In the spring I pulled out the HOSS Tools seeder loaded it with a bag of corn I bought at one of the farm supply stores, then walked the seeder back and forth, row by row, till I covered most of the north goat pen in planted rows of corn. I planted my pmpkin seeds in some of the leftover space, and some cantaloup. The cantaloup never sprouted. But the pumpkin and the corn most definitely did! I have the pumpkins remaining for the grandchildren to come and pick their own, but we harvest the corn cobs on Sunday, and today Missus and I shucked about half of it, and cleaned it up and put it in the freezer.
The gils and I have already eaten corn from the garden twice, one being before harvest day, and once today, and the corn was excellent both times. We were just about overwhelmed with what we have grown, even though it was an easy growing season, and I only had to water a few times despite it being dry this summer. Despite the work, I was surprised to hear Missus exclaim that next year she would like me to grow lots of popcorn. That suits me just fine!
This summer has been hot and dry in our area. Nonetheless, I have been able to grow a garden full of corn and pumpkins, which is not a lot of food for the family, but it is a success in gardening! It is harvesting time, and I hope to get the kids to help with that tomorrow. We only need to take the corn. The pumpkins can come in the next two weeks as the grandkids come to visit next. I figure that between them and my still at home kids, there are two large pumpkins per child. That is extra exciting to me, because this simple item is one of my favorites. Each kid can have a Jack-O-Lantern grown by grandpa, and candled with a beeswax candle grandpa has made, as well. Let them dream of the Will-O-the-Wisp as they drift off on Halloween night. It is my favorite holiday of the year except for Christmas and Thanksgiving, which only get their points because of the family time together. But for style and flare, Halloween has got it.
Farming has not really been a thing on our farm this year. I have been too busy working for money to do anything really with the farm. I got out free lawnmower running, then it stopped again, and I have just not had the time to mess about with it to get it going again, much less use it. So, the grass all around the house has been out of control. That has only added to a state of gloom around here. I have a filter to install on the fuel line, and I think that will help keep it going. I am sure the carburetor clogged again.
Two days ago, on the 1st of October, I had surgery on my neck and am out of commission for a week or two. Maybe three. hopefully not! I am hoping to resume light duty work after the post op follow-up in five more days. The operation will cause further changes as time goes on with my hormones, and things like calcium in my blood. As functions in my body normalize, I hope to be in better shape than I ever have been in my adult life. I don’t know. But I do hope. I am meant to be digesting better, have improved kidney function, and even less brain fog and gloom. Maybe this is all I have ever needed to finally grow up?
Like many others, we are struggling to keep going in this economy. I have been delivering on a food courier app, and with gas prices so high, I have more cost to do business, and people who also have their own tanks to fill are paying less in tips, thus lowering my income from both ends. It is a real struggle. My take home pay has dropped by about close to around 50%. It was tragically low to begin with. There is no excess in our lives right now at all. I say this to state it, not to compare to others and try to be worse off. We are among you, struggling to get by. And we know that we are in so many ways, the lucky ones to have the position we do with a garden to grow in. I recently heard this expression which seems to suit so well. “We are very bourgeoise, for not only do we have a pot to piss in, but also, a window to throw it out.”
I am off work now, which is going to pinch us hard. I will return as soon as I can. But I also need to calculate if there is some way to balance things out so I can do other income earning from things here on the farm, and such. My dream is to do portrait photography, and all the farm and hobby related things on the side, axing the courier work completely, or doing it only when necessary. People need to know we exist here, and what we have to offer. Surely that is only a matter of marketing! Not my forte! And Maybe it is just a matter of getting on YouTube, finally!
And on that note, I did make a new channel. It is The Peasant’s Manor Millworks. I will do everything woodworking there. Next trick is to get any of the channels started!
I got a bit of time yesterday to get the tiller on the tractor, and get it greased up and ready to run. So I put a shallow till on the pen where the llamas used to live and will work as a little garden to put in some corn and pumpkins this year, as well as a couple of other vegetables.
The grass is growing up already on the farm, and the weather has been supportive of that, but it is mysterious and confusing this year. It has been warmer than ever this winter, and spring has come in both warm, and yet cold enough to prevent planting out. The ground has not been dry enough to till properly. But I will fit that in soon since the tractor is ready to just drive in and get it.
