hansjurgen

Multi purpose building update #2

I have made a little more progress on our multi-purpose building. In my last post, we had graded an area for the building. Our first choice was to have a concre...

Homestead Trivia

It is commonly believed that a cow has four stomachs. That is kind of correct, but technically a cow has one stomach with four different compartments. They are ...

Homestead Enemy #1 - The Housefly and what we do to fight the war

The number 1 pest on our homestead is the common housefly. We have wasps, hornets, Japanese Beetles, stink bugs, ticks, chiggers and mosquitos, just to name a f...

Staying Cool with Solar

As the days get warmer we look for ways to stay cool on a hot afternoon. I would like a ceiling fan, but without electricity, I did the next best thing. I took ...

One Reason We Moved from the City

According to the 1790 census 95% of American lived in rural areas. The 5% of Americans living in urban areas lived in small villages and cities like New York an...

Homestead Trivia

The Homestead Act of 1862 was passed on May 20 that same year. The act encouraged settlement of the western territories. Families were awarded 160 acres of publ...

We have water at the kitchen sink

We manually pump water to the header tank on the roof which gives limited water pressure at the kitchen sink. Finding a faucet with adequate flow has been a pro...

A Pavilion for Feast of Tabernacles

I started a new project this week. For me it is a bigger then the other projects I done so it will take some time. The plan is to build a 24 x 50 foot multi-pur...

DIY Chimney Sweep

The cold weather is behind us so it is time to clean our wood heater to get it ready for next winter. I like to do this job early before it gets too hot to be o...

Homestead Trivia

May 5 was International Respect for Chickens Day and the whole month of May is International Respect for Chickens Month. So we missed International Respect for ...

Poison Ivy is Back

It’s back with a vengeance. Last week it looked like this. We were away for five days and when we came back it looked like this. It is a very pretty plant that ...

Baker Creek Spring Festival.

This past weekend we attended the Baker Creek Spring Planting Festival in Mansfield, Missouri. We drove up Friday afternoon and spent Sabbath camping at Baker C...

Homestead Trivia

Seventy percent of the RED meat eaten in the world is goat meat. Pork is the most consumed meat in the world. We do not raise goats so I had to take a picture o...

Water for the Chickens

With the summer just around the corner, I wanted to add more water capacity for the chickens. I looked online for automatic drinkers, but I thought they were ki...

Muffler Repair

Yesterday I had to do a little generator repair. Not long ago two of the brackets broke off the muffler holding the muffler heat shroud, leaving two holes in th...

A Sleeping Fox Catches no Poultry

I saw this quote recently and it got me thinking. Can any successful homesteader or farmer be lazy? There is always something to do from sunrise to sundown. It ...

Homestead Trivia

It is commonly misreported that you can lead a cow upstairs, but not downstairs because a cow’s knees can’t bend properly to walk downstairs. This is not true. ...

Too much Water in the Hen House

A few weeks ago, we had a rain storm which dropped almost six inches of rain. It washed out our road and saturated the ground. Water running off the mountain fl...

Kaleb's Projects - Everything is a Weapon

When I am in my workshop, my 5-year-old grandson Kaleb likes using his imagination to work on his own projects as well. It is usually a weapon of some sort. I p...

The simple Mayapple

The Mayapple is an interesting little plant. In early spring the little umbrella like plants begin to pop and blanket the forest floor, but by the end of May wh...