Vaughnshire Farm

At the end of a long day, my 11 year old announced, “I just had the best Monday of my life…”

What, you may ask, was so great about Monday?

He, his brothers and dad worked out in the hot sun all day and plowed a 60X20 garden plot. In addition they also laid some water line from the overflow tank at the spring and shoveled out mud in the pond to hopefully prepare it to be a gravity fed spring pond that they can stock with fish.

During supper, our 9 year old commented that “it seems like working and playing are the same thing!”

I have made many interesting observations about boys over the years, but one striking observation is that boys need lots of work and productive outlets to focus their mind and energy on. Not only do bored, unchallenged boys end up in trouble, but they develop a lazy attitude about everything.  Besides, work doesn’t have to be drudgery all the time. 

In our home, at 6 years old, a boy graduates from being a playminded little-responsibility momma’s boy to a worker boy. It isn’t a magical immediate switch from toddlerhood to worker-boy-hood.  The change is gradual and we have many ups and downs in our training progress.  However, we have noticed that not only do they desperately need to be given more responsibility, but they need to be given work and chores that challenge them to step up to the plate and encourage them to be a worker boy.

Here are a few things that we have identified as important aspects of boyhood work:

Physical Work — Boys need to use that energy God gave them to physically work hard. Depending on where you live and the opportunities available, a boy’s work will greatly vary from place to place.  The important thing is that boys need to work. The day my boys plowed the field, it was hot, sweaty, smelly work! But they loved it. I love making them a big glass of ice water with lemons or sweet tea and taking it out to them while they are working hard. It makes them feel like a man.

Responsibility — Young boys need to be given responsibilities. Whether it is taking care of a animal or a section of space or a specific chore, boys thrive on having something to be responsible for. Recently, we handed over the pig feeding assignment to our 6 year old. Every day he is responsible for getting the food bucket off the kitchen counter and walking it down to the barn and dumping it over the fence to the pig. He then gathers eggs and brings the bucket and eggs back home. He has thrived with his new job and we have seen a big maturity growth in this boy. Everyday, he gives us a report on how the pig is doing. He knows what the pig likes and what he doesn’t like and reminds me not to put orange peels into the pig bucket because he doesn’t like them. Of course, as the boys grow, the responsibility increases.

Accountability — As parents, part of our job is training our children how to work. We first teach them to do all their work heartily as unto the Lord. We strive to cultivate a heart of humbleness, diligence, excellence and thoroughness in their work. They know that we are there to help them, but also are there to guide, correct and train them in how to work. We also have a deep desire to teach them how to work with their siblings. 

Rewards and job well done incentives — Many times we hire our children to do a job. I recently hired my 4 year old and 6 year old to move dirt from a dirt pile, to the garden. I paid them .10 cents a load. They worked hard and received payment for their work. The older children work different jobs around here and are paid accordingly, however, not everything is a paid chore or job. Some things you have to do just because you live here. We do not promote “free-ride or free-parking” living around here.

Vision for future work — At 4 years old, don’t be discouraged if they are still whining a lot and attempts to work become flustered because they are prone to distraction. Training during these early years will eventually pay off. Starting out early and starting small may not seem important but it is vital to begin at 2 if you want a worker boy at 10. We want to lay out a vision for the future and give our boys goals of things they can achieve in regards to work. We have been encouraging our boys in entrepreneurship. This type of work excites them very much. They have made plans for selling things they make and grow. Our oldest son has several invention ideas that he is planning on experimenting with, with the hopes of marketing a solar / hydro gardening device that will grow pre-flood sized plants. Even if his overenthusiastic idea is a flop — the point is that experimenting and dreaming up ideas is always better than being cemented to conform to a pre-determined mindset of normality. As bad as I hate to see some of the boys “experiments” or “contraptions” laying around the yard, I have to tell myself that “It’s really not junk…It just looks that way…”

Another interesting observation I have made about raising boys is that when we promote healthy physical work, responsibility, accountability and a vision for future work, a boy’s mind is stimulated to think, solve problems, invent, and lead.  He begins to think beyond himself and starts to see the world through the perspective of the creature God created him to be.  A creature with a dominion mandate. 

