This is our journal of what we pray is our sojourn of life (Hebrews 11:8-10) along the narrow way (Matthew 7:14), even the old paths (Jeremiah 6:16), submitting to the Bible as a light unto both (Psalms 119:105). It is our prayer that these documented moments in our earthly time benefit whom God might choose to edify, but ultimately that God glorifies Himself through them.
Although apparently inbreeding goats is a defined method for increasing a herd, we decided to use outbreeding instead, as inbreeding can bring to surface undesirable traits (as well as desirable ones, which from what I’ve read is why people inbreed); so our plan is to trade our males born here with other folks who are raising dairy goats. Our neighbors the Sustaires are doing just that, and the Lord had granted them twin bucks around the same time as He did our triplet bucks, which are half Nubian and half what Winnie is, which is part LaMancha. We also had Donny available, who is a little older and full Nubian. Theirs are Alpine-Nubians, and so we agreed to swap goats. They chose to take Athos, the first born of the triplets, partially because of how well Winnie is producing milk vs. how well Betsy, Donny’s mother, is; and we chose the one of theirs that had horns (one of theirs was born without them) so that he could compete with our other males since we are not de-horning our goats.
Since he’s part Alpine, that makes him rather “Piney,” and so we decided to name him Piney Tim (we’ll probably call him Timmy for short). And so here he is:
We’re thankful to the Lord for allowing the perpetuation of the animals for all of the families here on the land, and for allowing us to have this opportunity with a local family to husband the animals in this outbreeding way.
Boy, if there was any doubt carrots grow well in West Central Texas, may it be forever removed. We planted carrot seeds in one entire bed this year; and, wow, the carrots took advantage of every bit of space in that bed. This blog post reflects the second round of thinning of the carrots; and I still have one, maybe two, rounds to go!
The carrots grew very densely because there was so much depth for them to grow in the double-dug, raised bed. So each pull of the greens revealed a handful of carrots:
“Ehhhhhh……what’s up, doc?” Gary loves carrots. The greens, eh, not so much:
So I filled the bucket with greens knowing they would be appreciated somewhere else……
Shatner, on the other hand, loves carrot greens. (In a high-class maître d’ French accent…”Taybelll for one, Monsieur?”)
I stopped pulling carrots when the basket was fairly full, knowing this many would take several hours to prepare for canning:
What a blessing to sit out in the fresh air and sunshine to work at my “day job.” I had two buckets for the initial processing of the carrots: one was for a first rinse to get the major dirt off, and the other was to give them a good scrub with the vegetable brush to get them as clean as possible:
Next, I gave them a final rinse, cut off the ends, and cut up the carrots into smaller pieces. I munched along the way and loved knowing these carrots are God’s direct provision, and that any middle men and chemicals have been eliminated:
Here they are in the jars ready to go into the canner:
And, yippeeeee! Fresh garden carrots preserved to be used in many delicious dishes:
And speaking of delicious things for meals, I thought I’d provide an update on our other garden adventures.
In addition to our abundant yield of Zuchini, we were blessed with an abundance of summer squash:
We also shredded up much of the summer squash and put it in jars with salt for lactic fermentation, and placed them down in the root cellar. It tastes great – just like sauer kraut. And it makes a very flavorful and healthy salad when you add cucumber and tomato:
Our peppers are still going gangbusters. Here is a bowl of freshly cut peppers ready to be put in jars. I have found it to be very handy to grab a jar of these off the shelf and saute them with onions when I’m making fajitas. Thanks to one our readers, Ginny, we also got the idea to cut them up and dry them in our solar dryer. They are great to add into recipes, and I was very pleasantly surprised at how much taste is packed into even one of these small pieces:
Here they are ready to be canned. As I was going through the pepper plants harvesting the ripe ones, I found that a plant with smaller red and green peppers resembling chili peppers had popped up. (Imagine, if you will, what the Chili’s Restaurant pepper logo looks like.) Well, I haven’t been canning those because Dave likes to eat them raw here and there. HOWEVER, we have found that somehow these peppers were rubbing elbows with some of the other peppers; and sometimes when we bite into a sweet red or green pepper, we’ll get a HOT surprise! So some of these jars are packed with more taste than we bargained for! 🙂
We planted 17 tomato plants this year hoping that we might have a successful crop; but for some reason, none of them did well at all. We have harvested probably fewer than 40 tomatoes the entire summer. Not sure what happened. But, thankfully, the local produce market was selling fresh tomatoes at a fraction of the normal price to keep them moving. We paid a whopping $5.00 for these tomatoes and got 22 quarts! Thanks to the Lord!
