A New Crop For Us

We always like to try new crops that we haven't grown before.  Last year it was kohlrabi.  I was not really familiar with that, but we grew it and really enjoyed it.  We'll be planting more this year.  Sometimes, we like to plant new varieties that we've not tried.  This past spring we tried the Alabama Black Eyed Lima bean.  As the name suggests, it has the looks of a black eyed pea, but it's a lima bean.  I love black eyed peas and limas, so this has to be good, right?

I planted them in the spring and they promptly grew lush and filled up the trellis.  Then something weird happened.  They bloomed and produced pods, but the pods never filled out with beans in them.  Since this spring, we've not eaten a single one.  Here is the trellis full of Alabama Black Eyed Limas.

A curious thing happened this week though.  I began cleaning up the rows just to the west of the trellis to make room for transplanting the tomatoes.  The remnants of squash plants, purple hull peas and black beans needed to be cleared back.  Once it was all cleaned up, something caught my eye on the trellis.  Yep, you got it.  The black eyed lima beans decided to FINALLY start filling out the pods with beans!  The vines were full of them, too!

So I pulled one off and popped it open.  Sure enough!:

It's a black eyed lima bean.  We haven't eaten any yet, so I can't give a review.  This harvest was a long time coming.  I ALMOST chopped down the vines to make room for another crop.  I'm glad I didn't.  It looks like this fall we'll get some lima beans to eat.  Speaking of wanting something to eat, while I was shelling the lima bean pod to see if it really looked like black eyed peas, I was greeted by a beggar in the garden.  

That's Elsie.  Isn't that a face that you just can't say "no" to?  Wasn't long after that her cousin-sister (it's complicated) LuLu came to panhandle with her.

In just a week or two we'll be harvesting the sweet potatoes, so these two, along with Rosie, will be getting a ton of sweet potato vines to eat.  They love those things.  Be patient, girls.

The Beginnings of the Fall Garden

We had planted butternut squash and tomatoes and cucumbers from seed and transplanted the young seedlings into the garden.  With promptness, worms ate up the cucumbers.  We've since replanted the cukes and transplanted the seedlings into the garden under the trellis.  The butternut squash are mostly doing fine in the side yard garden.  We lost the spaghetti squash to the heat and dry conditions.  So it goes.  You win some and you lose some.

The very first seeds were direct seeded into the garden last week.  We have a two rows of broccoli and one row of cauliflower and two rows of cabbage.  They are all up and about an inch tall, about to put on their first true leaves.  Here's the beginning of that process.  I didn't get the finished photos.  You can see one of the roosters standing guard.

The tomatoes have been planted in the garden and the experiment with fall Irish potatoes grown in landscape tubs.  We'll see how that goes.  In the next week or two I'll plan on planting the following:

Beets                    Lettuce                Mustard greens        Turnips        Radishes
Kohlrabi               Swiss Chard        Sugar Snap Peas      Spinach       Carrots

My problem is that I am running out of space in the garden as some of my summer crop is still producing.  Crops like okra and Southern Peas take up a lot of space in the garden.  Other crops like sweet potatoes won't be ready to harvest until a couple more weeks.  Once that happens, it'll free up a lot of room for those items I need to plant.  

One thing I'm trying new this year is proper plant spacing.  I always have a hard time pruning back plants to proper spacing between plants.  The reason is that I hate to pinch off and kill a perfectly good plant.  But if you don't they crowd each other out and compete for nutrients and you don't get quality produce.  This year I vow to do something different.  As the plants grow, I'll dig up those plants that are too close to one another and plant them in the side yard garden where the Blackeyes and Ozark Razorback peas are finishing up.  It will be a win-win situation.  

As I look at the barn and the hen house to the south of it, I also plan to use more of our natural fertilizer this year that I've harvested from beneath the roosting bars in the henhouse.  I went in there with a big tub and shovel, scraped off the top layer of chicken litter and got down to the older, composted stuff.  I shoveled a big tub full of it and moved it into the garden.  I've been slowly amending the soil with it and have noticed greener leaves on the snap beans.  They are full of blooms right now.

The weather is absolutely gorgeous right now.  Perfect time for gardening!

