The Fall Garden is IN!

I'll post more photos this weekend, but I am pleased to say that the fall garden is all planted.  With the hurricanes and the rigors of work, it is an amazing thing - at one point I didn't even think I would have time to put in a fall garden, but it is done!  Granted, the Back to Eden Gardening method has really made gardening SO much easier.  It is essentially no-till, except for the narrow seedbed I prepare for each row.  Here are some radishes that are popping up out of the ground:

I have about one season of seeds saved in the freezer and some in other safe storage, but as I plant the seeds, I re-order the non-hybrid seed for next year.  One interesting thing that I'm noticing when trying to replenish my seed inventory is seed scarcity.  At several of the seed merchants I patronize, much of their seed is marked OUT OF STOCK.  I was still able to get a few items.

I haven't seen that before.  I figure that the Covid-19 scare has many people purchasing seeds.  Perhaps it is the civil unrest and government uncertainty that has prompted citizens to buy seed inventory until its out of stock.  Whatever the reason, it is a good idea to know how to save seed from your open pollinated seed stock.  I will re-double my efforts to build up my seed inventory this year.

In addition to ordering seeds, I placed my order for the onion sets I normally get (Short Day Sampler).  They'll come in the mail in early January.  I have a nice spot picked out for them.  We had a really good onion crop this past year and I'm looking for more of the same in the upcoming year.

We had a cool front that blew in bringing with it stellar weather.  I can't wait to work in the garden this weekend!

Moving Mulch to the Garden

Well, it's Fall and as we're harvesting the old crops and pulling out the remnants of the old crop to make room for the new, we are moving another 4 or five inch layer of mulch into the garden.  The mulch is a year old now.  The size of the piles have shrunk to half of what they were.  Over time, the decomposition of the wood chips have turned the piles of mulch into havens for earthworms and mushrooms.  Much of it resembles rich, dark, soil.

The layer of mulch does several things:

1) It retains moisture in the soil.  We seldom have to water.  

2) It crowds out weed growth.  We still have to weed, but it is not the chore that it used to be.

3) It becomes part of the soil, adding fertility.

4) It helps with compaction, making the soil easier to work.

We moved the entire pile of wood chips away from the back yard and into the garden,  I scrape back the mulch prior to planting and then work up the soil with a hoe for planting.  Once the plants are big enough, I rake in enough mulch to cover the soil.  These are Contender Green Beans mulched.

Tricia has already spoken with some crews that are chipping a lot of the hurricane tree limb debris about bringing more loads of wood chips to us.  It is a free resource and is a nice way to "import" fertility onto our land.  I'll show some additional photos of the Fall garden this weekend.

I Can't Stop!

A week and a half ago, I had to bring my car to the shop.  While driving to work, I noticed my brakes getting worse and worse.  By the time I got to work, the brake lights were on and I could hardly stop!  I popped the hood, checked the brake fluid and found that the reservoir was completely empty!  I filled it and drove home, but by the time I got home, I had no brakes again.

I noticed brake fluid leaking from under my back tire, so (slowly and carefully) I took it to the shop.  The mechanic asked me if I had hit some debris in the road?  I told him that was likely with all the hurricane debris everywhere.  He replaced both the brake lines in the back that had been torn up.  Good to go!

This morning early I got in my car.  A few miles down the road, I thought I was experiencing deja vu all over again like Yogi Berra said.  No brakes.  I drove very carefully on to work.  It was a strain.  I stayed purposefully well behind other motorists.  I felt as if I might have to pull a "Fred Flintstone" at any moment and use my feet to stop the car.

When it turned daylight, I popped the hood.  No brake fluid!  I climbed under the car to inspect and found that the brand-spanking-new brake line had holes in it and was leaking brake fluid on the pavement.  Well, I did what any redneck would do.  I found a roll of duct tape and taped up the holes read good and re-filled the reservoir with... Automatic Transmission Fluid.  I didn't have any brake fluid at work and didn't want to risk driving around town to get it.  I googled and found that ATF can be used as a replacement for brake fluid.

