Raising Wood

I grew up in the 90’s as a homeschool child. At the time homeschooling was a vanguard approach to education, the default mode was public education. This resulted in endless conversations during school hours at the store, the library, the church, the museums, with the inevitable inclusion of: “…Oh! You Homeschool? How do your kids socialize?“

Replies were variations on the theme of ‘Homeschool groups, church groups, family, sports, etc“. These were perfectly suitable answers to the question verbally asked, but the underlying question was different: “Won’t your kids turn out weird?” The answer was to the effect of: “Instead of having a narrowly focused social scene with repetitive settings exclusively with same-age peers, they are interacting across a wide range of ages in a variety of settings.” People would nod and recognize this was different and seemed to be working out well. When people thought about their school time growing up, then compared it with a different form of public education before the 90s. They recognized there had been a phase change. Recess? Dodgeball? Prayer? Where did they go? The system changed.

Today, we are homeschooling four children in the 2020’s. People don’t ask the socialization question, unless they are quite distant from Childhood 2026(TM). Today, the default question is different. Today, people ask “What do your kids do all day?” The answer involves breakfast and dressed by 9, then assigned handwriting, online mathematics, reading history, active listening & read aloud time, spelling, grammar, drawing, and piano, all usually done by noon. Then there’s play time and chore time and farm time and Jiu-Jitsu time and Lego time and reading time and game time and puzzle time and building time and cooking time and so-many-different-times. The days have similar structure, but a wide range of self directed activity after the get-it-done work of the morning is done.

The change in the question itself is interesting. We live in a structured world, where children live stripped of the rights of play and required to conform endlessly to factory model schedules. Get up, get out the door, get to class, get through class, get to next class, on repeat through mid-afternoon. Then after-school activities, piled high with rigid structures and requirements of where to be and what to do and who to follow. Then go home, knock out the homework or dinner before some kind of regimented sports engagement, then to home and to bed.

The grown ups of the USA have embraced the scheduled existence. Up with the alarm, off to work, follow the work schedule, thirty minutes for lunch, pick up the kids, shuttle the kids, get domestic chores done in brief snatches, maybe find a workout, then get everyone to bed to quickly wind down with show on binge then back to sleep. In the middle of all that, fight yo’ FOMO with snatches of scrolling and liking and slashing, while burying the feeling of being simultaneously a hamster on a wheel and a rat in a race.

“What do your kids do all day?” reflects an existential change in our mode of existence. 70’s people asking 90’s homeschool kids questions reflected a reality where face-to-face, peer-to-peer social interactions were good, right, normal and expected. “What do your kids do all day?” reflects a failure of freedom of thought. We’ve become accustomed to our lives being dictated by the specter of the spreadsheet and the orchestration of order. We cannot imagine allowing children the free time we live without. We won’t live without it because we fear boredom.

In an age of activity and amusement, boredom is a forsaken virtue.

“What do your kids do all day?” reflects people living in a different level of the hierarchy of needs. The 90’s question about socialization was asked from the middle of the pyramid, Love and belonging. It was assuming Physiological and Safety needs were met, so what about your sense of connection? The 2020’s question of what do you do doesn’t reach up to the social interaction level. It exists within the Safety & Needs level. What is their employment like? All these other children have clear employment, what about these castaways?

The reality of our socialization reflects a shift down in the hiearchy. Friday and Saturday nights were long the mainstay of recreational social time. Today its just like any other weeknight: In 2003, people spent 6–7% of weekday time socializing, 9% on Fridays and 12% on Saturdays. In 2025, Friday evenings with friends fell from about 9% to 7%. Saturdays fell from 12% to 7%.

Check your own past month or two against this question: How many times have you had others over for dinner, or been for a dinner at a friends house? If you’re in line with most of these United States, it’s fallen off a cliff:

• Hosting friends or family at least monthly:
  • 42% in 1975 vs 12% in 2026. (70 percent collapse in a half century.)
• Entertained at home at least once in the past year: 88% in 1995, 67% in 2026.

