Seems like a little overkill, but now that I have the wood cookstove up and running, I cannot wait to post and show everyone how it is working.

Here I am adding the two 45 angle pieces to get the stove pipe down to the right spot on the stove.

The big job was cutting the hole in the roof, and installing the stainless steel insulated Class A stove pipe down through the roof, through the attic, down into the ceiling adapter.  I also have an attic insulation shield above the ceiling that keeps the insulation from getting too close to the stove pipe.  The next part was installing the stove pipe from the ceiling down to the stove.

Here I am installing the sheet metal screws to tie all the parts together, to keep them from moving.

I purchased wood stove fiberglass woven gasket material that I fit between the stove and the bottom stove pipe piece, to seal it and to keep it from wiggling back and forth.  I also used some of the gasket material to seal gaps between the sections of stove pipe.

Lighting that first fire.  Most of the smoke went up the chimney.

As you may be aware, when a wood cookstove is restored, it gets painted and then it gets coated with stove blacking to make it look pretty.  That is all very nice, until you go to burn wood in it.  When all that stuff gets hot, real hot, it starts to smoke.  Then the house starts to get smoky, then the smoke detector goes off, and you run around opening the doors and windows, and waving a towel at the smoke detector.  That's how it goes the first time you fire up a wood cookstove.  Happens every time.  Well, this was no exception.  The kitchen got nice and warm at first from the stove, until it started to get smoky, and then we had to open the doors and windows to get the smoke out, and then it got real cool again.

Nice fire in the fire box.  I had to shut off the draft to keep the stove from getting too hot.

Well, as you may guess, you just can't have a nice hot stove and not cook something on it, now can you?  Of course not!

A nice fried egg.  Farm-fresh, just laid the day before.

Of course, you've got to cook that fried egg in a nice cast iron pan, and I had just the right pan to do it, too.  One that has already been properly seasoned over many years of use.  They say that cast iron is the original non-stick cookware.  And, it is true.  That egg slid around in that little frying pan just like it was a brand-new Teflon or "Super Copper" or whatever is the fad now.  I wouldn't want to put one of those pans on this stove, it would probably just melt into a puddle.  One thing I did learn from our last wood stove, is that once the fire is going, everything is hot.  Don't assume that those little silver spiral things will stay cool enough to handle.  Just assume that everything is hot, and you won't get burned any more than necessary.  I wouldn't go so far as to say you won't get burned, because once you start using a wood cookstove, you do get burned at some point.  It just goes with the territory.  But using hot pads and oven mitts every time you go to handle something on the stove goes a long way to minimize the burns.

Well, I do want to wait until I have some photos to share before making a new post.  So, now that I have some new photos, I feel that I have enough to make some new new posts.  First,  I have a new tractor.  Not a new, new tractor, but a new, old tractor.  It is a 1953 Farmall Super H.

Farmall Super H.  I have it parked in my tractor shed.

The reason I bought it is that my other tractor is a B Farmall.  It is a smaller tractor.  It puts out about 10-12 horsepower on a good day.  I have a front end loader on it that I use a lot to move stuff around on the farm.  It is very useful in that way.  The problem is that the front end loader uses the PTO to run the hydraulic pump, so if I need to run any equipment that needs the PTO shaft, I have to take the front end loader off.  That's a lot of work.  The other thing is, the B just doesn't have the horsepower to run a lot of the equipment that I use, like the mower and the hay baler.  So, getting the Super H allows me to leave the front end loader on the B all the time, and I can use the Super H to run the mower and the hay baler and it has more horsepower, about 25-30 horsepower, which is more than enough for what I need.  Fortunately, there's enough room in the tractor shed to park both of them.


This is my Kineo B in its new spot in our kitchen.

Now, on to the next topic, the wood cookstove.  We have the Kineo B installed in our remodeled kitchen.  As you can see, the stovepipe is not yet connected to anything, so we can't burn wood in it, yet.  The weather is getting colder, so we are getting a little anxious to get this all hooked up and ready to use.  Last weekend I was up on the housetop, clunk, clunk, clunk, so to speak, sawing a hole in the roof with my saws-all.  Yes, that made me very nervous.  There is something very wrong about taking a saw and deliberately sawing a hole in the roof of one's house.  Ordinarily, a person works very hard to make sure there aren't any holes in the roof, so to saw a hole on purpose is just very backwards.

Sawing a hole in the roof.  Something very wrong about this.

The next step is to install the roof flashing, and then lower the chimney pipe down into the ceiling adapter.  The problem we ran into was that the clamping band was too large to fit through the flashing, so we ended up having to put the pipe down first, and then put the flashing down over the pipe, and then slip it under the shingles.

