TheBar1 Homestead- From a sword to a plowshare

Well after we built the pen last week for Terri and talking to the Chief, we decided to invest in a lathe and all of the pen turning equipment involved to try and do it ourselves.  Not saying I will be seeming much but at least for now I will be playing with it.  The one good part about being where we are is the availability of good olive wood form the holy land to use, so I have put out a few feelers to find me some wood that I will be able maybe use next year (need to give it time to age and dry). I really love the look of olive wood, and with the closeness of the Holy Land most of the pen kits I bought to build have a religious theme such as Celtic crosses and the such.  I am hoping to be able to work on  goblets and beer tankards eventually, Chief says it is not to hard but I have only turned one pen so far and had alot of help with that!!!  Spent a good part of my holiday weekend watching you tube videos of all kinds of turning and the more I see it the m...

Well, this weekend was a first for me, my first real attempt at wood working.   My boss at the office right now is an Air Force Chief Master Sergeant (for military folk, an Air Force E9).  Lately as an office  fund raiser he has been selling these custom wooden pens, he orders the pen sets and blocks of wood and basically uses a lathe to turn the wood into the shape of the pen he is making.  Each pen is unique to the wood and grain of the wood and they make some beautiful pens.  Below is one of his pens I purchased. This weekend he invited me over to give it a try myself, and I have to admit I may be hooked.  The first thing I had to do was pick out a pen set.  I really had to idea of how many different options there were!  At the end of the day I picked a gun metal cigar style twist pen.  Next thing I had to do was pick out a block of wood that would become my pen.  Most of the wood he had was darker colored wood but I wanted somet...

Well, have not posted in a few weeks now, work has been pretty busy with some long days.  I enjoy the challenges of this job and get to make more of an impact on things then I ever thought I would but find myself more and more frustrated with the bureaucracy and more and more ready to get out.  Every morning when Terri and I go for our walk before work all I can talk about is the Homestead and things I would like to do.  I am leaning more and more towards not even putting in my packet this year for promotion, I really do not know what I would do if I was selected. Unfortunately I have not been able to do much research over the last couple of weeks so not much to talk about this week as to what exactly I will do or what I am planning but instead will talk about some hopes and goals as well as things we are looking forward to trying. Terri has always talked about salted hams, rather then the precooked sugar hams which is really all you can find these days.  Being i...

Well I have been reading my rear end off doing research for the homestead so today I am going to talk about a couple of the books I read or am in the process of reading if I may. The first is Storey’s Guide to Raising Rabbits by Bob Bennett.  To be honest it was kind of hard to get by the first chapter, while the information is good the author comes across as condescending stating a lot of opinions (which granted at backed up with over 50 years of experience) and presenting them as facts.  He comes off as a such a breed snob to the point I had to do research to see if he was a president of some breed association or something.  The book really should be call Storey’s Guide to Commercially Raising Rabbits.  Mr. Bennett, looks at everything through a commercial lens, and that is not really what I want to do, but he assumes that is the only reason to raise rabbits, to make money on them.  The book is not really all that useful for what I am looking at, he d...

  Perennial Wooded Garden What is a perennial wooded garden?   A perennial wooded garden is known by other names such as a survival garden or hidden food plot or permaculture.  A perennial wooded garden is not  as much a garden as we see it with its organized rows but more of an organized chaos.  The main focus of the perennial wooded garden is the one time planting of trees, shrubs, vegetables and herbs that continue to grow and produce year after year with little to no human input.  It is much as it would grow in the wild with the exception that we plant it where it will most compliment or benefit the other plans in your gardens yet it maintains it natural chaotic appearance rather than in neat orderly rows. Rick Austin is the person who I am basing most of this idea on.  I recently listened to a web seminar that he was a part of and just ordered his book “ Secret Garden of Survival: How to grow a camouflaged food- forest. ” Which is wh...

Pre serving Food Other than figuring out how I am going to harvest grain, preserving food is probably the thing that intimidates me most next.  In order to be as self-sufficient as possible in a northern environment I need to be able to preserve food for year round usage.  When you talk about butchering a whole pig or cow, let’s face it, that is a lot of meat.  Freezing it all is just not an option when you also want to put some veggies (like corn on the cob) in there as well as some poultry and a rabbit or two!  Not to mention you need to have a backup plan if electricity is lost for an extended amount of time.  This week I am signed up for a web seminar called “Beyond Off Grid Summit” that will have many classes including one on canning and one on traditional food preservation.  For those interested the web site is http://beyondoffgrid.com/summit (and it is free)There are three types of food preservation/storage I plan to practice (other than standa...

Well it has been a fairly busy week this week and plans are starting to solidify even more.  Until this week we had played with the idea of staying in the Military for one more tour, I had been nominated for a follow on tour with the Defense Attaché Service and I had been offered an opportunity to go to Ottawa Canada for my next tour.  This would have pushed my homestead plans back three years but would have been close enough for us to work on the property and get on a little stronger financial footing before making the leap. On the other hand, it would have put me at 50 before starting my homestead adventure.  This week the choice was taken out of our hands as my functional branch in the army (Finance) declined to let me stay with the attaché service, they wanted me back with Big Army.  Meaning after this tour in Jordan I would go where ever the army needed me.  Often in the Army we say we know when it is time to go, when to retire and hang up the uniform,...