Shampoo For You (and me)

Since we began butchering our bull calves, we get lots of tallow that we render and freeze.  Other than cooking with it, we make soap.  But up to this point we've never made shampoo.  Growing up, I used Head and Shoulders and a shampoo called Apple Pectin that smelled so good.  For the last 20 something years, we've used Suave Shampoo and Conditioner.  Store bought soaps and shampoos rob your skin and hair of natural oils that are good for you.  Read a label of the bottle of shampoo in your shower.  Lots of words on there you can't pronounce.  Chemicals.  We've been making a concerted effort to get away from all that.

So Tricia did a little research and wrote down a recipe for Shampoo Bars that she wanted to try.  Here is the recipe that she finally settled on:  Notice that you can pronounce every word:

She got the oils listed above going on the stovetop.

I came in the kitchen and my wife, the mad scientist, had safety glasses on.  When I asked her what was going on, she explained, "There's lye in that jar right there."  I see she has a note on her jar that says, "Vinegar neutralizes lye."

The oils go in the half gallon jar...

And then the lye and distilled water get poured in with the oils.  Tricia used a stick blender to begin mixing it all up.  The shampoo started to trace (emulsification of the oils & lye) too quickly, so she added some water to slow it down.

The shampoo was poured and spooned into a soap mold.  It really hardened too fast, but that's okay.

Voila!  Our first ever shampoo bars are poured!

We'll let the shampoo bars cure and harden for six weeks.  At the end of that time, we'll pop the shampoo out of the mold and cut up into individual shampoo bars.  We'll say adios to Suave.  Maybe we should try out the shampoo bars and give a review in 6 weeks, shall we?

Drop The Tailgate

In our driveway sits a 24 year old pickup truck that my Dad gave me.  Russ drove it to college for four years and Benjamin drove it to and from high school after being home-schooled.  Although it currently has a rear engine oil seal leak, it still runs.  I just have to check the oil frequently.  I'll get it fixed one of these days.  Tricia and I like to drive it down the back roads to a gas station about 5 miles away and buy some boudin balls and a soft drink, sometimes a greasy brown bag full of cracklins.  Then we roll down the windows and play old country music and sing along as we drive about 35 miles an hour on the way home, eating our boudin balls and drinking Dr. Pepper and looking at the scenery on either side of the dirt roads.

As I walked by the truck the other day, I dropped the tailgate and sat down.

In our modern society, we have many apps and tools that help us save time and money.  If we optimize our time, well, we'll be more productive and squeeze more minutes out of the day, right?  But what do we do with those extra minutes we've saved?  What if we did nothing better with a few minutes but sat down and just did some thinking?

And I dropped the tailgate and plopped down and did just that.  I dangled my legs and swung them back and forth and thought at first about nothing in particular.  In my childhood, we did a lot of riding in the back of pickup trucks.  We'd sit on the edge, or we'd sit on the toolbox with our backs resting on the sliding glass back window, but mostly we'd sit on the tailgate as we'd drive down country roads at the farm, spitting on the blacktop road as it passed beneath us.

You don't much see people sitting in the back of pickup trucks anymore.  You never see people sitting on tailgates.  I wonder why that is?  It used to be so commonplace in our neck of the woods.  I'm sure there's a law against it or something.  It is pretty dangerous, I guess, but none of us ever fell out the back. 

In the back of a farmer's truck, there were always several things present.  First, there were a lot of empty Dr. Pepper cans rolling around.  You had to be a little careful during the time that we were water leveling, because we'd catch snapping turtles and put them in the back of the truck to bring to my Dad's cousin.  He would make a turtle sauce picante and we'd go to his house when we'd break for lunch and eat those turtles.  The empty cans in the back of the truck were like an early warning system.  If you heard the cans rustling, it meant a snapping turtle was back there and you'd better be careful.  If they bit you, and old wives tale said, they wouldn't let go of you until it thundered.

There was the ubiquitous shovel in the back of the truck, used to patch holes in levees in the rice field so you wouldn't lose all your water and also for killing cotton mouth water moccasins.  Hanging upside down between the tool box and the cab, was always a pair of Lacrosse rubber boots.  Sometimes you stepped in some deep water or your boots developed a hole and hanging them upside down did the trick of drying them out.

Back then, they hadn't invented fancy steps or ladders that come as attachment or option to tailgates these days, nor did they have a camera mounted on the back that helped you back up to hook up a trailer.  Those inventions had yet to be discovered back then.  The tailgate was merely something you'd drop and plop your bottom down onto to do some high-powered thinking on.  I'm convinced if we'd drop the tailgate, many of the world's problems could be resolved overnight.

