The Sifford Sojournal

Our journal of what we pray is our sojourn of life along the narrow way, even the old paths, submitting to the Bible as a light unto both.

Category: agrarianism (Page 19 of 19)

Homemade Fat Lamp

May 9, 2009 / / 22 Comments

In doing a little more research on fat lamps, I decided to try making one myself using baling wire and a mason jar. Basically, the wire would be coiled and shaped so as to hold the wick (a mop head string), and a handle would be included to be able to pull out the wick and wick holder. Here’s how I did it:

I wrapped the wire around a pencil. For the mop string we had though, the coil ended up too large; and so, I bent the coils to make them smaller:

This is the completed wick holder:

And here it is with the lard-saturated wick in place:

This is the wick holder and the wick now in the jar. Before I placed them in, I put several table spoons of lard into the jar and mashed them with the spoon to flatten them out:

Finally, here the lamp is lit:

Thankfully, the wick holder handle doesn’t seem to get hot when using the fat lamp.

We again are grateful for the Lord’s provisions; for Christ Jesus, the Light of the world, the Light of life (John 8:12); and for His Word, a light unto our feet and a lamp unto our paths (Psalms 119:105)!

— David

 

On the Road to Agrarianism I Got a Fat Fire

April 16, 2009 / / 5 Comments

In continuing on a path to the old ways, we are hoping to lessen our reliance upon electricity, which for us right now includes producing light. Typically in the old days light was generated by burning oil (Lev 24:2; Ex 39:37). Interestingly, one of the oils people would use was lard from animals. We have the rendered fat from our pigs that have been butchered; and so, I thought it might be interesting to see if using the lard might work for us.

I discovered that there are things that exist called “fat lamps”, and so I purchased one from over the Internet that was a double, hanging lamp. These don’t have a wick, but apparently a strings from a mop head can be used, a couple of which the neighbors gave me. I put a large tablespoon worth of lard in the little “pan” of the lamp, took a mop string and put it in the lard so that it would be completely covered (the lard needs to be melted just enough to do this), put the lard-coated wick in the spout of the lamp, and lit it. It worked!…sort of — it had a very small flame. I found that if I positioned the wick to stick up in the air a little like a candle, it worked much better. The lard melted as the wick burned; the wick became saturated; and with as much lard as we used, the flame lasted for about three hours.

Here are some pictures of it in action:


Here it is, set in its hanging partner lamp:

After the first test where all of the lard was used, I wanted to see if by just adding more lard the lamp would continue to work. And so, I took another bit of lard and put it in the lamp, trimmed the wick and repositioned it, and then lit it. It was soaked enough with the previous lard that it worked fine; and then as the new lard melted, the lamp continued to burn.

Here it is re-lit, and at night with the electric lights off:

We are thankful for the Lord showing us ways to do things that are fashioned from His direct provisions.

— David

Garden 2008 II Update II – Sauerkraut

March 21, 2009 / / 11 Comments

We had a drought last Summer and Fall which really affected the quantity and size of many of our garden vegetables. The time came to harvest our red cabbage from our 2008 Fall garden, and the heads were small and did not really look like cabbage heads but more like a bunch of leaves loosely wrapped around or falling away from each other. Dave said we had to at least try to do something with them. Our neighbor, Michael, mentioned you could make sauerkraut with cabbage, so we thought that might be the best way to go.

I looked up the simplest recipe I could find and hoped for the best.

Here is the cabbage in our garden waiting patiently to be harvested by its novice owner (pick me, pick me!!)

I washed all the cabbage leaves and cut them up with a knife because they were too loose to shred with a shredder or grater. I put the leaves in two 9×13″ pans, added the proportionate amount of pickling salt, and mixed well with my hands. There wasn’t much moisture to be drawn out of the leaves, so I had to add a lot more water when putting them into canning jars. After about 24 hours +/-, I prepared pint canning jars and filled them up with the cut-up cabbage leaves adding water, leaving 1″ head space, and screwed on the lids. I followed the instructions to put the jars into a pan (or lined box in my case) because as they started to ferment, there was some (not much) overflow leakage.

