Picking up Hay - Summer 2016

This post contains a lot of pictures and may be a little longer than my normal posts, but I wanted to capture the day's events.  Hay day is a hot, hard day, but it is only one day of the year and when the job is done, it is done for the entire year.  And, I must say, you sure sleep soundly that night!  Here goes...

When I was a young boy, I remember my Mom always telling us to make a wish when we'd see a truck with a load of hay on it.  This past Saturday we had the load of hay and if I had made a wish, it would have been that all 75 hay bales would make their way into the hayloft in the barn without us having to work so hard.  That wish did NOT come true!

Our neighbor down the road bales fantastic, top-quality, bermuda grass hay. People who own horses come from miles around to purchase hay from him.  He always calls us when he bales the first cutting.  He gives us a great price per bale if he doesn't have to touch it.  We simply drive in the field and pick up the bales as they come out of the baler.  Tricia drove the truck, I picked up the bales...

1 down, 74 to go...

We met Russ in Breaux Bridge which is halfway between Baton Rouge and Jennings and I traded my little car for his truck.  We also borrowed my Dad's cattle trailer.  As Tricia drove slowly, I would pick up the bales and toss them in the back of the trailer.

Benjamin would pick up the bales and stack them,  I would count the bales and Benjamin would repeat the count so we wouldn't lose track of how many we picked up.

Stacking and Counting

Now on Saturday there was rain falling all around us.  One thing you don't want to happen is for rain to fall on your hay.  Our neighbor has his whole family out baling.  In the photo below, his grandson is running the "fluffer" to fluff up the hay after it has been raked and ready for baling.  You can see the thundercloud in the distance.  They are trying to race the storm to get the hay baled and in the barn.

Hurrying, fluffing, trying to beat the rain

Here is the view in front of the truck.  Tricia drives between the bales and I picked up the hay on either side.

Here is my neighbor on his baler.  We normally 'shoot the breeze' for a bit, but he was in overdrive as he was trying to get everything done before it rained.  A smile and a wave would have to suffice for today.  He is an amazing fellow.  He is 85 years old and keeps going.  He beat cancer after some tough chemo and radiation and nothing stops him.  He just keeps on rolling - literally and figuratively.

You can see the hay bales dropping out of the back of his baler as he heads southward in his field.

Now this next picture shows perhaps the best invention a hay-man has ever seen. This contraption picks up the bales and stacks in on a trailer with no manual effort at all.  All it requires is a tractor driver.  We sure could have used one of these!

The Amazing Hay-Picker-Upper

The machine picks it up...

lines it up, and then stacks it.  He'll take this load to the barn and the entire wagon lifts/dumps and stacks the hay in a neat stack in the barn.  No sweat.  Seriously.

Our job wasn't quite as easy.  We filled the trailer with exactly 50 bales.  I wanted to see if we could creatively stack 25 bales (to give us the 75 we had ordered) without making a second trip.  It is only a mile down the road, so it wouldn't be a big deal if we couldn't fit them, but we certainly wanted to try.

I tossed the bales up to Benjamin and he continued stacking and counting.  At last he put the 75th bale on the very top, tying them all together nicely.  The truck and trailer were loaded down.  I don't think we could have fit another bale.

Whew!  We got it done!

C'est tout!

The prettiest little truck driver in all the land posed with her (tired) boy.

On our way out of the field we met our neighbor's daughter and paid her.  All honor system.  We chatted for a while and we thanked her and told her to tell her Dad we appreciate him and then we took off.  The work was only halfway done.  We had to drive the truck and trailer back down the road very, very slowly, back it to the barn and get it all up in the loft.

Easier said than done.  I bogged the truck down backing it in.  Tricia and Benjamin had to unload the truck and trailer one by one into a wagon and then pull the wagon to the barn.  There is a pulley on a 4x4 outside the loft door where I pull the bales up after Tricia and Benjamin hook the hay up to the rope with a bungee cord.  After I pulled the first one up, Benjamin alerted me to the fact that there was a big wasp nest right over my head under the eave of the barn.  I asked him to go get a cup of gas.  He returned and I threw the gas on the wasp nest, killing all the wasps but filling my ear with gas in the process.  It burned, but I guess it was better than being stung by a bunch of wasps.

