The Best Method I Know of to Trellis Tomatoes

We plant heirloom, open pollinated tomatoes in our garden.  These tomatoes aren't the hybrid, determinate (bush-type) varieties that you attach to a stake.  These tomatoes are indeterminate, meaning they vine and just keep growing and growing and growing.  I've tried unsuccessfully to stake them, but their volume is just too much for the stake and inevitably the tomato plant weighs down the stake and the entire thing comes tumbling down.  It makes a mess.

The Internet proves to be a great source of information and I learned a trellising technique while researching that really works and although I've posted about this in past years, I'll share it again for new readers. People a lot smarter than I am came up with this tomato trellising idea that is called The Florida Weave.  That sounds like a trendy hairstyle or a crocheting technique, but funny name aside, this really works.

If you use wooden stakes and live in our climate, each year you have to purchase new stakes as they rot over the course of the year.  Not so with the stakes used for the Florida Weave - you use metal T-posts.  They'll last forever.  The method will hold up tomatoes in rough weather.  The tomatoes you see below just went through two separate storms carrying > 60 mile per hour gusts of wind and they are just fine.

The Florida Weave

Let's go step by step.  My garden rows are 30 feet in length.  I drive a T-post on one end, a T-post in the middle, and a T-post on the other end.  These serve as the main support skeleton of the apparatus.

T-posts provide the 'spine' of the trellising system

I purchase round bales of hay for our cows.  When I put the bales out in the pasture, I remove the polypropylene baling twine and wrap in around a stick to save for later.  Now is later!!  I take the twine and anchor it firmly around the T-post on the end.  Then I weave (see how it gets its name?) the twine around each plant - to the right side of one plant, to the left side of the next.  When I come to the center T-post, I firmly wrap the twine and continue weaving until I get to the T-post on the end. 

I tie it tight and re-trace my steps, only this time, I weave the twine on the opposite side of the tomato stem, weaving until I get to the end and then I tie it up tight.  You can see in the picture below that the twine forms a support structure around the plant. 

We appreciate your Support!

With the first strand complete, we put our twine away, but keep our eyes on the plants.  In a week or so they will have grown another 6 inches.  At that point we'll repeat the steps just shown (just 6 inches higher) and we'll have two strands of support.  We'll repeat the process again and again.  I think last year, I had 6 horizontal strands.

The thing I'm going to change this year is I will try to add some additional support going up. My T-posts are 6 feet in length and these tomatoes grow taller.  In past years everything is real neat and tidy until the tomato plant grows higher than 6 feet, then the top kind of falls over.  I tried to train the vines to climb along the top twine, but it still got kind of messy.  This year I'm going to try to extend the height by wiring another post to the top of each T-post and continue up vertically.  We'll see how that goes.

Healthy young tomato enjoying lots of support

These tomatoes have weathered some rough storms in April that brought high winds and over a foot of rain cumulatively.  I think now we'll get some more stable weather and we'll be able to watch the tomato plants really flourish over the next month or so.  Lots of the plants are putting on blooms. The plant below has a double bloom.  This is not uncommon and the fruit will be fine.  It will just produce an odd, atypical-shaped fruit.  Apparently, they appear on early blossoms and some think they are caused by cool weather or cross-pollination.  You aren't supposed to save the seeds from fruit like this if you want to produce the uniform-looking perfect tomato.  

Double Bloom on the tomato

Back to the Florida Weave, this process has really made growing tomatoes much easier and orderly for me and I recommend it highly.  There's always little tweaks to help make things better, but all in all, this technique is a winner.  

Dewberries - Enjoying berries you don't have to plant!

About ten years ago, I was browsing through the garden department in one of the large stores - either Home Depot or Lowe's and ran across some raspberry canes for sale.  I remember thinking how cool it would be to plant and harvest our own raspberries.  I never see them growing around here and sort of see them as an 'exotic' berry.  I picked up a raspberry cane package and brought it to the checkout, envisioning eating fresh raspberries on top of homemade vanilla ice cream.

