‘The Farm’ Articles
Check out our recycled farm house, buy some beef or a heritage turkey and find out what happenes when your farm straddles three vegetation zones in the great state of Texas.
Written by Pineknot on 28 June 2010
When you live or work or play on a farm, its the constancy of nature’s dynamics that gets to you. What I mean to say is, nothing the same any day I go out to the farm, and yet its always about seasons and cycles and such.
Take for instance bugs. Right now, out at the farm, there are a million insects. They are flying everywhere, moths and butterflies eating sap and whatever else they eat, June bugs pouncing on the screens at night dying, literally, to go into the light. I’m used to seeing giant cockroaches, so much so, that I think anytime I see a fairly large brown object move, inside or out, its one of them. But nooo.. not out at the farm. If they were roaches, we’d call it an infestation. There are that many crickets making their home in our organic refuse. Something about them flitting across, rather than roaches makes me feel very good.
Then this caught my eye while I was weeding the garden. I love the plant cock’s comb. For some reason they are hard to grow, and despite the jillions of seed we planted, only two plants survived. I looked this little bugger up on google. Isn’t she cute?
I thought it weird that she was on this flower. But given that her common name is Flower Crab Spider (which translates into Misumena vatia), she is just where she is supposed to be. Guess she thinks some other tinier tasty little insecct morsels are going to come her way, given the beeeuuttiful magenta flower she is sitting on.
Ahhh.. the cycle of life.
Tags: Farm, Insects
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Written by Pineknot on 16 May 2010
We raise prime Angus Beef cattle. We are committed to responsible husbandry and specialize in healthy, hormone free animals.
Tags: cattle company
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Written by Pineknot on 28 February 2010
Strange the things you don’t know… like where in the heck do ladybugs go when they aren’t eating the aphids off your summer plants and garden? (Coccinellidae is their, um serious, scientific name.) Seriously, where do they go? I am not even sure I wondered about that until I realized that hundreds of them were at our farm for the winter, in very strange places.
Still, not moving much, they lined up in the door well of Jake’s F450. Down in the woodpile, nestled among the cracks and crannies made by layered logs, their little round bodies lay. Most often on the south side…
At first I thought they were dead. And then I looked it up on Wikipedia.
Yeah, just like bears, they hibernate. Well, okay, maybe not just like bears, but you get the idea. Waiting patiently, hungrily for the spring sun to make days a little longer and those pesky little aphids and scales to come for lunch, there they wait, amid ice and snow and cold.
See?! They are like little self sufficient tanks… ladybug tanks…
Tags: Science
Posted in The Garden | 1 Comment »
Written by Pineknot on 28 December 2009
The Kitchen
looked like this:
Please note the brown paneling and the yellow linoleum, two very popular items.. in hmm.. about the 60′s .. I should know, we had them in our house in Arkansas…
For a little better frame of reference, it also looked like this…
(Just so you know… that yellow linoleum was glued, ALL OVER, to the floor and if not for the leak under the sink, evidenced by the blue bucket you see, we would never have discovered that the glue, while impenetrable to jack hammers, tile and cement removers and all manner of nasty, organic solvents… all it took was a little… well, no, a rather large leak from under the sink one night after we left, that all we needed was to douse the floor in water… just so you know.)
And the sink, at least 70 years old looked like this…
And after several Brother Neil man hours, looked like this…
And then,
After Grandmother did her magic…
Come have lunch with me!!
Tags: The Farm
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Written by Pineknot on 07 December 2009
Old houses, before there were utility rooms, had a windowed room, just about big enough to put an old washtub or if you had a lot of money, a ringer washing machine. In our old farm house, being from the 30s and having gone through decades of use, sported an added on, lean-too, decaying room tacked to the back porch…
So the first thing you have to do it to get help to tear down the lean too…
And a little more muscle…
And now for the roof!
In another post we’ll go over just how hard it was to reframe those windows… for now, just trust me.
You gotta get the new door dimensions right… okay, so Silent Bob and Brother Neil don’t trust me. Just cause I messed up that one time… geez.. such perfectionists.
A little architectural landscaping…
Go Johnny, GO!
The first AFTER!
Tags: The Farm
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Written by Pineknot on 17 November 2009
One of the first things we had to do with that old farm house, was level it up. There’s a lot of sand at the farm and when the old farm house was brought up from old town Houston, where she’d been since the early 30′s, the footings they placed her on weren’t the best.
There wasn’t a door or a window that wasn’t cattywomped. (that’s an Arkansas word.. or an onomatopoeia… I am not sure.)
Basically nothing opened or closed. And there was one certain door, a an old timey, swingin’ one between the kitchen and dining room, that hadd been left open when the house started to go kattywomped and the whole side of that part of the house sort of rested on it… permanently open unless we found a way to straighten everything out and up.
Leveling a house is not as simple as it sounds. There’s a lot of things to thing about.
We first had to assess the situation (I love using that term ‘we’ loosely).
If you take his shoes off, he won't melt into the ground.
From every angle.
Please note that he is standing in what used to be the furnace hole in the hallway.
Neil had a plan. First we bought 17 timber jacks. And then we bought bags and bags of concrete. And then the men on the premises scooted under the house while the women in the group toted water and everybody shoveled and carted cement to the holes that were being dug in just the right places under the house.
Ahhh...cement....
The first jack.
And then it got harder.
So here’s the thing. For the next 3 three weekends, Silent Bob and Brother Neil went under that house, digging holes and ladeling concrete, until a little more than 23 jacks were intalled, permanently, underneath the most important joists of that old farm house.
And then, for the next three months, slowly, the jacks were turned, each at their own pace and place, as slowly that old house got back to plumb. She would creak and groan, each weekend, old timbers shifting, the weight of that 70 year old house, repositioning itself over new foundations of concrete piers and red timber jacks.
It’s not easy to get an old house back to plumb. A house is after all, a three dimensional thing, and leveling and plumbing means considering just about every angle from every angle in every room.
But there did come the day, that the old swingin’ door, moved slightly towards its frame and then swung freely, just as it was made to do.
We sat on the ground the last real day of jack adjustment, and each in our own thoughts, Mother, Neil, Bob and I pondered just how hard a job that it all was. To my mind, it was sheer genius on Neil’s part to have left those timber jacks in place, for if that old farm house should start to lean one little bit, it’s just a turn of the jack screw we’ll do. We won’t let her get so far that her doors and windows wont’ work.
It’s hard to escape the value of foundation. Without it, you’re pretty cattwomped.
Tags: The Farm
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Written by Pineknot on 01 November 2009
We bought the farm… in early 2008, a skinny little piece of land, that rolls up and down, just outside of Hempstead. We got good neighbors, Gene and Debbie on one side and the Buddhist Meditation Center on the other.
Our first walk in the pasture, January 08, with yankee weed all over.
I heard a rancher say one time that he didn’t want all the land, just what bordered his, and while I get that, we still have, well, just that one little piece. But it’s the home of GalleyWinter Cattle Company and its the home of our heart.
Side of house... the before pic
Stay tuned here for what we did with the condemned old farm house that came with that skinny piece of land as well as the goings on city slickin’ cow raisin.
Tags: The Farm
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