Wood Cook Stove

Posted on November 8, 2023 by Ned Newby

When we were building the house we acquired a wood cook stove. The elderly lady was still using it when it was removed for a remodel. We wanted to incorporate it into the house but insurance and fire code requirements made it to difficult. So for the last 20 years it has sat in the corner as conversation starter, decoration, and storage unit.

I finally gathered all the necessary components and set it up on the side porch that has become our outside kitchen. Now, we have a 3 burner propane stove, a 4 burner BlackStone Grill, a green egg grill, and now the wood cook stove.

A Lot Of Catching Up To Do

Posted on October 11, 2021 by Ned Newby

The last post was about the tractor not running right. Well it turns out an algae build up in the fuel lines. I had no idea. The dealer suggested that I add a fuel additive with algaecide to prevent this in the future. Done.

We paid off most of our debts so Lisa suggested that I retire to work the homestead. So, my last day at my previous employment was September 3^rd 2021.

We got a call a few weeks ago about some baby squirrels. The nest had fallen out of the tree during a thunderstorm. The people whos yard they fell into were doing all they could to rescue them but they didn’t have the time or knowledge to do it. There were 4 but they lost one right before we got there. They were very dehydrated and it took a couple days of regular feedings before that was fixed. They are now healthy and very feisty little squirrels. We moved them to an outside cage yesterday. Well all but one. Noah escaped and made his way back to the house where we saved him from one of the cats who chased him up the Bell pole. We will reunite him with his sisters today and then open the cage in about a week once they get used to being outside.

It’s been a very wet year so we’ve had a good year for muscadine and scuppernong grapes. I missed most of the muscadine harvest due to back problems but scuppernongs are still falling. I’ve got one gallon of muscadine wine and 2 gallons of scuppernong wine bubbling on the counter. I was able to make 10 pints of jelly with more to come.

I’ve started selectively laying down trees to open up more pasture and increase our firewood pile. Starting with pine and sweetgum trees. Once they are removed I will thin the oaks as needed. I hate cutting anything that produces food and animals love it when the acorns start to fall.

Olives heifer, Sassy, is nearly grown and we are hoping Olive will have another in the near future so we can have fresh milk again.

Violet gave us a little bull calf at the end of July. A good friend of Lisa’s runs a nonprofit Monkey rescue. She wants to add a petting zoo to help raise funds so we donated the little guy to the cause. We didn’t need another bull he will have a good home so it was a Win for all.

I have passed the General HAM radio test. My computer/radio area is nearly organized and I have my antennas up. It’s time to refocus on studying for the Extra Class license.

With all the rain the garden wasn’t what it could have or should have been. A lot of green beans and some purple hull peas but everything else drowned or was choked out by the weeds.

Tractor Problems and new Homestead Preps

Posted on January 14, 2021 by Ned Newby

I hate hauling hay by hand and using borrowed equipment but that is where I find myself today. Tractor will not keep running and the John Deer Dealership just came and picked it up. It took them a week to come get it and they say it will be about two weeks before they can get to it. I wish I would have bought an older tractor without all the environmental crap on it. One without all the computer crap on it. One that the average person could work on.

Now that that is out of my system.
It has taken some time but Olive is completely mastitis free. I don’t think that would have ever cleared completely up without the calf helping to keep her milked out. I have been and will continue to milk every morning to strip her out even without separating her from the calf. I thought that she had lost the right front quarter. It was still mostly hard as a rock giving very little milk as late as a month ago. Now it is normal. It has been a long battle that is finally won.

Also, an addition to the Homestead and preparedness in general, right before Thanksgiving I got my HAM radio Technician license. Working on the General and maybe if I can dedicate some time to it like I did the Technician it will come sooner than later. Call sign is KO4IPQ. I have a small handheld transceiver and just bought a Kenwood TM-V71 that I will put in the truck for now. Once I get an antenna up I will move it into the house for my base station and get a different one for the truck. Not exactly a cheap project so this will have to be done over several months.

Productive weekend

Posted on December 17, 2018 by Ned Newby

We’ve been so busy that many things have just flat been neglected. To be honest almost everything that wasn’t critical has been neglected. We made a little progress this weekend even with the dreary weather.

We sold 2 pigs Saturday and they are coming back for another one next Saturday. After they left I fixed the main gate that wasn’t closing all the way. Then I fixed a place in the fence where the dogs were going under. Just a note, I have more trouble keeping the Great Pyrenees in than I do all the other animals combined.

Sunday afternoon we castrated some little boars that should have been done weeks ago.