Got the Tomatoes Transplanted Today

Today was the first day in a while that it didn't get hotter than 90 degrees.  For the next week it isn't going to hit 90.  Highs in the 80's - how nice.  It was exactly what I was waiting for - the perfect day to get the tomato seedlings transplanted into the garden.  I was worried about the high heat and dry conditions killing them.

The tomato seeds were planted on August 1st.  They have grown and grown and are very healthy.  It is past time that I get them in the ground.  Roots are coming out of the bottom of the little pots they are in and they are long and leggy, some two feet tall!

I am planting them in the very southernmost part of the garden.  This is the part of the garden that I experimented with hügelkultur.  I buried big logs deep in the ground and covered them up with soil.  It raised the area of the low-lying portion of the garden that would flood.  The buried wood acts as a sponge, holding water and releasing nutrients.

Since these plants are leggy, I'm planting them deep, covering the stem up to the bottom leaves.  The entire stem will grow roots.  I put some composted chicken litter in the hole along with composted wood chips and then watered them in good.

This is a horrible photo as the lighting is all wrong, but there are 19 tomato plants in the garden on three rows.  As they grow I'll trellis them using the "Florida Weave" method of staking since they are indeterminates.  There are 19 plants in all made up of the following varieties: Creole, Campari, Pink Brandywine, Roma, Black Vernissage, Black Krim, Big Rainbow, Mortgage Lifter, and Cherokee Purple.

I gave my son, Russ, some plants that he'll plant in his garden and the following six plants will go to my Mom and Dad for their fall garden.

Louisiana's tropical weather allows you to get a second crop of tomatoes in. Fall is a wonderful time to grow tomatoes.  The pest pressure is light.  The disease pressure is light.  The temperatures to work in the garden are nice.  However, it is tricky.  All it takes is an early frost, and all your work is for naught.  We'll see how it goes this year and report back our success (or failure).

Making Hay While the Sun Shines

A good friend of mine that lives up in Arkansas recently emailed to tell me that he read on the blog where we were putting up hay and it brought back a lot of childhood memories from when his Dad had cattle.  He mentioned that they were baling hay up in Arkansas and what a beautiful sight it was to see fresh mown hay on hillsides being baled into round bales.  

He's right.  There's something about hay fields that is just downright nice to look at.  I think it is the uniformity of it.  Previously, it was a rough and tangle field of tall grass.  All at once it is mowed close to the ground, raked up and baled, leaving the field looking like a putting green on a golf course.  

Last week, I posted about The Hay Field in Front.  We sat out on the front porch and watched as the neighbor baled hay.  It was late afternoon and he was trying to get as much baled before the sun went down.  The round bales were scattered across the field. A nice pastoral sight, to be sure.

The guy on that John Deere tractor was making things happen.  "Gotta make hay while the sun shines." is a country quote meaning that you've got to work hard to get things done in any short window you can.  As you can see, the sun was sinking quickly.  I'm sure he was listening to some country music in his air conditioned tractor, comfortable and safely away from the heat and dust.

We sat out on the front porch and watched until he turned his lights on.  There was no sense in pushing it, so he drove to his truck, got out of the tractor and called it a day.  "It'll be here for me tomorrow," I'm sure he said.

The very next day, he did finish up baling up all the hay in the field.  I counted up 96 bales.  He unhooked the baler and put hay forks on the front and back of the tractor and drove across the field time and again, stacking all the hay against the road.  Then a truck and trailer showed up and he loaded all the hay on the trailer.  The hay was then moved off site for storage or sale.

Everyone up and down the road is putting up hay.  Cutting, raking, fluffing, baling.  We haven't had rain in a few weeks and there's a tropical storm about to enter the Gulf.  Gotta make hay while the sun shines.

Pickin' Peanuts

This year we had a peanut plant that came up volunteer.  We didn't even have to plant it!  The seed just stayed in the ground until the conditions were right and it grew and thrived.  Isn't it strange how we try so hard to take care of plants and try our best to have a productive crop and then we witness plants vigorously growing that we did absolutely nothing to them.

I watched the peanut put on flowers and broaden out.  It grew and grew and finally in the heat, the leaves began to turn yellow.  I decided it was time to harvest our lone peanut plant.

I took a shovel and gently loosened the wood chips and soil beneath it.  Peanuts were growing on pegs.  

