The Big White Farmhouse

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Frugality drives creativity.  I recently read that phrase on a blog post and it resonated because it’s true!

Farming/homesteading is such a great vehicle for that type of thinking.  We spend so much money on feed and infrastructure and trailers and buckets (so many five gallon buckets…) that when something starts to malfunction or break, we do all we can to fix it as cheaply as possible. A stubborn streak runs through us…we can fix it! We’re not spending another dime!  This thinking can be helpful for families not on the farm, though. A job loss, a reduction in income, an inflationary tightening of the belt – it all forces our hand in a certain direction and that doesn’t have to be a bad thing! Sometimes constraints are good for us.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking of some recent examples of our frugal creativity and here’s what I’ve come up with:

• We are always constructing and reconstructing pig shelters.  We pull apart the lumber of one and create something new with the same cuts.
• I’ve purchased truckloads of compost over the years and it is not cheap.  This year, I’m committed to building and tending to my own compost pile.  Now more “trash” (aka coffee grounds, egg shells, toilet paper rolls, dryer lint, etc) has a purpose.
• On a particularly windy day last month, one of our chicken tractors was thrown, busting one of the sides.  Instead of buying a new one ($$$), we fixed what we could with rope and it works fine.
• I recently started a new junk journal.  As I get back into the process, I’m realizing how much I enjoy this creative outlet, how much I enjoy the challenge of creating something beautiful from random bits and pieces of life.
• In order to avoid the grocery store and fast food, we whip up simple meals from ingredients we have in the house.

Hoping to document the abundance around me all year long!

Around here, abundance looks like…

+ bringing Max and Ruby to the butcher.  We are extremely proud because they are our first full circle “farrow to finish” operation.  We bred, birthed and raised these guys!  What an incredible experience – I can’t wait to do it again.

+ sharing with a new friend.  My husband recently met someone from church and their family generously shared a big mason jar of their famous homemade Caesar dressing with us.  Delicious!  When we returned the jar, we passed along a dozen eggs as a thank you.

+ making some ant bait from baking soda and powdered sugar.  We’re not ant-free in the kitchen yet, but I think it’s working.

+ selling fifteen unneeded items for the Farm Sitter Vacation Fund: six books, five pieces of clothing, and four pieces of curriculum.  After shipping and fees, I made $118.16!  We’re almost to 45% of our goal.

Reading //

Lots of pondering on family in the modern age this week!

• Why We Call Them Fathers from Denise Trull at Theology of Home // “I have met many priests over my lifetime. They had many gifts between them. Some wrote beautiful sermons. Some were impressive and efficient stewards of their parishes. Some celebrated exquisite Masses and convinced me that the spiritual life was a poem we each speak to the Father. But it is always the priests who most exemplified fatherhood that have stayed so firmly in my memory. Those whose greatest talent was being a father to their people.”
• The Family Tree, Stripped from Andrew Yuengert at Front Porch Republic
• Cousins are disappearing. Is this reshaping the experience of childhood? from CBC
• Multi-Generational Mothering from Siobhan Heekin-Canedy at Fairer Disputations // “Restructuring policy and culture to accommodate both women’s desire for motherhood and their presence in the workforce is a complex task. An important piece of this puzzle is capitalizing on the familial network of mutual aid that already exists. In other words, the answer isn’t ‘less family,’ it’s ‘more family.’”
• Every family needs a leader from Jim Dalrymple II // A really interesting look at “kinkeepers,” people who work to keep their families together.

New Additions to The List // 

• Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy: Ut Unum Sint and the Prospects of East-West Unity by Adam A.J. DeVille // My rabbit trail started with an encyclical and ended with this book: an examination of the Roman Catholic papacy from an Orthodox perspective.
• Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam by Frances FitzGerald // Mentioned in Come Fly the World: The Jet-Age Story of the Women of Pan Am.  Sounds fascinating.
• The Holiness of Ordinary People by Madeleine Delbrêl // Spotted in the latest Ignatius Press book catalog.

Watching/Listening //

• Love What Lasts: An Interview with Joshua Gibbs from The Commonplace // I loved the distinction between the common, the uncommon and the mediocre.
• Joel Salatin on the Avian Influenza Outbreak from Beyond Labels Podcast Clips

Loving //

• Reading the Old Testament in the New: The Gospel of Matthew from the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology // I’m on lesson five.
• Yours, Mine and Ours // We found this DVD with Lucille Ball and Henry Fonda at the used bookstore and it’s been a big hit.

This post contains affiliate links, which means I may receive a commission of any sale made at no extra cost to you.

Going back to a simple prompt from a few weeks ago!  I sure needed it: gas prices around us jumped, our dog Samson puked on two of my rugs, we have ants in the kitchen and someone stole my credit card number and spent $3K on fraudulent plane tickets!

