Time flies when your busy

Well, today we are packing for our return trip to WV and I still haven't posted the first trip! I guess I'm a pretty unreliable read, but I will try and get better when we return.
I plan on doing some study on blogging to learn a bit more about it, so hopefully it will have been worth the wait.
Also, please continue to pray for my health situation. The doctors are now leaning away from surgery and have recommended full disability. As you can well imagine, this doesn't exactly fit into my worldview. While many of my countrymen would be thrilled at the idea of getting a disability check from the govt. I am not one of them. Here we stand on the very end of the Empire, and they are trying to encourage me to sign on for a bigger role in the pillaging of my fellow man before they finish their song!
I am hoping that a modest adjustment can be made that will allow me to live and work on our land without the need for drugs. And without the governments involvement with any part of my existence. Please pray with me about these things as you have opportunity.
Many thanks, and see you in a few weeks.

The pause before the storm

We have made it back from our recent trip to WV but we won't be home long!
We had a very productive time during August and most of September as we did some serious preparation with some seriously raw land! There will be quite a few photo's and tid-bits about logging, saw-milling, and chiggers...LOT'S of chiggers....coming soon!
My hope is to post a bit over the next couple weeks because we are returning to WV for the month of October so that we may complete a pole barn and 2 16X12 foot rooms on our humble abode!
The Lord is always gracious, and there is a lot to share with this new adventure and the things we are learning.
We actually made it through a month of no running water, and no electricity, with 9 children and 4 adults covered in chiggers and poison sumac for most of the time! We are talkin' serious lessons learned about WV wilderness living!
Thankfully, no bears have been encountered and everybody left with the same body parts they came with. And that, after dropping some 30 large diameter trees along with a hundred scrubs and bushes.
Yes indeed! We have much to be thankful for!
Well, as you can imagine there is a ton of catching up to do before we turn around and do the whole thing again! We also have two children that we will be teaching to read over the next few weeks, so ...busy, busy.
I promise that I will try and steal enough time to share some of the amazing times that we have had lately.
P.S., Did I mention our week long trip to Monticello and the surrounding area!!!
Hope to share soon.
Grace and Peace, Bob

A brief update and needed pause

I wanted to let my vast readership know what is going on in my little slice of the world.
Since last blogging, our new baby girl has been doing well and the family is adjusting to the new pecking order! Her father ( that's me!) however, has taken a turn for the worse. My health has become much worse than we anticipated. Mostly, it is related to general pain and the need to take large doses of really nasty medicine. For those of you who are not familiar with pain medicines let me tell you that they cause as many problems as they solve.
The upside is that they have completed a few successful, albeit, painful tests that have determined the level and extent of the nerve damage. This will allow them to see exactly where and how the spinal cord is injured and come up with a long term treatment plan. For this, I am very grateful.

For the past month I have been in a virtual whirlwind of pain and/or delirium from the medicine and the associated problems. I am planning a few blogs on this whole process and what you can expect from our new socialized health system, since that is what I have been on for the last 12 months to get to this point. A very long year to get a few answers that could be achieved in a few days if the right procedures are applied! Anyway, that will have to wait because I will be out of commission for the next month as we are planning to leave for a trip to the mountains for the month of August. We were originally planning on going back to West Virginia and felling trees and saw milling them into lumber for this whole month but my health has changed our plans! Instead, our gracious hosts will be taking us on a tour of our national landmarks and do some general resting. The day before leaving I will get a spinal block that is supposed to numb all nerves in my injured areas so it will be a pain free/drug free month!!!!! I will post the updates in the second week of September, just before my expected surgery dates.
All prayers are appreciated and I thank you for your patience in my delays answering your comments. There have been few lucid days lately and I look forward to being pain/drug free as soon as possible.
Until then...

A healthy home-birthed baby girl!

Praise the Lord, for He is good!

We are happy to welcome our new daughter into the family! Mary Elizabeth wass born @4:10 am on Thursday in the comfort of our bathtub. 9lbs 2oz, 22" long and a head full of hair!
We are pleased..and tired.

The Lord is gracious and we are thankful.

It is a wonderful thing to look outside and see a couple of young dairy calves grazing in the yard!
Yes, as unbelievable as it seems to us right now, there are a pair of Jersey bovine in our back yard! The Lord is good to His people at all times, but sometimes we have a special blessing that really reminds us of that fact. Our friends recently surprised us with this 4 week old Jersey heifer calf and a 5 week old Jersey mix bull calf! We have always dreamed of our own Jersey milk cow but at around $1000.00 a piece in these parts, we did not expect to procure them this soon. We are overjoyed at the kindness the Lord has shown us!
This is Bessie! Our future little cream maker!
And here is Buddy! Proud future Papa!

