This past weekend we had a square dance and roasted a hog out here on the Curley homestead. My daughter took a bunch of pictures of the hog slaughter process for the book I am working on (hope to be available late in fall or early winter) on how to slaughter and butcher a hog. Here is a sample of some of the pictures she took.

The first picture was taken actually after the bullet was fired. The hog was standing up for the shot, but you can see here that the back legs are down.

Stunning the hog

 
 

Scalding the hog in a barrel of heated water (165 F) before scraping the hair off.

 

Some of the hair was stubborn, so we singed off the rest.

After evisceration, my son Matthew saws the carcass in half.

 

 

Oremus pro invicem!

"we need more people on the land"

There is a lot of good ideas over at www.frontporchrepublic.com . While I am not sure I agree with everything Mr. Peters says in this piece, still there is some good stuff here. Here's an excerpt from Jason Peters' post:

Consider some grim statistics. In 1930 there were over thirty million farmers in this country and 6.2 million farms. By 1950 there were still twenty-five million farmers on 5.3 million farms. But then the post-war mischief set in, and the government turned against its farmers. By the turn of the century there were fewer than three million farmers on 2.1 million farms. The difference between 1930 and 2000 is a reduction of five farmers to slightly more than one farmer per farm—which is to say, far fewer eyes observing fertility losses on much larger farms. And today, for every one farmer and rancher under the age of 25, there are five who are 75 or older.

More:

One, we need more people on the land. We need a better eyes-to-acre ratio. ... we need young people in local and regional governments who are liberally educated, which means they are familiar with, among other things, the philosophical and political theories that led to our current living arrangements. It also means they must be trained in both physical and cultural geography, urban planning, farming, gardening, environmental studies, and the courses in English and American literature that I teach.

And then from the comment box of this article, an idea close to my heart:

While Deep Springs is a two-year nontraditional college built around an operating ranch out in the desert, I find myself wondering if it might be worth founding and funding small two year post-10th Grade Institutes in varied contexts (urban, rural, seaside, mountains, plains) along the Deep Springs model in various parts of the USA to train “…young people in …the philosophical and political theories that led to our current living arrangements…physical and cultural geography, urban planning, farming, gardening, environmental studies, [as well as] courses in English and American literature…” and applied technology, health and nutrition, and rudimentary business skills added in? - See more at: http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2013/10/lucks-a-chance-but-troubles-sure-2/#sthash.q68hJvdg.dpuf

Interesting about Deep Springs, I never heard of it, but it is an all-male school. Unfortunately the Board of Trustees are trying to break the trust and go co-ed. But that is an aside. I think there is a need for schools which educate the whole man, but which also encourage traditional rural living.

 

Oremus pro invicem!

So I think I pinched a nerve which makes my left arm and shoulder hurt a few weeks ago. Not one to let a little pain get in the way, I have kept working with it until this past weekend when it became a big pain. Now I am pretty much useless around here. Although I haven't seen the doctor, I believe the best prescription is rest.

 

This is why any readers out there have seen more posts from me during October this year than any month since March 2012 (well, except last month.) I have started to revive my "writing career"-that one that doesn't pay any money-although I did have a paying article published in a homesteading magazine last year.

 

The whole point of this is to alert you all to a new series of mine which begins today on www.catholiclane.com and which will continue every Friday for the next few weeks. The series is about being a father. Some of the articles in some form or another first appeared on this blog.

 

I certainly don't claim any particular expertise on fatherhood. In fact these reflections are actually my own meditations on what I need to do to become a better father-at least at the time they were written. So enjoy, if you can and give me some feedback.

 

Here's a quote from today's installment:

 

St. Thomas Aquinas notes (in The Ways of God) that we should “model ourselves” on our Creator in his attributes and imitate Christ in His actions.

- Read the whole thing at: http://catholiclane.com/the-ways-of-god-for-fathers-introduction/#sthash.7Cmf9q9R.dpuf

 

Oremus pro invicem!