Hay Woman

Finally the last 3 bales were waiting for me to pull them up.

I would pull the rope while walking backward and then pull the bale into the loft and slide the bale along the floor and stack it tightly and neatly.  Over the years of doing this, the floor of the loft is worn smooth, like a dance floor in an old dance hall.  It is getting kind of slippery.  I had to be careful.

The View from the hayloft doors

We were finished!  Finally.  Except first we had to go get the truck out of the mud. Using a come-along, we got the truck and trailer out of the mud in no time.  We cooled off, showered, changed clothes, and rewarded ourselves by driving into town to the Rocket Drive Inn and treating ourselves to root beer floats and Oreo milk shakes.  That work we did today will benefit our Jersey cows throughout the winter. On a day approaching 100 degrees, it was hard to even imagine the concept of what winter is!

Hay Day 2016 can be summed up like this:

Proverbs 6:7-8 Though they have no prince or governor or ruler to make them work, they labor hard all summer, gathering food for the winter.

The Borers Return With a Vengeance

When walking out to the barn the other day, I glanced up in the canopy of trees that border the eastern edge of our property and immediately noticed a troubling sight - the leaves to three of our oak trees have turned brown and are dead.  This happened so fast it made out heads swim.

Let's back up a bit.  We've lost four water oaks in that same location over the past several years.  The eastern edge of our property was once a shady grove and now, well, it's not so shady any more.  There are some pecan trees in the "grove" that should enlarge their canopy now without the competition, but I don't like to lose trees.  We'll use the wood for firewood and all, but still, I'd rather have a live tree providing shade for the animals in our hot summers.

If you look around the bases of all the affected trees, you can see sawdust.  I Googled it and found that the culprit is something called the Red Oak Borer and the water oak is in the red oak family.  I've blogged about it previously HERE.  It doesn't seem to bother other trees from what can gather.  From talking to a knowledgeable tree expert, I learned that water oaks live for only 70 years.  I've read elsewhere that they live for 30 years and then die for the next 40!!  That's a more accurate way to state it, I guess.  Well you can see the dead/dying trees below.  It looks like fall, but it's not.

It ain't fall.

So here's my plan.  First, I'm going to borrow a chainsaw from my Dad and cut the trees down.  It will be mighty tricky, though, as the tree on the left in the picture below leans precariously over the garden fence.  The tall one on the right below is right near the barn.  I think I'll have to use a come-along to pull the tree in the direction that I want it to fall.  This project is not going to be for the faint of heart. I'll tackle that within the next month before limbs begin falling.

I'll then cut the trees into firewood sized pieces and then split it all and stack it for firewood to be used over the next several winters.  It is hard to even think about firewood at the tail-end of June, though.

Finally, I read that to treat borers you should spray permethrin all over the bark of the base of the tree. I'll have to purchase some of that and spray the remaining water oak trees in the grove to keep from losing any more of them.  I should have done this before, but there's always something else going on and I was negligent in not taking care of business.

Borer Damage

Hopefully, once the remaining trees are treated, we won't lose any more as those trees cast a shadow over the garden until almost noon, allowing me to enjoy shady mornings in the garden on the weekends.  Darned Borers!!

Weaning Luna

Luna is our little heifer (Daisy's little girl) that was born on October 27, 2015.  She's 8 months old and past time to be weaned.  Tricia and I had been talking about it and finally decided to get the job done on Monday night.  Normally in the evening, we let the calves nurse and then separate them from their mommas so that we have the milk in the morning.  But on Monday night, poor Luna got no milk.  I milked Daisy while Luna stood at the gate and moo'd... loudly.  Something was wrong. This was not her normal routine.  What is going on?

Well, she was soon to find out.  We normally install what we call a weaning plate that makes it near impossible for the calves to get to their momma's udder.  We usually use a plate that you tighten down with a wing nut.  Here is a post about that style plate in this post: Weaning Clarabelle  Although we've used that weaning device numerous times, the crafty calves always figure out ways to pry it out of their nose.  Then when we go to milk the cows in the morning, we discover that the calves have robbed our milk.  (I'm sure they see it from a different perspective.)

