Thanksgiving week

Well, a lot of water has gone under the bridge since I last updated this blog, so bear with me. I have several items to talk about today. First, I finally did get some photos to share, I didn't want to write another update until I had some pictures, I hate reading blogs when there aren't any pictures. The pigs are growing fast. I haven't weighed them, but I am pretty sure they are well over 100 lb by now.




I now have four pigs as I bought a Large Black hog, female, a few weeks ago for breeding with the black and white boar. I understand that it is better to wait until she gets full size before allowing her to breed, but I don't think I will be able to do that, as that involves building a completely separate enclosure complete with housing, feeder, waterer and electric fence just for him, so I guess she will just have to deal with it as it comes.

Here they are at the feeder I built.  I don't talk to them any more, as they will shortly be invited to dinner.  You can see the insulators for the electric fence I installed a few weeks ago.  That has saved me from lots of anxiety as the pigs figured out how easy it is to get out.  The electric fence has convinced them that they don't want to try.

  





This is what they looked like just a few weeks ago.

 The chickens are doing okay, but I am still only getting one or two eggs per day. I finally did decide to butcher one of the roosters on Saturday, as my sons were home for the weekend, so they helped me catch one of the black ones, and I had the opportunity to learn by doing, as I have not done this before. I read about the technique in my Storey's guide to chickens, but this was the first time I have done it, and I have not seen it done before.




Here's the black rooster head down in the "Cone of Death."

  I had purchased a "Chicken executor" at a flea market last summer, so now is my chance to try it out. The rooster was upside down in the cone, and his head is supposed to be sticking out the bottom.




As you can see, his head is not sticking out the bottom of the cone, like it is supposed to.  He had pulled his head up inside the cone.  All I see is rooster comb.

  So, I ended up having to reach up inside the cone and grabbing his head and pulling it down and out of the cone in order to do the job. I will refrain from going into gory detail at this point, but let's just say that the rooster lost a lot of blood and then he was dead. The next job was the plucking. I had put a big pot of water on the stove to boil, so I got the water, as it was nearly boiling, and dumped it into a big enamel bucket, hoping that there would be enough room for the whole rooster, less his head, as that was gone now. After a bit of swishing around and turning over a couple times, the feathers started to come loose. Now, I had forgotten some of the instructions from Storey's guide, so we left the rooster in the water as we plucked, which was a mistake, as he got partially cooked, but at least all the feathers came off.



The rooster is being undressed, so to speak.

 I did have enough presence of mind to take it out of the hot water partway through the plucking process, so it didn't get boiled completely, but it did get pretty stiff. Once the plucking was done, came the gutting. It did turn out to be a bit of a struggle to get inside the bird, but once I was in there everything came out pretty well. I ended up removing the neck, as I needed to get the crop and upper parts out. All the inedible parts went over the back fence, along with the feet and feathers. What was left looked pretty close to what you see in the grocery store. I weighed the chicken on the kitchen scale, and it weighed about 5 and 3/4 lb. So, a good-size family chicken for dinner.



The Mighty Hunters, having captured and killed the dangerous and wily chicken.  Me, on the left, and my youngest son, Adam, on the right.  He is the only one who is brave enough to help out with this stuff.  He is also the one who helped me castrate the pig last time he was home.

 On to Thanksgiving dinner! I wanted to cook the turkey in the wood cook stove this year, as this is the first year in the new house, so I put the turkey in an oven bag so that it would stay nice and moist, and popped it in the oven. It was supposed to cook 4 1/2 hours at 325 degrees, so I got it in the oven at about 8:30 a.m. with the idea of being ready for dinner by about 1 p.m. We had waffles from the wood stove for breakfast, so that helped to get the oven hot.