At quitting time I drove home.  Painstakingly.  Carefully.  About 10 miles down the road on my journey, the fluid leaked out and I had no brakes.  I called Tricia and asked her to meet me at the mechanic's shop as it needed repairs... again!

During the day, I began to think about it.  Something was just not right.  Too coincidental.  And I didn't remember hitting any debris in the road.  Then it hit me.  I recently learned that Belle (our Great Pyrenees livestock guardian dog who enjoys eating our chickens more than guard them), has chewed all the valve stem caps off of my car tires.  Even though she is huge, she enjoys laying under my car.  I always have to check before backing out.  What is she doing under my car?  I couldn't wait to get home to confirm my suspicions!

And there it is.  It was too dark this morning to see it, but there is a big puddle of brake fluid where my car was parked.  Overnight Belle plotted my demise, probably sharpened her teeth with a file and cut through my brake line, intending me great physical harm.  Belle proudly sits beside her handiwork.  Argh!  Belle doesn't know it yet, but she's moving out to the pasture.  This weekend we are going to put her in a spot fenced off from the chickens where she can roam without eating chickens or brake lines.  What else are you gonna do when your dog is trying to kill you?  

Round or Square?

I don't know if you're like us, but we have routines -daily, weekly, monthly and annually.  Routines make us feel comfortable.  We are familiar with the events.  No surprises.  Routines are cyclical.  You can almost set your watch by them.  Normally by this time, we have 100 square bales of hay stacked tightly in the hayloft of our barn that you can see below.  Retrieving the hay from the neighbor's field is hard work and getting it into the loft is even harder.

This year, as it seems, the two months of hurricanes have put a stick in the spokes of our cyclical year routine of putting up hay.  Several years ago we posted THIS POST about getting hay in the barn.  Our neighbors down the road weren't able to get the amount of cuttings in due to the hurricanes and that left their supply of hay woefully short.  It looks like we may not have any square bales this year.

But, as in year's past, we also purchase round bales of hay from another gentleman who lives about four miles north and east of our place.  He has a trailer that fits eight round bales on it.  I email him and as soon as he is able, he hooks up his tractor and delivers the eight bales to our little farm.  We got our first delivery of the season on Wednesday afternoon.

The hay man stacked the hay in a straight row right in front of the gate.  Since I don't have a tractor, this serves a practical purpose.  As soon as the cows are in need of another bale of hay, I'll swing the gate open and roll the first bale out to the hungry cattle.  The grass in the pasture is dwindling and at this time in the growing season, the grass isn't as nutritious as it once was.  The cows will soon need a bale.

We will do our best to protect this hay.  Tomorrow, I will place a tarpaulin over the bales to protect them from getting rained on in order to preserve the quality.

We've learned that a round bale of hay usually lasts about 6 days; however, it will be less this year.  Our two bulls are much larger and will consume more hay quickly.  At the end of December, they both go to the butcher shop.  After that, a hay bale will last longer.

Thirty Years!

He who finds a wife finds a good thing

And obtains favor from the Lord.

Proverbs 18:22

Indeed, I found a good wife!  On October 20, 1990 Tricia and I said our vows before God and man in Corpus Christi, Texas.  Yesterday marked 30 years of marriage!  On Sunday we decided to celebrate early and attend a brunch in nearby Breaux Bridge, Louisiana.  The restaurant was formerly Cafe Des Amis, a favorite of ours, but is now named Cafe Sydnie Mae.  We wanted to try it, but most of all, we wanted to spend some quality time with one another.  It has been a crazy year, punctuated with storms and sickness and tumult, but we'll weather those storms.

Here is my bride in front of the restaurant.

The weather was perfect!  Cafe Sydnie Mae had a jazz band playing on the porch of a house across the street with tables set out on the sidewalk.  We almost opted for sitting there to enjoy the music, but we decided it might be a little too warm, so we sat indoors.  We could still hear the music.

We enjoyed spinach and cheese crawfish dip with tortilla chips for a starter.  Tricia had a shrimp, crawfish, and crabmeat omelet with homemade biscuits and strawberry preserves.  I had shrimp and grits with zydeco green beans as a side dish.  Delicious!

