Skimming cream

The cows are staying warm and dry in the barn during the winter, eating hay and dreaming of green pastures (I’m imaging that last part, of course). I didn’t get either one of them bred back this last summer as I intended. It’s been a year since Tilly freshened (12/31/2009) and about 7.5 months since Josie freshened. We’re still milking both of them twice a day, and intend to continue doing so for another year or as long as they continue lactating. I’ll get them bred in early summer, I hope. I prefer that their calves be born in Spring.

If I kept a bull on the farm, it would simplify getting the cows bred, but I don’t really want an extra mouth to feed. With two cows, two steers, and a horse, we go through enough hay. I considered selling Tilly so that we would need to feed less hay, but we ended up keeping her – I didn’t really want to get rid of her. We probably don’t need two milk cows, but we have them and are able to keep them fed. And, the milk is appreciated.

At this time of year while the cows are eating hay – and it’s just grass hay, nothing special – we’re getting 1.5 to 2 gallons of milk a day. The amount varies depending upon how well they like a particular bale of hay and how cold it is. Colder weather requires them to convert more energy into keeping warm, and it affects the amount of milk produced. Now, this quantity of milk is not really much for two cows, but I don’t expect or want extreme production. This is enough milk for our uses and to share with my parents and Danny. It’s also better for the cows’ health since it isn’t taxing them to much to produce this amount, I believe.

During the summer months when the cows are on fresh grass and closer to the time they freshen, we get between 3 and 5 gallons of milk per day. That’s more than we can keep up with, usually. We ought to be converting some of that into cheese, but we’ve not taken on the extra task of doing so on a regular basis. We do make as much butter as we can, and Anne cans it when we have enough accumulated. Canned butter will keep for years. We use the butter as shortening/oil in baking and cooking so that we don’t have to buy oil. It also gets used on hot biscuits, sweet potatoes, and other things.

During the summer months, I skim cream off of the jars of milk on a regular basis. I have to in order to have jars to put more milk into. We also drink whole milk a couple times a day (whole milk is good for you and easier to digest than skim milk). Since the cows have been in the barn, I’ve not had to skim as often. The cream from cows eating fresh grass is preferable to the cream from hay-fed cows. Also, we’ve been mostly keeping up with the amount of milk we’ve been getting.

I know there are different ways that cream can be separated from the milk. The cream naturally rises to the surface when the milk cools. If we’re going to drink the milk, we shake the jar to mix the cream back in with the milk. If we want to use a little of the cream, like for coffee or tea, we can pour some off the top of the jar. If we want it for butter or baking (we substitute cream for some of the liquid and oil called for in a recipe – makes good biscuits, for example), then I need to skim it.

We strain the fresh milk through a cloth into 2-quart wide-mouth jars before refrigerating it. The wide mouth is large enough so that I can get a gravy ladle into the jar. My skimming method is quite simple: I use the gravy ladle to take the cream off the top of the milk. I put the cream in a quart jar so it will be available for use later. When I get down to the milk in the jar, it’s visible (you can see the separation between the cream and the milk) as I’m ladling out the cream. That’s when I stop skimming. It doesn’t take long to skim the cream off of two or three gallons of milk. The amount of cream we get varies some during the seasons. We can usually get a quart of cream from 1.5 gallons of whole milk, sometimes from only 1 gallon. If you click on the photo to enlarge it and then look closely, you can see the line between the milk and the cream in the two full jars (just above the “B” in “Ball”).

Canned ground beef

It was a lot of work, but Anne finished canning the meat yesterday. She ran eight canner loads in four days. It takes longer when canning on the wood stove than it does on a conventional stove. So, two loads in a day is pretty good.

We ended up with 25 quarts of shredded meat from the roasts and 61 pints of ground beef.

