Quick and Easy Fire Starters or Boosters

We have lived with wood heat through 1½ winters, and I must say, I prefer it. As with anything, there are pros and cons. The pros for us definitely outweigh the cons though. There's nothing quite so comforting as the sound of the logs popping and the clicking of the cast iron as it heats up. And if you've never smelled walnut burning, you're missing out. It smells like Fruit Loops!
The first winter we lived here, in our cabin, we hadn't found a small enough stove, so we tried to get by with space heaters. The worst part was, we still had cold pockets all over the house. We lived in thermal undies and lots of blankets. Over $1000 combined heating bills later, we vowed that we'd have a stove by the next winter.
Last year was our first winter with wood heat and while my husband grew up with a wood stove, I'd never had one. He told me all summer how hot it would get and how we'd be cracking windows even in the dead of winter. He was right! I love how cozy the whole cabin is.
Our cabin is a rectangle and the stove is in the center on one wall. We played with a couple of box fans and learned that placing a fan at each end of the house, facing toward the center, seemed to pull the heat down from the lofts and kept both rooms (our bedroom and the bathroom) almost the same temperature as the living room. It's pretty awesome.
We are fortunate to live where we can find trees already fallen and seasoned, so with a family wood haul every other week, we are usually well stocked on firewood. It's a bit of work, but it beats buying firewood. All things considered, minus the cost of the gas for the chainsaw, we're heating for free.
So there's a bit of back story. As I mentioned, I'm a novice at this starting and feeding a wood stove. My husband is an excellent teacher, but we birth have our own unique ways of handling things. As I've tried (and erred), I've learned some tricks that help get and keep a hot fire going.
I tried using dryer lint in toilet paper tubes, but it seemed to me that they burned too fast and not hot enough. I have burned cardboard boxes, paper bags, all kinds of things to try to start a fire. Finally, I think I've got it!
One side effect of having firewood piled on the floor is the presence of wood chips, bark, etc. I am always sweeping up. Late one night, when I looked forlornly at the bits of wood in front of the stove, I decided to throw it into the fire. Woosh! It lit up like tiny little fireflies and breathed life into the dying coals. So naturally I wrapped it in newspaper and tied it with twine!
Now, rather than transporting the dusty wood bits to another surface, I just plop down on the floor with newspaper or phone book pages, scissors, twine and make a bunch at a time.
Just put 2 or 3 little bundles of potential under your sticks or kindling and light. Or, if you need to bring the fire back to life, put a bundle in with another log.

Granted, this may seem too simple to explain. However, I'm an experimental pioneer, so I thought I'd share in case anyone else could benefit from my limited experience.