This morning I found our second midsize Jersey “BobbieJo” standing next to a new little bull. I really hoped she wasn’t that far along. Her and Olive’s calves were spaced about 6 months apart. Perfect for milking. After she got sick last time and stopped eating I took the calf off her and drenched her with propylene glycol until she was eating again. I also held her in another pasture away from the bull until she got out and got hit by the truck. Any way that gave her some time to build up her body but not long enough to keep her on the same schedule. I may try to separate her again to delay her being bred but I don’t know how it will work since I don’t have the pasture across the road anymore. Mike will probably just tear down the fences to get to her.

Mishaps, Rescues, and a new calf

Posted on December 6, 2017 by Ned Newby

On Thanksgiving day I noticed Abby wasn’t with her mother and brother. I really didn’t think much of it. It wouldn’t have been the first time a baby was left sleeping next to a tree while everyone else moved off only to wake up bleating for it’s mom once it realized it was alone. Still, as I fed the other animals I called to the goats and I never heard her cry out. I decided to make a quick look around even though I didn’t have time because everyone was loading up to celebrate Thanksgiving with relatives. I continued to call out while I walked the area. I noticed something dark hanging in a fallen dead cedar. At first I thought it was just a bag or something the dogs had brought home. As I got closer I could tell it was Abby. She wasn’t making a sound nor was she moving. I thought she was dead until I got close enough to see she was holding her head up. She had been playing on the down tree and slipped catching her leg between the limbs and there she hung, front feet barely touching the ground. I got her out and checked her over. Nothing appeared to be broken but she wasn’t using the leg at first.

Over the next few days she began to put some weight on it. I still caught her a few times and checked for any sign of a break but everything felt fine. Then this last weekend I noticed I noticed she wasn’t using it at all and it appeared to be swinging unusually. I checked and it was obviously broke above the ankle. Last night with Lisa’s help we put a splint on it. Either the swelling was keeping me from noticing the break or it may have been cracked and something caused it to break after she started using it again. Either way she will be fine in a week or so.

For a few weeks now we have been feeding some dropped off cats and kittens at the local dump. We decided to take in the remaining kittens this weekend. No we didn’t need anymore cats but one of the kittens was sick and we couldn’t leave it like that. I started putting some antibiotics in their water but the sick one continued to get worse rather than better. So it went to the vet for some stronger medicine. One day and the rattle in it purr is gone. We will keep them in a dog kennel in the barn for a week or two and then open the door and let them be barn cats. Hopefully they will stay. The last two we had at the barn left after about a year and decided they liked living around the house better.

Last week our oldest grandson Jacob found a baby squirrel. He named it Brandi. It was kind of beat up so it was placed in a cage outside until I had a chance to look at it. It was obvious to me that it was much younger than anyone else thought so I put it in a bird cage in the house with some old rags to burrow in. We have been feeding it with a syringe and a special nipple. Yesterday was the first time we have seen her out climbing around the cage. I have no idea what we are going to do with her if she can’t be released. One of her front feet/wrist may be broken. Hope it heals well. Time will tell.

Olive had her calf yesterday in a rainstorm. I think it is a little heifer but I haven’t gotten close enough to be 100% sure. The pictures are not that good because the rain was reflecting some of the flash making them look darker. Plus you can see the rain streaking the pictures. I’ll get better pictures later. I’ll go back to milking in a couple days. NO MORE STORE BOUGHT MILK and CHEESE!!!

Lastly here is a picture of Jacob cleaning up around our little barn and refilling the compost bins. He likes driving the tractor.

Growing Family

Posted on October 10, 2017 by Ned Newby

When we were stationed in GA back in the late 80’s we went through the adoption process. All the classes, home visits, etc,… We were looking at a set of twins at the time. By the time we were approved as an adoptive family the twins were no longer available. Shortly after that I got orders to Alaska. That put an end to any possibility of adopting in GA. The process was completely different in AK so we didn’t start over. In GA they had a book, yes a book as this was before the Internet, anyway this book had pictures of the available children and a brief biography along with a statement from the child. There was this one young lady in there that pulled at our heart. To this day I can’t tell you what race she was or anything about her other than she was about 17 years old and getting close to leaving the Foster Care system. The one thing that I remember because it was burned into my heart and mind is what she said. “All I want is some place to go home to for Christmas” That one statement has almost haunted me over the years. From time to time I have checked the state adoption sights. Lisa and I have discussed adoption again several times but one or the other wasn’t sure we wanted to jump back in and start over.

That changed a little over a month ago. The misfortune of a little girl out of state and the possibility of a private adoption rekindled our desire to adopt. The little girl that gave life back to our desire for more children ended up in foster care before we could act. So, we have started going through the process of in state adoptions. Our first of 10 classes was last night. It went very well. We are looking for hard to place kids, older with multiple siblings. There is one set of siblings that we have really connected with even though all we have is website pictures and short videos. Lord willing everything will work out and we will be able to bring them into our home but we have several months to go before approval as adoptive parents. Anything can happen. They could very easily get adopted by someone else or there could be something that we don’t know about yet that would make us a poor match. Time will tell. The one thing I know is there are a lot of kids on the website that need a home and we will be able to help someone once we get through the process.