Note the shiny double-wall chimney pipe.  We assembled a four-foot piece onto a three-foot piece, then lowered both down through the hole in the roof.

Once we had it all together, we were able to finish caulking all the seams with roofing tar and high-temp silicone.

All assembled.  The spark arresting screen had to be jerry-rigged, as it was too large for the weather cap, but we got it wired on with baling wire, the farmer's friend.

The ceiling adapter is in place.  I know, it is dusty with sheetrock dust, but it will clean up.

I still have one more piece of stove pipe to come in the mail, and we will be ready to put it all together.  I have two 45's that will bring the pipe back a few inches and then two 3-foot sections that will connect the stove pipe to the stove.  I have also ordered some special gasket material to seal the pipe to the stove at the bottom to keep it from leaking any smoke where the stove pipe connects to the stove.

This post is going to be about milling and flour.  It's been a while since the last time I wrote about my flour mill, so I will give a bit of history about my flour mill.  My mill came from a grist mill in southern Missouri that was established sometime in the late 1800's.  It was located on a small river that fed into Pomme de Terre river.  In the 1950's a dam was built and it became Pomme de Terre lake, and that location was flooded and became part of the lake.  The owner of the mill saved the mill parts, and passed them on to his grandson.  The grandson sold the mill to a fellow who was going to make moonshine, but then never quite got around to it, and made the mill available on Craigslist, which is when I bought it, about eight years ago.

This is my Nordyke & Marmon mill, made around 1900.

The case is made of cast iron.  The stones are called French buhr.  That is because they were quarried in France, in a stone quarry near Paris.  It is a volcanic stone, very hard.  It is a porous stone, so it's got lots of little holes in it.  The reason it was so valuable for millstones was because of its hardness.  It came out of the stone quarry in small pieces, so it had to be fitted together like the pieces of a pie, or the pieces of a pizza, and then an iron band was put around the outside to hold the pieces tightly together.

This is not my mill, but another N & M mill stone just like mine.  This is the "runner" stone.  It has to be carefully balanced, as it turns at 1,000 rpm.

You can see from looking at the face of the mill stone that the stone is very porous, not smooth, like limestone would be.  Also, you can see the "grooves" that have been cut into the face of the stone.  That is where the grain gets caught and ground between the two stones.  Both stones are cut the same way, so that when you put the two faces facing each other, the grooves are going opposite directions, kind of like scissors.  The grooves get shallower as they get closer to the outside edge of the stone, so that the flour gets ground finer and finer as it gets closer to the outside of the stone.

This is the bedstone.  Again, this isn't mine, but is just like mine.

By looking closely, you can just make out the grooves on the face of the bedstone.  You can see that they do go in the same direction as the "runner" stone, in the photo, above.  The bedstone is the one that is fixed in position in the front of the mill.  The grain falls from the hopper at the top of  the mill into the "shoe" which shakes by the vibration of the shaft of the mill.  That shakes the grain down into the funnel down through a hole in the center of the bedstone.  An auger on the center of the mill shaft then grabs the grain and pulls it into the middle of the mill.  Grain falls between the stones by gravity and is caught between the grooves of the runner stone, which is turning at about 1,000 rpm, and the bedstone, which is stationary.

The flour is coming out of the chute into the bin.

Once the flour reaches the outside of the stone, there are metal fingers that grab the flour and throw it around to the chute and out the chute into the bin.  The flour is warm, as it gets scrubbed between the grindstones.  You don't want it to get too hot, because that cooks the flour before you use it, and then it's no good for making bread.  Also, you don't want to burn the grindstones, or wear them prematurely.  So you have to check the temperature of the flour as it is coming out of the chute, making sure it is warm, checking to see that it is the correct fineness, but not too hot, and checking to be sure there is no odor of burning grindstones, that is, the smell of hot flint.  That is where the saying comes from "keep your nose to the grindstone."

I run my mill with a 15 hp Farmall tractor.

We take our mill to our friends' farm once a year to do a demonstration of flour milling.  I grind about 50 lb. of wheat into whole wheat flour.  I give most of it away to family and friends who like to use it to make whole wheat bread, and then the rest I use myself for making my own whole wheat bread.  This is the real stuff, whole wheat, not like the stuff you buy in the store.  It's got everything in it, including the wheat germ.  The stuff you buy in the store has the germ taken out because that is oily and it would go rancid sitting on the shelf in the store.  I keep mine in the freezer to keep it from going rancid.  Then I have to warm it up to room temperature before I use it for baking bread.

Oh, no!  Not aquaponics again!  I hate to bore you again with that subject again, but, yes, that's it, all over again.  The continuing saga of aquaponics.  The never-ending (it seems) story. 

Well, at least now it has a gutter to help divert the rain, and a piece of corrugated vinyl to help keep the rain off.

