Gardening OnThe Brink Of War,& Taking Leave

Dateline: 31 March 2014

Transplanting Romaine, 2013

Spring is upon us here in central New York state and there is much to be done around this little homestead. Therefore, as difficult as it is for me to put the brakes on my blogging habit, that's what I'm doing. I'll be off for a week… or two. 

If you have not yet done so, I encourage you to sign up and receive new blog posts (when I start blogging again) by e-mail. There is a place to sign up on the right side of this page.

Before I go, I'd like to retract something I wrote here earlier this year. You may recall that I said I wasn't going to have a very big garden in 2014.  I expected to be too busy with my Planet Whizbang business this year. Well, I take it back. I'm making the time to have a big and productive garden this year! Here's why...

I am particularly alarmed by the recent and ongoing events in Ukraine. There is sufficient evidence to indicate that the United States government played a key behind-the-scenes role in the destabilization of that country. Multinational banking interests, along with global energy and agribusiness corporations stand to benefit greatly. Follow the money.

The corporate news media in the US is unreliable. It has clearly become a propaganda arm of the federal government. They routinely discuss trivial matters as if they are important, and feed us misinformation about things (like the situation in Ukraine) that are critically important. 

I have become skeptical of everything our government is doing in the realm of "foreign relations." I do not believe it is in the best interests of the American people to have our government stirring up trouble with the Russians over an area of land that is on the Russian border, that used to be a part of Russia, and that is largely populated by people who identify themselves as Russian. In short, Ukraine is of major strategic importance to Russia and has always been. What strategic importance is that country to the people of America? None.

For our government to be over there causing trouble for Russia, then criticizing them for responding to the trouble, is something I don't understand. There is a whole lot more to this than meets the eye. And, like I said, I'm alarmed. 

There isn't much we can do about globalist elites (American politicians among them) perpetrating their self-serving corruptions in so many places around the world. But there is something that we can do to be better positioned to deal with the difficulties that will, in time, surely befall the people of this country... 

We can be more and more proactive about providing for our food needs, apart from the industrial providers. Which means, we can get more serious about growing food for ourselves and our families. And that's what I intend to do.

Squash seedlings, 2013

If you are getting more serious about your own gardening pursuits this year, I want to point out that I have numerous Planet Whizbang products that can help you be a more successful gardener…

1.  The Planet Whizbang Idea Book For Gardeners

2.  The Planet Whizbang Wheel Hoe

3.  Whizbang Bucket Irrigation Kits

4.  Planet Whizbang T-Post Trellis Span Y-Holders

5.  Planet Whizbang T-Post Grape Trellis Fittings

6.  Whizbang Garden Cart Plans


For more inspiration and information, check out This Archive of My Garden Writings.

Tomatoes, 2013
(on Whizbang T-post trellis spans)

And finally, until we meet here again, I want to leave you with some pleasant, reflective music to listen to…

That song is part of David Farley's new CD, and you can listen to the whole CD At This Link. 

If you go to that link, play close attention to the beginning of song #5 (Stella). That was going to be the lead-in music to my Agrarian Reader podcast (which I decided not to follow through with).

I'll be back here in a week... or two.

Best wishes,

Herrick Kimball

P.S. I have finally posted another old excerpt to my Agrarian Nation blog. Check it out: Earth Ovens—1869

Me & Futureman, 2013

Deliberate Agrarian ReduxMarch 2010

Dateline: 29 March 2014

Yours truly, with my Aunt Carolyn, when I was a Futureman.

New readers are coming to this blog all the time, and most new readers don't have the time or inclination to go back and read the hundreds of essays I've posted here over the years. So, once a month, I think I'll feature a Deliberate Agrarian Redux post, like this one…

Back in 2010 I was posting a single, monthly "blogazine,"  and my March 2010 blogazine elicited one of the harshest comments I've ever received here...

"My goodness, I've certainly never heard a conservative set up a phony moral high ground and then bash everyone down below with his scepter of Ultimate Moral Authority before. You're a greedy fool, old man, and you want to see the "bad" people's blood run out across the land like every other lazy minded, selfish bastard in the world. Too bad there are so many of you, we might have had a shot. Have fun playing pioneer and sneering at those wage slaves who'll never own land. I'm sure it feels mighty fine."