Hmmmmmm, then there is okra (not to be confused with Oprah). Okra and I are still getting to know each other. Coming from the West Coast, I had never eaten okra and don’t believe it is on any menu I’ve ever seen in California. So I’m still becoming acquainted with these Southern crops. To be completely honest, okra and I have a kind of love/hate relationship. They are SO prolific, I could not keep up with them. Do you know that okra can grow to maturity in four days?! It’s almost too much of a good thing. They are fibrous by nature; so if you don’t catch them when they are young and tender, they can get pretty tough and stringy. However, in the canning process, they do soften up and are very edible. I only tried to fix fried okra once but had to put doing that on the back burner (no pun intended) after that until I have more time to experiment with the seasonings. For now though, we are very grateful to have several jars of nutritious okra put away in the root cellar. They’re actually quite tasty when I process them with lemon juice and a little salt:
We planted a half bed of turnips this year as a kind of experiment to see how they would grow. They did very well, and we had many great salads with turnip greens. The greens are a bit misleading because the actual number of turnips that were harvested were not that many. But we were very thankful to have this basket full of them:
Dave put them in freezer bags to be kept in our large freezer (which we had running because I was in the process of canning our two butchered hogs at the time) until I could get around to canning them. Here, we paid Gary a couple carrots to guard them until Dave could put them in the freezer:
Sadly, they thawed just enough in the freezer that they started going bad by the time I could get to them. So our turnips were, instead, enjoyed by our hog, Missy. Maybe next year…….
We also have gotten some great green onions and red onions from our garden, of which I don’t currently have pictures. I still haven’t gotten used to knowing I can just walk outside over to the garden and pick a bunch of fresh produce to put into our meals. What an amazing blessing for which we are so thankful to God.
One of the ways agrarianism still affects culture is in the form of some idioms in the English language. We thought it would be fun and educational to mention a few, which I obtained from http://www.brownielocks.com/wordorigins.html (of course, others may have different versions of the origins):
No Spring Chicken
New England chicken farmers discovered that chickens born in the Spring bought better prices, rather than old birds that had gone through the winter etc. Sometimes farmers tried to sell the old birds as a new spring born chicken. Smart buyers often complained that a tough fowl was “no spring chicken” and so the term now is used to represent birds (and even people) past their plump and tender years.
Beat Around the Bush
This comes from boar hunting in which the noblemen hired workers to walk through the woods beating the branches and making noises to get the animals to run towards the hunters. Boars were dangerous animals with razor-sharp teeth (you really did not want to meet one-to-one, esp. with no weapon). So the unarmed workers workers avoided the dense undergrowth where the boar might be and beat around it, rather than going into it. Thus, this evasive technique was termed “beating around the bush” and today represents anyone who avoids approaching anything directly
Old Stomping Ground
The prairie chicken was often observed by early settlers dancing around at dawn with their fancy mating steps, making noises and strutting as part of their courtship with the females. They were so intense on this, they actually wore some areas of the ground bare! Soon, settlers could just tell by looking at some bare land that it was the mating spots for those frisky prairie chickens, and soon got called their “old stomping grounds.” Today the term is used both for areas when males and females gather to meet each other, or for any place in which a group of people just go to have fun and kick up their heels etc.
Henpeck
Biologist W.C. Allee gained fame when he discovered the pecking order of hens, and the female’s habit of using her beak as a weapon among other females. The hens never peck the male roosters. And yet the term today is often referred to represent the verbal attacks females put upon males. Go figure!