After installing the gutter on the edge of the roof, and the corrugated vinyl to keep the rain off, and adjusting the water flow on the flush tank, I thought I had the whole thing figured out.  Wrong!  Without full water flow the flush tank would not flush!  And, every time the flush tank flushes, the grow beds would get too full of water.  No good.  Even though the grow beds were draining completely when I got them first set up, as time went by, they were draining more and more slowly.  Now, they will not drain quickly enough with the full water flow from the flush tank, so that they were overflowing every time.  Very frustrating.


My only option now is to bypass the flush tank entirely, and just water the grow beds using a timer.  It still works fine, but it's too bad, after going to all that work to get the flush tank put together and getting the thing finally working.  Well, the important part is to keep the fish alive, and to keep the plants properly watered.  Since the green bean seeds still have not started coming up, I decided to re-plant.  I figure with all the flooding and drying out over the last week, they probably died.  So, new green bean seeds last night.

Nope.  Nothing to do with aquaponics this time.  No, this is something totally different.  For those of you who have been following our family lately, this is something we (that is, Brenda and I) have been dreaming about recently.

Yep.  That's right.  A travel trailer.

It's ours.  We got it about 3 weeks ago.  We don't know beans from applesauce about how the thing works, but we are learning.  It's a steep learning curve.  It's 16 feet long.  I know.  We were talking about getting a cute little old antique from the 50's or 60's.  The problem we kept running into was that the ones we could afford were junk.  The ones that were really nice, and were in really nice condition, and useable, were terribly expensive.  This one is nearly brand new.  It's only 3 years old, and the company that owned it hardly used it at all.  The toilet never got used at all.  We got it for half the price of a new one.  You just can't beat that kind of a deal.


It even has a microwave.

We took it in to an RV repair shop here in Springfield to have it checked over, since it hadn't been used for a while, and everything checked out good.  Brenda and I are going to try to take it to the lake over the weekend just to try it out sometime soon.  We are getting some RV books and videos to study to learn about how the thing works.  We need to get a membership in some RV clubs and campground memberships and stuff, so that we know where we can camp out when we travel.  We are thinking about doing some traveling when I retire next year.

The toilet will be quite an adventure the first time we use that.

The table folds up and then it makes up into a full-size bed for Brenda and I.  It has heat and A/C.  It also has a refrigerator and a stove.

It only weighs 2,000 pounds, so it will tow very easily behind the Land Cruiser.  Really, it doesn't weigh any more than the older antique trailers from the 50's and 60's and they didn't have all the nice things in them that this one has.  So, we are very pleased with this.

Yup.  Aquaponics again.  I got it all finished yesterday.  Sort of.  I bought some goldfish a couple days ago and put them in the fish tank.  Then I got the rock and the grow media washed out and loaded into the grow beds.  Then I got the plumbing hooked up and the holes drilled in the workshop wall next to the fish tank.  Then I got the fish tank pump hooked up to the flush tank, and everything going and circulating yesterday evening.  Then we went to bed.


That's right, there are dead goldfish floating on the surface. Yuk.  You can see the water returning from the grow beds into the fish tank.  The black tubing is coming from the fish tank pump that goes to the flush tank on the grow beds.  I added more water later, so the water level is higher now.

The black tubing is coming from inside, goes to the flush tank.  The white pipe is the drain pipe that drains the water from the grow beds back to the fish tank.

This is the flush tank.  When it gets full, the water bottle pulls the flapper open, flushing the tank and emptying the water into the grow beds.  That waters the plants (which will be there eventually) and filters out the fish waste.

Now, back to the story.  Brenda and I were sleeping peacefully.  About 5 o'clock this morning we were awakened by the sound of thunder.  Now, it has been very hot and dry for some time here.  The grass is brown and dry and crunchy.  The grow beds are positioned directly under the eaves of the workshop, which do not have guttering or downspouts.  I am going to be installing guttering to keep the rain from pouring into the grow beds, but that is one thing I have not done yet.


So, you can imagine my consternation when we were awakened by the sound of thunder at 5 o'clock this morning.  I ran outside to find that the rain was already pouring into the grow beds which was already pouring into the fish tank.  If I didn't do anything, the additional water would very quickly overflow the fish tank.  So, I unplugged the water pump, preventing the pump from pumping water from the fish tank into the grow beds, and then I unhooked the drain pipe from the grow beds, allowing the water from the grow beds to drain onto the ground, instead of draining into the fish tank.


Brenda and I were soaked to the skin with the rain, but at least we saved the fish tank from getting too much rain water into it.  Later today I plan to install gutters on the roof, and a shelter over the grow beds to protect them from getting rained on again.  Then, I can re-start the circulation.  I planted bush beans in the grow beds yesterday, so with all the rain and warm temperatures they should be coming up in a few days.


