He Is Risen!

 

Image Credit

Christ the Lord is risen!  Hallelujah!  Happy Resurrection Sunday.  

I hope today that you and your family celebrated Jesus' payment in full of our sin debt.  We had a nice worship service and remembered Christ's sacrifice in the Lord's Supper.

We then drove to Kinder where my sister and brother-in-law hosted us for a wonderful meal and fellowship.  We ate a delicious meal and enjoyed one another's company all afternoon.

Here are our boys, Russ and Benjamin and my Dad and Mom.

And here's the same thing but with Tricia and I in the photo.

God is so good!  Faith and family - what a blessing!

Chocolate Milk Rapids

On a family trip to the Smoky Mountains, we went whitewater rafting in the Nantahala River.  We have many fond memories of that area and that trip.  Our guide was friendly and knowledgeable and made sure we had a blast.  The river is controlled by a dam which releases water from 250 feet beneath the surface, ensuring the current is swift and the water is COLD!  What fun!  My parents took Russ on a trip to Yellowstone back when he graduated from high school and they went white water rafting on that trip, too.

In our state, Louisiana, there is no white water rafting.  There's no white water.  When Tricia moved here that was one of her observations.  Why is there no water that you can't see to the bottom?  And why is there alligators in the water?  

I was driving home from work the other morning heading south down LA 3086, when something caught my eye on the east side of the road that made me smile.  I like to look out over the countryside at the many sights I encounter.  I went over a small bridge that goes over Bayou Serpent and saw it.  Rapids!  There are rapids in the Bayou State, believe it or not.

This, I think, is a hidden gem that the parish tourist bureau might be overlooking.  We don't have white water, but we have something better.  What could be more thrilling than to go rafting down Bayou Serpent?  Chocolate Milk Rapids, you might call it.  You could observe serpents and alligators and nutria rats.  

All we need is investors and an outfitter.  It's springtime.  Have a great weekend, y'all!

Cheep! Cheep!

For the Sunday after church meal, my wife was planning on making Chicken Etoufee.  We always like rice & gravy for lunch.  She informed me that when she reached into our deep freeze to get a chicken out to thaw, we were down to our last bird!  We still have a few bags of the roosters that we butchered from the birds we hatched out, but as far as the meat birds we raised, they are almost gone.

Tricia told me that she had seen some Cornish Cross meat birds at Tractor Supply.  Normally, we order them by mail directly from the hatchery, but hey, if Tractor Supply has them, we'd save on shipping.  Saturday afternoon we went to Tractor Supply.  They had 7 Cornish Cross (straight run) left.  We said, "We'll take 'em!"  She told us they normally get more each Wednesday AM.  I made a note to check back on Wednesday.  Seven birds won't last us very long.  We put the seven little birds in our brooder under the heat lamp.  The fence on top puts a lid on (pardon the pun) the temptation that our cat, Ginger, might have in getting a chicken dinner under the heat lamp.

I was passing through Jennings today at lunch and pulled into Tractor Supply Company.  They had just received an order of 25 Cornish Cross meat birds this morning.  I said, "I'll take 'em all!"  She boxed them up for me.  They were all eating organic chick grower 18% protein.  At $2.99 per bird with NO shipping, this was a better deal than ordering by mail, where they were $3.30 per bird before shipping.

One box had 12 and the other had 13 chicks.  They all appeared healthy and happy, moving around and making "Cheep, cheep" noises.  Here's what they looked like when I unboxed them.

I picked one up and put it in my hand.  This is when they are still in their 'cute' stage.

And here is a profile shot, just like Olan Mills used to do:

I added the new arrivals in with the other, larger 7 birds.  Those seven are probably a week older.  The younger chicks weren't intimidated.  They ran around like they owned the place while their 7 larger counterparts watched their brooder be over-run by the new chicks.

I added more food and filled their water container, adding a teaspoon of apple cider vinegar.  This weekend, weather permitting, I'll move them out into the chicken tractor.  Hard to believe, but in 8 short weeks, we'll be butchering them and they'll move into the deep freeze, hopefully before our remaining inventory is exhausted.

The Bees Are Back in Town

It was back in 1975, I think, when a rock group named Thin Lizzy released a song called "The Boys are Back in town."  It had a really catchy baseline, I remember as a kid.  The reason I was thinking about that old song is an event that began happening outside our side door just the other day.  For years we've had a colony of honeybees that live in a hollow column that holds up our side porch.  It is the perfect place for bees, like a hollow tree.  The trouble with it is that there is no way to get the honey.  But that was before we had bee boxes and we liked having them even if we couldn't get the honey because they pollinated the garden and fruit trees.  Over and over, the bees fill the column up with comb and then probably run out of room and move out.

