How to Buy a House for Cash

This Money Monday we are going to learn How to Buy a House For Cash.

Buying a house is part of the American dream. Many couples rush into this decision before they are ready, fueled by insistence  from family and friends. Home ownership can be a great blessing but only if you are ready to own a home and you don't get into the ill advised situation where the home owns you.

Let's ask the following questions to determine if you are ready to buy a home.

1. Do you have 3 to 6 months living expenses in an emergency fund.
2. Are you out of consumer debt? Student loans, cars, bank loans, and credit cards.
3. Have you saved for a significant down payment

If all of the above have been accomplished then you are ready to move ahead with home ownership.

The title of this article is "How to Buy a House for Cash". This is a special case where you have saved 100 percent for a down payment. 

Lets look at how this can be done.

Stages of Learning in Farming - Becoming the Expert

By season 10 or before, you may be able to quit your day job if that is your goal. You have developed a playbook for your farm. Many farm families have off farm income and that is OK. But if you want to farm full time you will need a plan to do so. How much income will you need, what is the scale of your operation that will generate this level of income? Will you need farm workers? Have you achieved this goal? By year ten you should be approaching your basic farming goals.

Even so, there is much more to learn on the road to becoming an expert.

Stages of Learning in Farming - Becoming Self Sufficient

Stage two typically lasts an additional 3-5 seasons.

You are on your way to a successful farming enterprise. You have a firm direction, you are focused and you have, by trial and error, refined your course, but you are still doing much fine tuning and investing.

Petersen's Market Menu February 20, 2016

2015-2016 Squash, Photo Credit Reed Petersen

Here is our market menu for this week.

The spaghetti squash are hanging in there. Depending on how many we sell we maybe out after this market or next.

The carrots and parships are now safely in storage for the winter. November is the best time to pick the best carrots and parsnips of the year. Can you guess why? Frost! You need a few hard frosts to bring out the sweetness of those carrots. The children call our carrots "candy carrots" because of this crunchy sweetness. Here is a link to an article on our web site about why carrots are sweeter with frost?

We will have the following items at the Farmers Market for Saturday, February 20, 2016 (New items are in Bold Print)


Cabbage - Red

Garlic
Carrots
Parsnips
Walla Walla Sweet Onions
Red Onions
Shallots
Squash
Beets




Pickles: Spicy Dill, Sweet Sandwich, Okra, Dilly Bean, Corn Relish, Pepper Relish.
Salsa

Chipotle Smoked Peppers

Charcoal (home grown, home made). Made three fresh batches in the last week.

Stages of Learning in Farming - Building on the Basics

Building on the Basics

Congratulations, you have formally stepped into the world of farming. You are starting into your first season or like us maybe you have been doing things on a small scale and want to step into the commercial market place.

Stage one typically lasts about three seasons:

Stages of Learning in Farming - Laying the Foundation

In my experience, every new farmer goes through stages of learning in building their farming knowledge and expertise. Lisa and I completed Land Stewardship Project's Farm Beginnings class in 2001. We learned much in this class which was organized to help beginning farmers get started. Even with this advantage, we had a significant learning curve to make the transition from growing on a small scale (literally gardening in our back yard) to taking the first steps into the commercial market place on a scale that is 10 or even 100 times the size of our starting operation.

I am going to organize these stages according to our recent experience. The farm calendar typically operates on a seasonal basis and whether you are growing vegetables like we are, or growing row crops and small grains, or livestock, the stages are similar. I have provided links to other articles on our website VegetableFreak.com  for more in-depth information on certain topics

Can We Borrow Ourselves Rich

An economist was evaluating the deficit spending that our government has been doing during the Bush and Obama administration. He made an interesting observation. He said that we have gone from an economy that creates capital and produces real value through manufacturing and commodities from farming and mining, to an economy where we just pay each other for services and we just move money around, while producing less and less value. He said we are trying to "borrow ourselves rich". Well I don't know if he is right or wrong about our economy. At least the farm economy is still producing real value.

But lets look at this from a personal stand point and ask ourselves if borrowing will help us prosper.

Soil 308: Fever

You probably thought this post was about hemorrhagic fever or some other phyrogenic virus. In the human body, even a fraction of a dead virus or bacteria can cause a fever response. These fractions are called pyrogens. Many years ago, I worked on an implantable cardiac stent and pyrogens were was a big deal.

In soil, elevated temperature typically occurs when we don't have adequate residue on the surface of the soil.

Stages of Learning in Farming - A Land Stewarship Project Guest Post

I wrote Stages of Learning in Farming over the last year with the intention of doing a guest post on the Land Stewardship blog.

Check it out. They published Stage Zero yesterday.

It is called "Laying the Foundation".

Soil 307: Thirsty

Conventional agricultural soils are thirsty. In his book "Your Bodies Many Cries for Water". Dr. B. talks about the critical role that hydration plays in the health of the human body. The same thing applies to the soil. If there isn't enough organic matter in the soil to hold the rainfall our soils won't function properly.

Hydrating our soils is more about having adequate cover on the soil surface and organic matter to hold the moisture than having a certain amount of rainfall. Most cropping regions have enough rainfall, but they may not utilize it well. We should focus on building our soils with the need to retain moisture in mind.

The Best Wings Recipe

Ingredients:

Wings
Honey
Rosemary

Directions:

1) Coat the wings in Honey
2) Sprinkle on the Rosemary
3) Bake the wings in the oven for 21 minutes (try not to burn the wings)
4) Enjoy with the big game, and hope that exactly 3 goals get scored and the kicks are made.

Petersen's Market Menu for February 6, 2016

Candy Carrots, Photo Credit Johnny's Seeds

Here is our market menu for this week.

The carrots and parships are now safely in storage for the winter. November is the best time to pick the best carrots and parsnips of the year. Can you guess why? Frost! You need a few hard frosts to bring out the sweetness of those carrots. The children call our carrots "candy carrots" because of this crunchy sweetness. Here is a link to an article on our web site about why carrots are sweeter with frost?

We will have the following items at the Farmers Market for Saturday, January 23, 2016 (New items are in Bold Print)


Cabbage - Red and Green

Garlic
Carrots
Parsnips
Walla Walla Sweet Onions
Red Onions
Shallots
Squash
Beets



Herb Plants - Rosemary,


Pickles: Spicy Dill, Sweet Sandwich, Okra, Dilly Bean, Corn Relish, Pepper Relish.
Salsa

Chipotle Smoked Peppers

Charcoal (home grown, home made). Made three fresh batches in the last week.

Soil 306: Aged

Soil, like a fine wine, should improve with age. Conventional agricultural soils are aged beyond their years due to our poor farming practices. Our soils are aging, when they should be "youthing", to borrow a term from the health and wellness industry.

Did you know that the North African crest of the Sahara desert was the once the bread basket of the Greek and Roma Empires. What happened to reduce these once fertile soils to one of the largest deserts on the planet.

Soil 305: Confused

Conventional agricultural soils are confused because of the GMO (Genetically Modified Organisms) plants and residue that the soil biology is forced to deal with. These new "super plants" have unknown DNA that our soil microbes don't know what to do with, in terms of breaking it down. I think that some of this new DNA is also toxic to soil life as it persists long after is should have been cycled.