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Crazy Stories

Welcome back, this is episode 17! Man, we started this show on January first and it’s almost the end of April! I’ve got some stories to tell you today and I promise they have not been embellished or exaggerated at all. But most importantly my stories all have a moral and a purpose that I’ll get to in a little bit.

News

We’re milking the cow now, and last night during the rain one of the does had her first kid. A little black and white buck. I tell ya what, we have baby animals coming out of our ears it seems like!

The quail are laying eggs very well now and we’ve discovered that we like their eggs the best! My wife is a huge fan of the quail eggs, so we might be upping the number of quail we keep to supply her with more quail eggs. We got in a big shipment of comfrey cuttings from Marsh Creek Farmstead and got them planted right away.

I wanted to shoot some video but life was too crazy and I had too many balls in the air to manage video that day, so I’ll shoot some video of what they look like after they’re growing. I planted a few dozen lemongrass seedlings, wild oregano, english thyme, grandview catmint, feverfew, german chamomile, a species of Echinacea that almost went extinct in my lifetime, it’s on the rise again but still at risk and I planted a few hundred stratified seed. I also got moringa planted, true comfrey, pigeon pea, velvet bean, true roselle, and I’m sure I’m forgetting a dozen or two other things that went in the ground and pots the past few days. This time of year is all about planting things and welcoming baby animals onto the farm. And it’s official, we’ve named the calf Ribeye. It just suits him. He’s doing great by the way. We’re looking at whether or not we can justify the cost of an electric milking machine to help with time management and productivity. We’re thinking about bottle feeding the calf milk and getting him separated from his momma so we can use more of the milk, and to help him deal with the future inevitability of graduation day. Plus having a calf that will come when called and allow us to handle him will make our life a lot easier when that day comes. But now let’s get into the…

Plant of the Week

On to the Plant of the Week! This week I want to talk about Echinacea! Since we just started hundreds of echinacea plants and since it’s one of my go to plants for most of the USA, let’s cover some of the benefits and reasons to grow this great plant. Here’s something cool, this is taken straight out of some USDA literature. The Plains Indians used it widely as a painkiller, for toothache, coughs, colds, and sore throats, as well as snake bites. It’s a widely used medicinal currently in Europe and in the USA for colds and flu remedies. The juice of the plant has actually been shown to make mouse cells 50%-80% more resistant to the flu and herpes viruses! Holy cow that’s pretty cool! I believe in herbal medicine guys, medicinal herbs work! And remember I got this straight out of a USDA publication, so if anybody is going to put natural medicine down it’s going to be the US government. So if even they are reporting that it works, well yeah…
I suggest to cold stratify Echinacea seed for 8 weeks to get the best germination, but some people say you don’t need to stratify them at all. This means that you should put them in some moist sterile mix in the fridge for a couple months then plant them in your garden bed, some flats outdoors, or in some pots to grow for their first year. Just make sure to keep them moist through germination and early growth.

This plant does well in rocky, sandy, dry, poor soils but also does fine in fertile moist loamy soils. But don’t be afraid of putting it somewhere most other things will die. It tolerates calcium rich soils, and are very drought tolerant.

After they grow for a year you can expect them to flower and the bees just love this flower. It’s one of the big reasons I like to have it on a property, relatively long lived flowers that bloom constantly all summer, medicinal, attractive, tough, what’s not to love!

Interesting Things

Good job Titus, interesting things is what we’re on now, and I’m going to give away one of my favorite tips. If you use this tip, it could save you tons of money and heartache. Lately I’ve been seeing lots of people posting pictures and video of dead animals and they have a big problem with predators, dogs, coyotes, bobcats etc… killing their ducks, turkeys, chickens… So I thought I’d share one of the tips that my clients pay for when I show up on their property.

If you have heavy canine or other predator pressure I always suggest you use a good fence energizer like Stafix or Speedrite. Don’t skimp on the energizer, always get the highest joule rated energizer you can. But I can cover tons of info about electric fences in a future show, I’m getting off topic here. For predators specifically of the canine flavor this is what you do. Add another hot wire to the outside at dog nose height, preferably a foot or two away from the electronet but just a few inches off the electronet or other fence will work but you might end up with issues, so I suggest step in posts about a foot away. Suspend from that hot wire a folded flag of aluminum foil. I like to put peanut butter on one, then the next one about 10 feet away put bacon grease on it. When the predators come by, they encounter the irresistible smell of fat and can’t help but either sniff it with a wet nose, or immediately lick it. And I don’t know about you, but I don’t ever, ever, ever want to lick a 3 joule energized fence. And I guarantee that predator will never ever want to mess with your fence ever again. Now I will say this, if the predator is hungry enough and determined enough, they might just ignore the electric fence and jump over. So this is not a silver bullet solution, but I think it’s pretty incredible how well it works. There ya go, one of my best tips!

Topic of the Day

Let’s get on to the topic of the day! I’m going to share some stories with you today, or depending on how long this first story takes to tell, you might only get one. So I might save the other crazy story for another show. But the moral of the story is to always be prepared. I like to encourage all my listeners to be prepared for bad things to happen, because let’s face it.. Sometimes you get a flat tire, or lose a job, or someone gets hurt and if you’re prepared to help, or even just make it through the tough situation with a little more comfort or control, then that’s a really good thing!