Tilapia.  I plan to get some tilapia this weekend to add to the fish tank.  If things go well, they should be ready to eat in about 6 months.

Why tilapia, you ask?  Well, the idea is, that tilapia are much more tolerant of water conditions than other types of fish.  So, if the water isn't just the right temperature, or just the right amount of oxygen, or just clean enough, or just the right acidity level, and so on, they do just fine, while other fish would just die.  Tilapia are tropical fish, so the water does have to stay warm all the time.  That's why I have them in the freezer.  (The freezer doesn't work)  I know it sounds counter-intuitive, but the freezer is very well-insulated, so it will stay at a nice warm 80 degrees all year-round with very little electric heat input.  Which is why I have the two aquarium heaters in the fish tank.  The water actually feels cool, but that's because a person's skin temperature is 94 degrees, so 80 degree water will feel cool to touch.

Back to aquaponics again.  Yep.  I've been working on my aquaponics setup over the last two weeks, trying to get it all put together before the growing season ends.  I got water in the fish tank, one hundred gallons of water.  At first, I tried using the water from the rain barrels.  Each rain barrel holds 55 gallons, so you would think that would give me more than enough.  Nope.  The problem is, that as you drain the water off, the pressure gets lower and lower until you can't get any more water out.  Then, the drain is not in the bottom of the barrel, it's about three inches from the bottom, so that when I draw water from the barrel I don't get the dirt and sand off the roof.  So, there's always some water left in the barrel.  Anyway, I was only able to fill the fish tank about half full from the rain barrels.  So, I filled it the rest of the way from the well water.  Oh, well.

Fish tank.  It has two aquarium heaters to keep it warm, and an aquarium air stone to add oxygen.

So, this is what a chest freezer looks like when it's filled with one hundred gallons of water.  Brenda says it looks like a baptistry.  Pretty close, I suppose, except for the lid.  The next step will be to add fish, I guess, but that will have to wait until I get the grow beds hooked up.

The new grow beds.

This is the new grow beds system.  On the right end is the flush tank.  The fish tank has a pump that pumps water from the fish tank inside the building through the wall next to the door on the left, over to the tank on the right.  When the tank on the top right fills, a mechanism in the tank trips, sending the fish water through the pipes on top of the grow beds to water the grow beds.  When the tank is empty, the mechanism closes the valve and the tank starts to fill again.  The grow beds fill with the fish water, which filters through the grow media (clay pellets and rocks) and then it empties by gravity through the white plastic pipes at the bottom back to the fish tank, now clean.  When I have this all finished and going, I will have the grow beds filled with those bags of clay pellets that are sitting there at the bottom, and they will be planted with vegetable plants.  The vegetable plants will help to filter out the goo from the fish tank, which, of course, feeds the plants.  You have to have the right combination of plants, bacteria, worms, and fish all going together in harmony in order for this to work properly.  And, of course, it helps to have warm temperatures and sunshine.  As soon as I have the outdoor system up and running, I plan to get started building the indoors system.  Hopefully, having done it all once, it will go a bit smoother the second time around.  Also, I will already have the fish tank part done, so only the grow beds will need to done.  Hopefully, I will be able to get the indoors part put together before the weather gets cold.

New chickens.  Today we have new chickens.  We had chickens last year, some production reds, and then we had some Old English Bantams.  The rooster was real pretty, but he disappeared one day.  Since then the girls have not had a fellow around to give them protection.  Earlier this week we had an opportunity to do a trade, so we traded one of our production reds for three roosters.  The fellow who had the roosters said he was getting tired of all the crowing.  Since we have ten young hens that will be laying here in a few weeks we can afford to let go of one of the older hens.  So, we did the trade.  We got two barred rock roosters and one big dark colored rooster of uncertain breed, but he is pretty.  Now the girls have plenty of guys around to give them protection and, well, companionship.

Mark giving the chickens their daily afternoon scratch feed.

It didn't take long at all for the fellows to get very well acquainted with the girls.  One of the roosters has been following the big production red hen around ever since we brought him home.


This is a tomato hornworm.