What did I say to bring that on? Well, see if you can figure it out…

Four years ago in March I dug up my garden clamp, which had perfectly preserved a cache of carrots and beets through the winter.

Four years ago I wrote about Obamacare, which had just passed. My editorial of that law is still, I believe, a valid analysis.

Four years ago I told of how I was voluntarily taking a 30% work reduction at my State job. I was dreaming that someday I would be able to completely leave the job and come home to work my Planet Whizbang business full time (that dream came true last year).

Four years ago I wrote about Victor Davis Hanson's book, The Other Greeks, which tells of the rise and fall of the Greek Mycenaean culture. Understanding what happened to the Mycenaean culture gives us some insights into the post-collapse world of our own culture.

Four years ago I posted a bunch of old pictures of myself and Marlene.

And four years ago I introduced the whimsical chicken art of Jax Hamlin, who is actually me. I have yet to follow through with my chicken art aspirations, but I still want to someday.

CLICK HERE to read the March 2010 Deliberate Agrarian blogazine.

Our $10,000 house, when we first built it.
(a picture from the March 2010 blogazine)

The Holstein MemoriesOf Christopher Kimball

Dateline: 28 March 2014

Back in February of 2006 I posted an essay here titled, Making An Agrarian Family Calendar, which I was prompted to write after reading an editorial by Christopher Kimball, editor of Cook's Illustrated magazine. Today's blog post comes by way of Mr. Kimball's other magazine, Cook's Country, a copy of which recently arrived in the mail addressed to my son, James. 

In the recent issue, Christopher Kimball writes of a time not that long ago (He was born in 1951) when small dairy farms still dotted the rural landscape, when farmers knew their cows by name, and when kids still had plenty of opportunities to help out with farm work….

"I have fond and lasting memories of Holsteins, since I spent many summers in Vermont helping out with the afternoon milking. This was a small mountain farm operation with 25 head (fewer milkers at any one time), a barn filled with flies, and an overhead manure bucket on rails.

I soon learned each of the Holsteins' names and personalities. Some hauled off and swatted their tails more than others; some liked a nice scratch behind the ears, like a dog. I can still feel their warmth; the swollen bellies; the heavy, bony heads; the supple, silky skin of the udders, and the rhythmic pumping of the [milking] machine.

I also learned where food comes from. The last pail of milk was brought into the farmhouse, so I drank raw milk in summers, knowing every step of its production, from calling in the herd to shutting the barn door once the cows had returned to pasture.

We have lost the intimacy between farm and table. Farm kids are lucky. They press cider, they dig up carrots and hill potatoes, they milk cows, and they may even help with the taking of life, gratefully putting food on the table.

Cooking does not exist apart from fields and barns. If you have never milked a cow, it is hard to appreciate the taste of milk. A cold glass still reminds me of a small red barn on a mountain farm a very long time ago."

To some degree, I can relate to Christopher Kimball's recollections. I worked for a year on a dairy farm after high school. There were about 6o head of Holsteins. I learned that dairy farming is hard, never-ending work, and I concluded that I would not want to be a dairy farmer. But there were certainly endearing aspects to the work and, in retrospect, I have good memories of that time.

Christopher Kimball's memory of an "overhead manure bucket on rails" led me to do an internet search…

Click Here to learn more about this old-style manure carrier. It would not be that difficult to  make a track-carrier like this, and I can see where such a tool might prove useful. It's something to "file away" for possible future use.

Forking manure into one of those things was, undoubtedly, a lot of work. The farm I worked on had a gutter in the floor behind the cows, with a chain-driven "gutter cleaner" that carried the manure outdoors to a manure spreader. Once a day, after the morning milking, the gutter was cleaned out. But there was an addition on the barn with maybe a dozen cows that had a gutter without a cleaner in it. So I had to fork the straw and manure into a wheelbarrow, then wheel it into the part of the barn with the mechanical cleaner, and dump it. 

Sometimes I had to clean that gutter out while the cows were still in their stanchions. One day a cow slapped me in the mouth with her manure-and-urine soaked tail, and my mouth wasn't closed when I got hit.  That isn't a fond memory. :-)

If God Is So Powerful,And So Good,Why Do Bad Things Happen?