We’ve got at least three very full 20-quart stock pots of bones to cook down for broth. We’ll start that this weekend. They’ll cook for at least a full day, extracting lots of good stuff out of the bones and making a rich broth. There ought to be several more quarts of meat and some of broth to can from that. Then, there is some fat to be rendered. That will be used for making soap sometime, or it will be used in cooking.

It’s nice to have the meat. We’ll be doing it again next year, God willing. We have another steer which will be 18 or 19 months old in a year from now. He’s a beef breed (Belted Galloway-Angus cross), so he ought to have a little more meat on his bones than Chucky Joe did (he was a Guernsey).

Canning beef

Dad, Danny, and I worked on cutting the meat off the bones on Sunday and Monday. We decided to just get it done while we had the time. I don’t know that anything would have been gained by waiting. The meat would have kept fine in the chest refrigerator, I’m sure, but by getting it cut up, Anne has been able to process four canner loads so far. She cooked roasts, and I helped her cut the meat into pieces. Then, she filled jars and ran two canner loads yesterday and two today.

It takes 90 minutes at 10 pounds of pressure to can meat. She filled the jars full, adding hot broth after packing the meat. The canner holds 7 quarts at a time. We were disappointed yesterday that three jars broke. There was no apparent reason for the breakage. Sadly, one of the broken jars was a favorite old jar of Anne’s (she ‘collects’ old canning jars and uses them). As near as I can figure, the grate on the bottom inside the canner which holds the jars off the bottom of the canner is transmitting too much heat to the jars. So, today, she put some canning rings under the grate to get the jars up a bit higher. No broken jars today – we’re grateful. We have a couple dogs staying with us (maybe permanently) who will enjoy the meat from the broken jars (usually, jars that break in the canner have clean breaks, but we have seen glass slivers in the past, so we don’t use the contents ourselves). So, it’s not completely wasted.

While the second canner load was processing this evening, I fried some steaks off the backstrap. Let me tell you, they were awesomely good! Wow! We had some small steaks yesterday that I cut off of the front leg. They were good, too, but they weren’t as tender as these off the back. We have some tenderloin to cook and eat, and we’ll also have some hamburgers this week. Once it’s all canned, we won’t have the fresh meat. Canned meat is very good, though, and very convenient. We are so grateful for it.

We gave my parents and Danny a little over half of the beef. There was almost 250 pounds of beef after it was cut off the bones. We could have taken a larger portion, but we wanted to share with them. And, they appreciate it. We’re happy with the blessing of healthy, properly-raised meat!

Bakers’ Choice

During the winter we heat our home with wood. For many years while I was growing up, the primary heat source in my family’s home was from an old wood stove in the kitchen. My grandfather had salvaged the stove from a local junk pile, and, after a little work on it, it kept my family warm during many cold Illinois winters. Well, in that old house, it kept us warm when we were near it in the kitchen. We didn’t heat the bedrooms in that house.

The first winter after we moved to Kentucky, I installed a wood stove. The previous occupants in the mobile home that we currently live in had put in an insulated chimney through the roof in the kitchen area. I moved an old wood heat stove that was in the garage into the house, and we heated with that. I removed the old electric furnace and made a pantry closet where it had been located – we weren’t going to use it (the duct work served as an interstate system for the resident mice, let alone the amount of electricity the furnace would be sure to consume).

After two winters of heating with that old stove, we purchased a new wood stove, one with which we could heat our house and cook and bake. After doing some research, we decided that we would be better off with a new stove rather than buying an old one with unknown problems and difficulties. The criteria we used in determining what stove to buy were price and capability of heating our home. We ended up buying a Bakers’ Choice wood cook stove.

We love our stove! It’s utilitarian, designed by an Amish man for heating and cooking – just what we wanted. It’s also one of the least expensive new wood cook stoves available.

With the Bakers’ Choice, we can cook and bake. It takes a little getting used to in order to cook on a wood stove. You can’t control the heat as readily as a gas or electric stove. You are able to use the entire cook surface, which is more than on a conventional cook stove. You soon learn that different areas are hotter or cooler than others. So, you move your pot to where the temperature is what you want. We cook everything on our stove. Anne even cans – hot water bath and pressure – on it.