Here’s what I found this week:

Waking up to birdsong outside my bedroom window.  Finishing up a few school subjects for the year.  Healthy and diverse pasture for the broilers.  Being so, so close to an empty laundry room (for one day, anyway).  Blooms and new leaves on all of the fruit trees and bushes.  House finches in the front porch nest.  Another new driver in the house.  The smell of freshly mowed grass.  A trip to the used bookstore to add to my anti-library.

Hoping to document the abundance around me all year long!

Around here, abundance looks like…

+ making our groceries stretch!  My husband stopped by the grocery store one day and picked up five items for me – five! – and the total was $50.  My eyes almost bugged out of my head when I saw the receipt.  Time to be creative in the kitchen again.  This week, I made granola and bread.  I also organized the pantry and collected items together to make specific meals.  (That will help a lot on busy days.)

+ packing away my winter clothes and pulling out all of my spring/summer dresses.  I went through everything (both piles) and took out the things that were too worn or too big.  I have a few gaps in my wardrobe now, but I’ll make due with what I have until I can find some deals.

+ making a new junk journal completely with things I already own.  I’m hoping to use this one as a scrapbook and a way to stretch my creative muscles.

+ selling eight unneeded items for the Farm Sitter Vacation Fund: six pieces of clothing and two pieces of literature curriculum.  After shipping and fees, I made $93.38!

Reading //

• A Picture Worth a Thousand Words from Denise Trull at Theology of Home // “Holy cards just appeal to a real need for intimacy with God in our hearts. They are like getting to hold his hand or pressing His love to our cheek.” I loved this.
• The Cure to Our Social Breakdown from Seth D. Kaplan at First Things // “Embedded community is not only important to the future of our faiths, but also to the future of our country. Our growing social breakdown highlights this now more than ever.”  I wonder if this is a similar argument to The Benedict Option (which I have heard a lot about, but never read).
• For the Love of a Thing: Not Every Worthwhile Endeavor Is a Performance from Keith Lowery // Thought provoking.
• “Higher Education and Home Defense” from Home Economics by Wendell Berry // This essay was about a community in Indiana concerned about the construction of a nuclear plant nearby, but you could easily equate it to communities in northern Virginia and their fight against data centers.  Berry’s argument is that the highly educated professionals push their goals on a community because they have no attachment to the place.  They do not consider the area home.  They see themselves superior to the people who are naturally cautious about new advancements in their community.  I especially loved this paragraph about the true sense of education:

Education in the true sense, of course, is an enablement to serve – both the living human community in its natural household or neighborhood and the precious cultural possessions that the living community inherits or should inherit.  To educate is, literally, to “bring up,” to bring young people to a responsible maturity, to help them to be good caretakers of what they have been given, to help them to be charitable toward fellow creatures.  Such an education is obviously pleasant and useful to have; that a sizable number of humans should have it is probably also one of the necessities of human life in this world.  And if this education is to be used well, it is obvious that it must be used some where; it must be used where one lives, where one intends to continue to live; it must be brought home. (p.52)

• Places where you can peek into Heaven and how to find them from Fr. Michael Rennier at Aleteia

New Additions to The List // 

• A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving // I stumbled on a Substack where the author shared his favorite quote from this book: “If you’re lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it.”
• The Desert Smells Like Rain: A Naturalist in Papago Indian Country by Gary Paul Nabhan // Mentioned in Home Economics.
• A Natural History of the Hedgerow by John Wright // Another rabbit trail book due to Home Economics.
• The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East by Sandy Tolan // A view on the Gaza crisis from a less hysteric/opinion-filled source.  Even though this was written in 2006, I heard this is a sad but good look at both sides of a very complicated history.

Watching/Listening //

• How to fill your journal pages! Easy first page ideas and what to write from Johanna Clough // A little inspiration as I begin a new journal.
• 7 (8?) Books to Read as a Postpartum Mom from The Commonplace // Good ideas even for the non-postpartum mom!

Loving //

• the marigold varieties I bought this year from Park Seed // I got the Whopper Orange, the Flamenco, and the Disco Mix.  I started them all under grow lights and they are beautiful.
• The 10 Year Reading Plan for the Great Books of the Western World // I found five of these old books at the used bookstore and am anxious to begin this plan.  Seems challenging!

This post contains affiliate links, which means I may receive a commission of any sale made at no extra cost to you.

Soooo….I went down a bit of a rabbit hole.  It started with this article which linked to this article, which shared this quote:

Taleb uses legendary Italian writer Umberto Eco’s uncommon relationship with books and reading as a parable of the most fruitful relationship with knowledge:

The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?” and the others — a very small minority — who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.

Guys.  There’s a name for my piles of unread books!  It’s an anti-library!

I actually have a Storygraph account that I use to catalog all the books I’d like to revisit.  If I’m reading a book and it references another interesting one, it goes on the list.  If I read about a historical figure to my children for school and realize I know very little, I add a few books of my own to the list.  If I hear about how a classic novel or religious text influenced someone’s life, it goes on the list.  And on and on and on.  As of this writing, my list stands at almost 1600 books. (!!!)  Realistically, I will never finish all of those books in my lifetime.  But it stands as representation of my humanity, a constant reminder of the virtue of humility.  The more I know, the more I realize all I don’t know.

