A Sign of the Times

Our little country church sits in the S curve on Highway 26 north of Jennings.  We have thirty something people attending on a typical Sunday morning.  Small in number, but big in love.  It is a loving family, not a perfect church, but a church that loves Jesus and one in which the people love each other.  God's Word is studied and believed that its truths are relevant as ever, and we still sing the old hymns.  It was founded in 1981.

In a recent business meeting, we decided that the age of our sign originally erected at the church's founding is in need of some work.  Rust had eaten away at the tubing that makes up the frame and lichen was growing on it.  This called for immediate attention.  On a recent Saturday morning, we arrived with ladders and a grinder and began grinding the entire sign, roughing up the surface for painting.

Then we primed the sign frame, having to climb way up there to get the top portion.  It was a beautiful day to get the work done.

Finally, we put a thick coat of oil based paint on the sign's frame.  The sign really shines now, but we're not done.

We're going to update the lettering on the sign, adding service times for Sunday School and Morning Worship as well as our church website address.  We're also looking at putting the same thing on the back side of the sign so that traffic southbound on Highway 26 will be able to see it.  We may look at a board beneath the sign that would allow us to put up lettering for Scripture verses and special announcements.  Finally, we'll plan on affixing some solar lighting to the sign so that it is lit up in the evening.

If you don't already have a church home, we'd love to have you come worship with us!  If you were looking for a sign, here it is.

Broody Hens in the Henhouse

Each afternoon around 5 pm, I grab the rustic wire egg basket that hangs from a rafter of our barn and I enter the henhouse.  The henhouse is where the birds roost for the night on roosting bars that line the eastern wall, but it is also where the hens lay their eggs.  We have nesting boxes that line the north and south walls of the henhouse - four boxes on the north wall and four on the south wall, along with a milk crate full of hay that they lay in.  It serves as an overflow nest when the other boxes are full.  Sometimes two hens crowd themselves in one box to lay farm fresh eggs for us.

The boxes on the south wall are closest to the woods and thus, attract rat snakes.  Big, long, scary, but harmless snakes that eat our eggs.  It is not uncommon to get ready to pick up eggs and find a six foot long snake coiled up in the box.  It is for that reason that I keep ceramic, wooden or chalk eggs in each box as a 'decoy' for the snakes to eat and get a fatal case of constipation.  I mark them with a black stripe written across them with a Sharpie so that we don't gather them up with the edible eggs.

I wanted to draw your attention to the black hen and the white hen.  They are all fluffed up as they make themselves look larger than they are.  They are quite aggressive and also make threatening noises when you try to move them to get the eggs out from underneath them.  They'll peck at your hands.  The thing is, the birds don't move - at all 24/7.  That's when you know they are broody.  

Broody hens have a strong, hormonal urge to set on their clutch of eggs and hatch out chicks.  She has nothing else on her mind except hatching out a clutch and mothering her young.  She lays no more eggs.  She stays on her nest.  She rarely even gets up to get food or water.  God put that instinct into our fine feathered friends.

In like manner, He also gives that to humankind.  It is the normal maternal instinct, biological clock, or whatever you wish to call it for us.  Tragically, we as a modern society have largely rejected this and walked away from this gift.  As a people, our birthrates have fallen dangerously close to not meeting replacement numbers.  Why?  Materialism.  Children are expensive.  Our time is more valuable.  If we don't have kids, we can afford the vacation or the camp on the lake or the $80,000 Suburban.  The real question is: if we don't have kids, what are we missing?  Can parenting break your heart?  Most certainly, but oh, the joy you can receive!  Can we learn something from the broody hen?  I think so.

"Leave me alone," says the black hen.

"Don't bother me.  I have a mission to fulfill," says the white hen.

“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, who kills the prophets and stones those who have been sent to her! How often I wanted to gather your children together, the way a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were unwilling. Behold, your house is being left to you desolate! For I say to you, from now on you will not see Me until you say, ‘Blessed is the One who comes in the name of the Lord!’”  Matthew 23:37-39

Jesus was speaking to Israel who had rejected her Messiah.  He likens His love to the deep, nurturing, compassionate care of a mother hen.  It's funny how you read verses like this and then walk into the henhouse and experience a teachable moment in looking at the broody hens that point you to our Savior and His great love.

 

Making Soft Goat Cheese

Last week we made a couple of batches of Chèvre.  We ate all of it and decided to try another soft goat cheese.  The recipe says it is a basic goat cheese for beginners.  That's what we are in this endeavor.  We purchased the book shown in the photo below that is very simple to understand.

We followed the recipe below with the only change is that our goat milk is not pasteurized.

 We followed the directions and after a day the curds had formed in the pot.

Tricia scooped out the curds and set them in a strainer to allow the excess whey to drain out below.