I planted the raspberry cane according to the directions and watched in despair as the plant made a feeble attempt at growing in our harsh summer before finally calling it quits and withered away.  So much for my raspberry adventure.  I have since learned that raspberries are just not well adapted to our conditions here in South Louisiana.  It made me think: There are enough hassles, why try to force things that aren't going to work?  Like the candy positioned strategically around the checkout counter, I made a impulse purchase based on emotion with the raspberry purchase.  I learned to research first and plant varieties that are known to grow in our climate and zone.  But even better yet, I learned to not plant things that grow for free in the wild!

I'm talking about dewberries.  We have dewberries that grow wild in the overgrown field across from our home.  Dewberries ripen a little earlier than blackberries and they run along the ground and on top of other weeds that grow.  They have a reddish-colored cane or vine that grows with a gazillion pointy spines.  It is a difficult operation to pick dewberries without getting scratched up.  No pain, no gain, though.  We pick them each year at this time and the best part is, we don't have to do anything. No planting, watering, pruning, fertilizing...  They just appear every year, begging us to pick them. We oblige.

Dewberries, to me, are bigger, juicier and sweeter than their cousin, the blackberry, but I wouldn't turn down blackberries, for sure.  You can see how plump this dewberry is:

Juicy Dewberry

All the rain we've experienced in April has put a dent in the amount of time we've had to get out there and pick, so we're a little late and have missed a lot of the crop. We'll still get enough for our use. Fortunately, we still have a gallon or so frozen from last year's crop, along with a good number of jars of seedless dewberry jelly put up in the pantry.  Here is Benjamin reaching in to pick a dewberry or two:

Picking dewberries

Here's a view of what he's trying to grab, without getting all scratched up:

Success!!  For every berry that goes in the bucket, two or three get eaten.  By the time we get back to the house, our fingers are stained purple!

Plump berries!

We just stayed out for a brief time but were able to pick a nice bucketful that we placed in a colander in the vegetable sink and filled with water.  Once the sink filled with water, you start seeing lots of little critters float to the surface - worms, stink bugs, tiny beetles - all things that you don't want to be eating along with your dewberries.  We scoop them all out along with twigs, branches and other trash.

Cleaning the berries

We freeze the cleaned berries spread out on trays.  Once frozen, we scoop them up with a spatula and put in gallon sized freezer bags.  That way they stay individually frozen and are easy to pull out and measure for making things like ---  Homemade Pies!!

This is a nice one that just came out of the oven.  We call it The Black and Blue Pie because it is made with both Dewberries (which are black) and Blueberries.  It is jam-packed with flavor that was harvested right out the front door (dewberries) and right out the back door (blueberries).

Black & Blue Pie

I had a nice slice of pie after supper last night.  We did plant the blueberry bushes, but the dewberries are one of those things that just occur naturally, and I'm thankful for that.

A little slice of happiness

Here is a side view where you can evidence the fact that this pie is loaded with berries!

Even though my raspberry experiment didn't work out as planned, the dewberries that naturally spring up each year across the ditch helped me to see that sometimes the easy way is the best way. Sometimes the best things in life are free!

When Poop Doesn't Hit the Fan

People talk about what is going to happen when the poop hits the fan. What about when it hits the ground?  Now that we butchered 43 of our Cornish Cross birds and put them in the freezer, I was thinking about the differences between our egg layers and the meat birds.  The egg layers are pretty. The meat birds?  Not so much.  The laying hens follow you when it is feeding time and are somewhat polite and patient, but the meat birds clamor together like they are starving.  They eat food quickly, voraciously, even getting into the pvc gutter I use as a feed trough and then they sit and poop.  And then they sit in their poop. They are nasty animals.  This is why you must move the chicken tractors often.

As I was comparing the differences of the different breeds, something came to my attention: their poop!  If you've had your breakfast already and aren't afraid to discuss a smelly, unsightly topic, let's examine chicken poop.  I want to show you something odd that I noticed about the differences in chicken poop between breeds of birds.  Take a look at the photo below.

It looks like I spilled some of the 18% Protein Chick Grower that I feed the Cornish Cross meat birds - except it's not.  It is their poop.  Yes, the rain made it wet, but even on dry days, poop from the Cornish Cross meat birds looks like wet feed.  They eat SO MUCH and I know that Cornish Cross birds are extremely efficient in converting feed to meat, but that just looks like undigested feed to me. It looks like waste.  I don't like waste! And it's certainly not pretty (although it does make the grass grow green!)