Using the oven also takes getting used to. The temperature is slower to respond to your inputs than a conventional stove, and it’s harder to get the heat exactly as the recipe may call for. You’ve got to be flexible. You also need to remember to turn what it is you're baking during the process because the oven often tends to be hotter toward the back and on the side toward the firebox.

We also purchased the hot water reservoir that is an option for the stove. It holds about 7.5 gallons of water. While using the stove for heat, we keep the reservoir filled and use the hot water for washing dishes.

As far as heating our home is concerned, we seldom are cold. The firebox is nicely sized, allowing a fair bit of wood to be put in it at one time. The stove is also airtight, allowing the burn to be controlled quite well. I load the stove at night before going to bed and set the draft control so the fire continues to burn slowly (we only need some heat during the night). Eight or ten hours later in the morning, there are still plenty of coals and/or wood in the stove so that it’s very easy to get a good hot fire going to warm up the place.

During the last two months, we’ve cooked and baked exclusively on our Bakers’ Choice. We’ve actually turned off the circuit breaker for our electric cook stove since we’re not using it.

Our stove is also useful as a clothes dryer. We hang clothes on drying racks near the stove rather than use our propane clothes dryer. We’ve also dried herbs and food by hanging them from the ceiling near the stove. It’s definitely a useful part of our home that we would be hard put to do without.

Supplying the stove with enough wood during the winter isn’t a problem. There are lots of trees available for firewood in this area. We’ve mostly cut firewood from the tops of trees on neighbors’ properties that were left after the properties were logged. This has been good wood that would otherwise just lay there and rot. I estimate that we burn less than three cords of wood a year (a cord is a 4’x4’x8’ stack of wood).

There’s nothing quite like the heat from a wood stove when it’s cold outside. It’s a kind of warmth that you can just soak up and enjoy. No forced air furnace could ever duplicate the comfort of wood heat. Being able to cook with the same heat is great, too.

Lessons from butter

Anne wrote the following in an email to her sister. I thought it was worth sharing:

 
I am working on canning the stuff in my freezer in preparation for going solar. One of the things in my freezer was 15 lbs of butter - mostly from the coop, a pound or so from our farm. Well, I have directions on how to kettle-can butter, and how hard can that be, right? 

I successfully canned 10 lbs of the butter. Of the other 5 lbs, 4 lbs are in jars that haven't sealed and I don't think they're going to, and 1 lb is in the trash can.

I learned some things today:

1) it is better to kettle-can butter working in small batches, otherwise the butter in the pot cools off too much and your jars won't seal.

2) a pot of simmering butter boils over when you have a lid on it. (learned that one twice.)

3) a really good way to fill your house with a lot of smoke is to have two big pots of butter boil over on a wood cookstove.

4) if you pour hot butter into a jar that got too hot while being sterilized in the oven, the jar will break. (resulting in a pound of butter in the trash can.)

5) if you have a pint jar (full of melted butter) break, there is no way you can salvage the butter or the kitchen towel that the jar was sitting on.

6) every homestead kitchen, no matter how frugal, needs paper towels.

7) you CAN survive disastrous canning days - it is not the end of the world, although it sure seems like it.

So, that was my day. Tomorrow I will try again and redo the four lbs that didn't seal. (1 pint jar and 9 half-pints).

Anne :)

Recipe for canning butter

Do we need this many green beans?

Last year Anne canned many, many quarts of green beans. We had oodles of them. The thing is, we really don’t care for them canned. We much prefer them frozen. Fresh is even better, but that’s seasonal. As it turns out, we had several dozen quarts we didn’t eat. They’ll keep, of course, but we’re getting bushels of fresh ones from the garden now. So, we gave all that we had left over to some friends to whom they are a great blessing. We’re freezing ones from this summer.

