    How do I build a portable chicken coop for less than $300? Which chicken breeds do I choose? Should I have a rooster? These and others questions will be answered as I share my own personal experience with chicken farming. Got bugs...get chickens! Want wholesome entertainment...get chickens!     

<div> <div> <div> <div> <p>How do I build a portable chicken coop for less than $300? Which chicken breeds do I choose? Should I have a rooster? These and others questions will be answered as I share my own personal experience with chicken farming. Got bugs...get chickens! Want wholesome entertainment...get chickens! </p> </div> </div> </div> </div>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Agriculture

Modern Homesteading

Tim Barker

Spring Development & Water Sources

Okay, well I think we'll go ahead and get started.

This seminar is Springhead Development, so if that's not what you're expecting, if you're expecting a different 1, you have time to get up and find your other 1, but this is Springhead Development.

I currently work as a farm manager and groundskeeper at Bass Memorial Academy in Mississippi.

I spent a number of years, maybe before that, about 10 years into literature work, doing literature ministry.

About 4 years into that, my wife and I really felt convicted.

We needed to be moving to the country, and about that time I got a call to go to Tennessee to do the literature work and we were, Lord provided us with the ability to do some country living out there, we were able to get a property and Just a little disclaimer, I am not an expert.

III didn't grow up learning a lot of practical skills, but when the Lord calls you out to do something, He qualifies you to do it, right?

And so, for those of you who are, who are thinking about making the jump, doing country living, If I, if we can do it, anybody can do it, ok?

It's not, if the Lord is with you, it, it will happen, ok?

But before we begin I would like to ask the Lord to be with us.

Gracious Heavenly Father, we just gather here in the precious name of Jesus, our Savior.

We ask for your Holy Spirit to give us wisdom and understanding.

This wonderful, beautiful nature, earth, water that you've created.

Help us to understand and be able to use it wisely.

Just to get a little bit of an idea of who I'm speaking to here.

How many of you actually own property with a spring on it and you're trying to, you're thinking about developing it?

How many of you are looking for property, are in the process maybe of looking for property and you're thinking about, okay, okay, a few more of you, good.

When I, when we started looking for property, 1 of the things that I really wanted was a spring because, well, it's, you know, the water's right there, it's easy to get access to, You don't have to spend thousands of dollars to drill a well.

And there's some drawbacks to springs, but it just seemed like it was going to make 1 step getting water a lot easier.

And when I was looking for property, probably the top, probably the top thing you want to look for when you're looking for property is you got to have access to water, right?

And you're going to want nice, fresh, clean water.

So we prayed to the Lord, prayed to the Lord, and he provided a place with a nice spring.

Actually, we have a few different springs on there.

And so I'm not an expert, I'm not an engineer, I'm not a plumber, I'm just somebody who bought a property with a spring on it and developed a spring.

And there's a pretty simple, easy method to doing that, okay?

Revelation 22, 1 says, and He showed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal proceeding out of the throne of God and of the midst of the Lamb." Revelation 20, 2-1.

I don't know if you've ever thought about that the river of life flows directly from the throne of God.

You know, water is a source of life and what God's throne represents is authority, right?

And so life comes from obedience to God And that's just a wonderful thought.

It's also the river of life is what gives life to the tree of life, right?

On each side of the river of life is a tree of life.

And I don't know where he came up with the calculations, but I heard 1 prominent Adventist minister, he was talking about the tree of life, maybe it was a mile wide.

Excuse me, the river of life was a mile wide.

And if you had the tree of life that was on both sides, that's a pretty massive tree, isn't it?

Well, we were praying for water on our property and 1 of the things I wanted was a spring and I also wanted a creek.

Because if you're in a situation where you don't have electricity, at least with a creek, you can go down there and you can wash your clothes.

If it's really hot, you can go down there and just lay in you have Natural air conditioning right you can cool off This is a picture on our property a few years ago and The in the children's you know when you're when you're out there in the country It's just the best place in the world for children.

This is a little, this is our bridge across our creek.

It's just a log to go across but kind of keeps the neighbors out though.

Okay, there are several different types of water development that you can think about.

