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Start Your Day the Right Way, With a Devotional.

If you’re anything like me, it’s easy for you to get caught in the hustle and bustle before you’re even out of bed. My alarm is on my work phone, so when I pick it up in the morning to shut it off, I check texts, missed calls, and emails before I even have pants on. There are a few things wrong with that.

The first thing wrong is that you haven’t even had your coffee. Whether you start your day with a delicious cup of Black Rifle Coffee or you’re frugal like me and choose the cheaper between Maxwell House and Folgers, it doesn’t matter. You aren’t even awake and out of your bed yet. I’m very adamant that you shouldn’t work in your bed because it’s bad for your brain. Studies have shown the effects that doing work in your bed can have on your sleep, and it’s no bueno.

The second problem is that you’re not even on the clock. Those demanding buttholes, whether it’s bosses, employees, customers, or whatever, can wait a couple of hours for you to get to the office. If their life hinges on you checking emails before you roll out of your bed, you aren’t the only one that needs help. They can wait until you’re “punched in.” Whatever that looks like for you.

The last reason, but really the greatest reason, is that the rest of your day hinges on how you start it. I’m sure that with very little thought you could come up with one morning that went horribly wrong and ruined your day and one morning that started perfectly and the day followed suit. I can think of several examples where I woke up to a text message that sent me into a tizzy before I even kissed my wife goodbye. Our attitudes are pretty fragile, especially before we’re really awake.

Recently, I’ve discovered New Morning Mercies By Paul David Tripp. It’s a daily devotional that was recommended to me by one of the leaders at my Church. He actually read out of it during a small group discussion, which is what caught my attention. It is so well written and not at all like any of the devotionals I’ve ATTEMPTED to read in the past. A lot of people enjoy a devotional, but they are rarely for me. The corny quips and heart warming stories just aren’t my bag. If I’m taking the time to read, I want some meat. I want some walk away. Tripp really does great work of breaking the Bible, or parts of it, into daily bite sized pieces. This really wasn’t meant to be a book review, but I guess you got a freebie out of me.

The real point to all of this is that tomorrow morning, before you get out of bed, don’t check your phone. Get up, brush your teeth, get dressed, eat breakfast, and read a devotional. Read the Bible. Take a few minutes in the morning and ask God what He has in store for you for the day. Ask Him for your daily bread to be a Christian, a father, mother, son, daughter, employee, supervisor, employer, man, woman, nurse, whatever. Whatever it is you do, you need the good Lords breath in your lungs to accomplish it. Why not ask Him to help you be your best version of you? Read Tripps devotional and start your day with some sustenance. You don’t need any help surrounding yourself with negativity, the world does that without provocation. What you do need, is to make the choice to make a change. You can only move in the direction that you’re moving. Passivity is an action. Don’t be passive, change your life, and others, one morning at a time.