Dateline: 27 March 2014

Voddie Baucham
(I really like this guy)

I have been listening to some YouTube clips of pastor Voddie Baucham, and I've come to really appreciate this man's teaching. 

One particularly good talk I listened to is, Speaking on Manhood. If you have daughters that are getting up near marrying age, you may want to have them listen to his advice for them in that talk.

Voddie Baucham is one of the only preachers I've ever heard who will take on the cult (my word) of modern sports. (I gave my opinion of modern sports in This Past Essay)

On another subject, in one of his YouTube clips Pastor Baucham said something that grabbed my attention  He said that when God created Adam, and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and  keep it (before the fall), Adam was the perfect man in the perfect place.  That's worth pondering.

One of the shortest and best Voddie Baucham YouTube clips I've seen is of him answering the question: If God is so powerful and so good, why do bad things happen? The 5-minute excerpt (posted below) is well worth listening to if you have ever wondered the same thing.

The answer he gives is, I believe, theologically spot-on. But I don't think it will satisfy most people. That's because, as Pastor Baucham says, most people "judge God based on how He carries out their agenda for the world." 

Most people who listen to what he says will simply not accept (or even understand) it, because most people have a man-centered worldview, not a God-centered worldview. 

Bearing that in mind, I recently read a definition of reality that I liked…. Reality is looking at the world the way God looks at it. 

God is the creator of reality, seen and unseen (by human eyes). He defines reality. And most people do not properly deal with reality because they either refuse to, or are unable to, see it.

Well, anyway, here is Voddie Baucham… talking about reality:

Agrarian BitsFor March2014

Dateline: 26 March 2014

The picture above is of William Elliott, a farmer in Tennessee. The farm he operates is designated as a "Pioneer Farm," which means it has been in his family and in continuous production for at least 200 years. That is something special! You can read the story at this link: Family Farming Legacy Measured in Centuries.

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The above article link was sent to me by Matt B., a reader of this blog. If you come across an article that you think I (and the rest of the readers of this blog) would find interesting, please let me know: hckimball@bci.net

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A reader in Ohio sent me this letter a couple weeks ago….

Mr. Kimball,

Based on your review/recommendation I asked for a copy of "The Market Gardener" for my recent b-day.  It's a great book and unlike most of the others out there (which I have) it delves more into the economics of market gardening.  I'm only on page 10 but amazed that I've learned that outside labor can account for 50% of production cost!  This is much higher than I might have initially guessed, but it makes sense when one considers the scale of the operation.  This fact alone makes me convinced that a market garden business is the ideal family, multi-generational, home-based business.  If one could get his family set up on a chunk of land that means a single set of expenses for many things like property taxes, utilities, insurance, etc.  There are tasks associated with this type of business that older grandparents who might not be up to heavy physical work but would easily be able to assist with things like managing orders, paperwork, startings seedlings, interacting with customers, etc.  Further, from a demand standpoint one would be providing something with inelastic demand - food.  People will always need it regardless of any, what an engineer would call, boundary conditions. 

So, what is point of this email?  A big thanks for the recommendation.  I'm 100% convinced that we are headed for some sort of economic calamity.  We need to all be thinking of in terms of home-based business like you have.  Unfortunately, I'm devoid of creativity so a Whizbang alternative is off the table for me.  Growing vegetables - now that's something I can get into. 

If you missed it, Click Here to read my review of The Market Gardener.

My response to that letter is that I believe a successful market garden business, like the author of The Market Gardenerhas, would be a much better home-based family economy business than my Planet Whizbang mail-order business. 

Unfortunately, at my age, I don't have the stamina required to launch a market garden business, nor do I have the time or inclination to invest in the learning curve. Besides that, my children aren't interested. So I've settled for the next best thing… a home business in the country, where I can pursue a more self-reliant, agrarian lifestyle.

I do believe that micro-farming enterprises are "where it's at" when it comes to developing a land-based, family-centered, multi-generational lifestyle. 

By the way, if you are new to this blog, and you read my review of The Market Gardener (linked above), be sure to also read this: Sage Advice For Would-Be Farmers.