Chicken Feed
As far as farming goes, chicken feed is the poor quality wheat or corn given to chickens. Soon, city folks used the phrase in regards to our lower denominations of coins. And, the phrase soon became really popular among riverboat gamblers to mean a small amount of money, and it stuck.
Goose Bumps
It’s a phrase used to describe visible small bumps on our skin because of fear, shivering, etc. The phrase is based on the fact that geese were plucked of their feathers every couple of months, leaving the birds pretty bare. So, when they’d get a chill from the cold air, their skin would shrink and create these large pimples.
A Gift Horse in the Mouth or Straight from the Horse’s Mouth
When you get information straight from the horse’s mouth, it means you are suppose to be getting honest, correct information. The phrase comes from the old days when determining how old a horse was was done by looking at his teeth. So, before betting on a horse, people wanting to check its teeth to see how old this horse was. Therefore, anyone who worked around the horse (stable hand?) knew how old the horse was and could let the others know. Therefore, the information was acquired, ‘straight from the horse’s mouth’ and not the owner of the horse.
On the other hand, if someone gave you a horse for free, it was considered rude to look in its mouth and check to see how old it was. Therefore, you were not to “look a gift horse in the mouth.” Today, this means not to question the quality or motive a gift you get from someone.
Web Behind the Ears
This refers to someone who has absolutely no knowledge or skill in some craft or job assignment. It goes beyond being a beginner. It means to know zip, nada, nothing! The origin is simple. It refers to newborn animals, who are wet from the womb when born. They dry slowly and often behind their ears stays wet the longest. Newborns are pretty helpless and know nothing, just like someone who has to do something that they don’t know how to do.
Caught Red-Handed
The phrase today means simply to be caught doing something wrong, usually while you are doing it so there’s no doubt you are doing something wrong. In the old days, it simply meant to be caught with the red blood of an animal on your hands as a result of butchering an animal that didn’t belong to you. According to the laws back then, just having freshly cut meat didn’t make you guilty. You had to be caught with the fresh blood of the animal to be convicted.
To Be At the End of Your Rope
Today it means that you have used up all possible resources, solutions, ideas, etc. in order to surmount a problem you have. It originated from the tethering of horses to eat (but not allowing them to run free). So, horse would eat in the area his rope allowed. When the horse ate all the grass that was easy, he then was stretching and eating in the area that was “at the end of his rope.”
To Gum-Up the Works
Someone (or something) that suddenly stops a project from running smoothly is “gumming up the works.” The phrase originates in old lumbering days when the men had to deal with the Sweet Gum tree. It’s sap gummed up their saws. They hated that. But, they discovered that the gum was fun to chew. So, they’d go collecting it and as a result, oftentimes returned all sticky from head to foot. And, it was hard to wash off! So, a person was all gummed up and stuck (lacking freedom of movement).
Scapegoat
On the Day of Atonement (Hebrews) the priests would take a black goat as the representative of all the sins of the people. During this ceremony he would lay the sins of the people on the goat’s head. Afterwards, the goat was let go (escape). Later on, anyone who was made to take the blame for the actions of someone else was called a “scapegoat” just like the ceremonial goat did for the sins of the people.
To Go Haywire
Logically, this phrase has to do with bailing hay. Back in 1828, Moses P. Bliss patented a machine that bailed hay. It worked pretty good, but there were times when the wire used on the machine would get stuck in the machine, wrap around the horse’s legs, etc. When the men cut it to untangle the mess, it often snapped, causing injuries. The situation soon slipped into social talk to represent anytime anything gets all messed up and can’t work properly (machines, projects, ideas etc.).
Kick the Bucket
It’s an expression meaning death. The phase originates from slaughter houses. When a cow was to be killed, a bucket was placed under him, while he was being positioned on a hoist. Sometimes, while adjusting the hoist, it made the animals legs jerk and he’d kick the bucket before he was killed.
Barking Up the Wrong Tree
Settlers hunted raccoons, possums and squirrels. Most hunting dogs would chase them up a tree and then bark until their masters came and shot the animals. Sometimes, the animal managed to sneak across to another tree w/o the dog seeing. So, the dog would continue to bark up a tree that didn’t have any prey. Soon, the phrase became known in social circles to mean anyone who is wrong about something and/or is being mislead.
