A Very Lucky Snapping Turtle

Someone at work asked me if I ate snapping turtles last week.  I said, "sure."  He told me there was a big one in the ditch right outside the shop.  It has been raining non-stop for two weeks now, so all the ditches are flooded with water.  I walked outside and grabbed a big stick and walked to the ditch.  There was the old snapping turtle on the bottom of the ditch.  The clear rainwater made the snapper easy to see.

I used the stick to pry him off the bottom and slid him up and out of the water.  He was pretty mad and started snapping at the stick with his 'beak-like' mouth.  I was careful to keep my distance as old-timers say that if they bite you, they don't let go until it thunders or lightning strikes.  I wasn't going to test out that theory.

I remembered back when I was farming, I had lots of experience in catching snapping turtles.  Prior to planting rice we would water level all the rice fields.  The best way to describe this practice is to say that it involves dragging a big blade behind a big tractor in a flooded field.  The blade pulls the mud up and rolls it over, turning the mud into a slurry that is pulled round and round in the field.  You do your best to pull the high spots into the low.  Gravity levels the mud so that the portion of field you are in is level and would accept a flood with no high spots.  Kind of hard to explain.

Anyway, this would inevitably unearth big turtles.  You could see them swimming in the water and we would get out of the tractor, wade through the water and grab the turtles by the tail.  I'd bring them into the cab of the tractor and put them on the floor.  Man, would they stink!  Turtles have the ability to emit and nasty smell.  At the end of the day, we'd put them in the back of the truck and bring them to a cousin's house.  You could hear the turtles rustling underneath a bunch of Dr. Pepper cans.  We'd put them in an old freezer in the yard where they would wait until we had gathered enough turtles to eat.  A big turtle sauce piquante (turtle meat cooked in a spicy red gravy) would be cooked and we'd eat it for lunch.  Delicious!  It has been a while since I've eaten turtle sauce piquant.

I was thinking about bringing him home and cooking him, but this is no country turtle.  We work right near a bunch of big chemical plants and that is where this turtle was found.  These turtles can live to be 100 years old.  I have no idea what type of toxins are in his meat and didn't want to take the chance in eating him.  Besides, he's really stink up my car if I tried to take him home.  So, I used the stick to push the old fella back in the ditch instead of taking him home to eat.  He's a lucky turtle!

Treating Hoof Rot on Annie, The Nubian Goat

We started noticing that Annie, our Nubian dairy goat was limping.  After closer inspection, we could smell a powerful stench.  Yep, you guessed it, foot rot.  Foot rot is a condition that goats and cows get between their hooves.  It is caused by bacteria and high temperatures and humidity causes the skin between the hooves to crack and then the bacteria infect the foot.  Moist, warm conditions make a perfect environment for the bacteria to grow and that is exactly what we have.  Hoof rot makes the animal feel really bad.  They stop walking and spend a lot of time sitting down because their feet hurt.  Therefore they don't eat and become skinny and sickly.

Annie exhibited all of these symptoms and ALL of her feet were infected.  Tricia was very concerned about her.  We quarantined her in the barn as we didn't want her out walking in the ankle deep mud.  Tricia brought clippers out to the barn and began clipping privet and other browse from the woods in back to feed her.  At first she wasn't eating very much.  We drenched her with a molasses/water solution to get her rumen active.  Then we mixed up a 10% solution of copper sulfate with water along with two tablespoons of apple cider vinegar and gave her foot baths for 10-15 minutes a night.  The ACV is supposed to increase absorption.

There is likely a much easier way to give the foot baths, but we normally choose the most difficult way, unfortunately.  Tricia mixed up the copper sulfate solution with apple cider vinegar and poured it into a yogurt container.  Then we put her in the goat stanchion and hobbled her legs to the side with a lead rope. 

• Yes, she kicked a lot and carried on, but we dunked her feet in the cup of copper sulfate solution and held her feet submerged in the solution for between 10 - 15 minutes.  Opportunistic mosquitoes swarmed and bit us menacingly as we held her feed down with both hands.  Unable to swat the mosquitoes, we resorted to blowing them off of each other as sweat trickled down our noses.  Each night we repeated the process, but on different feet.  All this for a smelly goat.  You've GOAT to be kidding me, right?