Today we have gone ahead and opened up the firewood stand!
I elected not to put too much firewood in there to start out with. For one, I don’t want to come out and find someone under a fallen stack of wood. Also, I don’t know if theft will be a problem. It seems like it is for others on YouTube who open a stand, so I would like to keep that down a little by not putting a lot out to go at once. Honestly, things could be just fine, I don’t know. So, we’ll ease into it.
I think it is plenty obvious where the honor box is with this new sign up on the side. I plan on one more sign in the stand that says to pay the honor box around back of the structure. That sure is a lot of letters to have to cut! That needs to be shortened! Then I can post a bill on the back in the sense I can advertise other offerings to someone who is there to pay. I’d be happy to run a community bulletin board on the side, too. But honestly, I don’t know if many people will be stopping by anytime soon. Now THAT would be the thing to have right next to an LFL whenever I can get around to making one for Missus.
For now, we are offering to our neighbors! Hopefully it will help to open a gateway into our community.
All firewood on offer at any size is $1 per piece! You get to choose your own pieces! I try to maintain larger pieces than you could get at any gas station or store. Most of the wood is poplar.
The most time-consuming thing on the farm is earning a traditional income to cover all the bills that we are responsible for. I have been using DoorDash to try to keep up on them, but even when I work my butt off it does not produce enough to get ahead. The nature of working my butt off means there is not enough time to do anything else to help make up further distance on any of it. Then there are the car maintenance costs and time, problems and maintenance that all take from the pittance I earn.
My birthday arrived last week, and because Idaho Driver’s Licences last eight years, I didn’t even think to check it, so it quietly expired. I was off that day, but when I went in to work the next, I was prompted by the app to verify my identity. I thought that was weird because I had only done it the week before. So, I tried and tried, but every time, it only showed a black screen when I took the photo of my license. I gave up and went home, where my wife pointed out to me that the license was expired, and proposed that was the reason I was getting a black screen. I don’t know. Awfully clever if that is true. Means it is reading it before I even upload it. Either way, I went down to the DMV and got it updated, they voided the old one, and said a new one would arrive in ten business days, which is just a less bad sounding way of saying two weeks. Then they gave me a paper temp. I tried that, then DoorDash suspended my account for using a paper license, which they can terminate you for doing. That was something they make you aware of when you first sign up but leave you to forget a year or more later when you happen to have an expired license. So, now I am under threat while I wait for the new plastic card to show up. Pleasant. Real nice.
So, I am on a forced vacation!
So what am I doing with the time off and the money gone and the lack of money coming in?
Well, we are looking at all the ways we could be earning on side-gigs that we have not been able to do anything about because I have not had the time. For example, today I photographed some new pictures of beeswax candles to list online. I have been finishing up on the roadside firewood stand, too. It is nearly ready to fill up and start selling from! I’ll need to spend some time on splitting, probably tomorrow. It needs the steel put on the roof, but for now, it should do. I need to get some roofing screws first. Next, I need to get my photography and portraiture business listed and try to get some traffic to the website.
While all this is going on, I have had time to clean up the shop for summer work and get moved back in there. I have also had the time to help Missus get some cleaning up done in the house, and get her big loom photographed and listed. She is just unable to put the time and work into warping that monster. Getting too old, and all that!
So, summer will be along before you know it, and with our winter having virtually vanished this year, I think summer will be here by the time Spring starts in a couple of days. I don’t know if it is safe to plant anything. We have had such late frosts here. But I will be cleaning up in the barn and the yard before long, and hopefully will have that done before the new ID comes in, and I can get back to work, because I have a lot of financial catch-up to do.
I put the wires back together in the battery charger and managed to get it working again and able to charge car batteries. I’ll do the one on the sawmill soon and see how it does at starting up. I have a couple of projects that need doing, like a roadside market stand, and a little shed for the potter’s wheel. I will dual use that as a firewood shed for the shop for winters. That’s the plan, anyhow.
This summer has been the busiest ever for me. That is both good, and bad.
It is good because I have been feeling up to it. I have had such joint pains for something like 45 years that I have been affected by it for what seems like forever, and however bad it has been, it has progressively gotten worse and worse. It has never quite made it to a full disability. But it has always been a low-grade pain that has certainly slowed me down severely. When I was a kit, I would wonder how others could run the whole mile. As an adult, I was finally getting to the point that I wanted to look into getting a proper diagnosis from a doctor and consider getting a placard. I made every step count, because I only had so many in a day before I had to be down because of the accumulated pain.
