I’ve been doing some research on cattle breeds for free range beef. Attached are the results, so far. Right now, the Devon breed is #1 in the ranking and Belted Galloway is a close runner up. I still need to evaluate some other breeds, including Brangus. Ideas and considerations would be welcome. -Allen Hynes

One of our recent projects related to preparing the house for sale was laying sod in the front yard. At 7:30 one cool Friday morning the sod delivery man unloaded seven moist one-ton pallets of what looked like mammoth red-and-green burritos into our driveway. We had already tilled up our front yard, but it needed some more prep before we could actually lay the sod. We picked out rocks and weeds and raked it smooth, and finally...we were ready to get started.

There are many steps involved in laying a piece of sod. First, you have to figure out the pattern of how the sod farmer loaded the rolls of sod in their different directions, so you can remove the right ones first. Otherwise you end up trying to pick up one that has its end under another one, and you either tear the sod or are unable to remove it from the pile. Another note on this one: the rolls are heavy so a lot of us ended up having to hold them up against us to move them to the cart (first coat of mud to arms and shirt).

Second, you have to transport the slimy roll of sod to the right place. At first we used a hand-truck and a wheelbarrow for transportation, but after a little while we got smart and used the tractor and cart.

Third, you unload the mushy roll, put it where it goes, and roll it out, crawling after it (coat of mud to skirt or pants). This is the fun part. Then you have to interface it to the adjoining pieces of sod so that it is as snug as possible but with no overlap.

Lastly, you drag a roller over the sod.  Mare was our expert roller horse, walking back and forth behind the roller (if that isn't putting the cart before the cart).  As I watched her, I could just tell she was having fun, and doing a good job.

And then you repeat. And do it again. And again. We were starting to make some progress, and get together a sort of relay line of loaders and unrollers. The sun was coming out. I looked at the row of pallets on the driveway...we had used a third of one pallet. This was going to be a big job.

At about 10:30 Grandaddy drove up to the busy scene. We brought him a chair to sit in, but he wanted to help us instead. Thank you for your help and bits of humor, Grandaddy; it was fun to work with you.

******

At about 7:30 we were almost done. Everyone's front was covered with red Virginia clay – not just splashed or smeared, but covered; you were doing well if there was still some fabric showing. Dad and I drove out to the nearby Giant to get some dinner while the rest of the family finished up the last of the sod, and it really was funny to see the looks we got from some of the other customers.

And we were done with the sod. Except that it all had to be water several times a day for the next two months.

Oh, and by the way, enjoy the painting pictures as well. That was another exciting October project.

 

July 31st, our family, minus Mom who was visiting her mother in Florida, geared up to do our first honey extracting since our move to VA in 2001.

Dad and Becky started by inspecting the hives and removing the supers that had the most honey.  The rest of the girls got the sunroom all ready for extraction. First, we removed the rug, plants, and a plastic table, and then we cleaned the tile floor.  Then we had to search for all Dad’s honey extracting supplies.  They were stored in various places, including the attic, boxroom and workroom.  We had to spray out the honey extractor, and also filters, screens and tubs.  Dad also had to attach the motor to the honey extractor, and stabilize that whole contraption.  Then Tim and Jon brought in the supers with the honey in them, and after cutting the caps off the honey, we put the frames through the extractor, four at a time.  It was neat to watch the sides and bottom of the honey extractor fill up with all that delicious honey.  Dad says the honey is mostly Black Locust.  After the honey was all extracted, we emptied the honey from extractor into a tub, and filled gallon jars with it.  We were able to make a few jars of cut comb, and in all we got about 35 pounds of honey.

 
 

"My son, eat thou honey, because it is good; and the honeycomb, which is sweet to thy taste:  So shall the knowledge of wisdom be unto thy soul: when thou hast found it, then there shall be a reward, and thy expectation shall not be cut off."  Proverbs 24:13-14

 We FINALLY finished our BIG outdoors project.

 

Although this has been a stressful time for our family, I believe that working through our difficulties has brought us together into closer family unity. 

We've been working on a massive project which combined a few changes we wanted to make to our property.

• Widening and repaving our driveway, and building a 175ft retaining wall to do it.
• Leveling our front yard, and building a 120ft retaining wall to do it.