Several months ago a woman who had just won the lottery was interviewed. Here’s the comment (not an exact quote) I remember:

“Now that I have won the lottery I can afford to put my kids in daycare and get a job.”

Last week a government worker was interviewed just after the government shutdown started. He was asked his biggest concern. Here’s what I remember (not an exact quote):

“I don’t know what I am going to do. The kid still has to go to daycare. How can I afford to pay for that?”

So there you have it: daycare at all costs. Rich? Send your kids to daycare. Out of a job? Send your kids to daycare. Daycare must go on!

Sorghum

Here's a few pictures from our sorghum harvest and cooking. Sorry I forgot to take any pressing the stocks which was done up the road. A local farmer who grows sugar cane lent us the use of his cane press for the morning.

 Collecting the stocks - no that's not me. We had some friends over to help.

 Taking the seeds off the stocks to feed to the chickens and turkeys.

 More de-seeding. After pressing the stocks go to the milk cow who absolutely loves them. In fact, her output has gone up 2 quarts a day since we started feeding the stocks.

 Cooking the sorghum. You get about 1 gallon of syrup per 8-10 gallons of juice. This is early stage cooking. It took about 3-4 hours to cook it down.

The finished product. Not as much as we hoped, but learned a lot and if we do it again, I am sure we can get 5-10 times the output on about 1/4 the plot of land. And boy is it good, especially on hot biscuits!

Oremus pro invicem!

Raising Good Children

This quote is from a post today by Rod Dreher. He is discussing fundamentalism of various types. So the quote is a bit out of context for my purposes, but this is often what I have observed.

“These yuppies want to have good kids,” I told my wife. “But they are terrified of being like people who actually do what it takes to raise good kids.”

Many people want to raise good kids, but it is not simply a time (or resource) commitment. It is in a sense a religious commitment. You need to pray with and for your kids. You need to pick your friends carefully as well as being careful about the kids your kids spend time with. You need to be willing to let much of the current culture behind. What you do, what you watch, what you listen to, and who your friends are will influence all this in your children.  Tough choices in what you do and what your children do, and where they school.

 

It is a challenge and sacrifice. Take homeschooling. This is a sacrificial and daunting endeavor, not for the faint-hearted. But it can be done well, even for those not confident at first. I am amazed and gratified that my Mrs. Curley has embraced and dedicated the last 16 years of her life to schooling our children, even though both she (and I) had many doubts and fears initially. (People who know us today have no understanding of the level of fear and doubt we had in the beginning.)

 

That is not to say homeschooling is the only way to go-but if another option doesn't exist, it may be necessary in today's environment.

 

Raising good children depends on discipline: disciplining yourself and your children-albeit often in different ways.

 

Raising good children is hard (may be impossible) to do in a isolation. Finding other families who are willing to make the same hard choices, who believe in God - not just in their words, but in their actions, decisions, and commitment is as important. Both children and parents need the moral, spiritual, and fellowship support of others who share their goals.

 

Reflecting once again on these challenges, I am again humbled and realize my need for prayer: yours and mine.

 

Oremus pro invicem!

What to think

I still haven't quite decided what to think of some of the recent papal interviews. There is a problem if every time Pope Francis gives an interview there has to be multiple disclaimers about interpretations and explanations from multiple Catholic columnists who support the pope. At the same time, you also get the feeling that other Catholics are laying in wait to criticize, ready to accept the most problematic interpretation, even if evidence proposes otherwise.

I am not worried about the secular media take. They operate both with ignorance and their own agenda. They lay in wait to take snippets out of context to suit their own purposes and always have.

My tendency is to give the benefit of the doubt to Pope Francis - after all, I am merely a poor sinner, husband and father whose vocation is not the pope's vocation, nor as papal advisor. In all this, I am reminded that I still need to remove the log from my own eye ... but still, it all can be confusing.

After reading all sorts of commentaries on these issues, I believe Carl Olson's current editorial on Catholic World Report most closely reflects my current thoughts.

