This is my homemade smoker. The body is made from a fruit juice can. The smoke spout was made by creating a form/pattern out of cardboard. Then, I used that to cut out a piece of tin and bent it into shape. It is held together with copper split rivets. The top doesn't seal very well to the base but it dosen't really matter. Extra smoke in the air helps get flying bees.

Smoking it up!

Here is my "hobbiest" smoker for comparison. I repaired the bellows with duct tape.

Wood chips make good smoker fuel. Get it started with dry leaves.

Duct tape created a good bellows for my homemade smoker too. There is a spring inside and you can see the tube that forces air into the bottom of the smoker body. Using things I had laying around, this smoker cost me $0. Thats always a good price!

This is inserted in the smoker body to help with ventilation. It also helps keep coals from falling out the hole that receives air from the bellows.

Copper split rivets are again used for the hinge that hold the smoke spout to the top.

Naturally, our four acres is a slice of the surrounding landscape. Any plants you find here are most likely typical of the ridge and valley geographic area of East Tennessee. Our terrain can be described as half creek or river bottom land and a mostly red-clay hill. Some of our soil is very rich, in the bottom land and in our garden, while in other areas, we run into red clay very quickly when digging. We have shaded, sunny, well-drained, and damp areas so this provides a good variety of growing conditions.

In our yard we try to find a balance between letting plants grow and keeping our grounds looking “kept-up” and useable. This makes for a biodiverse landscape that would be impossible with “weed-n-feed” products. I find it immensely more interesting to walk around a biodiverse yard and explore all the different plants growing there, than to walk through a mono-culture yard that children can’t play in soon after it has been chemically treated. Many type of wildflowers grow in a biodiverse yard.

I have made art for quite some time now and my subject matter has changed but the basic inspiration is the same. Nature influences my work greatly. When I was in college I painted and drew a lot of animal figures, sometimes cartoonist, and usually for their symbolic value. Human spirituality has historically and prehistorically been associated with animal spirits. The things these animals represent can sometimes be very abstract and are better left to the visual display of art to express their meanings. More recently I have moved to painting nature scenes or natural objects in abstract ways. This reflects my attention to nature. I look to nature for spiritual guidance and my relative place in the world. In future art projects I want to incorporate objects from nature into sculptures, creating pieces that bring attention to nature and put it on display for a second look. Once no longer valued, these pieces can drift back to the earth without making a permanent mark in a landfill or some forgotten corner of our place.

Right now my creative energies in art are being well spent in non-art matters. I won’t try and say that raising chickens, goats, and plants is art, because it isn’t, but the creative, and ideological energy used in making art seems no different to me. I once quit making art because I was rock climbing every weekend and there too was creative energy as intricate and infinite as art. So if you’ve never made any art before think about other things in your life such as playing music, or some other activity where you create something, or some action, that makes a creative feeling within yourself, and you can transfer that same mindset into making visual art. Skills come with time, just like anything else.

In my experience, chickens are by far the quickest, easiest, and cheapest way to produce high protein food. You can order a flock of chickens through the mail for about $40 and in 6 months you can be getting over one dozen eggs a day. Hens are far more valuable as egg producers than as meat, but you only need so many eggs. However, extra homegrown eggs can be easily sold to make up your expenses. We have found, if given access to pasture, and food scraps, a small flock of hens require little extra feed. We supplement our hens diet with 1 part corn, 1 part whole oats, and 1 part layer pellets. The amount varies depending on how many chickens we have, and how much we let them run loose. During the spring you have to be careful where your chickens go as they can destroy your flower and vegetable garden, or worse; destroy your neighbors gardens!

Keeping a small egg producing flock economically productive over time, requires planning and maintenance. As of winter 2006 most of our hens are now over 2 years old and are producing few eggs. We raised over one dozen chickens from eggs this summer, planning to replace our flock, however we ended up with just 3 hens and the rest roosters. So with some 24 chickens we where getting about 1-3 eggs per day. So the lesson I learned on that one is; hatch out 4 times as many eggs as you want hens. Make it 5 times to account for eggs that may not make it. I'm planning on just ordering some hens this spring, but will likely revisit hatching out my own chicks again in the summer. We will be faced with the dilemma of what to do with our trusty old hens next year also. I'll probably keep the friendliest ones, and release the rest to the wild with an available water source. They will do fine till the coyotes get them, but coyotes have to eat too.

Beekeeping was the first non-vegetable farming activity I ventured into. In 2007 its been 8 years and the bees haven't ceased to amaze me yet. Apiculture is an activity that truly challenges the mind and inspires the soul. You must not only understand these wonderful tiny creatures, you must also be in-tune with the flowering plants of you neighborhood, the weather, and your beekeeping peers to keep up with the latest developments and increase your learning. 

Here I am in front of my masonry wood stove. The concept of a masonry wood stove is to circulate the smoke within the masonry mass thereby heating it. The heat is stored and released slowly and steadily for several hours. This is a better design than a iron wood stove because a greater amount of the heat generated by the fire is absorbed by the masonry instead of escaping through the chimney. When the fire goes out in an iron stove, the heat stops. When the fire goes out at night in this masonry wood stove, it is still warm and heating the house by morning. Masonry wood stoves are also designed to burn wood hot and rapidly thereby creating less smoke, less pollution, and more heat generated from the same amount of wood. Uncombusted smoke is lost heat. The extra work and expense creating such a stove is saved over the long term by using less wood. This stove heated our 1000 sq foot home this past winter. If our winters ever get cold again (global warming), it would still heat the house with more wood. We keept our gas furnace hooked up for the occasional days when I don't feel like I have time to build a fire, or get behind on chopping wood and such. The coldest month this winter resulted in a $20 gas bill, and boy where we cozy and warm!

To get an idea in what was involved in building this stove, continue to the report below. For the design, I basically flattened a "contra-flow" design and added two "bells" in the spaces created beside the firebox. I laid every brick and my father welded most the hardware from scratch.

On first glance it appears this barn is ready to be burned. But upon closer inspection, I found alot of good..., well, "usable", hardwood within this structure. Every joint and point that touched the ground was rotten away, but the wood in between these points is mostly hard as nails and very usable. Giving a second thought to many sources of materials has saved me enormously in cash and encouraged some much needed recycling. One thing to remember with old barns and other structures is that you are likely looking at hardwood that has withstood much more than the low grade pine within modern homes could ever possibly withstand.

At this point I have already removed enough wood to build the chicken coop With what you see here, I built a nice, smaller barn for the goats, made a sandbox, saved several nice pieces for use later, and made a nice stack of firewood for my woodstove.