Each part of the plant I pulled had numerous peanuts growing on it.

I weaved the peanut plants through a livestock panel to allow the peanuts to dry in the sun.

Here is a good shot of the peanuts.  It's crazy.  This may be my best yield ever, and I never even planted them!

Once they've dried, I'll bring them inside.

The boys and I used to roast them in the oven and then put them in a food processor with a little oil and make homemade peanut butter.  One year we experimented and made cinnamon peanut butter and chocolate peanut butter.  That was my favorite.  Maybe we can try that again!

Peas, If You Please

The cowpeas we have planted are producing in big quantities right now.  Each day I'm picking a gallon.  We have four different varieties planted and I'll show you three of them today.  We've talked about it before, but shelling peas is such a therapeutic activity.  You sit down with a bowl and start shelling, removing the peas from the pods.  The pods go in a big bowl to be composted later and the peas go into another.

These, off course, are blackeyed peas.

These are an heirloom we've grown to like.  They are called Ozark Razorback peas.  They are smaller and more round than blackeyes.

Finally, here is another heirloom variety I picked up at a seed swap.  They are called whippoorwill peas.  They are smaller than blackeyes and Ozark Razorbacks. 

Each year I save some of the seeds to keep for next years' crop.  The Ozark Razorbacks and Whippoorwill peas germinated from some really old seed I had.  

We don't separate the peas.  "Variety is the spice of life, That gives it all its flavor." is a quote from a poem by William Cowper in 1785.  It holds true today.  We shell all the peas into one bowl.  Aren't the different colors and sizes pretty?

In addition to freezing a bunch of these in bags, we eat a bunch of these, too!  They are nutritious and full of flavor, like the poem says.  We put them in a big pot with some water and cut up some smoked sausage along with peppers and onions.

Once a pot of rice is cooked and these peas are served over rice...  Mmmmmm.  One thing that kicks it up an extra notch is to serve the peas over some homemade cornbread with a good many dashes of hot sauce on top.  Comfort food at its finest.  My wife tells me I'm easy to please in that regard because fresh shelled peas over rice is a favorite dish of mine - especially in the winter.

Random Ramblings on a Monday

Observation #1 

Last week was a teaser.  In the mornings, temperatures actually dipped into the 60's and it NEVER made it to 90.  In fact, by mid-morning, it hadn't reached 80 yet.  Humidity was low.  It was pleasant and a foretaste of fall.  This week, we have a high pressure sitting over us.  It is dry and temps are forecast to be in the upper 90's.  Ugghhh...

Last week we drove east on our road and took a left on LA Highway 102.  I looked out of my window and saw a large field of soybeans.  I remarked to my wife that they were ripe and needed to be harvested before rains set it.  Farmers are wrapping up the first crop harvest of rice and trying to get the beans in.

Well wouldn't you know it, we rounded the curve and a combine, two tractors with carts and two big trucks with trailers passed us.  In about 30 minutes on our way back, the combines were busy at work, bringing in the crop!

In comparison to other occupations, farming requires heavy labor inputs as well as unthinkable capital investment.  A brand new machine like the one you see below runs between $500,000 to $700,000 - maybe more.  That just makes my head hurt.  I know the guy on the combine.  I like how he has two big American flags flying on either side of his cutter bar.  He also has his last name on the grain hopper with a crawfish with pinchers raised making the 'I' in his name!

Fuel prices are up and fertilizer prices are at all-time highs.  I know there are a lot of very nervous farmers concerned about how things are going to work out.  

Observation #2   

When I was throwing my dirty laundry in the hamper the other day, I started laughing when I thought about what I was looking at:

Most folks probably separate out their 'whites' from their 'reds or blacks' when putting dirty clothes away for washing.  You don't want your colored clothes bleeding on your white clothes.  We separate between "regular" and "farm" clothes.  There's a reason for that.  The farm clothes are so doggone filthy with dirt, mud, cow poop, blood and other stuff, you don't want that touching your regular clothes.  Lots of times, especially after picking up hay or working in the garden, the clothes will be soaking wet with sweat and needs to be laid out to dry outside before putting into the farm hamper.  

Observation #3  

Take a look out on the back patio.  I've got some tomato seedlings and some squash that I planted from seed a few weeks ago for the fall crop.  I transplanted the squash this weekend into the garden bed.  The tomatoes will go in the garden this weekend.  I want to get through the high heat of this week before I subject them to the stress of transplanting.

