The comings and goings
Everything is always changing here on the farm, find out what we are building, repairing or just generally working on
UUUGGGHHHH, farming is hard.
Just like the rest of southern Ontario we got crushed with freezing cold weather the past week, although today is 6C and raining, go figure. We had the joy of losing power for almost 5 hours, pipes freeze to the only bathroom in the house, getting an avalanche of compacted snow/ice blocking the only man
Farm IoT beginings
The Orange pi that I built and installed in the chicken coop to control the light is having some problems. Now why do you need to have the light in the hen house computer controlled Mike, isn’t that overkill? First off, let me have my fun. Second off, chickens need three things to generate an
Pie crust
Ingredients 5 1/2 cups all purpose flour 1 pound lard (or shortening I guess) 1 Simerville Farm egg 1 tbsp white vinegar Vodka (optional) Instructions Put flour and lard in bowl. Using a pastry cuter cut the lard into the flour until you have little clumps of flour/lard the size of small peas. Gently mix
Things are constantly evolving
Things change and things stay the same. I got the Polaris ATV all put back together and running GREAT, so it was time to sell it LOL! I really enjoyed having that bike it was a real god send here on the farm. I never really realized how much I would use it until I
Damn good Roasted Chicken
Ingredients 3.5 – 4 pound Simerville Farm Chicken 4 tbsp Maple syrup 1 tbsp Melted butter 1 tsp Garlic powder 1 1/2 tsp Seasoning salt 1 1/2 tsp Black pepper 2 tsp Dijon mustard 1 tbsp Corn starch 500 ml Chicken stock Instructions Mix melted butter and maple syrup in a small bowl or wide
It’s ALIVE!
Anyone that has been out to the farm or that knows me at all knows that I love to do things with Arduinos and Single Board Computers. As a good friend has said on many an occasion I am the only person that he knows that is actually making and deploying real IoTs. Now, while
New site and ATV update
As you may have noticed we have a new website! I have needed to do a redesign for….well…years to be honest. I needed to give the page a more streamlined look and feel and generally clean up. I have done tonnes of work behind the scenes trying to get things organized so that I can
Beef stew
Ingredients 300g Beef 1 tbsp of butter or lard 1 Onion 2 Carrots 2 Potatoes 1 celery rib 500ml of Chicken broth or stock Salt Pepper Basil Oregano Savoury 1 tbsp of all purpose flour or corn starch Instructions Cube the beef (raw or precooked from the previous night) to a size you like, I
Simple tea biscuits
Ingredients 354ml cold milk (butter milk is preferred, we keep powdered butter milk on hand for these sorts of things 🙂 ) 1 tsp salt – do not use if using salted butter 500g general purpose flour 4 tsp white sugar 2 tbsp baking powder 12 tbsp unsalted butter (cold and cubed) – salted butter
ATV transmission
This is an example of when things go snap it generally isn’t a good thing. All that ripping and tearing to get to this little part. Now it is time for the good news, bad news time of this little post. Good news is that now that I have the transmission out of the bike