Each night we would trudge out to the barn and repeat the process and we'd sprinkle lime down on the floor of the barn.  Over the course of 3-4 days, we're seeing great results!  Annie's feet don't have a foul odor any longer, she's no longer limping and she's begun eating again with great vigor and is even being bossy again to Oreo, our La Mancha goat.  Thank God Annie is back to her normal self again.

A Barren Wasteland

Most of our pasture has lush, green grass.  The cows and goats and chickens roam on it and forage.  Summer rainfall has given the animals plenty of grass to eat on and I'm thankful for that.

The photo above me, while it shows the majority of the pasture are like John Conlee's "Rose Colored Glasses" that "show only the beauty, 'cause they hide all the truth!"  When I turn around and take a photo behind me, here's what you see:

A barren wasteland!  This area had a thick cover of bermuda-bahai grass mix a couple of years ago.  Then things changed.  We burned numerous bonfires in this area that killed a portion of grass.  Then the 100 or so chickens we have roaming on the land began scratching, making their dust baths, and plucking out every single blade of grass from the ground. 

I truly want to reclaim this area to the grassy area it once was.  Barren soil is unnatural and unhealthy.  In fact, if you look at nature, it hardly ever occurs unless something is out of balance.  Even forest floors are covered with leaves, rotting logs, and understory.  It is time to try to get grass growing here again and I know just where to find the grass to plant - IN MY GARDEN!

Bermuda grass is a wonderful thing in the pasture!  It is a horrible week in the garden.  It spreads out its rhizomes and will quickly cover the garden.  That is exactly what I'm hoping it will do to my barren wasteland.  You can see the thick bermuda on the edge of the garden in the photo below:

The abundant rain in the past few days allowed me to get in the garden on Saturday and pull up 3 full 5 gallon buckets of bermuda sprigs with all roots attached.  I packed the buckets full and tight to ensure that I had as much bermuda grass as possible.

Then I walked out to the barren wasteland with the buckets and a shovel and I began to make long trenches with the shovel and began to "sprig" the bermuda into the trenches.  I quickly covered the roots and the rain began falling.

I think I made a pretty good start.  Hopefully the grass will take and will begin stretching its rhizomes out and covering the barren soil.  To give the grass a little breathing room, I erected an electrified net all around it to keep the chickens out while the grass gets a head start.

Hopefully, I'll be able to report that the grass has made a foothold and then we can expand from there and make the area around the barn and hen house lush and green instead of barren and brown.

Priceless Art

In This Wall Street Journal Article, I read with great interest about a priceless piece of art that had been lost for decades.

Leonardo da Vinci's painting of Christ, Salvatore Mundi, "Savior of the World," was auctioned last year for a record-setting $450.3 million dollars!  Wow.  That is a lot of money.  The amazing part of the story, though, is where it had been.  The quotes below are excerpted from the WSJ Article:

Susan Hendry Tureau, a 70-year-old retired library technician in Baton Rouge, La., only last week learned that a painting her father, Basil Clovis Hendry Sr., had owned was reauthenticated as a da Vinci. She said he acquired the painting after she and her siblings were adults and no longer living with him. Her brother and her niece remember seeing it hanging in the plantation-style Baton Rouge home of her father, who owned a local sheet-metal company, she said. Ms. Hendry Tureau remembers a number of religious-themed paintings at her father’s house, though not specifically the da Vinci. 

“We can’t believe it, that such an incredible piece could have been in our family and we didn’t even know it all this time,” Ms. Hendry Tureau said. “It just sort of brings me alive.”

Ms. Hendry Tureau said her father, who died in June 2004, inherited artworks after the 1987 death of his aunt, Minnie Stanfill Kuntz. The aunt’s husband, Warren E. Kuntz, ran a furniture business in New Orleans and died in 1968. Ms. Hendry Tureau said her great aunt and great uncle often traveled to Europe, and purchased art and antiques for their collection while abroad.

While in Europe, the Kuntz' purchased Salvatore Mundi for $120!  After Kuntz' death, the piece of art was valued at $750 and sold it.  It was then restored by the purchasers and authenticated to be a da Vinci painting and sold to the Saudi Crown Prince for $450.3 million dollars!  To think that this thing hung on the walls of a family home an hour and a half away from here is amazing.