The tomato plants seem to be really healthy.  I've been watering them with some fish emulsion mixed into the water.  They seem to like that.  I've got 29 plants, but I'll give some of them to my oldest son for his garden.

Hopefully we'll get a good fall tomato crop.  The fall crop is usually better for us with less bugs.  The trick is to get tomatoes harvested before you get an early frost!  We'll see how it goes.

Gotta Come up With a Plan B for the Cows

Last week when we were driving back from the hay field, we passed in front of the pasture and I had to stop the truck and get a photo of the cows.  They were all lined up in a row and looking right at us.  It was as if they were posing for an Olan Mills Family Portrait.  (Makes us sad Clarabelle isn't in the photo.)  In the afternoons, the cows like to meander over to the west side of the pasture next to the neighbors and relax in the shade.  Tricia and I were hot and sweaty from loading hay.  The cows were refreshed and rejuvenated in the green grass, shaded by pine trees.

From left to right is: Elsie (Clarabelle's heifer), LuLu (Rosie's heifer), and Rosie.  If you remember, Clarabelle was injured when the cows were going in heat and jumping on one another.  Cows' cycles are 21 days.  It is almost that time again.

This afternoon I contacted the neighbor that lives about 5 miles down the road that we always bring our cows to him to get bred.  Well... bad news.  He informed me that he sold his Jersey bull on the 12th of this month.  It was so darned convenient.  We'd mark off the days and when the cows/heifers were going into heat, we'd drive them down the road for their "date" and then pick them up.

We are frantically calling around, trying to arrange breeding with another Jersey bull.  So far the first call resulted in Strike 1.  The gentleman I called sold both of his earlier this summer during the drought and hasn't replaced them.  He did give us a lead and we'll be following up tomorrow on that lead as well as another.

Dairy bulls are not found in every pasture.  When our cows have bulls, we keep them around for at most two years.  They get real mean.  In fact, they injure/kill more farmers than beef cattle bulls.  When our bulls show the slightest signs of this ornery or bossy behavior, it's off to the slaughterhouse for them.

We will be on the phone tonight and tomorrow, trying to come up with a Plan B for how to get them bred.  We'll take Rosie and Elsie for breeding first and then two months later, we'll bring LuLu.  Hopefully we can find a bull that's not too far away!

Seventy Square Bales up in the Loft

 "I ain't as good as I once was, but I'm as good once as I ever was." - Toby Keith

It's a startling and humbling discovery when you find and must admit that you just can't do what you used to do.  Your body tells you, "You can't do this, boy.  But your pride says, "Oh, yes you can."  I say this to preface today's posting.  We walked down past the neighbor's Jiggs Bermuda pasture and saw that they had cut it.  I called them and they said, "Yep, we'll be baling at 2 pm on Wednesday."  The price was $6 per bale picked up in the field or $7 in the barn.  We are frugal farmers, so you know which price point we selected?

We hooked up the trailer and made the 1 mile drive west down our road and drove into the field.  My wife drove the truck and would position the trailer close to the bales and I would load the bales into the trailer.  To keep count, I would call out the number I was loading and Tricia would repeat the number.  After loading the first bale, I was chased out of the trailer by a nest of wasps that were hiding in there.  I was still fresh and full of vigor and ran quickly and didn't get stung.  We made a quick drive back home and killed 8 or 10 very angry red wasps.  Then we drove back and got down to business.

It was 3:15 by this time and we had church at 6, so we needed to really get down to business.

You can stack hay four bales high in the trailer and three wide.  With each bale put in, it's a shorter walk.  This is good hay - horse hay.  We use this sparingly during the winter.  We roll out round bales that they eat on all the time, but for the good square bales, we ration it, giving them a slice while we're milking.

 

Pretty soon, the trailer was full!  But there was still work to do.  We weren't at 70 bales yet.  I strapped the gate closed since it was too full to properly latch.

Our neighbors were fluffing, raking and baling right ahead of us.  Baling hay is always a beautiful sight to me.  

