Our First Garden in Arkansas.

Our first garden at our new homestead has been more of a success than we could have expected. We have been enjoying fresh produce, canning some and even bringing veggies to the local farmer's market regularly, something we have been wanting to get involved in for years! Here are some pictures we hope will give you an idea of our little patch. We hope to expand it by a lot next year!

The view from the front yard. As you can see it is raised beds, mostly rotted hay bales from our nice nieghbor's cattle pastures :-) 

Green beans

Tomatoes

This heirloom corn, Yellow Jarvis, has been in Dustin's family for more than thirty years! This little patch is mainly for seed for next year .

Ahhh... the joys of a summer mellon-patch!

'' Yummy, we can't wait to cut it!"

View from the road. We see a lot of rubber necking as folks drive by, people love a garden! What can we say? :-) 

Selfie with the baby!

Some shots from the latest farmer's market, fresh herbs have been a good seller.

Home-Made-Home,what's in the future for you? We can't wait to see!

A Day in the Blacksmith Shop.

Dustin recently had a commission for a reclaimed wood and iron-work coat tree. He spent most of a day in the shop with his little helper, Esther. They documented the project with step by step pictures. 

Above, you can see a bit of smoke drifting out of the eaves of the smithy.

Firing up the forge.

These next pictures show the top layer of hooks taking shape. The stock he is using is 1/4 X 3/4 flat bar. Above, he has just flattened the ends of the forged blanks in preparation for rolling them as you see below.

Putting the curve in. The metal is still red-hot.

Now the bottoms of the pieces have been rolled up into hooks.

A few views of the inside of the shop. Esther was having a ball!

Finished except for drilling the screw holes.

On to the small hooks for the lower tier.

These will be driven right into the wood, hence the sharp ends.

Nicely curved.

Finished.

Now Dustin drills the pilot holes in the large hooks. ( P.S. Esther took these photos! :-) )

Daddy and his girl!

The drilling was done with an old fashioned hand drill.

The horses ambled over for a visit so Esther took a quick break to do a little petting. 

...and a little hugging :-) .

After drilling the pilot holes with the hand drill he finishes the holes with the drill press.

 

A view of the drill press.

Here all all the hooks with the reclaimed wood that the body of the coat tree will be made of.

The foot of the stand is designed to be hard to topple over, as the tree was destined to be in a shop holding merchandise. The lady didn't want it falling over on customers!

 

It turned out so pretty! It has a real nice rustic/western vibe. Below are some pictures of the completed project, ready to be delivered to it's new home.

To order similar pieces, call us at 1-870-283-4002 . Thanks for reading! H.M.H. :-)

Fun at the Farmer's Market.

We recently enjoyed setting up at a local farmer's market. Our garden isn't producing enough to sell quite yet, but we brought baked goods and a small selection of wood and metal work. Dustin also demonstrated how he carves wooden spoons all morning.

There were quite a few other vendors selling fresh veggies, herbs, home made soaps, farm fresh eggs and more . A lot of farmers were sold out by 10:30 am .

Janet baked mini loaves of whole wheat bread and oatmeal cookies the night before. Both turned out to be popular items at the market.:-)

Dustin carving with some interested onlookers. People always love to watch him working.

We love how this spoon just looks like it is bursting out of the wood! We actually had people waiting for him to finish this one so they could take it home :-) .

Here is Dustin just finishing putting his sign on the back of the spoon.

And here is little Conagher Quinn! He is a wonderful little boy and he slept most of the morning. We are all enjoying having a little brother in the family. 

Happy big sisters.

We are looking forword to coming back to this one!