Duties of a Father

This post may seem off topic and overly philosophical, but it is a notion integrally part of how and why we are doing what we are doing with our homestead.  It's something that I must share if one is to understand what drives us forward.

I grew up in a very modest farm-type family.  I say farm-type because our family farmed when I was very young, but after that was involved in agriculture in various capacities after that, generally working for someone else.  I remember my Dad being the hardest working man I know, and someone that always put his kids and wife before himself.  He never became wealthy; in fact, quite the opposite is true.  But, he managed to raise 4 kids pretty well, I believe.  I am the oldest child in our family and my next brother is a year younger.  We're both married with large families.  We both take our jobs as husbands and fathers very seriously and I credit my dad for that.  I have a college education and law school degree, but the lessons I learned from my father have proven to be the most valuable knowledge I have--and my only regret is that I didn't listen more closely when I was young.

When I was 19, I left home to give my life to God as a priest.  I spent three years in the seminary and was so happy and so at peace.  There was no shred of doubt in my mind that I wanted to serve God completely as a priest.  However, God had other plans, and it took a great deal of prayer, struggle, and tears to come to this realization, and I left.  I felt so alone because nobody could understand why I would leave the seminary, but I did, because in my heart, I knew God was asking me to serve Him elsewhere.

Soon after leaving, I began dating the woman that would become my wife and we now have 5 small children.  I am so blessed and am very thankful for the opportunity to be a father.  But, being a dad is hard work, must harder than I ever expected.  Much harder than I think celibacy would have been.  But, it's my vocation, and one that I live with great love and commitment, if not always the greatest joy.

Here I am, and it's been 10 years since I married and I find myself struggling to identify who I am and how I want to live.  Having discerned a call to be a lawyer, I invested myself in that endeavor, and graduated with a law degree at age 27, with no savings, no land, 2 kids, and plenty of debt.  I am a pretty good lawyer, but my no means a highly successful lawyer in a worldly sense.  I make a decent living, but probably not yet enough to put me in a position better than I would have been had I just skipped college and law school and started farming on my own.

I spend many days wondering to myself, why did God call me to this life?  I find satisfaction in my profession, but feel like the life I desire for my family is always just out of reach.  Once you've jumped on the treadmill of a modern professional career, and the investment that goes with it, it's hard to jump back off.  Student loans, bar dues, mortgages, all of these things that are necessary to live a modern professional life make it almost impossible to escape that life.

We've owned two homes and are working on our third.  We've lost money on the first two.  The dying housing market, along with hyperinflation, make it almost impossible to catch up and life debt free.  My job takes me away from my family for about 60+ hours per week.  While a necessary part of life, I find myself always longing for less work and more family.  I desire to be with my children more, so that I may teach them, guide them, and provide a holy (hopefully) example for them.  I have a greater desire to be with them now that they are young than to enjoy trips and the "good life" when I'm retired.  That's what I desire, but somehow, I feel like it is an impossible endeavor.

We plod on, and continually surrender our lives and this process to the Lord.  I ask the Lord to help me be a good and holy man, a caring husband, a loving father.  Being a good man and loving father in this world is harder than I could have ever imagined.  I thank God for the internal desire to be better, and hope and pray that God's grace will make me so.

Blessings my dear friends.

Fall is fast approaching

After what has seemed like a mercilessly long summer, fall seems to have finally arrived.  You can just feel it when you go outside.  You can smell it.  You can sense it.  The garden senses it too, as things go through their final maturation.  The potatoes we lovingly planted, mulched, and weeded throughout the summer are now brown and ready for digging.  The pumpkins are turning orange.  We're just about sick from eating garden fresh melons, but that doesn't stop us from having just one more.  The sweet corn has been picked and now mowed down with the rotary mower, soil food for next year's crop.  Squash are starting to turn and the tomatoes more than we can keep up with.  Despite the odd summer, we fared much better than many, so for that we are thankful.  Many of the new berries we started this summer are thriving and offer promise for next year.

A few observations and musings:  I think the black plastic with strawberries makes so much sense.  Once we got the strawberries inside the electric fence so the deer would stop munching them down, they took off and are full and lush and ready for the next growing season.  I went through the patch a few times this summer and pulled off the runners so we can have nice healthy plants for next year.

The trellis for the blackberries seems to be working very well too, although for the raspberries I believe I'll keep the top set of wires further apart than I did with the blackberries.  I think it will be good for the tops of the canes to be able to hang out further and have more air between them.  I'll be anxious to see how the blackberries do next year after I've pruned the 2nd year canes.

I have the best luck with cool weather plants (e.g. broccoli, cauliflower, kohlrabi, lettuce) by planting for a fall harvest.  Next year I'll do the same with peas.  You plant the seeds in the garden in late July and by the time they get established, you have 2-3 months of cool growing conditions so the plants thrive and the fruit is tasty and tender.  Unless you're able to get them in early in the spring, they don't seem to mature until the heat of the summer is upon you, which stresses the plants and makes the fruit more bitter.

Here's some updated pictures from the homestead.  The cabin is coming along.  The steel roof went on the last week and they are putting pine up for the soffit, which will then be cut out for vents.  We're still debating on what kind of windows to put in, but hope to reach a decision on that in the next day or two.  Then it will be boring holes in the walls for the wiring and cleaning out the cavities with a stiff piece of wire.  After the wiring is done, we'll then move to insulating the ceiling of the loft and hanging sheetrock.  Finally, we'll finish the kitchen and add hardwood flooring on the main floor (likely hickory at this point).  I'm shopping around for a wood cook stove to warm the cabin and to give us an opportunity to learn to cook with wood.