You may ask, what does a tomato hornworm have to do with chickens?  Well, I noticed that something has been consuming our tomato plants.  With some investigation, I found this creature.  A tomato hornworm.  I fed the thing to the chickens.  They ate it.  It did take them a while to figure out that the thing is good to eat, though.  With more checking I found more hornworms.  Lots more.  So I have been feeding the chickens.  They have figured out that tomato hornworms are tasty treats.  That big production red hen and I are real good buddies.  She comes along with me when I check out the tomato plants.  Yesterday when I was checking the tomato plants she kept jumping and snapping at a tomato leaf.  I couldn't understand why until I found a big hornworm attached to the underside of the leaf.  I pulled it off and gave it to her.  She ate it.  Then I found a great big one on a potato leaf.  I gave it to her, but the rooster snapped it up, instead.  Why are they called hornworms?  Because they have that bright red horn-shaped thing on their tail end.  When they are completely still on a tomato stem, they are almost invisible.  You grab them and pull them off, and they squirm and try to bite you, and hit at you with that horn thing, and then they throw up nasty green stuff to make you let go of them.  They are like a big fat balloon.  The chickens snap at them with their beaks, and work on them for a while until they deflate, like letting all the air out of a balloon, and then down they go.

This is the chicken house.  Two houses.

We have three chicken houses.  I know, it is a lot.  The small one on the right is the one we started with many years ago.  It is heavily insulated, so it is very warm in winter.  I recently re-sided it with new plywood all over the outside, and new roofing material, and a new nesting box on the back.  The big chicken house on the left was there when we moved to the new place a year ago.  It is a metal building with a fiberglass roof, not insulated, but well-ventilated.  I did a lot of work recently to get it all cleaned out and renovated.  I built some new nesting boxes for it.  So it is in good condition now.  It is much larger and it will accommodate up to twenty chickens.  The one on the right will hold only about six or seven.  So, right now all the chickens are housed in the big house.  The small one is unoccupied.  When it gets cold,  I might try to move some of the hens to the small house, but chickens don't like change, so we'll see how it goes.  The third chicken house is what I call my summer house.  I built it at the last place.  It is a metal building.  I painted it white to keep it from getting too hot in the summer sun.  I haven't used it, since we have this metal chicken house that works just fine.  I may end up getting rid of it since we don't use it.

Antique cast-iron wood burning wood stove.  As you know, I am going to be remodeling my kitchen to accommodate my Kineo B wood burning cook stove.  You probably think I'm a little bit nuts for doing something like this.  Yup.  You probably are correct in that way.  I probably am a little bit nuts.  I think of it as a challenge.  I like keeping the old ways and the old skills alive.  In some ways we have become too dependent on modern conveniences and modern technology.  In many ways I do enjoy having modern conveniences.  I like having air conditioning and refrigeration and gasoline powered automobiles.  I really do.  I would hate to live like the Amish.  But, I recognize that all of those modern conveniences are based upon fossil fuels that aren't going to last forever.  And, when they run out the old skills will need to be re-learned.  People are going to need to preserve the knowledge that they developed over many years.  We don't need to reinvent the wheel.


The old cast iron cook stoves were developed in the 1800's as a direct result of the development of cast iron.  Iron foundrys were developed in the 1700's and really became prominent in the 1800's.  Cast iron became common during the 1800's and was used in many big construction projects, including bridges and skyscrapers.  One place cast iron came to be used was in the kitchen.  Pots, pans, kitchen utensils, and especially, the stove.  People had been cooking over the fire in the fireplace before this, which was very inefficient.  Almost all the heat energy went up the chimney.  The cast iron stove immediately changed that.  An air-tight wood stove can convert 80-90 percent of the heat energy of the wood into heat used in cooking and heating the room.  That's a huge improvement in efficiency.


The cast iron wood stoves continued to be sold until the early 1900's when gasoline became available and was cheap enough to be used, then electric stoves and natural gas stoves took their place.  Then the old cast iron stoves went out to the scrap yard.  Many of them ended up out in the wood shed or the dump out in the back yard.


Some intrepid soul in the Bangor, Maine Public Library scanned the 1912 catalog of the Noyes and Nutter Manufacturing Company in Bangor.  Here's the front of the catalog.

Noyes & Nutter

They scanned it, put it in .pdf format, and made it available on the internet for people like me to find.  So what, you may ask?  Well, as it happens, Noyes and Nutter is the company that manufactured the cast iron stove that I bought.  My Kineo B.  And, if you look in the catalog, on page 26, there it is!

There it is.  Page 26 in the catalog.

My Kineo B stove.  If you closely at the shelf in front of the oven door, you can see  the words, "Noyes & Nutter Manufacturing Bangor, Maine."

It's pretty cool, having that documentation.  In a way, it's hard to believe that wood stoves were still being manufactured that late.  I suppose there were some people that still were not connected to rural  electric clear up into the late 1950's that had to depend on kerosene lamps and wood stoves.  Noyes and Nutter went out of business during the Great Depression along with a lot of other companies.  People just weren't buying anything during those years.