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Spiritual Crisis

Sometimes you’re just living your life and all of the sudden you crash into a brick wall. It may not be something as serious as death or disease, but enough to rattle you. You can live very contentedly for months or years and then watch it all fall apart while you stand there, most likely with an idiotic look on your face, wondering where it all went wrong.
You guessed it! It happened to me a few weeks ago. I’ll spare you the gory details, but work sucks. It was the happiest I’ve been in a job, to the extent that I happily ignored my family in pursuit of…uhh…I guess retirement at 80? I have no idea. Was it to impress someone? Was it pride? Maybe, maybe not, but it was certainly divine intervention.
I realize that this is all a bit off brand, but as I’m writing this, I realized that I may just change brands. I have been feeling empty. Not in my family or my marriage, but somewhere I couldn’t pinpoint. It’s actually been so long, that it’s part of the reason I started this blog, if you care to look that far back. I assumed that I just needed a career change or something, but was too comfortable where I am to change anything. Sound familiar? Lately though something has really been bugging me. To get to that, we kind of have to go backwards again.
It all started with my divorce. One night while I was sleeping, I woke up at around 2:00 AM. And I mean wide awake. As if I’d been awake for hours already. I had a vision and just started writing things down. I filled about 8 full sheets of paper and then I passed back out for the night. No joke. The vision was of a nonprofit. Now, this was all of 6 years ago and I still have the papers I wrote. What I don’t have is a nonprofit. Every time I get restless like this it comes back to mind and I dabble a bit with it and nothing comes to fruition. That’s most likely my fault. I’m pretty instant gratification when it comes to jumping into things. If I do it, and it works at all in the beginning, I dive in and never come up for air. If it fizzles, I drop it like a…good habit. Bad habits are easy. Anyway, I digress.
So, here I am. Yet another spiritual crisis and at a dead stop with the Harvest. That’s the name of the nonprofit if you wondered. I know what I want to do, but I need someone who can write code to build me a plugin. I asked the only guy I know, he said he could do it, and then radio silence. So I’m still at zero, with about $2,000 to my name that I’m willing to throw at this thing with no questions asked. And nothing. SO. As I’m laying in bed, not asleep because the thoughts are racing around in my head, I had a breakthrough. And if I’m honest, a bit of a break down. I’m not one for crying, due to the innumerable times I was made fun of for it as a child, but in my own home when my wife is asleep, or when I’m driving down the highway I don’t mind. I realized that I was doing nothing to lead my kids to be like Jesus. I talk about it, and they hear it at church, but what do I do? I come home grumpy from my job that makes me pretty miserable these days and I yell and huff and puff and watch TV and go to bed. The only one of those things Jesus did was the bed thing. You know what I hate more than anything in the world? People. So, here I am at 1:00 AM googling ways to serve people as a family.
I don’t do anything. I have so much information and wisdom about God, but what good is it? Right now I’m writing letters to soldiers and to people in nursing homes. Tomorrow I’m going to make cards with my kids to send with them. I’m going to send the soldiers cards here when I’m done and see what happens. I also signed up with soldiers angels to see what they’re about.
The two greatest commandments were love the Lord your God and love your neighbor as yourself. Maybe Gods big vision for the Harvest won’t come to fruition until I start somewhere else. Maybe it will never be anything. All I know is that I want my family to be where God wants us. And being there means serving and loving. Ask me what my weaknesses are, I’ll I’ll tell you that Jesus called them the two greatest commandments.

Just remember in these uncertain times:

“Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous! Do not tremble or be dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.” Joshua 1:9

Wherever you are is where God wants you to be, and NOBODY can snatch you out of his hand.

Wives

I was getting ready for work the other day and I noticed how good I looked in the mirror. No, I’m not being vain…well ok maybe a bit. But when I noticed, I realized that it was only because of my wife. Although this is not a blog about Kristi, her womanhood is an important part of the picture I am about to paint.

Kristi is the best wife that exists. I don’t think they get any better. Sometimes I don’t understand how one human can have such a broad range of emotion, but I’m sure that’s as much for my lack of emotion as it is for her excess.

All of this weight I lost was an attempt that Kristi has made to figure out what foods are bothering my asthma. I quit smoking in January, which led me to realize how poorly I was breathing. It’s bad. She has been spending time finding new recipes, looking for alternative foods, and even working to maintain the same grocery budget through it all.

Why am i telling you a story about my wife?

Good question. I’m telling you because that little glimpse of myself in the mirror made me realize some things about wives.

All of this talk about “empowering women” seems more and more like a joke to me and I’ll explain why. Women have the power, but they see it as weakness.

If it weren’t for wives (women), men would have long been dead. We would have destroyed this planet eons ago over pride or neglect. We were created to create and to build and to work and to dominate. Not to dominate in a negative way, which is par these days, but to subdue the earth. Men were built for that, and I think that’s impressive. What I think is more impressive is that God gave women the power to subdue men…

Take this scene:

You’re at the bar with your girlfriend. A guy you’ve never met walks up to you and starts running his mouth. Your girlfriend could either push you into a fight, or have you out of that bar and laughing with a few words. Women own all of the emotions, so it’s no surprise that they can easily manipulate or subdue ours. While it was instilled in us to tame a world, it was instilled in women to tame us.