Right now, Ramiah and Malchiah are snapping green beans, and Anne just put a few quarts in the freezer. I picked a bushel and a half a week ago. They needed picked again the end of last week, but my back still hurt from the previous picking. My dad was kind enough to pick. He spent two or three hours picking on Friday, but stopped when he’d filled all three five-gallon buckets he had. There’s still another quarter of the beans to be picked, and they don’t want to stop producing.

Earlier, when Dad and I talked about what to grow in the garden this year, we figured we didn’t need too many green beans. Mom and Anne were considering preserving many since we had so much left over. Dad planted two 50 foot long double rows using beans I saved for seed from last years crop. What was he thinking? We’ve picked five or six bushels off of them so far, and they are threatening to produce another three or four bushels. How many do we need?

When planting a garden, it’s hard not to plant the seeds you have and set the plants you have in the space available. But, that’s not always a good idea. You can be overwhelmed by the produce. I find it hard to not pick it when it needs picked, even if we don’t need it. We give away what we can, but often, other people have an abundance just as we do and don’t want our extra.

We can be thankful, though, for the blessing of abundance. It’s great to have the problem of figuring out what to do with too much food rather than what to do with too little.

I'm in North Carolina for the weekend

Anne and I decided on making a quick trip to North Carolina to visit her siblings. We didn't get to go for Thanksgiving last year. It's become a yearly tradition for all five siblings and their associated families to get together for Thanksgiving and Ruth and Harvey's house. Last year, for various reasons, we were unable to attend, and we missed everyone. So, earlier in the week, we decided to make the trip.

We're staying at Ruth's house, and Anne's other siblings will come over on Sunday. They all live within 2 or 3 hours of Ruth's house. We'll be heading back home on Tuesday.

Mom and Dad are taking care of things at home while we're gone. There are many advantages to having a homesteading community. One of these is that it provides built-in help. Dad's been helping me a lot during the last week or so with cutting and skidding cedar logs out of the woods. These will be for the house. While we're gone, he's taking care of the bovines and the turkeys.

Although he's nine months old, Chucky Joe still believes that he needs to nurse, and Josey continues to let him do so. He went a week or two without nursing. I think that Josey kicked him off during that time because he had made her teats sore. But, since they've healed (mostly), she's let him back at it. The calf weaner didn't seem to make a whole lot of difference for him. So, I took it off the other evening.

Actually, with him nursing, it makes chores a little easier. Chucky gets locked up separately at night, and I milk in the morning. This also gives Dad the option of not milking while we're gone -- just leave Chucky with Josey to do the job.

There's a lot of work to be done once we return home. It'll soon be gardening time, and there's a lot I want to do on the house. Taking this trip now is good because it's before the really busy time gets going. It's nice to see everyone. Anne is out enjoying they day treasure hunting with Ruth.

General goings-on

Spring is approaching. Or, at least it sure has felt like it. We’ve enjoyed some nice, warm temperatures during the last couple of weeks. This winter has been different (they all are, though) in that we’ve had some frigid weather with temperatures near zero and some warm weather with temperatures over 70. I had planned on tapping some maple trees and making syrup, but the weather hasn’t cooperated to make that really doable. We’ve made syrup the last two years. Maybe next year will provide cooperative weather.

Wednesday of this week we had a windy day. The storms that moved through the central part of the country mostly missed us, except for the wind. Other places got it worse than we did, though. We only received about three tenths of an inch of rain, and all of that seemed to come within 15 minutes. That’s alright, though, since the ground is still plenty soft from the previous rains. Winter time is like that though; around here it seems that the ground doesn’t dry out until summer. It does somewhat, but it sure seems like we have mud from November to May.

