2021 Rainfall - By The Numbers

I've been running a little behind in the thing we normally compile in January, and that's the accounting of rainfall totals and egg production on Our Maker's Acres Family Farm for the previous year.  Tricia and I were talking about the fact that by midnight tomorrow, 1/12th of the year is already gone.  How can that be?  2021 was a year that will be remembered for Covid lockdowns.  You know what wasn't affected by the Covid Lock-down?  Rainfall and Egg Production.  The rain kept on falling.  The hens kept on laying.

Each day we keep detailed records of rainfall, egg production, and milk production.  It's very OCD, I know, but it is interesting to see trends year over year.  Yes, it can be a pain and very tedious doing this, but it keeps me off the streets and out of trouble (for the most part).  I follow a blogger from Florida that blogs about composting and gardening tips.  He and his family WEIGH all the produce he produces in his garden and posts the total each year.  It is in the thousands of pounds.  Maybe we'll do that?  Maybe not.

Let's take a look at total rainfall by month for 2021:

You'll note that we accumulated 66.6 inches of rainfall in 2021.  That was up 6.64 inches over last year.  The month with the most inches of rainfall was May.  The lowest was November.  The wettest and driest months of the year were totally different from last year as well as they were January and March, respectively.

As I look over the monthly rain logs, I see that it did not rain on the 30th day of any month in 2021.  Interesting.  We'll plan our picnics on the 30th in 2022.  January is already keeping the streak alive.  It did not rain today.

Now let's take a look at our compilation of 9 years worth of rainfall data:

You'll note that over 9 years, we are averaging 66.91 inches of rainfall or 5.58 feet of rainfall per year.  In 2021, we nailed the average.  On average, in our 9 year data collection period, the month of May is the wettest and the driest is November.  In 9 years, we've collected 602 inches of rainfall or 50 feet of rain.  At Our Maker's Acres Family Farm, we wish you showers of blessing in 2022!

2021 Meat Birds - Week Seven

Thursday afternoon and it is time to weigh the meat birds.  It has been a rough week for them, I think.  It has been on the colder side and I think, despite the heat lamps, they've burned a lot of calories staying warm versus directing that energy to growth.  We'll see what the weight shows at the end of the post.

As you'll notice in the photo below, we've started the chicken tractor on its journey back south.  Once it gets past the live oak, we'll turn it due east.  Next Saturday, it will be right where we need it to be for butchering.  Nine more days to go!  One other thing to notice, the 5 gallon buckets are filled with rain water that we catch off of the roof in catchment barrels.  The bucket stacked atop the orange one gravity feeds into the bell waterer in the tractor.  Some days those chickens will drink 15 gallons of water.  It is amazing, really.

Today, we thought we'd do something a little different.  Normally, we just pick up the first bird we can grab.  Today, I thought I'd pick the first rooster and the first hen to get a wider representative sample of weights, as we know roosters grow bigger, faster.  You can tell it is a rooster because of the bigger comb on top of his head and the wattle beneath his neck.  Here is the rooster:

Up on top of the scale, and he weighs...  4 pounds 15 ounces.

And here is the hen.  You can see a much less pronounced comb and wattle.

And she weighs... 4 pounds 14 ounces.  Surprisingly, they are approximately the same weight!

Sadly, though, they are the exact same weight as last week!  No weight gain.  How can that be?  I have a couple of theories.  One is the item I mentioned in the first paragraph.  In the cold weather, their calories were expended keeping warm versus growing.  However, I think the bigger issue is that I'm noticing once I went back to the chicken tractor and surveyed the flock, while most look about the same, there is not exact uniformity in size.  Naturally, the more aggressive, dominant, bigger birds were the ones in past weeks that would come closer to me (as they expected food) and those were the ones I selected for weighing.  When I wanted to purposefully pick out a hen and a rooster, I picked a more representative sample.  We are shooting for a 6 pound bird in 9 days, and I still think we'll get there.

Last week the bird weighed 4 pounds 15 ounces and this week they weighed roughly the same.  Here are the weights at this stage in prior years:

*Week 7 2021: 4 pounds 5 ounces

*Week 7 2019:  5 pounds 9 ounces

*Week 7 2018: 5 pounds 15 ounces

*Week 7 2017:  4 pounds 1 ounce 

*Week 7 2016:  5 pounds 14 ounces 

*Week 7 2015:  3 pounds 9 ounces

Next Thursday is the final weigh in.  We'll see you as we document their final weigh day.

