0:00:00 - 0:00:20 So I had some thoughts on, on sin and repentance and I just wanted to give some encouragement. I was walking by. This is my dog queen. This is gonna be my demo dog here. I was walking Quinn, take some mail in the mailbox, went by a neighbor's house and he had been talking to me about clearing out some 0:00:20 - 0:00:43 weeds and I guess he decided to do what he said he was gonna do cause it looks like he scraped a bunch of the dirt on his property with a skid steer to see what it looks like before. It kind of looks like this. This isn't his property, it's mine, but it's just really stubborn native grasses and some 0:00:42 - 0:01:05 , some weeds. And this is what you start out with now. Something I'm not sure he knows is that when you disturb native soil like this, trying to get rid of grass and weeds, what you end up doing is activating a whole lot of seeds that you don't see that are actually being kept at bay by the established 0:01:05 - 0:01:34 plants. As ugly as this seems. When you disturb the soil, it gets a lot worse. And I don't have any examples of that, but it does. And so this is a lot like when you first attempt to change your life to address the things that, you know, you need to work on. And what happens is, seems like you're making 0:01:34 - 0:01:56 a lot of progress. At first, if you scrape land, clean with a skid steer, it looks like what you're dealing with is clean dirt. But actually what you're doing is exposing deeper things that are much more difficult to get rid of. So now this is my garden, by the way. Now, what I'm showing you is land 0:01:55 - 0:02:14 that we've been working on for years and this isn't nearly as bad as it was when we first started, believe it or not. But you see the gravel everywhere. I basically live on a huge gravel mound. So there's tons of plants in this. But what you might not notice is that only a few of them are weeds. There's 0:02:14 - 0:02:42 one there but these little Tufts of grass that's all rye, ok. And so there's a process that I've been developing here to convert native soil to productive farmland. Now, productive is all relative cause I, like I said, as far as farming goes, I, I live in a, a wasteland. Ok. But what I wanna show you 0:02:41 - 0:03:09 is what happens when you don't give up, it seems like it gets worse at first. But if you just keep going bucket by bucket, taking all these stones out and year by year, tilling and replanting and feeding the soil. What you end up with is something that looks like this. You see how lush and green that 0:03:09 - 0:03:42 is. It's beautiful. Now, this is actually still quite early in the season. But look at that, this rye will get about 5.5 ft tall. And before it goes to seed, we, we will actually come through and until this under and plant in this spot, we plant corn. I wish I could show you how rich this soil is. Maybe 0:03:42 - 0:04:06 I can do it without disturbing things too much here on the edge. This isn't even the best part of the field. But let me first off, it's loose enough that I can actually jam my hand in there. Look at that beautiful dirt. Ok. This field, this particular spot here just where I'm standing to that building 0:04:06 - 0:04:42 . We have probably pulled 200 tractor buckets worth of rocks out of just this area. We've probably dumped in about 50 tractor buckets worth of chicken compost and we cycle through green manure crops like rye for years. But it's possible. So don't give up. Just keep going. The thing to remember is it 0:04:42 - 0:04:49 doesn't matter how many rocks you keep finding which one you take out is one less rock that you have.