:26:00]And the same thing applies to where we're moving. They get a little bit more snow there than in some of the other areas in that region, but it should be fairly comparable. And like I mentioned earlier in the video, we are hoping to get a four-season greenhouse, which is going to revolutionize my gardening because I will be able to grow in the wintertime, which is so exciting. I have been talking about wanting to have a four-season greenhouse since we moved here 11 years ago. So to have that dream come into reality is going to be extremely exciting for me.

[00:26:39]So, I've talked about this a lot over the last probably 6 months to a year, just about how the amount of food that I'm having to grow for my own family is shrinking, but my love of growing food, I'm growing plants and flowers and all the things is only increasing the older I get. So, I don't really want to cut down on the amount of uh food and plants and things that I that I grow. In fact, I want to grow more. So, the only way to make that really practical is to sell it. So, that is the plan. Check out all this garlic, friends.

[00:27:16]Look at all that garlic. That's fabulous. So, my plan here is I'm going to leave the garlic sitting out here to dry a little bit for a couple of hours and then I'm going to be moving it. I'll be curing it here in my little greenhouse. This is where I always cure my garlic and my onions. It works great.

[00:27:35]It's very well UV protected. You wouldn't want to leave these somewhere where they were being blasted with UV rays, but that's well protected from the UV. And the because the I have vents in the door, it keeps a nice breeze growing through uh blowing through there, which helps with drying everything out. So, we'll wait until the garlic has completely dried back, and then I'm going to go in and sort them and take out the best ones for planting in the fall this year. I probably also will order some seed from Raa Creek. I think it's Resa. It might be Raa. R E S A Creek um seed garlic in the Boundary Country here in BC. I have been ordering seed garlic from them for years. And they have fantastic quality. So, probably to get a couple of fun varieties, I'll do an order there. But primarily, I'll be planting from my own seed garlic, the same as I did last year. So, I'll make sure that when we're at that point, when everything's cured, I'll show you what the cured garlic looks like. It usually takes a couple of weeks um to completely dry out. And I'll show you how I'm sorting it and how I'm kind of grading it.

[00:28:42]Oh my goodness, it is definitely getting warm out here. But we have one more thing that we really need to harvest because otherwise I'm going to lose it.

[00:28:50]And that is some absolutely beautiful cauliflower. Just wait till you see the size of these heads, friends. They are absolutely enormous. They look so beautiful. This is just inexpensive um bug netting from Amazon. But what I find is best to keep it pinned down is these landscape fabric pins or staples. And then I also use 2x4s along the side. And even with all of that, I still end up with one or two cabbage moths in underneath. But this year has been awesome. I have had no worms in my cabbages or my um cauliflower at all.

[00:29:31]I also have some absolutely stunning looking cabbages that I really should pull out. But I think between getting this garlic all moved in and processing all of this cauliflower, I'm going to leave those for I don't know. This is where it gets a little tricky to make the judgment call of how far I can push things. Because remember in the last video I mentioned about how if you're going to have a lot of rain or you're going to um be watering your garden and you have plants that are just about fully mature, like a cabbage for instance, that that infusion of a lot of moisture can cause them to split. Well, look at this. Most of these cabbages are looking fantastic. They're not splitting at all. But if we look over to that one, can you see how it's splitting there? So again, totally usable for just fresh eating. I just wouldn't want to use something that was split like that for making sauerkraut, for instance. Oh, look. See, that one is starting to split, too. And so is that one. Look at this. We have a little bit of splitting happening on that one. And a little bit on this one as well. So, I think what I'm going to do, and this might be a little risky, but I know that we're not supposed to have rain for 2 days.

[00:30:46]So, I think I'll get all of the cauliflower pulled out, all of the garlic moved in to the greenhouse and leave doing the cabbages until tomorrow.

[00:31:00]As long as it doesn't it doesn't look like it's going to rain at all. The sky is super clear. But, um, but I think that's a risk I'm going to have to take cuz I just don't have time to do all of that today.

[00:31:18]Oh my goodness, look at this beauty. Isn't she gorgeous?

[00:31:24]And they all look like that. That is so beautiful.

[00:31:44]Another bonus of northern growing is that the crops that like cooler temperatures like all the brasas do extremely well up here.