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Scott Terry's radio program last week about Industrialism and The Church was a good one. I see at Scott's blog that Tony Konvalin added a link to issue #104 of Christian History magazine. I never heard of that magazine and am glad to know about it. Issue #104 is about Christians in the New Industrial Economy.  If you have an interest in history, industrialization, and agrarianism, that online issue is well worth reading.

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It wasn't that long ago that the word, "agrarian," was practically forgotten and few people knew what it meant. Now it is, as they say, "trendy." As proof of this, Williams Sonoma is now attempting to cash in on an "agrarian line" of products. 

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Have any readers from Indiana been to Agrarian Urban Homestead and Supply store? It looks like a neat place.

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The future of maple syrup production?

Speaking of making maple syrup (in My Previous Blog Post) there is now a new way of "tapping" trees. Simply lop off the top of a maple sapling, seal around the cut, attach a hose, and suck out the sap. No joke. Click Here for details.

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If you have not yet seen "maple water" on your grocery store shelves, you probably will soon. This is a promising new (and trendy) product in the maple agribusiness industry. It's actually not a bad idea, as long as it's just maple tree sap. But I guarantee you it's not anywhere near as good for you (or as inexpensive) as drinking the sap right out of your own maple tree.

Vertical Water is one company cashing in on this idea. For more insights into this idea check out, New Maple Water Drink Has Untapped Potential, from the Cornell Chronicle. Also, did you know that you can tap walnut trees and make walnut syrup? Details are in that Cornell link.

By the way, drinking maple tree sap is a big deal in South Korea. They call it gorosoe, which means "tree good for the bones." It is reportedly good for other ailments too. Those folks have been drinking maple sap for centuries. You can Read This Article and learn more about it. Then, go tap a maple tree and give it a try!

Mud, Rust, Fire & Sap...Down-HomeMaple Syrup Production

Dateline:  25 March 2014

Family-scale syrup production. Photo Link

Many a farm family here in upstate New York used to make maple syrup as a sideline enterprise each spring, and sell it to folks in their community through the year. But those days are gone. They’re gone because most of the farm families are gone. And most of the farms that remain have become larger and more specialized. Farms have become larger in order to remain profitable (and keep their creditors paid).

This evolution in farming, away from small, diversified, family-scale economies, to larger, more specialized agricultural businesses is really not anything new. The consolidation and industrialization of farming has been going on since the mid-1800s.  Small farms have given way to big business. They call it agribusiness. 

With the loss of so many small-scale maple syrup producers has come the rise of maple syrup production as a specialized agribusiness pursuit. My middle son works for a man who makes syrup from around 27,000 maple trees, most of which are on leased woodlots. In addition to sap from those trees, the man buys enormous quantities of maple sap from others.

Whereas maple tree sap used to drip out of the tree into a bucket for collection, the sap collected by large producers is now sucked out of the trees. It goes from the tree into a plastic tube that connects to ever larger tubes and ends up in a large collection tank. It is then trucked to a central facility where it is run through a reverse osmosis filter to reduce the water content, then quickly boiled in an enormous gas-fired evaporator. Industrialized maple syrup production is efficient and fast. And it can be very profitable.

Plastic sap lines

The technology and cleverness of the industrialized maple producers is impressive, but I’m not impressed enough to adopt any part of it when it comes to my own maple syrup operation. Call me an agrarian curmudgeon, but I don’t want anything to do with plastic hoses and plastic fittings and all of that. I like metal spouts and buckets and my little backyard batch evaporator pan. I even like using a brace and auger bit to drill a tap hole in the tree (instead of a cordless drill).

An enormous maple syrup evaporator.
Click Here to read an interesting article that goes with this picture.

I like making maple syrup the old way because, for one thing, the older way is more reliable and sustainable. If the grid goes down, and/or the plastic factories can’t make their product, and/or gasoline and fuel oil becomes hard to get, I’ll still be making maple syrup just fine. I'll still have a good dose of sweet, condensed tree minerals in my morning cup of coffee. But, more than that, I’ll still have maple syrup that tastes good. 

I’ve had industrialized maple syrup and it isn’t the same as my own homemade syrup. Maybe it’s all the microorganisms, bacteria and yeast that develops inside, and clings to the lining of, all those miles of plastic lines, or maybe it’s the quick boil in the sugar house. Whatever it is, the  more industrialized the operation, the worse the flavor. That’s the way it tastes to me.

