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.