The first 1, probably the most common, would be drilling a well.

That is, just the pros and cons, I'll go through the pros and cons of each of these, but drilling a well is probably going to be your most reliable source of water.

If you can get down and find it, and you get a drilling company that knows what they're doing, you get down there and find a nice underground stream, you're not going to have to worry about droughts or anything like that.

It's going to be a really nice situation.

The downside is drilling a well can be quite expensive.

And in our situation, I was living on a literature evangelist salary, and so I didn't have $8, 000 or whatever to drill a well and so the spring was ideal for us.

But you want to make sure if you're buying property that you talk to some of the people around there, I would even call a drilling company, and see what the success rate of drilling wells is.

Because if you drill a well and you don't find water, you don't get your money back.

Actually, we have 2 friends, 2 families that have, well 1 they drilled the well and they had water for about 6 months and then it went away.

Another 1 drilled the well and no water at all.

So that's not a situation you want to get in.

The other 1, mostly what we're gonna be talking about today is developing a spring and that has a lot of benefits.

However, springs can be kind of temperamental.

If you get in a situation where there has not been a lot of rain for a while, a drought situation, sometimes springs can start to turn into a trickle.

And so that's where your research of the area comes in.

The other thing that, of course, water treatment plants and things, they just get their water straight out of the river, right?

And of course there's new technology they're trying to come up with developing seawater making that into drinking water and as time goes on what fresh water is becoming scarcer and scarcer in our world.

I was even reading a couple of big cities out in the West are even making plans to start turning their raw sewage and turning it back into drinking water, because their drinking water supplies are so scarce.

So water is a very, very, very valuable resource.

Okay, I don't have that guy in there, but yeah, in the country that, in our, in our family, 1 of the high days of the year, we always, all winter long, they're reading the little magazines, wanting to order the chicks, and spring comes and here they come.

So it's just a wonderful, wonderful day when those, okay, locating a spring.

If you're looking for property and you want to have a spring on it.

The best time to look for a spring is in the, what would you think, July, August, in the summertime when there hasn't been a lot of rain.

Okay, if you can find a nice flowing spring in July or August, September, there's pretty good odds you might you're going to have a pretty good spring.

But if you're looking at property and you're looking in in December, January in the wet season, it might not be in all year-round spring.

You want to make sure that the spring you're looking at is a year-round spring.

As far as where to look, if you're looking on our property, the most success I've had when we're looking at properties and looking for springs is down at the base of a hill.

You can see on our property here, this is quite a large hill.

But down at the base of this hill is, we have 2 springs, 1 down on their left, 1 on the right, and then the 1 I developed is about 45 feet up on the hill there.

But Here you can see, this is pretty obvious, you have, it's almost, it's just like a trickling little waterfall.

Again, I talked about, you need to make sure before you buy your property, go around, do your research, talk to the neighbors, see what the water is like.

Is there problems with the water purity around there?

Is there problems with bacteria in the water?

Do they know of anybody who's drilled wells or not had success?

Did they know anybody where their springs have dried up recently when there's been a drought?

Just on the other side of our hill, now we haven't had this problem, but just on the other side of our hill we have friends that live over there and when it was a drought their spring really started to taper down quite a bit.

It was about 2 gallons a minute and during the drought it went down to about half a gallon a minute.

The other thing you want to seriously consider is testing the water that comes out of the spring.

Jennifer Dysinger

Lyn Howe

Simple Food Preservation

And we've been farming there for 10 years.

So I served overseas for 16 years in Africa and Arabia.

And before I went there, I met Lynn in Loma Linda, the 2 of them, and Lynn is a good friend of, her family's a good friend of my husband's family.

So Lynn Howe is the wife of Tim, who was just speaking.

And she moved to Maine and we moved to Africa, I mean to Africa and Arabia.

And so we met up again, but we were in a mother's group together when she had her son Paul, and then I gave birth to my first child, Evangeline, and we were in the same group studying God's ways of raising children.

So I just want to introduce Lynn that way to you that we go way back together and her 3 children are married and my 3 children are married.