The Crazy Story

I’m sitting at the Shreveport regional airport waiting on my plane that is delayed. I’ll be sitting there for another 2 hours or so. I’m very bored because I didn’t bring a book this time. I’m on my way to do a consultation in Kansas City Missouri I think. The guy right near me and I somehow start a conversation, we chat for about half an hour when a woman wearing scrubs walks over and sits down near us and hears part of our conversation. Somehow stories come up and the two of them tell a story about something crazy that happened to them. After both of their stories I say, “well, I don’t know if you’ll believe this one, but it’s 100% true, so I’ll tell it to you and let you decide if you believe it or not”. So I began…

To set the scene, My wife and I are at my old friend’s wedding. It’s being held at a historic cotton gin north of Shreveport Louisiana. Beautiful weather, perfect temperature. After the wedding vows and pictures are finished, I still have on my rented tuxedo. My wife Catie and I are sitting there visiting with another couple, we’re eating cake and drinking lemonaid I think. I hear a pop, it could have been a gunshot, the lights flicker. I hear an explosion. All the people at the party immediately start pushing towards the outside dance floor area. I immediately check the exits and start to get up to get Catie and I out of there the OPPOSITE direction of the possible gunfire. When I hear a couple snatches of conversation and no screaming, no yelling, no gunfire. I go from red alert to yellow, so I tell her to stay put and I’ll be right back, I push through the crowd and I keep hearing just bits and pieces, single words, “crash”, “airplane” etc… I think to myself “there’s no way a plane just crashed”.

Once I get through the crowd I see it there in the soybean field across the road about 600 feet away. A small airplane is nose down in the dirt. I kind of stand there in shock for what felt like minutes but was only a few seconds when it hits me “what if there’s a family in there, or a dad with his little girl going out for a ride to watch the sunset? This is what I prepare for”. I looked back for my wife and she motioned for me to go, so I sprinted to my truck and pulled out my “get home bag”. Opened it up to pull out the trauma kit, took of my suit coat, rolled my sleeves up, put on some blue nitrile gloves and ran across the road towards the wreckage. I had no idea what I’d find, the plane looked pretty bad from my angle, but I figured I’d do what I could when I got there.

There were lots of people already across the road trying to see what was going on and I saw two men walking away from the crash. One looked relatively unhurt, banged up but definitely not too hurt. The other guy was barely walking and I suspected he was in shock because he wasn’t very responsive. I kept trying to get him to sit down so I could find out where all the blood was coming from that was making his shoes squelch with almost every step. He just wouldn’t stop walking, he said he needed to go. I finally used the firmest tone I had with a couple choice words and told him he was going to sit his *hind end* down right then. He stopped and sat like a puppy.

So I crouched in front of him to look at his shins. Man, it was rough. I could see his bones. I figured out real quick where the bleeding was coming from, so while I was trying to cut his pants off at the knees, to get to the lower portion of his legs, the crowd was gathered around so much that a couple people had almost pushed me on top of the bleeding dude. I turned to the best man and he asked me what I needed so I told him to get me some space and get everyone to back up and go back to the party. So this guy, jumps in between me and the crowd and yells “Everybody back up! He’s trained! Go back to the party!” If it wasn’t such an intense moment I would have laughed out loud!

So I finally got his jeans turned into shorts, pulled out my Field Dressing, or Israeli Battle Dressing as they’re commonly called these days and attached it to the worst of his two shredded shins, and did the same to the other one that wasn’t so bad. Checked him over to make sure he didn’t have any wreckage sticking out of him anywhere else and turned around to find a doctor standing there with her arms crossed and I asked her to keep an eye on him until the paramedics got there. Then I boogied on outta there. I told my friend, “well at least your wedding will be something you and your guests will never forget, and at least it was a plane crash and not a train wreck”

After I finished the story I shrugged and said, “so there ya go, that’s my story” The woman wearing the scrubs said “I’m the ER nurse who cut those bandages off the guy!” She said I did well and saved the man from losing a lot of blood. I didn’t save his life or anything, but talk about a crazy story.

But I wanted to tell this story because I want to illustrate that you never know when you might need some first aid supplies. You could come upon a car wreck and need the supplies, or you could be out at a ball game and your kid slips and falls, and busts their head on a piece of metal and you need to stop the bleeding before you can get them to the hospital.

There are so many instances of everyday problems popping up that I think it’s foolish for anybody to not have at least a rudimentary first aid kit in their vehicle. Don’t buy one of those garbage kits with the white case and the red cross on it. Those are overpriced and just filled with garbage. Here’s a basic list of what I have in mine.

By no means is this an exhaustive list, and I would much rather have a larger kit in the vehicle but all this stuff fits in a small bag that goes in my backpack in the truck. And for the most part, that little kit goes with me everywhere I go. So if you don’t have a first aid kit in your vehicle, you might consider one. You never know when you might need to render first aid to some plane crash survivors like me.

Thank you so much for listening!

You can reach me at nick@homegrownliberty.com, and if you would please help me out a whole lot by signing into iTunes searching for Homegrown Liberty in the podcast section, and leaving me a rating and review. It really helps to have a lot of reviews and ratings on the show, right now there are about 20 or so ratings and we have about 1600 listeners every show. So if you want to help me to make the show better and better, and help me to make this thing a success, hit that 5 star rating and bump me higher in the charts! You guys rock! Keep up the good work, thanks for the interaction on facebook!

Until next week

I hope you have a wonderful day, God Bless. And as always “Go Do Good Things”