Who Needs Video Games?

"When I was  kid, all I needed to entertain myself was a stick and a string!" 

Maybe my kids really will use that line on their grandkids.  Check out their most recent creation, made in the dead of winter:



Steps

Swing

Sticks and strings.  Proud of my kids' creativity.  Made by Akea, checked for safety by Byron.

Scissor Truss Eggmobile, Part II...and a Short Break

You've probably noticed that my posts have been spread a little thin these days (or maybe that's just my modus operandi?), so I wanted to let you know that while I have several ideas for posts swimming in my head (garden update, plumbing DIY, home and upholstery updates...to name a few), I'm going to leave you with a few photos of our Scissor Truss Eggmobile and take a week or two off from blogging.  As you probably know, springtime is a busy time for homesteads, and when you throw in some extra activities we've taken on, life can start to unravel. 

And if you have young children, you'll know that interruptions like breaking off curtain rods or just needing time with Mom can make focusing on writing a little bit difficult.

So please forgive the hiatus, and know that I will be back just as soon as we complete a few projects and get back into a manageable routine!

As usual, feel free to post comments and/or questions!

We have yet to enclose the ends, put up roost bars, hang the nest boxes, and install the bolts so we can actually haul this thing.  We're planning on tackling this Thursday evening.  Think we can get it all done???

A sense of scale.

Well, maybe I'll sneak back on here with some photos of the completed project...

January Calm...

...before the storm, which will come in the form of 660 S.F. of heart pine flooring that Byron will install this winter.  Until then, here's what's been going on:

Snow.  Which melted by the time I took this photo.

Rain.

Cozy chickens.

Cozy cows.

School.

And more school.

Fencing.

Painting.

Weeding.  Yes, thanks to a mild winter, I am still weeding the garden.  And then I feed the weeds to the chickens, and cover each row with a layer of compost, made from the horse manure which Byron diligently hauls from a farm 1/2 mile away. We will thank ourselves for this in the spring, right?

And soon to come, re-upholstery.  I promise.

A New Year, a New Name

Happy 2012!  As you may have read, a couple days ago Byron posted that much of the land we use has been in the family for 100 years.  If you missed it, click here to read his post.

To that end, we have decided on a new name for the farm.  While Green Acres seemed kind of fun, kitchy, and appropriate given that Byron's great-grandparents were the Greens, a few months ago he came up with a name that better captures what we are trying to do: Green Legacy Farm.  Our main purpose in embarking on our farming adventure is to steward this land God has blessed us with so that we can both continue a legacy that began 100 years ago and leave something meaningful for future generations. 

As time allows, I am going to give the blog a facelift and look into changing the URL...but I will give plenty of warning.  And trust me, it won't happen right away.  This is going to be a large technological leap for the Luddite that I am, and it will probably involve late nights, tears, and threats to the life of my computer.

But here's something I want to share with you now: our new sign!  This sits at the top of our driveway, and was easier to make than you might think:

I want to go out today just so I can drive up and see this!

Leaving the driveway...

First, we already had the post.  It was dull, black, and in desperate need of a facelift.  It's amazing what a sixty degree day and a can of white spray paint will do!  I cleaned it up with a bit of sandpaper, first.

Next, the mailbox is new, and I spray painted it hunter green to match the color scheme.  The old one had been beaten to death by many a redneck.   I can remember guys from high school talking about bashing mailboxes and running over possums.  Let's pray the new sign (and the local possums) don't have the same fate.

Finally, the sign.  We bought an oval template from Home Depot and cut out a piece of plywood.  Next, I stuffed wood putty around the curved edge to seal any small holes.  After sanding, I primed and painted it white.  Then I printed out the lettering, cut out the letters, arranged them on the sign, and traced them with a pencil.  It took about three coats of green to make the lettering and design solid, but it dried quickly.

I feel like for all the renovation mess we're in right now, this is a glimpse into who we are.  We reused what we could, and for minimal cost ($25, maybe?) created something we're happy with.  And now one project is completely done!

And that, so far, makes for a very happy new year!

Click below to join in Homestead Revival's Barn Hop!