Sweet corn after harvest

Corn stalks mowed down with rotary mower

Freshly cut hay

Trusty Ford 9N and our dump rake

Raked hay

Raked hay

My little boy helping water the fruit trees

Loft after roof installed

View from woodline

Front of cabin with steel roof almost complete

Rear of cabin with new roof

Pine car siding for soffit (vents to be cut in later)

Videos and such

I remember when cell phones first came out with cameras and then video cameras.  I thought it was such a ridiculous notion.  Now I find I use them all the time to catch life's moments, for use at work, and as a quick and easy way to document some of the things we do around the homestead.  The quality of the camera and the cameraman are not great, but it's something, and sometimes it's easier to explain things in video than photo.

I have tried uploading videos directly to the blog, but find it to be slow and only practical if the clips are quite short.  So, I've created a Youtube page to upload things and invite you to subscribe.  My channel is named "Homestead2Emmaus".  Here are a few videos I recently uploaded.

Here's a link to a video on how our blackberries are doing with the new trellis system.

Here's a link to a video showing the outside of the cabin and here's one of the inside, still under construction.

Here's a link to a video about our grape arbor and here's one about our strawberries.  I hope you enjoy.

A roof over our heads

The guys started working on the roof of the cabin this week.  Seeing the logs go up was certainly exhilarating, but I think seeing the roof go up was the most dramatic change in one day.  It also makes things start to look complete, but is likely one of the last phase of the project that will seem dramatic.  Everything else, with the possible exception of adding the steel and windows, will happen more slowly and less noticeably.  With that in mind, here's some updates.  I'm going to shop a local Amish store this Saturday for windows and will need to finally get ready for electric, insulation, sheetrock, and flooring.

View of gardens from loft window

Overhangs done and roof sheathing going up

Loft beams

Rear side with loft dormer

Loft

Blackberries: be fruitful and multiply

I finally finished the trellises for the blackberries, other than a few steel posts I need to add. I still have to tie up the thornless vines, as they are starting to get long enough. Only time will tell whether the posts remain sufficiently tight under the weight of the berries, particularly the thornless, which are entirely non supporting. If that happens, I may have to add a brace or a deadman.  I'm including links to two videos I created of the process.  BEFORE and AFTER.

Before: tangled mess

After

Blackberry trellis

Today I finally got started on the blackberry trellis.  As I've indicated in prior posts, I've been dissatisfied with the cages we had first tried to hold up the blackberries.  The canes are simply too tall, and as a result, they bend over under the weight of berries and get tangled at a minimum, and break off at worst.  Plus, it's almost impossible to watch them enough to feed the new canes up through the cages, and once they grow out one of the holes on the cages, you cannot feed them back through, as the canes are brittle and will crack and break.

Earlier this week I grabbed two railroad ties I had laying around and set them at the ends of one row.  I then purchased the wire.  I had thought about using barbed wire, since I have plenty laying around, and it's not as if the barbs will be even close to as bad as the thorns on the canes, but I was afraid the barbs might damage the canes if they moved back and forth in the wind.  I needed some smooth wire.

In the past, I've used #9 wire for fencing--mostly for brace wire on long fences--but thought it would do the trick.  Unfortunately, it's very expensive and I didn't even see any at the farm store I visited this morning, so I decided to try high tinsel wire, a new for me.  After reading the instructions, I decided it was the most economic alternative and would also allow me to tighten the wires as needed.

We started by removing the existing cages--a process that could only be done with bolt cutters to cut the cages apart because the canes were so intertwined.  Once that was done, I strung some rope along both sides of the row and hand tightened it so as to get the canes off the ground.  I then strung out and installed two strands of wire.  The bottom strand is approximately 30 inches off the ground and the top strand is approximately 5 feet high.  This week I'll set the posts for the other two rows of berries and then put up trellises for both.  Here's some photos and video of the process.

Corn and Logs

Like much of the country, this was an unusually dry year for us.  We had to water much of the garden, although the long row crows, like corn, didn't get watered because we lack the means to run a sprinkler.  Everything gets hand watered.  As a result, the corn suffered, although not as bad as we had predicted.  Because corn needs a certain amount of rain during the pollination process (i.e. tasseling), the lack of rain prevents the corn from getting nice full ears of corn.  Accordingly, we ended up with a fair number of ears that were underdeveloped, particularly on the first batch.  Nonetheless, we were able to pick enough to make about 120 quarts of sweet corn, plus quite a few meals in between.  On a good year, the yield would have doubled, at least.

Now that the drought is essentially over for us, we're having trouble keeping things dry enough to keep the cabin builders moving.  But, they continue to plug along and all the walls are up. Today they are supposed to start cutting in the timbers that make up the loft floor.  Next week should entail substantial progress on the roof.  We can't wait for that to take shape.

In the next few days, I plan to start work on a more permanent trellis for our blackberry patch, which has become entirely unruly.  We have both thorned and thornless.  The thornless are more like a grape vine, in that they tend to grow long and are generally nonsupporting.  The thorned, besides being more hardy for zone 4, are generally more upright like raspberries.  But, they grow tall (some are over 7 feet tall) and the cages we attempted to use simply are not going to work because it's difficult to get the canes to grow up through them, and they tend to droop over under the weight of berries and can break off.  So, I'm going to anchor posts on each end of each row and string multiple courses of wire on which to tie up the berries (both the thorned and thornless).  It's not going to be a very pleasant process with the thorned berries, but will be well worth it once it's done.

Here are some recent pictures of the gardens and the cabin.