Newsletter #253 2024 Apr 05 Friday
A really good week, especially on the pig front
For those of you new to Substack, which is most of you I think; if you click on the title it will take you to the post on Substack. Poke around on the Homestead Rebel page to get familiar with how things work. Do a search for some topic on your mind in the larger Substack universe and see what comes up; there is some great writing on the platform, and most content creators provide a lot of free content.
Primal Woods
Sawmill Services
The picture at the top is the product of last week’s milling job with Mary Ann.
I’ve got the logs lined up for George’s job; I’m planning to have the milling done next week.
I plan on milling all 25 logs over the course of 4 days; lumber will be moved directly to the kilns, 2” thick (8/4, said “eight quarter”) in one kiln, and 1” thick (4/4, said four quarter”) in the other kiln.
Homestead Rebel Farm
The ramps are coming in the woods, as they do every spring. When the canopy closes after the trees have fully leafed out, that’s it for the ramps. Ramps are also referred to as “wild onion,” “wild leek” or “wild garlic;” we find the flavor to be a mild combination of onion and garlic, perfect with eggs from where I sit. Like a green onion, the leaves and the root bulb are edible. Unlike green onions, ramps are in short supply as we have modified our environment for human activity; they are protected in Canada. We don’t take the bulbs, only the leaves, which can be used fresh of course this time of year, and Geri dehydrates and grinds the leaves for use as a dried herb.
Above is the solar array at its winter angle; I didn’t get around to changing the solar array angle until Mar 31, the spring equinox was on the 19th.
A couple of wrenches and 30 minutes later, the array is set to its spring/fall angle of 40 degrees from the horizontal.
And we are already starting to lay in next years firewood supply, as this year’s heating season comes to a close.
Between cleaning up the pasture across from the Farmhouse, which will be home to the Katahdin sheep next year, and restoring lake access from the Farmhouse, we should have all the firewood we need for the 2024/2025 winter.
Layers
Either I have been mis-counting, or God has blessed us with a 13th Golden Laced Wyandotte chick. Actually if my memory serves, Geri said there were 13 from the git-go. Men are stubborn fools sometimes, fortunately we are not alone!
Pigs
We will bring on 8 pigs this year as mentioned last week; we were able to hold the line on the price of the piglets, by buying from the Amish. Ervin and I stood and chatted about pigs, sheep, and farming in general, and one by one there were soon 5 young boys, having completed their chores, right there with us. That’s the good stuff.
There are a total of 12 piglets with the sow; I put a down payment on 8 of them this week. Tentatively we are planning to pick them up the first or second week of May, after they’ve been weaned.
Oxen
The coniferous tree (cedar), up behind Elmer, is sitting pretty close to the East fence line of the oxen’s winter pasture; the West line runs just over and behind Boris’s rump. Notice how that first paddock is greener than the rest of the pasture? That’s the advantage of having the oxen on pasture all winter instead of in the barn; no manure spreader required, Boris and Elmer thoroughly fertilized the paddock with manure and urine, and the grass will be much better for it. This is how the Great Plains were made, grass and bison together. You cannot grow plants sustainably without animals in the mix; it just doesn’t work without the ruminant mowing and fertilizing the grass.
Today I also planned for more paddocks to the East of the existing paddocks. I reckon I can fit 8 more 1/4 acre paddocks before reaching the East property line; that will give us 10 paddocks. More on how that will work in the future I’m sure. For now I’m going to leave the Oxen in paddock #2 that I reported on a couple of weeks ago, build one new paddock to the East, and move them to the third paddock after the grass has a bit more time to get established.
News
Good news! And from the Washing Post no less.
“The Washington Post ran a surprisingly encouraging and optimistic story last week headlined, “Wait, does America suddenly have a record number of bees?” Why yes, yes it does. According to WaPo, America’s critically important honeybee population has somehow survived decades of disaster and rebounded to an all-time high. From the USDA’s five-year survey:
How could this happen? The Post’s reporter buzzed around, doing some actual investigative journalism, and tracked the majority of the bee increase to Texas. It turns out that in 2012, Texas passed an agricultural property tax exemption for — you guessed it — beekeeping.
Several other states have followed suit; I happen to know Florida has similar rules. Pay less property tax by keeping bees. So simple.”
That was from Coffee & Covid, to which I subscribe; it goes well beyond Covid.
Bad News!
NATO. I think I’ve written before that once upon a time I assumed that our leaders were simply stupid, or ignorant; that’s a bad assumption. Our leaders are just operating within a different system of incentives, disincentives, constraints and/or lack of constraints, than are we mere mortals.
Blinken, U.S. Secretary of State, stated within the past couple of days, that “Ukraine will join NATO.” This is very bad for many reasons, but I’ll just mention two:
Article 5 of the NATO treaty requires member nations, that would be us, to treat an attack on another member country, like Ukraine let’s say, as an attack on our own soil.