Leaving a Legacy a Century Later

My husband, Byron, is the guest author for today's blog post.  He's been looking forward to writing this one for awhile.

Recently I came across a marriage license from 1878 that I had made a copy of at the courthouse.  The groom was 27, his bride just 18.  On December 30, 1911, the man, a farmer, bought a 54-acre piece of land a couple of miles from his farm for $250.  Less than two years later, the man sold the land to one of his sons – his sixth of nine children – for the same price.  The son was married the following year and the young couple cleared the land without the benefit of a tractor, establishing a farm on which they raised a diverse variety of crops and animals.  They reared two daughters and a foster son on the farm and would see three grandchildren and 12 great-grandchildren born in their 70 years of marriage.  They loved their family and their farm; their family very much adored the hard-working couple and the home and land that epitomized the idyllic American homestead.

I’m proud to be the tenth of Grandma and Granddaddy Green’s great-grandchildren and equally honored to have had the opportunity to buy back a piece of my family’s heritage.  In the 20 months since Laura, Akea, Charlie, and I were fortunate enough to buy back into the family the heart of Grandma and Granddaddy Green’s farm, I have fallen more in love with this wonderful place every day.  It’s an incredible feeling to have the opportunity to live here and farm on land that was so special to Grandma and Granddaddy Green.  When you add our acreage to what my Dad and Aunt Dottie have kept in the family all of these years and are kind enough to allow us to use, nearly 32 acres of the original farm are presently family-owned.  While the house and acreage we purchased spent over 18 years out of the family, 26 acres of the original 54 have been in our family for exactly 100 years today!  To me, this is incredible!  I wonder how many families nowadays have had land in their family for a century?  We are so blessed to live here and to have the chance to be stewards of this wonderful place we call Green Legacy Farm.*

Byron with Grandma and Granddaddy Green during his very first visit to the farm. Could Grandma and Granddaddy Green have thought at the time that their great-grandson would one day live at the farm? This very special photo has a place of honor on our mantle.

*A while ago, we decided that Green Legacy Farm would be a more apropos name than Green Acres, though for the interim, Green Acres will remain the name of the blog.  We like the dual meaning in the new name, in that Byron's great-grandparents were the Greens, and that we are making every attempt to live as "green" as possible in our endeavors here.

Family Visit!

We love having visitors at Green Acres, so last week when Byron's Aunt Dottie called us from the road and told us they were coming our way on Saturday, we were very excited! The reason this was so significant is that the house had been out of the family for about 20 years, so it's been at least that long since Aunt Dottie and Uncle Hank - and their son Heinrich and his wife Donna - have seen the place!  And this was the first time Heinrich and Donna's daughter, Anna, has seen the place her great-grandparents lived.

Also significant is that this was Aunt Dottie's birthplace; her mother had wanted to be close to her own mother when delivering her first baby...and Aunt Dottie was born right above where I sit, in what is now Charlie's room. Funny to think that home births are making a comeback, when just a few decades ago they were the norm! Anyway, here are some photos from the visit...

Anna encourages the calves to try out some grass.

Aunt Dottie meets Friskies, our first "farm animal."

Uncle Hank and Charlie, who apparently looks just like his Granddaddy (Aunt Dottie's brother and Byron's Dad)



Uncle Hank, Aunt Dottie, Charlie, and Akea



Aunt Dottie and Anna, her granddaughter

Two lovely ladies!

More lovely ladies - Anna with her mom, Donna

I'm not sure why they were checking out the old well???

Father and daughter - Heinrich and Anna

Byron and Uncle Hank

Uncle Hank, Aunt Dottie, and Byron

A Special Visit and I Actually Design Something: Green Acres Weekend Update

First, let me say that many of the happenings last week deserve their own posts, and as long as I find an extra hour or five this week, more details will come.  The best way for me to handle this will be chronologically, and in photos, of course.

One of the cool things about homeschooling is the opportunity to ditch The Three R's for the day and take a field trip.   Another mom in our church graciously organized a zoo trip for over 100 homeschoolers, which meant that I got to spend the day asking my daughter the specifics on various and sundry vertebrates, because I'm a fun mom like that.  But after a while I gave up (or ran out of questions - I'm not a biologist) and started taking photos for a lap book we'll make.