To Build a Fire Under Someone
We all know that mules are pretty stubborn. Sometimes they just firmly set their legs and well… So, farmers decided that building a small fire under the mule’s belly would get him moving. There’s no proof this was really done a lot by muleskinners. But, the idea and imagery was such that people started using the phrase to mean “trying to get someone to move or take some action.”
Poppycock
It’s just a name for barnyard excrements from chickens. The phrase first appeared in stories written by Charles F. Brown (aka Artemis Ward) in the Cleveland Plain Dealer in 1858. He used the phrase to described the political talk he was hearing from candidates. It seemed to then catch on as a way of expressing any talk that was worthless and stupid, whether political or not.
A Stuffed Shirt
Anyone who is rather immobile (rather in actions or in ideas) is said to be a stuffed shirt. The phrase comes from scarecrows in which shirts and pants were stuffed with hay, supported by a stiff pole to create a figure to scare away pesky crows. It didn’t really move, it just stood there.
To Live High on The Hog or To Eat High on The Hog
The origin is pretty simple. It comes from the fact that the best part of meat on a hog is cut high on the thigh. The lesser quality meat comes from the lower thigh (has lots of fat). So, the meaning of the phrase is basically when you are eating (or living) the very best that is available to you; and, are not having second best or lower quality.
Fork Over of Fork It Over
“Fork over the dough!” is often heard on old 1940’s gangster movies. The term originates from England where peasants had to pay their landlords (Noblemen) rent in silver. When they didn’t have any silver, then they had to pay their rent from their crops. Shrewd rent collectors would decrease the market value of the crops to get more. In the meantime, the peasant was paying his rent via his pitchfork as he shoveled his crop into a wagon and grumbled. Rather than a pitchfork, today we just use our hands and “hand over” whatever is asked.
Stool Pigeon
It’s not about pigeons in the park sitting on stools. The origin goes back to when pigeons were eaten as a good meat source. In order to get one, many hunters took a tame pigeon, tied it to a stool in order to attract the wild pigeons to shoot at. Because the pigeon that was tied to the stool was used to trap the other birds, the name “stool pigeon” soon was used to represent anyone to tells (betrays) on his friends.
Hogwash
Two origins: First, male pigs are called swines. When they are castrated they are called hogs. The castration process required that the hogs be washed afterwards. The water was tossed out as worthless. Or….it’s just the name of the swill fed to swines which really has no nutritional value at all. Today, if something is said to be hogwash, it just means talk that is stupid, invalid or illogical. In other words, it has about as much value as the nutrition in hogwash.
Pull Up Stakes
When you leave a place where you’ve been and go to a new spot, you are said to “pull up stakes.” The origin goes back to homesteaders, were stakes were put in the ground to mark survey lines. But, sneaky settlers would go out at night and move the stakes of other people to their benefit.
Fishy
Benjamin Disraeli, Prime Minister of England wrote in his novel, Coningsby in which he has the phrase “the most fishy thing I ever saw.” to describe a suspicious political deal. He observed that both fish and politicians could be slippery. Today, if something is said to be fishy, it means there is something suspicious about it.
Nip It in the Bud
Horticulturist learned years ago that in order to produce good fruit, a plant had to have a lot of buds snipped off. This improved garden produce, but was disastrous to individual buds. It became proverbial that when a bud was nipped off, it would definitely no longer produce any fruit. Today the word is used to refer to a sudden halt in any plans or project in which no further progress will result.
And finally, here’s everyone’s favorite deputy sheriff demonstrating the usage of this last one…well, sort of…
🙂
To me, word and phrase origins can be quite interesting. The site noted at the top of this post has many other English language words and phrases and their origins, in case you’re inclined to read about some more of them.
This is just an introduction to a large topic, but I wanted to take a moment and talk about it briefly in hopes it might benefit someone as it did me when I first learned about it.
There are two elements of the Bible called “type” and “antitype” (together referred to as “typology”). Types, or shadows, are spiritual “pictures” shown in the Bible that represent concepts or persons. The fulfillment of a type is referred to as its “antitype.” Some have been fulfilled, perhaps in multiple ways (or layers) over time, and some have not. Also, a type may not represent an antitype completely, and the picture may only go so far; and there can be multiple types for one antitype.