Then I stored the jars at room temperature for six weeks and turned them upside down several times over the course of those weeks to distribute the brine and keep everything moist.

At the end of the six weeks, I opened up all of the jars and emptied them into a large sauce pan, simmering them for about five minutes. Yep, it smelled and tasted like sauerkraut, although it was very dark green and more coarse than the kind you buy at the store. Although turning the cabbage into sauerkraut is a preservation method in itself, I proceeded to can the pints of sauerkraut and put them down in our root cellar in order to preserve them for as long as possible. Since we are not generally sauerkraut eating folks, I needed all the time I could get to figure out more ways to fix it!

Wow! I couldn’t believe that we were able to make sauerkraut and preserve it from what appeared to be pretty lifeless leaves. What a wonderful blessing! I’m very thankful to be learning these valuable lessons in food preservation and to be able to witness God’s direct provision from planting to our table.

Susan

Animal Rotation Pens Expansions

January 19, 2009 / / 1 Comment

Part of our plan for our animals was to rotate them through a set of pens, which would provide various types of fertilization in an effort to revitalize, improve and maintain the efficiency of the soil. Also, with the need to separate out our male goat from the female goats to control the breeding process, I decided it was time to add a couple more pens to our current set of two pens. Our neighbor Kelly was looking for some work, so we hired him to build these for us.

Before starting on the new pens however, some work needed to be done on the previous pens to bolster the support structure of the wood posts. On a few of them I had hoped to get away with just a single post without supports. Even though I didn’t stretch the fence that tightly, it still had been putting enough pressure on the posts to begin to pull out of the ground a little. And so Kelly added some “kickers” (the diagonal posts) and “dead men” support (the small posts to which the lower part of the diagonals are attached) to help with that problem. This also would set a better design precedent for the new pens. Further, in the way I designed the first two pens, I had the entry gates for each pen (which were 12 foot gates in order to allow for the driving through of the tractor and disk plows) next to each other so they would share a common post to which the opening side of the gate would latch. This was in order to try to use fewer posts. Although not perfect, this has seemed to work fairly well in being able to move animals from one pen to the other:

However, in adding the next two pens, we could use this same design between them; but if we were going to be able to move animals from pen 2 to pen 3, it would need to be done through gates that would be nearly 200 feet apart, which would probably require a pathway between those two pens. And so instead of that, Kelly added a gate to the side of pen 2 that would allow for free movement between it and pen 3:

Then he set to work on replicating pens 1 and 2 as pens 3 and 4. We plan on adding a 5th pen at some point, so he implemented the same pass-through on pen 4 that he added to pen 2:

We thank Kelly for his work, and once again for the Lord for His resources and provisions. We pray that God always guide and direct us in our decisions in how to build our homestead; and that, despite ourselves and any lack of understanding or foresight, He lead us to do the right things and to those that will work well in the future, for His glory.

— David

The Answer, My Friend, Is Blowing in the Wind

August 7, 2008 / / 13 Comments


Dave and I lived in a cottage behind our landlady’s house before we moved to Texas. We weren’t able to have a washer and dryer in the cottage so we had a standing laundry mat “date” every other week to get it all done at once. I very much liked the fact that you could get all of your laundry washed and dried in a matter of two hours once every other week!

For many reasons, our ultimate goal here in Texas is for me to be able to hand wash and line dry all of our laundry. Setting up a homestead has been more demanding than we could have imagined and hand washing/drying the laundry has been pushed down on the list of priorities many times. It has been too easy to bring the bag of quarters into the laundry mat and take care of everything the automatic way. My mother-in-law had given me a wonderful outdoor clothes line before we moved, and it has been patiently waiting to be utilized. We were waiting to move onto our own land to set it up; but now that I didn’t have that excuse anymore (by about 10 months), we figured I could at least be drying most of our laundry. So Dave set up the line several weeks ago, and I am sorry I didn’t start it sooner! Thank you, Mom Sifford, for your gracious gift and foresight in knowing how critical this would be to our homestead life!!

