duckminifarm.com Blog

I get so amused by some of the “green” experts I see on TV…..especially the ones that hail from “green” areas such as New York City. Now, I’m not saying that a city-dweller can’t have strong feelings about ecology, but it must be difficult to practice being “green” when the only bit of nature you [...]

One of the problems in America (according to a program that I saw the other day) is the overabundance of processed food.
I know that since I’ve started avoiding sugar (corn syrup, honey, etc.), I’ve discovered that there’s sugar in all kinds of foods that don’t need sugar. All this sugar is for is to [...]

Well, spring has sprung around here, although the weather’s been very strange. Last Sunday it snowed all day, although after mid-morning it didn’t accumulate. The week before, it hailed. I estimate that that severe hailstorm cost about $1,000 a minute.
Other than that, we’re busy doing the normal farm chores. I sheared all but [...]

I was reading an article on Yahoo this morning about people who go to technical school, get mired in debt, and then graduate only to make minimum wage or a little higher.
I pay better than that for someone to clean out the goat barn…it’s contract labor, but I pay better. And I [...]

Many of you know that I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia (chronic muscular pain, sleep problems, etc) in 2002. I had a classic case including the extreme tender points and also changes in my brain (that I got to see thanks to an MRI.)
During the intervening years, I tried lots of different medicines [...]

I read a lot about different methods of teaching reading. When I grew up, we learned by an eclectic mixture of look-say and phonics, and most of us learned to read. Sarah definitely prefers look-say; her memory for new words is really amazing. She’s going through the intensive Rod & Staff phonics, but she doesn’t [...]

Like most homeschoolers we have a few vintage and antique readers around the house, including reprints of McGuffey.
After glancing through the 4th reader, I’m almost convinced that 19th century English will be as incomprehensible as Old English in a few decades….except perhaps among the homeschoolers who grow up on these relics. It’s [...]

I firmly believe that God puts challenges in our path so that we can use those challenges to help others.
In our home-school, we’re pretty challenged by math. I was never a math whiz, but I understood it enough to make an A in calculus and then I waved “good-bye” to the math department [...]

The most naive thought I’ve ever had in my life (I think) is that in order to teach a child all you have to do is explain the subject in a suitably simple manner, or hand the child a workbook, and he or she would absorb the info like a little sponge and diligently work [...]

Over the past few weeks it’s been colder here than we’ve seen in a long time. In fact, it hasn’t been this cold since we moved here, although that was only 3 years ago.
Our pond froze for the first time. I won’t say you could ice-skate on it (Sarah tried, but that’s another [...]