This time with Luna we determined that we'd try a different style weaning plate.  At $2.65 it was half the price of the metal one.  It is made entirely of plastic and has pointed spines on it.

Calf Weaner

We held Luna securely and took the weaning plate out of the package.  It came with no instructions, so I figured that you twist the plate until the prongs separate and then install in her nose.  We'll give it a try.  As you can see, Luna is not exactly thrilled about this exercise.

"What are my people up to?"

After a couple minutes of me sweating, Luna mooing, and general chaos in the barn, the device was in place.  The nose is a very tender, vulnerable place on a cow. That's why you see a lot of rings in bull's noses.  I wouldn't like anything in my nose either.  Luna did not like this thing in her nose at all. She stomped around in disoriented fashion and at one point, went down to here knees.  No sir-ee. She didn't like this a bit.

Cmon Man!

Here is an up-close photo.  As you can see, the plate blocks her from opening her mouth to suck milk. It does, however, allow her to reach her head out, flatten the plate on the ground, and pull her head toward her to eat grass.  You'll also notice the points.  If/when she does try to nurse, the points will poke Daisy's bag and she'll promptly get a kick or a nudge to say, "Git!"

Testing a new-style (for us, anyway) weaning plate

In a few minutes, Luna seemed to calm down.  She still looked at me suspiciously, but overall, I think she was coming to grips with this change.  Growing up is tough, huh girl?

Normally, I would separate her, but now she is free to join the rest of the herd.  No more separating her each night!  This will save some time, although we'll now be milking Daisy in the morning AND the evening.  Luna promptly ran up to Daisy and tried to nurse, but it was to no avail.  The weaning plate did its job.  After a bit, she tired of trying as Daisy tried to console her by licking her on the neck.

It's gonna be alright, Luna.

As we left them together, Tricia and I wondered if Luna would pull a "Houdini" and figure out a way to get Daisy's milk or figure out a way to pry the nose plate out. We would know first thing Tuesday morning.  Well, Tuesday morning came and Daisy had a full bag of milk and sad Luna still had the nose plate in.  So far, so good.  We'll give it a while and report back to give a full review of the plastic weaning plate.

One benefit we always see when weaning calves is that the cream content of the milk goes up significantly.  We find this is due to the fact that the calf is getting all the 'hind milk' which is richer in cream.  Once weaned, we get all the cream.  That is a big plus for us!

Southern Peas Can Take the Heat

When it is hot outside, most garden plants like squash and cucumbers droop in the sun and heat similar to what I do after being outdoors for any length of time.  Southern Peas or Cowpeas, or Field Peas or whatever you may call them seem to love the hot, oppressive dog days of summer.  I like peas and rice with a little sausage or tasso cooked with them for some flavor, so we always plant a row or two of peas.  This year I planted some Blackeyed Peas and Ozark Razorback Peas on the row I had allocated for cowpeas.

The Blackeyed peas were the first to ripen so I went out in the sweltering heat and picked a bowl of peas.  They were of varying stages of ripeness, but they’ll all get cooked in a pot quickly, so it doesn’t really matter.  I like to pick them when I can see the big bulges of plump peas marking the pods, so that means I’ll pick them from the green stage of the hull color all the way to the brown stage.  I find they are easiest to shell when the pods are yellow.  Here you can see the peas ready for picking.

The Pea Patch

This closeup photo shows some blackeyed peas in every stage of development, from bloom (center), to tiny pods just forming (at the 11 o’clock location in the photo), to green (center left), to yellow, to brown.  Although some critter is eating holes in some of the leaves, it really doesn’t bother the pods or production of the peas.  The only thing that you have to be careful for is ants.  The pea pods must be extra sweet, because fire ants like to climb the stalk and bite you when you are picking them.

Peas ready to pick!

As you can see below, the cowpea row has weeds that should be pulled.  However, I’ve shifted my priorities to other areas as weed pressure at this point doesn’t really affect the production.  Besides, it is doggone hot out there! 

A few weeds, but so what?