After slowly enjoying the meal and conversation, we strolled down Bridge Street and stopped in at a cafe for coffee.  There were musicians playing cajun french music in the cafe, making for a nice atmosphere.  We walked a couple of blocks toward the Bridge for which the town is named.  It is an old drawbridge over Bayou Teche.  The crawfish on the sign is there to celebrate Breaux Bridge being the Crawfish Capitol of the World.  Breaux Bridge is the gateway to the Atchafalaya Swamp and was settled in 1766 by Acadians after their deportation from Nova Scotia.

The Bayou Teche Visitor's Center sits at the foot of the bridge.  Although closed, we walked down a walkway leading to a shady deck where we relaxed and took in the sights and sounds of the morning.  The muddy waters of the bayou flowed slowly toward the Gulf of Mexico, leaves of live oak trees spinning softly in the current, while minnows swam alongside the bank.  It was nice to sit back, relax, and take in a beautiful view.  We had a simple, but very enjoyable anniversary celebration.

But the most beautiful view was my wife, the Belle of the Bayou.  Her smile lights up my life.

This is the face of a blessed man to have been given such a wonderful wife to spend the last 30 years with.

Happy Anniversary, Tricia!  I Love You.

Curing The Crop

Once the harvest is over, we begin sorting out the sweet potatoes.  Unlike the ones you find in the produce section of your store, there is a wide variety of sizes of sweet potatoes you unearth from the garden.  We like to sort them out and grade them into several categories.  We lay out buckets for the sorting job and then get after it.  We'll take all the HUGE sweet potatoes and put them in one container.  These big ones run the risk of being too stringy or woody to eat.  If we find this is the case, they become chicken feed.

The easiest to sort are the sweet potatoes that are really too small for human consumption.  Or maybe those that got cut in half during harvest.  These go into the bin that will be used as feed for our cattle.  Cows love the sweet potato vines and leaves, and they also love the crunchy sweetness of these.  We will toss a few in their feed buckets and they enjoy them.

The next sort are those that are too big for cattle feed, but are too small for baking.  We'll generally use these for making latkes or oven baked sweet potato fries.

The next sort are those that are pretty much perfect in size.  These will be baked and cut open so that pats of butter can be inserted into the steaming interior.  Delish!

Fortunately, we have a lot of sweet potatoes that are this size.

But it is not wise to bring them in to eat just yet.  First you must cure the sweet potatoes to get the maximum flavor out of your harvest.  Curing is done so that changes occur within the sweet potato in which starches are converted to sugar.  It takes four to eight weeks of hanging.  We generally do this in our garage.  We use typical onion sacks to provide air flow.  During this time, cuts from the harvest caused by shovel nicks heal up.

Coincidentally, these sweet potatoes ought to be at their best flavor around Thanksgiving time!

We have a lot to be thankful for this year!

Harvesting the 2020 Sweet Potato Crop

2020 has been a crazy year.  Things need to get back to normal, and we made a start at doing just that this weekend.  A cool front actually moved in, making the mornings enjoyable.  Low humidity.  Temperatures in the sixties.  Time to do what we normally do in early October - Harvest Sweet Potatoes.

The sweet potatoes would continue growing; however, we need the real estate that the sweet potatoes now occupy to plant carrots, lettuce, beets and turnips.  Look at the jungle below.  Those are sweet potato vines.  The nice thing about them, I always say, is that we never plant them.  They come up on their own every year from one that we composted many years ago.  The gift that keeps on giving.

Now you must be very careful to not cut the sweet potatoes, but I take a shovel and gently turn the soil over, unearthing hundreds of the things.  Nice ones.

The sweet potatoes below are the Beauregard variety.  They were developed in 1987 at LSU.  These were the ones that started it all many years ago.  We bought one of these at the grocery store, ate it and disposed of the remainder in the compost.  It grew and vined across the garden, leaving numerous tubers.  We missed harvesting a few of those and more grew the next year...  And the next...

And these are Golden Wonders.  They are an heirloom variety that Jeff Poppin, the Barefoot Gardner, gave us at a sustainable agriculture conference.  We planted them and they grew.  They are now taking over the garden as well.  Tricia likes the Beauregard variety better.  Next year I'll make an attempt to weed out some of the Golden Wonders to leave room for more Beauregards.