I Only Have Eyes For You

I was struggling on the title of today's post, but remembered that cool song by the Flamingos, "I only have eyes for you."  That has to be it, I thought.  A friend from church sent us a funny text that said, "Don't tell secrets in the garden.  The Potatoes have eyes, the corn has ears, and the beanstalk!"

We try to plant our potatoes around Valentine's Day each year.  That means you have to get busy beforehand.  I asked Tricia to go by the feed store and pick up 8 pounds of seed potatoes.  We like the LaSoda variety as it seems to do well in our growing zone.  Well, Tricia forgot.  When she went the next day, the feed store was already out!  The early bird gets the worm.  They were out the next week, too.  Finally, another shipment came in and Tricia came home with 8 pounds.  Now, you have a choice here.  These potatoes would be great boiled and buttered and topped with fresh parsley.  Why, I'd eat the whole pot.  But, delayed gratification is where it's at.  Patience is a virtue.

Later this spring, we'll weigh our harvest and will be able to determine if planting the potatoes versus eating them was a good investment.  Anything more than 8 pounds is good, but we're shooting for an abundant harvest.  We'll see how it goes...

The first step is to get out the pocketknife and quarter the potatoes, ensuring that you have eyes on each quarter.  Some of the seed potatoes were small, so I cut them in half or in thirds.

I arranged them cut-side up on trays and counted them.  Unfortunately, I lost count, but I'll count them again as I plant them.  It was over 110 pieces.  That's a lot of potato plants, if they all come up.

I then placed them out in the sun and wind and allowed the cut up potatoes to begin to heal, or as we call it, scab over.  This is an important step.  If not scabbed over, if you plant them, they are more likely to rot in the ground.

Since then, the weather has gotten cold and it's rained several times.  Being that it is so cold, the eyes on the potatoes haven't done any growing.  I think I'm going to put them in the warmest room in the house and see if we can't coax some growth.  When we plant, in a week or two, I'd like the eyes to show some more growth.

Fresh, new potatoes in the spring.  Looking forward to it!

2021 Pecan Harvest - By the Numbers

As we've discussed in previous posts, we have three pecan trees on the property that bear pecans.  Trouble is, they don't produce every year.  This is the first year in the past two or three years that they've produced.  In this PECAN BLOG POST from mid-December 2021 we talked about the harvest a little bit and then how we brought them to our local feed store for cracking.  In total, we brought 122 pounds of whole pecans for shelling.  As discussed, it costs $0.33 per pound to crack them.  In other words, we paid $40.26 for the feed store to crack the pecans.

Once cracked, we take them home, and shell them.  It is really easy and quick to do this!  You simply separate the shell from the "meat."  In the past, I'd save the $40 and crack and shell them myself, but I've found that the time cracking can be better used in other areas.

It is a very relaxing task to do while sitting in front of a fireplace, especially if the weather is cold and wet outside.  I'll take all the pecan shells and throw into the compost pile.

An added bonus in allowing the machine at the feed store to crack them is that you generally get mostly whole pecans - not a lot of brokens.  We'll generally get gallon-sized freezer bags, label them, fill them and then put them in the deep freeze.  Pecans freeze well and then you just don't know, we may not have another pecan crop for a couple of years.  We'd do well to stock up.

And, stock up, we did!  We filled a number of gallon-sized ziploc bags.  Before I loaded into the deep freeze, I decided to count and weigh the bags.

In all, we filled 13 gallon bags and 5 quart bags.  The total weight of pecan "meat" was 39 pounds!  The total weight of pecans cracked was 122 pounds.  So that means that 83 pounds of the total weight was NOT the edible pecan.  Seems like a lot of shrinkage for the shells, but as I think about it, roughly 1/8th of the pecans were bad (rotten, dry, inedible).  

So, not counting my time, we spent $40.26 in total for Parsley's Feed to crack the pecans.  That yielded 39 pounds of pecans and that equates to $1.03 per pound.  I just pulled up the price of a pound of pecan halves at Wal Mart.com and the Great Value Brand is $9.48 per pound.  Looking at the bottom line, we saved $8.45 per pound on pecans.  With all this talk of pecans, I'm getting hungry for a slice of pecan pie right about now!

A Ride to the Farm

With my new job, I have a little discretionary time on my hands, at least until I get trained up and hit the ground running.  It is something that I'm not accustomed to.  I was able to make arrangements to meet up with Dad and ride with him out to the farm.  It's been a long time since Dad and I rode together out there.  That afternoon, he took me down all the roads that border the cropland, and I was able to see a lot of changes in terms of improvements.  But I was also able to just see fields that reminded me of the way things were decades ago.  