Crowned Crane

Is the giraffe a staple of every zoo?

Next up: I got to be a stage mom.  Akea's dance recital was this week, which kept us busy with two rehearsals and two performances.  I was uncertain as to how much she liked dance up until now, but I think the recital won her over.  Or maybe it was getting flowers.  At any rate, on Friday night she intermittently would stop dancing, shade her eyes, and peer out into the audience, looking for us.  Fortunately, she had everyone rolling!

I think the fun costumes were a hit, too.

Finally, back at Green Acres, we got a lot of rain...and then it cleared up on Saturday just in time for a visit from Aunt Dottie, Uncle Hank, Byron's cousin Heinrich, his wife Donna, and his daughter Anna.  It's been a couple decades since any of them had been here, and they recalled how the farm used to look as we walked back toward the barn and before the guys disappeared into the woods...where Heinrich found his initials carved into a tree!  Aunt Dottie also got to again see the room she was born in, which is Charlie's room.  And they left us with this:

Byron's Great-Granddaddy gave this milk container to Aunt Dottie, his granddaughter.  We feel so honored that she and Uncle Hank have passed it on to us! 

Here we are...and this visit deserves - and will get - its own post!

Right now I'm going to let you in on a little secret.  I have that degree in architecture, right?  So I come up with all these cool design ideas for the house, right?  Um, not quite.  Since my brain has been rather preoccupied with children for the past almost seven years, Byron oftentimes comes up with and executes creative ideas in and out of the house.  Does this irk me to no end?  Sometimes.  But then every once in a while, my old muse remembers I exist and pays me a visit. 

First let me mention that with our animals, we are following the Polyface model of rotating birds (chickens) after herbivores (cows) in order to restore pasture, provide food in the form of larva for the chickens, and thus control said larva from hatching into flies.  Joel Salatin of Polyface explains this in great detail in his books, but he primarily follows patterns seen in nature and has been able to mitigate much disease and produce outstanding food.  Have you seen Food Inc.?  Cue it up on Netflix when you're done with this post and when you watch it, look for the part that features Salatin.  Even though we're on a MUCH smaller scale, we're following the Polyface model of using portable electric fencing to rotate our animals.

Since we have such young calves, we decided we needed a light, portable shade device that we could easily move from pasture to pasture.  After discussing various options, here's what I came up with:

Tarp over PVC anchored to bulky landscape ties = portable shade!

I'll share the design details in a post this week; it was very simple to construct!  I also worked a bit on those delinquent rain barrels.

And let's Barn Hop again at Homestead Revival!  Click the button below:

Our Four-Year-Old Metal Detector

Last summer, Byron borrowed my brother's metal detector to do some relic hunting on our property, and he's definitely found a few interesting things.  But truth be told, he's unearthed more nails and random scraps of metal than anything else, which has been frustrating.  Because this land has been picked over, he's been thinking that he needs a newer metal detector that can sense the presence of Civil War belt buckles - and the like - just waiting to be unearthed but buried too deeply at the moment.  Until we discovered that we had a four-year-old metal detector right under our noses.

Charlie, like most boys, loves to dig and is always asking to dig holes in the yard.  As a female, I don't exactly understand this urge, but that's okay.  So this weekend Byron found a place for Charlie to dig, and dig he did.  Though he didn't find the coveted Civil War belt buckle, he unearthed this:

We're not sure if this horseshoe is Civil War era or Great-Granddaddy Green era.  But one thing's for sure: it's old!

Just to give you an idea of how deep Charlie's holes are!  Needless to say, the pants he was wearing are soaking in the sink as I write this.

And you'll be the first to know Charlie's next discovery!

Advent Calendar Sans CANDY??!!

Well, not quite.  But for the past couple years, I've been looking for a reusable Advent calendar that I could fill with whatever I wanted, be it candy or redeemable coupons for kid-size salads at dinnertime, seasonable veggies, etc.  You know, because I'm a fun mom like that.

