The Post Is Finished

We were without internet for about three days and had patchy touch and go service for another few, but I think we are up and going good now. We have lots of pictures to share of our last couple of weeks on the farm. This has been a post in progress for many days now.


As usual, Dane has a variety of projects going. He read that tea seed oil (not tea tree oil) is a very healthy cooking oil like olive oil that is used commonly in China. It can potentially be used to make biodiesel as well. Since we have six acres of tea and tons of tea seeds just lying around, Dane decided to try pressing some. He used his vice to do so, and stuff came out! :-) Next, he wants to take some to Obera to be pressed in an actual seed press to see what the end product is. The oil will have to be processed and that is going to take some more research too. Anyway, it is exciting to think that eventually we might be able to supply our own oil needs.

Here is what the tea seeds look like before they are shelled.

Here are the seeds with their shells removed.

Dane worked on getting the wood up around the attic until he ran out of wood. The rest of the attic and the columns he enclosed with plastic to help keep out the rain and insects. Since it is a possibility that we may not get the rest of the wood that we ordered from the sawmill, Dane may just brick in the two unfinished exterior walls around the first level porch and remove wood off the back wall to finish the attic and brick the back wall, but we will see.

The vertical wood around the attic has turned out very nicely. We like the contrast.

Dane has also been working on plowing a field above our garden. It is going to take quite a few passes with the plow and disc to chop up all the vegetation, but we hope to plant corn, beans, and squash in this one and half acre area in the next few weeks.

Here is Dane working on the disc.

Dane purchased all the pipe for the hydroelectric project. It is going to take one hundred meters of it.

Dane bought a few fruit trees: two peach, two plum, two pink grapefruit, and a persimmon.
He planted them high on the hill by the internet tower. Being low in the valley, we get later frosts, so we thought the trees might do better at a higher elevation. The pasture where the tower and trees are is about 40 meters higher in elevation than our homesite.

This is a picture of the persimmon tree in the corner of the garden before Dane got it planted.

These are all the other fruit trees in the garden before they were planted.

We discovered that we have a mulberry tree right by the house. I don't know how we missed it last year.

Three brothers: Elijah, David, and Joseph.

One morning Joseph pushed a chair up to the kitchen counter and grabbed a sponge and started cleaning. It was cute, so I had to take a picture of him. He was very serious about his work too.

We Have Cows!

These are our new cows. They are both pregnant. The grey cow is supposed to have her calf any day now and the red and white cow is due in February. We pray we are able to milk them.

Here they are resting in the grass one afternoon.

Here are Sarah, Abby, and David petting the red and white cow. They have requested a brush to brush her hair. Lol!

This is a picture of Patita, our little female duck. Our male duck disappeared a couple of weeks ago. Sadly, we probably won't have ducklings for a while until we can get another male duck.

Well that is all for now, but it took me so long to get this post out that I already have pictures and things to tell about for another. Hopefully by next week I get it up.

Take care,
Jessica

He Has a Passport

After applying for a passport twice and fifteen months later, Joseph has his Republic of Argentina Passport! Abby, Joseph, and I traveled by bus to Posadas, the capital of Misiones province, on Thursday morning and picked up Joseph's passport from the Policia Federal. We are very excited and thankful. Praise the Lord!

I will explain why we had problems getting his passport for those of you who may not know the story. Joseph was born two and half weeks after we arrived in Argentina as tourists. It turns out that here in the province of Misiones there had been an ongoing problem of poor mothers selling there babies to foreigners. Several cases came to light and all the babies involved had falsified birth certificates, documents, etc. So when we applied for Joseph's passport, it immediately made some red flags go up. The passport agency of the Federal police never contacted us to let us know, but after several inquires by us they asked for a copy of my permission to fly while I was pregnant. I had misplaced mine, but thankfully my midwife had another copy and promptly sent it to me. We had to have this translated and I missed the deadline to get it to them, so the original passport application was denied. We reapplied with the permission to fly document in May and this time they approved the application. Thank the Lord!

Here is Joseph looking it over.





We still need to report Joseph's birth and apply for his United States Passport at the U.S. embassy in Buenos Aires. I scheduled an appointment to do so on September 16th, and plan, Lord willing, to travel with Joseph there the night before. Abby willl most likely accompany me to help. Dane plans to travel to the embassy at a later date to complete the paperwork.

Also this past week, Dane completed two more sections of wall around the attic. He is leaving the top foot on the ends open for now because he doesn't have a good way to reach that area to work without a ladder. He may just screen in the open part later for more ventilation instead of putting up wood. We are going to see how it goes and how it stands up to the rain before deciding.



