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Welcome to 2019: A year of extraordinary adventures and growth!
Hello and welcome back to our first blog of the year! Our household has been super busy this summer! How about yours? Did you do anything fun over Christmas and New Years? Have you added anything to your homesteads or have you done anything different in your life? We’d love to hear about it! Speaking…
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On Masculine Virtues
Today’s post is a bit of an unusual one, in that it’s exploring not so much farm life, but a philosophical topic and yet one of great practical importance. On a certain niche social media site I’m part of, there was a discussion on the importance of maintaining good personal habits, even on the superficial…
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“This is your job now.”
The way of the sluggard is blocked with thorns, but the path of the upright is a highway. Proverbs 15:19 (New International Version, 1984 edition) One of the hardest things about the last couple of years for me has been the need to largely reinvent myself. Or, at least, to significantly change how I viewed…
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Snippets and Highlights
Greetings, readers! As usual, the best laid plans of mice and men, when not backed up by good habits, gang aft agley. So to get back on track, I thought I would post some highlights of homesteading thing-a-ma-jigs we have accomplished over the last couple of years. Chicken infrastructure: For small numbers of chickens. I…
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Kittens!
Right, time to do something about this blog. I’m going to try for Saturday morning posts, to at least get into a routine. Anyway. It so happens that in the autumn of last year, we had holes cropping up left and right across our land. Rats. This is a farm, not a golf course. Besides,…
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Getting Back to the Land
Even before we left New Zealand, the Kiwi Homesteaders had chosen to join forces with Starfish’s parents. This worthy couple, having moved from Auckland to a small town in North Canterbury in order to be closer to us, were realising that living as an ageing couple in a small town with attenuated support networks was…
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“Are we there yet?” Part 2
Or, how we escaped from New Zealand. This post was written in August 2022, but backdated to mid-February 2022. It was in October 2021 that we got the news. Starfish was pregnant – which we knew – and would not get obstetric care at a New Zealand hospital. Starfish’s father, being medically contraindicated to receive…
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“Are we there yet?” Part 1
Or, why we escaped from New Zealand. This post was written in August 2022, but backdated to mid-February 2022. What happened to New Zealand is enough to fill the heart of a faithful citizen with grief. The land that was once called, “God’s own country,” (and so acquired the nickname, “Godzone”) has turned its back…
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Kiwi Homesteading is dead…
Long live Rhedding Farm! The Kiwi Homesteaders were a determined bunch, save perhaps in the matter of blogging. But though we persevered in our twelve-acre North Canterbury block, things finally got too much for us. I needn’t say a great deal about the COVID-19 panic that gripped the world in 2020 and 2021. Suffice it…
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How to Survive a Lawsuit
It happens. You’re going along in life, minding your own business; perhaps a few months ago you quit your job in frustration, or there was that tradesman who did work you weren’t happy with. You go to your mailbox and suddenly your heart sinks. There’s a letter in there threatening legal action, or, even worse,…
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Endings and Beginnings
The best-laid plans o’ mice an’ menGang aft agley. Robert Burns, in To a Mouse That, I am sure, describes many of our experiences this last year, notably dominated by attempts to control the spread of a certain (alleged) Coronavirus. We of course had a short, sharp lockdown for four weeks in our autumn, with…