Women are the perfect balance to man. They are no less than man and no more. I’ll leave you with this nugget. If you’re a woman, you ARE empowered. If you’re a man who wants to empower women…be a man.

Beets, Please.

Although it may be a very uninteresting title, it’s not an uninteresting food. I’ll be honest. The garden is in that stage right now where the only thing I’m harvesting is lettuce. Everyone knows how boring lettuce is. It’s just something for ranch, chicken, cheese, and croutons to stick to so you feel like you ate something healthy.

The one thing that I have picked (prematurely) is beets. They were very small, but Kristi was very excited and yanked one out of the ground to eat.

There a few cool things about beets.

They taste like dirt. I just think it’s great that they don’t masquerade as anything but a vegetable that grows in dirt.
You can put them in flipping anything. You can boil them and eat them like a potato. You can put them in salads (after the ranch but before the cheese), you can cut them up and eat them raw. When we picked ours, I threw it in a fruit smoothie. Greens and all. It was great and it made my smoothie purple. So that’s cool.
They’re easy to grow. We planted ours in early spring and have done noting to them but some minor weeding. Kristi thinned them out once and planted the ones she plucked…which added about 10 feet to our row of beets.

Versatile and dirt flavored. That’s what I’m talking about.

As always, start small, think big, and stay healthy!

What is a CSA?

A CSA, by definition, is a Community Supported Agriculture. In a CSA, people buy “shares” in a local farm in advance of a growing season, and receive their return in produce. It’s like that CD you have had at the bank for 10 years, except you get a return out of a CSA. To answer the question “What is a CSA”, we will go over a few pro’s and con’s.

PRO:

They’re flexible. One of my favorite things about using a CSA is that they are flexible. All of the farmers operate differently, and many times personally. They can grow produce according to past purchases of shareholders, deliver produce if you’re sick, and put your kids to work when they’re driving you nuts. The point is, It’s really a relationship between you and your grower that dictates how and where you can get your produce.

CON:

There is no guarantee. If the tomatoes get blight, or your farmer produces 1,000 linear feet of beans and no lettuce or kale, you get what you get. Paying in to the CSA does not guarantee the type of return you get. Just like any investment, you’re in it for better or for worse.

PRO/CON:

Most likely, your share will consist of produce you may not normally use. Your farm has to grow a decent variety of produce to stay relevant. They may even have some things you’ve never heard of before. Until I met my wife, I thought kale was a form of seaweed, so I understand the plight. If you can manage a bit of positive thinking, this is a great way to broaden your cooking repertoire. Along with that, you’ll be adding a healthy variety of new vegetables into your diet that you would not have normally ventured into. It’s an adventure!

PRO:

You can learn how to farm. If you have been reading my blog at all, you know that I am starting at zero. Why do you think I’m interviewing CSA farmers and following homesteaders on Instagram? I’m a flippin cheater. One thing that Graham from Valhalla Farms told me was that you can always glean from other people and other styles of farming. Even just by going to the farm to get your produce or asking the farmer questions. If you are lucky enough to be within range of Graham and Bianca, you may learn more about farming than you even want to. These people are a wealth of knowledge at your fingertips.

PRO:

It’s fresh. Check out this article. It is not the only article ever published on the nutrients lost in food in time. The more freshly picked your food, the better. For instance, Bianca and Graham pick their produce the night before or the morning of pickup depending on the variety. Do you have any idea how long it takes from farm to store to table for produce at a place like Walmart or Meijer? Neither do they! I guarantee it wasn’t picked that morning!

These are just a few of the things that make up a CSA. In the simplest terms, at the beginning of a given year, you pay for a growing season and are given fresh, usually organic, healthy produce in return. Sounds like a good deal to me.

As always, start small, think big, and stay healthy!

What About Their Legs!?

This is a question I get so often that I decided to dedicate a post to it. “What happens to their little legs when you move the rabbit tractors around?” Well…not what I assumed would happen.