I hope at least one reader has an "a-ha" moment. ☺

Confessions of an Accidental Pig Farmer

When we decided to take on the country, we talked at length about having laying hens, raising a few head of cattle, boarding horses, even briefly considered goats or sheep. We never once considered raising pigs. I can count entire years of my life that I went without eating any pork. My husband doesn't really care for it beyond the occasional sausage or bacon. We learned how to eat turkey bacon and sausage and were fairly satisfied with it.
Fast forward to the day we moved into the cabin. That was the day we became accidental pig farmers. The opportunity to raise two pigs was presented and we decided to give it a try. How hard could it be? They eat anything and all we had to do was feed them, right?
The pigs we were given are a very special breed, called the Ossabaw Island Hog. They are, apparently, the purest breed left over from the colonial days. Unlike most other breeds of swine, these babies don't turn feral if loosed and they do not cross breed with other swine. A smaller breed, they only grow to about 150 to 200 lbs. I discovered this when I googled it. I googled and googled and googled. I had never been this close to a pig. I really wanted to know what to do with them.
We named them Bacon and Pork chop. While not very original, these names served as a reminder that these pigs had a destiny that would eventually put them on our table. The kids did quite well keeping this in mind and didn't make too much effort to pet or get attached to them. This was a relief to me.
We had to expand their enclosure several times as they grew. That, my husband handled brilliantly. The first real surprise was how picky they were about their food. We started them on a grain mix called "hog grower." This had higher protein than standard feed for when they were little. Our understanding was that after about a month, we should switch them to cracked corn. This didn't seem right, because we didn't have access to organic corn and we really wanted them to have a more natural, better rounded diet. Out of necessity, and with the intention of continuing our research to find a better solution, we tried switching them to cracked corn. They wouldn't eat it! I took this as a personal affront. I mean, these are pigs. I had already seen them turn their noses up to various vegetable scraps I had proffered. They loved apples, tolerated potatoes, but wouldn't touch onion, broccoli, spinach or celery. I actually stood at the pen on various occasions and asked them what was wrong. I scolded them, explaining that they were pigs, and pigs had a reputation for eating everything! When they refused the corn, we were at a loss. Here we had taken on the responsibility of these living things and they needed food.
We went back to the hog grower mix and Google. I found nothing truly helpful with regards to their breed. If one can believe Wikipedia, the Ossabaw Island Hog is adept at foraging. I did find a few websites about natural hog farming and they also mentioned turning out hogs into wooded areas and letting them eat to their fill on acorns, persimmons and walnuts, etc. Eureka! We thought we had found the answer. Our property is covered in acorns, persimmons and walnuts. We gave each of the kids a 5 gallon bucket and sent them out a'gathering. It took under an hour to have 5 gallons of each. We started offering the pigs some of each at every meal, along with their feed. Turning them out wasn't a viable option, because we couldn't keep them from crossing fence lines. Plus, as you can see from the picture, they look like wild hogs. We joked that we were raising razorbacks. We were worried they would be shot! We thought that foraging for them was the next best thing.
ARGH! No, it's not National Talk Like a Pirate Day. I'm trying to convey the frustration of having obstinate, abnormal pigs. We weren't discouraged when they snubbed the new offerings after the first couple of days. We knew they had never seen them before. We even decreased their feed in an attempt to make them hungry enough to be curious and try the forest floor smorgasbord. Nope. They might have eaten a few persimmons and acorns, but not enough to thrive. They did enjoy our smushy (it's a word because I said it), leftover pumpkin from a pumpkin painting party. So, apples, pumpkin and the occasional persimmon or acorn...that is what they liked. Unfortunately, we could not afford to feed them what they liked all the time. When we first acquired the piglets, the idea was to collect the produce that local grocers throw out, to supplement their grain feed. We hit a wall immediately. The smaller grocers already had commitments with other farms. The bigger chains would not even consider it, citing the liability of giving away food no longer safe for human consumption.
Now, to recap. We knew nothing about pigs. We acquired pigs and thought they would eat everything. Wrong! We also thought obtaining food for them would be easy. Wrong!
Now for the next, even more frustrating challenge: catching a pig that gets loose and doesn't want to be caught. Pigs love to dig and they are masters at it. They reached a certain point where they decided to go exploring and they started digging under the pallet and hog wire enclosure. The amusing part is how long they were at it before we realized it. We had thrown hay in for them to use as bedding, etc. and they grabbed it and moved it around the pen. I watched them move piles of hay to different areas of the pen and then lay on it. The first time they dug out, my husband, my 8 year old son and I all had long sticks in each hand, in an effort to make ourselves "bigger" and repeatedly tried to surround the pigs and herd them closer to their pen. They would get close, then one of them would dart past and the whole process of creeping slowly toward them started all over again. Our saving grace was that they were litter mates and didn't want to be separated. We realized this another time, when only one got out and kept coming back to the pen. It was painstaking and patience testing work. The humor of this came when I realized that the hay beds they were making around the pen actually disguised where they had been digging. Ooooh! Game on!
My husband still works full time in town, so it fell to me on multiple occasions to walk the pen and find the weak points and get my carpenter on, so to speak. I trudged out with hammer and nails, and my favorite tool, a staple gun, as well as arm loads of pallet boards. I hammered and stapled until the hog wire was almost covered in boards. Each time they got out, my resolve grew to NEVER let it happen again. Each time I visited them, I told them in sweet, calming tones, how good they were going to taste. All told, they only escaped a handful of times, before they grew big enough that they couldn't get out so easily. One of them got loose months later, the night before they "left" us, but we thought maybe they had a growing sense of dread and decided to try once more. We were more adamant than ever that they be penned and ready when the nice man, whom I dubbed the "Pig Assassin," came the next morning to end our brief stent as pig farmers.
I hope I don't sound heartless. I sincerely hope that the pigs didn't know what was going to happen. We wanted the pigs to be happy and healthy. We never intended for them to be pets, because we took them in for the singular purpose of eventually eating them. All the tongue-in-cheek references (Pig Assassin) were my own way of keeping things in perspective.
Now that we have completed that first chapter in our adventures in the country, we can see the lessons we've learned. We thought that we would never again want to mess with swine. However, we learned so many valuable lessons, and we have had so many people interested in buying some of our pork, that we have decided to give it another try. We do have a lovely little valley that, if properly fenced, would be ideal for a hog to forage and grow fat and happy. We have decided that our next pig should be a sweet, little, normal pig, one that looks like a farm pig and not a razorback, and that eats like a pig!