Image Credit

Now, I certainly don't want to come across as being pretentious, but as I walked around our house, I discovered that we have some priceless art hanging on our walls too.  I'll share a peek of our gallery with you:

If Christie's or Sotheby's auction house comes calling, I've already authenticated the valuable paintings to be masterpieces that our kids painted when they were younger and... they ain't for sale!

It Rained So Much, It Broke Our Rain Gauge!

He provides rain for the earth; he sends water on the countryside.  Job 5:10

September has been the wettest month this year and it isn't even close.  It rains every single day.  I really wanted to get some gardening done this weekend, but the stormy skies did not cooperate.  I was unable to work up and land or do any planting.  Perhaps tomorrow or the next day, Ill show you what I was able to do.  I couldn't even tell how much it rained as my rain gauge has waved the white flag and surrendered.  Here is what the old rain gauge looks like:

Not gonna catch much rain water like this.

I had to estimate the rainfall for the day.  We try to keep real accurate records to compare year over year rainfall and monthly rainfall totals.  I figured it was high time to get a new rain gauge.  During my lunch break on Friday, I visited Tractor Supply Company and found a bigger rain gauge for only $3.16!                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     

The holes on the rain gauge where the mounting screws were positioned is a hair outside the width of the 4x4 post that I want to mount it on.  I fixed that issue by mounting a couple 1x4s to the post and it made a nice area to mount it on.

I only have one slight improvement that I'll make to the rain gauge.  Many times while it is raining I like to see how much it has rained so far.  I think that by painting the 1x4s that the rain gauge is mounted on a darker color, it will be easier to read the rainfall amount.

Insurance - Sometimes A Gardener Needs It

Back on August 6th I planted our cole crops.  Several varieties of cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, and brussels sprouts were carefully planted in seed pots filled with seed starting mix.  Over the next month or so I've babied them, dutifully watering them and then two weeks ago, Russ and it planted them in the garden.

And then the rain started falling which has not let up.  In conjunction with the rain a plague of bugs like you've never seen descended upon us and the already sickly plants due to the rains were ravaged by bugs and/or worms.

Not looking good

These are a little taller than the first, but you can see the holes where the bugs and/or worms are snacking on the tender young cabbage leaves.

After a real big rain today, I walked in the garden and tried to locate the plants.  I found a few, but many had succumbed to the rain and soggy ground and bug pressure. 

Over the years I've used the practices of composting, hugelkultur, and adding topsoil and it has built up the level of the soil.  You can see how much higher the garden is than the land just to the west of the garden.  The land slopes from east to west.  Even though the garden area is higher than the surrounding areas, the soil is still saturated.  When the sun comes out, it scalds the plants and makes them sick and die.

I love to plant seeds and watch the 'dead' seed germinate and grow.  I never get tired of watching this miracle in action.  I especially like to eat the fresh vegetables that come from those tiny seeds.  I like to also plant open pollinated seeds and save the seeds that those plants eventually produce.  This year, with the many cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower and brussel sprout seedlings I planted now either dead or sickly, I don't know how many plants will actually survive.  So, I had to purchase a little "insurance."  I drove down to the local hardware store on my lunch break and bought some plants to take the place of the ones that are dead or ailing.

I will take care of them here on the back patio while the saturated soil dries out a little.

Then once the soil dries, I'll plant them in the garden.  Sometimes things don't always go as planned.  Weather, bugs, crop failure...  All things that just happen despite the best of intentions and best laid plans.  C'est la vie!  We keep moving forward.  Good weather is right around the corner.

Brightening Up the Garden

In one of my old jobs, I drove down a road called Tank Farm Road to get to work.  There was a house with a small vegetable garden that I would always admire because they always planted a thick row of zinnias.  The zinnias would grow tall and fall all over each other, but the beautiful colors caught your eye, from reds, to pinks, yellows, oranges, white, and purple.

I'm a vegetable gardener first and foremost, but this year, I mixed things up a bit and planted sunflowers in the garden.  I didn't want to take up room on the garden for flowers, so I planted zinnias in the holes in the cinder blocks that line the ditch that runs on the northern edge of the garden.  Here is a look:

Red!