There are so many peas it doesn’t take long to pick them.  I straddle the row and quickly fill a bucket with blackeyed peas.  Our Ozark Razorback Peas aren’t quite ready yet.  I’ll give them another week or so.  Normally, I plant purple hull peas, but (gasp) I didn’t have any in my seed inventory.  I made a mental note to be sure to get some.  I’m thinking about planting some in another week or so.  Some years I like to plant Holstein peas, too.  They are named as such because of their distinctive black and white markings, similar to the milk cow.

A nice mess of blackeyed peas

I brought the bowl of peas inside and sat it on the counter.  Benjamin and I enjoy shelling peas together, so we tag team them and in no time at all we have a nice bowl of blackeyed peas shelled.

Now they are shelled!

This will make a nice meal served over rice.  It is a healthy dish as it is a good source of protein.  Whatever you may call them, they are delicious and are always grown in our garden. 

The Colony Has Collapsed

We walked outside the side door of our home Saturday morning and immediately noticed a funny smell.  It was kind of sweet, but mainly smelled like something was spoiled, molded or mildewed. We looked around to find the source of the foul odor and it didn't take us long to find it.  There was a black, sticky substance oozing from the bottom of the column on the side porch.

Tricia reached her hand and swept a finger through the substance and looked at it closer.  Honey. This column is home to our colony of bees that have lived here for the past 3 or 4 years, maybe longer.  At night when they calm down, you can stand outside, and put your had on the column and listen.  There is so much buzzing with all the bees inside the column, it is as if the whole thing is vibrating.

Substance oozing out of the column

Here is a little bit of a closer look at the sticky, stinky substance.  As you might imagine, it was attracting ants and plenty of them.

So what's going on here?  I can't say I'm really sure.  If you look at the top of the column, there are normally bees spilling out of the top or you can see numerous bees flying in and out of the column. I'm sure that the entire column is filled with honeycomb.  The trouble is there are just one or two bees flying in or out.

I'm not a beekeeper, nor will I pretend to know anything about them.  Because the bees aren't in a traditional beebox, we've not been able to rob a drop of honey.  We just enjoy them living in there because they do a great job of pollinating all of our fruit trees and the garden.  If I had to guess, I'm assuming that maybe they ran out of room in the column and moved out to find a new larger house since they outgrew their "starter home."  That would explain the few bees I still see flying.  Perhaps they are just going in to eat the honey.

Worst case scenario is that the colony has collapsed and died.  We do have mosquito trucks that drive around weekly spraying pesticide to kill mosquitoes. I've heard that this pesticide can kill bees, too, although I'm not certain.

No more bees!

This is not good news.  We enjoyed having the bees even though we didn't get any honey.  I'll wait for a short time to see if a new colony moves into the column, but if they don't, I'll need to remove the column, lay it on it's side and use a pressure washer to remove the honeycomb/honey.  I've heard that if you don't remove the abandoned honeycomb and honey, it will attract all sorts of varmints and vermin like roaches, mice, and rats that come around to eat the honeycomb and honey.

If that is the case, I'll also talk to a couple of beekeeper buddies of mine to see if they can put one of their beeboxes full of bees in the backyard.  I don't want to get into the beekeeping business, but I do want to have some bees around the house.

Cade’s Cove Beans

The other night at supper as a conversation starter, we asked each member of the family to say what their favorite family vacation destination was.  That’s a tough question.  We had as many favorites as there are family members, so there was no consensus.  All of the family vacations have been fun and scenic and we spent some time talking about each of them.

One of the places discussed was the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.  Sitting in the middle of the Park is Cade’s Cove and is in a valley surrounded by mountains.  There is an 11 mile loop that you can take to enjoy some really scenic sights, stopping along the way to hike and explore.  Cade’s Cove was settled in the early 1800’s by settlers, and you can tour the old restored buildings, mills, churches, barns, etc.  Those were some tough people – no cell phone coverage or WI-FI to be found anywhere! 

Anyway, I was happy to be given a small envelope containing maybe 10 seeds at a seed exchange at a Sustainable Agriculture conference a few years ago, and the handwritten label said “Cade’s Cove Beans.”  “Awesome,” I thought and couldn’t wait to plant them.  Since it is a pole bean, I planted them at the end of my trellis that contains Snow-on-the-Mountain and Multi-colored pole beans.  You can see the Cade’s Cove beans on the bottom right in the photo below.  The leaves are yellowing as they are about finished.