Lots of oil is the key here.  Spray vegetable oil on the hot waffle iron and about 2 tablespoons of vegetable oil in the waffle mix.  I learned from last time that one scoop (ladle full) of batter is enough to fill the iron.  The first attempt ended quickly when the batter ran over the sides and onto the stove.  When it is smoking hot on both sides, it's ready.  I removed the stove lid under the waffle iron in order for it to get hot enough, so it is directly over the flames.



Since the turkey was in the wood stove oven, I used the electric stove oven to cook the pies. I made home made apple pie, pecan pie and pumpkin pie. The pumpkin was from last year, as we did not use it all last year, and I could not in good conscience throw it out. It was in the deep freezer, and still good. I thawed it out and then put it in a cotton bag (one of my t-shirts) and hung it up to drain. I got this idea from my friend, Jim, on his "Wood Cookstove Cooking" blog about how to get tomato pulp to get thick enough without cooking it down on the stove. After a day or two of draining, it was thick enough to use for pie and pumpkin cake without having to cook it down. What a great idea!



The pumpkin pie and the pecan pie are cooling, the apple pie was next in the electric oven.  I also had made a cherry pie, but it really doesn't count, as that came from a can.  I did humble myself and used frozen pie crust.  I know, it isn't as good, but then it sure was easy.  With everything else going on, it made all these pies possible.



Before.




After.

 

The oven bag was burned away on the left side, over the turkey's crop area, as that was the side closest to the firebox. That didn't matter, as there wasn't anything on that side to eat, anyway. It was done just right, the meat was nice and moist, and we had plenty of juices left for gravy.




We all had a wonderful dinner together for Thanksgiving.  Thanks be to God, who always leads us to triumph.  Praise the Lord for his many blessings, and for all the wonderful people we have in our family!  We had our two college kids home on Thursday and two of our older kids with their spouses on Saturday.  Brenda's mom was able to be with us from Thursday through Saturday.

 

First full week of cooking on the wood stove

Now that the weather has cooled off I have been doing all the cooking on the wood cook stove. One meal was fried chicken with fried potatoes and vegetables.


Fried chicken on a wood stove.  It doesn't get any better than this!  I got the chicken fryer at an antique mall.  Unfortunately, I have not gotten any family heirloom cookware.  The two teapots are purchases, the tall one from a flea market, and the shiny 2 gallon job online.

 I actually fried the chicken the day before, as I had the chicken all thawed and ready to go, but didn't have time to do a whole meal that day, so I went ahead and fried the chicken that day (Tuesday) and then fried the potatoes and warmed the vegetables in the microwave (shudder).

The chicken was fried the day before, so it got warmed up in the microwave, and now it is sitting on its little warming trivet on the stove backsplash while the potatoes are frying.  The vegetables were warmed in the microwave, and they are just sitting there keeping warm while the potatoes finish frying.

Notice that I removed the lid and put my frier pot directly over the fire to get it hot and keep it hot while the potatoes were frying. The next meal we had on Thursday was baked cod, in the oven, and rice cooked on the stove top, and canned vegetables that I heated up on the stove top. I was pretty nervous about using my good Farberware aluminum bottomed pan on the wood stove, but it worked just fine, I think the only serious concern would be if the pan boiled completely dry, so I made sure it didn't. I had trouble getting the water to boil for the rice, (a watched pot never boils), so I had to keep adding water as it was evaporating faster than it was boiling. It finally did boil enough to put the rice in, but I think it was about an hour before it did boil. I think that if I had built a quick hot fire with small sticks instead of the big chunks I was using, it would have boiled a lot faster. Next time.

Well, here's the meal.

It was very good.  The only real problem was that it took way too long to prepare. The next meal, Friday, was homemade pizza. I made up the dough in the automatic electric breadmaker, as it works great and I can do other work while it is mixing and kneading, although I do enjoy making my own bread from scratch from time to time. First, I cooked the pork sausage. Then when the oven got up to about 350 degrees I baked the crust first. That way it isn't soggy in the middle from the toppings, and it bakes faster. I learned from a food fair many years ago that if you flip the crust over it's a lot easier to put toppings on. The bottom of the crust is flat. You have to try it. It works!