Here's the link:

http://www.catholicworldreport.com/Item/2622/pope_francis_the_good_the_baffling_and_the_unclear.aspx

Prayer for Pope Francis, the Church, and for each other is the most efficacious and what we are certainly called to do.

Oremus pro invicem!

Club of Queer Trades

More Chesterton fiction. I love it. I think I should become a professional detainer. I might be good at it.

It is funny how confused things can be in your head when you are young, and how it can carry over. We used Crest toothpaste growing up, always. I thought Colgate toothpaste was either immoral or just plain not for good Catholics. Likewise, since we didn't ever eat pizza growing up, I thought there was something intrinsically wrong with it. I am sure my dear mother would be appalled at these awkward opinions I held in my early youth. Of course I grew out of these foolish notions, but it was still a shock to find out that my future wife used Colgate AND her favorite food was pizza. I wasn't sure for a moment that this whole thing would work out. But only for a moment. Things have been great.

Oremus pro invicem!

I have been reading some Chesterton fiction of late. My daughter ordered interlibrary loan "The Man Who Knew Too Much", knowing that I like both Chesterton and the Alfred Hitchcock movie of the same name. Well, the Chesterton title is not the same story as the Hitchcock movie, but enjoyable anyway. It is a series of short stories centered around a man who seems to know everyone and "know too much about everything" which allows him to figure out mysteries which remain mysterious to everyone else.

Having read this one and many of the Fr. Brown mysteries, I was unprepared when my daughter brought home from the library Chesterton's "The Man Called Thursday". It was a page-turner (I liked the others, but in a calm and quiet sort of way) I couldn't put down, at least until the very last when it took a turn which I won't divulge.

Okay, so we are trying out a new boar. Tarzan could have fathered his last litter for us. He has been here over 5 years and thrown us many large litters. Our best sow, Harry, (she of 9 litters for us) was sold this week. We now have 1 remaining sow (Sam) who has had one litter for us. Her pigs are outstanding and she and Red are our future.

Last year I never got a fall garden in because of the quail farm stint I did. This year we are well on our way. The peas have just broken ground. We have broccoli and lettuce, radishes and a field of turnips. I will plant kale and some other greens tomorrow in our remaining garden space. It was great summer for okra for a while, gathering 6 pounds a day, but it just quit a week or so ago. Some okra still is straggling in, but I plan to pull it this week and maybe plant a bunch of carrots? It may be too late, but we'll see. They will harvest in the spring.

We sold a bunch of piglets and few pumpkins this weekend. God has been very good to us=-once again.

Oremus pro invicem!

My latest effort. Too short to put an excerpt here. Just go over and read it at www.catholiclane.com (Attack the Ball). For some reason I can't put links in my post this morning.

Oremus pro invicem!

Here's something I believe in:

“There’s an unlegislatable mandate to communities to be faithful to future generations, which means replacing yourself, or exceeding the replacement rate. When a community’s healthy, it will do that, and it will only do that when people essentially love a community more than they love themselves.” - Caleb Stegall, newly confirmed to seat on the Kansas Court of Appeals quoted in Rod Dreher’s 2006 book “Crunchy Cons”)

Oremus pro invicem!

Cooking Sorghum

So yesterday we pressed the sorghum stocks at a farmer's place about 10 miles down the road. We got home and started cooking the sorghum juice to reduce it to syrup.

We didn't get a whole lot of juice, about 8-10 gallons. This should yield about 1 gallon of syrup. Next year we will space the sorghum better and give it more manure.

We cooked a few gallons yesterday and figured out when to stop cooking. One batch we had to cook again because we took it out too soon.

This morning I am cooking the rest. It is a 3-4 hour process to cook a batch. We don't have an evaporator, so we are cooking it in batches on the stove. If it was a little cooler I might cook it outside.

We had a little sorghum to sweeten our cream of wheat at breakfast. Delicious!

Oremus pro invicem!

harvest time

Eventful week. We harvested the peanuts Saturday and have them drying on posts in the yard. Saturday we also started stripping the leaves off the sorghum. This continued on Monday with some friends. We took the leaves off, cut the stocks, and saved the seeds.