I wish that my entire life was on video so that you could see the ridiculous events that unfold around me. Just last week I feel off of my A-frame ladder onto my extension ladder from my roof swatting at a wasp…all the while being yelled at by my wife from the kitchen window because of my lack of safety. Just a quick snapshot of my life for you.

Back to topic. So there I was, trying to answer this question. I thought “I’ll lift the tractor up higher so that I can see the rabbits better and keeps their legs above the ground. Don’t. Just…stop it.

Have you ever seen a mouse squeeze through a tiny spot while you stood there in amazement and stupification? Me too, but with a rabbit. So now I’m holding up a rabbit tractor with one hand above my head while crouching on the ground and trying to grab an escaped bunny with the other. Lucky for me, Kristi was outside. She ran over to catch it and the little bugger moused back IN to the tractor.

Oy.

So to answer your question, don’t worry about their little bunny legs. Just drag the dang thing slowly and they will be fine. Whatever you don’t, don’t pick it up high enough for an escape. You will regret it.

Side note: don’t swat at wasps while leaning over a poorly balanced ladder.

As always, start small, think big, and stay healthy!

Why use a CSA?

A question with more answers than anyone would care to read about. The question should really be “why not?”

In the last post, I mentioned some pros and cons and could only think of 1.5. That is not a whole lot when you compare it to the health benefits alone.

In a CSA, members get access to fresh, often organically grown food. Fresh like…if you don’t wash it when you get home you may find dirt or bugs in your veggies.

You get to know your farmer. This may not seem all that interesting for any of you introverts like me. I’d rather be in my own yard cursing wood chucks than ever have to go to the farmers market and converse with a strange human, but there is something to be said about knowing the person who’s food you’re ingesting. You may not want to talk to him about the Lions, because who cares about the Lions, but at least he/ she can be accessed. Because sometimes, even though you don’t want to, you want to know that you can if you decide later that you want to. Bagging up what I’m rakin in?

Another reason is local community support. You may not like your neighbor, but you may REALLY not like the next guy who moves in. So support him just in case. It’s always good to keep local support whenever possible. Small sustainable communities are a great thing and are fewer and farther between every day.

I will conclude with this. It was an honor to meet with Graham and Bianca from Valhalla Farms. I got so much information from them about farming, CSA’s and healthy food that I hope that I can repay them with your patronage. They are wonderful people and I recommend checking them out if you’re ever at the Davison Farmers Market in Davison, MI on the weekend.

If you’re a dad and you’re reading this, happy Fathers Day! And, as always, start small, think big, and be healthy!

Who is the CSA

This is part one of a multi-part series about CSA farms (Community Supported Agriculture’s), how they work, and who works them.

Your CSA farmer may not be Graham and Bianca (sucks to be you) but I’m sure they’re great. The “who” behind a CSA farm is really, in part, you. Yes, your farmer works his tail off every season to deliver you fresh produce in the healthiest way he can, but without his community supporting him, he will fail. To create a sense of community again in times like these seems priceless, but it apparently is not. Its costs vary according to your CSA, and it’s returns are more than food. They are community, family, health, friendship, and much more. More than can be seen or measured. More than can be weighed on any scale. It’s even more than consumer and producer. It’s a pledge in your local farmer with a return. It is, in essence, edible stock in your local community.

I recently had the great pleasure to sit down and chat with Graham and Bianca from Valhalla Farms. If I meet my own expectation of this article, I will by no means do the two of them any justice. The vast amount of knowledge, dedication, and joy for farming will in no way shape or form be able to be expressed in this blog. Only by meeting them face to face could you ever understand the joy that it was meeting with them and learning more, not only about how a CSA farm works, but about THEM.

To me, one of the things that stuck in my head the most about purchasing produce from a CSA is that you know where your food is. If at any point in the middle of the night you wake up distressed, thinking about the poor living conditions of your turnip plants, you can get in your car and drive by the farm. Breathe a sigh of relief, because Graham and Bianca have taken great measures to ensure the quality of your turnip plants. Hyperbole? Yes. Fact? Also yes. What is better than know exactly where your food is before it hits your table? You can even go feel the dirt that it’s growing in if you ask nicely.