This is an easy pizza.  Pork sausage, mushrooms, tomato paste, diced canned tomatoes, mozzarella, cheddar cheese.  Baked for about 15 minutes at about 350-400.  I turned it around about halfway so that it wouldn't be burnt on one end and raw on the other end.  The edges got a little dark, but it was still very good!

 On Saturday I made bacon and scrambled eggs for breakfast. I spent some time and burned a lot of energy cutting more wood out back. There's a really big red oak tree downed by the back fence that I have been wanting to cut, so I worked on that for a couple hours until I got the chainsaw into some rocks and ruined the chain. Once you burn the chain on a rock, sharpening it with the file doesn't help. I have another chain for it down in the bottom of the truck toolbox, so I will have to dig it out and switch chains. It's fairly new, as I sharpened it only a couple times, and it started cutting sideways on me so I bought a new chain. Later I learned that this can be corrected simply by sharpening more on the opposite side. I cut some of the sections of oak short so they would be easier to split. I got a little electric wood splitter last year, it actually works! I never could get my great big hydraulic wood splitter to work, so it is just sitting out by the back fence. It is supposed to run on the tractor hydraulics, but my tractor doesn't have integral hydraulics. It has a hydraulic pump that goes on the PTO shaft, but that doesn't work very well with the wood splitter. So, I split a couple of sections of the oak, but it sure was hard to split. I think it is as tough and stringy as elm. Some of the pieces I had to finish off with the axe. But at least now I have enough small split pieces so I can get the stove hot fast. The bigger round stuff is good for keeping the oven hot once it gets hot. The damper is a slide in the back of the stove that slides over and partly closes the opening to the flue pipe. It works great when the stove is cold, but once it gets hot the iron expands and it sticks, so I have a little hammer that I use to open and close the damper when the stove is hot. I am sincerely hoping and praying that my banging on it doesn't break the iron! Maybe it would be better to use a piece of wood in between to absorb some of the shock from the hammer. Hmmm. The pigs finished off the two bags of feed I bought for them three weeks ago, so Saturday I bought four more bags. It filled the pig feeder to the top with some left over. I also refilled the 55 gallon drum I have for the pig's water. So that should keep them fed and watered for a while. I am still only getting 2 eggs a day. I think some of my hens are holding out on me. I will have to follow them around and see if I can figure out where they are hiding their eggs.

Baking with the cookstove

Saturday was cold, wet and rainy, so after finishing paying bills on the computer I decided to give the cookstove a try at baking. I got a box of brownie mix, as I figured that would allow me a rather wide margin of error. I got the fire started and then after about 30 minutes the oven was not getting hot, so I packed the firebox with wood and went out to get another egg from the hen house. When I got back the smoke alarms were going off, the upstairs was filling with smoke, and the oven temp was up over 450 degrees. I finished mixing the egg into the brownie mix, figuring that the oven would start cooling down some, but it didn't. So, I opened the "check draft" on the front of the firebox and when that didn't seem to do anything to the oven temp, I went ahead and put the brownie mix into the oven. When I opened the oven door, smoke billowed out into the room. I guess when I fired up the stove the first time, I didn't get the oven part hot enough to burn off the blacking, so now it was burning off. I opened all the windows and doors upstairs to let the smoke out of the house, it didn't really get cold inside because the stove was giving off so much heat. The brownie mix was supposed to bake for about 23 minutes but after 15 minutes it was browning quite dark, so I took it out and put it on a rack to cool. I let the fire burn out over the next 2-3 hours and I recorded the temperature inside the oven with a store-bought oven thermometer and the temperature that read on the front of the oven to see how close they were, and wrote it on a post-it note so that in the future I will have a better idea what the oven temp is without having to open the oven door.