Anne and mom took the opportunity to run off to Glasgow on Wednesday to do some treasure hunting. They both enjoy spending time looking for bargains in thrift shops and antique shops. Dad came over so that he and I could go over our garden plans for this summer, mainly determining if there are any seeds we need to order. There are only a few like onion seeds and some seeds for winter squash. We saved a lot of seeds from last season’s gardening, including tomato, corn, squash, okra, green bean, pepper, arugula, and basil seeds along with some others. We grow open-pollinated and heirloom varieties so that we can save seeds. We also have potatoes to plant and will start some sweet potato slips.

Yesterday, dad and I worked on pulling some cedar logs out of the woods. He wrote a post about it on his blog and I wrote one on my Cedar Ridge Farm blog. It was a great day for working outside, and the previous day’s rain didn’t make things too wet and sloppy to get the job done. I’ll have some more logs to cut and skid out of the woods.

With the nice weather, I’ve been able to work on some house projects. It’s kind of nice to be able to focus some attention on it. I’ve actually been motivated to spend some time thinking about the project and planning for different aspects of it. So, I’ve posted a few times to Cedar Ridge Farm, and I expect there’ll be a lot more posts on that blog in the coming weeks and months. It is my hope to get a great deal of the house project completed this year. So, keep an eye on my other blog, too. 

Spring and summer are busy times of the year, but there is such a richness in living the life we do. We count it a blessing every day that we have opportunities to work together, to grow good food and not be completely dependent on that which is called food but really isn’t (standard grocery/restaurant fair), and to be surrounded by such fabulous beauty as can only be found in God’s glorious creation!
     

Chucky Joe is home

On Monday, January 26, we brought Chucky Joe home. Chucky is our 8-month old calf. Josey had become lonely during Chucky’s absence. The week prior to Thanksgiving, I took him to a friend’s farm to stay for a while. I wanted him weaned, but he had a problem recognizing the fact that he wasn’t supposed to climb over the fence. Granted, he only went over the fence in one place where I needed to fix it, but all the same, we didn’t want him getting to momma and taking all the milk. It was becoming more difficult with how we have things set up here to keep him separate from Josey. So, we packed him up and took him away.

Two months later I figured he ought to be well weaned and would no longer try to nurse. That, and Josey was lonely. She needed a companion. So, the children and I headed over to bring him home. He led out of our friend’s pasture just fine and loaded on the trailer with no problems. When I unloaded him near our barn, he recognized where he was and seemed excited to be home. He called out, and his momma answered him right away. As I took him around the barn, Josey excitedly came out of the barn with a special skip in her step. I let Chucky go and stayed to watch the reunion.

They were happy to see one another. They sniffed each other, and, then, Chucky decided he needed to nurse. Two months wasn’t long enough after all. I dissuaded him from nursing, but he continued to try. So, I locked him in a separate stall, not wanting to sacrifice the evening’s milking to a calf too old to need to nurse but too young to know better.

I went into town and bought a calf weaner from the feed store. It attaches to the calf’s nose and is supposed to make it difficult for him to get to his momma’s teats. It also has some tabs that are meant to poke the momma a little bit so that she will kick the calf off when he tries to nurse. Well, when I put it on Chucky and put him with Josey, he still figured a way to nurse. Figuring that the one I bought may have been too small, I returned to the feed store and bought the larger one. It seemed to work when I first put it on him. But, later in the evening, it was clear that he had figured out how to nurse with it on anyway.

In some ways, this worked out well. Anne and I made our trip to Michigan, and while we were gone, I left the weaner off of Chucky and just let him nurse. This meant that Dad didn’t have to do the milking. He wasn’t disappointed in this deprivation, either. Once we returned, I reattached the weaner to Chucky’s nose, figuring maybe it would at least slow him down. I was just going to separate him at night so that I would have the morning’s milk until I could get another weaner of a different design. However, somewhere in the first day or two after we returned, he decided it just wasn’t worth his trouble. He no longer tries to nurse. I’ve left the weaner on him, though, but it’s nice that we’re still able to milk twice a day as we really appreciate the cream, the milk, and the yogurt we make on a regular basis.