Dad is leasing out the farm to a gentleman that is crawfishing on a number of acres and also planting rice.  He's doing a good job taking care of the land.  They were already fishing a number of acres and were in the midst of putting out crawfish traps on the remaining ponds.  The irrigation wells were all pumping water to fill the ponds.  The ponds are essentially rice fields flooded up with water so that fishermen with boats can run the traps.

Dad wanted to show me an improvement that was recently made on a 10 inch well.  The diesel engine recently went out and it just made good sense to replace with an electric motor.  In the past, it never made good economic sense due to a spike in electric current which would push you into a very high rate.  Now there is a "slow start" that alleviates that.  The wells pump water from underground aquifers to flood the surrounding cropland.  The crop you see below is rice that was planted for the crawfish.

The electric motor appears to pump more water.  Another thing is that now that it is electric, it is very quiet.  When this very engine was a diesel engine, we would check it before heading home for the evening.  The straight pipes were very LOUD.  I also remember in the evenings, the exhaust manifold was glowing 'cherry red' it was so hot!  Converting to electric seems to be a better choice right now with oil/diesel prices rising.  The diesel engines we run would burn a little north of seven gallons of diesel per hour and they run 24/7 for days.  The engine oil and filters must be changed often to protect the motor.  The electric motor, in contrast, on takes only a 'dripper' oil for lubrication.

As I watched the water, I remembered that about 22 years ago I dug some Louisiana Iris that were growing in the roadside ditch off the gravel road just 30 feet north of where I was standing when I took the photo below.  I replanted them at our home and they've multiplied.  They should be blooming in a month or two.  I'll be sure to show some photos.

It was a nice afternoon, driving around with Dad, looking at the land that I grew up on.  

2021 Meat Birds - Week Six

We are in week six of the Cornish Cross Meat Bird Project.  In checking our inventory of frozen birds in the deep freeze, we will be right on time.  We only have two chickens in the freezer.  With 50 birds approaching butchering, we will fill the freezer back up, and it is right on time.  It is 'gumbo season!'  With the winter chill setting in (or as much winter as we get in South Louisiana), nothing hits the spot like a big bowl of Chicken and Sausage gumbo.

These are real chickens.  I noticed this week that Kentucky Fried Chicken began selling a product they call "Beyond Chicken."  They are nuggets made of soy and wheat protein fried in oil.  This is America and people are free to eat what they want.  We'll eat vegetables from our garden and real chicken and real beef from our pasture, not vegetables pretending to be meat!  But to each his own.

Tonight it will be in the upper twenties (b-r-r-r-r-r-r!) and the north wind is steadily blowing at 18 mph.  It is very cold.  We have a fire burning in the fireplace and I've staked down the chicken tractor so that the winds don't blow it over.  The chickens are huddled up under the heat lamps and the tarp breaks some of the wind, but those birds are cold.  We still haven't lost but one.  It would be nice to get all 50 to the eight week period.  We shall see.  It will be in the twenties for the next three nights.

As is our custom, Thursday afternoon is 'weigh day.'  I walk out to the tractor and pick out the first bird I can put my hands on.  The bird tonight is a rooster, so he's a little bigger, but most of the birds are within a half pound of each other, I would assume.  He feels heavy, solid, and healthy.  We are still feeding them 3 times a day and still feeding them an 18% protein ration.  Some people really pour the feed to them and give a higher protein percentage ration, but we are only trying to get them to about 6 pounds and aren't interested in rushing it.  These birds will overeat and can get so heavy that their skeletons cannot support the weight, resulting in leg issues.  We'll just go slow and steady to avoid that.

Let's see what the scale says.  On Week Six, the bird weighed 4 pounds 15 ounces.  That's some nice, sustained growth.  I'll bring this fellow back to his flock.  They were all sort of piled up in the tractor, trying to stay warm.  Hopefully they won't suffocate one another.  We've had that happen before when they piled up.

The weight of the bird I picked out this week to weigh was 4 pounds 15 ounces. Last week the weight was 3 pounds 7 ounces, so they have gained a pound and 8 ounces this past week. This is how we compare with previous years at this time period:

Week Six 2019: 4 pounds 5 ounces.
Week Six 2018: 5 pounds 4 ounces.
Week Six 2017: 4 pounds 8 ounces.
Week Six 2016: 5 pounds 1 ounce.

The birds are right where we need them to be and are on schedule for butchering in two weeks.  Tune in next week for the second to last weigh in.