The column has been vacant for, I don't know, around a year, maybe?  That began to change last week.  We noticed scout bees looking around.  If you look closely you can see them hovering around the entrance at the top of the column.

With quickness, I quickly got our swarm trap, ratchet-strapped it to a ladder and put a cotton ball with 2 drops of lemon grass oil on it and set it up by the column.  The lemon grass oil attracts the bees.  In the swarm trap are some frames of drawn out comb.  Here's the strategy:  The scout bees are checking out possible sites for a queen and her swarm to move in.  If we could coax them into our box versus the column, well, that would be a real coup.

Bees aren't lazy, but they are efficient.  If they find a location that was previously occupied with bees and the old hive had plenty of drawn out comb, that's perfect.  They move in, clean the place up, and the colony grows.  It's like moving into a house that is fully furnished.  You don't need to buy furniture.  The bees, instead of working to build comb, can instead focus on making honey.  It's an effective allocation and usage of energy.  Bees never cease to amaze me.

Now we're at a disadvantage, I know.  I couple of frames of comb in a bee box that we use as a swarm trap doesn't compare to a column-full of comb, but I had to at least try!  We'll wait and see...  You can see some that are checking out the swarm trap, like an Open House in a subdivision.  See the bee?  That looks promising!

At one point we had as many bees around the swarm trap as we had in front of the column!

Until one day last week when there was A LOT of activity around the entrance to the column.  The queen and her entourage had arrived and decided to move into the furnished home.  We thought our swarm trap had curb appeal and we were offering owner financing with low mortgage interest rates.

I was very tempted to get up there and scoop them into the swarm trap, but there was a good chance the queen was already in the column, so I chose not to.  I'll move the swarm trap back out into the yard.  There will be more swarms coming, no doubt.  We'll catch one, I'm confident.

For now, the BEES are back in town.  We can't sing the BOYS are back in town, because the colony is mostly females.  

An Update on Our Egg Preservation Experiment

Back on July 5th of last year I believe we posted about trying a new way to preserve eggs.  Before the mink killed the majority of our flock, we had a plethora of eggs.  We used a dehydrator to dehydrate a bunch of them.  You can read about that process by clicking this link right here:  Dehydrated Eggs

At the end of that post in which we showed the process of dehydrating them, we mentioned at the end that we would keep you updated when we ate them to give a review.  Eight and a half months later and here we are.  Tricia pulled a half pint jar of dehydrated eggs out of the pantry and ran it through the food processor to turn it to a fine powder.

Here is what the dehydrated egg powder looks like.  It smells like... well, eggs.

So now the time comes to scramble up some eggs.  So how do you convert this powder back into eggs?  Well, the ratio is 2 Tablespoons egg powder + 2 Tablespoons water = 1 egg  (We played around with the amount of water until we got the consistency we wanted.)

So we followed the recipe and rehydrated our egg powder into an egg:

Okay, I'm going to be honest.  It just looks gross.  I guess I'm an egg purist.  I like gathering fresh eggs, cracking them and frying them in a well-seasoned cast iron skillet.  This process seems weird, but we're looking at different ways to preserve eggs.  Each method has its benefits, to be sure.

We put the reconstituted egg in the skillet and scrambled it.  It cooked like an egg. It looked like an egg.  It smelled like an egg.

There was one important think left to do.  Taste it.  This egg has been sitting in a jar in the form of a powder for 8 1/2 months.  How would it taste?  Here are the reviews:  

Kyle:    It tasted like a scrambled egg.  The texture was slightly different than a fresh egg, but I would have thought that this was a fresh scrambled egg had no one told me about it.

Tricia:    It had a slight "metallic" taste, but it was definitely edible.

We've eaten it several times since this post.  It's always fun to learn to do new things.  I like my eggs fresh, but if we had an abundance of eggs and wanted to make some 'shelf stable,' this is definitely an option.

Tricia's New Favorite Vegetable

Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds, in addition to having a seed catalog that could double as a coffee table book because the photos in it are so stunning, gives you a FREE packet of seeds with every order of five or ten packets (I forget which one).  The free seeds are mystery seeds and usually something you've never heard of and certainly not planted before.  A couple years ago, the free seed was Purple Kohlrabi.