Josey and Chucky seem happy together. Contentment has returned to the barn now that Josey has the companion she needs.

Ice in Kentucky

In my last post I mentioned that Anne and I were heading to Michigan to deliver a vehicle. Well, we sold the Suburban to a really nice individual who lives near Flint, Michigan. It was a 550 mile trip there (and about the same coming back). We put our car on a U-Haul trailer so that we could drive it home. We left on Thursday, January 29, 2009, the day after the major winter storm moved on east. We were going to leave on Wednesday, but we were concerned about the snow and ice and how they were affecting road conditions.

You may have heard about how many people in Kentucky were affected by this storm. In our neck of the woods, it didn’t cause any problems. However, we didn’t drive very far after we left before we saw evidence of much greater ice accumulation. Driving north on I-65, there was lots of ice all the way from Cave City, KY, where we got on the interstate, to about Columbus, Indiana. From that point on, there was plenty of snow. The roads were fine, though.

We took a few photos as we were driving north on that Thursday, and then we took some more on our return trip on Friday. The ice was still hanging tenaciously to the trees Friday afternoon (January 30, 2009). I thought I’d share a few of our photos so you can see some of what it looked like along the interstate as we traveled. The first two were taken in Kentucky as we were headed north on Thursday morning. We took several others on the following afternoon, mostly in Kentucky with a few in Indiana a little north of Louisville. I don’t remember exactly where the ones I’ve shared below were taken, except that they were along I-65 (I think these were all in KY).

A little winter weather

A good-sized winter storm rolled through the night before last. We got some freezing rain – about 1/4” accumulation. The ice stayed on the trees until last night, even though it rained all day yesterday. It warmed up a couple of degrees last night, or the rain we got then would’ve frozen also. As it was, the ice melted overnight.

 
All together, we received just over five inches of rain here. At the end of the storm this morning, the temperature dropped into the upper 20s, and we got some sleet and snow. Just enough to cover the ground.

In other areas of the state, there was more ice accumulation and/or snow. Anne and I were going to drive to Michigan today to deliver a vehicle to the buyer, but we postponed until tomorrow. We would’ve had to have driven through areas in Indiana that got some significant snow. We still may have some icy roads tomorrow, but there’s no rush. We’ll be back home on Friday. The younguns are staying with my parents, and Dad will take care of chores while we’re going. That’s one of the advantages of having a bit of community on the homestead.

  
Even though we didn’t receive a major storm here, we were prepared for one. Being prepared is a way of life, actually. We have food, water, and heat. We don’t live our lives with the need to run to the store for every little thing. Running to the store happens as infrequently as possible. That means it will usually be weeks or even months between trips to buy some “necessary” item from the store. With that sort of situation, there is little adverse effects from a severe storm, only some inconveniences (like no internet if the power goes out).

Homestead objectives (part II)

I made a list of some of our main objectives thinking that I would write one post describing them. Then, I started and determined that such a post would be quite long, longer than I had thought it would be. So, I’ve broken it down into individual posts focusing on the individual objectives. The first one I covered was to grow and harvest good food.

The second objective I’ll discuss is to grow together as a family.

Homesteading provides opportunities for us to be together and to work together that would not otherwise be possible. I’m very blessed in the job that I have because it allows me to work from home. It’s also not full-time work. The income it provides is less than many families spend just for food each month, but it allows us to be together. We have made choices about how we live, and we appreciate the advantages that come with it. Sure, it would be nice to still have the income I had before we moved here, to still live in our big, red-brick house, but I would be gone much of each day and several evenings every week. I wouldn’t be around for us to eat three meals together as a family like we do now. I wouldn’t be there every night to help get the children ready and into bed and to kiss them goodnight. We wouldn’t be together as we are now. Our children are growing up with their daddy as an every day part of their lives. In fact, Malchiah and Naomi have always had it so.