It turns out that there is a Dairy farm about 50 miles south of here that uses Jersey cows. Usually they seem to use Holstein cows in our neck of the woods. Holsteins are copious milk producers, but there is not enough butter-fat content in the milk to make a good supply of cream products like cheese and butter. Jersey cows on the other hand, produce less milk but the most cream of any cow. This means that a Jersey would be a good homestead cow in most situations.

The really odd thing about the dairy industry here is that they will almost never let any heifer calves go for sale. One farm that I contacted in the past even said that they would cull, (kill), the heifers before selling them because it would be hurting themselves to have people keeping their own milk cows! The bulls are not so hard to come by. Bulls are a burden on a dairy farm so they are usually glad to sell them for $100-$150 just to get rid of them.

As it turns out, this heifer was nursing from an older cow that was once a regular industrial milk cow but had recently been moved to the 'nurse' cow category. The mother cow was not only rearing this calf, but had 2 other orphan calves that it was feeding. A week ago we had a huge storm system moved through the area and the venerable nurse cow was killed when lightning struck a tree that she was under! This left all three calves without any milk. The farm had planned on culling them, but a worker asked if he could have them as bottle calves to try and save and the farmer said yes.

The worker bottle fed them for a week and then decided to go into the cattle business himself and placed them up for sale. He was planning on making quite a pretty penny of the two heifer calves and a modest $150 on the bull. Apparently though, there was little interest in the calves and he was stuck rearing them and buying milk to feed them!

The fellow posted a couple ad's offering to sell them for $150 each to the first comer. As soon as our friends heard of it they came and got us to go look at the heifer. The thinking is that this will be a good investment for our future homestead in West Virginia.

Upon our arrival the fellow said that he was willing to let the bull go for $75 if we bought a pair. He even dropped $25 on the heifer! So, in all we got both calves for $195 !

Our friends paid the man on the spot but since we were all crammed in our vehicle it was decided that I would come back with my little pick-up the next day and get them.

Saturday morning had me and the two older boys loading old hay in the back of my truck bed and setting off for a 100 mile round trip to get our new little blessings! We were thrilled to get them loaded up and back to their new home. The only thing wrong was that we had no where to shelter the animals and more rain was coming.

We have been told that rain could kill new calves because they just stand out in it from pure ignorance without a mother cow to teach them. We needed a cheap shelter and quick!

Enter the many purpose pallet! Recycled pallets were the obvious choice to build a little barn for the protection of our new beasts.

Below are the photo's of our new two stall calve 'barn' done Poor Man style! I think that you will agree, they came out even better than my chicken tractor! That is a 16oz waterproof canvas tarp on the roof, and it was a gift also. In all the building cost $129 with the $100 tarp and nails and feed. Pretty good for a two stall barnette!

Here is a good shot of Bessie's new room! The open slat walls are perfect for the hot Florida weather! Here we never worry about warmth or snow. It is the lack of cross ventilation that kills all the livestock here. Also, having the inner/outer wall keeps the rain out very well.
Here you can see how we made the 'doors' by driving in a trio of free fence posts to allow for the pallet doors to be slid in and out! We even got his and her milk buckets hanging on the posts to dry!

I told ya that the Lord is good and kind!

Hope you get some ideas for cheap building too!

Poor Man's attempt at a chicken tractor.

Or perhaps, a man's poor attempt would be better.
After much procrastination, I am publishing my recent project for the Missouri Rev, and all the world to ridicule!

Since I have been forced to put up these photos I might as well share the story of just how this contraption came to be.

If you have read the previous post about my new bath-tub brooder chicks , then it will be obvious what motivated the need to get my new little chicks out of my wife's birthing tub!

Unfortunately, the Lord has chosen to keep me humbled by literally breaking my back about a year ago, which means that I have no job and no income for the purchase of material to build a 'real' chicken tractor like the one's all over the Web! Hence the need for my innovation.

A fellow that I know, had recently contracted to clean up an old nursery business that is now closed down. He told me that there were lots of pallets and old 4X4's at the site which needed removing. This fellow said that I could have the material if I would pick up the pallets and dig the 8 foot 4X's out of the ground. Voila! Prayer answered!

My strapping 14 yr. old and 12 yr. old quickly 'volunteered' to help old Dad gather the material! So with shovel and sweat, we soon hauled a goodly supply of new, (to us), construction material back to the junk pile that my wife allows me ;) to keep in the back yard!