We set it aside to allow the cheese to drain for 2 days.

After the cheese has drained for a while, it shrinks down a bit.

We picked some fresh dill we have growing on the back patio and cut it up.

The dill is folded into the fresh cheese along with coarse salt.

We put it into a strainer to allow for additional drainage.

The one pound round of soft goat cheese is done!  We ate it on matzos and toast.  It was delicious and we quickly ate the whole thing followed by another after that.

We like this even better than the Chèvre.  We currently have a gallon and a half of goat milk in the fridge.  We'll be making more and more of this.  Like I mentioned, we'll also make some cajeta (goat milk caramel) soon.  I can't wait for that.

Clover Everywhere!

After running the cows through the side yard and the front yard, I finally mowed everything but the back.  The back yard, near our bees, is our unofficial wildflower area.  Although the cows and goats would love to get in there and eat to their heart's content, it's off limits to them.  This area is for the bees.  If you walk around in what I now like to call our "meadow," it is abuzz, literally, with honeybees flying from flower to flower.  The White Dutch clover is abundant and thick this year.

Looking from west to east

The White Dutch Clover reaches in a belt right up to the beehives.  They don't have to go very far to get the nectar they need to begin making honey.

Looking from south to northwest

Here's one of our busy bees right now.  

But what I wanted to show in in the midst of the White Dutch Clover is something that I didn't think I'd see - Crimson Clover.  This past fall, I purchased a couple pounds of Crimson Clover seeds from our local feed store.  I think it is pretty and that the bees would like it.  I simply hand-scattered the seed several months ago in the fall/winter.  I didn't work up any soil, but I did make sure that the seeds made contact with bare ground.

And then...  It didn't rain for over a month.  I thought to myself, "Well, the seed isn't going to germinate.  Maybe birds will eat it.  It will never grow."  But this week, I saw clover foliage that was a lighter green color than white dutch.  It also grows taller than white dutch.  Yep, the crimson clover is popping up all over the meadow.

I see it all over the place!  It is just starting to bloom and boy, is it pretty!

I'm not going to mow back here in order that the clover can go to seed.  It would be nice if we could get this established so that it comes back year after year.  It is a high value source of pollen and nectar for our honeybees.

A Foul-Smelling Concoction

If you'd take a peek down into one of many 5 gallon buckets I have in the garden, I'd like to show you something.  Let me take the lid off of it first.  It's a good thing you cannot smell this loathsome "brew of poo."  When I tell you it stinks, I'm not exaggerating.  Some of it splashed on my hand, and I learned a valuable lesson to be more careful next time.  

We're trying our hand at producing our own liquid fertilizer.  In order to do so, I filled a bucket halfway to the top with rainwater.  Then I added a whole bunch of chopped up cabbage leaves as well as weeds that I had pulled from the garden along with some chopped up tomato plants that froze this winter.  Then I walked out to the pasture with a shovel and harvested a shovelful of fresh cow poop and added it to the bucket, chopping up the contents repeatedly, and finally topping off with more rainwater to fill.  I closed up the bucket.

The bucket sat in the sun, percolating, fermenting, baking and aging.  Once a week, I'd pull the top off and stir up the concoction with an old broom handle.  Over time it turned into a slurry of sorts.  You couldn't really tell what the contents were as it all turned into this thick, malodorous liquid.

After months, I want to test out our liquid fertilizer.  I gasped at the smell once I removed the top and then dipped out a third of a gallon of the smelly stuff and poured it into a smaller one gallon bucket, trying to leave any solids in the 5 gallon bucket to continue to break down.

I filled the remaining available space in the gallon bucket with rainwater to dilute the homemade liquid fertilizer.

I poured this concoction at the base of my crookneck and zucchini squash that had been burned by a recent frost.  The leaves on the squash were yellowed and looking sickly.  I was unsure if they would be able to be saved or if we'd need to replant the entire squash crop.  Well, in a little less than a week, the squash responded favorably to our homemade liquid fertilizer!  Look how healthy the plant is!:

Last week I transplanted some straightneck yellow squash in the last row near the sugarcane.  The plants are small and, as you can witness, the leaves are yellowed.  They are needing something.  I'm thinking it is calling out for some homemade liquid fertilizer.  You asked for it, you got it.  I poured some at the base of the squash plants.

We will keep checking on the squash in order to see if it reacts the way that the other squash did.  We still have some experimenting to do regarding concentration rates.  I don't want to burn the plants, but on the other hand, I don't want to dilute it so much that it doesn't provide the plants with the food they need to be healthy and grow.  If this works, just think about it.  We're able to create fertilizer with garden scraps and a cow patty - an affordable circle of fertility for our garden.