Even worse, we’re not seeing each other away from the dinner events either. Drops from 1995 to 2026 include club meetings, from 45% to 26%, picnics (−19), playing cards (−19), going out to breakfast (−13), and volunteer work (−12).

Neal Postman put together a series of essays in his book “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business” The technology he reckons with is broadcast television and that palace of the VHS tape, Blockbuster. He postulates that when the easy thing to do (staying home alone) becomes nearly as entertaining as the alternatives (work, recreation, socialization), it becomes the dominant mode of living. What was true in the days of Magnum PI and MASH carries onward. We’re living way beyond the corner Blockbuster and the results are magnified: We’re anxious because we’re disconnected. We’re disconnected because we’re obsessively structured. We’re obsessively structured because we can’t imagine boredom as a suitable plane of existence. So we collectively remove childhood from children to fit into our own mode of living out of safety, not out of love and belonging.

You can break that cycle:

• Make the first move, have people over for dinner.
• Make the hard choice, turn off the screens and the earbuds and take the dog for a walk with the kids on bikes.
• Make the change to live with people in the moment, rather then without people and without a moment to spare.

PS: The Bible Project opened a new mode of thought for me earlier this year, and now that I’ve seen it, I can’t unsee it.

The Second Command of the Ten Commandments is to make no idols, to make nothing to be an image of God to worship, to focus on, to live for. Tim and Jon made the point that man is created in the image of God. When we make idols to worship, we make two errors. First, we worship the created rather then the creator. Second, we exclude man from his rightful place as the image of God. We replace the endless variety and creativity and joy of a right relationship with the manufactured masquerade of diversion and misdirection. We trade gold for straw and wonder why we suffer.

Christmas season is coming. The opportunity is ripe to rekindle old relationships, to beckon others to your home, and to stop waiting for someone else to be the change. Godspeed out there with what you do all day.

Bonus picture, from the days before Molly was booted outside:

It’s been six years of waiting with a solitary wood chip drop. This past month, the game changed. New tree service in the area connected through https://getchipdrop.com/ and has made four drops in a week.

It’s the good stuff. Fresh and wet and ready to be used.

Mulch. What is it good for?

Absolutely many things.

Garden bed maintenance and weed prevention.

Water retention around fruit trees.

Slowing water down on exposed slopes to preclude erosion.

Filling in areas chickens have scuffed to oblivion. (Turns out they like doing that on the side of slopes)

Filling in holes dogs dig to make a cool bed on a hot day.

Covering naked earth so that nature may cloth herself.

Compost piles to bury chicken carcasses, because sometimes a young dog hasn’t learned to knock it off yet

How well does it compost? The carbon content is certainally there, and it’ll cook. Steam is proof of a hot pile:

How do you move a lot of mulch? We’ve done it by hand. We’ve done it with a riding mower and a trailer. We’ve done it with a truck bed. I’m here to tell you, ain’t nothing so handy at moving big piles of mulch as a tractor. I processed and placed 1-1/2 dump trucks of chips in a 60 minute window, easily 10x more quickly then any other process we’ve worked with. At this rate, they can continue to bring in chips into the dozens of loads and we can continue to solve fertility issues across the property.

One bucket of the tractor holds ~20 cubit feet of material, or 10 bags of mulch from Lowe’s. At the cost of $4 per bag, each scoop is $40 in material. Each dump truck is 15-20 scoops, figure $700 in chips in bag form.

Even moving this all by hand, it’s a good investment in the future with sizable cost savings.

Bonus Pics:

Customer Feedback on the Pork:

Had a conversation with some similar-minded fathers with similar age children this week. One of the concerns raised was “I am still trying to figure out a good way to get my kids to understand the importance of hard work”

This is a common situation. Most children will shirk work when given the opportunity, because up to this particular moment in life, they mostly could shirk a task and someone older and more capable will take that responsibility from them. The challenge is growing out of that.