Webster’s 1828 dictionary defines type and antitype as follows:
type:
A sign; a symbol; a figure of something to come; as, Abraham’s sacrifice and the paschal lamb, were types of Christ. To this word is opposed antitype. Christ, in this case, is the antitype.
antitype:
A figure corresponding to another figure; that of which the type is the pattern or representation. Thus the paschal lamb, in scripture, is the type of which Christ is the antitype. An antitype then, is something which is formed according to a model or pattern, and bearing strong features of resemblance to it.
The following are just a very few, brief examples:
Type
Antitype
Egypt
The world, its systems and culture
God bringing the Israelites out of Egypt.
God separating unto Himself a specific people; the people of God leaving the world (including its systems and culture) to worship God; the salvation of God’s chosen from the bondage of sin and the world
Angel of death passing by those households in Egypt with blood on the door posts
Christ’s blood saving His chosen from eternal destruction
Noah saved in the Ark
Salvation in Christ
Ark of the Covenant
Christ, His humanity (ark made of wood) and His deity (gold); as Christ’s blood for propitiation (blood sprinkled on mercy seat for propitiation)
Sun – too bright to behold its glory; brings life; is the light of the world
Christ, the Son – too bright to behold His glory; brings life; is the Light of the world
Israel of the Bible (physical Israel) – God’s chosen people on earth
Spiritual Israel – God’s chosen people who are or will be in heaven
Moses – the deliverer of God’s chosen people (physical Israel)
Christ – the deliverer of God’s chosen people (spiritual Israel)
Joshua – brought God’s chosen people (physical Israel) into the promised land
Christ – brings God’s chosen people (spiritual Israel) into the Promised Land (heaven)
High priest for Israel and all of his duties
Christ in His office as spiritual High Priest of His people
David – King of Israel; savior of His people against their enemies; shepherd; the least of his brothers
Christ – King of spiritual Israel (and over all); Savior of His people against spiritual enemies; Shepherd of His people; clothed in servanthood and humility
Saul – enemy of David
Antichrist – enemy of Christ (who is the antitype of David)
Goliath – enemy of David and God’s people
Antichrist/Satan – enemy of Christ and God’s people
The animals slain, and skins clothing for Adam and Eve after the fall
Christ’s sacrifice with blood, and the clothing of righteousness for His people
The 12 tribes of Israel (12 is the number of completion) – all of God’s chosen people at the time
All of God’s spiritual chosen people (His elect, throughout time)
High priest entering the Holy of Holies with the names of the 12 tribes (God’s chosen people), and only them, written on the stones put on the shoulders of the ephod (Ex 28:11-12) on behalf of those with whose names he enters (and thus on behalf of only them)
Christ entering the Holy Place with the names of His chosen people, and only them, on behalf of those with whose names He enters (and thus on behalf of only them)
The paschal lamb during Passover
Christ as the sacrificial Lamb
Marriage of a man and a woman
The union of Christ and His bride (the Church)
A woman taking a man’s last name upon marriage, forsaking her own name for his. Keeping her name or any part of it is not forsaking herself to her husband completely
A Christian taking the name of Christ, forsaking their own name for His. Their forsaking of themselves must be totally
Jonah – in the belly of the whale for three days and nights (Jonah 1:17); vomited out from the belly of the fish after that (Jonah 2:10)
Christ – in the grave for three days and nights; resurrected out from the grave after that (Matthew 12:40)
Christ raising Lazarus – he was dead, He gives him life, calls him forth, Lazarus is now able (now that he’s alive) to respond and does so
The beginnings of salvation – the person Christ will call is dead in his sins, He gives him spiritual life (regeneration), calls him forth to Himself, and the person is now able (now that he’s alive spiritually) to respond and does so
God’s people, when most were rebellious, although there were a some righteous, like Joshua and Caleb, or the remnant gathered by God (Jer 23:3; Jer 31:7) after His judgment against wicked Israel (Jer 1-23:2), or His true disciples while He was here on earth vs. the religious leaders of the day
Professing Christians, who are mostly rebels (Matt 7:21-23), although there are some righteous (true Christians), who are the remnant/elect of God, the true spiritual seed of Abraham (Rom 9:6-8; Gal 4:22-31)
Sabbath day rest
Resting alone in Christ’s righteousness (working on the Sabbath breaks this “antitype,” in essence claiming our works are our righteousness); eternal rest with Christ in heaven
Learning about type and shadow in the Bible really opened it up to me, especially the Old Testament. I believe the Old Testament events truly happened; but I believe just about everything in it also is some sort of type, mostly of Christ as the anittype. Hebrews talks quite a bit about Christ as the fulfillment of many of the Old Testament types. It’s a beautiful work of wisdom by the Holy Spirit that paints such glories and wonderful pictures of our Saviour and His essence, characteristics, offices, etc.
