Sunday, January 9, 2011

A Few Words About the "King Family Farm"

Just so you know.... both Bryce and I were “raised in the shade”. This is to say that we are far more enthusiastic than experienced regarding an agrarian lifestyle. We would never have ventured down this path were it not for our friends and next door neighbors Karl and Nancy Falster. So if you come here looking for wisdom it’s more likely that we’ll be able to share with you how NOT to do things (based on personal experience) as opposed to the best way to develop a productive farm.
As this blog develops we’ll be sharing our trials and triumphs as well as sharing books, website links, photos and other information that have been helpful to us and that we hope you will find to be of interest.

To date we have accumulated 1 miniature hereford heifer, 1 miniature hereford bull calf, 19 laying hens, 1 rooster, 3 California (meat) rabbits (2 does/1 buck), 3 dwarf bunnies, and 2 dogs. We had a good experience with 50 meat chickens we raised and processed last Summer. It has been wonderful having the freezer stocked with our own chicken and we look forward to raising more again in the Spring.


As we enter the new year we have no lack of fresh eggs and we hope to add rabbits to the freezer at some point in the near future.

We successfully planted grapes, blueberries, blackberries, 2 apple trees and 1 apricot tree and we had limited success with onions, potatoes, peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce, peas, radishes and herbs. We'll continue to experiment with garden sites and raised bed boxes later this year. I just ordered seeds for this years Spring garden with plants appropriate for both in-ground and in-box plantings hoping for enough produce this year to participate in our local Farmer's Market.

Speaking of the Farmer's Market, I'm also making a list of what value added foods we can make/take as well as creating kitchen related cross stitched pieces (bread cloths, sachet bags and hand towels) and hand painted/carved gourds Bryce's mom creates. We'll be planting a variety of gourds for her this Spring.


Remembering our Goals

As we start a new blog and a new year I thought it would be good to review our life goals...


1. Our primary life goal is to love the Lord with all of our heart, soul and mind, glorifying Him in thought, word and deed; enjoying Him forever. In the same spirit we strive to love others as ourselves being sensitive to their physical, emotional and spiritual needs. We view each life experience as a training ground preparing us for future ministry opportunities and are committed to using the talents, abilities and spiritual gifts that God has given us. All of our other goals are subordinate to this primary goal.
2. We want our endeavors to be God honoring, meaningful to ourselves and to others, interesting and challenging spiritually, mentally and physically.
3. We want our relationships with our family members to be mutually respectful. We want to live in a place no more than a one days drive from each of them; close enough to enjoy a good visit, but far enough away to give each one their own space. (This one isn’t working very well right now as we have Niki and her family, Sara and her daughter and Kelly’s 2 children living under our roof right now... we are hoping to get back to everyone in their own dwelling sometime within the next couple of years!!!)
4. We want to live in a friendly community; a place where we know the names of the people with whom we do business, and where we can feel comfortable participating in the local economy, politics and activities.
5. We want to be honorable and honest in our relationship with others. We want to have friends with whom we can fellowship, laugh, cry, play and hang out, and that are mutually supportive.
6. We want to become as independent as possible with a significant amount of our food and energy needs coming from our own work and renewable resources.
7. We want to be God honoring with our possessions and finances. We want to be good stewards, viewing each of our possessions as a gift from the Lord and a tool to meet a need, purpose or function; when something outlives its usefulness, we want to be able to give it away freely to someone else who can use it. We want to function on a “pay as you go” basis and be as debt free as possible.
8. We recognize our role as God’s stewards, so we want to be both compassionate and respectful in our treatment of our plants and animals. We want our interaction with the land to be beneficial to the ecosystems, leaving the land healthier than when we started.
9. We want to live off the beaten track, away from heavy traffic and high crime. We want to live in a place with moderate temperatures, lots of sun and minimal pollution. We want to be able to enjoy God’s creation on warm evenings and quiet mornings observing the wildlife in our backyard.

Crashing into 2011

Welcome to the new Kingdom Chronicles. Our website/blog that we managed on iweb quit uploading anything, so we have decided to take this opportunity to move our family and farm ramblings over here to blogspot.

I had expected to make this change in the comfort of our home, but as life would have it I'm doing it from a little motel room in Manitoba, Canada. If you follow us on facebook you will already know that we were making a hotshot delivery to Edmonton, Alberta, Canada when we slid off the road and jack-knifed the truck and RV we were hauling. Great way to start 2011!

So, here we sit waiting for some things to be resolved before we can head home. As things like this often do, it happened in the wee hours of Friday morning, not enough time to get things finished before the weekend. We were able to get our truck back on Saturday, allowing us some mobility in town while we wait. Hopefully we will get clearance to leave on Monday or Tuesday.

As we reflect on things we are first and foremost grateful to the Lord for his protection, both for us physically (not a scratch, bump or bruise) and for the relatively, minimal damage to the truck and RV. We are waiting for word from the transport company about the job... it's dependent on whether the RV manufacturer totals the unit or not. If not, we still have a job... if so, well... we'll be looking for what's next.

Please be patient as I try to wade through how to add pictures and other information over here.