I sent this reply: “Mine are motivated by a few things. 1, sense of ownership over what they are working on, particularly tasks that require daily engagement, eg animals care. 2. Sense of profit based on outcomes. Eg paid for every egg recovered from the hens, but paid 2x for clean eggs vs dirty eggs. 3. Sense of importance to the task. They don’t keep up with the dog water, the dogs can literally die because no one else is checking it this week. 4. Family practice of hard work, it’s a do as we do rather then do as we say. Lot of dads do their work/productive/honey dos/hobbies away from the kids but they should be apprenticed into them.”

Turns our, what motivates a child to work isn’t all that different from what motivates a man in his job, differing only in the sense of scale.

The sun has risen. The dew has lately evaporated. Jenny leads the charge into the garden. We’re talking tomatoes, potatoes, okra, watermelons, all the good things you expect to find in the height of July in a North Texas garden.

Wait, what’s this? The boys investigate. They discover the muscadine grape, so delightful to the goats and cows on the other site of the fence, has bunches of grapes now fully ripe. They begin picking them, because what else do you do with bunches of ripe grapes shrouded in leather skins?

Next thing you know, Jenny is pulling kids around in the Honda quad to pick more ripe grapes from other pastures. Then she switches vehicles and pulls out, finding Robert returning from hours of fence repair and barb wire stringing. “We’re going to the store, get in!” …”Why?”…“We’re making grape jam and need stuff for it.” …”do you know how to make it?” … “No. We’ll figure it out. Let’s go.”

So the merry band moseys over to Wally world and finds that no one can walk out of Wally World without dropping $300 in things you forgot you needed, even if it’s only partly grape jam supplies. Turns out, inflation waits for no man.

The next day, some friends come over with experience in vineyards. They point out a great heap of ripe grapes hanging above the shop roof, and within an hour the three oldest have coordinated the movement of ladders, the gathering of collection buckets, and the acquisition of additional ripe grapes.

A few days later, Jenny is busy in the kitchen with the first born acting as sous chef. Great heaps of sugar, piles of sanitized glass jars, a vat of boiling water, and many, many mashed grapes fill the kitchen. After hours of diligent work and learning with the Claude AI, there’s a stack of jam on the counter.

It’s dynamite. The store grape jelly is like saltine crackers vs a bacon cheese burger in comparison.

The boys are plotting for next year. Turns out the goats are salivating for the grape fall, because they were aggressive in picking up the dropped ones. Jenny is researching different canning solutions. The hot fresh biscuits for dinner stand as worthy thrones for spoonful’s of grape jam. The AI is lurking in sorrow, for it alone has not tasted the canned fruit of the vine.

Bonus: We had one of those dinners that catches us off guard, so you get a influencer style picture. Every food item on the plate was sourced from the homestead (watermelon, pork bratwurst, beefsteak tomatoes, roasted potatoes)

After a decade of planting gardens, we should be good at nailing the spring planting. We are not. March rolled around and we missed the potato window.

It’s the last week of March. While Jenny and I are figuring out chicken and pig feed at feed store while the boys rumage through the last of the seed potatoes in the bin out front.

Valentine’s Day to early March is the sweet spot for potatoes in North Texas. You want to get them in the ground 2–4 weeks before your last frost (around March 15). Heat above 85–90°F stops tuber formation, so they will stop growing by mid-may.

Potatoes are tetraploid, meaning they have four chromosomes. Compare with diploid, the more common two chromosomes. Therefore they are wildly erratic when producing from seed, and universally seeds produce less useful varieties. So you plant seed potatoes in the dirt and let them sprout themselves. They are clones of the prior plant and grand-clones of the plant before that and great-grand-clones of the plant before that, etc.

