The Cultured Home

Filling the dipping vat with pieces of tallow

Once a week we have a “candle lit” dinner, so we go through a lot of candles at our house.  I’ve been thinking of this project for a long time, so when I ended up with about 10 lbs of rendered tallow last week, I had to give candle making a try.

I learned a lot through the process, and I’ve been very pleased with the result.  I started with filling my 4″ dipping vat.  It’s 15″ tall, and it takes a lot of raw material to fill it.  Because I was putting cold pieces into the vat to melt, it took about 30 minutes before it was full and liquid. read more »

My 22" Drop Spreader works fine when things are dry

My soil test last summer showed acidic soil and low calcium to be our limiting factors to growing more grass.  The recommendation we received was to apply agricultural lime at a rate of 500 lbs/acre, so I’ve been working on that.

The math was easy.  I’ve got 3 acres of grass & pasture x 500 lbs/acre = 1500 lbs of lime.  Of course the local feed store sells lime–they had three, 25# bags.  Hmmmm….  I kept looking.  It was the usual problem of being too big for the local feed store, and too small to buy from the commercial Ag distributors (although they would deliver a 10 ton truckload if I wanted them to).  I ended up getting a pallet shipped up to me with thirty 50# bags at about $5/bag for powdered gardening lime. read more »

Goodbye cubicle job!

Happy New Year 2011!

Here is a short list of the changes that have happened in the past couple weeks: read more »