In the mean time we turned our open loft into a third bedroom and two small offices. Here are the pictures.

Original loft space.

Here is some of the construction.

And here is the finished space.

This is the first computer area at the top of the stairs between the bedrooms.

This is looking into the new bedroom.

The other side of the new room.

Looking down the walk to Lisa’s home office. More like a cubbyhole but she just wanted a desk, phone, internet connection and the window.

The remodel turned out pretty good I think. It may take a while for my sinuses to get over all the sheet rock dust but that’s a small price to pay. I can’t thank a good friend Toby enough for his help and guidance. We now have two extra bedrooms waiting for someone to fill them. Our oldest son and grandsons will use the space for a while while they get resettled as they move from Alaska.

If all goes as planned we will have some permanent additions to the family by summer if not sooner. If this all blows up and for any reason things don’t work out we have a nice spare guest room. Can you tell I’m trying not to get my hopes up?

On a less than positive note. I think I managed to kill all the tilapia in the aquaponics tank. When the remnants of hurricane Nate came through the GFI tripped killing the power to the pump. No water circulation equals no oxygen. I found 12 floaters this morning and I suspect there are more that didn’t make it. I know I saw one come to the surface and then swim back down. Didn’t look real healthy but it might make it. The worst part is I knew the power was off. When I did my morning rounds feeding all the critters I noticed the problem and corrected it with the intent of resetting the GFI when I made my way back to the house. Well….something obviously distracted me and the GFI didn’t cross my mind until I walked outside this morning. First thing I thought of was the aquaponics tank and I knew what I would find. I hate that sick feeling of knowing I could have prevented this loss. Then again that is why I keep two fishtanks running in the basement. Insurance. When I move the system I am planning to put in a battery backup and an air pump so that when I loose power the fish will still have that much to keep them going.

Happy Thanksgiving

Posted on November 25, 2016 by Ned Newby

We had a very nice day yesterday visiting with family at two separate gatherings. My niece Ashley and her husband hosted Thanksgiving dinner for my side of the family. Then we went to Lisa’s moms house to visit with her side of the family. Good food and company all day.

It’s been a while so a little catching up is in order.

I don’t think that I mentioned the last hive swarmed late this summer. I don’t know what caused it but my guess is it was a combination of ants and the drought. So, I’ll buy some more bees and start over in the spring. Maybe I can catch another swarm or two. I didn’t get any last summer.

With the drought still in full swing and the unusually warm weather I never did plant a fall garden. I placed the last two sows and their oops piglets in the garden area for now. The plan is to castrate the males this weekend and move them all back with all the rest. Then I can plant my garlic and onions. The weatherman is saying that we have a good chance of some rain in about a week. We’ll see. A lot can happen in a week.

A couple of weeks ago my cousin, his girlfriend and her daughter came to visit the farm. The piglets were a hit but nothing like Ava. We have gotten used to Ava stealing the show.

Everyone waiting for breakfast.

Something you don’t expect to see at Tractor Supply. I stopped in for a few items and had to get a picture of what was in the trailer next to me. Lisa wouldn’t have believed me without proof. It might be a little hard to tell but there are two camels in the trailer. A large one on the left and a much smaller one on the right.

Found this little guy in the basement when I was feeding the cats. He was small and cooperative so he lived and went for a ride to a new location away from houses. I was able to slide a pet carrier up to him and he went right in. He must have know what the alternative would be.

Here we are torturing Ava with pecan pie. She wanted out badly. I missed getting a picture of her head upside down looking through the mesh. She is just too quick.

Due to other commitments Lisa’s younger brother Greg and his family wouldn’t be able to attend Thanksgiving so they came down a day early. We had a nice visit and as usual the animals were a hit. Especially for little Cooper.

The only remaining registered boar for sale may have gotten a stay of execution. If the weather would have stayed cool this week he would have made it into the freezer this weekend. I just got a call from someone who wants a pair of American Guinea Hogs. If he takes the offer he will be getting a deal. I’m over run with hogs and need to move them.

The aquariums in the basement are full of fish and I noticed tilapia fry in the outside tank. I will have to try and move them this weekend or they may not last if the temperature drops again. The heater will keep the water warm enough for adult fish but I don’t know about fry.

Look what I found!