Fox in the Box

We've all joked about children getting presents when they are younger and quickly grow tired of the toy and spend more time playing with the box that the toy came in.  And it's true.  I've always loved boxes.  It was so much fun as a child when my parents got a new appliance like a refrigerator or washer or dryer.  Those boxes were fun!  We made forts out of them, spaceships, race cars.  A child's imagination could run wild with what you could do with an ordinary box.

As it turns out, when I grew up, I never outgrew my love of boxes.  When we make a new purchase, I put the empty boxes up in the attic because, "that's a good box and it'll come in useful one day."  The other day, Tricia ordered a new crock pot.  When we have 'dinner on the ground' at church, it is so doggone handy to have a crock pot to bring your offering to the fellowship hall, plug it in to keep the food warm, and place on the serving line.

That new purchase meant we have a new box.  But we have so many boxes already.  Tricia placed the empty box outside in the garage to put in the trash can.  But now we can't possibly throw it away.  Why, you may ask, can't we throw it away?

Because Ginger, the cat, has adopted the box as her new home.

Instead of the cat in the hat, I call her the fox in the box. 

Each day, she's in her box where she naps in solitude, in safety, in security, tucked away out of sight.  And it's a good thing that she's not out patrolling around because just outside the garage door on the patio, there is and adventure taking place.  Like Marlin Perkins on Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, there is the hunter and the prey.

Let's take a look.  Can you spot that bird on top of the patio chair?

That's a Carolina Wren and she's got food in her mouth.  She's bringing bugs to feed her two babies that are in the planter behind the ivy plant.  We watched as she repeatedly fed them.  The babies were big, almost full grown.  The Carolina Wren was mighty brave, trying to raise her young in a nest at ground level instead of in a tree.  A ground level nest provides zero protection for her or her two babies from the huntress.  But she is a really wise wren, and she surveilles the area, not giving away the location of her babies until she is absolutely sure that there is no danger.  Then she swoops in and brings a breakfast of bugs to two open mouthed baby birds.

We were worried about the mama wren and her babies.  But the babies grew up quickly on their diet of bugs and apparently flew out of the nest for they were gone today.  They owe their lives to the fact that the carnivorous cat was otherwise preoccupied with cat-napping in the cardboard crock pot box.

By-products from the Hive: Beeswax and Honey Water

When we butcher a cow, we use most everything except the "moo."  We make bone broth with the bones and pressure can it.  We render the tallow for soapmaking and for cooking and so on and so forth.  Same thing with the bees.  The honey is the main attraction, but there are other uses for what's left behind.  Tonight I'll show you what we did.  

Here's a photo of the cappings.  When the honey in the comb reaches the correct moisture percentage (17%, I think), the bees cap it.  In order to pull honey, you must cut the cappings.  You try to cut as little as possible so the bees don't have to work so hard to make comb and can make honey quicker.  Here is a container that catches all the cappings.  There is honey in it, too.  The honey drips down into the lower container, where it is drained off through a honey gate.

But what about all that wax?

The wax will not be wasted.  We manually squeeze as much honey as possible out of the wax.

That leaves little palm-sized wax footballs.  We throw those in a bag.

We put some water in a crock pot and warm up.  The wax is put into a muslin cloth 'filter' and is melted.

The wax runs right through and the muslin cloth catches most of the solids.  A lot of that is propolis.  We squeeze everything we can out into the crock pot that is heated up.

We set the bag that contained the wax on the back patio and the honeybees discover it quickly.  Nothing goes to waste with them.  They collect it all and bring it back to the hive to reuse.

Then we let the wax in the crock pot come to room temperature.  The wax is on top and the water goes to the bottom.

We did this numerous times to process all the wax.  It hardens into disks and then we weighed it.

Here is all of it once we were done:

The cappings from our 13.5 pounds of honey made 2.25 pounds of beeswax.  Our friend that let us use his honey extracting equipment did not want his cappings, so he gave it to us.  The cappings from his 16 pounds or extracted honey made 2.75 pounds of beeswax.  In all we have 5 pounds of beeswax!  We plan on making candles, lip balm, furniture polish, and melt some to brush on to frames prior to putting foundation in the hives to give the bees a head start.

But wait, there's more!  The 'water' at the bottom of the crock pot when the wax goes to the top isn't just water, it's honey water.  We filled bowls of it, but didn't throw it out.

