Acevedo Homestead

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Montpelier, VA
Acevedo Homestead

We grow and raise as much of our food as we can homeschooling our 5 kids.
(55)

12/15/2024

There’s chicken p**p all over 😄👍🏼

12/15/2024

Still makes me laugh 😄

12/15/2024

🦌❤️👨‍🌾

“I was once told when a man walks into the timber he carries much more weight then he does walking out. As a boy I never got it. I figured the goal was to be packing the weight of a harvest. But as I got older it all made perfect sense.
While your sitting there 20 feet up a tree you have no choice but to think about the things weighing on your mind. You come to terms with all the rights and wrongs, you make light of the dark times and pray for the good.
What I owe to the woods I could never repay. Its where I have become who I am, its made me appreciate life and its beauty, and most of all its one of the things that’s kept me going.... ”

Author unknown

12/15/2024

The girls are always wanting to participate with the animal processing. They ask so many questions and gain such knowledge and confidence. It was a great size buck and our family will get so many meals from this and they know they helped with it. I love that this is their normal ❤️

I love that this is our normal 👨‍🌾❤️👩‍🌾

12/14/2024

❤️

12/14/2024

The moon looked extra pretty last night ❤️🌕

12/14/2024

The first police officer reaches under the one-ton bale of hay and attempts to lift it off of me. Of course, it doesn’t budge. He grabs his flashlight and shines it under the hay into my face. I blink. He yells over his shoulder to his partner, “He’s alive! He’s alive! Help me move the hay.”
Even working together two officers can’t move it – not a fraction of an inch. A thousand pounds each? Of course they can’t move it.
“Cut the strings,” I whisper. My voice is weak. They can’t hear me.
I am not going to last much longer. If they will just cut the strings, the bale will break apart, and they can drag me out of here.
“Lift, Joe, lift!”
“Just cut the strings,” I mumble, “Please cut the strings.”
“C’mon harder.”
“It’s too heavy! We can’t lift it. We gotta go for help! Hang on Chad, we’ll be right back!”

I am alone again in the growing darkness. Wonderful painless, peaceful, irresistible sleep beckons. I struggle to remain conscious. One. Two. Three. Four… Where are they? How long does it take for police, fire, ambulance, to arrive? Where is the Coast Guard? Where are the Marines? Where is that one old farmer with enough common sense to just cut the strings?
The desert air grows chilly as the sky darkens. I grow weaker. Dizziness overcomes me and I begin to drift off into that gray space somewhere between the living and the dead.
Help finally arrives. One of the police officers bends down so I can see his face. “Hold on! A fire engine is here. There are six men aboard.”
I do the math. Two big, strong cops and six burly firemen must move a ton of dead weight off me. That’s two hundred forty five pounds each. No way can they possibly do that – but somehow, miraculously, they do. A couple of neighbors who have arrived at the scene stand by to catch me. They lower my limp body to the ground where I lie in a broken heap.
Why didn’t they cut the strings? They could have saved a long, tortured hour.
How heavy is hay? A piece of hay is about the weight of a feather. How many pieces of hay does it take to make two thousand pounds? Lots. That package of sixteen bazillion individual pieces of hay wrapped in a gigantic bundle is a crushing weight. But separated, it would have been nothing. I feel bad saying this, because it makes me sound ungrateful – and I am very grateful to the guys who saved my life that night – but there is a point to be made here, isn’t there?
Is it too big?
Is it overwhelming?
Cut the strings – just cut the strings!
Are you buried under crushing burdens? Projects that are too huge? Schedules that are too complicated? Maybe you are trying to do too much at once – trying to do everything instead of doing something.
Cut the strings and cut yourself free. Do one thing at a time – and get it done ❤️

12/14/2024

Good morning chickens! I got the plastic over the chicken wire walls for the winter to stop with any draft but left the top gaps open for ventilation. ❤️🐓🐓🐓🐓👨‍🌾

12/13/2024

🎯 ❤️🦌👨‍🌾

12/13/2024

Send it 😄

12/13/2024

😄🦌

12/13/2024

😄

12/12/2024

Mama, please be patient,
it’s my first time here.
everything is new to me.
every sight, every sound.
please forgive the feelings
that can be too big for my tiny body.
i want to laugh and play
and do what you do.
if i make a mess,
please forgive my tiny fingers
because it’s their first time too.
mama, please be patient,
i’m taking it all in
and learning how to be a person.
but i am so sure,
with all of my tiny heart,
that you will show me the way
-Author unknown

12/11/2024

John Puckett (1838-1912) was a man who drank too much. He was the son of Jacob Puckett (1794-1887) and Sarah Marshall. John married Orleana Hawks (c1844-1939) when she was just sixteen years old. She was born in North Carolina and received little or no formal education. She and John never had much money.

