Making a book list

Here’s a tip that may have already occurred to most people. My book shelves are overflowing, and there are a lot of books which I am sure I won’t be reading anytime in the near future if ever, but which I am not yet ready to get rid of. Those I plan to store in [...]

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The Gift of Good Land, by Wendell Berry

Anyone thinking about agrarianism has to deal with Wendell Berry at some point. Berry is by far the most well-known proponent of agrarianism today; one of the chapters in Allan Carlson’s The New Agrarian Mind is devoted to his thought and writings. Although he is often touted by liberals and environmentalists for his stands against imperialsm [...]

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Older writings

Years ago I wrote a series of essays for the Every Thought Captive newsletter. I thought I had posted them all here and here, but now I discover that at least one was left off the list. So I’ve posted it, an essay titled “Modeling Faithfulness for Our Children.” As often happens when I re-read [...]

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Manure

Even though a few weeks back we had enough compost delivered to last us quite awhile, we’re already looking ahead in hope that we’ll someday be self-sufficient in that area. Our friend Roger who lives nearby keeps cows, and periodically he scrapes together their manure into a big pile. He was about to have the [...]

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Stillwater Farm

Last week Chris, Matthew, and I drove a few hours east to visit our friends the Hammonds in Mendota, Virginia. While we lived in Bristol I kept a close eye on D.J. Hammond as he and his wife Jennifer forged ahead and began to build Stillwater Farm, an old-fashioned homestead on ten acres in Poor [...]

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Fall garden work

I’ve mentioned before that we have enough ground preparation to do this fall that we decided to not plant any fall crops. Today most of the remaining garden came out We pulled the bean plants and took down the trellises, and we went through and picked the few plants that were still bearing—some cucumbers, a [...]

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Getting started with pastured chickens

Here is a helpful article about a couple who recently started raising pastured chickens for their eggs. I like how they have approached the project in a modest and tentative fashion, scaling up only as it made sense.

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The coolest thing

Sometimes I run across an idea that is just so cool that I’d do almost anything to try it out. A few days ago I was thinking about eggmobiles (portable chicken coops). We hope to have a few cows eventually and Joel Salatin says that an eggmobile is just the thing to follow the cows [...]

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No mandatory NAIS?

I was looking through the latest copy of Stockman Grass Farmer, which arrived today, and was surprised to see an article buried inside (p. 12) with the headline “USDA Abandons Mandatory Animal ID Plan.” It referred to a June 22, 2006 Wall Street Journal article, which I managed to find online: The USDA, which has [...]

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More books for the stack

Debbie happened to mention that she had collected together some books on medieval society for the homeschool library, so I asked her to add them to my stack (which isn’t actually a stack, but a separate shelf of books in the family room). So in addtion to the books I mentioned before, I will soon [...]

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