Whole family just went to urgent care. We all tested negative for strep, but we have some sort of viral infection.

I am about to go scorched earth for the next couple of days on cleaning and quarantining the family. So tired of this.

And grass, some people really need to touch some grass.

So a happy accident.

We move our chickens around the property in a ChickShaw, and we throw them food scraps.

Well our mower has been broken down for the last 5 weeks, so no mowing, I haven't been too disappointed about it. Well we finally got it going again Tuesday night.

Well, my wife did not want to wait for the weekend, for me. She took it out mowing and found a bunch of areas where volunteer vegetables are growing where chickens were.

This is kind of cool. She went around those areas so we have extra garden spaces that are fertilized and growing, that we didn't even work on. Kind of a cool thing. We shall see how they develop.

We might wait a while every year before mowing to see what kind of stuff pops up.

#garden #grownostr #homestead #oklahoma

I can understand that. I feel like that is a model of my life. I grew up as a tech person, always on the computer learning to program, or game as a teenager, I went into software development as a career. However, from being an Eagle Scout I always wanted to live in the country surrounded by nature, two competing goals TBH. With that it lead me to marrying a country girl whose dad grew up a farmer, moving to the country, being curious about chickens. Now I help with cattle, grow chickens, help my wife with a garden, I build all sots of stuff. I am a very different person now, but the path was not a straight line. lol.

Agreed, but in my drive to succeed and have my own side hustle when i get on tangents like this I start to question myself.

That said it isn't that big of a tangent considering I am wanting to get a farm going, and be able to be self reliant on farm equipment. So while learning the history of the engine isn't a direct application, it will probably help.

True, and I think that is the thing that keeps me going back and reading is I keep waiting for that day. 😆 Granted most of my life has been centered on technology, software, cloud infrastructure. Only in the last few years have I worked on learning things in the real world. So I have a lot to catch up on, and have a bit further before I have enough of a base of knowledge to start putting those things together.

True. TBH sometimes I wonder how much history is worth learning. Is it worth diving deep. What value do I gain from learning little things of history other than to scratch my own itch.

As an example the history of the 3 point hitch. There is some very interesting history there from the books I have read. That is started with the ferguson system as a tractor. Then licensed with Ford and a couple of other tractor manufacturers. However, International Harvester saw problems with the 3 point hitch and made the fast hitch to compete, and it was a better hitch system. But they lost. Eventually, they reverse-engineered the 3 point hitch to not pay the licensing fees, and fixed problems with the original design that they saw.

From that I am super curious about who all licensed it, why did ford break away, what were the flaws in the design that IH saw, how did the overcome it, why didn't the fast hitch take hold?

All really interesting, but really who cares? it is settled we now have 3 point hitches.

Sometimes I just get caught up in my own brain.

I'll definitely checkout that book, and it is even on audible. I'll probably listen to it next.

Very true. I find the stories and history fascinating. Just one of those moments of self-doubt where I wonder if I should go back to business and marketing books that I like as well.

Sometimes I wonder if it is worth learning some things.

I just spent $80 on 2 books that is the complete history of the internal combustion engine, and the development of the diesel engine.

There is literally no reason for me to learn the history of engines. Even if it has been a curiosity for years, I gain no value in learning it.

To work on an engine I don’t need to know the history, society is moving to electric engines so the future value is

negligible.

I have read about 8 history books in the last 3 months on agriculture, tractors, and farm tech. Most of it does not gain me anything.

So is it really worth it?

#history #grownostr #philosophy #continuingeducation

I made another attempt at the cub tonight. I am pretty sure I got the points gauged right, but still no start. I tried some ether, but I kept having to jump from one side to another really fast.

I need to check on fuel flow, carburetor, and replace the distributor cap.

All I really want to do at this point is get it started so I can move it into my shop to do more work on it.

#grownostr #homestead #diy #tractor #farmall

Pool + house poor. Took my parents a couple of decades to recover from a few bad financial decisions.

I do not, but I wish my parents had thought of it. We could have actually had money growing up. They paid way too much for a pool that you could play volleyball in so when family came over everyone could play.

Interesting side hustle idea came across.

#grownostr #sidehustle

Finally got my NIP-05 verification working on my domain.

Now onto figuring out running my own relay.

I do similar, but use Joplin app. I also have a document with preset hashtags and categorize them. I can then copy and paste them into post. That way I keep consistent.

I still haven’t done my own relay, but that is on the todo list.

Will do when it is ready 👍 still says upcoming for me.

That is the crazy thing is how you describe, minus the hitting the brain, I am doing. However, they still have crazy death throes. Other people don't seem to mention it. It is definitely in my research topics as I have to be missing something.

It was a bit of a long weekend, but we got our 25 meat birds in the fridge. Wednesday our new freezer comes, would have been sooner if not for some customs issues.

While I am happy with the efficiency gains from this years setup, I still have a long way to go.

It took about 10 hours from setup to tear down for me and my wife. I did most of the work, and my wife helped where she could. She just couldn't do the evisceration, even though she tried. She also couldn't do the kill either.

I think we got the flow down fairly well, the biggest issue is we now need to figure out a few things in the actual doing.

Here are areas for us to work on:

1. Cutting off the head. I don't know why we had so much trouble this year when in years past this just wasn't an issue.

2. More efficient rinsing of the bird after evisceration. We were using a hose, but we really need a sink right there by the table.

3. The actual killing of the chicken wasn't bad, but the death throws are tough since they are violent at times the chicken wants to flop out. So we have to sit there and hold the chickens until they are done. This is a huge time waste. I need to work on this more.

4. Evisceration could go smoother/faster, but I am not sure how. For the first 10 I was trying to re-remember everything. I then got smoother/quicker. That said with how fast joel salatin can do it, I have lots of room for improvement.

5. Scald and pluck 2 at a time instead of 1 at a time. The new scalder is awesome and our first time using it, but if we can do 2 at a time we should save quite a bit of time.

6. Organization of equipment. Currently I just don't have a lot of room so this needs to get better. We did just get a 40' container so that is going to help a lot.

As you can see there are a lot of areas for improvement, but considering where we started to begin with. I would say we have made great headway.

Also we put 150lbs of chicken in freezer. We averaged 6lb chickens this year, woohoo. I'll talk more later on how we got that, and why, for us, it was a surprise.

#homestead #oklahoma #grownostr #diy #chickens #selfreliance

I tried to get one of my cubs running tonight. I replaced the points and condenser since that was supposed to be the issue. No success. However I freely admit I might have done it wrong since it is my first time ever to do this. Lol.

It also got my mind off of the prep work I have to do for chicken butcher day on Saturday. I just kept thinking about all the things I have to do, but can’t until tomorrow.

I wish I had learned a lot of this earlier in life that is why my kids will learn it before they move out. They will then have fallback skills if they don’t want to pursue the farm.

#homestead #diy #grownostr #oklahoma

I don’t know. They have never had it before and then this year boom, multiple times.