Back to Country Homestead

April 15, 2020 - Grab your coffee and come on along...a morning walk with Jeff, Lorena and Whiskey as we share some thoughts and projects

I spent over 30 years in the Air Force, mostly in offices with no windows behind a computer. I knew well in advance when I would have to retire so we made a plan. At 25 years in, we executed it. It was a pretty simple plan; the hardest part was actually deciding where we wanted to spend the rest of our lives. Our 5 year plan from 2012: 1. Decide where we wanted to retire 2. Purchase at least 40 acres in the country 3. Pay it off before retirement 4. Save money to develop it Two years ago I retired and by that time we had fully executed our plan and exceeded most of our expectations. Now it feels great to be outside playing in the dirt. So great, my wife has retired as well and joined me. But there is still a lot of work to be done and we are attempting to do it ourselves (without any real experience in most of it). We are now inviting everyone to follow along as we share our journey to get out of the big city and back to the country. This video is an overview of our property.

In part 2 of this series we re-assemble the cylinder while having other philosophical discussions...

We use several pieces of older equipment on the homestead and save a fortune by doing our own mechanic work. In this video we make a common repair by rebuilding a hydraulic cylinder. We also talk about other common problems and how to get great deals on equipment.

Lorena doing her thing and saving some trees!

We are building a homestead literally from the dirt up...here we are doing some of that dirt work

Part 2 - Putting together a water filtration system for our off-grid rain water harvest system

This is the first part of a water filtration build to use with our off-grid capabilities as we harvest rainwater then filter it for use.

Our early attempt to solve our lack of water while developing our off-grid property.

Moving Bees from swarm trap to langstroth hive.

How to video on using swarm traps. In this video we setup commercial type swarm traps from Mann Lake to catch swarms and get free bees.

Checking out the hive from the earthmover

Informal inspection of a hive we relocated from our earthmover

Start to finish how we make the best Mexican Barbacoa you will ever have!

This is a very basic video about what you need to get started in BeeKeeping...Do it on the cheap or Spend a fortune it is up to you and we cover it all

These bees are so aggressive they would attack if you even walked into their area. We went through the process of splitting and requeening this one

Timing was perfect to catch the emergence of the worker bee

This was a live series we did during lockdown to show folks how to make a sourdough starter (especially valuable when there is no yeast)

WE purchased a few flowhive when they very first became available and based on our online sharing of our experience we received a visit and were interviewed as part of their "Meet the Beekeeper" series.