Making Chèvre

Chèvre is French for "goat."  Bunny, one of our Nubian goats is in milk now.  We milk her twice a day - once at 6 am and another time at around 5 pm and get almost two quarts.  Here is Bunny all cleaned up in her stanchion.  It holds her head firmly in place while she eats and we milk.  While cows have four teats, goats only have two.  The milking goes very quickly.  Agnes is one of our other Nubian goats that is in milk, but her baby is strong and drinks every drop of her milk, so we don't have to milk her out.

For the past couple of decades, we've milked cows and goats through a muslin cloth filter placed over the bucket (for cows) and over a quart jar (for goats).  Tricia just purchased stainless steel funnels with a paper filter that fits in the bottom.  We find it works much better.  The muslin cloth filter is used day after day and had to be cleaned and disinfected, while the paper filters are disposable and a new one is used for each milking session.

Today we'll be making Chèvre cheese using a half gallon of Bunny's goat milk and a half packet of Chèvre starter.  Our starter was old, so we were unsure if it was going to work.  You'll find out at the end of the post if it works.  Here's the starter:

Here is the recipe that we're using.  Chèvre is a creamy, soft cheese similar to cream cheese.

Following the directions, we heat the milk to 86 degrees and add the starter and stir.

Then we cover the milk and let it sit at room temperature (not below 72 degrees) for 12 hours.  When we open the lid in 12 hours, we'll know if the starter was still active.

The proof is in the pudding - or curds, to change the saying up to fit.  We open the lid, tilt the pot and...  The cheese has set!  There are curds that have formed and the whey is on the bottom.  Remember Little Miss Muffet?  The nursery thyme says "She sat on a tuffet, eating her curds and whey."  I had to look up what a tuffet is.  It is a small foot stool.  Along came a spider that sat down beside her and frightened Miss Muffet away...  Well, no footstools or spiders involved in our cheesemaking or eating adventure.

We pour the curds and whey into a cheesemaking strainer to separate them.  The whey flows to the bottom over time, leaving the curds in the basket.  We'll save the whey to use later in lacto-fermentation of vegetables.  Here are the curds in the basket, slowly draining the whey off.

You can add herbs or spices to this.  Tricia just eats it plain.  We also use it to make smoothies with by adding berries.  It came out really good!  It'll store in the fridge for about a week, but we've completely finished this batch already.  Perhaps in a post next week, we'll be making another type of soft goat cheese.  Bunny, unfortunately, lost both of her babies.  One was stillborn and the other was so weak that she died after about a week.  Bunny is still in milk and making lots of milk, so we'll continue milking her and making cheese.  We're also going to attempt to make goat milk cajeta.  Cajeta is a goat milk caramel.  Can't wait to make that.  

To Restore the Door, And Several More

Lift up your heads, O gates, And be lifted up, O ancient doors, That the King of glory may come in!  Psalm 24:7

Speaking of ancient doors, The doors to our home aren't exactly ancient.  They will be 26 years old later this year, but they LOOK ancient.  Although they don't get direct sunlight as we live beneath trees, they are weathered, dull and dried out.  Every so often we'll apply some Old English Lemon Oil to the doors and it will liven them up for a brief time and then they revert back to the same sad-looking doors.

From a distance, you might think that the doors don't look that bad, but when you zoom in, you can see clearly that something must be done!  Each morning when I pray, after I call out names of family, friends, and needs to the Lord, I also pray for all that He's given us stewardship over.  Our animals, garden, trees, and yes, our home.  I pray that we'd be able to keep things maintained and that things don't break and stay in good repair.  Well, our doors are in poor repair, and it was high time that we did something about it.

I went to our local hardware store and got some helpful advice on how to restore the doors.  The front door was worse for wear, but all eight doors needed a facelift.  It was a tedious process, but you have to start somewhere.  I got some 220 grit sandpaper and used a palm sander to sand all the flat areas and a piece of sandpaper wrapped around a foam brick to get all the nooks and crannies sanded.  I didn't sand all the way to the wood, but just to rough it up a little.

Then I stained the doors with a stain called Provincial using a foam brush.  I came back in a bit and wiped the stain off with a rag.  We had some low humidity days which worked in our favor.  When the stain dried, I used a 320 grit sandpaper to gently rough the surface up and then applied a coat of polyurethane.  Once that was dried, I sanded gently again and applied yet another coat of polyurethane.  Once that was dried, it was done!

Here is the finished product:

We are pleased with the outcome.  It's certainly better than they were.  Here is the side door once it was redone:

The ancient doors look somewhat new again!  It was good to get this project completed before the hot, humid days arrive.  When they arrive, the stain and polyurethane would have taken a long, long time to dry.  We'll try to be better stewards and keep the doors in better shape from now on.