So last year I got an unnatural urge to hit a post-Christmas sale and came out of it with this:

Pretty cool, I think, and so do the kids.  This will be our first year using it, and as I was racking my muddled brain for WHAT to fill it with, a friend of mine suggested using scripture...specifically, Biblical prophecy of the birth of Christ.  Of course, that led to a Google search, and I found a site called Teachingmom.com.  It's a couple years old, but the webpage on advent calendars can be found here, and if you scroll down, she has two links to Advent verse chain links for a 23-day Advent.  (You can fill the extra days with candy.  Or redeemable coupons for plain yogurt).  I'm thinking of printing these out on some red and green paper and making the actual chain link so we can add a bit of Christmas cheer to these plain, white, to-be-painted-someday walls.  And I'm excited that the kids will get to see the amazing accuracy with which the Old Testament prophets told of our coming Savior!

And the redeemable coupons for healthy food?  I'm kidding...I think.

Green Acres Weekend Update

Okay, so I sort of like this weekend update thing.  Again, not sure how consistent I'll be yet (it is Monday morning, after all), and I still am going to write some more detailed posts, but it gives a bit of structure to the blog.  And it's nice to have some structure these days!

The most important event of the week was this:


All I want for Christmas are my two front teeth!

I also spent my evenings mudding the drywall in the parlor instead of folding the four+ loads of laundry I did last Monday.  I actually sort of enjoyed applying the joint compound, but I can honestly say I HATE sanding it down...and I've always had a hard time with detail work, which probably partially accounts for my love of set design because the audience simply can't see any tiny imperfections!  And despite wearing a mask and goggles, the dust somehow still sneaks into your digestive system! 

I applied three coats to the walls, but a seam on the ceiling required four because the old drywall and new didn't match perfectly.  I also found that it's important to apply thin layers as opposed to thick, because the joint compound tends to crack otherwise.  This Youtube video was helpful (I told you I went to Youtube University)!


Aunt Dottie, this is the best picture Byron got of me.  I promise!

We also worked on pruning the pear tree, which hasn't been touched in about twenty years.  I'll do a longer post on this process, but you can see from the photo that the upper portion of the tree (which is about 40' high) still needs some work.  And just imagine the lower part as "hairy" as the rest of it.

I did most of the pruning, and Byron helped me saw off a dead branch that I couldn't reach.  It was braided with two others and a little tricky to remove, as proved by this:

 

A very handy and very nasty saw!  Byron probably should have gotten a stitch or two on one of the puncture-like wounds, but he likes to be his own doctor.  Did I mention he's a history teacher???

I also squeezed in a batch of pumpkin chocolate chip cookies!  Byron and Charlie went down to Other House on Thursday to rake leaves and make sure everything was in order, so I wanted to make a treat for them for sacrificing their day.  Update: the recipe is posted here!

Pumpkin chocolate chip cookies are The Best Cookies Ever!

And click here for homemade granola!

Nine Lives? Let's Hope

About a month ago, a little cat showed up on our front porch.  She's since adopted us.  We didn't want a cat, but we couldn't resist...we even shelled out money to get her spayed and get shots.  She's seriously one of the sweetest little creatures I've ever encountered.

Which begged the question, "Why would someone get rid of her?"  Byron and I guessed she had been dumped off on our street, since she was obviously used to being around humans.  Well, last week we found out why someone may not have wanted her.

Friskies had a seizure.

It began right after we'd put the kids to bed.  We were keeping her in the house for a few days after her surgery, so she had, in typical Friskies fashion, followed us upstairs.  Byron called her to come downstairs, and she started to scurry toward the stairs, which was strange.  She may be sweet, but she's still a cat and cats don't usually come when you call unless bribed with food.  She then stopped by our door and began convulsing.  I called Byron in a panic.