Do you know where your turnip plants from Walmart come from? Me neither, and I’m sure that nobody stocking them knows either. You might get an answer like “Uhh, I just grabbed the box from the back” along with a very confused/ possibly angsty look. Push your cart very politely back to the cart corral, get in your car, and go to Valhalla Farms. If you ask Graham where his turnips come from, he will give you that information plus the history of hybrid turnip plants and the most suitable soil types and zones to grow them. Have you ever seen rain man? It’s like that.

In this article, I hope to teach you (and learn myself) a bit more about how a CSA works and how it works for YOU. It’s being inserted in your body, so you have the right to know where it comes from and what it is. I hope that you enjoy reading this article as much as I have had fun writing it and learning more about CSA farms, especially Valhalla Farms. If you have more questions than answers, stay tuned for the next couple of sessions and I will fill you in on the how’s and why’s.

Start small, think big, and stay healthy!

Valhalla Farms

Graham and Bianca from Valhalla farms will be the preface for a short three part series on CSA farms. I met them recently to do an interview for an article about their farm and found more than I bargained for. I ended up with a series about CSA’s on top of it. The best part is that I’m going back to work on the farm with them just for giggles, so I hope that puts in perspective the depth of knowledge that these two have for their trade.

In the Beginning

I always liked that sentence in the Bible, and I thought it fitting to start off the birth of Valhalla Farms. I found it fitting because, well, “it was good.” If you were to step back and take a look at the world, it would seem that man was created to destroy and to hate. His fellow man means nothing, war abounds.

If I were to believe the Bible, and I do, I can see that “God created mankind in his own image.” Oddly enough, in that sentence, he said that he created us, and thus, we are creators. This is the story of what brought about the creation of Valhalla Farms. Graham has been part of war. He has seen death and destruction and hatred to its core. After all of that, he found that his peace was in creating. He had farmed in Arizona in the past and knew that he enjoyed it, but not enough perhaps to calm a storm inside of him.

As with any good man, he is held up by a wonderful woman. In Grahams search for calm, His fiancé Bianca told him to do what he enjoyed. She wanted him to love what he did…and I truly believe that he does.

Be the change

Graham and Bianca both realized that something had to change. They wanted to be part of something productive on an emotional, physical, and communal level. In our interview, one of the things that Graham said was “what do you want your legacy to be?” This word legacy gets thrown around a lot, rarely for reasons of any merit. Legacy can generally mean money, houses, cars, property… but is that really what you want to leave? Wouldn’t the world be better served by knowing how to grow food and eat a balanced healthy diet than by your kids having a 5200 square foot house? Unless they turn it into a homeless shelter or have 40 kids, it doesn’t really serve much real purpose other than taking up space. I guess the real question is, will you be remembered as a producer or a consumer? Did you add any value to the world or were you a parasite to it?

They decided that they wanted to leave something real behind. They wanted to turn Grahams passion for creating into something that people could benefit from. Graham and Bianca are striving toward interpersonal relationships between farmers and the communities they serve to promote not only health, but community, and friendship.

Too much like work

When I asked Graham what advice he had for people who wanted to start a CSA from scratch, he and Bianca looked at each other and said “Don’t.” with a chuckle.

This wasn’t from a competitive standpoint, but a matter of hard work. For a CSA starting out, they have no money to hire help and no money for things like crop insurance. They can’t even take advantage of farming tax breaks until they hit a certain sales number. They had to make a rule that they only work six days a week at the farm because “There is ALWAYS something to do.”

Graham and Bianca are always looking for ways to save time (all while staying organic), and increase efficiency. Every move they make and every plan they plan has to be very well thought out, because if they miss something, they don’t have the means to start over. From the placement of the greenhouse, to how to position their crop rows, to the hand equipment they use to work their land. It all takes time, and as we all know, that is a very limited resource.

