The Crawfish Boil

This past Saturday, my cousin, Patrick and my Aunt Cheryl flew in from Dallas.  We had a crawfish boil planned.  Dad got 120 pounds of crawfish and we had some corn and potatoes to go along.  It was the perfect day for a boil!  The weather was nice.  My brother and sister-in-law came in from New Orleans.  My sister and her crew were there.  Mom & Dad and Tricia and I and our three were there as well.  Before the boil we spent some quality time visiting.

We put the first of four sacks in the heavily seasoned boiling water and set the timer once it returned to a boil.  Five minutes later, they were done.  We let them soak for 20 minutes and posed with the first batch of crawfish.

(L-R) Benjamin, Laura Lee, Cheryl, Mom, Patrick, Tricia, Emery, Kristian, Russ, and Dad

We poured the first 30 pounds of crawfish across the table and folks began peeling and eating.  We got the second batch boiling.  The way we timed it, when the 30 pounds on the table were just about eaten, we had the next boiled batch ready to pour on the table.

A ravenous crew of crawfish eaters demolished those crawfish!

In between each new batch, we emptied the table of the heads and peelings.

There was visiting going on, too.  Aside from eating crawfish, there was corn and potatoes, jalapeno poppers, cookies, watermelon, blonde brownies and all sorts of other snacks.

Kristian brought his potato gun and my sister's kids shot potatoes into the woods with a loud BOOM!  They had lots of fun watching potatoes fly hundreds of feet.

And then it happened.  Like a Biblical plague, the horseflies descended on us, swarming, stinging, harassing.  Like ants at a picnic, they thought they were going to terrorize us into submission.  But they were wrong.  We fought back.  Armed with fly-swatters and rolled up newspaper, we waged war.  Slow progress at first.  It seemed like if we killed one, three more would appear.  The battle went on for 30 minutes or so.

At last we could visit and eat in peace.  When I tell you we killed over a hundred horseflies, I'm not exaggerating.  In fact, my sister swept them up and like hunters posing with their prey, we took a photo to capture the memories.  Look at all the dead horseflies at our feet!

Visiting, laughing, eating crawfish and killing horseflies.  Louisiana Saturday Night!

The Trouble with Tomatoes

Here is Tricia's Mother's Day bench.  She wanted this bench placed in this very spot so that she could sit in the shade, drink coffee and watch the garden.  It is a peaceful spot, for sure.  If you could add audio to this photo, it might not seem quite so peaceful.  There's a goat that's not quite weaned that's hollering for a bottle, roosters are crowing, cows are mooing, dogs are barking.  But you know what?  It is still a peaceful, nice spot.

The garden looks nice from that serene, pastoral spot.  But just beyond the picket fence, there's a sinister plot brewing.  Annie, the Nubian goat, despite my best efforts at barricade building, has been successful in a scheme of craning her neck over the garden fence.

She's snipped off three branches of a Cherokee Purple tomato plant and devoured it!  Annie's antics cost us in tomato production.  I'll be fashioning yet another panel to thwart her from doing it again.  You've always got to be thinking three steps ahead with these goats!

If we are successful keeping the goats out of the garden, we still have quite a time with worms and bugs.  That's why I've started to pick our tomatoes when they just start to turn a pinkish color.  I put them on a platter inside and let them ripen indoors.

The label you hear about "vine-ripened tomatoes" sounds great, but I've found that if you leave them to ripen on the vines, the bugs and worms (and goats) will get far more fruit than we will.  Here's one of the culprits I'll introduce you to: The Stink Bug!  It's called that because if you squash it, it emits a nasty odor that really stinks.  These boogers will sting the tomato and cause scarring and discoloration.  Bringing them inside before ripening betters your chances.

Let me introduce you to another villain: The leaf-footed bug.  See him on top of the green tomato?  He stings the tomato and causes scarring to the tomato.  Secondary pathogens enter the opening in the fruit where the leaf-footed bug damaged it and causes the fruit to rot.

There are things to kill these bugs, perhaps, but we don't want to spray poison on the food we'll be eating.  Harvesting early seems to be the trick.