Generally, I start pulling up vines and the cows come running.  People tell me cows aren't smart, but I tell you, they remember sweet potato harvest.  The leaves and vines must be as delicious as the potatoes, because the cows love them.

The vines usually grow from a single tuber, but they send down roots at various places and generate more sweet potatoes.  The one old sweet potato can yield many, many sweet potatoes.  Below you can see where it all started.

When you pull one up like this, it is a HUGE sweet potato!  Most of the time, it is too woody, or stringy to eat, but we give it a try.  If it is bad, the cows are chickens have less discriminating taste buds than we do!

Digging up sweet potatoes is a big job.  We've turned over a big chunk of the garden with a shovel.  Over the next week, we'll plant this land with carrots, lettuce, beets, turnips, among other things.  Then we will apply a four inch coating of mulch.

We are finding that using the Back to Eden gardening method, the mulch is improving the soil.  Hopefully soon, we won't have to turn over the soil to harvest.  Instead, we'll simply pull the sweet potatoes from the soil by our hands.  Tomorrow, I'll show you the next step in the sweet potato harvest.

We're Back! Again - Safe and Secure

First, Hurricane Laura.  Next, Hurricane Delta.  Two powerful storms coming ashore 12 miles apart from one another such a short time apart.  Really quite amazing when you think about it.  We are safe and sound.  Another stint of no power, but a friend let us borrow a generator.  At night we would turn it on to power our refrigerator, a deep freeze, and an oscillating fan so that we could sleep comfortably.  Electricity came back on for us a little quicker than it did for Laura.  Our neighbors still don't have power.  Our hats go out to all the linemen working so hard to restore power.

We weathered the storm in our home.  Tricia, Russ, Benjamin and I rode it out and prayed.  The electricity went out at about 6pm.  This time the storm passed in daylight hours and you could see the ravaging winds.  It was better to SEE instead of just hear what was going on.  We prayed for the storm to pass through quickly.  The Weather Channel was here in our small town.

Russ had a large tree fall on top of his house in the last storm and had a blue tarp on his roof when this one came through.  I could tell he was worried.  When the eye was above us, it became very still and quiet.  We quickly went to the truck and decided to try to make the 10 minute drive to check on his home while still in the eye before the back end of the storm hit us.  We left and had to turn around because of downed powerlines and poles blocking the highway.

We turned around and drove through high water to find another open route to his home.  We ALMOST made it before things got rough again.  We were glad to make it to shelter in his home for the last part of the storm.  We re-positioned buckets in his house to catch rainwater falling into three rooms in his house.  The next day we put a new tarp up on the roof.  

For several days, we cooked on a Coleman stove you can see on the patio table above.  We also ate some MRE's and food donated by some gracious ministries distributing aid around our town.  Samaritan's Purse was here in Jennings along with many other fine folks, helping in peoples' time of need.  All in all, even though Delta zeroed in on us in Jennings, we felt like the winds were stronger in Laura.

We had no damage to our home once again.  Praise God!  When this storm was coming in, I remarked to my wife that we probably wouldn't have any limbs down since Laura had "pruned" the weak limbs, leaving only the strong.  My theory proved to be incorrect.  We had quite a few limbs down, though not as much as in the first storm.  The entire yard had broken branches strewn about, and it took the better part of a day to drag them all to the pasture.

The cows and goats took full advantage of the buffet of fresh live oak leaves we placed before them!  They quickly devoured and defoliated the branches while we drug new branches in like the next course to a meal.  

Here they are in action from a different angle.  We will have a nice bonfire once things dry out a bit.

The next morning I had to drive in to work to check on the facility.  There were countless 18 wheelers and campers turned on their sides on I-10, including four 18 wheelers turned over on the Calcasieu River Bridge in Lake Charles.  Though out of power, things were okay at work.

Our neighbors called and checked on us during the storm.  They had windows that were being busted out of the frames to their patio by the strong easterly winds.  We talked to them more after the storm.  They took some serious damage to their barn, losing a total of 230 month-old chicks they were rasing to the storm!  Although there was lots of damage, people are safe.  People are thankful that the damage wasn't worse than it was.  People are thankful to have their families, friends and neighbors out of harm's way.  God is good!  Thanks for your prayers and concern.  We will be back Sunday night.