The hay field was full of square bales - much more than we could use.  They had customers that were loading like we were.  They also had a contraption that would pick up the bales, stack on a trailer being pulled by a tractor.  One man.  He'd drive it to the barn, tip the trailer over, and it was stacked perfectly without the exertion of any energy (by the man).

While we're on the topic of exertion of energy, well...  The trailer was loaded and the truck was loaded.  The old truck creaked under the load.  I tell you, it took everything I had to throw those last bales up on top of the truck.  I was, as they used to say, tuckered out.

I hopped in the truck.  My driver, the "hay maiden," was counting out money to pay the neighbors.  $420 to be exact.  The price was up $1 per bale this year, but it had been $5 a bale for years.  It's good hay.  They are our neighbors.  We like to buy local and it doesn't get more local than this!  I sat down and drank a full Yeti cup of ice cold water.  Ahhhhh!

We drove home very, very slowly and turned in the driveway.  I got a jack and disconnected the trailer.  Then we opened the pasture gate and backed the truck full of hay right next to the barn.  I climbed up into the loft and opened the doors and put the pulley and rope on the 4x4.  Now comes the really hard part.

Tricia clips the bungee cord hooks to the baling twine.  I grunt and groan and pull each bale up.  The rope has a ring on the end.  When the bale is even with the door, I put the ring on the nail to hold it while I grab the bale and swing it into the loft.

Just like in the trailer, I start stacking the hay.  I push the bales to the end.  The 2x12 wooden floor to the loft is smooth and shiny as it's been polished by pushing hay on it over the years.

We got 35 bales up in the barn before I looked at the clock and decided it was quittin' time if we wanted to make it to church.  Besides, I don't think I could've pulled another bale up.

After a good night's sleep, Tricia and I went out to the barn to conclude our work.  We were a little sore from the night before, but each bale put up was one bale closer to the end.  That's how you gotta think.  By and by, the work was done.  The hay was in the barn.  Another year done!  

The tired hay workers walked slowly into the house.  Part of us rejoiced as the work was finished.  The other part of us just wanted to lay down and rest.  Hay Day 2022 is in the books!

The Hay Field in Front

Special Note:    I learned from a reader that they stopped getting emails alerting them of new postings.  I researched and found that Blogger stopped offering this service.  You can no longer subscribe.  Save our website to your favorites and check in with us daily for new posts.  I normally try to post on Sundays, Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays - usually between 9 and 10 pm.  We so appreciate your readership.

I've written about the land across the street.  It's not ours.  It is well outside of our price range.  It's currently zoned agricultural, and we pray it stays that way.  Each morning, I kid you not, I pray that we stay in "the country."  I pray that this land remains undeveloped.  We pray for our neighborhood's safety and protection.  I pray for each of our neighbors, calling each of their names to the Lord.  It is a blessing to know your neighbors, to look out for one another.

If you enlarge the photo below, you can see a brand-spanking new subdivision has gone up across the hay field.  88 homes on 18 acres.  The houses sprang up overnight.  In the past, the view you see at night was almost pitch black.  Now, you see rows and rows of street lights.  Progress, one might say.  We had a scare a while back.  They began plowing and leveling the field in front.  We went to the police jury meeting to see what was going on.  Our police jury member assured us that the plowing and leveling was just for a hay field, not development.

The "hay" didn't look too healthy during the drought-stricken month of June, but when the rains came, the grass (weeds) grew with vigor and enthusiasm.  Yesterday afternoon, I had come in from feeding the chickens and was picking a mess of blackeyed peas and ozark razorback peas in a bucket.  I heard a commotion in front.

Well, I declare (like my grandmother used to say).  They were cutting the hay.  The cutter cuts the grass short and lays it down.  It dries in the summer sun.

Then the fluffer comes by and fluffs it up to allow it to fully dry.

It a jiffy, the hay was all cut and fluffed.  I'm such a nutball.  Look at the photo below.  There's something that bothers me about it.  I guess my OCD is kicking in.  The cutter missed a little strip of grass between the field and the road.  That is going to bother me until I take the sling blade out there and chop it down until it's flat and even with the rest of the field.  Crazy?  You bet!

On a September afternoon, I looked out at the hay field.  The blue skies overhead, the reduction of humidity in the air and the fragrance of freshly cut hay wafting over across the road gave assurance that I could be grateful that, at least this year, a pastoral, relaxing view was able to be enjoyed on a peaceful afternoon.

