Last Week's Happenings

We had a nice week last week. The weather was warmer and we had some rain.

Dane went on a marathon sanding and painting streak and got all the exterior wood for the house done, so putting it up should go quickly, Lord willing.

Here is a picture of it as the children were counting how many pieces he had painted on Sunday. At that point he had painted 204 for the day, but he continued on an hour or more after that.





Elijah, who turned seven last week, lost his job painting to his Dad, so he started making the frames for the new bee hives that we hope to establish. He is starting to get good at driving nails.



Our chickens stopped laying eggs a few months ago, and we bought our first store bought eggs last week, a whole 30 dozen of them. Ironically, four of our hens started laying again two days later. Of these, one has insisted on laying her egg in Joseph's bed. The first day I found an egg in the bed I thought it was funny, but it has been a fight to keep the hen out of our tent ever since because the zipper isn't functioning properly. Needless to say,we have found an egg in the tent nearly every day for a week. This has led to discussions on expanding the chicken yard and ending this free ranging bit. We certainly want our chickens to free range, but here in these parts the vegetation is abundant and so are the insects, so a very large enclosed area would work nicely and keep the birds out of our area. My mother always thinks it is funny when we are talking on the phone and I have to excuse myself to shoo chickens out of the kitchen tent. Yes, living without doors can be very interesting.

This is a little video of Abby spinning Joseph on a tote lid on the table.

With the rain this week, Joseph had to spend some time off the ground to keep him from getting too muddy. In the below picture, he had just fallen off a chair and into the mud. Sorry, the shutter of the camera got a little stuck.




Last week Dane took the U-joint off the Toyota to replace it; however, the new one did not fit. We decided to go to town in the big Ford truck to replace the part and to do our monthly shopping. Unfortunately, the truck slid off the road and got stuck in the mud on the uphill just in front of our neighbors' home on the other side of the creek. This is the same spot where the gravel truck got stuck a year ago. As Dane was trying to get us back on the road, the truck ran out of diesel. There hadn't been any diesel in town the last two trips Dane had gone and he had gotten word that there was some that day, so therefore, another reason to take the big truck. We ended up walking home and taking the Toyota without a U-joint or rear drive shaft. This meant Dane had to drive the truck in four wheel drive without functioning rearwheels. I didn't think we would make it, but thankfully, the Lord saw us to town safely.

The next day Dane and I spent the afternoon trying to get the truck out with the little crawler. I steered the truck while he pulled with the crawler. We finally got free after two and half hours when I figured out how to be helpful and not counterproductive (the truck is big and I am little - I can't see which way the wheels are pointing and it took me awhile to figure it all out). It is amazing how strong that crawler is. No tractor could have pulled that big truck out, but the crawler did! Afterward, I learned how to drive the crawler and got to drive it back to our farm as Dane drove the truck. The crawler had left some huge ruts in the road about two foot deep, so Dane returned to the site with hoe, shovel, and pick ax to do some road repairs. All and all it was an exhausting and exciting afternoon!

Here is a picture of what the house looks like today (Tuesday). Dane finished the exterior wood on the northwest facing side except for the attic at the top.


This is a picture of a huge cockroach. For a roach, it was pretty. It had an armor-like shell and neat colors. I can say this because Dane found it outside on a piece of wood, not in the kitchen.

Still Learning

Well we had a good week here. The weather was colder, so it was hard to get up in the mornings. I think it was in the lower thirties most nights and mornings, but warmed up to the sixties in the day. We slept very cosily in our tent under lots of blankets and in the morning we all crowded around the wood stove while I made breakfast and the children did their schoolwork. A couple of mornings we woke up to lots of frost.

The frost looked kinda like snow.

It was on the clothes on the laundry line too.

Early in the week, Dane finished putting cyclone fence around the goats' corral, so that they would be more secure as they learned the electric fence.

We have gained the confidence of the pregnant goat. She comes running up to us now when we take her something to eat. The other goats, the momma and her kid, are still pretty skiddish, despite us milking the mother every day. And for this reason, we lost her and her kid yesterday just as we lost the first goat when Dane brought them home. We turned the goats out into the other fenced area (the three acres of jungle that Dane fenced) in order to give them more grazing. Well, we discovered right away that finding not so friendly goats in the jungle was going to be a problem (this isn't Texas - no wide open spaces on this farm). We all manned a post as Dane searched through the brush looking for them. After a while, I spotted them and hollered to Dane which direction they were headed. He saw them just as they jumped through the fence and into the tea tree jungle.