In 1871, a young man named Luther Burbank lived in Massachusetts. He noticed an Early Rose potato plant went to seed in his garden. He carefully cultivated the 23 seeds harvested,. One of these was fast growing, large sized, high yield potato. He propagated it and the results were sustained. Luther named it the Burbank potato, sold the rights for $150, and moved to California to be near his brother who had moved a few years prior. There in California, Luther Burbank continued developing plants, including the Daisy flower we know today, the first commercially viable plums, and ever popular freestone peach. The Burbank potato became the Russet Burbank Potato. It is the most common potato in the USA, on account of its excellent baking and frying characteristics. McDonalds alone fries up 2.6 billion pounds annually. Every Russet Potato today is a clonal-descendent of Luther Burbank’s providential seed propagation.

So we buckle down and get two lanes of the garden busted up. Yes, that means running a tiller to bust up the garden that laid fallow for a year. Yes, that means endless war with the bermuda grass. Yes, that means hours of management, most of which fell to Jenny, some of which fell to the boys. Yes, that means sunburns, ant bites, wasp stings, and ‘man that hoe was close to my toe’ moments.

Then a picture comes in from the wife, and it looks like this:

73 lbs of potatoes. From the 2 Lbs we planted!

We did ??? Red potatoes and Yukon Gold varieties. In our North Texas sandy loam soil, we planted in two rows 20’ long each. We took the small seed potatoes planted one every 12”, mounded dirt on top of the growth 2-3 times. The rain fall this year was sufficient that we did not go about watering them very often. Equal starting weights (1lb each) produced 27lbs of Yukon Gold and 46lb of ??? Reds.

Pumpkins are planted today to take over the growing lanes. We’re optimistic the annual plague of the Squash Vine Borers of Doom has passed and the winter squash can grow in peace. Also optimistic the squash vines will spread out and keep the grass from invading.

Potatoes need to cure/harden their skins to preserve for the next planting season. This is 10 days of 50-60f temperatures in a dark place with air flow. None of which is readily available in my house. Per the books and the Reddit’s, basements and root cellars are great solutions. In lieu of that Midwest fantasy, Jenny has conjured a solution with a big cooler, ice packs, and a potable fan, now utilizing our closet for the next week:

For us this week, potatoes are a reminder: I can follow the news of wars and rumors of wars, famine and injustice, outrage and injustice I can wallow in the sorrow and fear and imbibe the trauma as a constant firehose dump into my life. I can also take some time to go get dirty hands and knees, and be shocked by the irrepressible abundance the Good Father gives to his creation. We didn’t make these plants grow, we just made space for the sun and the dirt to do the work. Take care of what’s at hand. It’s good for the soul.

Speaking of mass suffering and famine, let’s talk about the Potato blight in Ireland in the 1840s. The Lumper variety of potato became the dominant monoculture potato of the Emerald Isle because of it’s high yields. Year after year after year, it became the custom of the occupied and oppressed Irishman to plant his plot of potatoes to feed his family. He would have a gentle loam from spudding up his taters. it would readily host the next round of potatoes in the broken sod. He could readily manure (fertilize) the soil there, and keep it lively and fresh, with the least work possible, and with these Lumpers, have the highest pounds yielded from any potato yet developed.

These Lumpers were all clones, consistently clustered with a lack of rotational planting for the sake of minimizing labor and inputs. The blight swept through the nation like a scythe, destroying the entire Lumper clone army. Partly as a result of this, I’m typing tonight about potatoes, because the Irish brought potato culinary culture with them as they fled to the USA.

We’re well past that problem in the modern world, right? High Yield Monoculture in the name of efficiency is a thing of the past, right?

We’ll be planting potatoes again in the fall. Dirty hands, clean taters. We already have our own clone seeds, after all. Maybe we’ll even add some Russet Burbank’s this time. Just wait till I tell you about the watermelon conversion rate.

The time has come to cast aside the shackles of high-stress factory chickens. Imagine what kind of bird you could raise if you gave it a low-stress environment, daily fresh grass and clean water, and a properly balanced diet of non-GMO feed steeped in probiotics and essential oils. You could grow some Texas Style Chickens.

Texas Style Chickens are what we’re doing at Raising Wood. This is our fourth go at raising Cornish Cross birds on pasture to stock our freezer with meat, and it’s the best. Let me show you what we’re doing.