I had never eaten kohlrabi before and certainly not a purple one, but I'm game for adventure, so I planted them.  They thrived.  I had no idea when they were ripe.  We had no idea how to prepare and cook this thing and didn't even know if we'd like it or not.  But it was FREE and I had a little space.  We ended up really liking this vegetable and it has become a staple in our fall garden.  They are also called a German turnip or a Turnip Cabbage.

We have been harvesting them and eating them and we have two remaining in the garden.  I need to pick them, along with the rest of the cabbage to make room for the rows of okra that I'll soon be planting.  Here is a nice purple kohlrabi that I just pulled.  The leaves are edible by humans like other brassica leaves, but I clip them and feed the cows and goats.  They seem to enjoy them.

It is a plump, healthy vegetable that just looks weird.

Once the leaves were snipped off, it fits perfectly in your hand and is exactly the size of those Nerf footballs that my brother and I would throw to each other in the yard when we were growing up.  However, I'm not throwing this thing anywhere but in the skillet.  

The way to prepare it is to cut the hard, woody part off that's near the base.  Then, I take a sharp knife and "skin" it until you are looking at a greenish-white bulbous thing.  Then, I slice it into disks and cube it by putting it into our vegetable chopper.  The cubes emerge as 1/2 inch by 1/2 inch sized squares.  These little cubes are seasoned and sautéed in a cast iron skillet.

I think kohlrabi has turned out to be my wife's favorite vegetable.  We would have likely not discovered this without Baker Creek Seeds (rareseeds.com) free seed promotion.  Although kohlrabi is indeed a top-shelf vegetable, I would say that mine is still fresh-picked snap beans (Italian Roma variety) cooked with new potatoes cut in half with plenty of butter.

Not Chef Boyardee

When we were younger my brother, sister and I really liked Chef Boyardee Beef Ravioli.  We'd open the can opener and take the top off and pour the contents in a pan and heat it up.  What a snack that was!  It was fine Italian cuisine as far as we were concerned.  To tell you the truth, I think it's been since the college days that I have enjoyed ravioli from a can.

We decided we could do a little better.  With fresh spinach coming in, it gave us an idea.  We had been eating fresh spinach sautéed with Parmesan cheese, cooked just right, but it was time to step up the game. 

Fresh Spinach and ricotta cheese stuffed ravioli.  It's always a fun job to make pasta, so we made up some pasta dough.  We flattened it out and ran it through the pasta machine, starting out at setting 7 and lowering it each run until we got to #2.

When it finishes its last run through the machine, it yields long sheets of pasta.

We flattened it out and laid it out on dish towels.  We had two down and six more to go.

The fresh spinach was cooked and drained to remove all the liquid and then ricotta cheese and seasonings and parmesan cheese was added and mixed together.

The mixture is put into a piping bag and we squeeze out a teaspoon-sized amount onto the sheet of pasta, about 2 inches apart.

Then we folded the pasta over, carefully pressing all the air pockets out.  Before doing that, we wet the pasta along the edges to form a good seal.  Here's what it looks like:

My wife bought a nifty little Betty Crocker tool that made fancy wavy edges.  

Here is the finished, but uncooked ravioli.

When we finished making them, we counted them up.  We made 51 raviolis.  It didn't take long at all with our little assembly line going.  It would have made Henry Ford proud.

The ravioli were boiled and then pulled out into a colander.  They were seasoned and Tricia made a tomato basil sauce.  Fresh parsley was put on top for garnish.

It was game on.  We each fixed a bowl of spinach ricotta ravioli.  Here's the money shot:

Look out Chef Boyardee!  You've got some competition...

Sticking Your Tongue Out - Some Straws Are Good!

I was thinking about things long forgotten this afternoon as I was putting mulch around my potatoes.  They are tall enough now that I am putting about 3 inches of composted wood chip mulch around the all the potato plants.  It is monotonous job of using a pitch fork to load the mulch (that has almost turned into topsoil) into a wagon, pull the wagon to the potato patch in the side yard, and gently place the mulch around them.  Doing this for many years has made the soil full of organic material.  It is not compacted at all and is a rich, growing medium.  The mindless activity provides plenty of time for thought.

Strange thoughts filled my mind while mulching today.  In Lake Charles and Baton Rouge, there was a cafeteria called Piccadilly Cafeteria.  When we were kids we'd go there.  They had a plate for kids called the "Dilly Plate"  We'd get that every time we went.  I liked their Fried Fish.  It came in a square shape for some reason.  Their macaroni and cheese was so creamy and cheesy.  There's nothing like it.  I think all macaroni and cheese one day aspires to be Piccadilly Macaroni and cheese.  I would also put jalapeno cornbread and maybe some green beans on my plate.  