If you have never heard of type and antitype in the Bible, I really hope you will spend some time learning about them. Here are a couple of starting points:
We are very thankful to the Lord for His gift of His word, preserved in our language through heavy persecutions; and we thank Him for granting us this understanding of type and shadow that He put in there to help us understand Him and His glory better.
We planted cabbage in our summer garden again this year. If you’ll remember from our garden last year, we didn’t have any cabbage heads to speak of; but this year the Lord has graciously blessed us with large, beautiful cabbage heads to eat fresh and preserve.
I can probably count the number of ounces of cabbage I’ve eaten in my life in single digits. I have nothing against cabbage in the least but just didn’t grow up eating much of it. So I was stumped to find a good way to preserve all of this cabbage with which God had blessed us.
I surfed online a bit under canning cabbage and found a recipe that sounded pretty tasty to me. Fast forward several weeks, and I now have over 60 quarts of borsch in my root cellar! (NOTE: For you proper spellers, “borsch” is, indeed, an approved variant spelling of “borscht.”) I had heard of borsch but had never eaten it to my recollection. I’m not certain if this recipe is an “official” borsch; but, regardless, it’s tasty! Wow! All these years I’ve been missing out! This recipe calls for five pounds of tomatoes per batch, so we were very thankful when we discovered the local produce market was having a sale on tomatoes at about $.50 per pound.
I’ve listed the recipe below in case anybody is panicking like I was, wondering how to capture and preserve their garden cabbage crop. Or if you just have a “hankerin'” for borsch 😀
Here is the official link to the recipe, but I made a few changes so I thought I would post it here also with a few personal notes in italics:
Yield: Eight pints (or four quarts) although I was generous with the ingredients and consistently got five quarts each time.
5 lbs. tomatoes (about 20 medium tomatoes)
8 cups coarsely shredded cabbage (I tried using a grater but realized coarsely chopping the cabbage works just as well and is much faster)
6 cups water
2 cups chopped onions (approx. 2 medium onions)
1 cup chopped apple (approx. 1 medium apple)
2 tablespoons instant beef bouillon (store-bought bouillon contains MSG, so on some of the batches I used pork stock from previous canning sessions of our pigs in place of the six cups of water, and added a little garlic and onion powder seasoning in place of the bouillon; and it worked fine)
2 tablespoons sugar
2 tablespoons lemon juice
1 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon pepper
Wash, peel, remove stem ends and cores, and quarter tomatoes. Use a small spoon to scrape out the excess seeds, if desired. (I didn’t take the time to peel the tomatoes or scrape out any seeds, and it was fine)
In a four to six quart kettle or dutch oven combine all ingredients. Bring to a boil; boil uncovered five minutes.
Ladle hot soup into hot jars, leaving 1/2 inch head space.
Adjust the lids.
