wORKING WITH THE LAND
LOVING EVERY MINUTE OF IT… er… ALMOST EVERY MINUTE
Thank you for stopping by! I hope you enjoy the stories of our adventure. Feel free to have a look around. We are exploring a number of farm-business opportunities, so please let us know if you are interested in any of them. For now, we are proud to offer you pork. You can pre-order a half or whole hog. Just fill out the form, and we will contact you with further details!
Rockin’ It
I had a very fulfilling day yesterday (Saturday)! Friends of ours have decided after having a couple of years off from it, they are going to market garden. As it turns out, my Frontier tiller is a magnificent tool. In preparation for their garden for next year, I spent a large part of the day tilling their garden area, which totals a little over 12k square-feet. My tiller is about seven feet wide, and my John Deere purred contentedly the whole time. Yes, my Deere usually purrs that way, but when tilling in the Ozarks, there are usually hiccups. I have multiple times felt like I might need a shower tilling as I watched the slip clutch start smoking and the PTO shut down. After a break, though it has [...]
New Pig!
We have spent the summer having to travel back and forth a lot to St. Louis. In fact, because of all this travel, we decided not to raise hogs after our last group went to the processor back in May. Even though we are gearing up for a new group of pigs that will be raised over the winter (hopefully the deer leave them some acorns), that anticipation has not relieved us of feeling like something is missing. The path taken over and over this summer to St. Louis goes right by an ornamental concrete business. The last time we went was Tiffany's birthday, and she wanted to stop... so we did. Frankly, I had been wanting a bird bath for quite a long time, but had not been anywhere [...]
It happens to everything…
For various reasons, I have been struggling with my chores over the last several weeks. However, routine made things go smoother. For example, when taking the lambs to their pens in the morning: graham crackers. Yeager literally will walk in your shoes on the way. About every 30 feet... piece of graham cracker. This worked for two months. And then it didn't. I drank Coke from 13 years of age until I was about 36. Then I stopped and switched to Mountain Dew. At least I lasted more than a couple puny months. We have moved on to a strategy that I hope will last much longer. I now put a handful of grain in each pen, shake a bucket, and we all run (I drive the Gator, of course) [...]
Yes. I’m kind of pathetic…
Tiffany hates it when I say it this simply, but our lambs grew up in our house. She feels it brings up images of the lambs running wild and mass amounts of urine and feces around the house. That last part was not the case, but the truth is, especially for Maple, that they lived in the house. It was quite a while before we were comfortable letting Maple outside by herself. She just followed us around the house, and tried to eat the indoor plants if we turned our back on her. As a result, the lambs are more like puppies than they are like livestock... especially Maple who was babied even longer. One might think that Yeager would be the more babied, since he showed signs of illness [...]
The Cancelled Eleventh Plague
I think there may have been an 11th plague that was going to be called down on Egypt, but Moses asked God to skip it. That plague was an attack by wasps and hornets. Locusts was a plague? Please. Wasps and hornets would rate as one of the highest plagues ever. Only the deaths of the first born would top it. I remember wasps and hornets as a kid in Southwest Missouri. I got nailed a number of times on the farm, and when we moved to town I was mowing someone's lawn, which resulted in me disturbing a yellowjacket nest. I took off running. It turns out that yellowjackets can fly faster than a scrawny 14 year-old boy can run. They finally left me alone after I ran about [...]
Meep! Meep!
Since we moved to southern Missouri, we have been fascinated with an unexpected variety of wildlife. Yes. I am talking about the nemesis of one Wile E. Coyote. When I was young, I sympathized a bit with Wile E. However, having shot at and missed one of his brethren that was killing my chickens by waiting in the yard for the coop door to open, I have changed my mind. Now that we have spent time with the roadrunners, we are definitely on Team Roadrunner. That's right. We have roadrunners. The Missouri Department of Conservation has written about them and their arrival in the 1950s. You can find good pictures of them on the internet... not just the one of our famous friend from Loony Tunes. As I mentioned, we [...]
All hard work brings a profit, but mere talk leads only to poverty. – Proverbs 14:23