I’ve chronicled how we make maple syrup on a small scale here in past years. You can read This Series From 2008 (with lots of pictures). Not much has changed with us since then, except this year we have a new firebox for our batch pan. Well, it isn’t exactly brand new. It’s actually old, and rusty, and a little bit broken, but it’s new to us, and it was free. 

And now….. for some radical contrast between industrial maple syrup production and down-home, contra-industrial, agrarian-curmudgeon, backyard maple syrup production, here is a little photo chronicle of this years operation on our homestead:

What your'e looking at in the picture above is a dearth of firewood. That space was packed full at the beginning of winter. It has been an unusually cold winter and the woodshack is almost empty (some people have spiffy wood sheds. I have a wood-and-tarp wood shack). There is enough wood in that picture to get us to warm weather, but not to boil down a few gallons of maple syrup. So…..

That right there is my homestead work-car. Some homesteaders have trucks. I've got a work-car. The firewood was cut in my woods. I just drove down the road, cut some dead trees and loaded them in the trunk.

By the way, that's also the family default car. When one of my kids has a problem with their vehicle, they can drive my work-car. Since I no longer drive to a job in the city every day, the car is usually available. It barely passed inspection last year, and probably won't pass this year. But I've got a couple more months before I may have to finally buy a new vehicle. By "new" I mean new like my new maple syrup evaporator firebox…..

Ain't she a beauty? Well, that old firebox is truly an improvement over the 55-gallon drum we have used for years. It sets up higher and I was able to lay in firebricks on the sides. Now the metal on the outsides is only warm to the touch, not hot. If you click the picture you can see better where I cut out a section of the metal so my old boiling pan with its outlet drain would slide down into place.

In the picture above, you can see the "door" on the firebox. Those pieces of steel (held in place with a piece of firewood) came from the 55-gallon firebox I made a few years ago. You don't want to throw out rusty old pieces of steel like that when you have a scrappy little homestead because you never know when they can be employed to serve a necessary purpose. The hose you see (held in place by a length of baling wire) is what feeds sap into the pan. Here's a picture of the sap barrel….

It was an overcast and cold day when I took these pictures. But you can see enough to grasp the concept (click to see an enlarged view). The sap is collected from the trees with buckets. The buckets are dumped into the plastic barrel. Sap flows by gravity from there into the evaporator pan. The barrel is supported by a pallet platform. Pallets are another handy item on a homestead (you can never have too many pallets). The right side of the platform pallet is attached to my house. You can do things like that when your house is sided with just plywood and tar paper. I've got most of the house sided and painted but this side is different. It's kind of like my "work-car" side of the house—not all that great to look at, but very functional. Here's another view of the operation…

Once we have a full barrel of maple sap, we start boiling in the morning and boil into the evening. I hook up a light and it's kind of nice to hang out around the fire.

When my boys were younger, and the whole family made maple syrup together, we would all gather in the "sugar shack" at night and enjoy the ambiance of it. Maple steam, and smoke, with everyone all together makes for good memories.

Two of my sons (Chaz and Robert) have helped this year with tapping trees and collecting sap. The evening after I took the pictures above, the two of them were sitting on upturned buckets by the boiling pan of sap. I was glad to see it. Instead of some modern amusement, they were re-living a good experience from their childhood. 

Marlene was away helping a family member with something. James was working at his job, but I was home. I went out and spent some time  around the evaporator. Eventually I went to bed (I need my sleep!), but they stayed out there 'till midnight.

If we don't get the whole batch boiled down in a day, we just leave the pan overnight and fire it up again the next day. That's what we did with our first (and only) boil of this season. We ended up with 1.5 gallons in quart canning jars. 

Now we're waiting for the weather to warm up again and the sap to start flowing again. A gallon and a half won't last us a year, and I don't want to have to buy syrup from the industrial providers.

Marlene tending the fire last year.
This picture shows the old firebox, and a jar of the finished product.