We are now very familiar with the variable and strong winds here in Texas, so we knew the base of the clothes line had to be extremely secure. Thusly, Dave made two round metal forms and poured concrete into them to create a two-level anchor base and dug a hole to place it in the ground so as to make it portable if we need to relocate it.

The clothes line opens up very nicely when I’m ready to use it:

and then closes back up when I’m finished with it!

Surprisingly, I have really enjoyed the experience of being outside hanging the laundry surrounded by the peace on the land and fresh air, etc., rather than being in a hot, muggy laundry mat. I realize come winter that it may not be as enjoyable, but we didn’t choose this lifestyle for the sake of comfort and convenience: it was out of obedience to God and His Word, so there is joy and peace in any homesteading chore with that being the case.

I am currently researching wash tubs and wringers to start washing much of our laundry here on the land. Thanks again, Mom Sifford!

Susan

In a Nutshell

April 6, 2008 / / 1 Comment

A few months ago I was asked by a cousin I haven’t seen for probably 30 or so years, who had indirectly received our update emails, the following: “Wow! It seems like a huge undertaking that you are doing. What brought you to that decision? We heard that you live off the land and are kind of getting back to how life used to be. We would be interested in hearing all about it.”

“Wow!” back atcha! Explaining some 5 years of doctrinal, belief and worldview changes to someone unfamiliar with the whole process we had been through I thought was something of tall order. However, I tried; and so I post it here, in the hopes someone might benefit from this brief synopsis, which was my reply:

As far as what has brought us to come live this life, that’s something that happened over some time with changes to our doctrinal beliefs and worldview. For people who ask us this kind of question, or even when we’ve tried to explain things to family or friends as we’ve gone along, because they haven’t gone through the same studies, it makes it difficult for them to understand why we are doing what we are. But I’ll give it a shot. And so, several years ago the Lord led us to an understanding and belief in what are typically called the doctrines of grace, which talk much about God’s sovereignty, including over salvation itself (sometimes people call it Calvinism). This is in contrast to what we were brought up believing, which is the more commonly held belief of free-will salvation (also referred to as Arminianism). We came to believe these doctrines of grace to be true, and believing them led to us leaving our current church at the time as it didn’t hold to those beliefs. Through the process of learning about these doctrines, we came in contact with folks who believed them down in Texas. Over time we got to know those people generally over the Internet, and then through visits to Texas. Further over time, one of the beliefs we came to understand is the Bible’s call for Christians to separate themselves from the world and ungodliness unto Christ in Christian community. Through much study over yet more time, we began to believe that God’s prescribed way of living as described in His word (in how His people lived in the past and in most forms of teaching throughout the Bible, including the Lord Jesus’ parables) is an agrarian lifestyle. And so, as the world and its systems of functioning (which include dependence on it for all of our necessities, including food [grocery stores], clothing [department stores], electricity and water provided by the government, etc.) began to appear more ungodly to us, and since we believed in separating from worldliness as much as possible, and since we believed the Bible teaches man was to till the soil and work with his hands (in command and by examples throughout the Bible), and since we believed we should live in Christian community with like-minded believers, we left our corporate jobs to buy land here in Texas in fellowship and community with those like-minded folks we had gotten to know, so as to start farming the land and raising animals for food. Since our moving down here a little over 2 years ago, the Lord has seen fit to grow our community by adding several other families. We’re not a commune, in that, each family owns their own land and stuff; we’re more of a neighborhood than anything else; and we fellowship together more of as a home church, with singing, meals, teachings and just living our lives together as family.

And so, there you have it, in a nutshell.

— David

 

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