You probably cannot see the temp gauge on the oven door, but it was reading well over 450 degrees.  If I had had some presence of mind, or if my wife was at home she would have suggested that I leave the oven door open for a while until the temperature dropped down to the desired temp of 375 degrees.  But if my wife were at home I wouldn't have been doing this, anyway.

So I taped the temperature conversion chart I had made to the back of one of the cabinet doors so that next time I do some baking I can see what the actual temperature is in the oven.

You can see that the back left is dark, that is the side closest to the rear of the firebox.  It probably would have been more evenly browned if I had remembered to rotate the pan halfway through the baking.

Anyways, I was very pleased that I could get the oven that hot with only fairly small sticks of wood. I was just using some pieces of junk wood that I had piled out by the back fence. In the future, at least during the winter, I plan to use regular firewood (oak, maple and walnut). I still have lots of small trees that were taken out when they made the driveway through the woods, plus several large trees that are down out by the back fence that need to be cleared. I think I have enough down trees right now to keep me in firewood for several years before I need to start cutting live trees.

Here come the pigs!  They always come running when I go out there, to see if I have anything good for them to eat.  Their dogloo is back under the trees on the right.  Most of the chickens stay in the pen, although the Americaunas manage to get out and back in again every day.

I have some barn metal that I plan to use to make a larger shelter for the pigs, as they will outgrow their dogloo pretty quick. I would guess that they weighed about 5 pounds each when I got them the 10th of September. Right now they are probably about 10-15 pounds each. They have gone through one 50 lb. bag of feed and are well into the second 50 lb. I built a pig feeder for them last week modeled after the one I saw in the store. It probably will hold about 300 lb. of feed, so that should be big enough to feed them when they get big. The plan is to castrate the white boar pig, and raise him and the female for eating, and get a large black for breeding. I figure the cross between the black and white pig I have, and the Large Black pig will give me good growth and hybrid vigor. We shall see.

Foster parents to be!

We had the official interview and home visit last night with our foster care contact from the Missouri Children's Division representative. She said that as soon as she gets the fingerprints and completes the paperwork we will be ready to host some kids. We are attending training classes, so we will probably wait until the classes are done before we take any foster kids. Brenda and I have hosted foster kids for about 8 years now, so we pretty much know what to expect. We built the house with the idea of hosting several children, so we are prepared.

Here's the photo of the three little pigs we got last week. Pig 1, Pig 2 and Pig 3. I have been bottle feeding them three times every day. I can tell you it is starting to wear on me, so I have been giving them what milk replacer they can drink, and then I put the rest in with their pig pellet food. Eventually, that is, sometime during the coming week, they will be off the bottle entirely. I am hoping to get the fence put up this Saturday and then I will move the chickens and the pigs inside the fenced area over by the shop. Brenda is getting tired of having chicken manure left on the porch, the sidewalk, the driveway, the garage floor and the deck. I will have to clip their wings so that they won't fly over the fence. I have been feeding the fish every day since we got them, the fish guy said that it is important to feed them the first year so that they get a good start. It was so dry the last few weeks that I was just about to start running water from the well into the pond, but it started raining again two days ago and then it rained again this afternoon, so I think they will be okay. I bought two rain barrel kits from Amazon. They are made by Fiskars, the scissors company. I really like these. I have them set up so that the downspouts from the back half of the house go into two 55 gallon barrels in the back yard, next to the retaining walls. I will get a photo of the setup later. That first rain we had two days ago filled one barrel completely. The other one didn't work, so I have been playing with it to try to figure out what happened. I plan to use the rain water for the teapots on the stove, as rain water doesn't have any lime (minerals) in it, so when the water boils down, it doesn't leave any lime deposits in the bottom of the pot. I keep three teapots on the wood cookstove all the time. That gives me plenty of hot water for cooking (soups and stews) and it helps to absorb some of the heat coming off of the stove top. Rain water can also be used for washing hair as it is very soft water, and when we use the Jacuzzi, hot water off the stove can help to fill the tub!