This is a picture of the fenced in area from the outside looking in. It is all jungle in there. Coming from west Texas, we thought it would be great to give our goats such a nice place to eat weeds without us having to buy and haul food to them all the time.

This is the tea tree jungle.

We have decided that the tea tree jungle is some sort of black hole because goats disappear in there without a trace. We have about five acres of old black tea trees downhill from our camp that have grown to about twelve feet in height. In between the tea rows, there are pine tree tops that were chopped down and left to rot and intermingled with this are vines and other brush. Dane and the older children covered two treacherous miles of it, going up and down rows, a week ago in search of the first goat and never found a sign of her. Elijah said that in one of the rows he was walking up an incline covered with pine needles and he started to hear a bunch of crunching below him. He suddenly crashed through a pile of brush that had been hidden by the pine litter only to find Sarah, who had fallen into the same trap in the adjacent row, at the bottom of it. He said, "I fell through and Sarah was in there!" We are sure that the goats are in there, but we have not seen or heard them since they entered. They have plenty to eat and drink and are at little risk of being taken by predators, so I guess we will be searching for them from now on every time we go down there.

In the search for goats we found lots of berries. These berries are all over the place in clearings around the forest. They aren't very sweet, but we still enjoy snacking on them when we find them.

This is a picture of a giant spider web along the trail to the spring. It is hard to tell from the picture just how big it is, but it spans nearly a four foot by four foot area. I haven't seen the spider that lives there, but judging from the size of the web, it might be a big one.

Dane continued to work on the exterior walls of the house this week. It looks very nice.

Our chicks are growing and are doing very well. Our other chickens have started laying again too! We are very excited about that.

Dane just got back from moving the three bee boxes from the neighbors property to Jim's property. He said it all went well and he feels a lot more comfortable working with the bees now.

Also, I forgot to mention in the last post that we finished taking all of our corn off the cob and bagging it to feed the animals in the future. We ended up with about 150 pounds of corn from our small corn field. Not a lot, but it gives us an idea how much we need to plant the next time. We are also using the husks in our wood burning stove as a source of fuel. They burn very well.

Goats

We are happy to announce that our search for goats has ended. For months we have been trying to plan a trip to several goat dairies in either Salta or Mar del Plata to purchase goats, but have put it off due to the expense and inconvenience of such a trip. Dane looked locally, but did not find any desirable goats until this past week. The men at INSA, the ag extension office, in Obera told Dane about a man who sold meat goats in a nearby town. After some goose (or goat) chasing Dane found another gentleman on Tuesday and spent a nice day on his farm. The man, Mr. Coon, and his family have over 100 head of cattle, 70 some goats, sheep, bees, chickens, etc. Mr. Coon told Dane that he shouldn't pursue buying goats in other areas of Argentina because they are not sufficiently resistant to parasites, a big problem in this area. His goats were all very healthy looking and have good milking characteristics, so Dane bought three nannies from him: one with a young kid and two that are pregnant.

Sadly, we lost one of the pregnant nannies about ten minutes after Dane arrived home with her. These goats are a little wild and the two pregnant ones bolted right through the electric fence and into the jungle. The children and Dane found one of them quickly in the tea, but the other disappeared without a trace. Dane spent every day this past week searching for her, but to no avail. The way the terrain and vegetation is out there, the goat could be within a few feet and us not know it. We have learned a valuable lesson and will have to be very diligent when it comes to our animals and the forest in the future. Dane is now putting some chain link fencing around the goats' electric fence training corral to make it harder for them to escape while they are learning the fence.

Wednesday morning, we woke and milked the nanny with the kid. To our delight, we got a full quart of milk. Although each milking since hasn't proved as bountiful a catch, we are already dreaming of making cheese and eating fresh yogurt again. For now, we are enjoying every drop of milk she gives us and we anxiously await the birth of the other goat's kids so we can begin milking her as well.

Here are pictures of our three new goats who have yet to be named.....

Dane did a little research on manderins and it turns out that there are over 200 varieties of madarins, and only one of those is a tangerine (and only named this because they were first imported to Florida from Tangeir). So the manderins that we have here on our property that they call "mandarinas" are mandarins. It is unlikely that they are tangerines, but who knows? We certainly don't! We do know that they are all ripe now and very delicious. We each have consumed about a dozen a day and praise the Lord for this provision. We hope to begin preserving them once we find some canning supplies.

This is a picture of one of the mandarins.

We had a really warm and dry week and the children got to do some of their schoolwork outdoors. Here is a picture of Elisabeth doing her schoolwork this past week on the table the children made of scrap wood. She just turned five and is reading well now.