We were always told to clean our plates because there were starving children in China.  I understand that we were not supposed to be wasteful, but I never understood how 'cleaning my plate' had any bearing on the Chinese children's famine.  But I cleaned my plate and still do today.  The Dilly plate, beneath each three sections of the plate, had drawings.  One was a little boy with a rocket ship.  I remember that one well. The pictures were different under each section.  The benefit was if you cleaned your plate, in addition to helping feed children in China, you were able to view the cool pictures beneath your food.  Today I have learned that I need no enticement or gimmicks to clean my plate.

The other thing is this, as we'd slide our tray along the stainless steel tubes toward the cashier, we'd pass in front of the dessert section.  There were lines of glass bowls full of cubes of jello.  I don't know how they cut the jello into perfect squares, but somehow they accomplished this feat with precision.  And oh, was the jello tempting.  Some had yello jello, or purple, or bright green, orange or red.  I liked the red.  It was impossible to not put some jiggly jello on your tray.  You'd continue pushing your tray down the gauntlet of desserts beckoning for you to select them.  I had another favorite.  Egg custard with some nutmeg sprinkled on top.  Delicious.  I could eat some of that right now if I had some.

We'd sit down and say a blessing over the food and begin to eat, but not before my Dad took all the straws away from us.  Straws were forbidden.  Even knowing that straws were verboten, we'd tear the white paper from the top and bang it on the table until the plastic straw was exposed.  We would quickly put the straw in our beverage and lean over, but before we could take a slurp, Dad would reach over with the speed of a cheetah and pull the straw out of the drink.  The reason for the prohibition on straws was that invariably, we would lean over to drink from the straw and would turn the drink over.  What a mess!  Sticky Coke or iced tea would cover the table and us, and Dad, like the Raven in Edgar Allen Poe's poem, said "Nevermore."

Being an adult now, prohibition is now lifted and I use drinking straws from time to time.  I drank from a straw last week at the Bayou Beekeeper's Club Meeting at Green's Cafe.  I didn't spill either, no siree.  I'm quite proud of that accomplishment.

Speaking of bees, our two boxes of bees have been busy.  The queens are laying and the population is growing.  They have been flying each day to the rain barrels I have that collect water coming off the roof.  They line the edges of the barrels and drink water.  We like to watch them.

Would you believe me if I told you that bees drink from a straw?  They sure do.  Most people call it a bee tongue, but the official name is the 'glossa' and they use it to sip water, or nectar or to eat honey.  I zoomed in with my phone camera and caught this bee with her tongue sticking out, drinking water.  Can you see it?

She didn't even spill.  Not one drop.

Up By the Road Ditch

Up by the road ditch in the front yard is a huge azalea bush.  In recent years, we've planted a baby's breath bush beside it for the white color to contrast against the hot pink.  It's in full bloom right now.  Actually, it's a good thing I got a photo of it when I did because we had a 2 inch downpour of rain today and most of the flowers are faded and torn up.  Glad I got a photo of the azalea in all its glory.  This azalea is one that we moved from my grandmother's house in Kinder.  I like planting things that have a story or some history.  That way when we walk around the yard, the sights spur fond memories.  The azalea is happy and is flourishing.  We planted in to anchor the western side of our yard.  It's doing a nice job.

Something that is not doing a nice job is the parish crew that is in charge of the ditches.  They pass by in a truck and spray Round-up in the ditch.  This variety of roundup kills everything buy Bermuda grass.  I can see why they do it.  It keeps the ditches clean so that water flows easily through it.  It also reduces the amount of time that they have to pass by with a tractor and cut the grass.

There's one problem, however.  They consistently over-shoot the ditch and spray Round-up 3 feet onto my property.  I'll show why that's a problem in a minute.  To combat this, I ordered some plastic corrugated signs and made some homemade placards to kindly and diplomatically request no spray on the ditch in front of our yard/pasture.  I have the similar message on the back side in the event they spray coming from the other direction.

Here's the issue and my grievance with the herbicide.  Roundup kills the grass down to the dirt.  This makes their job easier, BUT barren soil with no grass and no root structure holding it together creates an erosion problem.  You can see below how my topsoil on my property is eroding into the ditch.  Topsoil that should be growing grass now is slowly filling the ditch.  At some point the ditch will have so much of my soil in it that it won't properly drain.  Then they'll come with a track-hoe and a dump truck and scoop up my top soil and carry it away.