They settled close to his family near Groundhog Mountain in Patrick County Virginia. They made what they needed and grew what they ate supplementing their diet with foraged food. She was a loyal wife who carried food to her husband and other Confederate deserters who hid out in the hills. During this time marauding troops robbed mountain families of the little food they had and searched tirelessly for deserters.

Even though Orleana could not read or write, she possessed a wealth of mountain knowledge, folklore, and humor. She was a friend to neighbors and fed strangers who came to her door.

Daughter Julia Ann was born to the Pucketts when Orleana was 18 years old. The infant died of diphtheria at the age of seven months.

Orleana Puckett bore and lost a total of 24 babies. Some were stillborn; others lived a few hours or a number of days. Her last child was born in October 1881 when she was around 37 years old.

Twenty Puckett infants are buried in the graveyard on Groundhog Mountain where John first built a cabin for Orleana. The babies sleep eternally facing Doe Run Mountain in one long row, beneath dry, dying grass shaded by enormous pokeweed growing over a split-rail fence. Most of their resting places are marked by simple field stones, one at the head, one at the foot, barely three feet apart.

Four more are buried on top of the mountain where Orlean and John Puckett lived after they left their Patrick County home.

Sometime after the death of her last child, when no doctor or other midwife could be found for a neighbor, Aunt Orleana delivered her first baby. She soon began traveling by horse, mule, carriage, or on foot all over Carroll, Patrick, and Floyd Counties, sometimes up to twenty miles distant, to deliver babies. She never charged for her services and became known throughout the area for her compassion and skill, having never lost a mother or baby during the more than 1,000 deliveries she attended. She delivered babies for 50 years. Her last delivery was of her great-grandnephew in 1939, the year she died.

Aunt Orleana became the most famous of all the midwives in the southern Blue Ridge Mountains. She knew mountain herbs and the medicinal value of whisky. She always carried a satchel like a doctor’s bag and a standard item in it was always peach brandy. She put a knife under a laboring woman’s pillow to cut the pain and unlocked every door in the house to provide an easier delivery. It's said Orleana would run a burnt goose feather under the nostrils of the pregnant woman. This would induce sneezing and coughing, and supposedly help bring on that last or next-to-last push.

John Puckett died of tuberculosis in 1912. Aunt Orleana was forced to move from her home by the construction of the Blue Ridge Parkway in 1939, she died shortly afterward. Relatives say she died of a broken heart.

The Puckett home has been preserved and can be seen at Milepost 189.9, Blue Ridge Parkway, Laurel Fork, Carroll County Virginia.
The Puckett family has an annual family reunion above Puckett cabin.

Image: Puckett Family Cemetery From the intersection of Doe Run Road (VA Route 631) and Friends Mission Road (VA Route 675), travel about a mile on Doe Run Road; the cemetery will be on the right.

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Montpelier, VA
23192

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http://www.acevedohomestead.com/

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Good morning chickens! I got the plastic over the chicken wire walls for the winter to stop with any draft but left the top gaps open for ventilation. ❤️🐓🐓🐓🐓👨‍🌾

Soooo I’ve got all these skills now…. 😄

Rabbits are my number one favorite homestead animal. Uses: We socialize ours so they have a fair shot to make it as a pet or we love to help start/add to breeder programs so rabbits used to being handled are easier to sell. Not USDA regulated so I can sell and butcher them for a customer(I can charge for processing) We can sell/trade the pelts. We can sell/trade dehydrated feet and ears that make great dog treats Sell for healthy dog food Sell for healthy reptile food —reptile and dog owners have turned into a good backbone for dependable sales. They return regularly which gives us a predictable profit flow! The manure can be dried and sold for the same cost the feed bags are! Or can go straight into the garden! Easy to raise Easy to breed Easy and fast to butcher Can sell to the public! Fast gestation I’ll add to the list as I think of them or folks bring them up. I know some of you would have some great things to add to the list!

Camoo has kind of overcome her dislike of me because of food 😀 She will even let me touch her nose through the fence when I walk back to the woods to hunt . The other one doesn’t care for people at all but she’s much you younger. I’m sure she will come around The names they came with were Camo( Camoo) and April( was thinking of changing it to Mooana but it didn’t stick 😄)