Cornish Cross Chicken Poop

Then look at the chicken poop below.  This fine specimen came from one of our laying hens.  I didn't watch her make this 'deposit,' but it was either a Barred Rock, a Rhode Island Red, a Black Star, or an Aracauna.  Notice the difference.  You can actually see undigested feed in the poopy mess above, but not below.  The food has been fully digested and used by the hen.

See the 'white cap' on top?  Know what that is?  That is urate.  Chickens don't urinate like other animals do.  Their urinary waste is deposited in the poop in the digestive tract in the form of the white cap you see below - the urate.  I don't know, poop isn't pleasing to look at by any stretch of the imagination, but what you see below sure looks a lot better than the mess you see above.

Healthier looking poop from one of our laying hens

The huge amount of feed that a Cornish Cross eats, coupled with the fact that this animal doesn't forage very much or move around makes it critical that you push the chicken tractor each day, preferably a couple times a day, in order to get them on fresh grass and out of their poop.  The vast quantity of their poop can actually kill the grass.  It comes back, though, lush and green, like the grass growing over the septic tank that Erma Bombeck used to talk about.

On the other hand the laying hens roam freely over 3 acres, eating grass, bugs, worms, seeds, etc. all the while distributing their healthier looking poop all over the pasture.  They may not have the genetic make-up of the Cornish Cross, allowing them to quickly convert feed to meat, but they do what they do best - lay beautiful eggs.  The life of a Cornish Cross is over at 10 weeks.  In contrast, a good laying hen will continue to be productive laying eggs for our family for years!

Each chicken does what they do best.  I guess I'm partial to the more natural, beautiful laying hens.  

Chicken Butchering - Spring 2015

"A Family that Slays Together, Stays Together" -Anonymous

(Oh wait, maybe I quoted that incorrectly...)

Each year we raise a number of Cornish Cross meat birds, butcher them, and fill our freezer with them, so we never have to go to the store to buy chicken.  We eat on our own birds all year long, confident that the birds don't have any medicine, antibiotics, hormones, etc.  We know how they were raised and killed and feel that this affords our family the healthiest and best protein source around. Our family members and friends gather to assist us and we work together as a team to get the job done.

Saturday marked the 10 week timeframe at which we normally butcher our Cornish Cross meat birds. Over the past few years we've learned that a 6 pound bird will yield a 4 and 1/2 pound cleaned carcass and that's what we shoot for as experience has shown us that this is a nice sized bird for many dishes.  This year, as you might have read from previous posts, we've experienced more difficulties than we ever have and we attribute that to horrible weather conditions and perhaps genetic issues with the birds.  To summarize, we've had an extremely high mortality rate, coupled with very slow growth, leg and prolapsed vent issues, and an unexplained slower conversion rate of feed to protein. It has been like the perfect storm - both literally and figuratively!

A friend met me on Friday night and we decided to weigh all of the birds.  We lowered our historical 6 pound weight standard and decided to butcher all of the birds that weighed in excess of 4 and 3/4 pounds, while leaving birds that weighed less than 4 and 3/4 pounds to continue to grow.  Here are the candidates for butchering on Saturday morning - 43 birds.  We moved them to an enclosure on concrete so that they would be cleaner and stopped feeding them 1/2 day prior to butchering to ensure that the food would be worked through their digestive systems. Both of those procedures help to ensure that the slaughter would be a (somewhat) clean process.

43 Cornish Cross Meat Birds Ready for Slaughter

Here are the remaining birds that didn't meet our self-imposed weight limit.  It amounted to 30 birds. Like a small fish, we'll "throw these back" so they can continue to grow.  We'll weigh again in a couple of weeks.  This part hurts to type. We started with 117 birds.  At this point we have 73 total birds.  That equates to a whopping 35% mortality rate!  We've never lost anywhere near this amount of birds.  I won't editorialize on how dismal that is, but will tell you that it has made us re-think our entire way of doing things.