We put it in freezer jars and freezer bags and will freeze it and give it back to the bees.

In the winter, when there's not much for the bees to eat, we'll thaw out the honey water and pour into bowls for the bees to come eat.  Many people feed their bees sugar water, but we'll try a natural approach and feed them their own honey water.  It'll have them fat and happy to begin making honey for next spring.

Farewell To A Friend

 

I was at work about two weeks ago when my wife called me to tell me that a former pastor of mine had passed away.  Like all news of this nature, it is sad and heavy and starts your mind thinking of your mortality and how brief and fleeting this life is.  News like this makes you take inventory of your life.  Is what you are doing meaningful and do you make an impact on others?  Do the things you invest your time in pay eternal dividends?

Charlie was my pastor when we lived in Kinder and attended the First Methodist Church there.  When my newborn son had a life-threatening illness, he rode with me to Children's Hospital in New Orleans and prayed with us, standing by our side in the toughest of times.  His heart was so big and he thought nothing of sacrificing his time to meet our spiritual needs.

He was a voracious reader and his sermons were always so well-researched and interesting!  A brilliant student of history, and a fantastic storyteller, Charlie incorporated interesting examples and thought provoking points to open our hearts to the teachings of Jesus.  He challenged us to live for Christ.  I still remember how he taught us that the word BELIEVE in the Bible (Acts 16:31) is the Greek word pisteuo, which means to entrust, rely on, and is more than just mental assent.

He and his beautiful family lived just down the road from the family grocery store that we managed.  It could be a stressful job at times and Charlie could sense that.  I was young and idealistic and probably immature in a whole lot of ways.  Charlie would walk over and ask me to sit with him in a swing under a big oak tree behind the store.  He would pull out a worn copy of C.S. Lewis' book, The Screwtape Letters and read a chapter to me.  We would discuss the topic in the day's letter and then he would pray with me.

He was so thoughtful, so intelligent, so giving.  I'm not the only one who thought this.  The whole community, even those who didn't attend his services highly respected him.  I missed him dearly when the Methodist Church moved him to a different pastorate.  Later, we learned that his daughter, Katie, was seriously injured in a car accident, and suffered a traumatic brain injury.  We kept up with the CaringBridge posts and prayed and prayed for her healing.

Over the passage of time and years, we had lost touch, but almost a year ago, Charlie presided over the funeral of a family member in Welsh.  We were able to sit and visit for a long time afterward.  It was SO good to get to see him and reconnect.  His familiar smile, humility, kindness and big heart had not changed.  Charlie lived a life that made such an impact on my life.  He loved the Lord Jesus and studying His Word.

First Honey Harvest - By the Numbers

7 The law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul: the testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple.  

8 The statutes of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart: the commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes.

9 The fear of the Lord is clean, enduring for ever: the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.

10 More to be desired are they than gold, yea, than much fine gold: sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb.

Psalm 19:7-10

The honey gate opened and the sweet, sticky stuff flowed.  You sit there and watch and marvel.  It is amazing what all goes into making honey.  All that work and we've robbed them of it!  We did leave some for them to eat, though.

Once we screened and filtered the honey, the food grade 5 gallon buckets filled up.  Of the five medium boxes of honey, we harvested four 5 gallon buckets of honey with varying amounts in each bucket.

Bucket #1 weighed 50.9 pounds

Bucket #2 weighed 53.5 pounds

Bucket #3 weighed 53.5 pounds

Bucket #4 weighed 11.4 pounds

The buckets and lids weigh 8 pounds total, so to get to the tare weight, we subtracted that out.

That left us with a total weight of 161.3 pounds of honey or 13 gallons!  That'll work.  We purchased jars and we'll be bottling the honey for sale and for personal consumption.  We will show that operation in the upcoming days.  We are also processing the beeswax right now.  I'll show you that operation in a few days.  We plan to make candles, lip balm, and have some remaining to coat the foundation frames.

Honey in the Bible symbolizes God's goodness, His sweet provision, and wonderful blessings.  He did, after all, lead His people into a land flowing with milk & honey.  Come to think of it, our little 5 acres is flowing with milk and honey, literally.  God is so good and His Word is so sweet!

Our First Honey Extraction

Saturday was a big day for us.  We planned to extract our honey for the first time as beekeepers.  We met in the morning, smoked the openings to the four hives and went through each box, only pulling out frames that were completed capped.  When the nectar has turned to honey, the bees cap the cells.  Pulling honey from only capped comb ensures that your honey has the correct percentage moisture.