Erosion!

The downside of "No Spray" is that I'll have to take responsibility for keeping the ditch clean.  You can see in the photo below that I used a string trimmer to weed-eat the entire ditch.  It is not a terrible job to do this, but it's not a job I prefer doing.  The thing I thought about is the job will become a terrible job in August when the temperature approaches 100 and the humidity level approaches 100% as well!

I don't know.  We'll discuss this again in August.  It may make me re-think my position on "No Spray."

The Spuds Are Up!

We planted a 45 foot row of La Soda red potatoes.  The row has 4 potatoes planted (wide) and 34 (long) giving us 136 potato plants.  I planted them as soon as the cuts scabbed over, so the eyes were not well-developed.  It took longer than I thought for them to finally start peeking through the ground.  Here's one just popping out with what looks like the 5 o'clock shadow on my chin growing on its leaves.  My whiskers are becoming more and more white, ha ha!

As they are popping out of the ground, in the absence of rainfall, I try to get out there with a hose and shower the ground quickly to keep the soil moist.

The leaves open and the sunshine does its thing, causing green growth and a happy plant.  Buried an inch beneath the seed potato is a sprinkling of composted chicken litter.  Once those roots hit that, they'll really take off.  Tricia and I have worked to keep the potato bed weed-free.  Every time we walk past it, we pull out weeds.  

In another week, I'll carry wagon-loads of decomposed wood chips and use a pitch fork to spread out a four inch layer of chips on the bed and around each plant.  That will do several things.  It will help the soil beneath the plant moist and reduce the need to water.  It will also act as a barrier to keep the weeds from growing and stealing fertility from the soil.  Finally, the decomposed wood chips become part of the soil, enriching it and adding organic matter.

I think my love for gardening all started back in childhood with Irish Potatoes.  It was 1976 and I was ten years old.  We had just moved from town out to the country.  There was a little strip of land near the neighbor's pasture which allowed the sunlight to shine through the tall pine trees that were on the property.  I moved many pine knots that were all over the land and stacked them in piles.  It was doing this that I was first introduced to the black widow spider.  I was very careful handling the pine knots as they loved to hide on them.  The black widows had a glossy black body with a bright red hour glass shape on their belly.

My grandfather helped me till up the land and Dad ran PVC water line out there.  We planted potatoes among other vegetables.  I can still remember digging up the plants and unearthing beautiful new potatoes.  My Mom cooked them up.  Things always taste better when you grow them.  Forty seven years later and I'm still planting potatoes.  Still in awe of watching things grow and produce a bountiful harvest that you can enjoy at the supper table. 

Joy Comes in the Morning

For several mornings, we'd hear "beep, beep, beep" and that would alert us that bright and early, the workers on the right-of-way crews were unhooking the wood chipper and backing down our driveway to dump another load of wood chips.  We filled up all of our available space and had to tell them that we couldn't take any more.  That's too bad.  But we have all we need for now.

I zoomed in on the photo above to show you what is going on.  Can you see the steam rising from the wood chip pile?  It wasn't even cool outside, but the piles are heating up.  The chips are decomposing and bacteria growth is starting to work.  Pretty soon we'll see mushrooms growing on the piles.  Some will be edible and some not.  Eventually, all this stuff will make some rich compost.  I move it wagon-load at a time to the back of the garden and layer wood chips and cow manure, wood chips and more cow manure.

We did lose a couple blueberry bushes in the drought, but the ones that survived are loaded up with blooms.  Tricia made homemade blueberry muffins this weekend and they were absolutely delicious.  I asked her how many blueberries we had left in the freezer, hoping we'd not run out before this year's crop comes in.

The bushes are a-buzz with honeybees.  In our beekeeping class, they told us that honeybees can boost crop productivity by 30%.  I hope that is true.  Our bees are certainly working the bushes hard.  Hopefully, we'll have a great blueberry crop.

One thing we haven't had for the last two years is citrus.  The intense freezes we've had for the past two years have decimated our trees.  I spent the last two days burning the dead citrus branches that our neighbors cut off of their trees.  They even lost some.  The only citrus tree we lost was a lemon tree.  The navel orange tree was damaged, BUT, I'm seeing blooms on it!

Same thing with the 1 year old Owari satsuma tree.  We bought another satsuma tree at the nursery in town that is supposed to be more cold hardy (down to 10 degrees Fahrenheit).

This tangerine tree has very minimal growth on it, but it's a fighter.  It has some blooms on it.

My stroll through the yard was a joyful one.  We may have citrus once again!