Here on our place we are doing what we can to prepare for the worst that the economy will probably bring. Though we are not at the desired level, we feel that we certainly have an advantage over many others. The only hindrance I see is the government deciding to tax everything under the sun including the right to use our own well or the livestock being over taxed so that it’s impossible to even keep such animals for food. Those worries aside, we have pressed on to keep coming closer to the desired goal. It is a goal that is difficult to achieve and with the coming of a child comes a hang up in its pursuit. We have already discussed the reasons for this hang up so I won’t go into it here; however, I would like to show you all what’s been going on here the last week.

Monday brought an Ice storm to the central part of the country, most of you already know about this. We received about ¼ inch of rain that turned straight to ice, then we received about ½ inch more of a mixture of sleet and rain, forming a ¾ inch chunk of ice on the ground and in the trees. Later we received about 2 ½ inches of snow that lay on top of that. We didn’t loose power but we had family who did in Arkansas. Here are a few pictures of the place.

One thing I did this evening (Friday night) was to clean and grind some of my sorghum grain. I had already threshed it weeks ago and it has been sitting waiting to be used. Below is a picture of some of the Sorghum (I saved for showing what it looked like) before it was threshed though I unfortunately saved the small ones because I wanted to use the larger ones for both seed and flour so think of these doubled in size and that would give you the right image. I just cut the stalk heads off the main stalk when they were ready (dark red in color) and then stored in an open container in the house (I was worried about mice or birds eating it up outside in the shed). Weeks later I went back and checked and the seeds easily fell out of the pods when brushed so I knew they were ready to be threshed. I just took a handful and beat them against the container with a towel over it (because of the chaff dust) to get the seeds out of the pod. Another method which probably is better is to lay it out on the flat ground on a tarp or sheet and cover it up the take a stick and beat the tops on the ground. This generates less dust. Unfortunately for me I didn’t have any good flat ground nor did I have a suitable sheet to cover under and over the seed heads. I have some general plans on how to make a mechanical thresher but that is a major project for me and I already have plenty of those right now.