College Hill Farm

  I was talking to one of my  friends recently about activities here in the Paint Lick Area. They have put in a new sewer system and they are considering extending it out to and past College Hill Farm. Now having a sewer system would increase the property value of our property without a doubt. No longer would you have to have a big enough piece of property to construct a septic system. Thus you could section our property off into ¼ acre lots and sell each lot at a considerable price as a building lot. Or construct houses or set mobile homes and do the same. I know the kids will probably not adopt this lifestyle and would probably sell this property when we are gone and this would increase the value for them. But, I don’t know. Crystal and I had basic criteria when we moved to this homestead. We wanted to be in proximity to a decent size hospital – we are getting older. We wanted to be within 30 minutes of a city of larger than 18,000 so we could get services, we have always lived 3 h

Do you have a section of your property set aside for scrap metal? Right now I do. Since moving to the property in January of 2015 and beginning the renovation of the house we have accumulated a pretty good amount of scrap metal. Some of it I have used in other projects but there are some things that just will never be used for another project and is just lying around. Most of the stuff I have came about as we renovated the house or from daily life. For example: there is a riding lawn mower, washing machine, dryer, 2 old grills, water heater, 2 cast iron bathtubs, cast iron waste pipe, an old boat trailer, and various other pieces of metal and old roofing scraps from the old barns here on the property. There are 3 or 4 truck loads that I need to take to the scrap yard. So many in our society would take these to the landfill but that is not in my nature. Metal can have endless uses and tomorrow that water heater could become a car door or microwave. I also have an old aluminum fishin

Since I have been doing videos I never knew I was fat. Thank God for the folks who are so ready to help me on my road to fat redemption!! From the 14 year old who called me a fat Bastard to the recent guy who thought he was helping me out by pointing out that I am fat in a comment.   “ absolutely no offense im a personal trainer and bodybuilder. if you wanna save your back once again no offense you need to lose a lot of body fat percentage overall on your frame. our frames arent made for carrying over 200 lbs of weight trust me i have experienced it myself with muscle tissue. the less weight that your skeletal and muscular system has to carry the easier it will be for it. you wouldnt overload your tractor loader and expect it to work perfectly either am i right. good luck with your back ”   For the record I have overloaded my tractor bucket a lot since moving to the homestead. Sometimes these folks don’t realize the offense they are giving. It is like they think that all fat pe

  One of the hardest things this year is waiting to plant the garden. Since the Greenhouse is not finished I have not planted any of our own plants this year. Crystal has urged me to cut down on the garden some this year. Well with building a tractor shed and other projects that makes sense. But, I love gardening. I don’t know why. Early in the morning before the sun comes up it is like communing with God. It is a personal experience like meditation, which I have never been good at. So quiet motionless time is not my thing, but as I get older I am slowing down. However, patience is still not my greatest virtue. I should have planted in the basement again this year under the lights but I didn’t do that. I decided to let the local plant dealer sell their stuff to me. They carry plants propagated by the local Mennonite and Amish communities. There are many heirloom varieties to choose from. The last few years the cost has been $16 per flat of 48 plants. This year the price has gone up t

  Now when I was a kid and mom and dad bought an appliance it lasted for years and years. The refrigerator that Crystal and I got when we married came from her mom and dad and it was 15 yrs old when we got it and it lasted us over 12 yrs. It was still working when we sold it. We got a little 5 cubic foot freezer in 1986 and it lasted us until 2010, 24 years. It is not that way anymore. I wonder at the why of it. Mom and dad had the same couch for 35 years. Try that with one of today’s couches. What I am getting at is not that things are made less stable but I wonder if things are made less stable on purpose. Let’s say the car companies made a perfect battery, aka a battery that would last for the life of a car 30 yrs or so. Well, they wouldn’t sell many batteries now would they? I understand that in order to sell enough to keep a plant going you can’t make a perfect product that never tears up, if such a thing could be engineered at all. But, I would love to have something that just

  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