Another thing we have to watch is growth spurts after rains.  After a rain, and the sun warming things up, the tomato will grow so fast that it rips the skin open.  The fruit grows so fast that the skin can't keep up.  Look at an example of this below.  Can you see the long cut?  That's from rapid growth.  

We're picking 8 to 10 tomatoes a day right now.  They turn red quickly indoors and then those we don't eat or cook with, we put in the refrigerator.  Pretty soon, we'll be canning them and drying them.

The Work Day

Today's post has nothing to do with gardening.  Nothing to do with milking cows or dairy goats.  Not a word about chickens.  Most of our posts are about Biblical agrarianism - learning the 'old ways' while living in the modern world.  I wouldn't call us preppers, although we grow food and raise animals for meat and dairy.  For a long time we've strived to live contra mundum - against the world, in defiance of common opinion.  At the end of this post on spring cleaning, I promise you that you will find that this post has a lot to do with surviving and thriving while living in post-modern times.

Spring Cleaning.  Here's how it starts.  At our church's monthly business meeting, a motion was made and seconded that we have a "work day" at church.  The motion carried and we made a list of what needed to be done and what supplies we needed.  On Saturday morning at 8 am sharp, pressure washers were fired up and all the bricks were washed.  Dirt dobber nests were scoured off the building, along with spider webs, mildew and all sorts of other buildup.

The out-building that had a green-tint to it because of mildew, once again regained its tan color after power washing.

The music room was cleaned up.

The pews were polished so that the wood shined again.

As you might imagine, there was food involved.  The BBQ pit was fired up at the same time the pressure washers were.

The drainage canal that runs along the back of the fellowship hall had grown up in willow trees.  Coming from the north, you couldn't even see the church.  We tackled that project with machetes, axes, and a chainsaw.

The washing and cleaning and chopping continued until we were checking the time to see when the food was ready.  

Finally, there was only one tree remaining...

TIMBERRRRR.....

If a tree falls in a drainage canal and no one is there to hear it fall, does it make a sound?  I don't know the answer to that., but we heard it fall and we also heard our stomachs growl.  We were all hot, tired, sweaty, and hungry.

We were all done!

Inside, we were greeted with the fragrance of chicken, sausage, rice dressing and other delicious sides.  You may not believe me, but I promise you I'm telling the truth.  There was even a pot of squirrels cooked in a brown gravy.  How many other churches serve squirrels at their fellowship meals?  Delicious!!  There was a coffee pot going and about nine different types of desserts.  We asked God's blessing on the food, read some Scripture and began eating and visiting, laughing and smiling.  It was a good day!

So now we are at the end of the post.  I promised you that this post had a point, and here it is.  We are members of a small country church.  On a GOOD Sunday, there are 44 believers in attendance.  Everyone knows everyone and if you miss a Sunday, people call to see if you're okay.  If you are sick, you'll get food brought over.  If you have a need, people call or text one another for prayer.  After church on your way out, people bring produce from their gardens and other stuff to share.  You may go home with some cabbage, or sweet corn, or squash, or purple hull peas, or a dozen eggs or some sweet dough pies.  But we don't only eat good food, we feast of spiritual food from the Word of God.  It is nourishing and edifying to the body and soul.

Right now in our world that's spinning out of control, people are stocking up on food, ammo, and other necessities in the even times get hard.  That is, of course, wise.  May I add to that some better advice?  Get right with the Lord.  Put your faith in Jesus and not in your own preparations.  We can do nothing without Him.  Find a small church community of likeminded believers who love Jesus and love one another and serve Him and each other.  We were not created to be alone.  God will never leave us or forsake us.  When times get hard, it is vitally important to have family, friends and a community of believers to support, encourage, and assist each other.  We will really miss out if we leave that important aspect out of our preparation plans.

What Is Your Favorite Allium Crop?

Allium is the Latin word for garlic, but includes different plants in addition to garlic, like onions, shallots, leeks, etc.  I like them all!  Don't know if I can pick out a favorite.  They all add a layer of flavor to anything you cook, and the fragrance of any of them cooking down in a skillet is enough to make your mouth water.  