First Use of the Wood Cook Stove

Day before yesterday I was moving stuff into the new house and I got it into my head to try out the new cook stove. So, I gathered some newspaper, some sticks and a couple sticks of firewood. First I covered the bottom of the firebox with crumpled newspaper, then the twigs, sticks, and some larger sticks and lit the newspaper. At first the smoke all came right out into the kitchen, but then I closed the firebox door and opened the draft and the ash box door to give the fire some extra air and then I could hear the fire going. After a minute or so I checked the fire and saw that it was going well so I added the sticks of firewood (just some old junky stuff that I found on the ground). Pretty soon I could tell the stove top was getting hot and it was starting to smoke. The people who sold me the stove warned me before that it would smoke quite a lot the first time, as the stove blacking burned off, so I turned on the vent fan above the electric stove and cracked open the front door to give it some air. I was surprised that it didn't set off the smoke alarms. As the stove top was getting pretty hot, I decided to put it to some use, so I got out my huge cast iron frying pan and put that on the hottest spot over the fire, and then I got some bacon out and cut that up and threw that in. When that was going pretty well, I figured I might just as well cook that venison steak in the bacon fat, and then I threw in a couple of eggs for good measure. About that time Brenda came home from work and she helped me to get some photos. September 16, 2013 We have three new members of the Pearson farm population, Pig One, Pig Two, and Pig Three. They don't have names because I have not yet decided whether to make them into dinner or to keep them and have them "make babies." Their mother died suddenly after they were born, so we are bottle feeding them. I can tell you for sure that after bottle feeding three baby pigs for one week, that I am not going to do this for much longer. These pigs are going to get weaned a bit early. So, this week I am going to be introducing them to milk from a dish, and after that, they are on their own. I just don't get anything out of hanging onto a wiggling squealing grunting muddy dirty pig and trying to get it pointed in the right direction while it sucks a baby bottle dry. The only good part, if there is any, is that once they get going with the sucking part they get the bottle sucked dry in about a minute. And you don't have to burp them aftewards. Last Saturday we didn't have to be anywhere so after I fed the baby pigs and let the chickens out I fired up the cook stove and made bacon and eggs for breakfast. A cold front came through on Thursday so Saturday morning it was crisp and cold, about 55 degrees. We left the windows open so it was crisp and cold inside too. So, once the stove got going the heat from the stove was very welcome. When Brenda got up, she stood in front of the stove to get warm. I can see how the wood stove is going to be a popular gathering spot for cold people this winter. I have been pleasantly surprised at how well the stove works. It is very easy to get the fire going, and it seems to heat up fast and stay hot with just a small amount of fire wood. I didn't time it, but it seemed like once the fire was started, it took about ten minutes for the frying pan to start to get hot enough to cook the bacon. When I was cleaning up after breakfast I was putting the frying pan away and I checked the oven and found that even with the oven control off, it was about 170 degrees in the oven. So, it probably wouldn't take much to get the oven up to baking temperature. Last Saturday I put fence posts up to get ready to set up a pen for the pigs. I also want to put the chicken house in the same area. I don't know if the chickens will stay inside the fence, as they are accostomed to wandering all over the yard. We have been using an old Dogloo for the baby pigs, but it won't take long for them to run out of space in that. So, I plan to build a shelter for them under the trees so that it will be out of the wind and weather. I would like to have an electric fence also, but that will have to wait until I can find one cheap on Craig's list. We have eggs! We got two eggs Thursday and one egg each day after that. So, I think I have at least one chicken laying eggs. I think it is two chickens because some eggs are speckled and some are just plain. Eventually, the Americauna hens will be laying colored eggs, green and pink and blue. I have already had that talk with them so they understand what is expected of them. Anyway it is high time I started getting something for all that work and time and chicken feed.