Our pigs looked exactly like these, only with white spots. Somehow, I have lost the pictures I took, but you get the idea.

Day 1

View from the master bedroom.

Yesterday, my husband drove out to our little homestead, roughly 10 acres in Southwest Missouri, to supervise the placement of a 560 square foot barn. It has 8 foot lofts and windows in each end, a lovely windowed front door right in the middle on one side and two windows opposite the front door. It is 14 feet wide and 40 feet long. On top, there is a beautiful, green, metal roof. The reason these little details are relevant, and very, very exciting, is because this barn is ready for horses, but we are going to turn it into a home for our family of six. We will extend the lofts to an even ten feet each, we will add two interior walls, one to create a bathroom/laundry room, the other to close in a master bedroom. Our youngest daughter, only 16 months, will be in the master with us until she gets older. Our two boys will bunk in one of the lofts and our oldest child, our ten year old daughter, will have the opposite bunk. CRAZY? Oh yes, but we have never shied away from crazy. We are going to be living it up in our very own "little house on the prairie" for about five years. There is a method to our madness, though. We are bailing out of the city life. My husband was raised around animals, out in the country, working hard and growing character. He chopped firewood with his father to sell, he hunted deer to feed the family, he learned the value of putting your hand to something and bearing fruit.
I, on the other hand, was raised in town. My husband teases me and calls me a city girl. If you have ever driven through Rogers, Arkansas, you would know I am not a true city dweller. I have dreamt of country life since I was little, though. My grandparents in Morrison, Oklahoma, showed me the life I wanted. We would go to visit in the summer and my grandma would teach me needle point and how to bake. My grandpa would let us ride around on his tractor and feed the cows and fish in his pond. I knew that was the way to live. I always loved the farm, but when I was in third grade, I met this awesome girl who lived in Missouri. When I stayed over at her house, we rode horses and swam in the creek and ran wild! That just served to further my desire for something different than "city life."
Fast forward several years and my husband and I are on the verge of making our dreams a reality. We bought part of his family land and we are are going to buy some chickens, a milk cow, a few head of cattle and plant a garden. The challenge for us, while planning how to make this happen, was how to get from where we are to were we want to be, God's way. We started out looking at building a house, talked to mortgage companies, looked at pages and pages of house plans, spent hours discussing if and how we could afford to build our house, within our budget, within a reasonable time frame. The biggest challenge was that building our dream house from the ground up, all by ourselves, while continuing to live and rent in town, was going to put us way over budget. Paying for a builder to build it would have lessened the amount of time for the build, but would have almost doubled our costs. We talked to financial advisers, both professional and family members, we looked at all these different options, and ended up frustrated and still confused. Finally, Rich and I put our dream back into the hands that had given it to us. We had prayed about it, but we hadn't truly released it into God's hands and given up control. It was only then that we both had a peace about it, and then, that suddenly this crazy plan started to form.
So, in a nutshell, we have a barn in which we are going to live, for the amount of time it takes to pay off the land. It will be very motivating to us to save and get started building our dream house, which by the way, will not be a one room cabin. We also feel very strongly that this will bring us closer as a family and help us to simplify our lives. Our kids are ecstatic about all the trees they can climb and the valleys they can explore. They are also very excited about having farm animals. I am excited about them learning true responsibility and gaining some common sense.
Oh, I forgot to mention the craziest part of our plan! When the barn was delivered yesterday, the clock started on how long we have to finish the inside and get moved in. We have 90 days until the first payment is due, and we don't want to pay rent while paying for the property, so we have 90 days to add electricity and light fixtures, plumbing and bath, cabinets, walls, wall and floor coverings, heating and cooling and a front porch.
So, there it is, the whole nutty story, and it all starts today, on day 1.

View from our front door.

I'm standing in what will be the bathroom,
 looking toward the other end of the cabin.

Ella, our youngest, checking out the new place.