• About Farm School

    "There are obviously two educations. One should teach us how to make a living and the other how to live."
    James Adams, from his essay "To 'Be' or to 'Do': A Note on American Education", 1929

    We're a Canadian family of five, farming, home schooling, and building our own house. I'm nowhere near as regular a blogger as I used to be.

    The kids are 18/Grade 12, 16/Grade 11, and 14/Grade 10.

    Contact me at becky(dot)farmschool(at)gmail(dot)com

  • Notable Quotables

    "If you want a golden rule that will fit everybody, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful."
    William Morris, from his lecture "The Beauty of Life"

    "‘Never look at an ugly thing twice. It is fatally easy to get accustomed to corrupting influences."
    English architect CFA Voysey (1857-1941)

    "The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man. Nothing else that he builds ever lasts. Monuments fall, nations perish, civilizations grow old and die out; and, after an era of darkness, new races build others. But in the world of books are volumes that have seen this happen again and again, and yet live on, still young, still as fresh as the day they were written, still telling men’s hearts of the hearts of men centuries dead."
    Clarence Day

    "Anyone who has a library and a garden wants for nothing."
    Cicero

    "Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtile; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend."
    Sir Francis Bacon, "Essays"

    "The chief aim of education is to show you, after you make a livelihood, how to enjoy living; and you can live longest and best and most rewardingly by attaining and preserving the happiness of learning."
    Gilbert Highet, "The Immortal Profession: The Joys of Teaching and Learning"

    "Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment."
    Walter Wriston

    "I'd like to give you a piece of my mind."
    "Oh, I couldn't take the last piece."
    Ginger Rogers to Frances Mercer in "Vivacious Lady" (1938)

    "No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem."
    Booker T. Washington

    "Please accept my resignation. I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member."
    Attributed to Groucho Marx in "The Groucho Letters" by Arthur Sheekman

    "If you can't say something good about someone, sit right here by me."
    Alice Roosevelt Longworth

    "If we bring a little joy into your humdrum lives, we feel all our hard work ain't been in vain for nothin'."
    Jean Hagen as "Lina Lamont" in "Singin' in the Rain" (1952)

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  • Copyright © 2005-2016 Please do not use any of my words or my personal photographs without my express permission.

Moving (the blog)

Posted on April 13, 2016 by Becky

According to WordPress, I’m at 97 percent capacity here, which means that even with my lacklustre blogging in the past few years, I’ll be outgrowing my blog home before too long.

I can’t see spending any money on to add on to this particular blog URL, not when there are expensive appliances and light fixtures I’d rather buy, so I’m going to start migrating over to (farm school) Farm House, which will be mostly house related, to continue documenting our house-building process. But school only as it relates to the school of life…

I’ll be moving all the house-related posts from here over there as time allows (i.e. when I’m not hunting for plumbing and electrical fixtures).

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Motion sensor adapter

Posted on April 13, 2016 by Becky

This post is mostly a reminder to myself, and hopefully assistance to anyone else looking for the mechanism to convert a regular exterior/outdoor light fixture to a motion sensing fixture.

Rona carries the Heath-Zenith adapter sensor, model #HZ-5210-GR, for $34.95.

I’m considering adding the adapter to a Rona fixture, the “Martes” lantern by Globe, $40.99 (though it was under $40 a few weeks ago when I bought seven of them). I do like the look and the price point, though I’m not crazy about oil-rubbed bronze as a finish — I’d prefer black, but apparently that’s too boring, so ORB seems to be everywhere. I’m hoping when the lights are up they’ll read black, maybe with the help of some Rustoleum spray paint if not in reality.

Rona Martes

 

 

 

Filed under: House, Lighting & Wiring | Leave a comment »

Stairs

Posted on April 11, 2016 by Becky

All the permanent staircases are in now in the house. No more temporary stairs, or ladders, or scaffolding!

Here’s the main floor staircase,

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Calving continues but we’re on the downhill slide, with 23 or so cows left to go, and about 75 calves bouncing around. The mud (you can see a bit in the lower right corner) which was everywhere and deep has started to dry up, especially after several unpleasantly windy days. Today we enjoyed a high of 15 degrees Celsius (59 F), an increase of 14 degrees since yesterday!

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We need some new bulls for the cows this summer — they get too old and too related — so Tom and the boys went to a bull sale the other weekend, where they bought three bulls (two two-year-olds for this summer, and a one-year-old for next summer), and then the kids went to another sale yesterday, buying two bulls. The boys also went to another sale where they bought some heifers. The local college in town has a student-managed farm and so, it seems, do we.

And we dug another dugout, to help water the shelter belt trees and new garden,

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