30 Cornish Cross & Red Ranger Meat Birds that will continue to grow

We set up several different stations.  The first station is the Killing Cones. Chickens are brought from the enclosure by Benjamin and Carson, put into the cones, head-first, and then the chicken's jugular veins are cut, allowing the bird's heart to pump out all of the blood into buckets until they are blood-free and officially pronounced dead.  The cones hold them tightly, avoiding bruising that comes from 'flopping around.'

Carson and Benjamin keeping the killing cones full

Benjamin administers the quick incision, aiming for a clean cut that will quickly cause the bird to bleed out.  The blood is collected in the buckets where it will be later buried in the garden, providing nutrients that will be beneficial in growing vegetables for our table.

Bleeding Out

The second station is the Scalding Station.  This station in manned by our friend, Dale, who is a veteran in the scalding process.  We use a crawfish boiling pot filled with water atop a propane burner for scalding the dead birds.  We add a bit of dish washing liquid that seems to help prepare the feathers for removal in the next station.

Notice that a thermometer is clipped to the pot.  The temperature is monitored to ensure that it stays right around 145 - 148 degrees Fahrenheit.  Any cooler and the feathers won't come off cleanly - any hotter and you are cooking the bird.  The bird is dunked and pulled up several times.  At the point upon which a tail feather or wing feather is able to be pulled out easily, you know the scalding process is complete and you can move the bird along to the next station.

Scalding birds in the crawfish pot

The birds are dispatched to the third station, The Plucking Station.  This is a Whiz Bang Chicken Plucker based on Herrick Kimball's invention and this contraption is a time-saver and a thing of beauty.  My Dad, a veteran on the Whiz Bang Chicken Plucker, expertly runs the machine, knowing when to stop it.  If you run it for too long, it can tear up the meat.  If you don't run it long enough, you'll leave feathers on the bird.

Spraying down the birds spinning in the Whiz Bang

A clothes dryer motor powers the machine which is pulley driven and spins the plate on the bottom. Rubber fingers on the bottom plate and screwed into the sides gently pull the feathers off as the bird spins inside while being sprayed down...

The Spin Cycle!

In mere seconds, you have a completely de-feathered bird!  The feathers drop to the ground below where they'll be composted later on in the afternoon.

Feathers 'a flyin'

A beautiful, clean carcass emerges where it is placed at the fourth station, The Quality Control Station.  My Mom takes care of this station, expertly inspecting the bird, removing any remaining feathers and cutting the feet off of the bird.  At this point the chicken's head is pulled off.  Both heads and feet go in the compost bucket.

Quality Control

Here are four nice birds who have had their feet cut off and are awaiting quality control, where any remaining feathers will be removed.  Tail feathers can be a little pesky sometimes.

On the Assembly Line

Then they'll move to the fifth station, The Eviscerating Station.  Tricia and I handle this.  The previous night, we sharpened our Chicago Cutlery knives and keep a steel handy to keep them sharp throughout the process.  We first cut an incision in the neck, pulling on the windpipe and loosening the crop.  Then we slice an incision right near the vent, reaching inside the carcass, running our hand up along the breastbone until we grab the heart.  Pulling firmly, we pull everything out of the incision.

We place the heart in a pot with ice, the gizzard in another pot with ice, and then we carefully remove the gall bladder from the liver and place the liver in another pot with ice.  We carefully cut around the vent and throw the entire digestive tract into the gut bucket.  We reach back in the carcass and pull the lungs out that are embedded alongside the rib cage.  Then we cut the oil gland out of the tail and give the bird a final washing out.

Gutting the chicken

The clean carcasses are put in buckets of water and allowed to cool down.  The chicken's body heat will dissipate in the cool water and when completely covered with water, will keep flies at bay.

A cooling off period

We were a little more than halfway finished when a storm blew through (wouldn't you know it?), bringing thunder, lightning, and another 8/10ths of an inch of rain and sending us scurrying to the garage to wait the storm out.

Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head.

We finally set up a dining canopy to finish up the work without getting soaked.

Once the butchering was done, there is some cleanup involved, but essentially, we were done before noon after starting at around 8:30.  We have a bucket full of chicken guts, heads, and feet and blood that we'll need to take care of.

Gut bucket

I dug a trench in the garden and poured the contents of the bucket in the trench and covered it up. This will enrich the soil, increasing the fertility, not unlike the process that the Native Americans taught the Pilgrims with fish.

