Planting and Lots of Other Stuff

It seems like it has been a long time since I wrote a post, particularly after uploading all the following pictures. Among other things, we have spent the majority of the last couple of weeks planting and preparing to plant.



First off, I want to tell you about our trip to Buenos Aires. Abby, Joseph, and I had a safe trip and completed all that we set off to do. On the way there we were delayed by about six hours because heavy smoke from burning fields shut down the highway, and we missed our appointment. Thankfully, we were able to reschedule an appointment at the embassy for the following day. In the meantime, this gave us the opportunity to eat at Burger King and McDonalds (I can't tell you how good fast food tastes when you haven't had any in nearly two years) and we even visited the Buenos Aires Zoo!



Joseph now has all his U.S. documentation underway and the embassy is only waiting on Dane's signature to finalize the process. Praise God! I am so happy to have that done. Joseph will have dual citizenship in Argentina and the United States, and will have two passports with which to travel. What a special little boy he is!



This is a picture of the United States Embassy in Buenos Aires. It is a little like a fortress. I had hoped that I could take Joseph's picture by the U.S. flag, but they don't let you take any electronic devices in there. Having never visited an embassy, I was a little nieve about what it would be like. In my imagination, I thought that I would sit across the desk from a fellow United Statesican for the interview, but in reality all communication occurred through heavy glass windows via an intercom system.







Well onto some other neat stuff before I get into the planting........



The children continue to find really beautiful flowers. We have asked them to tell us when they find one so that we can get of a picture of it growing in the wild in the future. Here are a couple from last week.



This is a picture of the firewood brigade - Elijah and Sarah.


The one man show around here, Dane, is up to his usual business - trying to tackle several hundred projects at once. Anyone up to a rustic, back to nature working vacation in beautiful subtropical Argentina? We'd love to host volunteers!



Dane got the three bee colonies that we have changed into new boxes. The old boxes are pretty shabby and the hives will be a lot less vunerable to predators in new, more secure boxes. Here are some pictures of Dane making "marcas" or bee panels for the new boxes before he gave the bees their new home.


First, he takes a panel that he and/or the children made and hooks his battery charger to a wire on the panel.

Then he puts a piece of bee's wax on the wire and carefully melts it on with the charger.

A completed bee panel:

Dane also finished the bamboo chicken tractor and we couldn't be happier with the arrangement. We no longer have chickens rushing the door every time we open it and they aren't using the bathroom all over our porch.

We have even started eating some of our meals on the porch and don't have to worry about a single bird stealing food from the little ones. Sheww!

And guess what - we've even been getting some eggs. Those chickens were either laying in the forest or they like all the new feed that we have been giving them to boost there egg production. The following picture shows about a week's worth of eggs - not many but their numbers are increasing.

Furthermore, Dane bought a load of bricks. About 6000 of them, with which he hopes to finish the house, build the bathroom, a bread oven, a cistern, etc., etc. The picture below only shows about a third of them.

Well on to the planting....

The company with the acacia trees gave Dane 3000 trees to plant, so the past couple of weeks he has been preparing for that. Dane now has an agreement with this company to sell them the bark off these trees for making tannin in seven years. So not only do we get paid for the bark, but we get to keep the wood for fence posts, firewood, etc. Dane got a little over a hundred seedlings planted this past week on Jim's farm, but he hopes to hit the job harder after we get our fields planted here on our farm.

This is a picture of all the seedlings in the back of the truck.

Making "chorizo" for "mudas" and "macetas" .....

Dane and the children spent an entire day making little dirt filled bags "macetas" in which to plant our most fragile seeds (tomatoe, bell pepper, and egg plant). We plan to take special care of these plants until the seedlings "mudas" are ready to be transplanted into the garden soil.

In this first picture, you can see Dane cutting a long piece of tubular plastic in which to make the "chorizo" or dirt sausage.

In this picture Dane has placed a piece of pipe at the mouth of the plastic and he is scooping dirt into it. The bottom end is tied off.

Here is a nearly full dirt chorizo.

Then he poked holes in the chorizo with a fork to allow water to enter.

He placed the chorizo in water to allow the soil to be moistened.

Then he cut the chorizo into little three inch size "macetas."

After that, Sarah planted them with seeds. All and all that day, they planted about 250 tomatoe plants, about 80 bell pepper plants, and 60 eggplant plants. We pray the Lord's blessing upon our seeds this year, that they grow into healthy and fruitful plants.

Since we are still experiencing some cool nights, we have been covering our macetas with plastic at night in case of a frost.

The children and I planted lettuce, swiss chard and carrots into our garden last week. We also transplanted all of the onions and garlic to the other side of the garden that Dane had already plowed so that he could plow the side that they were on. We still lack planting green beans and okra and will get to that, Lord willing, this next week.

I also planted some macetas with lettuce and cabbage - about sixty plants of each.

Dane has done a lot of plowing and discing. He finished plowing the field above our garden and the field that we planted corn in down the road last spring. I spread fertilizer on the upper field yesterday and Dane hopes to disc it in this coming week and then, Lord willing, we will get these fields planted in corn, black beans, squash (summer and winter), watermelon, canteloup, and cucumber.

With all the plowing, Dane has discovered that the tractor needs some maintenance, so he has been working that into his list of tasks too.

Well, sorry about the long post, but I hope it catches you all up on what we've been doing around here. Take care and hope to talk to you soon.

Jessica

Toritos

Lots of exciting things have been going on around the homestead the past week.

We now have two mostly brahma (father full-blood, mother 3/4) bull calves that Dane will either train to be oxen or we will use one as our bull and eventually eat the other. Teams of oxen are very common here, and having strong work animals does sound very appealing to us. After all, the grass is plentiful and fuel for the tractor is a never ending expense.


Dane got the gate for the hydroelectric dam built. This is a picture of it right after he got it painted.

Dane has also nearly got the field above our garden ready for planting corn, beans, squash, watermelon, and cucumber. I think the next step is to spread the fertilizer and lime and then work it into the soil.

Here is a picture of the bamboo chicken tractor that Dane is working on. We have so much bamboo on the property, and many people like to build with it, so this is his first attempt at making something with it.

The children have gotten really good at moving the cows around. In the picture below, Abby is moving the gray cow out to her grazing area, early one morning.

Dane and I were researching how to make our own rennet for making cheese and we found online that vegetable rennet can be made from boiling the leaves of the stinging nettle plant. It turns out that we have lots of "ortiga" on our property, a variety of stinging nettle, so we picked some and cooked it up. In our research, we also found that stinging nettle is very healthy to eat with a nutritional value similiar to spinach, so we ate it. Next time, we will actually have to test whether it will set our milk for cheese.

This next picture is of a beautiful moth that made its way into the house. She decided to lay eggs (that we promptly removed) on the curtain before we let her back outside.

This moth we found up in the second story. I heard a big commotion of flapping wings against one of the windows and I thought a bat must have flown into the house, but upon further inspection Dane found the moth. The picture doesn't do it justice, but the moth had a wing span of at least six inches.

The next two pictures are of some wildflowers that the children picked around camp. We have some really neat and exotic ones coming up right now.

Well Abby, Joseph, and I are preparing for our trip to Buenos Aires to apply for Joseph's CROBA (Consular Report of Birth Abroad) and for his U.S. passport. Since his Argentina passport photo turned out pretty bad, and they printed it anyway, we decided that he should practice for his U.S. passport photo.

OOps, how did this one get in there?

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