Getting ready, missed opportunity, living our faith

I spent the afternoon Friday and the morning Saturday getting all the parts I thought I would need to make the swap in the well house to the new tank. I bought a lot of extra parts just in case, so my hope is that I have all the needs covered to make the connections once the old tank is emptied and removed. Unfortunately, the new tank is twice the size of the old tank and will not fit in the same place the old tank occupies. Because of that, all the plumbing needs to be rerouted to accommodate the change in position of the tank. Also, there is a water softener plumbed into the system that I plan to keep in service. I am confident that all the final details will work out as we look over the possibilities this evening. Trace has set aside the evening to help me get everything set and hooked up. Lord willing, we will be able to have the new tank in service in a couple hours. Once that is done, I can relax. Right now, I cringe every time we run water in the house because even to flush a toilet requires the pump to cycle (click on and off) five to seven times.

Saturday was a very productive day. Along with a lot of little repairs, Mama and I planted hundreds of seeds in the garden – both in the raised bed and in rows I had prepared in the ground. Most of the seeds planted were flower seeds. A huge variety of flower seeds. Mama and I are not sure if the seeds will germinate. They were from packets of seeds given to the Wycoff family by Walmart. All the packets were older, and Walmart wanted to eliminate them from their inventory, hence the lack of certainty on our part as to their viability. But the seeds are in the ground and if they do germinate and produce flowers, our bees will have a lot of nectar to harvest from the little work Mama and I put into it. We also have several rows of vegetables: peas, snow peas, Brussel sprouts, spinach and kale. We will see what we get, but the first step is done. The seed is sown. The growth and eventual harvest will take a combined effort of our watering and weeding and God’s oversight in the growth process. It is always fun to see the sprouts push through the soil in the beginning of that process. We now have potatoes coming up from the pieces we planted a couple weeks ago. Mama was very sore yesterday from all the bending over required in the sowing of our seeds.

Later Saturday we cleaned the large coop and yesterday after church we moved the chickens who had roosted in the little coop building into the West side of the big coop. We are emptying the little coop in anticipation of either getting a few Banty hens from Nancy or raising up a brood of chicks. I am not sure how many new chickens we need to get because Mama is collecting almost thirty eggs per day from her current flock. Fortunately, we have a customer base large enough the sell all the eggs we collect. That helps pay for the feed, which like everything else, has gone up in price recently. Unfortunately, Mama has not raised the price on her eggs, and she still gives away many dozen to our BBTI friends. She is hesitant to match inflationary pressures on feed prices and I don’t blame her. Our farm is more of a ministry and a hobby than a business venture.

One of the chores I should have taken time for was to inspect the hives, but by the time we had finished the garden work and cleaning the coop, I was pretty worn out and it was getting late. Too late to open the hives. I will need to be more diligent in the weeks to come. In only a few weeks the bees will be making swarm cells and I want to use those frames to make new hives. Putting out and baiting swarm traps will be on the agenda as well. I have high hopes of expanding to four hives this year as well as to collect honey from the two hives we have. For that to happen I will need to invest a lot more time with my bees. They are fascinating little creatures.

Sunday services were awesome! Our pastor preached with such power and conviction. He challenged all of us to raise the bar in our life to reflect our love for and service to our Lord. He took a good deal of time to remind us that what we have is not a religion. We have a personal relationship with our Savior and because of that relationship, we have a direct connection to our God and Creator. We have a personal responsibility to live up to the standard set for us in the Bible. Ours is not an affiliation with a denomination. Ours is a personal relationship with God the Son. Our friends and associates are watching to see if we truly live out what we say we believe. Both services were incredible.

I will be teaching classes tomorrow and Wednesday. I am especially looking forward to Wednesday’s class.