Soil Amendments for the Garden

We cleaned up the hearts, gizzards and livers and prepared for the freezer.  

Fresh Chicken Livers

And here is a photo of the Chicken Slayers for the Spring 2015 batch of meat birds. Each one provided great help and camaraderie and we made memories we won't soon forget.  I think the accurate quote listed at the top of this blog post is "A Family that PRAYS together, stays together," and we did indeed pray.  We held hands and prayed right before our lunch, thanking God for our lives and the provision He gives.  We went into town and bought a big boxful of (what else?) Popeye's Spicy Fried Chicken & biscuits to consume.  As long as we were killing chickens, we might as well eat them, right?

Tired Chicken Processors

Once we finished eating, we cut up all 43 birds into an 8 piece cut up and packaged each one into gallon sized freezer bags.  They were packed in ice and later moved into our freezer for storage. We'll rinse, wash, and repeat with the remaining 30 birds in a couple (or three) weeks and then do it all again next year.

Making Chicken Liver Pate

When we butcher chickens, in addition to the meat, we save the gizzards, hearts and livers for cooking.  The livers are my favorite, pan-fried in butter.  That's some good eating.  In looking for other ways to prepare a bunch of chicken livers, Tricia thought about making pate with them. Chicken liver pate can be used as a dip along with some bagel chips or crackers.

Although we'd never made it before, she found a recipe in her Nourishing Traditions Cookbook, by Sally Fallon, and got busy.  Here's the ingredient list:

3 Tablespoons butter
1 pound chicken livers
1/2 pound mushrooms
1 bunch green onions, chopped
2/3 cups white wine
1 clove garlic, mashed
1/2 teaspoon dry mustard
1/4 teaspoon dried dill
1/4 teaspoon rosemary
1 Tablespoon lemon juice
1/2 stick butter, softened
sea salt

First Tricia melted the butter in a cast iron skillet, adding the livers, onions and mushrooms.  She cooked them until the livers were nice and brown, stirring them around.  She then added the wine, garlic, mustard, lemon juice and herbs, boiling until the liquid is gone.  Then you allow it to cool completely.  She poured it all into the food processor with the softened butter and processed until smooth.

Processing

Using a spatula, the pate was moved into a bowl and we opened a bag of bagel chips to scoop up the pate.  It tasted rich and smooth, a perfect appetizer or dip.

We ate a bunch of it and then did a little research and discovered that it freezes well, so we packed it into individual containers for freezing.

It can be frozen and popped out and thawed for use later.  

It is a really simple recipe that is a delicious alternative for pan-fried chicken livers.

Feathers in the Pasture - Oh No!

Our pullets that are in the chicken tractor are getting very close to laying their first eggs.  When they lay their first eggs, I open the door to the chicken tractor and allow them to free-range.  At that point they are free to roam wherever they desire in the 3 acre pasture.  They'll return to the chicken tractor to roost at night and also will lay their eggs in the nesting boxes that are built into the tractor.

Until I release them, each day, twice a day, I walk out to the tractor with food and water for the birds and then push the tractor one length forward so that they have fresh grass to forage on and also a fresh 12' x 6' area to fertilize with their chicken litter.  I generally take a different route each day and I just observe things around me.  I'll pick up any trash that has blown onto the property, and I'll pull up any bitterweed by the roots.  (I don't want the cows eating that!)

As I was walking yesterday, from a distance I noticed something white on the ground.  I was thinking it was a piece of plastic that had blown in from the storm the other night that brought 60 mph straight line winds.  Only, when I got closer, it wasn't a piece of plastic, it was a single feather.

Birds of a feather

That's not unusual.  Sometimes the roosters can be very aggressive.  Even hens 'get into it' from time to time and feathers will fly.  Except as I walked further, I observed more feathers:

And then I saw the carcass.  This is not good.  The dead bird was an Aracauna hen. They are the birds that lay the beautiful blue and green eggs and this one was Benjamin's favorite - a hen that was smoky gray in color.  It was freshly killed and one half of the bird was eaten.