Pole Bean trellis

Here is what the pods look like as they are ripening.  They are fat beans.  The pods are green at first, but as they ripen, they turn a yellowish color with faint pink markings.

Ripened Beans

Once you pop open the pod, you can see some plump white beans with brown speckles on them.  Interesting! They shell quite easily.

6 Beans in a pod

So we picked the ones that were ripe and Benjamin and I began shelling the beans.  Okay, mostly it was Benjamin.  He really likes to shell beans and peas.  He found that they had mostly 6 or 7 beans per pod, with the most having 8 beans per pod. 

Shelling Beans

In fact here is a nice shot of the Master Bean Sheller in all his glory, proudly showing off his handiwork.

Benjamin's Beans

We had a nice container of shelled beans ready to be cooked.  I was anxious to try them.  I like rice and beans – any kind of beans.  Our preacher grew up in the depression and likes to say that they were never hungry and ate a variety of food – one day they would eat rice and beans, and the next day they would eat beans and rice.

Ready for cooking

Tricia cooked them with a little bit of smoked sausage to impart a smoked flavor and I gotta tell you, these beans were good!  They were creamy and delicious served over some rice.  The only thing missing was some cornbread.  Settling Cade’s Cove was a hard thing, I’m sure, but if Momma had a pot of Cade’s Cove beans cooking for supper over the fireplace, life couldn’t have been that hard, could it?

In a search to find out more information about Cade’s Cove Beans, I found that that area also yielded another heirloom bean called “Turkey Craw Beans.”  It was named that because a settler in the early 1800’s killed a turkey and when gutting and cleaning the turkey, discovered a bean in the turkey’s craw.  He planted the bean and it yielded some beans that look somewhat similar to Cade’s Cove Beans.  See, I love stuff like this and it’s why I try to grow heirloom stuff.  Not only are you growing and eating a delicious thing, but you get a history lesson as well!

While reading about this, I learned that Cade’s Cove Beans are rare.  For that reason (and the reason that they are doggone good), I purposed that I would do my best to save some seeds and continue to plant them year after year.  I let some pods dry on the vine as much as possible, but daily thundershowers caused me to go ahead and pick them and put them on the windowsill on a paper plate to dry further.  Over the course of several days, I moved them around to ensure even drying.

These we'll dry and save for seed

Hopefully the germination will be good on them and I’ll be able to continue growing Cade’s Cove Beans in our own little “settlement” to the south and west (and in much flatter topography!) than Cade’s Cove.

Dried Cade's Cove beans for seed - For the Future 2017 Crop

Maybe I’ll have to search for some Turkey Craw Beans as well!  For now, though, I’m more than happy with our Cade’s Cove Beans!  Here is evidence that this old boy might have too much time on his hands on some evenings:

God is Good.  Life is Good.  Cade’s Cove Beans are Good.

Praying for the Crop

My work life and my home life couldn’t be more different.  I work in an office at a desk sitting behind a computer for five days a week from 7:30 to 4:30.  When I am home, I am seldom indoors, always outside unless it is dark or storming.  During my lunch breaks at work while I’m enjoying some leftovers, I search through the Internet for stories of interest that I might consume along with last night’s delicious meal.  Those stories are largely about gardening, homesteading, agrarian blogs and such. 

Although I’m by no means an art critic, nor do I have good taste in fine art, I do know what I like when I see it.  On this particular day I think I Googled “Agrarian Art” or “Old Agriculture Paintings” and came across some artwork by an author named Jean-Francois Millet that I liked.  I looked at a lot of his work and I like this one the best:

Image Credit

It is a very simple painting that depicts a couple in the midst of solemn prayer.  If you look closely, you can see that the gentleman has a digging fork and the lady has a basket.  There are potatoes in the basket as well as strewn around on the ground.  There is a wheel barrow loaded with what appears to be sacks of potatoes that they have already dug.

It is either early in the morning or late in the afternoon by the lighting and this tells you that this peasant couple is hardworking.  I think it is nice that they work side by side.  I would imagine that they talk to one another and share their thoughts all day.  Either they are laboring early or they have put in a long day in harvesting the potato crop.  If you look off in the distance, you can see a tall church steeple.  The steeple prominently shown in the background coupled with the couple’s reverence lets you know that faith was of foremost importance to this couple and this rural community.