Closing on the house

Yes! We are finally ready to close on the house! I spoke to the bank (actually, the banker) yesterday and we are scheduled for closing on Tuesday. It has been a long time since we moved out to the farm, and it's kind of hard to believe that this is actually going to happen. We have been living in the garage for 18 months now, which is almost as long as we have lived in some of the houses in the past. We have watched as the house has (slowly) taken shape, little by little, and we have seen so many previous deadlines come and go. When we first moved a year ago February we thought we would be ready to move in before Thanksgiving, then Christmas, then New Year's, then by April, then before Abby's wedding in May, then by the 4th of July, and now here we are into the second week of August. Well, realistically, we are both of us very pleased at how the house has turned out. We didn't get everything we wanted, mostly because of money, but we did get almost everything in one form or another. For example, I wanted the fireplace in the basement to heat the whole house, but it turns out that no one makes fireplaces that do that, any more. But, we did get a fireplace that will heat the downstairs family room, and the upstairs living room. So, that is almost as good. It's a very nice fireplace that is air-tight. That means that it draws all of its combustion air from an outside vent, so it doen't take the warm air from the house to burn the fire. It has vents on the front to heat the family room and it has two vents that go up inside the fireplace to the living room floor upstairs.

You may notice that the mantle is a reddish wood.  I cut the mantle out of part of the cedar tree that was growing where the house is now located.  They had to take the tree out in order to put the house there.  It was about 60 feet tall and it had a double trunk.  Each trunk was about 24 inches in diameter at the base.  I cut up one trunk to make the boards that line the master closet, and part of that went to make the mantle for the fireplace.

Right here would be the photo I took of the tree before it was cut down, but for some reason it won't load.  So, just use your imagination.

Getting back to the wood cookstove, there is a bit of a story about the heat shielding around the stove.  Most of the time the wood cookstove in a house would be located in the middle of a big eat-in kitchen.  The kitchen would be big and square, and the cookstove would occupy the middle of the room.  It wouldn't be anywhere near the walls because it gets very hot when there is a fire in it.  The cast iron absorbs heat slowly and then gives it up slowly into the room.  For that reason most cookstoves would be used a lot in the winter when the heat is needed, and everyone would crowd into the kitchen during the winter because when the stove is going, the kitchen would be warm even when the rest of the house would be cold.  During the summer, many people would have a "summer kitchen" in a separate building out away from the house with its own cookstove.  That place would have lots of windows to let the heat out, and the cookstove in the house would not be used, or only rarely, to keep from heating up the house even more in hot weather.

So, in my little kitchen, the cookstove found its place in the corner over by the front hall.  So, it had to have some kind of heat shielding to protect the surrounding walls from the heat.  Our builder came up with the idea of using cement board around it, then covering the cement board with ceramic tiles.  There is no sheetrock there at all, just the cement board attached to the studs.

You can see that the cookstove is on a raised steel platform.  That helps to distribute the weight, and it gets it up to about the same level as the other kitchen countertops.  I guess the women who used these cookstoves a hundred years ago were shorter than people are today.  Remember, this is a real antique stove, made about 1900.  Wood cookstoves were used in many rural areas of the country until the 1950's, when electricity became commonly available.

With all the rain we have been having this last week the pond is quite a bit higher.  It's not full yet, but it is almost up to where it was in the spring before we had all that dry weather.  It makes the fish happy, they are discovering places in the pond that they haven't explored before.  I hope the water stays high until fall.  Then, when we get the fall and winter rains and the snow maybe it will fill up the rest of the way.  It should be about 1/3 of an acre when it is completely full.  That will give the fish enough room to reproduce, and to survive cold weather.  They need at least 8 feet of depth in order to make it through the winter.  The water at the bottom stays warmer, since it is close to the earth.  If this continues to do well, and the fish survive until next spring, then I will add large mouth bass to the mix.  The bass will help to keep the bluegill and the catfish from producing too many fish, as they will eat the small ones.  Then, in another year or two, the bass will be big enough to fish out (dinner for me).  Even so, I think the catfish and bluegill should be big enough by next summer for me to fish for them.  I like fresh fish.  I am not a fisherman by any means, but I like to eat fish.