[00:32:04]Okay, I think that's it. I have one more little tiny one that's right up here that I think I'll just leave um and grab that one in a couple days when I do the cabbages. I feel like this part of the harvesting is the easy part where you just go pull everything out of the ground and then the real work comes when you actually have to get it all ready for preserving or for storage or anything like that. Um because all of this cauliflower, I think I shared this in a video a couple weeks ago, so I won't do it again today. But all I do with it, I blanch it for three minutes in a ro roll rolling boil and then put it straight into some ice water and cool it completely down so it doesn't keep cooking. Then I dry it off, pat it off with paper towel and put it on some cookie sheets. I always like to use parchment paper because sometimes cookie sheets can alter the color of them, especially if the coating has worn off like a lot of my old ones have. And then I will freeze it. And I'm freeze drying mine. I have my freeze dryer just running non-stop right now, but you can just freeze it as well. I would recommend doing the flash freezing method on cookie sheets just cuz it freezes everything individually and it doesn't clump all together. and then put it into some vacuum seal bags or some ziplockc bags, removing all the air, and it freezes fabulously. So, that's what I'm going to be doing with all of that this afternoon. I thought since we're standing right beside my potato patch here, we could do a little bit of a test poll on the potatoes and see if we have anything happening. Well, we will have something, but whether it's anything good happening underneath the soil here.

[00:33:47]So, let's try this one here.

[00:33:53]Oh my goodness, look at all those potatoes.

[00:33:56]We have some funky potatoes. So, do you know what funky potatoes will tell you is that you have a lot of nitrogen in your soil and that is not surprising since we actually did a fresh coating of compost on this um this spring. I wasn't planning on planting these here at all.

[00:34:16]Um, what I was planning on doing is putting the compost on and covering it up with a silage tarp and just letting it rest for this year. But, uh, because I decided not to plant my big potato crop garden that's a different garden area than this main space, I decided I still wanted some potatoes so that I would just put them in here. So, normally I wouldn't put fresh compost on a patch that I was going to do potatoes for exactly this reason, but that is fine. These aren't for storage. These are just for fresh eating. So, let's see how many we have down here. Wow. Oh my goodness. Look at this. Look at all of these fabulous potatoes. They are sizing up beautifully. I showed you about 3 weeks ago the potatoes that I had left in my root cellar from last year and they were um sending off huge shoots and definitely at the end of their life, we were able to still eat a lot of them within a few days of that, but the rest of those ended up in the compost. So, this could not be more perfect. Now, we can eat fresh potatoes for the rest of the time that we're here. And honestly, I can't say that I'm overly surprised that they're growing so well because my garden this year, I'm not sure what's going on, but it is just growing just beautifully. Okay, same day, but my microphone died when I was filming. So, we decided to go up to the lake and spend a couple hours at the lake. And then when we got home, let me show you what we found. I'm not sure if you're going to be able to tell, but I'll put a clip in here that I took of the fire when it started. So, when we left for the lake, there was nothing over this ridge that you could see, and by the time we got back, there was huge plumes.

[00:36:00]And within a few hours, it was completely grayed out. So, I'll see if I can point. So, the fire is right there.

[00:36:08]And it's spread from, I think, 30 hectares to 900 hectares in just a few hours. It's very, very hot here. Like I mentioned earlier, very, very dry. We've been experiencing a drought in this area. And the fire is moving fast. And it didn't help that it was windy earlier, too. So, the good news is that they had fire retardant and water bombers and a crew, bulldozers, all the things on the fire really quickly. So, I'm hoping that they can put the fire guards in everywhere that they need to to stop the fire from getting into any buildings or houses or anything like that. So, if you can keep BC in your prayers and in your thoughts over the next little while, we would really appreciate it. There are fires burning all over the place. It's very reminiscent to me to 2017 when we were personally evacuated. We had fires all around the ranch for I think it was 40 days or something like that. It was a very long time that we were evacuated.

[00:37:07]So, the good news is in looking at the weather forecast, we have a couple more hot days, which is unfortunate, but then the temperatures drop significantly and we get rain for days, and that should help knock these fires back. All right, friends, that is going to bring us to the end of today's video. I hope the next time that we're together, there is not a forest fire raging in behind. And I do hope that we get rain all the way across BC. And I know there's lots of other regions dealing with forest fires right now. So, my heart goes out to you and I'm hoping for rain for you as well.

[00:37:37]I hope that you all have an absolutely fabulous day and I'll see you again next time. Bye everyone.