Dane bought a couple more bee boxes so that he could start some more colonies. We would eventually like to have up to fifteen boxes, but will start with five. He bought three used boxes with bees a few months ago that he needs to move to our property. He tried to move them last night, but found that the boxes have more holes than he had intended (they are homemade) and he ran out of grass to put in his smoker in the hole search, so he decided to wait to talk to the previous owner who knows the boxes better, in order to be better prepared next time.

Here is a picture of him in his beekeeper gear.

Lastly, Dane got his plow all fixed up and tested it last week. He welded a bunch of steel onto it to make it heavier and modified it some. It now plows great and moves rocks and roots too and doesn't bend in the process. He is anxious to start doing some real cleaning up around here.

Taking Pleasure in Our Work

We had a really good week. We are back to working as a family (one of the reasons why we came here to begin with) as we tackle the many projects that need tending to around here and it has been a great pleasure for us all.

We started the week with the idea of getting all 2000 of the yerba seedlings that Dane had moved here from the neighbor's nursery planted. In order to do this, starting last Monday, the children and I took off from schoolwork to help Dane; however, it is so cold here in the morning now and there is a heavy dew on everything, so Wednesday we decided to go ahead and have the childrens' classes and save the planting for the afternoons. By Wednesday evening, we had planted a little over 200 trees. Thursday and Friday we busied ourselves with other projects. The remaining seedlings we have decided will be planted only as time allows. Dane got the plow fixed up so that he can plow the rows which will make the planting go a little faster for us.

Dane has never been real enthusiastic about being a yerba farmer. Cash cropping just isn't very appealing to us. However, if we need a little extra income, harvesting the yerba will be an option, Lord willing. In the big scheme, we would like more to sell our honey and animal products if the Lord sees fit to allow us.

Other projects of the week included:

1) We worked on the house. Dane taught me how to sand the wood with his electric sander and the children and I have been painting while he has worked on putting the first wall up.




This is a picture of our little painting crew. The children love their job and we can't provide the wood fast enough for them to get tired of it.


This is the first exterior wall that Dane worked on this week. As the wood gets sanded, the children paint it, and when it drys, Dane puts it up. Plank by plank the wall is growing!


This is an inside view of the wall.



2) On Tuesday we harvested all the dry corn from our corn field so that Dane could clear rows for the yerba. Tomorrow the children and I plan to take it all off the cobs and bag it for later use.

3) Dane planted twenty-three citrus trees (nine tangerines, nine navel oranges, three blood oranges, one kumquat, and one lemon) and three banana plants.

These are some pictures of the citrus trees and Dane planting them.



This is one of the banana plants.

Dane planted the banana plants up on a hill at the tree line to protect them from frost. I took this picture from there overlooking the homesite and surrounding area. It is fall now, so things are starting to look a little browner.

This was the week for eye injuries here - at least for the boys. On Monday morning, Joseph fell while he was walking and hit his left eye on a wooden crate. He scraped his lower and upper eye lids pretty good, but thank the Lord, they were just surface wounds. Monday afternoon, David had a much scarier eye injury. Sarah accidently hit him in the left eye with a tree branch. The branch scratched his cornea to the point that I thought he would be blinded. I quickly ran to read up on such an injury on the internet and apparently corneal scratches are pretty common and the treatment is just the removel of any foreign objects and antibiotic oinment. The next morning he couldn't open his eye because mucus had dried around it and sealed it shut. His eye has looked better each day and his vision does not seem to be affected either. Tuesday morning, Elijah got stung by a wasp in his left eye and his face and eye swelled a lot. It is now Saturday and all three boys look like themselves again. Praise the Lord!

We lost four of our chicks this week. The first one we think died from health related causes, and we believe the other three got too cold in the night. The remaining eight chicks are doing really well and are starting to get their wing feathers.

Here is a picture of a snake that one of the chickens found the other day. We tried to identify it on the internet and we think it is a calico snake which is not venomous. It is hard to tell from the picture, but it is red, black, and white.

Working Solo

This past week our hired helpers, the Sosa's, have gone on to other things. We are very thankful to have had their help as we adjusted to our new environment and we pray they seek the Lord as they go on their way. Though things will be different without them here, we are very excited about our family's newfound freedom. We will now have to pull together more as we work on the homestead projects and the extra cash that is available will allow us to purchase some things that we could not before.


Our first week solo went great. We found that we can get just as much, or nearly as much, done without our helpers as we can with them, which is very encouraging.


Here are some pictures of the house. Dane worked on it all week and got the beams up for the second story ceiling/attic floor up.