Yesterday Brenda and I were working on grading the dirt around the back (the walkout side) of the new house.  When we get it all smoothed out we will spread grass seed and straw.  We will not be watering it, as that wouldn't do any good.  When it starts raining in the fall, the seed should sprout.  I got to use the tractor with the front-end loader, and that left Brenda with the shovel and the rake.  I think I got the better end of that deal.  Lots of rocks.  Even though this was all topsoil, it is amazing the quantity of rocks in there.  That's one thing you never have to worry about here in the Ozarks, is running out of rocks.  That's why the farms around here are growing hay and cattle.  That's about it.  Not enough dirt to plow.

This is my wood-fired cookstove in the new kitchen.  I hope to use the wood stove during the cooler months when a bit of warmth from the kitchen stove will feel good, and then use the electric stove during the summer when it is hot.  It is a cabinet Glenwood number 8.  I like the looks of the cabinet style, rather than the kind with legs, and it gives me a storage space under the oven for my cast iron cookware.  It doesn't have a hot water resevoir, but I will have a 2 gallon teakettle on the stove when it is being used, so I will have plenty of hot water.  It's not all hooked up yet, so after the stovepipe is installed, and we have moved into the new house I will build a fire in the firebox and see if it works.  I got it through a place called "The Love Barn" antique stoves, http://antiquecookstove.com/

They did an excellent job of tearing it down and rebuilding it so it should function better than it did when it was new.  Highly recommended if you are in the market for a real antique cookstove.  If you buy a brand new one, you won't find one like mine.  They really don't make them like that any more.

It's a beautiful sunny day today, not so good for the fish, who really need a lot more rain in the pond, but it's great for solar power!  Yesterday I was feeding the fish when I noticed some small plants growing on the shallow side of the pond.  Some were rushes, lots of small ones, where the dry wash goes into the pond from the upper pasture.  Some others looked like arrowhead plants.  The funny thing is, this is a new farm pond.  There has never been a pond there before, to my knowledge, although there was a low spot there that was always kind of swampy in wet weather.  So this is a new pond, lots of bare dirt, no pond plants, and yet, there they are!  I am assuming that the seeds have been transported into the pond dirt by wind or water birds, and they have taken root.  I have spent a lot of money and work to plant pond plants in the pond, some are doing well, and others didn't make it, and here are very nice pond plants that just appeared all by themselves.  Go figure.  The one, the rushes, are called spike rushes.  My  Missouri pond book says this is a very good plant to have in the pond, as it makes a nice green carpet on the pond bottom and helps to prevent weeds from growing in the pond.

I have been taking photos of all the wildflowers I find on our property.  I have a Missouri wildflowers book and I have been trying to identify them all, but some of them don't seem to be in the book.  I know the ox-eye daisy, black-eyed Susan, butterfly weed, milkweed, wild carrot (Queen Anne's lace), mullein, morning glory, horse nettle, red clover, wild strawberry, blackberry, thistle, wild rose, and I just saw bee balm starting to bloom.  It is so much fun for me to walk through the pasture and see such a wide variety of wildflowers there.

Now, of course, the pasture has been mowed and baled by our neighbor, Clifford White, so the flowers aren't visible any more until next year.

They came to do the final cleaning yesterday in the new house.  There are still a lot of details that have yet to be finished, so we're not there, yet.  Like doorknobs, paint to be touched up, the yard to be seeded, stuff like that.

Here's a photo of the solar panels being installed on the garage/workshop roof.

The crew from Straight Up Solar did a fantastic job.  They got the whole thing done in just a little more than one day.