We homeschool our children. There are too many influences in the public schools that we do not want them exposed to. Our children do not watch TV or play video games. They don’t go out to eat or to movies. They don’t do many of the things that most of society thinks of as “normal.” They aren’t deprived, though. They have 57 acres of woods and fields to run around in. They have great imaginations and are able to use them. They have responsibilities and jobs and are learning the value of working. They have been around and know about the process of live, its beginnings and endings. They are developing a healthy respect for and understanding of the purpose of the animals God has created. They are learning about proper stewardship for the things God gives us responsibility for. 

Ideally, schooling is a natural, normal part of life. We try to make that so. We also use some specific curricular tools and have “lesson” time for the children. They’ve been read to since they were just wee little things, developing a love of reading at an early age.

Our children are wonderful blessings, and God has given us a great responsibility in raising them properly. I wish I could say that we do it well. I know we don’t do it as well as we should. But, I can’t imagine the additional challenges that we would face in this task if we lived in different circumstances. When I was young, my family was financially poor, but we were rich in many other ways. We worked hard raising, harvesting, and preserving food. I didn’t always appreciate the work when I was young, but I do now when I look back upon what I learned through it. I want my children to learn some of the same lessons and to not be selfish, in-debt consumers.

We have extended family here. My parents living next door on the farm is a wonderful thing. It seems so uncommon to find extended families in our culture and society. Yet, that is the model in the scriptures and in many cultures. There is a strength and are great blessings in having an extended family. Our children are being blessed in ways they don’t realize yet just by having their Mammaw and Pappaw  and Uncle Danny living here with them. It’s also something that benefits my parents and Danny. I wish I could’ve grown up with my grandparents in the same way. There is so much more I could’ve learned from them.

I think that every homesteading adventure is unique, because each individual or family interprets and creates it in the ways that make sense to them. We thank God all the time for the opportunity we have to live here, to be together as a family. The are long-term benefits that we haven’t even imagine. Working and playing together, eating meals together, just being together, is incredibly important to us, and we are grateful that it is so.

Miscellaneous: painting, reading, photography

Homesteading is a way of life, one in which we are able to pursue what's referred to as a "simple life." I suppose it's simple in some ways, but it also brings considerable physical labor. Growing, harvesting, and preserving food takes a lot of time and work. However, there is still time to pursue other activities and interests, especially during the winter months when the days are shorter and the nights longer. Also, when it's raining outside, there are quite a few things that I'll gladly put off rather than get soaked.

I recently purchased a new digital camera (a Fujifilm Finepix S700), and I'm enjoying taking photos and exploring its capabilities. I have an interest in photography, at least to a small degree, whether I have much skill or ability in this area. I took these photos of the sunset this evening.

There's more time during the winter for reading. One of my evening activities is reading to the children. Currently, we are finishing Little House on the Prairie. We generally read the entire set of "Little house" books over the winter. The children really seem to enjoy them. This year, Malchiah is old enough to truly appreciate them. Naomi is enjoying them, too, although she doesn't follow all of the stories completely.

I also read other books for my own edification or entertainment. I'm currently reading The Global Achievement Gap: Why Even Our Best Schools Don't Teach the New Survival Skills Our Children Need -- And What We Can Do About It by Tony Wagner. I ordered this as an evaluation copy in order to consider using it in my class. I just finished Created for Work: Practical Insights for Young Men by Bob Schultz. I enjoyed the practical lessons he presents.

Probably because they've all been read to since they were infants and have seen Anne and I reading, our children all love books. Jessica reads every chance she gets. Ramiah is growing as a reader. All four of them love to be read to, the younger three asking quite often to be read to. That's a good thing, and I'm glad they are readers.

Years ago while still in grad school, I participated in an informal painting class put on by a friend. It was based upon Bob Ross' method. You may have seen The Joy of Painting series on PBS in the past. Bob Ross would paint a landscape within the 30 minute program. I studied his painting techniques by watching his program and reading some of his instructional books. Although I haven't painted any pictures in a few years, I enjoy painting. I hope to make time to do so again soon. The photos show a couple of the paintings I've done.