I think I had mentioned it before, but onions are spoken of in the Bible.  In Numbers 11:15 the Israelites were complaining in the wilderness after gaining their freedom:

"We remember the fish, which we did eat in Egypt freely; the cucumbers, and the melons, and the leeks, and the onions, and the garlic"

Onions and garlic are delicious, to be sure, but I think I value my freedom more than that!  Back in early January, we planted our onions in this post: Post on Planting Onions  Now, it is time to harvest!  You can tell they are ready when the leaves bend over like the one in the very center of the photo below:

Without hardly any effort, the ripened onion pulls right up out of the ground.

They ripen at different times.  I pull them as they bend over and then lay them in the sun for a day on their sides.

I'll then bring them on the back patio for curing.  Here is a nice Texas 1015 Sweet Yellow Onion:

There's a nice white onion.  On the rack behind, you can see some Creole Onions.  I like them all.

This is my original setup.  I snip the green leaves off the onion after a couple days of drying and then set them upside down on baker's racks with a fan positioned underneath. I've had trouble in the past in which on days of high humidity (almost every day in the summer), the onions would get soft and go bad.  Keeping airflow on them on days of dry weather helps to mitigate that.

Yesterday, however, a kind gentleman from our church brought by this drying table he made for me.  It is lined with hardware cloth to allow airflow all around.  

I positioned two box fans underneath to blow air upward and through the drying table.

This table is certainly a blessing!

We have been eating onions with fresh squash and onions with cucumbers.  We plant on eating French Onion soup and we will try other dishes featuring onions since we had a bumper crop of them.  The best onion harvest we've ever had!  Homemade onion rings are a favorite of mine.  I'll see if we can get that on the menu soon.  I tip my hat to Dixondale Farms in Carrizo Springs, Texas for running a great operation and introducing me to planting onions.

Diggin' Spuds

The back pasture around our house and the side yard was once a rice field.  There is an old deep water irrigation well shaft in the woods in the back of the house along with evidence of irrigation canals that transferred water for flooding rice fields from the well head to the fields.  A lot of the land, sadly, has been subdivided and now grows houses instead of food and fiber.

Fields that were once in rice have several things in common.  The ground is compacted, hard and has a hardpan that holds water.  It is almost devoid of earthworms.  The first year we expanded our garden from the garden to the side yard, I knew we had our work cut out for us.  I fed the soil bunches of organic matter, including composted leaves and cow manure and used mulch heavily.

Slowly, the earthworms returned.  Slowly, the ground became less compacted.  I normally plant all our potatoes in this bed and zinnias come up volunteer to beautify the spot.  I alternate blackeyed peas and purple hull peas to set nitrogen and grow protein.  Here is the bed.  I planted 8 pounds of seed potatoes in this bed.  At the end of this post, I'll let you know how the yield was.

Generally, when the potatoes are ready, I use a digging fork.  It's essentially a pitchfork with straight, thick tines.  It is a great implement for turning soil.  I find it the best thing for digging potatoes.  We rake the mulch back from around the base of the potato plant and dig in.

We turn the soil over to expose new potatoes!  You have to dig around with your hands to get them all.  I messed up a few times and stabbed through some big nice potatoes with the digging fork.  They didn't go to waste, though.  We ate them up with fresh green beans.

Digging up fresh potatoes from the soil is a rewarding experience.  The bright, red potatoes contrasted against the dull, brown soil highlights the treasure we find when we dig.  The boys, when they were younger, loved to follow me and dig through the soil to expose potatoes.  It was like digging for buried treasure, they'd say.

One thing we learned early on is that if you want your potatoes to store longer - don't wash them.  We bring them inside dirty and store them in milk crates so that they get air flow through them.  We wash them as we remove a few to cook.

I harvested in three separate days.

The total yield was better than last year, but still disappointing.  Out of the 8 pounds of seed potatoes we planted, we harvested 41 pounds of potatoes.  That's a five-fold increase, so I'm not complaining, but we've had better harvests.  I'll keep feeding the soil.  Next year we'll have a bumper crop!  (That's optimism spoken like a true gardener!)