The Russians have said for years, that NATO expanding to Russia’s border, through Ukraine in particular, is the Red Line of all red lines; they will do something about it, and it won’t be pretty. Ukraine is a real sore spot, because invasions of Russia came have come through Ukraine more than once.
We’ve already enchroached on Russia’s border, and from what I can see with the addition of just two more countries NATO would be on Russia’s entire western flank. What did we do when the Warsaw Pact, led by the Soviet Union, put missles in Cuba? Where do you suppose we will put missles if Ukraine becomes a NATO member?
If you care about why, how, when and where our service members are sent to die, supposedly in service of our country, call or write your Congressman and Senators to stop the feds from signing us up for yet more death and destruction.
Glenn Greenwald’s very informative episode on the subject can be found here; it’s about the first 35 min of the video.
Books
I read some in The Devil’s Chessboard, then went back to Giants In The Earth until I closed that out.
This week in Chessboard came a discussion of McCarthyism. And what a disgusting era it was; even Eisenhower was afraid of this monster. In what perhaps is one of very few good things that Allen Dulles ever did, he was finally the one to stop McCarthy, at the CIA’s front door of course, but only after McCarthy had decimated the ranks of the State Department, which his older, weaker brother, Foster, led as Secretary of State. Republicans run amok, not even able to control one of their own. Of course this was the hunt for communists, supposedly, which is to say anyone, for the most part, who was a leftover New Dealer from FDR’s reign. After being stopped by Dulles, it only took a few years until McCarthy had killed himself by alcohol. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.
Could such a thing happen now? Absolutely, in my estimation. Anti-vaxxers, White Nationalists (code word for “white supremacists”), Christian Nationalists are now a thing, transphobes, homophobes, election deniers, climate deniers; take your pick, or just go for the whole shootin’ match. Yes, it could happen. We have not “evolved” as a species beyond such things, as some would like to believe.
I wrote at the outset that this book was going to be a tough read; that’s proving to be true. Next up I see is Allen’s first coup; Iran circa 1951.
History my friends, when it is written by someone other than the victors, is a cold, hard bastard; it gives no quarter. Unfortunately for the most part, books like Chessboard are not taught in schools; if they were we might not be in the jam we are in. And I’ve come to the conclusion that knowledge is not power; to grow power from the seed of knowledge one has to act on what he or she knows. We the People have failed to act to rein in our government.
When you grow up as a patriotic American, believing everything you’re told about the greatness of this nation, it is a real jolt to learn of the evil we’ve perpetrated, starting with the indigenous people of North America, and continuing without end as it turns out. Okay, ‘nuf said, for now.
I finished the reading of Giants In The Earth. I don’t want to reveal any plot spoilers…let’s put it this way, the last 80-100 pp reminded me of The Long Winter, by Laura Ingalls Wilder; not the most famous of the Little House series, but my personal favorite. In fact the two books cover the same winter, 1880-1881. They were heating with hay twisted into what they called fagots (i.e. bundles), which burns fast and feeding the fire was therefore almost a 24/7 job, no wood to be had; just like in The Long Winter.
But the greatest hardship of all for the settlers was the scarcity of fuel — no wood, no coal. In every home people sat twisting fagots of hay with which to feed the fire.
Whole herds of cattle were smothered in the snow. They disappeared during the great early storm in October…in the spring, they would reappear on some low hillside…a horrible sight.
And the same thing happened to people…
Giants In The Earth, p 489.
The snow was so deep only the chimneys could be seen above their sod houses, . Blizzard, true white-out conditions. My Mom had told me that to avoid getting lost between the house and the barn farmers would run a line between the two. Even so, people got lost, and died, feet from the house. How they managed to keep livestock alive is beyond me, but they did. They were running out of food. The outhouses were blown apart, or buried in snow. Tough, indescribably tough people, our forebears; it’s hard to believe that it was less than 150 years ago.
Came across this quote, which I’ve noticed that the Amish hold to when they arrive in the area:
<The Irish> have a proverb which says that a good barn may perhaps pay for a decent house, but no one has ever heard of a fine dwelling that paid for a decent barn.
Giants In The Earth, pp 455-456
The barn, the means of provision, comes first; the Amish house might be still wrapped in Tyvek 5 years later. Put first things first.
The title of the book is from Genesis:
There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.
The last chapter is titled, “The Great Plains Drinks the Blood of Christian Men and Is Satisfied.”
As I reflect on the book, I know that I missed a lot of subtlety; it wouldn’t hurt to go back and read it again, but I won’t. If you’re from the Dakotas though, and South Dakota in particular, Giants In The Earth is a must read.
Online Presence
We have one issue left to resolve; for some reason Shopify is not allowing us to integrate UPS as a shipping option; Lisa is working on it. Other than that, the new site is ready to go! When it goes live I will definitely put up a post. I hope you will have a look around on the new site, and do some shopping!
All the best, and may God bless you and yours,
John & Geri
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