Aquaponics.  This is my latest brainstorm.  As if I needed more hobbies and things to be involved with here on the Pearson farm, right?  For those of you that don't know what aquaponics is all about, I will give you a crash course.  You may be familiar with the term "hydroponics."  That is, growing vegetables and other plants in a water-based nutrient solution.  The problem has been that the plants produce waste products, and they use up the nutrients, so the water has to be renewed, and there's a lot of waste, and it's expensive to replace the nutrient solution.  Aquaponics solves a lot of those problems.  You raise fish in a tank.  The fish produce waste, the waste water is pumped over growing beds that grow plants.  The plants, and the microbes in the growing beds, and the worms in the growing beds utilize the waste products from the fish waste to produce vegetables.  The water is cleansed in the process, which then goes back into the fish tank, clean.  The water is completely recycled, except for what little evaporates.  The only thing that has to be added is the feed that is given the fish, since the plants live off of the fish waste.

Bathtub aquaponics.  The fish are in the tubs underneath.  The veggies live in the ones on top.  The water is pumped from the fish tanks to the grow beds on top, which then drains back down to the fish tanks underneath.

If you live in a tropical environment, you can do it this way.  But, not in Missouri.  Here, the weather is only warm enough to grow fish and plants for six months of the year.  The rest of the time you have to grow them indoors.  Therefore, the freezer.  The freezer, you ask?  Yup.  An old, broken-down chest freezer.  Doesn't work any more, but the insulation is great.  Which means that it holds the water temperature inside really well.  It's an 18 cubic foot chest freezer, which means it will hold about 100 gallons of water very nicely, and with two 300-watt aquarium heaters it will hold its temperature of 85 degrees year-round with very little electricity input.

Tilapia tank.  It may look like a chest freezer, but it's actually a tilapia fish tank for aquaponics.

The plan is to put two grow beds outdoors and grow veggies outside during the six months of warm weather, and then have two grow beds indoors and grow veggies indoors during the six months of cold winter weather.  You may ask, why bother to keep it going during the winter?  Why not just shut it down during the winter?  The answer to that is, that it takes 8-12 months for the fish to reach eating size.  If you start with baby fish in May when the weather gets warm, by the time the weather gets cold in October the fish won't be big enough to eat.  They would need another 4-6 months to get big enough to reach plate size.  Tilapia are the fastest to grow.  Catfish are even slower to grow. 12-18 months to reach full size.  If you let the water get cold, they stop growing.  They don't die, but they don't get any bigger.  So, that means it takes even longer.  The other option would be to buy bigger fish to start with, but then if you are going to do that, you might as well just go to the store and buy fish to eat.  The whole point of this is to have a whole system of growing fish and vegetables year round to grow and eat.


Barrel aquaponics.  I will be doing my barrel aquaponics indoors like this.

The barrels hold the gravel which is the grow beds for the plants.  The tank at the back holds the water from the fish tank, which flushes through the grow beds when the tank gets full.

This is more like what the outdoors grow beds will look like, except that the flush tank will be on top, at the far end.

The fish tank (the chest freezer) is inside the workshop, and the plumbing will run through the wall of the workshop to the outdoor grow beds.  Then, during the winter, I will drain all the water out of the outside grow beds, and switch everything to the inside grow beds.

I'm pretty upset with Phil.  Phil is the groundhog that lives at our place.  We named him after Punxsatawney Phil that predicts the coming of spring every year.  He eats our garden vegetables.  He particularly seems to enjoy the leaves on the broccoli plants, and yesterday he enjoyed eating the cucumber plants.

Phil

Brenda thinks Phil is kinda cute.  He's short, and fat, and he waddles when he walks around the yard.  But he leaves destruction in his wake.  Now I think I understand why my grandfather shot the groundhog when I was a little kid visiting those many years ago.  Only at the time he called it a woodchuck.  Same thing.  Phil lives in the cow shed down by my workshop.  He has dug himself a hole in the dirt floor.  Groundhogs are really good at digging.  Even in Ozarks rocky ground.  Phil may get evicted soon.

This is really gross.  This is the pig's head.  For head cheese.

You may ask, what on earth is head cheese, and why would anyone want to eat it?  Well, why does anyone eat hot dogs, or bologna?  Because they taste good, and because they are convenient foods to eat, of course.  That's why.  There's a lot of good meat on the pig's head, and a frugal farmer is not going to throw away good food.  So, you are going to put the pig's head in the oven to cook for a few hours until it is very soft and falling off the bones.  Then you let the meat cool, then chop the meat up fine, mix it with spices, put it in a bread pan and refrigerate until it sets up firm like gelatin, and then slice it.  Then, package it in slices like bologna for sandwiches, or for frying for breakfast.  You probably wouldn't want to serve the pig's head like this to guests.