Here's some of the children (ours and friend's) gathering sorghum stocks before the seeds are removed.

Wednesday we will press the stocks to get the sorghum juice and start cooking it. Another busy week especially as we start school.

Oremus pro invicem!

I come back from NH yesterday after delivering Connor to The College of St. Mary Magdalen to many tasks. We have more wood to bring home from a neighbor, there are plumbing problems in the kitchen, the peanuts appear to be ready to harvest, as does the sorghum, and I have pigs to cut. But … as indicated below, we are back in milk!

Matthew has overseen the farm excellently while I and Thomas were gone. He has picked more pumpkins, kept the animals in good health, and been adopted by our new heifer calf. (I like the sound of that, "heifer".) She bawls everytime she sees him and runs to him. I guess I know who will be training that heifer the next few years.

Not to be outdone, Mrs. Curley and the girls have kept everything else going, including unloading a large trailer of manure which was donated to "the cause".

It is surely good to be home.

Oremus pro invicem!

Brown Swiss/Jersey cross heifer!

Back Home Again!

Just got back from 10 days on the road, delivering my oldest son to Wyoming Catholic College. I have never been west of the Mississippi except one business trip to San Francisco some 25 years ago. Some impressions of seeing more of this country:  You wouldn't believe the number of pro-life billboards in (most especially) Missouri. Boy they grow those rivers wide in the midwest: the Tennesse, the Ohio, the Missouri, and the Mississippi. Nebraska may look flat, but going east to west on route 80 is one long, long uphill trek. The flat land of Lander Wyoming is higher elevation than going over the Great Smokey Mountains of Tennesse. There is way too much corn being grown. Saw not a single hog in the "hog states" of Iowa, Southern Illinois, Missouri, and Nebraska.

Between Laramie, WY/Rawlins, WY and Lander, WY is truly the badlands-sagebrush and desert. While there are three towns listed on the map (Muddy Gap, Jeffrey City, and Sweetwater) they don't appear in person. One consists of a single restaurant, one sports a single liquor store, and I'm not sure the other exists at all. Certainly, load up your gas tank, cause there is NO place between Rawlins and Lander to buy gas.

I really like what I saw at Wyoming Catholic College. It seems to me that the staff and professors have the right stuff.

A couple more weeks and we do it all again for son number two at the College of St. Mary Magdalen in NH.

Oremus pro invicem!

15 piglets born yesterday - our first litter since early spring! Been pretty busy summer. Have been taking old corn and stocks from neighboring farmers' fields for the livestock. Picking eggplant and zuccinni. Orka should be coming in soon. Our sweet corn looks great and should be a bumper crop. Start picking next week. Peanuts look good too.

A couple days ago someone called an asked if we wanted a trailor of manure-of course there is only one answer to that question! Here is number Nick unloading the trailer onto the pick up truck, to be spread between the rows of sorghum.

Nick hasn't done much farm work this past year as he has been working for Darlington County as an EMT, taking practically every shift available. Next week he heads off to Wyoming Catholic, but he got his fix of manure shoveling this week!

Connor is heading off to the College of St. Mary Magdalen in a few more weeks.

Things will be changing quite a bit around here!

Oremus pro invicem!

The Homestead

It surprised me to see an updated satellite image of our homestead on Google the other day. This was taken in April of 2012 I am guessing. I can tell because of the cars present and the configuration of the plantings and pig houses. And it was in the spring as you can see in the field adjoining the property that some plowing has been done, but not finished. You can even tell we had the horse out that day because of the dark, just turned soil compared to the soil next to it.

In the front yard on the top side of the property you can see garden near the road, but also some pens with houses-last year we moved many of the pigs to the front yard.

Our milk cow (cows at the time) and bull and barn are located on the South side of the house (next to the house in lower portion of the photo).

On the South side in the back we still have a couple farrowing pens, but the rest was planted in sweet corn (which we picked June 1st last year and are still eating). The fences are still up as you can tell, but no housing.