White!

Pink!

There's only one problem.  I filled the holes in the cinder blocks with soil, but it tends to dry out quickly when it doesn't rain (or if I don't water them) and the zinnias wilt and fade.  They didn't exactly thrive like the garden I admired that I spoke of earlier.

I plan on saving the seeds from the zinnias and I do indeed plan on planting them again next year, but I'll make room for them in the garden next year so that they can really thrive in the deep, rich soil. 

Our Trip to Aggie Land

My beautiful bride is a graduate of the Texas A&M University Fightin' Texas Aggie Class of '88.  This past weekend we had the boys take care of milking the cows and goats and collecting eggs and picking okra and we made a trip to College Station, Texas, back to Tricia's Alma Mater.  We arrived Friday night a little after 10 pm and headed for campus.  We parked in front of A&M's new stadium.

Honestly, I think Tricia married me because of my name.  A&M's stadium is called Kyle Field, but remarkably, the stadium isn't named after me.  12thman.com says:

"Kyle Field was named for Edwin Jackson Kyle, who served as Texas A&M's dean of agriculture and athletic council president. Kyle donated a 400-by-400 foot area of the southern edge of campus that had been assigned to him for horticultural experiments."

So here I am:

We accompanied thousands of students and fans who assembled themselves inside Kyle Field at midnight on Friday night for Midnight Yell Practice. 

Aggies don't cheer - they yell and they practice different yells as they are led by the Yell Leaders.  Hand signals are passed back and all the students take part in "Farmer's Fight" or other such yells.  The band then played the Aggie War Hymn and everyone sways and sings about 'sawing Varsity's horns off."  It is about their arch-rival, the University of Texas, that they call TU.

Tricia sat in front of the 'fish pond' that is located right in front of Sbisa Dining Hall where Tricia ate when she was in college. 

I took a photo of Tricia in front of a large Aggie Ring.  Below it is a plaque with the Aggie Code of Honor: "An Aggie does not lie, cheat or steal, nor tolerate those who do."  Tricia is wearing her class ring.  She didn't always live by the Aggie Code of Honor, because she did steal my heart.  Ha Ha!

As we were walking to watch the Corps step off, we ran into a couple (The Browns) that we attended church with at Second Baptist Church in Houston and hadn't seen in 25 years.  Bryant's dad was a rice farmer in Dayton, Texas, so we had a lot in common.  It was nice to visit with them and catch up.

We stood by the Corps Dorms and watched all of the units step out and then watched the band march on the way to the stadium.  I tried to get a photo of Reveille, A&M's collie mascot, but I was not fast enough with my camera phone.

Here is Tricia in front of Kyle Field.  It is a state of the art, brand-spanking new stadium that cost $450 million dollars to build.  Texas A&M has an undergraduate enrollment of 53,065 and has the second largest undergrad enrollment in the country.

Finally, here we are at the end of the day in front of the stadium with the corps and the fans in the background.

We had a great time and it was nice to see the smile on my wife's face as she strolled down memory lane.

It is Time to Collect Wild Persimmons!

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; - Ecclesiastes 3:1-2

The passage of time is marked by things that the Creator made that arrive and depart like clockwork - Clockwork more sophisticated, precise and accurately made than the finest Swiss craftsman could ever hope to create.  If you are observant, you can pick these things out.  As the tired long days of summer play out each year in late August and early September, if you glance upward you can see golf-ball sized, golden-orange fruit dangling from the limbs of our wild persimmon tree.

They dangle there, heavy and sickly sweet until the appointed time at which they fall.  Some hit the ground and burst spilling the flesh onto the freshly mown grass.  Some fall intact, but are eaten up by blue jays, blackbirds and crows.  If we are diligent and get out to the side yard with a bucket, we are able to scavenge the fruit that the fall and birds hadn't ruined.  Each day we try to get out and harvest the persimmons.  This tree is a wild persimmon tree, probably planted by birds.  Ever since we moved here in 2001, we've enjoyed its fruit.