This has been our BIG outdoor project for the last 3 to 4 months. It has been a learning process for the whole family.

                       

This morning Becky and I went down the hill and planted the early seeds: Lettuce, Peas, Kale, and Beets. I'll try to follow up on our garden progress this year in subsequent posts. 

 

Science is the search for causes – we see the effect, what caused it? No matter which route you take, you will ultimately get to the question: Who or what caused this universe? We see the effect, but how did it come to be? Evolution has never been able to explain it satisfactorily. Many advocates of this theory say there was a big bang. Well, what caused the big bang? Maybe all the matter in the universe was originally compacted into a single mathematical speck, and than something made it explode. Well, were did the speck come from, and what caused it to explode? Your search ultimately must end with the inevitable fact that there is something or someone outside the natural space/time/matter realm; Someone who created it all; God.

It is true that we can not empirically prove that the universe was created, because nobody was there when it happened. Incidentally, neither can evolution be empirically proven. The best we can do is observe the effects and make a logical conclusion. If I were to hand you an extremely specialized piece of machinery, say a watch, and tell you it created itself, would you believe me? Me neither. If I told you to look around at the infinitely more complex and specialized universe, and expected you to believe that it created itself, would you believe this?

I believe that it can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the universe was created by an outside force (i.e. did not create itself, which is logically the only other option). Not beyond all doubt, but beyond a reasonable doubt: It is not a big leap of faith, just a tiny baby step. How many organisms would it take, that could not possibly have evolved, to disprove evolution? Just one. Many such organisms could be cited, but let's examine the bombardier beetle.

 

 

This little guy has a highly specialized defense system, in the form of dual turret-mounted cannons on its abdomen. These canons are triggered by two chemicals which react with one another. Its has a reinforced internal combustion chamber in which the explosion takes place. Without this reinforcement, whenever the beetle shoots its cannon, it would blow itself to smithereens. Back to ground zero for its evolution - better try evolving into something else.

If the two chemicals leaked, than again, the beetle would blow itself up. So it has an inhibitor chemical to keep the beetle from mistakenly exploding But with the inhibitor, it can't go off at all. Its predators eat the beetle, and again back to ground zero for its evolution. So it has an anti-inhibitor that it injects into the combustion chamber when it is ready to fire. But even with all these precautions, if the beetle ignited all the explosives required to fire its cannon at once it would be too much for the reinforced combustion chamber and the beetle would blow itself to oblivion. If you record the sound of it firing and slow it down, you can notice several distinct explosions one after the other. It does a sequence of small explosions to shoot its enemy without blowing itself out of the water.

Now for evolution to have produced the bombardier beetle, all of these highly specialized mechanisms would have had to evolve all at the same time, a statistical impossibility. Without all of them in combination, none is worth a wooden nickel and survival of the fittest would have eliminated the beetle before it even got started. When presented with the relative probabilities, the truth is obvious. It would take a whole lot of unsubstantiated faith to believe that this all was created by mindless random purposeless chance. An intelligent being outside this world created it.

 

I have found that some Christians have little ability to logically defend their belief system in a manner that would satisfy the inquisitive unbeliever. In a society that largely believes in evolution, this means presenting a persuasive argument using factual evidence to prove that evolution is illogical, and that creation is a more believable model to explain the origin of life and matter. We should not only know what we believe, but why we believe it. I hope you will find the following 10 facts useful in arming yourself to defend the Christian worldview and ultimately your faith in Christ.

1. The probability of random mutations resulting in improved organisms can be compared to the probability of creating a computer program with random ones and zeros. How long would it take to create a coherent computer program that performs a function, relatively small (1 megabyte), by feeding a computer random ones and zeros (much simpler than genetics)? Answer: Conducting a billion mutations every second (many more mutations than would happen naturally to animals), the figure representing the number of years it would take is a 3 with 300000 zeros after it. I won’t even try to say that number (it would take forty-two pages of zeros).

2. Several fossils were found where the footprint of a man was criss-crossed over the footprint of a dinosaur. This goes completely against the evolutionary model, and means man lived at the same time as dinosaurs. Interestingly, some of the fossils were stolen and destroyed, the finder had to impound the rest to keep from losing this evidence.