My new Kineo B wood-fired cook stove

This is my new cook stove.  It came in the mail two weeks ago.  It weighs about 400 pounds.  All cast iron.  It was made sometime around 1900 by the Noyes and Nutter Manufacturing Company in Bangor, Maine.  It's called a "half back" because the back goes up half-way, instead of having a tall back.  It has a nice thermostat on the oven door, which is handy, and a nice shelf on the right side for setting hot dishes off the stove if you want them to stop cooking.  It has two shelves above the stove for warming food, such as for rising bread when you are getting ready to bake, or for keeping food hot, like when you are making lots of pancakes and need to pile them up someplace but want to keep them warm.
We are going to be remodeling the kitchen this summer to accommodate this stove, as there is no room for it right now.  It is sitting in its shipping container in the garage.  The plan is for it to be in the center of the house, so that when it is fired up, it will provide warmth and good smells that will fill the whole house.

         It's been a while since the last time I posted on this blog, so it's taking me some time to figure out how the thing works, so please be patient.  I remember now that there are two different ways of writing, one is called HTML, and then the other is just "compose" and they come out very different.  The HTML does not allow normal punctuation and paragraphs and so on, so everything come out in one long run-on sentence, which is not very readable.  So, today, we will try making things more in a readable format.
         Pictures.  I was discussing pictures with Brenda yesterday after I got home.  Blogs are not readable without pictures.  No one wants to read blogs without pictures.  They are like deserts.  Deserts.  Not desserts.  So, I will be taking lots of photos at home, and then loading them, and then sharing them here.  Lots of photos.  That's the only way to really communicate.  As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words.  At least a thousand.

This is my herb garden.  I enjoy growing herbs.  I don't always use them for cooking.  Sometimes I do, but lots of times I just enjoy growing them because they are beautiful plants, they smell wonderful, and they look so good.  I have parsley, rosemary, basil, thyme, cilantro, sage, and tarragon.  The nasturtiums, zinnias and marigolds are for flowers, although I am told that nasturtiums have a peppery taste in salads.  The plant in front is kalanchoe, not an herb or flower, just a succulent.  It was a survivor from the previous owner.  I also have chives, which have survived from several years' of growth.  They bloom every year, and they just keep coming back.  All the herbs I grew from seed this year.  The seed packets said they were very difficult to get them to germinate, but we had about two weeks of very cool, wet weather right when I planted them, and they all came up in the first week except the rosemary, which took another week to germinate.

Coffee tree.  This coffee tree has a long history.  It is more than ten years old, although it is still pretty small.  Brenda and I bought this thing when we were on our honeymoon in Hawaii in 2004.  Yup.  That's 13+ years ago, now.  We had it in a little tiny pot for about ten years, and for some strange reason it never seemed to get any larger.  Strange.  Then, when we moved to this house a year ago, we left it sitting outside.  That was in February.  Yes, February.  I figured the thing was dead for sure.  So, I didn't even think about it until later that summer when I was cleaning out some junk out back and saw that it was putting out new leaves!  It was ALIVE!  Yes, the coffee tree that refused to die.  So, I re-potted it, took care of it, I was real nice to it, and it took off, put on all kinds of new growth, and went from a little dead stick to a beautiful coffee tree again.  Then, this spring we got it this nice big planter and some nice new potting soil for it to grow in, and it has really taken off.  It has grown at least another foot since this spring, and I'm pretty sure it will put on at least another two to three feet of growth by the end of the year.  I'm thinking we may see coffee flowers and fruit this winter.  We will, of course, be moving it indoors when the weather gets cold this time.



Mark mowing.  This is Mark mowing with the sickle bar mower.  As with everything else around the farm, there's a long story attached here.  As you may recall, we now have 14 acres, and about 10 acres of that is brush that needs to be mowed at least two to three times a year to keep it from growing into forest.  I suppose it would be okay for it to be forest, but we don't really want it to be forest, we would prefer it to be pasture, or hay fields.  So, that means it needs to be mowed.  That means it has to have a tractor.  That's my tractor in the photo.  It's my 1945 B Farmall.  For those of you who may not be familiar with Farmall tractors, what that means is, that the rear end of the tractor is real wide, as you may be able to see in the photo, and the seat is offset to the right, and that is supposed to make it easy for the farmer to see the crops as the tractor goes over them, so that he drives the tractor between the rows and not over the top of the plants.  Anyways, that's what a B Farmall is.  Well, my tractor wasn't running this year, it needed work.  So, it got later and later in the year and the grass got higher and higher.  Finally, my very kind elderly neighbor, Mr. Forrest, came over and helped me do the tune-up it needed and got the tractor running so I could do the mowing.  Then, because the grass was so high and so thick and heavy, I broke the U-joint on the bush hog mower.  Twice.  The first time wasn't so bad, it was only $10 to fix it.  The second time was much worse, it twisted the second half off, also, so it was $60 to fix it.  That did it.  So, now I had to get the sickle bar mower out, since the bush hog mower just won't handle that heavy grass.  Therefore, the above photo.  It has been several years since I last had used the sickle bar mower and it needed some repairs.  The mold board had rotted away and had to be  replaced, and the transport bar had broken when we moved (that was exciting! It took off a mailbox when it suddenly extended down as we were going down the highway at 45 mph!).  So, that meant getting out the welder and doing some grinding and welding, and then fabricating a new mold board out of exterior grade plywood, and then finding a nut and bolt to fit.  But, after getting it all put together, and dribbling some 10W40 motor oil over everything and starting it up, it ran! 