There's an additional benefit or two to this hayfield being cut.  If not cut, this field grows lush with goldenrod.  Beautiful to look at and our honey bees love it, but our allergies don't.  Also, if not cut, the tall grass becomes a perfect habitat for varmints of many types: coyotes, skunks, possums, snakes and rats.  It's best when those rascals stay far away from Our Maker's Acres Family Farm.

Opening Day of Teal Season

Special Note:    I learned from a reader that they stopped getting emails alerting them of new postings.  I researched and found that Blogger stopped offering this service.  You can no longer subscribe.  Save our website to your favorites and check in with us daily for new posts.  I normally try to post on Sundays, Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays - usually between 9 and 10 pm.  We so appreciate your readership.

This post needs a sub-heading.  "Not Much Meat For the Gumbo" sounds like a good description.  It was opening day for teal season.  I logged onto the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries website and purchased a resident hunting license for $20, a resident waterfowl license for $12 and a Federal Duck Stamp for $25.  I printed them out and carefully folded them in my wallet in the event we're visited by a game warden bright and early Saturday morning.

I set my alarm for 5 AM.  I had talked to my buddy, Gary, and was to meet him at the farm at the air strip at 6 AM.  That would give us ample time to get situated in the blind prior to sunrise.  Gary and I carried our shotguns and five gallon buckets down to the duck blind.  We turn the five gallon buckets upside down and sit on them.  They also are helpful in carrying out the game we kill.  Gary had gone out a few days prior and set out the decoys.  The pond is in a cut in a rice field that we had stopped up to save rain water.  As the sun began peeking up in the east, you could see the decoys bobbing in the water.

It was partly cloudy, with a gentle breeze.  Actually, quite cool for this time of year at 70 degrees.  Mosquitoes buzzed around us in thick clouds.  I began slapping my neck.  Gary passed a can of Deep Woods Off to me.  We heard shotgun blasts from other blinds in the distance as the time of official sunrise passed.  My Dad was hunting with my nephew and his friends not far from us.  Neighboring farmers were scattered in blinds adjacent to us.  Mexican squealers, crooked beaked cranes and cattle egrets flew by.

The ducks were coming in slowly - one or two at a time.  Some would cup their wings and land amidst the decoys.  Bigger flocks flew higher overhead.  Some groups circled our pond and then changed their minds and flew away.  Gary and I took shots when we had them.  Some of our shots were true.  Some were hopeful at best and fired when the teal were well out of range.  I thought I saw a teal look back at us and wink.

Gary and I use the occasion to catch up.  He's a good friend and we don't get to spend the time that we ought to.  We talk about family and work and the things you normally talk about like life, health, and memories of times we shared when we were younger and worked together.  In retrospect, some of this talking likely scared some of the teal away, I'm sure.

About 8:15 AM the ducks stopped flying.  The sounds of shotgun blasts from other ponds stopped.  We walked out to the pond and retrieved our ducks.  Sadly, Gary killed one and I killed one.  We missed four or five.  Not a very successful hunt, if you gauge it by the weight of your game bag, but we enjoyed ourselves.  Dad, and the other three in his blind killed 10.  Here's Gary with our two birds.

And here's me with the teal.

Gary was going to bring his daughter out hunting Sunday morning, but I told him I'd meet him next Saturday.  I'm waiting on a report to see how many they got.  With only one bird, it didn't make sense to get out the crawfish boiling pot I use to scald them or the big plucker we use when we butcher chickens.  I just decided I'd scald them on the kitchen stove.  It might have been my imagination, but I thought I sensed displeasure from my wife in this decision.

Once the water got to 145 degrees, I began dunking the bird.  You can see why they are called blue-winged teal, can't you?  I plucked the teal in the kitchen, being ever so careful to put every single feather in the five gallon bucket that had served as my seat in the duck blind.

I had sharpened my knife while waiting on the water to boil.  I took the teal outside to gut.  I certainly didn't want to push my luck.  Tricia sat out with me while I cleaned the teal.  It didn't take long.  In no time I had the teal cleaned along with the gizzard, the liver and the heart.

Not much meat for the gumbo, but that was only day one.  I'll get more.  We can always "stretch the pot" with some sausage, too.