I never had a visible disability. And you know the stigma that goes for people like that who park in the handicapped parking. Someone chasing them down yelling at them that they don’t belong there. It was that kind of stigma that kept me from ever perusing medical help in the first place. How do I deal with something invisible? Neverminded what others see. I don’t even see it. And you know the other stigmas of being weak. All these things compounded.
Then last summer came along, and the doctor I saw about an unrelated issue suggested I needed to lose weight and gave me a proper diet to follow to do that. That is what made me remove gluten from my diet. Basically, I figured out that I have had a lifetime of pain because of stupid breads and pastas.
Big changes happened. I was called upon to work to keep our family. I needed to do a job that I could balance time on my feet and time in a seat and really experiment with what I was now capable of. My body improved, a lot. I spent the next several months DoorDashing. It was an easy line of work to get into, and I could chose for myself when I worked and when I didn’t. That gave me time to keep the kids going on their school runs, and I could confidently stop for the day if I was fatigued by any more joint pains and the like. But I have not had that problem in 10 months now. I know I could not spend the whole day on my feet at this point. There is no way. Maybe there is lingering issues. Maybe it is to do with never having been able to do work up to it. I remember in my high school at the grocery store, wondering how the checkers could spend the day stood in one spot like they did. I took walking as relief because I was at least distributing time on my feet between steps. One place like that? When I tried, it killed me.
So now I know I can at least work out some time on my feet, and I am working to increase that without being overwhelmed by pain. Meanwhile I keep DoorDashing, and that is the bad part of this busy summer. The pay is awful. I have to do it a lot in order to have enough money to get us through each week of a relatively inexpensive lifestyle. Working takes all my time. I have found little to do other things. I am always trying to get to town to drive so we will have enough money. I also have to put about 25% back into the gas tank. So I am working a lot of hours just to afford to work a lot of hours. It is stupid.
I am trying to round up some time to work on putting more of my photography site together so I can attract clients. I would very much like to start shooting for real. I seriously could do three to five jobs a week on average to offset the entire time I am spending DoorDashing.
Meanwhile, there is the farm. Now, you don’t think with the schedule I have just mentioned that I have been able to keep up with things like mowing the lawn? I have not. The place is a mess. I have so much to catch up on. I have hardly been able to apply myself to getting any firewood sorted for this year. That is the worst mistake a man can make! I am lucky that where we go to get it, they have whole massive tree trunks that have lain around and dried out over years, and we are able to find plenty. Lots of people go there and pick up branches. I set up early on to get whole trunks up to 10 feet long at a time. While my electric winch is out of service at the moment, I am still able to take four foot sections and put them on the trailer deck. I prefer to do as much of my chainsaw work at home as possible. Safety thing.
Yesterday I gave up for the week and came home a few hours early. Rain was incoming, and I got to work under some of the most amazing skies. I got most of the smaller rounds split and the larger ones piled up ready to cut down and split. I hope to get at that on Tuesday. I do try to take one day a week off Dashing to get at least my laundry done. Oh! And Tuesday is tomorrow! So that is exciting! Noting like a restful day off to rejuvenate the body, right?
Thanksgiving is almost here. Christmas will soon follow. I am ready for neither. Missus is trying to make it as inexpensive as possible for us. Well, we will take it how it comes, I guess.
Meanwhile, Missus just came up to let me know that the power is out. I had not even realized it went out while I was typing away at this laptop at 5:30. I need to get up soon and get dressed and ready for my day. Looks like I am going to do it the old fashioned way in the candlelight. It also looks like I will be publishing this over my phone’s hotspot. Away I go!
Our farm and business are not yet profitable, and I have spent the summer working off the farm doing DoorDashing down in the local city, which is a university town in northern Utah called Logan. So a lot of what I would want to be posting here has not materialized this summer, especially where it seems to take me seven days a week earning enough to pay most of our bills. Well, that is what it is.