The down side was, two days later, I discovered that there must have been poison ivy in all that grass, because I had to go to the doctor for some medicine, as I had poison ivy rash all over me.  So it goes.  No photo of the rash.  Sorry.

Everything's new. Everything's changed. We have moved. The Lord God made it clear to us in many different ways that we needed to move to a different house and property, so we picked up and moved to Willard, Missouri a year ago. It's kind of at the other corner of the Springfield. Instead of being at the northeastern side of Springfield, Willard is at the far northwestern corner of Springfield. Actually, we are about five miles north of Willard, which puts us nearly at the north edge of Greene county. So, you my ask, why am I even bothering to pick up this farm blog, anyway? Good question. Two answers. One, I always do like to write about all the projects I have going on at the farm, I guess I get that from my father. And, two, I recently purchased another wood-fired cookstove and we will be installing it in the kitchen during the summer when we remodel the kitchen and living room, and I enjoy writing about my cooking adventures with the wood and cooking on the stove. I don't have very many photos of the new house to share, but what I do have, I will attach. More photos to come. New potatoes. Now new potatoes may not mean much to some of you, but for those of you that have had new potatoes, there's really nothing like the flavor of new potatoes freshly dug from the garden. It's a little hard to explain at this point, so I guess it's best to just start at the beginning. This is the best photo I have of the new house right now. I'll get a better one later. The Lord God led Brenda and I to this listing at exactly the same time a year ago. The house was a mess, but we were convinced that it was right for us, so we bought it. It has a huge heating fireplace upstairs, which has been a real blessing this last winter. It has a really big kitchen, which I love. And, I will be installing a wood stove in the kitchen this summer, and we will be enlarging the living room to make more space for living room furniture. So, all in all, it has worked out just right for us. We have 14 acres here, which is more than enough space. We had 12 1/2 acres before, but we were getting new construction on both sides of us before, so it was getting closed in. Here, the trees keep us very private. Lots of farm land, wide open space. The farm pond is full of big trees, so it will need to be dug out and rebuilt, but no rush on that. We raised a pig last year and butchered it. About 400 pounds, I would guess. It was huge. Massive. I was blessed by some good friends from church who came to help me butcher it. I could never have done it by myself. It took us about five hours to do the job. It was exhausting. It was well after dark by the time we were done. We gave a lot of the meat away to the friends who helped me with the job, and we have since given away a lot of the meat to friends and family. We still have hundreds of pounds in the deep freezer, so we aren't going to raise another pig until this meat is consumed. We are still working on the rabbits, the deer, and the sheep from last year. Rabbits. Wow. Rabbits. We got four rabbits from some friends. Two of them were really good at having baby bunnies. Really good. We got 40 babies in one year. That's a lot of rabbit. We still have rabbit in the freezer. It's really good. Tastes like chicken. I'll bet you didn't know that a rabbit has white meat just like a chicken, but in a different place. That's true. On a rabbit the white meat is along the spine, on the back. Beautiful white meat, just like a chicken breast. Since we have so much meat in the freezer I decided I would concentrate on the vegetable garden this year. I am doing something new, called a drip watering system. You may be familiar with a soaker hose? Well, a drip watering system is better. It has a tiny hole about every 8 to 12 inches, and it's on a very low pressure system, so the water just drips (right!) out very slowly. You lay out a line along each row of vegetables, so that the water goes directly to the row of plants. That way the water goes only to the plants, not to the ground in between. It's much more efficient than the old water sprinkler, where you would put a sprinkler somewhere in the middle of the garden, hoping to cover most of the garden. Turn the water on all the way. The garden right in the middle gets sopping wet. The garden at the edges stays bone dry. All the paths get lots of water, even though they don't need to be watered. Very inefficient. This is much better. Early girl tomato. Ripe tomato 50 days after transplanting. That's what it says. I guess we'll see. Right now I have several tomatoes on my Early Girl plants and it's been about four weeks since transplanting, so we may make it.