Tamale Time! New Year's 2022

During the Christmas holidays, it was a family tradition in Tricia's household growing up to make tamales.  It was a family thing with all hands on deck.  Everyone had a job to do.  The kitchen was filled with energy as the Garcia family assembled to make tamales.  Indeed a family assembly line was formed up in the kitchen.  Not only a fun family event, but one that would yield an abundance of deliciousness that all would enjoy.

We've continued that.  Tricia taught me the intricacies of tamale-making.  I am far from knowing what I'm doing.  In fact, I'm still a novice, but there's an old saying about an old dog and new tricks...  It is New Year's and not Christmas, but we still made it happen.  Let's make some tamales!

It all starts with masa.  Tricia poured some organic corn masa in a big stainless steel bowl.

In the background, Tricia was cooking the meat for the tamales and made some broth and saved that to pour into the masa.

Once that was mixed in, salt, garlic, and chili powder were added and combined along with fats.  Tricia used beef tallow, coconut oil, and butter.  All this was stirred together.  The aroma of spices filled the air.

It was time to get the corn husks ready.

The corn husks were taken from the bag and soaked in warm water for 30 minutes.  This softens them up and makes them easy to work with.

Meanwhile, Tricia used dried whole peppers to make spices for the meat.  The peppers are cut, seeds removed and boiled in water for 5 minutes to reconstitute.

The peppers are then blended in a blender with lots of garlic.  Look at the beautiful color!

This pepper/spice mixture is poured into the meat along with black pepper and cumin.  The meat is a 2.5 pound beef roast and a 5 pound chicken.  It rendered 3.5 pounds of de-boned, cooked meat.

Stir it all in, taste it, and adjust spices.

Then it is time to start making the tamales!  Using a spoon or a butter knife, we spread masa on the softened corn husks - about halfway up.  This is a tricky task.  You don't want it too thick, but not too thin, either.

The next person on the assembly line adds a tablespoon of meat to the center.

Then the tamale is rolled up and folded over.  This process is repeated many, many times!

At the end of the evening, we had a big mess in the kitchen, but also 10 DOZEN tamales!  10 cups of dry masa produced 10 dozen tamales.  These are stacked by the dozen and are now ready to be cooked.

Now we cook them by stacking them atop a steamer in a bucket with water in the bottom and steam them for about two hours.  The tamales aren't sitting in the water.  They are above it.  As they steam, the kitchen fills with a wonderful aroma and everyone watches the clock until we can eat!

We covered the bucket (Rosie's old milking bucket!) with a lid with a weight on top.  Tricia used a molcajete turned upside down as the weight because that's how her mom did it.  A molcajete is a stone pestle and mortar used to grind fresh spices.

Now, you're not going to believe this, but I don't have photos of the finished product, because we were so busy eating, we forgot to take pictures.  Ain't that a shame.  We put tomato sauce or salsa or hot sauce on top and eat a bunch of them!  It was New Year's Eve and Russ' birthday, so we shared a toast of some Martinelli's Sparkling Apple Cider.

Happy New Year's, Everyone.  Oh, yeah, tamales freeze very nicely, so we have some put up in the freezer for future feasting!

Kidding Season - Annie's Doeling

Tricia keeps tight records and announced to me that Annie's due date was today, January 17th.  Plus it is a full moon.  Annie is our 9 year old Nubian momma goat.  We happened to be outside when the labor began, and we coaxed Annie to push.  Hooves pointed outward and we see the little face.  Everything seems to be positioned right.

In three shakes of a billy goat's tail, the little kid was on the ground.  We checked it out and it is a doeling?  Healthy, active and vocal.  Annie began licking her to get her all cleaned up.  She scratched the ground all around and threatened all the chickens who wanted to venture too close.

Annie's teats are huge, and as a dairy goat, that is a good thing, except Annie's bags are messed up.  Mastitis in the past have rendered her unable to provide any milk to her offspring.  Therefore we have goat colostrum that we'll bottle feed and then this little doeling will be a bottle baby.

At first, she didn't get the sucking reflex too good, but after a second trip to the barn, Tricia had her draining the bottle.

She has all kinds of interesting markings on her face!  

We welcome yet another kid to the homestead.  Now we have to figure out a name for this new arrival.

First Load of Mulch in a Couple of Years

We had posted several times about a new gardening method we use called, "Back to Eden Gardening." You can check out a YouTube video to learn about it, but the synopsis goes like this:  You don't till or leave the soil uncovered.  You use wood chips (mulch) similar to what happens in the forest for propagation. 