Allow me to introduce myself as this is my first post.  I am a physician at the Federal Medical Center in Springfield, Missouri, where I have worked for about 15 years.  My wife, Brenda, works at the Pat Jones YMCA.  We have five children who are all grown and out of the house.  We started doing foster care about 6 years ago, and plan to get more foster kids when the house is done.  Brenda and I are believers in Jesus the Son of God, and we are very passionate about our faith.  We enjoy life on the farm and we hope to use the farm experience to give foster kids a place to call their home while they are away from their own home.  Brenda and I enjoy our little 12 acre hobby farm and we plan to grow most of our own food.  We bought the property about 6 years ago and have been working on getting things set up little by little.  We have 10 acres of pasture and 2.5 acres of woods.  We are building a new house (almost done) and we have been living in the garage/workshop for about 18 months while the house is being built.  Our vision is to be semi-independent, as we have our own water (well) everything is electric (except the cars) and we hope to grow most of our own food through gardening, fruit trees and wild berries, and livestock.  We have 10 chickens, one bee hive and fish in the pond.  Someday we hope to have cows and pigs, as well.

Today I realized that we are using more electricity that I thought.  We got the solar panels installed by Straight Up Solar out of St. Louis last Monday and Tuesday.  Thursday Dwight from Southwest Electric Co-op came out and installed the electric meter for the solar panels.  When I got home on Thursday I flipped the big switch to turn the solar panels on, and nothing happened.  So, I turned it off again and went to bed, wondering why it wasn't working.  Friday morning as I was going out the door to go to work, I decided to give it another shot, so I flipped the switch on again and went to work.  When I got home I saw that the solar panels really were working, but it just doesn't show on the meter, as it only reads in Kwh (kilowatt hours).  It's a new style digital meter, not the old one with the little wheel that turns inside it.  Anyway, it was reading 30.  So during the day it produced 30 Kwh of electricity.  The other meter, the one that reads our usage from the grid, was reading 396.  The day before it was 394, so we had used 2 Kwh of electricity.  Well, as I was thinking about this today I realized that there is no way we could have used 2 Kwh of electricity in one day.  That's 60 Kwh per month, 720Kwh per year.  No way.  We normally use about 34 Kwh of electricity per day, on average.  What I think it happening, is that it is subtracting one to get the other.  That is, we used 32 and it took off the 30 we produced.  That is much more likely, as we are living in the garage while the house is under construction, and the air conditioning  is on full blast in both places right now, as well as lights, and water pump, and the electricity the construction crew uses every day.  Once the construction is done and we move into the house, we turn off the air in the workshop/garage and turn the temp up during the daytime, our electric usage should go way down.  I figure an easy way to test this would be to just turn the solar panels for one day and watch the result on the usage meter, as I really haven't paid that much attention to it before now.

The solar panels are designed to produce all the electricity we use during the year.  We are "grid-tied" so we don't have batteries.  If (when) the grid goes down we will use our gasoline-powered emergency generator to run essential things like heat, lights, refrigerator, and so on until it comes back on again.  I figure we use about 11,000Kwh per year, or about 34 per day, on average.  During the hottest time of year, in July and August, we will probably use all of that 34 for air conditioning.  When the weather is cooler we will produce about 30 and use only 2-3 per day.  We will then use more during cold weather (heat pump).  We have 30 240 watt panels on the garage roof producing a total of 7,200 watts of electricity.  Of course, that is the design max, it doesn't ever actually produce that much due to various inefficiencies in the system.  And, the sun doesn't shine from directly overhead all 14 hours of the day.  So, the most it will produce is about 6,500 watts at high noon (standard time) and less as the sun is farther away from its zenith.  The idea is to reduce our electric usage to match the production from the solar panels so we aren't buying electricity and we aren't producing any extra.  It doesn't pay to produce more than we need as solar electricity is expensive and coal is cheap (up front cost).  At a final cost to us of about $25,000, saving about $200 per month, it should pay off in 7-10 years.  With a life expectancy of about 25 years that gives us a benefit of about $35,000 during the life of the solar panels (that is, we should get about $35,000 worth of "free" electricity).

I will add photos of the installation and the meters on my next post.