Start with chicks a day old when the frost may still fall to the ground, but you can also break a sweat working the garden in the afternoon. Put them in a warm, dry space with water and feed and a heat lamp and wood shavings, and check them obsessively for two to three weeks.

Before you know it, they have sufficient feathers to handle the cool dips at night. Move them out to your prepared chicken tractor on the grass. Each day, you will move them forward one tractor length. You will update food and water each day as well.

Before you know it, the edge of winter has passed, and the heat of the summer is threatening. Your birds will be hot. Texas Style Chickens have to deal with random Texas heat spikes. They need shade, in a hurry.

Then you’re going to realize that the shademobile nestled right up against the chicken tractors makes everything hard to move again. Then you realize that it’s going to be low 90s most of the week, and something has to change, or your birds will perish from the dang heat. So you root around in the shop with your wife for a while and come up with the “hey, don’t we have Radiant Barrier left over from the roof project? Let’s use some of that to cover them up. Then you congratulate yourself for being such a dang clever farmer. Then you go to cut your Radiant Barrier to size and realize you already cut them to size when you used this same solution last year and forgot about it. Farming is great for the mind, I tell ya.

This stuff works. You can feel the heat radiating back into your face when you stand near it. Chicken heat issue, solved. You can see the boys putting their own Radiant Barrier covering over their chicken tractor, as they raised 5 each this season to sell for profit.

Then the processing day comes quickly. You use your souper cubes and deep freezers to freeze 240lb of ice. You get a pasture-raised pork shoulder out of the freezer, and you smoke it for 28 hours to make lunch for the incredibly dedicated and diligent friends who have volunteered to do hours of hard work for the pleasure of learning the process.

Then your wife spends all day Friday setting up the carport for the killing, scalding, plucking, processing, dunking, icing, drying, and bagging of the birds. We are very blessed to have a covered carport and abundant hoses.

Notable improvements this year: Using a pickup truck bed to schlep birds from the tractor, energetic boys were ideal for loading and unloading. Then +2 kill buckets. A waterproof timer for the scald stand. Hoses with nozzles suspended over the processing table. Waterproof ergonomic mats for the table. +2x150qt Coolers. +1 folding table to drying. Poly Aprons. Meat Lug Liners. XXS gloves for kid hands. A bundle of terry cloth towels for handwashing/drying. Tractor with Post Hole Auger to dig holes and schlep the leftovers into. Custom Raising Wood labels.

When that last bird skids into the cooler and you clean up and go inside for lunch, it’s a tremendous feeling. There’s some work still to go, but the bulk is complete.

Bag the birds and freeze the birds, and do more cleanup, and that’s the end of the Texas Style Chickens for Spring of 2026.

So how did we do? There were changes made from last year. We moved from a 20% protien feed to a 22% protien feed. We started two weeks later in the year by virtue of hatchery availability. We moved to a different pasture area.

How many dollars were consumed, separate from capital expenditures?

Separate from the new tractor, equipment expenditures were $633, we’ll set those aside for their reusable nature. Labor is part of the equation, but I’m still sore and don’t want to talk about it.

What was the output?

60 birds processed. Average weight of 9.13#, blowing past the prior high of 8.25#. New High score in the largest size birds, with a pair of birds ringing in at 11lb 5oz, blasting past the prior high score of 10lb 6oz. As we were processing the final batch of birds, I cracked a joke that there were some big chickens, but it would be annoying if the boys managed to make a chicken bigger than the ones Jenny and I raised.

Sure enough, the boys clocked a bird in the freezer bag at 11lb 6oz, and hold the new high score for the largest Texas Style Chicken on the Raising Wood Farm.

8.5 weeks. Birds were healthy. Non-GMO feed and abundant grass converted into chicken to feed my family. Boys learned about working, each day, every day, until the job culminates in a forever-long processing day, then learned about order fulfillment and seeing customers delight in a quality product. Friends learned a new skill.

Texas-style chickens are the best type of production, one that brings people together and nourishes the family at the table and in the soul.