3. Much evidence used as missing links, such as Nebraska man, Gigantopithecus, and Piltdown man are hoaxes. Piltdown man’s jawbone is the filed down jawbone of a chimp. Nebraska man was found to be fabricated from the tooth of an extinct pig. Evolutionists often start with a preconceived conclusion and try to find or create evidence to support it.

4. Evolution depends on spontaneous generation. One second there is no life, the next second there is life. This is impossible. Scientists have not even been able to artificially induce spontaneous generation.

5. Evolution depends on mutations. However, the vast majority of mutations are harmful - a step backwards not forwards. Random change in a highly organized system (and life’s genetic code is probably the single most highly organized system known) will be a change toward disorder.

6. For many organisms, all parts are necessary for any to function. If it’s not all there than it will not survive. So survival of the fittest will route out the mutations, not support them. Look at it this way – the entire organism would have had to evolved at once. Take the bombardier beetle as an example.

7. Evolutionists call many organisms vestigial. The thymus, ear muscles, tonsils, thyroid gland, pineal body, coccyx, and appendix were all once thought to be useless “leftovers” from the evolutionary process. Modern medical science has discovered many of the purposes for these “vestigial” organs.

8. Evolutionists have difficulty explaining how fossils became fossilized. The great world-wide flood of the Bible explains it.

9. In 1968, a human shoeprint was discovered in rock that evolutionists estimate to be between 500 and 600 million years old. Humans aren't supposed to be that old. This shows the unreliability of the methods evolutionists use for dating.

10. Evolutionists like to stick to dating methods such as radiometric and radiocarbon dating (which we have seen is inaccurate), which tend to date the earth relatively old. Even if they were accurate, we know that God created much of the world with apparent age. (Adam was full grown, the fruit was on the trees, light from stars lightyears away had already reached the earth, etc.) But evolutionists tend to avoid methods such as volcanism, water formation, meteoric dust, soil formation, and scarcity of helium, because they date the earth relatively young. The evidence that it is young is overwhelming.

This afternoon, when I was working outside in my flower garden, I decided to go around the house and pick all the wilted, used-up daffodils.  I found a lot!   I was thinking.....God takes the old people who have carried out their purpose in life to be with Him in heaven.........He prunes the parts of our lives that do not bring Him glory...........just thinking of things to learn from the little project I did. Here are some photos Tim took of the wilted bouquet.

 

 

 

Last Thursday(2-31-08), the four Hynes girls went down the hill for a picnic.  We brought a couple of blankets to sit on and a nice lunch.  When we reached the bottom of the hill we found a sunny place, set our things down, brought some outdoors chairs, sat down.  Soon we were eating our lunch, and enjoying the sun.  When we were done eating, we got up and went to examine the tree taps.  After a while we went along the creek and played house on a big rock which jutted out into the water.  By then we only had about fifteen minutes of break time left, so we went back to the chairs to read books that we had taken along.  It was a lot of fun, but we were glad to come back to the house.

Last year we tried tapping some maple trees on our property. We had such good success last year that we decided to try again.   I started tapping most of the trees last week, and tapped a few more today. We got 6 gallons of sap yesterday (a good start into the season). I've been boiling the sap mostly down on the stove(wood burning), and finishing it off on the range-top. Because the ratio of sap to syrup is so high (80/1), it takes a whole lot of sap to make just a little syrup. I boiled 3 gallons of sap down to about 1/2 cup of syrup.  With the prices of maple syrup currently it is definitely worth the time to tap our trees, and make our own.

        

Check in at the end of the season, and learn how much sap we got, and how much syrup we made...

 

Last week we got a few inches of snow.  The snow started coming down in the morning, and in the afternoon we went out to play in it.  We discovered that the snow was very wet and would easily roll in balls.  Us little girls and Tim worked for most of the afternoon. We rolled lots of balls and built a snow fort with them.   Tim was the one who put the snow balls in place, and we filled in the holes between them.  The fort looked kind of like this - /*\ - it had a tall tower in the middle and two walls coming out of it. The tower was about 12 or 13 feet tall.

 

Gardening on the flood plane has been an interesting experience. This year was our most productive yet; 3000+ pounds. Drought conditions are in our favor, as was the case this year. Of course during those especially wet years we’ve had only veggies that could be grown in bog (none) doing well.

  

edit: I just posted some pumpkin photos.