Many wonder about how this applies to girls.  I will elaborate on young girls and work next. 

Vaughnshire is our family website located at www.vaughnshire.com

We are working on posting articles specifically related to the farm, agrarian living, escaping from the corporate american rat race, reviving local community, and raising a large family in an anti-Biblical culture. 

We are just getting this site started and for now I am posting my articles about farm life over on Vaughnshire as well.  My husband is also posting…but we have very little spare time to revamp the site yet.  We are hoping to add lots of pictures and a detailed account on our exit from the regular ol’corporate american job to working from home on our farm.  As we are still in the process—lots more to come.  We hope to use the site as a journal for our children to be able to look back on with much laughter and praise to God for sustaining us through the good times and the bad. 

This is a pancake recipe that we sorta made up from a combination of recipes. The idea was to create a simple pancake recipe that the kids could remember and whip up if I needed them to. In our house, the children over the age of 8 can whip this recipe up with relative ease.
Large Family Amount of Pancakes

4 cups of flour (I use freshly ground wheat–we like the prairie gold)
4 teaspoons of baking powder
1 teaspoon of salt
4 cups of milk
4 eggs
1 teaspoon of vanilla
1 stick of melted butter (you can use a 1/2 cup of oil instead)
1/2 cup of honey
Mix up in a large mixing bowl with a whisk. If you have an electric griddle –that works best, however we are griddle-less since we wore ours out. I use a griddle pan that covers two burners and another large skillet on another burner to make pancakes.

Feeds my 7 children (ages 11 and under). Next time we make them, we will count how many pancakes it actually makes.  If you have older children or more children, I would suggest doubling it.

I recently doubled this recipe when we had two families over for a breakfast supper. We had scrambled eggs, sausage, pancakes and fruit. With the pancakes and scrambled eggs used 42 eggs that night.

I can not wait to review this new film..

http://www.monstrousregiment.com/index.htm

Besides getting bit by bugs and kissed by the sun…working in the garden is pure joy for me.  I love the sweaty work of cultivating earth and shaping it into something fruitful and then trusting God to bless the work.  My garden is off to a slow start but it is moving along even if at a snail’s pace.  I have to reign in anxious thoughts and not let them overtake me with dissatisfaction in small beginnings. 

For now, growing in my raised beds are brussel sprouts, marigolds, cucumbers, beans, squash, several types of tomatoes, jalapeno peppers, purple sweet peppers, yellow banana peppers, habanero peppers, potatoes, mint and some other herbs.  I bought heirloom seeds this year along with several heirloom plants that I planted with the intention of saving the seed for next year’s planting, however, I already messed that idea up by planting several different kinds of heirloom tomatoes too close together.  If you intend on having heirloom varieties for the purpose of saving seed, you need to space your heirloom plants a certain amount of feet apart from other heirloom varieties or else your seeds will be cross pollinated with the other plants and not be pure seed.  I guess I could save the seeds of my plants and just see what happens when you cross a Cherokee purple tomato with a Brandywine pink tomato?  However, I figured that at least this year I was able to get the seed and plants in the ground– next year, I will work on my heirloom seeds and garden layout to insure pure seeds.  At least learning from my mistakes will benefit me for next year’s plantings.   

In another raised bed, my 9 year old planted several rows of corn and okra.  We are excited to see the baby corn and okra plants popping up and are hoping that they will grow big and tall without incident.  Our small asparagus patch is doing well in another small area.  There is nothing quite like fresh young tender asparagus.  I have been lightly steaming it or adding it to stir-fry but unfortunately I am not getting as much as I would like.  Again, not despising small beginnings, I am hopeful that next year it should produce even more.  

Here the boys are laying out several layers of newspaper and spraying it down with water.  Yes, the water did get out of hand and the boys ended being a nice mixture of wet barn hay, cow manure and mud. 

The 6 year old is inspecting the strange seed potato trying to figure out how it is going to produce potatoes.  Hopefully our wet paper hay combination potato planting will work. 