Here We Go Again! (I May Be Silent For a Bit)

As Yogi Berra once said, "It's Deja Vu all over again!"  Hurricane Delta will make landfall in almost the same path as Hurricane Delta did in late August.  We were just starting to see things get back to normal.  We're expecting wind speeds in excess of 110 mph.  

Our Maker's Acres Family Farm will be battening down the hatches.  We will go 'radio silent' for a while, but we'll be back.  See ya soon, God willing...

The Burn Pile - Hurricane Laura Edition

A full month and a week after the hurricane, I had a Saturday off where I could take care of some things that sorely needed some action.  We don't live in town so we don't have curbside pickup of trees and debris.  Or so we thought.  Tricia got word that they would be picking up limbs and storm debris for rural citizens.  We burned a whole bunch of limbs and sticks in the pasture, but we still had a bunch left.  Tricia and the boys had stacked a huge pile by the road in anticipation of the truck to come pick it up.  We waited and waited and waited, but it the truck never came.

Finally, we gave up hope.  I figured I would do it myself.  I backed up our truck to the pile and slowly gathered the debris into the bed.  I took the photo below after I had already picked up about half of the pile.  It took a long time.  I started around 9:30 and finished at 3:30. 

Despite not having roadside pickup of debris, I am still grateful to live in the country.  So many neighbors waved while passing by.  Others stopped to talk.  Just friendly country folk.  One neighbor rolled down her window to let me know she had just stopped by and put a bag of oranges and two bags of grapes "just to bless us."  I wouldn't trade simple, country living for anything.

It was such a beautiful day, I didn't mind working.  Not one bit.  I wish I had counted the number of truckloads I took to the back for burning.  Slowly, I began to put a dent in the pile.

Before too long, I was done!  The grass under the pile was dead from being covered by branches and leaves for a month, but it will grow back.

After the second load to the back, I set the pile on fire.  Despite being a little green, the fire roared, quickly consuming the leaves and branches.  Each time I would bring another truckload of sticks and limbs, I would dump it onto the fire and the flames would reach back up to the sky.

As the pile in the front of the house by the road got smaller, so did the pile in back of the house as a result of the insatiable appetite of the fire.  Pay attention to the Rubbermaid water trough lying on its side in the background behind the fire.  It becomes a central character in the rest of the story.

The nosy animals came to check out the happenings.  Each time I would open the gate to back the pickup truck in and unload yet another load onto the fire, the cows and goats would gather at the gate.  I had to be real careful to quickly close the gate or they would get out.  Sometimes the cows would sit right in the path of the truck, and I would have to honk the horn to get them to move.  Pay particular attention to the head of the bull in the bottom right-hand side of the photo below.  He plays another leading role in the story that follows.

On Saturday afternoon, the job was done.  I was tired, but happy. It is rewarding to finish a job of an honest day's work and see the fruits of your labors.  The fire burned all Saturday night.  By Sunday afternoon, all that remained of the pile was a heap of smoldering coals.  

Sunday night at 10PM I was turning off the lights to go to bed.  Something didn't seem right.  I looked out of the french doors and saw a huge fire in the pasture.  It looked like the barn might be on fire!  I yelled to Benjamin to meet me outside.  We both ran out in time to see flames leaping 15 feet into the air.  When I determined that it was NOT the barn afire, I thought it may be a ruptured gas pipeline.  It was burning with such vigor.

As we ran closer, we were able to identify that it was the Rubbermaid trough burning.  And boy, did it burn!  There was nothing we could do but stand and watch it as the flames lit up the surrounding area and thick black smoke filled the air.  We determined what happened.  Bulls, as they are apt to do, like to push and rub on things with their heads.  The empty trough is used as a feeding trough.  The other two catch rainwater off the roof for drinking.  The bulls had pushed the empty trough into the smoldering coals and it caught on fire.

Now we'll have to find another bucket to use as a feeding trough come feeding time!  Good news: the burn pile was gone.  Bad news: So is our feeding trough.  Oh well, it could always be worse.