Sincere Thanks

Dateline: 24 March 2014

Click to see enlarged view

Well, my 3-day book bomb came to a close a few minutes ago and, as the screen shot above shows, the desired objective was achieved. For most of the 3 days, the book was in the top ten of it’s two different category listings. On Sunday morning it was in the #1 position in the “Christian Families” category. 

It was a thrill to game the Amazon rankings and see Writings of a Deliberate Agrarian crash the party at the top of the mainstream Christian book rankings, even if it was only for a few hours. 

I may now officially claim that I wrote an Amazon best-selling book. That’s one of the objectives with a successful book bomb. But, unless by some miracle the book stays up there, I won’t be publicly heralding such a claim. That’s not my style.

The fact of the matter is that the book did not shoot to the top because it’s wildly popular, but because I have a lot of thoughtful and kind friends out there. When I announced the book bomb in my previous blog post here, and I asked for your help, you responded. You bought a copy. You sent e-mails to your friends encouraging them to buy a copy. You announced it on social media. You wrote a review of the book at Amazon. You blogged about it. Those of you who took a few moments out of your day to tell others are the reason this book bomb was a success. And I am grateful.

I was hoping to sell 50 Kindle copies of the book in three days. I thought that would be amazing. But, as of the close of the book bomb (a few minutes ago) 253 books were sold. 

I don’t know who all of you are, but I know who some of you are, and I’d like to extend a special thanks to the following people…

Scott Terry at Christian Farm and Homestead Radio mentioned the book on his program last Friday (it was an excellent program that night, by the way), and Scott blogged about it at North Country Farmer.

David the Good let his readers know about my book at Florida Survival Gardening.

Cindy Lewis blogged about it at Modern Christian Homestead

Richard Grossman, The Midland Agrarian, not only spoke well of my book on Scott Terry's radio show, he also posted a very nice blog about it.

Ron Woodburn, at Digging Into Freedom's True Meaning, also posted an insightful blog about the book, introducing his readers to Christian agrarianism (and making the point that there is a connection between Christian agrarianism and freedom).

Archer Garrett let his readers know at The Independent.

And my Aunt Carolyn, who lives in Maine (and who, I sometimes think, must know half the people in that state…including Barbara Bush), posted about my book on her Facebook page.

Five people (so far) took the time to write a wonderful review of the book at Amazon: Tim Inman, Ted Stevens, Nick, "Book in Hand," and Ron Woodburn. Thanks, guys!

If I have left someone out, please let me know.

In conclusion, because of the help of you, my friends, this book has been launched. It has momentum that it wouldn't otherwise have. 

I hope that everyone who bought a copy of the book will read it, and enjoy it, and be blessed by it. That is, after all, the whole reason I wrote it.

Thanks again to everyone to helped make this book bomb a resounding success.

Herrick Kimball

New!My Deliberate Agrarian eBook99-Cents(For Only Three Days)

Dateline: 21 March 2014
UPDATE: 6/24, 7:00am… WOW! The book made it to #1 at Amazon in the Christian Families category yesterday morning. The 99-cent sale ends at noon today. Thank you!
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Click Here to buy a copy

Click the picture to see a larger view

I'm pleased to announce that I have finally managed to get my 2006 book, Writings of a Deliberate Agrarian: One Man's Ruminations About Faith, Family & Livin' The Good Life, republished as a Kindle eBook. My sincere thanks to Anna Hess at The Walden Effect for spurring me on and offering advice on how to get the project done (more about getting the project done below).

At the Kindle listing, I have described this book as follows:


Part memoir, part manifesto, the 32 essays in Writings of a Deliberate Agrarian are an introduction to the Christian-agrarian worldview. This book is a Biblically-based, contra-industrial call for cultural reformation through the restoration of productive family economies, working within the natural order of God's creation.

Did God intend for His people to live a simplified rural lifestyle? Are Christian families nurtured best and strengthened most within the agrarian paradigm? Does the fruit of the spirit grow fuller within Christian-agrarianism? Prepare to have your modern Christian suppositions challenged.

The message of this book can be summed up in a verse from the book of Jeremiah (6:16) in the Bible…

This is what the LORD says: "Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls…"

My book presents a Christian-agrarian vision for today and the years ahead. In so doing, it presents a message of hope for the future. While the industrialized culture around us appears to be self-destructing, and so many people are despondent, there is a hopeful, positive, ancient path that we can take. The Christian-agrarian vision I offer is not a quick fix,; it is a step-by-step, multigenerational journey towards a more authentic way of living and thinking. 