I, too, am wondering if it will actually work.  At this point, even if the entire garden were a failure, I would walk away from it with many lessons on what not to do for next year.  Working the garden has been very healthy and beneficial for the children as well.  They have seen their tiny seeds grow into small plants which has produced much anticipation and excitement. That at least is successful in more ways than one.   

I have been amazed to see how farm life has affected our home schooling these days. I am still unpacking boxes of books. We have more books than anything else and it seems that we are still digging book boxes out and are shortly about to run out of book shelves. However, I have yet to unpack my homeschooling books so the children have had a nice reprieve on any sort of written book work for weeks now. Not that we did a lot of written book work to begin with, however, I do feel it is very important for my children to know how to write well so we do spend focused times on this important skill. The only written work they have done is making garden plot plans, recording rabbits and breeding information, business ideas and figuring out how much they need to sell and of what items at the farmer’s market in order to make a certain amount of money. Not your typical A beka type handwriting drills or math problems…but it works just the same only they are more motivated and interested in figuring those types of problems compared to a workbook.

But for now, in addition to lots of reading, other projects have been taking up their time and attention. Recently my older boys have been working on building a poultry tractor for their guineas and turkey as the baby birds are ready to graduate from being in a smaller cage to a real tractor that will be moved around the yard. This is sure to supply them with a generous supply of bugs that we are hoping will soon be a distant memory. Once the guineas are a bit bigger, we will release them to free range around the property.

In other happenings, we have been learning so much about the simple things most farmers take for granted. While we were not intending on being pig farmers, my husband received a real live baby pig for his birthday (from his nephew) So we were sort of thrust into learning all about pigs in a short amount of time. The pig is a very interesting creature and from what we can tell–this pig is very smart. He has escaped a couple of times, but the boys have risen to the challenge and figured out ingenious ways to catch him.

Looking out the back door, I caught two boys running around the yard with a very large net. This was the first attempt at retrieving him. Since his little operation(of which I am getting ready to tell you about)…he has been much more content and happy in his little home eating lots of leftovers and scraps from the kitchen.

The net didn’t work. The boys eventually had to trap the pig in their possum trap. After repairing the fence…they put him back in his pen. We found that those heavy plastic dog houses work great for pigs. He needed a place to sleep up off the ground where he could be warm and dry from the rain.

We were told that our pig needed an “operation” …the kind to render him sterile and secure his life as that of a meat pig. If you aren’t aware, pigs need to be castrated if you intend on raising them for meat for several reasons. 1–big male hogs that are not castrated are aggressive and dangerous and 2– those hormones affect the taste and quality of the meat. Unfortunately, we found out that you are supposed to castrate male pigs when they are about 2 to 3 days old—our pig was 10 weeks old and quite a bit bigger than a baby piglet. My husband spent a short amount of time reading about how to do this procedure himself and when fully confident, he called the 11 year old, the 9 year old and the 6 year old boys to come with him to the barn and told them the short story of what they were going to do. “Patrick…you sit on the pig and don’t get up— Pierce, grab one leg, Peyton, you grab the other leg and don’t let go.” My husband quickly made the cuts and did the job and I stood on the porch listening to this pig screaming like nothing I have ever heard. It reminded me of the scene in the movie, “The Princess Bride” where the farmer boy is in the pit of despair getting his life sucked out of him.

All is well, however, and the pig is now well on his way. The boys grew up a lot that day and are all the better for it with more conversation fodder for me to watch out for the next time we make it into a grocery store. To make the day more interesting, my 9 year old had the great idea that only a male mind would think: he suggested putting the pig testicles into their trap to see what they could catch. My husband, being the adventurous guy that he is, agreed with the idea and they set the trap in the woods. The next day, they went to check the trap and to their delight, they had caught a possum — a possum with 9 babies crawling all over her. Needless to say, we did not keep them as pets but they provided another interesting learning experience for the kids! You can imagine how excited the boys were catching 10 possums at ONE time with two pig test…well..you know. I couldn’t catch their excitement and wasn’t thrilled with it in the least. I finally went inside the house when talk started about “Hmm…I wonder if the cat will adopt the baby possums and nurse them?” Can we please move on…One thing has already led to another…let’s not risk something else happening and force me to blog about something even more strange than pig bait.