Autumn is upon us, and although the weather has only just begun to change a little, there is something in the air that feels it is here. I can’t quite identify it, but something hits the primordial senses and tells me that it is most definitely time to get ready to batten down for the winter. Is it to do with the pollen in the air, or that ever so imperceptible change in temperature? Our walnut trees know, and so do we all. Everyone I have spoken to about this so far has said they feel it too. Apart from the days shortening a little, I cannot think of anything obvious that gives it away.
One of the kids is borrowing the logging trailer to haul stuff to the dump in this week and says that next week we can dump it on Monday morning then he will go with me to get a long overdue load of firewood after. I will be taking at least that morning off work and going for it. I am going to be checking the weather forecast leading up to it, too. At this moment it suggests that I can expect 84°F for that day’s high.
It doesn’t look like it is going to get anywhere near that today. There are clouds and wind, and the temperature outside right now is 66.7°F. Promises to be a good day today for a day to rest up some. I will be working tonight. But enough about that right now as I have 4 and a half hours to rest up right now! I should also mention that there was a lightning storm last night, and it was bloody marvelous! Well, I barely woke up to notice it, but it was lovely that we had one. It has been so calm here this summer. Maybe winter will make up for it!
So, things are tight right now, and a little difficult. I hear on the news that the whole economy is on the fritz. It looks that way from the prices I see in the stores and at the pump. But then, I don’t spend a lot in the stores. Not because we are as self-sufficient as I would like us to be, but because I just cannot even afford to window shop at the moment. Well, thigs are what they are, and I have no control over any of that. So, we just keep plodding along. That’s all we can do!
Even though optimism is a seemingly vanishing point of view, spring and autumn are seasons of change, and they always bring me a bit of excitement as those changes occur. Spring brings new growth and everything else you know about. Autumn closes in, and then the first snow falls, and the fire in the hearth invites us to gather round and be close. With me out working so much, I think that has an extra appeal to it this year. I really look forward to spending time with my family, enjoying the gathering time as a period of bonding and joy.
We have a few months to rethink the businesses and get them going forward. Maybe this season of change will change our thinking and get us on our way!
My darling almost 17-year-old daughter made a couple of loaves of bread today. I want to publicly announce that I took a slice despite my joint problems that come of eating bread, and it was the best tasting, textured, and firmness of any bread I think I have ever eaten. If bread can have a definition as perfect, these loaves are it. I am really, really impressed. Well done! It was an Amish recipe, but her skills brought it together perfectly.
All work in the shop has been on pause the last few weeks as I have been putting in the time working for money and coming home beat. I want to change that. I need to change it. But getting the time in with my family is also a priority, and when the quality of that is at a minimum because I am so tired, then there is certainly no time to work in the shop, too.
Seeing the sights of the city has been amazing. Logan has been very busy this weekend with yard sales, people in the parks, walkers, runners, cyclists, the protests, the market, and other things. It is beautiful to see all the activity. Motorcyclist weave carefree through the traffic, while pickup trucks go about with canoes and other floatation apparatuses loaded up. My wife’s sister will be out in July, and she is a good friend to all the family, so that is exciting. It will be, surprisingly, her third trip to America in recent years. Everyone has ideas of activities planned. When she was last here, she was getting a feel for the lathe and really enjoying it. I should prepare some blanks for her, or maybe just get things ready to show her how to make her own from one of the logs on the pile out back.
My day off is upon me tomorrow. My plan is to get the trailer ready to get firewood logs and sawlogs with. I need to get those rolling, even if it is a trip down in the mornings before working, then work all day after. That’s two trips to Logan in two different vehicles per day. Oh joy. Then come home in the evening and unload and get ready for a trip again as soon as I can manage it. Just one a week would be sufficient to make a massive improvement upon what I am doing now! And we sure need the firewood! Okay, that is me speculating on what to do. Tomorrow, I need to mill up some replacement boards for the trailer. I need to do one of the stakes to replace a broken one and would like to do some thicker ones all the way around but will have to see how I can fit it in time-wise tomorrow. There is more to it than just cutting the boards. Especially where I don’t want to replace the bolts and will have to use the existing lengths. A bit of drilling required for that. Not troublesome. Just more involved. If I redo the stakes at the front, I can rely on them for the weight of the logs on the pulley I have to mount on top for the winch because of the weird place I have to put the winch to get it to work on the trailer. It gets hitch mounted, but to do that, I had to get a double receiver that is meant to hold a trailer and a bike rack simultaneously. Madness! All of it, really! But using the pulley allows me to move it up and down and adjust the travel of the line when needed to load the logs. That can be good as they seem to approach around eight hundred or more pounds each. It is a messy business.
