Agrarian Books

7/02/07 - 2nd Day - After Breakfast. Well, we finally had a couple of days without significant rain. We had a few short downbursts on the 6th day as we prepared for the Sabbath, but most of the Sabbath and the Lord's Day were sunny and we've dried up a bit. There seems to be more rain on the horizon, and there are storms threatening to head this way from up north, but we'll see.

We haven't gotten much work done on the ranch for some time due to the mud and rain, but I hope to get some things done this week. I have some materials to build with, and I have things to build, so maybe I can work that out.

I published the second part of the What is the Gospel? series yesterday. Here are the links for those two sermons:

What is the Gospel, Part I - The Righteousness of God Revealed

What is the Gospel, Part II - The Gospel Hidden

I received a nice package of books from Herrick Kimball - The Deliberate Agrarian, for which we are very grateful. He sent me the whole Whizbang Books catalog of books. I gave Tracy (my daughter, age 14) his most recent book Writings of a Deliberate Agrarian to read because it immediately caught her eye when I was opening the box, and she really, really wanted to read it. Apparently she has been reading it to the other children because they were walking around all day talking about the stories in it and doing something they called "a farmer handshake", which is apparently something they read in the book. Tracy said the book is great and she is going to do a book report on it.

Ok, here is your project for today (or sometime this week). We want to encourage this type of Agrarian writing, so why not order a copy of Writings of a Deliberate Agrarian? It looks like a great book, and maybe if you bought a copy or two (one for you, and one to give away) we can increase the body of information out there on agrarianism. Click on the following link to get a signed copy from Herrick:

http://www.thedeliberateagrarian.com/buyasignedcopy.html

I look forward to reading it soon. I gave the Whizabang Garden Cart book to Elder David to read (he reported that it was very good). I already read his The Complete Guide to Making Great Garlic Powder, which was an excellent book and has inspired me to plant a lot of Garlic this fall. After reading the chapter about what is wrong with commercial garlic powder I walked out into our cabin's kitchen and my eye immediately fell on our large container of commercial garlic powder (shudder). I think I will be trying to buy some organic garlic powder from Herrick or from some other provider if Herrick is sold out this year. I also read the Whizbang Chicken Plucker book, which was very interesting too, and it is something I intend to look into when I get some meat birds. We raise a lot of chickens, but primarily for eggs, and only occasionally kill a bird for meat. But I would like to get into pastured poultry more intensively and will look forward to making one of these chicken pluckers. I'll just have to run it using alternative energy since many of Herrick's great ideas are not particularly directed to the off-grid user; maybe one day he'll design one of these with a handcrank for us non-electric folk.

Anyway, thanks to Herrick Kimball for the books. Buy all these books for yourself, they are definitely worth it, and pass the word. Oh, and don't forget we are supposed to all buy two copies of Swarms of Locusts by the end of this month. Our goal was to sell 100 more copies, and I don't think we are halfway there.

Your servant in Christ Jesus,

Michael Bunker