Our combined thoughts were the she was either choking or having a seizure (Byron actually had a student a few years ago who had a seizure in class).  In any case, after we got her out onto the front porch, we both tried sticking a finger in her mouth; we found out a couple bandaids later that cats don't swallow their tongues during seizures.  But as she sat afterwards, her breathing shallow and her eyes glazed, we were convinced she was either going to die or be brain damaged.  In either case, I really wasn't ready to have that "Do cats go to heaven?" discussion  with Akea.  Seriously.  She had spent at least half an hour that afternoon drilling me on the eternity of God and the Trinity, and my brain still hurt.  Besides, I had become rather fond of Friskies and I wasn't ready to say goodbye to her either.

We were literally overjoyed to see her back to her normal self the next morning.  When we had gone to bed the night before, she had been almost catatonic and very unresponsive.  Apparently cats can be in this state for anywhere from one to twenty-four hours after a seizure.  She slept most of the next day, I and made some phone calls and did some research on possible causes.

Some cats are born with this condition, and others get it from environmental causes, such as head trauma or eating something they shouldn't.  It's relatively rare in cats as compared to dogs, and vets recommend a series of blood tests to determine the cause...and sometimes, even after dozens of tests and hundreds of dollars, the cause remains elusive.  It's also possible that cats can get seizures as a result of the rabies vaccine, so I called the clinic.  They said she would have reacted within an hour of the vaccine, so that was a no-go.

Possible remedies to seizures are a variety of medications that have ill side effects on vital organs, such as the liver.  That seems rather counter-productive to me.  The solution that Byron and I came up with is to keep her inside at night, so if she does have a seizure in the wee hours, she at least won't be prey to foxes, opossums, and the spattering of other potential predators that may roam the woods behind our house.  I grudgingly bought a littler box and pooper scooper.  We had a talk with the kids and told them we were going to be thankful for whatever time we had with Friskies. 

But cats have nine lives, right?  Here's to hoping that the nine lives myth is true!

Girl's best friend!

And Then the Cow(bell) Came Home

A couple weeks ago, Byron's Aunt Dottie sent me an e-mail wrought with mystery.  My in-laws had visited her and Uncle Hank on a cross-country trip, and apparently she had given them something for us.  Byron and I mused over this mystery, but this cowbell was nowhere near any of our guesses!

The thing that's so special about this cowbell - besides seriously being one of the coolest things I've ever seen - is the story behind it.  Back when she was a teenager, Aunt Dottie was a cheerleader at the local high school, and her grandfather, Charles Green, gave her this bell to use at football games.  You may recall that Charles Green was Byron's great-grandfather, and that this house was originally built by him.  We own 5 1/2 acres of the original farm, but back in the day it was a 51-acre dairy farm.  Byron's dad said that this was the bell that the lead cow would wear, and according to Byron's Aunt Sue, she and her siblings would "help" their grandparents drive the cows from place to place, though she admitted that they may not have been as much help as they thought!

Aunt Dottie wanted the cowbell that she'd kept all these years to come home again, and Byron and I are so honored that she passed it on to us!

Got Animals?

Finally! Green Acres has its first animal (that we know of) in years! However, it's not a cow. It's not a horse. And it's not even a chicken. In fact, we won't be eating this one:

Byron got home from the store last night to find this little creature on our front porch. We think someone may have dropped her off on the side of the road. Byron and I swore never to get a cat...unless one adopted us. It hasn't been twenty-four hours yet, but I'm pretty sure she has. The kids fell in love instantly; Charlie even woke up at 4:00 a.m. and asked if the kitty was still on the porch (I made him go potty, told him the cat was fine, and stumbled back to bed). Akea was up at 7:00 to check on her. As of last night, her name was Rachael, and this morning it morphed into "Frisky." Not sure of the connection, but whatever. So we're planning on making her an outdoor cat, despite the kids' protests, and are hoping she's good at catching mice.

Update: as I was writing this, Byron walked in with a baby doll dress in hand. Apparently the cat had been wearing it moments earlier. Yup, this should be interesting...and at least the cat is tolerant of children. Hopefully Akea won't try to dress up any of our chickens!

Sustainable Entertainment

The other day I had to stop what I was doing - and it probably involved making some sort of food - to take some photos of the kids. I love how creative they get out here. Sustainable entertainment!





I can't work on my art when you look over my shoulder, Mom!




Charlie achieved his goal of getting more chalk on his hands than he did on the brick!