Lots of things have changed since this photo. - Oremus pro invicem!

My latest wrting effort can be found: http://catholiclane.com/prayer-life-growing-pains/ . It's about trying to maintain a family prayer life as the children get older and busier, working etc. Enjoy it.

Here's a preview:

So on May 29th we surprisingly (and unexpectedly) had everyone at home in the evening. I had spent all day under my oldest son’s truck working on a very stubborn bolt while trying to change the starter. I had been struggling with this bolt for several days and was close to the end of my options. He really needed his truck back on the road for work, and in fact was off work because of the truck. As I was giving it my final effort, I thought about May and Mary, and how everyone was home. I made a promise, “Mother in Heaven, if you let me get this bolt now, I promise a May crowning today.” Then I started putting force on the lever and heard Nick shout, “It’s turning!” Sure enough that bolt came out. I told Nick of my promise, but cautioned him, “I only made the promise based on the bolt turning, not that installing a new starter will get the truck rolling again.” But Our Lady was generous. 10 minutes later the new starter was installed and the truck cranking.

Oremus pro invicem!

Four Types ....

I remember going to see the 1973 re-release of The Sound of Music in the theater as a child. I had a fleeting familiarity with the story-a family of singers who fled the Nazis by walking over the Alps. I thought and hoped the movie would be a chase through the wilderness. Initially disappointed that it was not the wilderness adventure, I still thoroughly enjoyed it for what it was.

Watching The Sound of Music on TV became a yearly event in my house growing up. It remains a great musical and tale, even if it is highly unhistorical. Do read Maria von Trapp’s The Story of the Trapp Family Singers for a wonderful story steeped in the Catholic culture of this family.

Several weeks ago, when we watched the movie as a family on VHS, my wife and I saw the movie in a new light, as an allegory for what is and has been happening in these United States for the past few years. Four characters in the movie (some fictional) illustrate four types of Americans and our country’s increasingly inevitable path to depravity.

Herr Zeller (played by Ben Wright) is an Austrian apologist for the Third Reich and enthusiastically welcomes the Nazi takeover.

Max Detweiler (played by Richard Haydn) is a friend of the von Trapp family, musical talent scout and apolitical. He doesn’t particularly like the Nazis but is keen on avoiding bloodshed and confrontation.

Captain Georg von Trapp (played by Christopher Plummer) is a retired Austrian naval hero and adamantly opposed to the Nazis.

Rolfe (played by Daniel Truhitte) is a young Austrian caught up in the new order.

All these men are Austrian, but each respond differently to the Nazi takeover of Austria. Herr Zeller facilitates it; Max Detweiler watches it, as first with distaste, but cooperates with it as inevitable*; Captain von Trapp resists it and finally flees in order to avoid cooperation; Rolfe joins the takeover, believing the lies and promises that a ‘new order’ will bring to society.

In America today we have these four characters: those who would destroy the moral order and force all others to accept the destruction; those who watch at first with disapproval or indifference, but then capitulate; those who resist and are increasingly the subject of marginalization and ridicule; and those young people who believe the lies, possibly because their teachers and even their parents belong to one of the first two groups.

I don’t tend to pessimism, but I think we have passed the crossroads. The new path is being chosen at an increasingly alarming rate. The time for penance is here. (It has been here for some time, but too many of us have ignored it.) The time for suffering is just around the corner.

Each of us must decide who we are in this cultural war and reform our life accordingly. If we don’t actively choose resistance in our words and deeds, we will become Max Detweiler, if we haven’t already, and our youth will become Rolfe.

This is a call to arms-or more accurately, a call to get on our knees. Our only recourse is prayer, penance, and Christian action; that is to say, personal holiness. It is always the same, but it can’t be restated too often.

*Max Detweiler does, in the end, facilitate the von Trapps’ escape, but his overall character is one of capitulation. I don’t think the viewer is expected to view this act as permanent conversion on Max’s part to become an Austrian patriot.

Oremus pro invicem!