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

  I have always been different from the rest of my family, not in many ways but a few. I was always a dreamer. I had a very vivid imagination and always wanted to know why and how things worked. My oldest brother was not concerned with such things. Sometimes I wonder if he thought about much at all. But I love him just the way he is, even if we cannot manage to get along and I have to love him from afar. My 2 nd older brother is a good guy. He knows what he wants and works toward it. He has an attitude very similar to mine, get it done! He never liked school but was very mechanically inclined like dad. Electrician, welder, fabricator, mechanic, and entrepreneur are all monikers that could describe him. Like me if something doesn’t exist he will make it up out of the stuff he has available. I don’t know if this is something we learned from our father and grandfather of if this is just the way we are hard wired. Me, I’m a thinker and doer. Sometimes my thinking gets me in over my he

  Since I was in Farmer Morgans shop class in the 8 th grade I have been very crafty. I remember the first craft I made was with hand tools. We each got a piece of Lucite Rod about 3” in diameter. We had to slice off a piece of that rod and then take that slice and turn it into a piece of jewelry. If you have ever sanded plastic you know that dilemma. I cut my piece but my saw meandered a little so I had a lot of sanding just to get it to the right thickness. The coping saw was the first tool I used with a clamped work piece. I clamped down that piece of Lucite and made the largest heart I could out of it. Cutting with a coping saw in plastic is an odd feeling. But I managed to get it accomplished without a lot of meandering. But there was enough that the sanding was a tremendous job. Today I would throw it on the belt or spindle sander and knock it out in short order. We were not allowed to use power tools in the 8 th grade. So hand sanding was the order of the day. I quickly lear

  Well this year at College Hill Farm we are working on so many construction projects that I don’t know how much gardening I will be doing. With my health conditions and dead of summer temps work is tough on me so I have to work early morning during the summer. But, right now the temps are right for me to work outside all day long. But, this is when I can do those construction projects. It is also time to get to be planting those gardens. Right at this moment our freezers and pantry are still pretty full. Since the pandemic we have not had as many visitors and have not eaten down our supplies like in regular years. So we still have a pretty full larder. So this year I will have to pare back the garden a little and concentrate on the building projects. I know! You come to the homestead and to see homesteading stuff. Well building tractor sheds, goat barns, greenhouses, etc. are all vital homestead infrastructure. I worry that my speed at production of these items will be the boring