And Sherry is going to join us with the pressure canning part.

She's nursing her baby, Hudson, so she'll be joining us later.

And she's a neighbor of ours and was serving at Wildwood with her husband, Sherry Neuro.

So we're sharing our experiences, so I want Lynn to go ahead, and we can maybe just share the scripture to begin with and have prayer.

This is speaking about the Proverbs 31 woman.

And for all you men that are here, we're really excited.

I met 1 of your wives and she says, well, I'm handling the first aid class, my husband's in your class.

You need a family to do preservation of food.

Like when we get bulk items, often we're getting it from different locations, right?

She rises also while it is yet night and gives meat to her household.

And we were thinking that she's not afraid of the winter.

This is a really special opportunity for us.

I wanted to tell you a little bit about how I got involved with canning because I think it's sometimes easy for someone to be in your position sitting in a chair and to look up at Jennifer and I and think that we are probably born reading Betty Crocker cookbooks.

And so I just wanted to give you a real honest telling of kind of my story.

I grew up in Central California and I was a total tomboy.

And my dad was a doctor, but we also had a large farm.

So I learned to ride and train and do all those things, and that was my life.

I couldn't have cared anything about cooking.

So then I went to college, went to graduate school, And right at that time, my sister went through a horribly painful divorce, needed to go back to school, so I took care of her children.

So instead of going out to get a job after finishing my master's, about the same time we got to know each other, I took care of my sister's 3 children.

I had never taken care of children, never cooked a day in my life.

The only supper I knew how to make was a tomato sandwich.

And so right about the same time I was going to the Campus Hill Church in Loma Linda, and I met an old college friend, my husband now, Tim Howell, and we spoke, and I told him what I was doing, and he said, he said, I'll come up and have supper with you.

So He would ride his bike up the hill, and I'd say, what are we having for supper?

And after several suppers of tomato sandwiches, he said, would you like to learn to cook?

And so he taught me how to make raisin bread, And he taught me how to make applesauce.

Because he had grew up in a family of 3 boys, so he had to learn all those things.

And I had, I mean, here's all this beautiful stuff.

And so I just want to encourage you that you may be someday in a place where you have no equipment.

It's still possible to do all these things with almost nothing.

And the other thing I wanted to encourage you is that sometimes it may seem like life is dark and there's a lot of pain or there may be a lot of challenges.

You know, we homeschooled our boys till they went to college and raising 3 highly energetic boys is a big challenge.

Some days it's extraordinarily humbling and you know that there's like things you can't know the answer to and you desperately need help.

And what I have really learned in my life, you know, definitely when Tim came into my life and brought so much joy and happiness and that knowledge and understanding about cooking is that God can answer prayers and he can help us even when we don't see the light going forward and He can give us answers when we can't see.

And so if this all seems challenging or difficult, I just want to encourage you, whatever the challenge you're facing, don't hesitate to ask God for help.

Because His angels are there, they want to love you, to help you, to encourage you on your way to heaven.

Dearest Father in heaven, I just ask you be with each of us here today.

And Father, help us to realize right deep down in our hearts how much you love us, how much you want to help us, how ready you are to help us when we come into challenges, how you're ready to bring light and joy and love, even in our most painful of times.

So when Jennifer and I were talking about this, when she first talked to me about it, we do make vast amounts of applesauce, as Tim referenced.

So I could almost make applesauce in my sleep, but not quite.

But I thought, well, we could kind of do it.

And you do this, and you do this, and you do this.

But I thought, you know, many of you have done a lot of canning and food preservation.

And probably the most beneficial thing we could do is really share what we have found to be very useful and our own personal experience.

And when Jennifer and I talked about that, it seemed, So we kind of split it up.

So we thought, well, I would share with you about applesauce, because that is something we have done a lot of.

So when we- And Linda's in a maple syrup boiler.

And you can do, we do that on the farm too and you can do like some hold how many does yours hold?

We have a we make maple syrup in the spring and so in the fall we use our maple syrup can and we we build a brick fire base for it out of brick that we reuse each year.

And then we put a large can, a pan, and it holds 126 quarts.