These are some pictures that Dane took from the attic when he was up there working one rainy day.





Dane is continuing to try to get all of our projects underway. Besides working on the house this past week, he worked on getting the beehives ready for occupants, he bought all the piping for the hydroelectric project and a couple more used implements for the tractor/crawler: a seed planter and a sicklebar. He didn't make it to the fabricator to discuss the distillery components but will probably do so next week.

The children have been busy picking wildflowers. They like to bring me home little bouquets and have me take pictures of them, so here is the latest one.



Well that's all we have for now. Until next time.

Jessica

Spring is in the Air

The old peach tree on our property has beautiful blossoms on it.

The temperatures have continued to stay nice. This "winter" has been considerably mild compared to last year's. Most days are in the 70's and the nights fall to the 50's. We have also had little rain, aside from a nice sideways driving rain and hail storm that wetted us inside our still unfinished house and knocked out the power to our internet tower for nearly a week.

The flies and moths are beginning to make their appearances again - another sign that spring is approaching. We have been amazed at the hundreds of different moths and flies that are in this area. There were few days last spring that we did not see a new flying insect that we hadn't seen before. This is a picture of a beautiful moth that came into the house the other night. At the top of its wings it had a glittery silver band and the circles in its wings were transparent.

We are pleased to announce that we had our first visitors from the U.S. two weeks ago, Mr. Reed and Mr. New. These two Christian gentlemen were in Argentina on a business trip and graciously stopped by our neck of the woods to see this area and to visit. We had a wonderful and uplifting time of fellowship with them and hope that they will return for another visit sometime.

Projects, projects, projects....

Dane's list of projects is growing. He got one of the eight sections of the attic roof done and we are very pleased with the outcome. He hopes to get the others completed soon.

In the meantime, Mr. Barney, the engineering professor from the University in Obera who has 40 years of experience with microhydro came out here a couple of weeks ago and looked at the creek down from our house, and the river and said that he thought the creek has plenty enough flow to build a microhydro electricity system on it. He felt that putting one on the river would be too complicated and expensive. So, after some careful calculations done by Mr. Barney on his watch calculator and Dane on his cellphone calculator, they are thinking that the creek has enough energy to supply our home with 7 -30 kilowatt hours / day, depending on how much rain we have had. We are excited about this. Mr. Barney is now waiting for Dane to build a dam so that they can install a turbine. Dane worked on site for a couple of days and says he is ready to do the concrete work. Lord willing, our microhydro system will be up and running soon!

Mr. Barney and Dane also have an alcohol microdistillery unit in the works. They have started making plans to build one so that we can supply our own fuel needs here eventually. They have begun the search for parts and have been visiting with local fabricators. Lord willing, we should be able to supply all of our fuel needs with just a couple acres of sugarcane in the not so distant future.

The time to plant things like sugarcane, corn, and many of our garden vegetables is coming upon us, so Dane has purchased a couple more implements, a disc and a box blade, so that he can prepare the planting sites.

We have decided that we want to keep our chickens in chicken tractors. They have become a terrible nuisance and instead of interrupting their free ranging, Dane has started plans for the construction of at least two tractors that we can move them around in. The current chicken house will most likely become a tool shed in the future, and the chicken yard, an all purpose animal enclosure.

Needless to say, Dane has a lot to do, but this fact is a great blessing, and I pray that the Lord be magnified in all our family endeavors.

Here is a picture of all the children working to make sweet rolls one afternoon. Cooking is one job they all are usually more than happy to help with. They did an excellent job on them too!

Abby and Sarah also helped me butcher two roosters last week. Besides the killing, the girls completely cleaned one rooster and and removed all the meat from both after they were cooked. They were very excited about their contribution to the menu the next day. We enjoyed a nice pot of chicken and gravy over rice.

We also wanted to give a special thanks to Kris Ante over at http://www.anteagrarians.com/ for nominating our blog as a Brillant weblog in July. We really appreciate our friends in other places that have an interest in our family's adventures. Kris, her husband Logan, and their three sons are on their own agrarian adventure in Texas. Through their blog, we have enjoyed having the privilege of watching their Christian agrarian homestead take shape.

Well I just stepped outside for a minute and our goat and her two kids have apparently decided to let themselves out of the pasture. I snapped a picture of them by the tent. The kids are growing so fast.

Well it is time to get the next meal going.

Take care,

Jessica