This 'tractor' was the first of a few projects that I had dreamed up for my little homestead. It was a crude endeavor but if you tune in later this week, you will be quite amazed at what some old pallets, and a gracious God, can do when you have needs.

So without further excuse....I mean ado, here is my infamous chicken tractor done Poor Man style!


This is an overall shot showing the open front 'coop' along with a run made from my rabbit cage wire roll. The wire will be used to build more cages after it is done working for us here. The run design was from my 14 year old. He used some pallet wood and some old lumber salvaged from an old headboard we threw out last year. There wasn't enough wood to box the thing out properly so it was a little wiggly, but it did fine work for the time it was used.

Next, is a pic of 'siding' we used to attach to the 4X4 pole frame. We tore these pallets all apart and reused the decent pieces to make a building. As you can see, the wood was a little rough and we couldn't drive new nails without splitting it to pieces, so we had to pull the old nails and beat them straight before nailing them back in the old holes. This worked pretty good since we didn't have any new nails anyway! We did find an old box of screws that I had though, so we used some of them where needed for extra security.
Everyone knows that chickens need to roost, so we cut out a few stair runners, and measured some limbs from our yard! Don't listen to folks who say that chickens can't roost on round limbs, or pipes. They have done so since creation, and do just fine.
The runners split in a couple places because the wood was so brittle, but we just pieced it together on the wall and ran some screws in to hold it together.

This was the tricky part! We had to figure a way to keep the run fairly secure to the box so chickens didn't escape, yet it had to come apart for moving around the yard because there wasn't enough quality wood to build a movable, sturdy frame that could be permanently attached to the coop. What we decided on was to jigsaw the pieces so they would interlock without having any metal latch. The idea came from some old Amish furniture that I had seen where they used the wood to bind some bunk beds together without fasteners. It worked great as it had the added benefit of giving a little needed stability to the run by forcing the sides to stand up straight. You can also see how we used the wood to sandwich the wire for attaching the support legs. We just used small chock blocks of wood on the outside and nailed through them, past the wire, and into the wood leg. This kept the 'legs' attached to the sides pretty good.

Here is how the poor man was able to , in clear conscience, use the term 'tractor' when describing this little experiment!

While it was not easy, it did work. We were able to carefully slide the contraption to a new patch of grass when needed. There were a few escapes during moving due to the run separating from the coop, but nothing major. We still have the same amount of chickens we started with!

The chicks are now in the big chicken yard and this coop has been converted to a nice dog house for our new American Bulldog puppies that are waiting to be sold. The run wire has been modified to give the pups a yard while allowing the mother to jump in and out to feed them.

In all, I am very pleased with my chicken tractor. Yes, I can proudly call it a chicken tractor! Though I am sure we will not be featured in Mother Earth News anytime soon, I am very satisfied that we did our best to be good stewards over the little flock that God has given us! And that, is my chief goal as an agrarian, and as a Christian.

Hope you enjoy the laughs, and do stay tuned for the next project. I think you will like it.

Some changes I am making

I have decided that I will be adding 2 new blogs. This blog will focus more heavily and less frequently on homesteading and Agrarian Economic Theory, as I learn more about the subject.

I am separating most theology on a new blog titled Eternal Truths Applied and most news/political commentary on a blog called The Pundit's Folly which already has one post for now.

My reason for running 3 blogs is simple. I am not at all organized enough to run 1 blog properly!

What I mean is that I have tried to plan a couple of series that really pool all the current debates about Agrarianism into one concise yet systematic standard of confession. This is a daunting task for a learned man to accomplish properly, and I am not learned in these matters.

What I have learned about myself is that there are some core interests and areas of experience that I have, and I would like to share them.

These areas include homesteading and the need for modern families to consider this as an alternative to the current system which keeps Dad away from home

Agrarianism may be an economic outgrowth of this primary goal of re-uniting families.

I cannot yet say that it is the only biblical model.

I see much of the problem with modern industrialism to be misuse and sin within the component parts. Not exactly the whole system being inherently evil.

I know that many will disagree strongly. I am not getting all snuggly with the 'world' here. Rather, I am sincerely attempting to be a faithful steward of God's word in these matters.

I will post more on this later.

For now, I hope to establish 3 basic blogs dealing with the 3 things that most interest me;
1. Homesteading and the return of fathers to the duty of training their children full-time as the scriptures require.
2. Speaking out against the apostasy of our leaders in church,state, and culture.
3. Edifying and exhorting the Church to holy living.

I pray that God may be pleased with my efforts to Glorify Him in these things. I also hope that they are a help to others.