Blanching & Freezing the Snap Bean Harvest

Way back on May 4th, we showed you our first harvest of green beans.  You might recall that, in truly goofy fashion, I spelled out the bean varieties with beans on the trampoline.  We harvested some Irish Potatoes, too.  Perhaps I'll post about the potato pickin' in a few days.  There are few things that go better together than fresh picked snap beans, new potatoes and butter.  We've eaten our share of those in the last several weeks.

When you have a bountiful harvest of bushels of beans, it is important that you process them to save some for later consumption.  We do this quite often.  We like the process of blanching them and then freezing them.  It is a quick, easy, efficient method for putting your beans up while protecting that 'fresh from the field' taste and texture.

So first, you gotta pick 'em.  Backbreaking work when you have several rows to go through, but you get it done because there is a reward at the end of the row.  We bring the buckets of beans in and wash them up.  You want to do this because you do bring in the occasional worm, bug, or snail with the beans, and you want to ensure that they are cleaned up before processing.  The next step is we snap off the ends.  Many people call this step 'stringing the beans,' but these varieties really don't produce much of a string.

Once the washing, snapping and stringing is done, we put them in a big pile.  On the stove, we'll get a pot of water boiling and in the sink, we'll fill with ice water.

When you have water coming to a boil in your pot, simply dump in a batch.  We estimate a batch being approximately a quart of beans.  Once the water has begun boiling once again, set your kitchen timer for 3 minutes.  That's how long it takes to blanch beans.

We pour them into a colander and then put the water back in the pot to get another batch going.  Notice the color of the beans.  They have a nice, healthy, green color.  They are blanched, not cooked.

These beans are still hot and will continue to cook, so you want to quickly pour them into a sink of ice water to abruptly stop the cooking process.

Once the beans are very cold to the touch, you can remove them and package them.  By this time, the next batch has been boiling for 3 minutes and are ready for an ice water bath.  You can have a real assembly line going in your kitchen.  We pack them in quart freezer bags.  We find that this is a nice quantity to pull out of the freezer, thaw and cook for a healthy side dish for any meal.

The next night we blanched and froze a bunch more.  I think so far we've put 12 quarts into the freezer with more coming.  Blanching has several benefits:  It preserves a bright, green color.  It cleans any remaining dirt off the beans.  It stops the enzyme action which would otherwise affect flavor, color, vitamin content and texture.

Last year's green bean crop was less than desirable, but this year looks to be a better crop.  

Sharing The Cucumber Crop

The garden is producing lots of good, healthy, wholesome food for us.  It's almost overwhelming to harvest it and then bring it in and process it.  We've been blanching multitudes of fresh green beans with more to come.  We're eating them fresh, too.  That's the best way with the new potatoes we've dug so far.

The cucumbers are starting to really produce.  We've been eating cucumber salad daily.  I'll post in a few days our favorite recipe.  In the photo below you can see a trellis that I have three different varieties of cucumbers growing on: Boston Pickling Cucumber, Marketmore Cucumber and Suyo Long Cucumber.  I think I have a fourth variety in there as well: Organic Pickling Cucumber. 

We do have a problem, though.  As I was harvesting cukes, I noticed that several of the ones on the very bottom had been eaten on by a critter of some sort. 

With flowers-a-plenty and many cucumbers at different stages, we have plenty of cucumbers to share with family and friends.  I'm not happy about sharing with critters, though!

I have a small varmint cage trap that a friend gave me.  I pulled it out of the barn and set it with a combination of chicken feed and dry dog food.  The next morning, here's what greeted me...

A RAT!  This one doesn't look like the big Norway rats that I'm constantly killing in the hay loft in the barn.  All I know is that he won't be munching on our cucumbers any more.  We're not operating a 'catch and release' program on Our Maker's Acres Family Farm.  Consider him e-Rat-icated fromt he premisis.  Rats make a mess, carry disease, and eat up the produce.