College Hill Farm

  I just got in from working outside and had lunch and was sitting eating my ham sandwich and popcorn, I know but I love it, and thinking about the modern prepper. I watch several prepping channels. Some are common sense and some are just out to scare you or sell you something. I call my version casual and complementary prepping because I take a common sense approach to things like my Grand Parents and Parents would have done. Were they preppers? The answer to that is that they were Appalachian. I don’t necessarily call what me and Crystal do prepping. I call it living an Appalachian lifestyle. What does “Living an Appalachian Lifestyle” even mean? Well, living an "Appalachian Lifestyle" is living a lifestyle in which you are ready for whatever life can throw at you. Get laid off and you are ready for that. Natural disaster occurs and you are ready for that. Manmade disaster occurs and you are ready for that. People trying to take what you have by force and you are ready fo

 “Its 5 am this morning and I just don’t have any motivation to get out and do anything.” If you think that this statement doesn’t occur on my homestead you would be dead wrong. The older I get the more it occurs. Some mornings I am anxious to get out and work and some mornings it is like I have asked myself to pull my eye teeth. Crystal and I went and got our annual flu shot for date night yesterday and I am a little out of sorts. I don’t know if it is actually the shot or totally psychosomatic. Every time I get a flu shot I feel puny for a couple of days. Now when I was a kid there weren’t all the flu shots and all the injections for the childhood diseases. We had many vaccinations including polio and smallpox but we still had childhood diseases that kids have a remedy for today. I have had the mumps, measles, chicken pox at 31, and all the other childhood diseases not vaccinated for. When Crystal and I were a young married couple, AKA before children, we got a flu that was so terr

  Just got done catching up on this weeks’ mowing, and my mind wonders back to what the folks in my lineage thought about things. Now I am an educated man, sometimes dumb but still highly educated. However, that does not preclude me from being spiritual in any shape form or fashion. Some days when I am working on my little homestead I feel God is there with me. It is not that I have set out to pray or that I am thinking about the churches of my youth or my upbringing. It has nothing to do with any of that. There is a time when a small still voice calls to my very soul. It comforts me and lets me know that it is near. It happens in the mornings just as the sun is rising on my homestead and I am caught by the beauty around me or late in the evening as the days’ chores are done and the last of the suns’ rays are spraying across the valley. It blows in the breeze as I am on my hands and knees with my hands in the dirt. I wonder if my ancestors felt the same way! Now I come from a long li

  This year has been tough on an old man. I am having a hard time getting stuff done on the homestead that needs to be done. One of my problems is my desire to do more stuff that is not homestead related. When it is hot outside I have more time to watch youtube videos and get ideas for stuff that just seems fun and cool to me. Do you ever do that? I have projects looming like building a greenhouse, tractor shed, and goat barn. But the heat has me indoors watching too many videos about cool stuff that seems like it would be fun. I have been watching Paul over at The Scrap and Pallet Man Channel and thinking – wow I could do some of that and stack copper and aluminum for smelting. Then I watch Bigstackd and the Okie Scrapper and think yeah I could be stacking copper and aluminum for making ingots for my retirement/burial fund. Needless to say, I am already retired except for this homesteading gig.   Then tonight I was watching Andy Wards Ancient Pottery and it looks like something that

  Now when I was a kid – maybe 14 or 15 – I was allowed to hunt by myself at night with a dog. Today most helicopter parents would die if they thought this was going to happen. My brother had plenty of $1500 coon hounds but that was not the hound of choice for me. There was an old dog – probably 10 yrs old that showed up at the house. He was set out at our bridge and wound up at the home of our neighbor Joe Henry. So I called him old Joe. Joe was probably a cross between a fiest, beagle, and black and white walker, black and white with shorter legs and a longer body. Long ears like a beagle but a long snout like a walker coon hound but with the tenacity of a little fiest squirrel dog. I loved that old dog. Silent on the trail till he got something run up a tree. Then he had that almost beagle yodel. Many a night he and I set out into the mountains but not deep into the woods like when we coon hunted. We liked going around the old orchards where the late apple, pears, and persimmons w

  I don’t know if the term was coined by the Farmers Almanac – yes I buy one every year – or if it has some other origin. When I was a kid my Grandfather always said that during dog days snakes always shed their skin and are blind and more likely to bite than run away. To be honest other than identifying local snake species and knowing whether they are venomous or not I have no idea about their other functions. I know they eat smaller stuff and are good for our environment and I don’t kill non poisonous snakes. But, I don’t know anything much about their anatomy or functions. Although, I do find a lot of snake skins here at College Hill Farm in July. Now Dog days runs from July 3 rd through August the 11 th . It has nothing to do with dogs on earth but dogs in the heavens. Canis Major is the Greater Dog Constellation and the brightest star in that constellation is Sirius – actually the brightest star in all our sky except for the sun. During “Dog Days” this star appears in the same

 College Hill Farm dot com is dead. We killed it...... Long live the supreme leader.... Wait wrong blog..... Anyway welcome to our new blog. Today is August the 17th 2022. We had a blog on the College Hill Farm website for 3 yrs. Don't be surprised if some of those blog entries meander over here. We hope to continue with our weekly content on this media. Blogger is owned by the same folks that own Youtube so it should be easy to work between the two.  I know some folks will say that blogger is dying. It might be but right now the price was right - FREE -We hope to continue with our 'Back when I was a Kid' content and even a little modern content about things here on the homestead that just don't lend themselves well to video.  Also, and I don't know yet, we might be able to post a few videos of content that could not be posted on Youtube.  As of today there isn't a lot going on in the Garden - I am about to harvest a few grapes and make a little wine but I have