We made a startling and educational discovery one year at a midsummer excursion. We had gone to a swimming party at a nearby river and had some unanticipated entertainment. Once we had fully saturated ourselves with sunburns, water up the nose and every kind of dive, cannonball and belly flop that can be demonstrated, we started working out way down river to the access site. As we came into the shallows with kids splashing and chasing each other, the air exploded with flying fish. Flying fish sounds dramatic and that is because it is. It is a shocking thing to see an 18-24 inch fish hurdle out of the water and even more so to see lots of them. Until then we’d heard of, but had not yet seen, the invasive Asian Jumping Carp.

After Khoke and I married, the life we wove with farming and gardening kept us as busy as one could imagine. The summer and fall harvest would leave our small house feeling quite small indeed. As winter wore on, our potatoes and apples would shrivel in the dry air and some of my canned goods would pop their seals from being stored at temperatures much too warm. So began the conversation about building a root cellar.

One of my husband’s outstanding qualities is his impeccable memory when it comes to important things. Namely, our anniversary or my birthday. He never forgets and they never slip by. One year, near the end of winter as the approach of spring was on the horizon, he asked what I wanted for my birthday. He always makes me something handmade, so he needs a little time to prepare. He has made wooden spoons, tricolored cutting boards, cauldron paddles, a wooden butter churn, stone or mother-of-pearl jewelry; sometimes by request, sometimes by surprise. That year, however, I stepped outside of the usual range with the unromantically practical request of a new clothesline.

Cob is a raw earth building style, free formed by hand. It is built and shaped like a giant pottery vessel. Only instead of coil, cob is shaped and stacked in carryable amounts as its Old English root suggests; meaning “a lump or rounded mass.” The clay has straw, sand and water added to it for strength, crack resistance, and to make it easy to handle.

What I love about wood cookstoves is the large flat cooking surface with variable surface temperatures. Something that needs high immediate heat is positioned over the firebox but the pasta now boiling can get slid to the right onto a slightly cooler surface over the oven. The closer I slide it toward the side reservoir, the cooler the stovetop surface. Sometimes if I am canning and my canner is taking its sweet time to get up temperature, I will pull out the eye of the stovetop and put the canner directly on open flame.

When I was a child, my father cut all our wood by hand. A neighbor, standing by watching him one day asked, “Why don’t you get a chainsaw? Just think how much more wood you could cut in a day, the extra time you would have to spend with your family, and you could even read your Bible more.” The day did come when my father got a chainsaw, and he did cut many times more wood than before. As he reflected on the conversation he’d had with the neighbor of his youth, he noted that for all the wood he was able to cut with relative ease, he somehow spent less time than ever with his family and certainly didn’t find occasion to read his Bible more.

When I lived in Tennessee, I traveled to a lot of events selling the baskets that I made. This gave me the opportunity to meet lots of interesting people. At one event I met the band director of a local school, his students were performing at the street event. The conversation turned to neither baskets nor music but rather gardening. He said he grew some of his own grain in his backyard garden. It grew across one end of the garden and he harvested it by hand. I had never heard of anyone doing such a thing. In this century at least. I was fascinated.

One of the ways tractors both gained and maintained their appeal is from the wider range of machinery they can power with the PTOs they carry. This definitely gave them the advantage over draft power. But is it going to stay that way? It may not have to be on a small farm. During the horsepower road trip Khoke and I went on a couple years ago, we got to see some examples from folks who knew which side of the fence they were on. We saw a number of machines that were reworked and reinvented to make them run off the power source of their choice, namely horsepower.

When I wrote about Khoke’s grandfather rebuilding a 7-sweep rotary horsepower unit, I wrote briefly about some technical issues we ran into. To this, we got a response from John Brubaker, the community mechanic for the Winchester Mennonite community near Hillsboro, Ohio. John suggested we come to see the five 2-horse treadmills connected to power the silage chopper in the fall. He also suggested that it might be worth our time to check out the Scottsville Horse and Buggy Mennonite community in southern Kentucky. This community is only 50 miles west of the Vernon community near Hestand, Kentucky, where our longtime friends, the Bye family, lives. Before our travel plans were finalized, they also included a stop at the Delano Mennonite community in Tennessee as well.

A few years ago we switched from tapping our maple trees with metal taps to wooden taps we make. There comes with it a feeling of independence and self-provision. Most of the elderberry canes we cut come from a thicket in the very woods we tap the maples. There are more canes every year, availing themselves in case we need replacements for taps that broke. Be sure to only select canes with live wood. Don’t worry about the plants, elderberries are very tenacious and will grow more canes to replace the ones you cut.