Aracauna carcass

We don't have a lot of problems with predators, but every once in a while we do lose a bird or two. This seems like it was an attack by an avian predator - maybe a hawk or an owl.  We definitely have those around.  In reading about the way this bird was killed, I'm leaning toward a hawk doing this damage as different publications said that an owl likes to carry off their prey.

So how to combat this?  First, it is a federal crime to kill any bird of prey, so that is out of the question.  Second, I wouldn't want to eliminate them from the area.  We have rats around the place - especially around the barn.  Hawks and owls, while they'll get one of our chickens from time to time, provide a check and balance against the increase in number of the rat population.  My best course of action is to try and deter them from feasting on our birds.

I looked around and found the following item for $11.44, shipping included, with lots of positive comments about its ability to ward off hawks AND owls.  I'll likely order this guy and give it a try:

A Fake Owl to Scare Away Avian Predators

The wise old owl is very lifelike and the comments state that the fake owl has been successful in chasing off birds if moved every few days.  Apparently, if you leave it in one location, birds soon "wise up" to the fact that the owl is fake and it loses its deterrence value.  While I'm thinking about it, this owl may do a job keeping birds out of our fruit trees and blueberry bushes!  I'll post an update once I install the owl.  Who...  Who... Well, the plastic owl, of course.

Drying off Rosie

Rosie is one of our three Jersey cows who will be calving first and we think the earliest date of exposure to the bull puts her due date about June 18th.  She's been in milk for around one and a half years and that's a long time for her (and us). Generally, a practice that we do, is to dry the cows off exactly two months before their delivery date.  That means we stop milking them. This gives them a much needed vacation from being milked every single day, twice a day. It also gives us a chance to have a break as well.  The cow needs to build up her stores of energy and use that energy for growing the calf in its final two months before birth and also to build up her strength for calving.

The first thing we do is gradually go down on the minimal amount of dairy ration that we give them during milking time, switching from a higher protein, nutritionally balanced ration to sweet feed only. This reduces the energy content of the feed they use to produce milk somewhat, and results in a drop-off of milk production.  The cows primarily eat grass, though.  As mentioned earlier, we gradually stop milking over a week time period.  On April 11th we stopped milking Rosie twice a day and dropped to once a day milkings and followed that practice for a week.

Milk production is based on demand. Where she was previously producing 2 gallons a day, when we went to once a day milkings, her daily production dropped to 1 and 1/3 gallons.  At this point (after a week on 1 milking per day), it was safe to stop milking her entirely.  Tomorrow will mark a week since she's been milked.  It's been nice to sleep 30 minutes later each day!

Rosie eating in the side yard by the potatoes and corn

It is very important to keep a close eye on your newly dried off cow.  The udder will swell with milk. I'm sure it is uncomfortable for the ole girl.  There is a chance that the cow could get mastitis and you don't want that infection to set in.  This is more of a danger when the cow is producing much more milk.  Actually, different publications I've read state that if the animal is producing a daily volume of milk that is 2 gallons or less, you can just stop with no problems.  The cow's body signals the mammary glands to stop producing milk since no one is drinking it.  Over a few weeks, the udder will shrink back down.  Until then, we inspect her every day.

Each day we feel Rosie's udder, each of the four compartments, to ensure that they are soft and not warm.  A hardening of the bag or heat tells you that something is wrong.  As you can see in the photo, her bags are somewhat swollen, but they are not hard and although they were full of milk and tight a few days ago, they are softening over the past couple of days.

Rosie in the process of drying off after about a week of not being milked.

So now it's only Daisy that we're milking once a day.  Daisy will be calving around October 31st, so we will repeat this process with Daisy on August 31st.  Then we'll get ready for Amy to have her first calf around December 23rd.

For now we'll relish our time off.  Milking one cow once a day is not a big deal and provides a little downtime while still giving us access to the delicious milk we enjoy drinking and turning into butter, cream, kefir, and cheese.  Once Rosie calves and freshens, we'll have an abundant supply of milk again, but for now, we'll enjoy the break - or use that time to get the Spring garden in!