The cast of characters

Since I'm going to be talking about my family in many of my blog posts, I thought it would be expedient to introduce everyone that lives here.

My wife, Anne, and I have been married for over eighteen years. She's a great blessing in my life for which I am very thankful. God has blessed us with four wonderful children. They have all been born at home, the last two here on the homestead. Jessica will be 12 in January. She loves horses and has a great interest in drawing. She has quite a few drawing books she spends time with working on her drawing skills. She also loves to read. She does a lot to help with the jobs and chores around the house and in the garden. I hope to acquire a horse for her benefit sometime within the next two years. I think it would be good for her. She has ridden Josey, our cow, but only when I was leading Josey. Besides, that's not quite the same.

Our middle children are our boys. The older is Ramiah. He's 7-1/2 years old. He has a lot of creative ideas and loves machinery and tools. He loves to build things when he has the opportunity. Malchiah is our third child. He just turned five in November. He is energetic, generous, and loves to have fun. He's been my helper since he was just a little guy, and he still loves to be with me doing chores or when I'm out working. If the work involves using a tractor or other machinery, Ramiah also clamors to be with me. It's really something watching these boys grow into young men. I pray that I can guide them as they need.

Our youngest is Naomi Shalom. She'll be three in March. She's a curly-headed little darling, cute as can be and knows it. She's almost always happy and spoils me rotten. She too wants to go do chores with daddy. If she doesn't get to go she is mightily disappointed. She loves to help around the house.

Anne, my beautiful wife, does so much to keep us going. She takes good care of me and our children. She oversees most of the food preservation. In fact, she canned nearly a thousand quarts of food this last summer and fall. In previous years we froze a lot of the food we harvested, but this year we tried canning most of it. Next year we intend to dry as much as possible. She's also the one who does the bulk of the homeschooling of our children. She does so much, and I appreciate her greatly. She has quite a knack at finding good deals at thrift shops and on Ebay.

I'm Darryl. I do a lot of different things around here. I take care of the animals, which right now consists of a cow and her calf and half a dozen turkeys. We have had goats and chickens until this last summer, and we'll probably have more again in another year or so. I'm building our house, a timber frame with strawbale walls. You can read about that project in my other blog, Cedar Ridge Farm. I mow, rake, and bale our own hay and cut firewood among other things. My income generating job is teaching an online class for Illinois State University. It doesn't produce much income, but it is enough to pay bills and allow me to be at home to do my real job. I'm blessed with this opportunity because of the 26 years I spent in school from Kindergarten through my Ph.D.
My parents, Garry and Connie, live about 200 feet from our house on the farm. When we bought the property, there was an unfinished, one-bedroom cabin the previous own had started. It was enclosed and had electricity, but that was about it. We mentioned to my parents that this was for them, and dad grabbed ahold of that idea like a bulldog on a bone. They moved down here from Illinois the spring after we moved, rented a house in town, and remodeled and finished their house. It's a blessing having them here. Dad helps me with many different jobs that I need help with with, like baling hay and working on our house. You can probably read about some of them on his blog. I help him as I can, too. Mom does her best to spoil our children, and they encourage her in that endeavor, I'm afraid.

A friend of mine from college, Danny D. Smith, also lives here. Danny and I met and became friends in 1987 when we both worked in the kitchen at Ambassador College in Pasadena, California. We kept in contact after we both graduated. After we moved here, he sold his home in the Raleigh, NC, area and moved her in the spring of 2004. He bought a small double-wide mobile home and put it across the driveway from our home. He takes care of his mom who lives with him. Our children love Uncle Danny. You'll often find one of the boys or Naomi (or all three) with him, using his tools or trying to "help" him. He enjoys our children and is very generous with them.