Dane still hasn't been able to find a ladder he is willing to pay money for. Every time he goes to the store to buy a good one, they tell him they will have some next week. So he has spent some time balancing precariously on a chair and even told me, "If I die, just tell them I fell off a chair." In this picture, you can see him standing on a board, which thankfully, is a little safer.

In this picture, Dane is sanding some of the wood that will make up the outside walls of the house.

Here is a picture of Elijah painting wood with varnish and having a very good time doing so.

We finished making beds and planting the garden this week. When we planted last Spring, we didn't get the entire garden planted because we had so many sun loving plants planted outside of it; however, the winter crops all like the partial shade and we easily used up all the space available. We already have some lettuce, cabbage, spinach, peas, and broccoli growing. Our tomatoes are still doing well too, despite the colder weather.

We finished all the tangerines we brought home from the Sosa's(we thought they were mandarin oranges because they call them "mandarinas," but we have since decided that they are more like tangarines); however, some of our tangerines are getting ripe too. This is a picture of the fruit in one our trees.

We got a dozen new chicks this past week. They call them "ponedoras," or "putters," but we think they are Rhode Island Reds based on their color. They were only a day or two old when we bought them, so we are keeping them in a plastic tote with a kerosene lantern. We read that when you use a lantern to warm your chicks that you should use one with a guard around it so that the chicks don't burn themselves. But as you can see from the picture, our chicks sit up on the tank and wrap their bodies around the glass to keep warm.

Here is a picture of Joseph peeking into the tote to see them.

We always encourage the children to use their heads. Here is a picture of Sarah doing just that, literally, with some of the day's laundry on her head.

Today the children made their own table out of some old scrap wood and some bent nails. They ate their lunch outside on it when they were done.

Time To Plant

The past week was rainy. We had some rain every day, and the temperatures were in the upper 50's most of the time. It was nice, but it is pretty muddy here around camp. Most of the week's laundry is stilling hanging on the line, and any other available spot. Little Joseph has had to spend most of his time playing on the table or on the wood pile because there really is no place for a baby to go when its pouring rain and you live in a tent with a dirt (or mud) floor. These things aside, we are very thankful for the rain, specifically since it is time to plant.

Mud, mud, and more mud.

We woke up to some frost the other morning as you can see on the truck bed.

Elisabeth was very excited to find this frog one night before we went to bed. It quickly escaped, but we did manage to get some pictures of it first, so that she could show her brothers and sisters, who were already sleeping, the next morning.

A couple of months ago Dane bought the yerba mate nursery of one our neighbors because the neighbor had moved to town and was not able to care for the seedlings anymore. There are about 10,000 little trees in the nursery that have to be transplanted to another location, so this past week, Dane, Javier, Andres, and Pascual started the process of moving the trees from there to here so that they can be planted on our farm, the Sosa's, and on Jim's farm. They managed to get 2,000 trees out of the ground and over here. After each load, we moved the trees out of the crates and into our garden to be planted later. Yerba mate is an evergreen holly and is the largest cash crop of this area. The leaves of the tree are harvested and dried for an herbal tea that is very popular in South America. It is slowly becoming popular in the U.S. as well. I haven't seen a farm in our area, that did not have yerba trees. Black tea is also an important crop here, but many farmers have abandoned their tea trees because of the low tea prices. We have several acres of old black tea trees on our farm, but they are overgrown to the point that eventually Dane will probably cut them down to the ground. We have been told by several people that once cut, they will regrow.

Here is a picture of Elisabeth and David helping to take the seedlings out of the crates.

This is a black tea flower off of one of our trees. The children brought me this one as a gift. The flowers smell very nice.

We worked in the garden some this week when the weather allowed. After the needed moisture and an addition of fertilizer, we are replanting some of the things that we planted a few weeks ago that never sprouted (lettuce, spinach, broccoli, cabbage). We pray the Lord's blessings on our garden, so that we can become more dependent on the produce of our own land instead of that of others.

Here is a picture of Susana and Abby working in the garden one afternoon.

Dane replaced the upper A-arm bushing in the Toyota this week. The rough roads are hard on the vehicles, so it certainly is a blessing that Dane is a good mechanic.

The children and I went to the Sosa's yesterday to pick mandarin oranges. They have a ton of orange trees and most of the fruit goes to waste, so we brought home three large bags. We are enjoying the fresh fruit. Isabel Sosa told me that most of their trees were started from seeds that they collected from oranges they bought to eat. I didn't know that you could start orange trees from seed, but it sure is worth a try. So I intend, Lord willing, to plant some of the seeds from the fruit this week as well.

Well, lunch is calling now.

Until the next post,

Jessica