I wanted to learn more about the background of the painter and the painting so I visited This Site and This Site.  Jean-Francois Millet was from France and was born in 1814.  If you look at his work, you will see that he painted many depictions of peasant agricultural life.  Many of his paintings feature simple farming folk bent over in work and capture the strong work ethic of a people tied to the land and its produce for their very survival.

The painting I posted above was originally named “Prayer for the Potato Crop.”  The art collector who commissioned the painting didn’t pick it up and Millet renamed the piece, “The Angelus.”  The Angelus refers to the ringing of the church bell at 6:00 am, noon, and 6:00 pm, calling Christian people to prayer.  The bell ringing is interesting to me, because my surname, Sonnier, is French and was the occupational name for a bell ringer (Late Latin sonarius, an agent derivative of sonare ‘to ring’) according to what I learned here.  It may have been an ancestor of mine that was up in the bell tower, overlooking the fields and ringing the bell, calling the couple to prayer – although I would have rather been in the fields!

I think it is important that the peasant couple humbled themselves and recognized that their success and survival was dependent upon the Almighty.  They toiled in a hardscrabble existence and performed manual labor that had been in effect since the Curse of the Ground in Genesis 3:17-18.  They were fervently praying for a bountiful harvest.  You can bet that they were doing the same when they planted the potatoes and worked the fields up until the harvest.  You can’t help but hope that their prayers were answered.

Millet’s painting is a good reminder that we would do well to answer ‘the bell’ and its call to prayer in our daily lives.

Dill or No Dill

In THIS POST from back in March,we showed you how we dried our dill that we grew in the garden.  It was our first successful venture in growing dill and it was a success.  Tricia has used both the fresh and dried dill to make some homemade pickles that fill the shelves in our pantry as well as the fridge.  She also used some of the fresh dill to cook with some carrots.

In order to make sure that we have plenty of dill for next year, I wanted to be absolutely certain that I saved enough seeds.  With the amount of seeds that the dill produces, I didn’t think that was going to be a problem.  Dill blooms in a big cascade of little yellow flowers all over the tops of the plant that contrast against the green plant.

Fresh dill in bloom

Here is a close-up shot:

Each one of those flowers makes an individual seed.  You can see in this photo how the flowering ends and then you can see the swollen part that becomes the seed.

I simply let them dry in the garden on the plant until the plant dies and turns brown.  I check the seed heads each day as I don’t want the seeds to get over-ripe and then shatter on the ground.  Here’s what it looks like when the seeds are completely dry and ready for picking.

All dried out

The dill seeds kind of hang, waiting to be gathered for next years’ crop. 

Dill seed dried and ready to be removed from the stalk

I simply take my fingers and gently rub the seeds and they fall off into a container or into my hand.  The seeds give off such a nice fragrance!  They actually smell a little like licorice.  Some might think that is not a nice scent, but I do.

A handful of dill seed

Just to make sure that the seeds are totally dry, I collect them in a dish and set them on the window sill to dry a little more off the stem.

Further drying on the window sill

We won’t know how good the germination will be until next year, but I always like to save seeds and build my seed inventory.  A bird in the hand beats two in the bush OR Dill Seed in the hand beats thousands on the bush!

Add caption

Other than the photos you see above, I’ve saved lots more dill seed.  So much so that I’ve been wondering what I can do with all this?  Well, other than using dill for making pickles, I learned that you can do the following:

v  Sprinkle dill seeds on top of boiled new potatoes,

v  Use them as a topping for homemade bread similar to what you would do with poppy seeds,

v  Mix dill seeds with butter,

v  Sprinkle them on top of fish dishes,

v  Use dill seeds as a salad topper,

v  Add dill seeds to cooked cabbage,

v  Add them to potato salad or coleslaw.

Finally, I learned that dill seeds can be used as an aid to relieve indigestion if you chew on them.  According to what I read HERE, the conqueror Charlemagne had dill available at his banquet tables so that his guests who over-did it while feasting could benefit from dill’s stomach-healing properties.

We have plenty of dried dill and dill seeds.  That’s a good dill deal, in my book.