Anyway, I thought I’d share a few of my latest additions to The List:

• The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams by Philip Zaleski // Hillsdale College recently provided a free video series on the Inklings and I want to know more about this group!
• Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler // A title on a reading list that I’ve never heard of before.
• The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful by Joseph Pearce // I heard about this from the Clear Creek Abbey bookstore.  The monks read this during refectory.
• Mightier Than the Sword: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Battle for America by David S. Reynolds // I just bought Uncle Tom’s Cabin and this looked like an interesting book to pick up after.
• Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive and Creative Self by Manoush Zomorodi // A surprise find and something that connects with the video from The Commonplace below.

Hoping to document the abundance around me all year long!

Around here, abundance looks like…

+ a busy week on the farm!  We’re definitely hitting the crazy part of the growing season where there is so much to do and never enough time.  Our tasks were filled with moving animals around: pigs rotated on pasture, broiler chicks out of the garage and onto pasture, etc.  We held our noses and mucked out the chick area.  (My least favorite farm chore!)  We picked up twenty new hen chicks and got them all situated in the brooder.  We dug trenches and planted seed potatoes and I also hardened off marigolds and some tomatoes to plant next week.  It’s a little early, but the future temps look promising and I need to get them out from under the grow lights!

+ finding an outfit for a fundraising gala.  Between losing some weight and not going to fancy events…ever…I needed a new dress!  Thankfully, I found a beautiful dress and shoes, new without tags, for a deal on Poshmark.  I love the secondhand market.

+ turning off the heat for the season and playing my favorite game of the year: “How long can we go before turning on the A/C?”

+ selling eight unneeded items for the Farm Sitter Vacation Fund: five pieces of clothing, a pair of sandals and two homeschool teacher guides.  After shipping and fees, I made $49.47!

Reading //

• A Guide to Booklegging: How (and why) to collect, preserve, and read the printed word from School of the Unconformed // The article that started all of this reflection!
• The Accidental Community from Heather Hawkins // This was so cool.  I would love to do this someday!
• The Philosophical Act of Wonder from Rachel Wooham at Circe Institute // “Recently, as I spiraled into motherly worries about my children’s spiritual development, it occurred to me that as long as they continue to call, ‘Look!’ something very good is taking place in their souls. This marveling is the harbinger of wisdom.”
• Home Economics by Wendell Berry and his 1982 essay, “Getting Along with Nature” // I’m reading this book slowly and have really been thinking about this paragraph on page 20:

To make this continuity between the natural and the human, we have only two sources of instruction: nature herself and our cultural tradition.  If we listen only to the apologists for the industrial economy, who respect neither nature nor culture, we get the idea that it is somehow our goodness that makes us so destructive: The air is unfit to breathe, the water is unfit to drink, the soil is washing away, the cities are violent and the countryside neglected, all because we are intelligent, enterprising, industrious, and generous, concerned only to feed the hungry and to “make a better future for our children.”  Respect for nature causes us to doubt this, and our cultural tradition confirms and illuminates our doubt: No good thing is destroyed by goodness; good things are destroyed by wickedness.  We may identify that insight as Biblical, but it is taken for granted by both the Greek and the Biblical lineages of our culture, from Homer and Moses to William Blake.  Since the start of the industrial revolution, there have been voices urging that this inheritance may be safely replaced by intelligence, information, energy, and money.  No idea, I believe, could be more dangerous.

• The Power Of Doing It Yourself from April Jaure at Hearth & Field // “In my reality, learning to craft these simple, but crucial items taught me to be attuned to the present moment, which is to say that it taught me to be present to my own life. I had been so accustomed to living life in my head, I’m sad to say that if it weren’t for motherhood and the necessity of acquiring some practical skills, I think I could have lived my whole life without being truly present for any of it.”

Watching/Listening //

• How to Get an Oxford English Education for Free from Benjamin McEvoy // Barring the crass first line, this was a great video.
• How a nearly blind schoolteacher invented the comic medium from matttt // A recommendation from one of my sons.  Very interesting!
• Contemplation in Mother Academia (Or, You Need to Be Bored) from The Commonplace

Loving //

• All the electrolytes! // One possible side effect of carnivore is muscle cramping and it’s generally due to mineral and electrolyte imbalances.  I haven’t really had any issues, but to avoid this possibility, I try to have an electrolyte drink daily.  We have a variety of brands in the house, from LMNT (pretty good, but I only use 1/3 to 1/2 a packet at a time) to Nuun (my favorite, but actually has little of the important stuff) to Jocko Hydrate (my husband’s favorite).
• this quote from Henry Ward Beecher:

A little library, growing every year, is an honorable part of man’s history.  It is man’s duty to have books.  A library is not a luxury, but one of the necessities of life.  Be certain that your house is adequately and properly furnished – with books rather than furniture.  Both if you can, but books at any rate.