If you keep a roughly four inch layer of mulch on top of your soil, you'll see several benefits:

1. You don't have to weed very much at all.  The mulch acts as a protective barrier for weed growth,

2. You don't have to water very much at all.  The mulch preserves soil moisture,

3. The mulch, over a short period of time, decomposes and becomes part of your garden soil, enriching it with nutrients and organic matter.

My wife noticed a tree trimming service in town.  They are clearing trees that have grown too close to utility lines.  They cut the limbs and feed them into a chipper and turn the limbs into finely shredded chips.  She gave them our phone # and address and they were happy to have a place to deliver loads of chips FOR FREE!  A couple years ago we got 22 or 24 loads, I forget.  Here is our first load this year:

Just one load of chips is a lot and there is a lot more coming!  I will be moving this into the garden and  begin to put a four inch layer across the entire garden.

You can already notice that the bacteria is already heating up the pile of mulch and starting the decomposition process.  The steam rises from the mulch pile early in the morning:

When it is planting time in the garden this spring, I'll run a line across where I want the row to be.  Then I'll use a rake to pull back the mulch underneath the string until I've exposed bare earth.  I'll then work up a 'hoe's width' area which will be my seed bed.  Then I'll plant.  When the seeds are up, as they grow, I'll pull mulch around the seedlings.  It's simple and effective. 

2021 Meat Birds - Week Five

It is once again 'weigh day.'  We normally do this on Thursday as we chart our journey in our annual meat bird raising project.  It is good to have this information to look at and compare year over year.  The birds seem active, alert, and very healthy.  We have not lost a single one since the first or second week, I forget, when we lost one bird that was weak upon arrival.  So that means we still have 50 birds.

We are using 18% Chick Starter and fill the feed troughs several times a day.  This week we added a second trough to give them more room.  As they grow they were unable to all fit around the one gutter we were using to feed them in.  This resulted in aggressive behavior with them all trying to get a "seat at the table."  Now with two, they have more elbow room and things are more serene.

So I went and got a bird for weigh-in.  I'm just grabbing the first one - not the biggest or the smallest.  This bird appears to be a hen.  As they get a little older, you can tell by their combs.  Hens usually grow a little slower that cockrels.

When I put her on the scale, she promptly sat down.  That is a better option than pooping on our scale and that's why I have the diaper on the scale.

So, drum roll, please...  She weighs 3 pounds 7 ounces!

This week they weigh 3 pounds 7 ounces.  Last week they were 2 pounds 4 ounces.  That is a weight gain of 1 pound and 3 ounces over the course of the week.  The weather has been mild and the birds are comfortable, enabling them to use calories to grow versus staying warm, I imagine.

Here's a comparison with where they are now (3 lbs 7 oz.) compared to previous years at this same time frame:

Week Five 2019: 3 pounds 4 ounces.
Week Five 2018: 3 pounds 14 ounces.
Week Five 2017: 2 pounds 15 ounces.
Week Five 2016: 4 pounds

Things are progressing nicely, I think, in our march to a 6 pound bird in Week 8.  Tune back in next week for the next update.

Tomatoes, Peppers, and Eggplant Planting in January

Normally, I plan on planting our tomato, pepper and eggplant seeds on New Year's Day.  This year it didn't happen.  I'm six days late, but that's okay.  Better late than never, as the old saying goes.  This year I'm planting the following tomato varieties:

Roma, Mortgage Lifter, Creole, Pink Brandywine, Cherokee Purple, Chadwick Cherry, Black Krim and Big Rainbow organic.

This year (being late) I didn't do what I normally do and purchase Seed Starting Mix as the medium for planting the seeds.  I used what I had on hand, which was various types of potting soil.  We'll see if that works.  I plant two seeds per seed pot and I always label the seed pots with the variety and the date planted so that I can keep straight what is planted.

I'm also planting the following pepper plants:

Horizon (orange) bell, Hot Jalapeno, Craig's Grande Jalapeno, Anaheim, Banana, Lilac bell, Emerald Giant, and Criolla Sella.

Same thing here, they're labeled and planted two to a seed pot.

I covered with an eighth of an inch of soil and watered them in.  I did the same with Eggplant.  Last year's crop was a PHENOMENAL crop.  I'm hoping they do as well this year.  Unfortunately, I ran out of the Florida Market Eggplant and I'm using Southern Exposure Black Eggplant.  We'll see if this variety rivals the variety from last year.

Now we'll watch for germination.  I keep them inside when it is cool outside and once they germinate, I'll put them under grow lights.