Many people wouldn't bother as there are many big seeds in the little fruit.  However, we like the flavor.  It is a lot of work to process the wild persimmon flesh.  The best way we've found to do it is to press the flesh through a sieve placed over a glass bowl.  The flesh oozes through the sieve, while the large seeds and skin remains behind in the sieve.  It is slow work.  Once you work your way through it, you turn the sieve over and scrape the remaining persimmon flesh that is stuck to the sieve into the glass bowl.

The seeds and skins can be composted, but be ready.  I've never seen a seed that has a higher germination rate than wild persimmons.  Well, maybe the Chinese tallow tree's germination rate is higher.

The persimmon flesh in the bowl is clean and ready to be packaged and frozen for later use.

Our favorite thing to do with the wild persimmon we process is to make persimmon cake.  The recipe Tricia uses calls for 1 and 1/2 cups of processed persimmon so we package that amount in zip loc bags and freeze them.  That way, we can look in the freezer and ask, "How many future 'persimmon cakes' do we have in the freezer?"

Right now we have 12. My goal is 'just a few more'...

All Creatures Great and Small (and Medium Sized, too!)

I always have loved the James Herriot book, "All Creatures Great and Small."  I highly recommend it.  It is one of those books that you must read again and again.  James Herriot was a Yorkshire country veterinarian from the 1930's.  His book is funny, interesting, and inciteful.  One of the stories I recall is from Chapter 36 in which Herriot goes to work on the dairy cow of a poor farmer.  The cow has mastitis and is very sick.  Her fever is high and it is clear that things look bleak.  Herriot compassionately tells the farmer that he doesn't think the poor cow is going to make it and that maybe he should put her down so that she doesn't suffer any more.

The farmer told Dr. Herriot that the cow was the most valuable thing he had left and he was not ready to give up on her yet. He told Dr. Herriot to come back in the morning.  The farmer got a bench and sat down and commenced to milking, massaging the swollen, hard infected udder, and stripping the black, clumpy infection out of the cow.  When Dr. Herriot arrived in the morning, he found the farmer had stayed up all night to save his cow.  The farmer was exhausted, but the cow was feeling better and survived!

I tell you that because yesterday afternoon I went to the barn to milk Luna and found this!:

As seen above her two quarters on the left side were super swollen, sensitive and hard as a rock.  This was so bizarre as I had milked her out the day before and all was fine.  Mastitis is serious and things can "go south" quickly.  Here is a front shot of the udder.  If you would touch it, it was hard and tight.  When you touched it, she would kick.  She was not happy and neither were we!  In fact, she wasn't eating her dairy ration.  That is very strange for her.

We took her rectal temperature with a thermometer and found it to be 101.4.  That is fine for a cow.  So perhaps we caught this early.  By this time it was approaching 8 o'clock, so we came in and checked the fridge where we have antibiotics.  All of them were expired except for one.  The one medicine that wasn't expired is not labeled for use in dairy animals.  We had some injections that you inject directly up into the teat, but they were all expired, too.  Not good.

"I'm hot blooded, check it and see..."

We decided to roll the dice.  We'd do what James Herriot's poor farmer did and massage and milk the infection out.  Starting at 9 pm and continuing at 10 and 11, we went out to the barn hourly, milking her out.  We also heated up water and made hot compresses to put on the udder.  We didn't stay up ALL night long, but at 5 am, Tricia was out at the barn again and all through the morning, massaging...

Rubbing and milking...  An odd, opaque liquid came out that wasn't milk.  By the morning, though, the swelling was coming down and she was starting to pick at her food.  Tricia continued to work with her throughout the day, giving her molasses and then let her out of the barn to eat grass.

By the evening, the swelling was done considerably.  Still no fever.  Her appetite wasn't back to normal, but she was eating.  She was still super-sensitive on the front quarter.  After repeated massaging and stripping, we were successful in getting streams of infected material to begin emptying.

Eliminating this nastiness, like the farmer in Herriot's book, will make Luna feel better and save her.

While she is still not 'out of the woods yet, she is making great strides.  We've contacted our veterinarian and will use penicillin if she takes a turn for the worse, but for now, the regimen described in Herriot's book is working!  Speaking of working, I'm headed back out to the barn now to check on Luna and see if I can get some more infection out of her front quarter.