We have queen excluders on top of the two deep brood boxes on each hive.  This keeps the queen from moving up and laying eggs in the medium frames.  Those medium frames are exclusively honey.  That's good.  We went through each and every frame.  When our inspection was complete, out of nine medium supers, five of them were 100% (or very close to it) capped honey.  We will leave the remaining four there.  By the fall we'll likely pull honey again.

The photo below shows the five mediums full of honey in the back of the truck.  Bees don't want you to take their honey.  In order to evacuate the boxes of bees, you use a fume board.  That's the board with the t-shirt stapled to it.  Once you have your boxes of honey, you spray the fume board with some "bee repellant" made with 100% natural ingredients as we don't want chemicals in our honey.  The bees leave the frames and you put a top on the boxes.  This means your frames are mostly empty of bees.

The boxes of honey is HEAVY!  I'm estimating around 50 pounds per box.  We stacked those up in the honey house.  We're using his equipment this first year rather than purchasing all that you need to extract honey.

I almost feel sorry for the ladies that made all this honey.  (Except they stung me, so my sympathy level is lacking a bit.)  They followed the boxes 5 miles and were trying to clean up some of the honey we spilled.  They did a lot of work to make that.

Here's a look down into the box.  You can see the 'bee space' between the frames.  The bees have drawn out all the comb and capped it.  

Here is an up close shot of a frame of capped honey.  That is all wax that covers each cell of honey.

Using a heated knife, we cut the cappings off, exposing the honey beneath it.  Once you do that, the frames can be placed in an extractor and be spun.

This photo zooms in on a frame of honey that has been uncapped.  It is now ready for the extractor.

The frames are loaded into the extractor.  This extractor holds 6 frames.

The extractor uses centrifugal force to remove the honey from the frames.  You hand-crank the extractor as you would in an old-fashioned ice cream maker.  As you spin, the honey flies out of the frames against the inside of the drum and then drains down the sides to the bottom.

This frame shows an empty frame once the honey has been spun out of it.  The comb remains.  We'll put that back out with the bees and they will clean that up.  In the fall, we hope to pull again when the flow of goldenrod ends.

While we work, we eat.  Fresh honey and honey comb.  So delicious!  We eat until our stomachs hurt.

We open the honey gate at the bottom of the extractor and honey (and wax/comb) flows out.  It is run through several screens to remove the wax.  It then flows into 5 gallon buckets where we collect it for bottling later.

Here is part of the honey harvest that we got from our first honey extraction!

Tomorrow we'll show you how much we got and look at some other by-products from our first honey pull.  It was a long day with a lot of work, but the benefits were, well... SWEET!

Random Photos On a Thursday

We were out of town for a work conference last night, and we're out of our normal routine, so tonight I figured that I would post some recent photos with brief explanations.  Tricia was a birthday girl this past week.  She turned 58 years old on July 13th.  The boys came in and brought a Chocolate chocolate chip cake from Nothing Bundt Cakes.  It was delicious.  We took her out to a local Mexican food restaurant, and we ate and enjoyed one another's company.

The neighbors across the street have some beautiful horses on their property with a white fence and red barns.  We walk over from time to time and visit the horses and pet them.  In the early evening last month, I captured the full moon rising.

We've harvested quite a few butternut squash this year.  We like to roast them in the oven and eat them as a side dish.  They're so sweet!  We also like to make a butternut squash soup.  It's a little hot for soup right now, though.

We are getting ready to extract honey this weekend on Saturday.  You can see Tricia and I in our bee suits in the photo below.  The four hives we'll be harvesting honey from are in the background.

This will be our first time since we've been beekeeping, and we're excited.  We haven't purchased a honey extractor yet, so we'll be using a friend's this time.  Tricia did purchase 5 food grade 5 gallon buckets to put the honey in.  Can't wait to get this done!  We'll show you the process at some point next week.

Just in the Nick of Time

It was about 19 months ago that we borrowed a registered Jersey bull from a friend who lives about 10 minutes away from us.  The bull's name was Nick, and that dude was big and not halter broken.  We didn't know how things were going to work out, but he ended up being gentle and we got him to the house.  We unloaded him and he was able to breed LuLu.  Elsie did NOT get bred.  As it turned out, she had a cyst on her ovary and hopefully we got that fixed.  Rose Ethel did not get bred, either.  We think that she may be past her 'child-rearing' years.  She's old.  But you never know.  Abram laughed when he was told that Sarai would give him a son in his old age.