When you reach for a bottle or jug of maple syrup there’s nothing quite like the price tag attached to it to make you think twice. It is worth it, no doubt, in more than one way. But if you have maples in your neck of the woods there is no reason why you can’t make it yourself. It is always best to start small with a process that is easy for you to handle and increase each year as you gain experience and confidence. There are also lots of great books out there with guidelines, facts and information of all kinds. Just don’t let yourself become overwhelmed with it. Sometimes more information isn’t more, it’s too much.

The brain-tanned and smoked tapered leather strips were braided from the handle to the tip. Then Khoke soaked some rawhide in our pond for a couple days to soak up. Once fully reconstituted, he cut it into tapered strips too. The rawhide was braided wet and was 4-braided over the tanned leather from handle to tip. The overall length for this whip was 20ft. Khoke wanted a bullwhip that was long enough to be effective on horseback. We can all take a moment to reflect on how good a horse Millie is to put up with that.

In regards to how to stitch harness lines, when I make mine I cut 2-3 lengths 1.5 inches wide out of the hide on its longest side. The ends of these strips of leather are rounded and then run through a skiver to taper them. These tapered ends are laid together and stitched in an oval pattern. Then I usually also rivet it. If you don’t taper these ends before stitching they can catch the harness and you can lose your control of the lines.

Old Threshers Reunion is a 5 day Labor Day weekend event that hosts a series of horse demonstrations. Among the demonstrations were a Case thresher run off of a 6-sweep horsepower, a smaller thresher run by a 1-horse treadmill, a buck rake and Jayhawk swivel stacker, a grain auger and horse powered sawmill, and more. We were definitely interested in checking these out, so we rode along with Jordan who nabbed Ammon Weeks to ride along as well.

One day, a couple winters ago, Khoke was in a hurry at feeding time and tried his hand at the hay knife again. Soon reminded of his previous dissatisfaction, he reached for his limbing ax that he happened to have with him. Still shiny from a sharpening, this ax benefited from the density of the round bale and worked well to open it up. It has become Khoke’s standard bale opening method.

Once upon a time there were no gas (or steam) powered motors. Necessity begets innovation and every discovery simply lays the foundation for the next. Mechanization arose, yet for a long time the only power sources were a person’s two hands or the four legs of a draft animal. An under appreciated amount of hand and draft powered machinery came to be. Among these were horsepower units. A set of gears set in motion by a draft animal walking a circular track pulling a tongue.

Once our cellar was done, meaning the shell, floor, doors, etc., then it needed shelves. The shelves needed to be rot or rust resistant (due to the natural cellar humidity) and strong. That set of shelves on the right, when completely full, would be holding over 2,000 lbs in jars and food, not counting the lumber itself. There is also a very finite amount of working space in that cellar for the construction of those shelves.

Living off grid is a fascinating way of life that captivates large audiences with varying degrees of reservation. Here in Southern Iowa, Khoke and I carve out a life on the land that omits many modern amenities that electricity in any form is counted among. A couple of the most common concerns people ask about include, how we manage without refrigeration, and how we do laundry. To say we do laundry with horses only begets more questions. Setting aside the mental image of horses treading washtubs full of laundry, our laundry house consists of more than one wringer washer powered by an old cast iron single sweep rotary horse power unit that Khoke rebuilt.

Every bit of length, taper, angle, weight and sharpness contributes to how and for what the axe is used. The temper (hardness) of the metal must be hard enough to hold an edge and soft enough to file and not be brittle. A blunter maul with an abrupt taper blows the wood apart, or bounces off if it cannot penetrate. A sharp bit with a longer taper will cut in and penetrate easier before splitting the wood apart. If it doesn’t fully succeed one must pump the handle to loosen the head and hit it again.

When you watch a field of wheat turn from green to golden and wave lightly in the wind, see the shocks lined up in rows as you pass by on the road, watch a load of grain auger into the grain wagon, and then see the cycle begin again. It is beautiful and worth it all.

Since the art of working horses has been around since their domestication, one tends to think that what can be accomplished with horsepower has surely plateaued. That we are just relearning and reusing what has been established in time past before it is lost. A subconscious belief that what can be learned, has been done, that the horizon has been reached. An arrogance that threads through each new age. Yet just as surely as machinery developed over the course of time, it continues on today. The mainstream use of draft animals may have subsided, but in the circles where they continued, the machinery they are yoked to has continued to develop as well.