We did finally move on and with much more excitement I was able to finally plant some potatoes and make some progress in the garden.

So when your boys are trapping wild animals, you never know what will turn up.  This day yielded a momma possum and her 9 babies.

Of course the real story is how will their baby sister repsond to such “cute” critters.  Fortunately she was not camera shy for this scene.

No animals were harmed during the MAKING of this video.

Living over an hour from a Kroger or almost 2 hours from a Costco or Sams, our methods of gathering groceries have changed quite a bit since moving out to the farm.  In an emergency, I can be at a Sav-a-Lot in 15 minutes, but I enjoy the local markets around here more. 

Once I get a bit more settled, I am going to pick back up on my couponing for certain items in a modified way (toothbrushes, razors, toilet paper, paper products, some food products, etc).   In the transition, my food stockpile was a great blessing to me. I still have a good stocked pantry of basic supplies that have been an invaluable resource from which I have been pulling from.  Because of the availability of bulk supplies like grain, local honey, local vegetables and seasonal fruits, I am taking advantage of my proximity to these items.  I found a wonderful country store that I have done my shopping at and while it is nothing compared to a conventional grocery store, it provides us with fresh good food for a good price.  It has the added bonus of me not having to worry about getting the children dressed in something other than overalls and rubber boots as well as, not worrying about all the strange looks and stares.  So while I did not have to give my “grocery shopping with 7 children speech”  when we exited the vehicle, I did give the ”Don’t ask me to buy any more animals…even if you have the money for it…we aren’t taking home live animals today…” speech.    

We took a picture to compare the differences in what the food from a country grocery store looks like, compared to what we are use to shopping at.  Here was our haul today: 

6 loaves of fresh baked sourdough (about $2.50 each)
2 gallons of fresh milk ($3.50 each) with the added bonus of fresh cream.
Lots of sausage patties ($2.xx a pound)
2 lbs of sliced farmer’s cheese ($3.25 a pound)
5 1/2 dozen fresh eggs ($1.49 a dozen)
1 peach frozen ready to bake pie (it was very good too!) 
Fresh picked sweet strawberries
And for the ride home –water and cinnamon rolls –

for a total of $50 

Last week, I purchased a bulk amount of raw sugar and local honey, fresh milk, grain berries, sourdough, onions

You know your at a real country store, when they have live animals outside for sale.  Last week, we saw a rabbit in one of the cages with a sign that said:

“$6 for Live, $8 for butchered” 

My children pulled the stray dollars and change they had in their pockets and bought the buck rabbit –alive–to breed to their does. 

To sum up my life lately….  I am not completely unpacked although I am functioning and I found my computer.   I have been consumed with our new endeavors of farm life and am loving every minute…almost…of it.   

Soon, I will post some pictures and maybe give a virtual tour on life around here.  For now, I have learned that:

• We are definitely south of the gnat line. Flies and gnats are a normal part of life when you live next to cattle farmers.
• Cows don’t just moo….I can’t even begin to describe the sounds of a herd of cattle during a rain storm.  African Elephants come to mind. 
• NEVER buy just one baby turkey.  After trying to figure out what was wrong with this bird who was constantly distressing with loud continuous peeping sounds, we read, “Never buy just one baby turkey….they don’t like being alone.”   After a few days, this turkey successfully gave me a headache and irritation that made me want to return him back to the Farm and Feed store.  My husband said absolutely not…we would be known as the “new people who returned the turkey because they didn’t know what they were doing”.  I thought, “Well, at least we aren’t known as the people who asked the sheep farmer about buying some of his goats”  (…That is a true story that happened when we bought our little fixer upper house several years ago.  At least now we can tell the difference between a goat and a sheep.)  So after I came back to the house one day and found the turkey out of his box and wondering around my house….he soon found a new home in the shed. 
• My boys didn’t think twice about bringing a sunfish they caught in their trap into the house and making him a new home on my kitchen counter.  Needless to say, he didn’t survive the attempts of 4 boys to make him a new, better home in the house and died the next day.  My oldest son buried it in the garden and planted a bean seed on top of him.  We recycle around here. 
• Snakes and ticks are a part of country life…..at least in the south.  We have some guineas incubating at a friend’s farm and will be soon releasing guineas to hopefully help control the tick population.  
• I do not like pigs… They are feisty and unpredictable, but very fascinating to watch them use their nose to plow up the dirt — but more entertaining than that is watching your children chase the escapee piglet around the yard with a large fishing net trying to catch it.  It didn’t work.  They eventually decided to trap the pig using their opossum trap.  That, however, did work and the pig was returned to its pen after they repaired the problem spot in the fence.  It was two days before he got out again. 
• Dogs like to tear clothes off the clothes line and run away with your laundry. 
• I love gardening.  Even with the rocks and weeds, I love the work of cultivating the ground and watching little plants grow and produce fruit.  It slows life down and causes me to think about important things. 
• My little boys are more entrepreneurial than I thought.  They have been collecting “critters” around the farm to sell at the farmer’s market on Friday.  So far they have 2 tree frogs, 1 ring neck snake, 3 butterflies, a couple of bees and two salamanders that just escaped. 
• My first milking experience lasted 5 minutes before I gave up and headed back to the house.  My husband met me at the door pretty impressed at my milking skills until I told him it wasn’t possible to milk that goat.  He headed  back out the door with me so we could “try again”.  With his help, we were able to get a whole 6 ounces of fresh milk.  Just enough to be proud of and make banana bread with ;-)  More on that fiasco later.  If you have ever seen The Fox and the Hound movie, the scene where the fox disturbs the cow, upsetting the milk pail, sending the chickens flying up into the air and knocking the poor old woman off her milking stool….well, that was a close representation of what happened. 
• Every day is a stark reminder that, as a culture, we are a pampered, lazy people that depend on fat corporations to to take care of us.  Were we forced to live pre-industrial revolution lives, many of us and our children would die the first week because we have sucked off the teat of convenience, material possessions and a life of ease for far too long, which has turned us into a bunch of lazy, ignorant saps.  I am speaking to myself really.  I can’t tell you how many times I have said, “I can’t believe we are so ignorant” and then think  ”Wow…I can not believe how much work this is.”  Right after that thought comes the, “Wow, I am such a wuss.”  I have running water, a bathroom, a dishwasher, air conditioning, a refrigerator…… We have it so easy.  I caution myself almost everyday to not become so comfortable in my ease, that I magnify idleness.  I challenge myself to love and embrace work.  Work is good for the soul and body and brings me closer to God as I draw upon His strength instead of doing “things” in my own power. 
• Pioneer women deserve our utmost respect and the more I think about what my great, great, great grandmother’s did, it inspires me. 

Though we are far from growing our own food and living a life of family interdepenence, our goals are to be more self-sufficient as a family.  Our desire is build a family that is a light in our community.  We desire to communicate the old fashion idea of the importance of  family and community, which has been lost in our mega-society of mass corporations and fragmented families who can’t live without them. 

We are excited about the beginnings of the local farmer’s market here and while our family won’t be making a showing with tree frogs and butterflies, we soon hope to be taking some produce goods from our farm to sell in the community market.  Last week, I bought some fresh mixed lettuce and spinach that were absolutely wonderful and I didn’t worry about whether or not it had ecoli.  Another friend gave me a loaf of her home made bread that she baked in a ceramic pot.  It was delicious.  We are anxiously awaiting the garden produce that will soon be showing up at the market from various farms around the area. 

While we all do not have access to these avenues for supporting sustainable agriculture or the local community economy, I have found that there are a lot of people looking for this.  Even if you live in the city, it is not impossible to arrange for your meat to come from a farmer that grows pasture fed cows or chickens even if you can not grow your own.  It is exciting to see people starting to research and change how they eat and what kinds of food they buy.  It won’t take too many more food recalls before we all are seriously considering abandoning the globalized markets.  I am already there, however, still reliant on way too many things. 

Now that I have rambled on and used up my computer time for the week, I will close with saying:  I completed our new working schedule this morning and only allotted 1 hour of computer time on Monday.  My husband said I should add more time, but I couldn’t pull it out of the days yet, so for now, I plan on posting a journal update each Monday.