Paradigm Shift

When I asked Graham and Bianca why they thought there has been such a shift in the way people think about their food, they had some good insight.

They believe that what once started as a fad turned into a real lifestyle change for a lot of people. People are becoming more health conscious because they are starting to find out the truth about where their food is coming from, what’s in it, and what the effects are on their bodies.

It seems to them that large communities like vegans and the like are a good point of reference for this kind of research. Although we don’t share all of their ideals, they lead a generally “clean” lifestyle in the food they choose and they have blogs and resources everywhere.

It is also the opinion of the writer and of Valhalla Farms that people are getting sick of big government lying to them. It takes very little common sense to know that there is no way something can naturally last as long as it has to to make it to our kitchen table the way it comes from the stores…that and we HATE buying bananas. If I want to eat a banana, I have to go to the store and buy them just to wait a week before they’re ripe. It makes me crazy. I digress. You are finally wising up the the fact that an FDA or USDA stamp really only means that it won’t kill you…that day. As more and more research is done on pesticides, hormones, preservatives, and the like, the news about our “fresh” produce from Meijer gets more and more dire.

Last but not least is your wallet. You’re sick of paying high prices for low quality, low favor, low nutritional food! You work too *$&%^#* hard to throw your money away on things that are of no value to your life. You spend 40 hours or more away from your family to provide for them, but the choices you have at the big stores isn’t cutting it anymore. Enough is enough!

I hope that I have given you a little insight on Valhalla Farms. They, like I assume most CSA farmers, are very passionate and knowledgable about what they do. It’s time to say enough is enough with big farming and big government food and to start saying yes to taking care of your body and your families body. You’re the only one who will.

As always, start small, think big, and stay healthy!

For more information from Valhalla Farms or to sign up for fresh produce, email them at valhallafarm2018@gmail.com

Roots for Days. How to Upgrade your Backyard Garden

“I love the smell of fresh tilled dirt in the morning. Smells like…sustainability.”
-Me, copying Apocalypse Now

We planted our carrots and beets in our backyard garden sometime in March and they are going crazy!

This is actually something that we learned this year on our homestead. We live in Michigan, and this year in March it was still getting into the high teens and low twenties at night with temperatures barely over 40 on average during the day. We have never planted anything before Memorial Day weekend to be honest with you. This is really the first backyard garden that I’ve started to get outside my norm and plant new things. I usually stick to the zucchini, tomato, peppers, and a few cukes if I’m feeling saucy. This is the first year I’ve played around with root vegetables, all in an attempt to be more sustainable every day.

As soon as the soil temperature picked up above freezing, they all shot up like crazy. So much that I’m actually worried that I messed up and it’s all too good to be true. For real, they look like I started them in a greenhouse.

How do i prep for a garden upgrade?

The point is, if you’re starting to venture outside of your normal tomato and green pepper plants and into a wider variety backyard garden, look into the seeds you’re planting. Heck, they usually have directions right on the packages. Figure out what you want in your garden for NEXT year and plan accordingly. Different plants need to be started/ planted in the garden at different times during different seasons and temperatures. They also require different soil moistures and sunlight. What we have been learning is to find someone who plants in our state and listen to some of their advice. If you’re in Michigan, my wife loves MIgardener. She even ordered the seeds for our backyard garden from them this year.

Where do i find a know-it-all?

Michigan is not the only state with a professional like MIgardener. The internet is chocked full of people much smarter than I am about this stuff who you could probably hit with a rock they are so close to you. YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook all have groups if you can’t find a singular entity with all of the knowledge. I’m actually part of a homesteading group on Facebook. I don’t glean much from the mindless posts, but if I ask a question, I can usually take a “majority rules” approach to the answers I get and figure the rest out on my own.

So here’s your takeaway:

Plan your backyard garden a year ahead
Read up on your seeds
Read up on your climate
Find a professional in your area
Plant Your backyard garden!

As always, start small, think big, and be healthy!

Click here for more ideas on That Homestead!