College Hill Farm

  My grandfather had an old Farmall IH 140 tractor as I was growing up as a child. It was a gasoline powered tractor. Gear Drive like my little Mahindra that I have now. I think he bought it when I was only 2 years old, traded in his old Farmall A.   It is not a huge tractor. It only weighs slightly over a ton and only a whopping 23 horsepower. I have an Emax 22 horsepower tractor so I am in the same ballpark. The big difference between the Mahindra and the Farmall is that it was set up as a high crop model for cultivation. The cultivators were right under your feet so you could cultivate close to the rows. That is a big difference from my Mahindra. I have to turn around and look behind me in order to see what is going on. It is always an effort to look back, look forward, adjust driving, etc. The Farmall was perfect for this type of cultivation. You just had to look down. The one drawback to using the Farmall was that it was very top heavy. This meant that you just couldn’t take it

  Have you ever heard that term. Recently a friend of mine and I were discussing what the Golden Years really mean. It is a relatively new term coined in the 1950’s by a retirement community for marketing. Supposedly when you retire those are supposed to be your golden years. I think about that with dad and mom. At 55 my dad had worked in the coal mines for many years. He had black lung, back trouble, high blood pressure, and maybe a few other problems. The culmination of mining work had left him basically unemployable in the coal mines (the old timers around called this “Broke Down.”) The mine workers pension was not available for him like it had been for his father. A local coal operator created a job for him.   He was night watching at a reclamation site. They didn’t need a watchman where this site was located. But, they had been friends since childhood and he knew dad wasn’t able to go underground anymore. He was able to cut his own grass and did most things an older retired pe

  I am 60 years old and when I was a kid we didn’t know what prepping was. Everyone I knew ate a lot of beans and taters. They all had large pantries with canned vegetables and medium to large gardens. Most folks had a pig or two being raised in a pen. They often had chickens, ducks, rabbits, and turkeys. Most of my family had this type of thing. My grandparents were the homesteader type and had a small 5 acre Appalachian homestead. Homesteading is nothing new. My grandparents did homesteading on the ground they had. Maw and Paw did their homestead on a 5 acre plot of bottom land. Granny did her homesteading on a plot of river bottom that was a little over ½ acre. They both had chickens, pigs, a cow, and many other livestock. They raised gardens on every inch of their ground. Back in the late 1930’s there were no stock laws and everyone ran their cow in the mountains and brought them home at night to milk. The pig was branded and spent all its time in the mountain until it came time

  First off this is not a whiner post and I am OK. Now that is out of the way recently I managed to get a free trip to the local Emergency Room, nothing new to me in the last 4 yrs or so. In 2019 I got myself hospitalized because I was bleeding from the bottom end. I spent 9 days in the hospital with IV’s antibiotics, and heart monitors and then the lovely butt scope and prep which was an adventure. But, the culmination was a diagnosis of Ulcerative Colitis. I had never had this problem before so this was totally new to me. I assumed that I would have a few pills added to my daily regimen and go back to homesteading like usual. That has not been my experience. I started the Youtube Channel in 2018 and was working on the homestead when this new problem popped up. And by August 2019 I was in it. The first part of the dilemma was dealing with insurance. I quickly reached my Maximum out of pocket the first year so my medicine was free during that time between October and December. Come