So we put a fire, we build all the wood underneath it.

And from when we light the match to when you pull the jars out, it's 45 minutes.

And this is our water bath steamer actually.

We moved from, I want to say that I'm also a daughter, I'm a daughter of 2 doctors and my mother did not think cooking was a skill that you really needed to learn.

It was interesting but she found out that when she got married she also didn't know how to make things because she was not she was used to playing music and different things her mother allowed her to do and didn't cook.

Weston Adams

Rootstocks, Grafting & Pruning

All right, well, let's go ahead and get started.

Thank you for agriculture and for fruit that brings us joy and also helps us be healthy.

And we just dedicate this time to you and ask that you would help us to remember and learn.

So I want to welcome you all to this class.

It's called rootstocks grafting and pruning.

Let me start with a brief introduction of myself.

I planted my first fruit trees, our family planted our first fruit trees in the spring of 2013.

And at that point, I was a littler guy, and it was just a homestead project.

We really, I really enjoyed it, because it was, you know, I enjoyed working our homestead.

But it was a new project to me and I quickly became very enthusiastic about it and I wanted to plant more and more trees.

And so since then I've done a lot of research on fruit trees and our trees are only 4 years old and we're still learning as we go along, but I've been quite enthusiastic about it for the past few years.

Let me get a quick, let me kind of get what your interests are here.

If you're primarily interested in learning what a rootstock is, why don't you raise your hand?

The overview of what we're going to look at, we'll start with the roots of the tree and we'll work up, just to give us a paradigm.

So I'll start with rootstocks and talk a little bit about that, and then I'll talk about the grafting, which is near the ground, so we're working up the tree.

And then pruning will be the last thing I talk about.

Would you be interested in rootstocks and grafting?

Would 1 be interested in grafting or rootstock?

Yeah, why are you using it in your work, for instance, with what you're doing?

Why did you just buy the plant already grafted?

Yeah, I would say that with the rootstock part of it It helps, you know a little bit more and have a little bit more control over your tree when you know what roots you're growing it on because the different roots out there produce different types of trees.

So if you know what those roots are, you're a little bit more knowledgeable.

Also, as far as grafting, When you buy a tree, they've already chosen what they're gonna put together, what roots and what top they're gonna put together.

And I'll get into that a little bit more as I talk about the paradigm.

But if you know how to graph, you can mix and match what you want rather than just buying what, what, yeah, it gives you the ability to put together your own tree basically.

When that happens, we just put a little piece off another tree.

Then we, there's a lot of life in that rootstock.

And that little bit of graft will walk some of the muir.

I'll just say it so that people can hear.

He was saying sometimes the top will die off a tree.

The scion, the part that is not the rootstock, will die and the roots will regrow.

And if you know how to graft, then you can...

Those roots are still good because you can graft back onto them.

So let me talk about rootstocks a little bit and these are the 3 things I want to talk about.

This is what I really want to focus on with rootstocks.

When you buy a tree these days, you're actually buying 2 trees in 1.

You're buying roots and you're buying a top.

So you're buying this tree and this tree and they're 2 different trees.

They're grafted together right about here.

This would be the location it would be grafted.

But you're actually buying 2 different trees.

So you know I would think, you know, starting out orcharding, I'd think, well, there's just, this is a Red Delicious.

And, yes, the top is Red Delicious, but the roots are a certain variety, too.

This is probably, I'm just going to estimate 90% of trees are this way.

So rootstock is the underground portion of that tree.

The rootstock is the underground portion of that tree.

And the reason you have rootstock and scion is because you want, it's making the best of both worlds.

You have rootstock, which is the best roots that someone can find.

The rootstock that the apple is growing on is the best roots that someone chose to graft onto.

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Series

Modern Homesteading

Choosing Chickens & Building an Inexpensive Chicken Coop

Transcript

Description

Parent Series

Sponsor

Recorded

Parts

Spring Development & Water Sources

49m

Simple Food Preservation

1h 32m

Rootstocks, Grafting & Pruning

57m

Choosing Chickens & Building an Inexpensive Chicken Coop

1h 15m

Sound Doctrine