Process in canner at 10 pounds, 45 minutes for pints or 55 minutes for quarts. (Please look online for altitude instructions if you live 1,000 feet or more above sea level)6. Makes eight pints (or four quarts) (As I stated before, I was generous with the ingredients and consistently got five quarts)
Here are the tomatoes we were blessed to be able to buy very inexpensively. A 20 lb. box yielded three to three and a half batches:
I cut up each tomato in half and then into quarters and placed them in the soup pot:
I coarsely chopped up the cabbage and placed it in with the tomatoes:
I was amazed at how many cups each head of cabbage yielded:
Here are all of the ingredients introducing themselves to each other and ready to be boiled:
The ingredients have now been boiled for five minutes and are ready to be ladled into the canning jars for processing:
MMMmmmmm, delicious Borsch all cooked, processed and ready to eat!
What a blessing to have been able to capture and preserve these abundant, direct provisions from God. Dave and I have had some borsch for supper a couple of times now. Dave said it doesn’t smell that great but tastes delicious! It can stand on its own as a very tasty and nutritious soup, or meat may be added to make a wonderful stew. I added in some canned brisket meat recently along with some homemade bread, and it made a well-rounded supper for us. All thanks to God for granting us this food from our garden as a type of the spiritual food He gives us from His Word.
We just wanted to catch you up on the progress of the house the Lord is granting that we be able to build right now.
I decided to use a pier and beam foundation, using 12 inch concrete piers.
And here is the first hole! I’ve found that below the surface is a layer of boulder rocks; and so I’ve been digging down to that point and leaving them so the piers will sit on the rock, hopefully creating a more firm foundation:
I cut rebar pieces and pounded them into the sides of the hole in eight places to help hold the pier in the ground against any lift that might occur:
And I tied them together with cross pieces so they act as a single piece in the concrete:
Here I tied in some vertical rebar pieces that would actually stick up into the pier:
And here is the base after the concrete pour:
For the pier part, I decided to use concrete tube forms. We’re finding the height of each tube by using a water level, which is just clear, plastic tubing with water in it. One person takes one end to an already established pier, the other person the other end to a leveled, empty concrete tube in place on the concrete base. The person next to the unfilled concrete tube gets in place, and the person at the established pier moves the tube up and down until their water level is level with the top of the pier. Then, the other person marks the concrete tube where their water line is showing. We’re doing this on four places on the tube, then marking a line all the way around the concrete tube and cutting it to size on that line. Also, we take each measurement from the same pier so that any error introduced only affects the new pier and doesn’t compound from pier to pier:
Once the tube is cut to the proper height, it is re-leveled on the concrete base and held in place by a wood form and stakes pounded into the ground:
This is the bolt that is set in the concrete which will hold on the brace which holds the beam. I tied in a couple of small pieces of rebar at the bottom to a washer held on by a nut to better lock it into the concrete:
And here the bolt is ready to be set into the concrete using the plywood to hold it “suspended” in the concrete:
Here is the pier after the concrete pour with the bolt set into place:
I decided to do the first two front corner piers so I could run a string between them so as to be able to line up the whole row of piers:
And here is the first row completed!
This past first Wednesday of the month was our community work day, and the men helped us with our foundation work. We poured a pier and three new bases:
I decided to complete the other two corners so I could have straight lines for all of the other outside piers, and here is where we are now:
We are again grateful to God for the provisions, ability and community to work on the house.
In a previous blog post, we showed a tank (pond) expansion project we worked on. As I mentioned at the end of that post, it had rained enough at one time to fill it up quite a bit, but much of it leaked out the sides; and since then it hasn’t had much water in it. In doing some other work to help fill the tank, I’ve built up a berm of dirt in a drainage area from our upper field, directing runoff water from it down toward our tank.
Well, recently, the Lord in His graces and mercies brought rain — four to five inches in around a week time period. This really did a lot with filling up tanks in the area, including here on our land. For our tank, God filled it up to about one and a half feet from the top. Again though, some of it is leaking out, but not as much as before, it appears. Hopefully over time the sides will continue to seal up.
And so, following and including the one above are pictures of the gracious bounty of water God has provided:
We thank Him for His abundant provisions, the water here on the land, and the Water of Life in His Son, Christ Jesus.
Heb. 11:8-10 - "By faith Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which he should after receive for an inheritance, obeyed; and he went out, not knowing whither he went. By faith he sojourned in the land of promise, as in a strange country, dwelling in tabernacles with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise: For he looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God."
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