  

Harvested a Few Peanuts This Weekend

A couple months ago I shared the photo below of the peanut plants flowering.  It is a bright yellow pretty flower a little smaller than a sweet pea flower, but very similar in appearance.

Back in August, the row of peanuts looked like this in the photo below.  They are being encroached upon by the black-eyed peas, but peanuts are hardy plants.  I knew they would hold their own.

Fast-forward to October...

Part of the plan this weekend was to harvest some items to make room to put in more of the fall/winter crops.  I got busy with another item that took most of the morning, so I didn't get to harvest any sweet potatoes.  I did, however, harvest some peanuts that I had growing on a row to the south of the black-eyed peas.

It wasn't a huge harvest, but I didn't have a huge amount planted.  I had saved some peanuts from a harvest a couple of years ago.  I wasn't sure if they would germinate or not, but put some in the ground and lo and behold, they grew.  We pulled them from the ground and tossed them over the trellis that will hold the sugar snap peas.  Those, by the way, have sprouted and will climbing on the trellis in about two weeks.  In the meantime, the peanuts will dry out on the empty trellis.

Peanuts, once they bloom, send down pegs into the ground.  On each of these pegs is an embryo and a peanut will form and grow until maturity, each pod holding 3 or 4 or 5 peanuts.

We will allow them to dry on the trellis, then we'll roast them in the oven and eat them.  I'm thinking that perhaps we'll make some homemade peanut butter like we did many years ago.  That was really good.  We experimented and made chocolate peanut butter and cinnamon peanut butter.

Although the crop wasn't exceedingly large, we didn't plant many, and we'll enjoy the ones we harvested nonetheless.  We'll be planting something else in the ground that the peanuts occupied - probably mustard greens, lettuce, or radishes.

Doing What We Shouldn't Do

Our puppy, Belle, is growing into a huge dog.  She's a Great Pyrenees.  Centuries ago, Great Pyrenees were bred to be livestock guardian dogs in the Pyrenees Mountains between France and Spain.  These dogs looked after sheep and protected them from predators.  A noble pursuit, but it is kind of a pretentious name for a dog.  I am a GREAT Pyrenees.  Sounds like Belle needs some humility.  Here she is atop her own diorama of the Pyrenees Mountain at our house.  It's actually a pile of wood chips, but she doesn't know any better.

On Saturday, I let Belle roam in the pasture to look after her charge of cattle, goats and chickens.  She ran around the perimeter, sizing up the lay of the land, walking around the boundaries and observing potential threats.  Good girl, I thought.  I began to work on a project and would check on her from time to time throughout the afternoon.

At one particular point I found her sitting under a tree with her big front paws outstretched.  A big, fat hen was in front of her in the throes of death.  Belle sat proudly, with a blanket of feathers around her.  Bad girl!  How could this be?  A dog with the instincts of guarding animals within her DNA becomes the predator.  Like the proverbial fox in the hen house.  I took her out of the pasture, disappointed and a little angry.

As I took time to reflect, I calmed down and realized that this was a parable of sorts taking place.  We are like the Great Pyrenees.  Almighty God had great plans for us.  We were made in His image and likeness to to great things.  We failed.  Despite having DNA equipping us to do our purpose, Adam fell and likewise we fell. 

Despite having great intentions of doing good and being righteous, even, we end up finding our selves surrounded by a blanket of feathers.  Feathers of destructive words that come out of our mouths, vile thoughts in our minds, vicious deeds we do to others, amongst many other examples.  

Like Belle, we're "puppies."  We have some growing up to do.  We lose our way, revert to our past, and disappoint our Master.  As a believer, I thank God that He doesn't give up on me.  As we'll work with Belle, He'll work with us, instructing us in the ways He'd have us walk, through reading His Word, Prayer, and conviction of the Holy Spirit.  We're in South Louisiana, barely above sea level, far away from the "Pyrenees Mountains" of Belle's ancestry.  But one day, we'll once again walk on mountaintops.    

The Lord God is my strength, and he will make my feet like hinds' feet, and he will make me to walk upon mine high places. Habakkuk 3:19