It's been almost a year since LuLu's bull calf, that we named Nicky, was born.  He was born at the hottest point of the year, during a drought.  LuLu was extremely stressed after calving and we thought that we were going to lose her.  We kept her alive by keeping a water sprinkler going that kept a small patch of bermuda grass growing and by feeding her sweet potato vines after she stopped eating.  We drenched her with molasses, too.  She pulled through and has raised a nice calf.  He's coming up on a year old on August 6th.  Here is Nick today:

Up to this point, he's been docile, but in our experience with previous Jersey bulls, that changes as they mature.  We're starting to notice that with Nick.  He uses his head as a weapon, threatening to come at you.  He'll also push the water troughs all over the barnyard.  He just likes hitting things with his big, meaty head.  We don't want one of those "things" he hits to be us, so we never turn our backs to him.

Our plans for him are what our plans have been for every Jersey bull calf born on our little farm - we'll eat him.  We'll give him another six or eight months to mature and, most importantly breed LuLu, Rosie, and Elsie and then we'll take him to the slaughterhouse.  We'll get all the meat, organs, bones, and tallow.  We use almost everything off of the animal.  It may seem cruel to some, but meat comes from somewhere, and that somewhere might as well be from our pasture where he's lived a good life, eating grass, with no antibiotics, hormones or medications.  

Starting Cuttings - Two Ways

I first was introduced to the Vitex tree (also called the chaste tree) on a trip to Dallas, Texas to visit my Aunt Cheryl and cousin Patrick.  Chaste trees lined the streets near their home, and the purple flowers were beautiful.  I immediately asked what the name of this tree was and was told the Chaste Tree.  The name behind it has an interesting history.  The chaste tree makes seeds that are like peppercorns.  

Ages ago, it was said that this tree quelled romantic and amorous urges.  European monks who took vows of poverty sprinkled the seeds on their food and slept on the leaves of the chaste tree to rid themselves of fleshly urges.  I'm not sure of the efficacy of this, but who's to judge?  Modern pharmaceuticals are touted to do this, that, or the other, and have been found wanting, no?

We purchased a chaste tree at the local nursery in town and it has thrived in our yard.  It attracts butterflies and bumblebees every single day.

The blooms are beautiful.  I wish they had a wonderful fragrance, but I don't smell anything.  My sniffer doesn't work too good, so that's not to say it doesn't smell nice.  

I began to think that it would be nice to have a few more of these growing, perhaps in a row, lining the driveway.  We need to go buy some more.  But as I thought about that, it reminded me of an item on my To Do List:  *Learn to start trees from cuttings.  I had done that successfully a couple of times, but not for trees.  We had success with starting a Bleeding Heart vine and Confederate Jasmine.

Now is a good time to try starting a chaste tree from cuttings.  I bought some rooting hormone.  I wanted to experiment two ways, though.  With some cuttings, I would put directly in a cup of water.  With some cuttings, I would put the rooting hormone on and put directly in moistened soil.

So about two months ago, I did just that.  I put three cuttings off of our chaste tree directly in a cup of water.  Two months later, and look what we have!:

Healthy vitex - successful cuttings

The quality of this photo is so poor, but if you look at the bottom of the cutting, you can see long roots.  Success!!

Out of the three cuttings I put in water, two had leaves and roots, and today I transplanted them into pots with soil.  I'll raise them for maybe a year in pots before transplanting in row to line the driveway.  The third cutting was a dud, but like Meatloaf sang, "Two out of three ain't bad."  (Now you'll have that song stuck in your head, won't you?)

No leaves, no roots

Let's go check on the ones that I put rooting hormone on and planted in soil.  As you can see, there are three that are healthy with leaves and certainly a good root system beneath it.  I planted 7 in total with rooting hormone into the soil and 3 of them made it.  Either method seems to be pretty doggone good!

Next thing I'm going to try to grow from cutting is:  BLUEBERRIES from cuttings.  I'm going to try them both ways - with rooting hormone and in water.  Our blueberry bushes are big and productive, but I'd like to have more to make up for the ones we lost last year in the drought.  Tricia makes me a fresh blueberry smoothie every single morning.  If we had more, oh, the things we could do!  Blueberry muffins and pancakes, Blueberry coffeecake, blueberry ice cream, blueberry scones, blueberry jelly!  The list is endless.  

In addition to tasting good, blueberries are good for you.  They're said to reduce blood pressure, prevent heart disease and increase memory.  Probably better health benefits than the chaste tree, too!