Posted on October 10, 2016 by Ned Newby

I was cleaning out the canister filter on one of the tilapia aquariums this weekend and found these 3 little guys in the bottom. How they have lived in there for so long is a mystery. Yes they are alive. The largest is about 2 inches long. The line going into the filter is only about a half inch so he has been there for a while.

I emptied the sump tank and cleaned it out yesterday and there were all these fingerlings in there. I knew they were there but didn’t know how many. There should be more in the main tank as well.

Pigs, Pigs everywhere. If anyone is interested in KuneKune AGH cross pigs I’ll make you a deal. Shoot me an email.

Some random shots of the cows and calves.

I cleaned out the compost and scattered it on the garden. I don’t know how well you can see in these pictures but it was full, I mean full of red worms. The garden is going to love this.

Got all the compost tilled into the garden and brought in 20 bales of straw. I’ve started breaking down and scattering the bales but I’m not finished yet. It’s almost time for the fall garden.

Here is a picture of the new home of the pig we sold that now lives in NY. We are waiting for updated pictures of him. He is living in hog heaven for sure. Wish that was my pond. Maybe some day.

And here is Billie Jo we sold earlier this year who now lives in Arkansas. She sure is a pretty heifer. I hear that she has a stubborn streak though. Personally I think they all do.

We still have hens, turkey and chicken, that have gone broody. Here is the latest batch of chicks. The hen made her nest in an unused portion of the aquaponics system.

Lastly, is Smokey. She more than any of the other cats loves new spaces. Boxes, bags or open cabinets. Leave something open and she will crawl in and make her self comfortable. We are using it for our bathroom cabinet but it is actually my Great Grandmothers bread making cabinet. Smokey is laying on top of the flour sifter. All original including the sliding glass doors and the sliding counter. It could use some work but would lose some of its charm.

There’s always something

Posted on September 13, 2016 by Ned Newby

The animals have been keeping me both busy and up at night this last week. Jack has gotten a nasty eye infection again. It isn’t as bad as the one he had a couple of years ago thankfully. I’ve been spraying his eye and putting salve around it to keep the drainage from causing a skin infection like he had last time. The infection had just started to form but I caught it early enough and that part is almost completely gone. His eye is still red and irritated but it too is getting better.

Bobie Jo never gained any weight after calving this year and started to go down hill. She continued to lose weight even though I was feeding her more and more. Last Thursday she only ate about half of her grain and Friday she didn’t eat anything. Definitely not like her. I started reading on the Internet and placed a call into the Vet. From my reading is sounded like Ketosis and when the Vet called me back he confirmed that her symptoms fit. I bought a jug of Propylene Glycol and a drench kit on the way home. 25 ml every six hours starting Friday night. She didn’t eat her grain Friday or Saturday but by Sunday she was starting to get her appetite back. This morning (Monday) she was back to her old self eating like a horse. Now maybe I can get some sleep. She is still not out of the woods yet but now that she is eating again and the calf is off her she should start gaining weight. Thankfully she never stopped eating hay or drinking. We tried to tube her Saturday to make sure she was staying hydrated but that wasn’t a successful process. I got the tube in a couple of times but wasn’t confident enough that I wasn’t in the lungs so we stopped and decided to just watch her to see if she was indeed still drinking. Thankfully she went over to the trough and stuck her head in. She didn’t drink as much as I would have liked but it was enough to keep me from sticking that tube back down her throat.

Weekend before last we were able to finish laying the grass on one side of the yard. I still have a lot of prep work before we can do the other side. It’s looking good so far especially with the flowerbeds Lisa put in this summer.

Happy Memorial Day Weekend

Posted on May 27, 2016 by Ned Newby

I pray that everyone has a safe and enjoyable weekend but please take a moment to remember why we celebrate Memorial Day. Thousands of men and women have laid down their lives so that we can have the freedoms and comforts that living in The United States of America provides.

After years of talking about it we finally put in a new walkway and a flag pole just in time for Memorial Day. Have to have Old Glory flying.

I’m no fan of concrete but after weighing the cost of other materials, concrete was the only way to go. It looks nice and once we get the front yard re-sodded it will be even better.

I’m glad we waited for the flag pole because where we originally planned to put it was too close to a young maple tree. The limbs would be nearly into the pole by now. The only thing close now is a crapemyrtle tree that will be kept short and bushy. It is taller than I would like because I didn’t trim it this winter.

Here is a perfect example of why we are downsizing out goats. Calvin is climbing on the fence to get to the willow tree. In the process he has the fence pulled down. If I wouldn’t have ran him off and ran a strand of electric fence along the top he would have been going over in short order.

One last note just for a good laugh. When I went into our little barn where several hens had been setting on nests I found this guy keeping a couple of eggs warm. lol

Newby's Homestead Hideaway Farm

A lifetime work in progress.

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