This book has garnered some wonderful reader reviews at This Amazon Page, where you can still purchase a print copy (for $11.66), as long as my dwindling supply lasts (I have no plans to reprint it). 

The Kindle eBook version is slightly edited from the print version. I have changed some words and phrases. And I have added a short Epilogue Update at the end to bring readers up to date with what has happened in my family (who are featured in much of the book) over the nine years since the book was first published.

As the Epilogue chapter explains, in nine year's time, important parts of my "agrarian vision" have  become a reality—and they were far from reality when I wrote about them. A lot can happen in a few years.

I am selling this new eBook version of Writings of a Deliberate Agrarian for only 99-cents. But that price is for only three days. I will kick the price up to $2.99 Monday, March 24 at noon. CLICK HERE to purchase a copy of the 99-cent eBook.

If you don't have a Kindle reader, you can also download the book and read it on Smart Phones and Tablets. There is a free App for doing that at the eBook link above. And Amazon offers a no-cost way to read the book on your computer too.

Also, a neat feature with Kindle is that you can download a free sample of the book. There is a "Try it for Free" link on the sidebar at the "CLICK HERE" link above.

A Plea 
For Your Help

I rarely ask readers of this blog for help, but this is an exception. If you have enjoyed my writings here; if they have encouraged you, or inspired you, or entertained you, or taught you something new, would you please help me by telling your friends about this 3-day, 99-cent sale?

If you are tapped into Facebook or Twitter, (neither of which I use), or have a blog of your own, a simple mention and link to this blog post would, I'm sure, make a big difference and help to spread the word. There are buttons at the bottom of this post that, if need be, allow you to easily share this post to different social media.

If enough of these eBooks sell over the next three days, it will get noticed at Amazon, and that could lead to a lot of new people being introduced to the important messages I am trying to convey in the book. 

Beyond purchasing a copy yourself, and letting others know about it (via a link to this blog post), if you are so inclined, I would also appreciate a review of the book at Amazon. That really helps people decide to purchase the book (or not).

About Publishing 

This E-Book

For those who have never published a Kindle eBook, but think you might want to do so, I'm certainly not the best person to tell you how to do it. I'm surprisingly inept when it comes to computers. If you want to learn How to Butcher a Chicken, or  Build a Nifty Cider Press and Apple Grinder (stuff like that), I'm your guy. But I really struggle when it comes to computers.

Anna Hess (who has self-published 25 eBooks) encouraged me to learn how to format my own books for Kindle. So I plunged into the project, got to a certain point, and hit a technological brick wall of confusion. Getting my Apple Pages file in shape for the Kindle was just too much for me to handle (at least, for now). So I ended up hiring MrLasers. 

I e-mailed my word processing file to MrLasers. He looked it over and told me he could provide me with a file of the book to submit to Amazon for $150. There are places on the internet that will prepare a mobi file for Kindle for less than that, but I had a good feeling about MrLasers and, considering all the time I had spent trying to do the job myself (like most of a weekend), I had no problem paying that.

In less than a week, MrLasers had the book done. He e-mailed the file to me and sent me a PayPal invoice for the job. I wasted no time in figuring out how to get the file uploaded to Amazon. There is a neat feature there that allows authors to see how their book (as it was submitted) will look on different eReaders. If it isn't right, you can reformat it and try again. But MrLasers did a splendid job—the book was perfect. It is exactly what I wanted. Simple and clear, with a clickable table of contents to each chapter.

There are some eBook authors who make a lot of money selling their books on Kindle. I don't expect this book to make me a lot of money, especially at 99-cents (or even at $2.99, which the price will be after three days). The royalty payment for a book priced under $2.99 is 35%. So I'll make 35-cents on each 99-cent book. 

But making money with this book is really beside the point with me. I am just delighted to finally have it in an inexpensive Kindle version, and I hope it will now be read by a whole lot more folks. Also, this first eBook has been a learning experience and something of an obstacle that (with the help of Anna, MrLasers, and many online web sites) I have surmounted.

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