It's Raining Buck Moth Caterpillars

The weather has been picture perfect for the past few days and has proven to be excellent days to get outside and enjoy the great outdoors.  Tricia learned, painfully, that it is very important to wear shoes when going outside.  You see, there are caterpillars EVERYWHERE right now, falling from the live oak trees and landing on every surface imaginable.  One was on the doormat and Tricia stepped on it unknowingly.  Moments later she felt a stinging on the bottom of her toe and then a burning, pain. She looked around and saw the flattened caterpillar on the welcome mat and identified the perpetrator - a guest that is not welcome on our welcome mat.  Ironic!

A quick google image search identified the suspect further as the Buck Moth Caterpillar.  They are very common around areas with live oak trees.  According to the link above, their spines are hollow and filled with poison.  That poison is released if you touch the caterpillar or step on it.  Each year around this time, they come out and cover every square foot of landscape.

Just walking around (with boots on) yesterday, they were everywhere and not just on welcome mats and live oak trees.  They were on the Bradford Pear:

On our Bradford Pear

Camouflaged on the bark of the live oak tree that holds up the swing:

On a Live Oak Tree

And showing that it is an equal opportunity offender, was on the water oak tree as well:

On a Water Oak Tree

While we were walking around, we came upon a buck moth caterpillar convention. Several dozen were gathered closely together and in an act of revenge or retribution, I asked Tricia for the sandal she was wearing.  With one solid slap to the caterpillar convention, I exacted punishment.  As green and yellow ooze dripped from the bark, Tricia holstered her sandal and we walked away.  A dog barked in the distance...

A caterpillar convention

To be honest, I had never seen a buck moth, but here he is in all his glory:

Image Credit

She lays her eggs in the canopy of live oak trees in December and when the eggs hatch, the caterpillars make their way to the ground where they pupate.  We've got our eyes opened for these guys and make every opportunity to step on them and make them pop - with shoes on, of course!

Spring 2015 Blueberry Preview

Out with the Old and in with the New

The torrential rains have wreaked havoc on our Cornish Cross meat birds.  They say one man's feast is another man's famine.  While we may have a 'chicken famine,' the blueberries are really enjoying the wet weather and have responded by putting out lots of bright green new growth.  It seems like they have added about 1/3 of their height/width in new growth.  I attribute that to the wet spring coupled with a good fertilizing regimen using composted chicken litter compliments of our laying hens.

New growth on the blueberry bushes

The blueberry bushes have responded by adding more than new branch and leaf growth.  They are loaded up with berries!  No, they aren't the distinctive blue color from which they get their name yet, but the little bushes are drooping with the weight of all the berries.

Blueberries!

Let's take a closer look.  We'll be busy picking in a few short weeks.

And that reminds me.  We still have almost a gallon of blueberries in inventory in the freezer from last year's crop.  We pick them, wash them, and lay them out on trays to freeze.  When frozen we scoop them up with a spatula and they are individually frozen.  Then we put them in gallon freezer bags.  That makes it easy to measure for recipes.  

The last remnants of the 2014 Blueberry Crop

We make blueberry smoothies, blueberry pancakes, and blueberry muffins for breakfast.  It is a tasty and healthy berry that comes right out of the backyard. Well, we need to eat up the gallon remaining to make room for the blueberry crop that will be coming in.  We decided to make something new - Blueberry Scones!

I used THIS RECIPE FROM FOODNETWORK.COM and we really enjoyed them for breakfast Saturday morning:  Blueberry Scones with Lemon Glaze.  You can click on the link above and try them.  They were easy to make and very tasty - a great alternative to muffins or pancakes and they go great with coffee or hot tea.  Here they are right out of the oven, cooling before we put the lemon glaze on top:

Hot out of the oven

Here is a closer look.  You can observe how the plump, flavorful berries have burst, allowing the color and flavor to bleed into the scone.  The aroma filled the kitchen and drew Benjamin in quickly. We didn't have to call to tell him they were ready!

Almost ready to eat

We plated the Blueberry Scones on Tricia's special Bluebonnet plates and drizzled the lemon glaze on top.  The glaze added a tart, sweet pop to the delicious pastry.  It wasn't long before the scones disappeared.

Homemade Blueberry Scones with Lemon Glaze

We still have about half a gallon of blueberries to clear out of the freezer, so we'll be making more of these along with other blueberry-inspired items.  It's a tough job, I know, but I think we're up to the task.