Well, the battery is getting low on the computer, and I have llamas and goats waiting on their food. It is summer, so I daily scythe fresh grass and load it into their feeder with the tractor. I am working my way along the roadside across the street at the moment. It is good to have that grass getting used, and honestly, so much easier than trying to stake any of these animals out. But first, another coffee, and some time with Missus.
There has not been a lot of time for writing in the blog lately, or for farming on the farm, to be honest! I have been trying to earn a few pennies DoorDashing the last few months to keep some food in our bellies and some bills paid.
But…
I have done a couple of things. I scythe daily now, to put food in for the goats and two of the llamas. If those llamas were not escape artists, they would be across the street, but I have no idea how they got out for sure, and nobody else does, so they stay in the pen over here with the goats. Scything some grass and putting it into the feeder in the pen using the tractor to move and lift it is a daily chore.
I have been working on the glue up and planing of the top for the kitchen island. That is not the highest priority, so it gets done as and when. I was well proud a few weeks ago that I had got the boards glued up and started on their planing, but it has sat by for a bit now, and I need to get out there and do some more. There are a couple of low spots that I need to plane the entire top down to, so that is a little discouraging, but after a break, I will get at it with the scallop, or scrub plane. I love that plane. It can make a cut that is smooth enough to not require sanding, and if I could get all the cuts to go with the grain and not blow any of the wood out, I think I could do a finished scalloped surface. I will try it one day when I get a cooperative board, then use it on a trunk or something. But for now, it is just a good way of quickly blowing through surface material and getting down in thickness. I am building a top that is the size of a house door. So, it is a bit of work. I’ll get at it soon.
In addition to this, I have done most of the construction on a little shack to sell firewood from out front. I have to build it a roof, put on an honor box, and add a sign, and I am ready to go. I need to get some logs up to the house and get them cut into rounds for splitting. That is also kind of a big thing. Once that is done, I will start selling wood ready to burn. I need some help from my business partner on this, but he is limited on what he can do, and when. I am going to have to get to work somehow without him, I think. So that is a thing. Right now his life is consumed in the oilfields of North Dakota. He is trying to find a trailer he can haul wood with, and I need to get two tires replace on my trailer, apparently! It was quite disappointing to find that both of the ones on the right side have huge gashes in them on the inside sidewalls. Did someone come back and slash them? I doubt it. But it is weird that they both have the same kind of gash, so maybe? I don’t know. Weird entertainment if they did.
I was informed by my oldest daughter the other day that there was a leak under the kitchen sink. I got back to it in two days. I decided the best thing for me to do was to wash the dishes and see what she was experiencing. Seems she was right. I looked under, and absolutely everything was leaking. The sprayer, the taps, the drains, the drain baskets. Well, one of the drain baskets, anyway. It was the newer one I put on when we removed the garbage disposal. Anyhow, my day off work was cancelled and replaced with a trip down to do some shopping, and to earn some money to cover the costs of it as best I could. I earned about half of it, but the days since have been low earning days, so that is a problem. Anyway, I bought some new seals for under the sink, and two new baskets. The old basket was a bear to get off and required me putting apart the nut with some wire cutters, which was time under the sink. I remember my stepdad doing the same thing when I was a kid. He included a lot more swearing. I thought it was going fairly well, so I did not feel so inclined. But there are times.
I got a whole new tap and sprayer. It was my chance to do as I promised myself I would the last time I replaced in the same spot. I got a taller one that we can stand the coffee reservoirs under, so nobody has to stand there and hold it at an angle while it fills anymore. Little things that improve productivity. Now the reservoirs get filled all the way, too. Meanwhile I can do other things, like grad my cup down from the cupboard. Little things that make the difference. It’s amazing how fresh the whole sink looks now.
So, that’s the kinds of things going on here lately. It is not as productive on the farm side as I would like it to be. But I am getting at more things now with the pain subsided from the joint inflammation I have suffered from for so many years. It has made such a difference. Now I have to fight the old habits of not being active because of the pain that is no longer there. But doing things like laying under the sink in a way that I know would have killed me a year ago, and not suffering for it is sure helping to lift my spirits.
