The Breakfast of Champions

Nope, not Wheaties.  Each year at this time when it is humid and especially after a rain, you can find the main ingredient.  There's a few spots in our yard that I call the honey hole.  Year after year, they come up.  Of course, I'm talking about Chanterelle mushrooms.  They are unmistakable with their 'electric orange' color.  They grow in dirt and never out of wood.  They have ribs that run under the cap all the way down.  Finally, they have a scent of apricots.

When I saw them, I went to get a glass colander to put them in and I plucked them out of the ground.  

Here are the ribs underneath the mushroom that I was mentioning:

It was evening when I brought them in.  I mentioned to Tricia that the Chanterelles would be a great addition to our normal egg breakfast.  So here was the breakfast special the very next morning:

Fresh eggs from the hens, fresh Chanterelles from the yard, fresh tomatoes, peppers and green onions from the garden.  A delicious breakfast for sure.  (It rained another inch yesterday.  I'll check the honey hole for more Chanterelles tomorrow.)

Harvesting the LaSoda Potatoes

Somewhere around February 9th we planted 15 pounds of LaSoda seed potatoes in our garden in the side yard.  It is near the bee hives and you sort of have to be on guard around there.  Sometimes they are in a docile mood, and other times, they'll run you inside.  Remember the 15 pounds we planted.  That will be an important point of reference a little later in this post.

This is the patch that I've been busy amending the soil with plenty of compost and mulching it each year with wood chip mulch.  Over the year the mulch disintegrates and becomes part of the soil.  This area that had once been rock hard with not an earthworm in sight is loose and easy to use digging forks to turn the soil over at the base of the potato plants to harvest.  I usually wait until the plant is mostly dead to harvest.  The plants look mostly dead, don't they?

I took soil samples at the end of last year.  The potatoes last year seemed to grow nicely at first and then the leaves slightly yellowed and didn't grow lush and green to their full potential.  I wanted to find out what the problem was.  The soil test showed that everything looked good, except for sulfur.  The soil is lacking in sulfur and potatoes need sulfur.  So, this year I added sulfur to the soil prior to planting.

Here is a photo of the entire patch harvested.

When the dust settled, literally, here's what we had:

It's a nice haul of Irish potatoes and we're going to eat every dadgum one of them, but I'm disappointed in the yield.  I knew something was wrong right off.  Some plants only yielded one potato.  Most had two.  Some gave us 3.  Essentially, we had the same problem.  The plants all germinated.  Every single one of them.  They grew and then turned a yellowish color and never grew vigorously.  The didn't get overly wet or dry.  The soil test showed everything looked good.

I wheeled our Gorilla Cart to the back patio and let the potatoes kind of dry off.  You never want to wash the potatoes until you're ready to cook them.  Otherwise you diminish their shelf life.

I loaded them in a crate where I'll bring them inside and store them in a cool, dark, dry place.  Let's analyze the yield and talk about it.  As discussed earlier, we planted 15 pounds.  We weighed what we dug up and you can see the total production below.  42 pounds of LaSoda potatoes were pulled from the earth.  We almost tripled what we planted.  Not terrible, but I expected much more.

I looked up to see what the potential yield should be for LaSoda potatoes.  The publication told me that you multiply the weight of the potatoes planted by a factor of 10.  That's how you estimate a good yield in our neck of the woods.  So, we planted 15 pounds.  We should expect approximately 150 pounds of potatoes harvested.  And we got 42 pounds.  Disappointing!

It was definitely a better harvest than last year, but nothing to write home about.  I'll be trying to figure out what we're missing and why they aren't producing like they should,  and what the soil needs.  Don't get me wrong, we'll eat them all, but I am compelled to find out why the potatoes aren't producing more.  There's something missing.

 

Honeybees on the Move

I read that having bees in the proximity to your crops can increase the yield by up to 30%.  I don't know how they figure that out, but I know we like having bees around to do their pollinating.  Take for instance the cucumbers below:

The honeybees are really buzzing around in the garden, doing their thing!

I usually like to let the cilantro plants bloom and go to seed.  Once seeded, they're called coriander.  Whatever you call them, they make a whole bunch of tiny white flowers that the bees find irresistible.

The bees are so active in the cilantro patch, you can't hardly walk around there without running into a bee or two.  I've noticed different pollinators on the cilantro as well, like wasps, bumblebees, etc.

Speaking of bees moving around, I forgot to mention that something strange was going on with the colony of bees that live in the hollow fiberglass column by the side door of our house.  For three days, not a bee came out or went into the hive.  We surmised they they swarmed.  Except when they swarm, the old queen leaves with half of the colony.  There are bees left behind.  Something just didn't make sense.

Fast forward a few days and no bees moving turned into thousands and thousands of bees moving!  The air was thick with the flight of the honeybee and the buzzing was so loud.  They were trying to get into the column opening, but there were so many of them, they couldn't get in there.

The bees finally bearded on each side of the column.  Of course, we can't get the honey out of the column, unfortunately.  We assume the entire column is filled with comb.

We think that this is a new swarm that is moving into the column to make it their new home.  I would rather have them in a box full of frames so that we could enjoy the honey that they make.  That's why you can see that I've positioned a swarm trap I made on the concrete bench facing the column where the bees are.  The next time the colony runs out of room or swarms, my hope is to catch them in my box.

Bees are on the move everywhere.  We are a little over a month and a week away from pulling honey.  Judging from the tassels on the Chinese Tallow Trees, I think the flow is about to start!

The Bible Bump

I went to my annual wellness exam at my doctor's office.  I will admit I was slightly nervous, because it was at this appointment last year that my doctor listened to my heart and it was determined that I needed to have open heart surgery to repair my mitral valve.  My nervous feelings manifested itself in the office when the nurse took my pulse rate and it was 95.  My normal resting heart rate is 74.

I like my doctor.  Twenty something years ago, my mom bought me a little book called, "Life's little Instruction Book."  It gives practical advice.  One of those was: "Get a doctor that's your same age so you can grow old together."  That seemed like awfully good advice to me and so I did exactly that.  Your doctor knows you.  Knows your health issues, your tendencies, your risks.  There's a baseline that he's tracking and you talk.  He never rushes things.  He sits and listens.  He also brings Tricia back and she has her annual wellness exam in the same room at the same time.  We get to all visit for a good while.

To make a long story short, the office visit went well.  He listened to my heart ticking and announced that my heart was fine.  He was about to wrap up my visit and move on to Tricia's, and then I remembered something I wanted to show him.  I pulled my left boot off and took off my sock.  I have a lump about the size of a dime on the top of my foot.  It doesn't hurt, but it's been there for a while.  It is hard.  

When we go out to the barn to milk the cows, I hardly ever wear boots.  I wear crocs.  It's not stylish, I know.  Sometimes a 1,000 pound cow will step on my foot and it hurts!  My guess is that LuLu or one of the cows in stepping on my foot caused some issue on my foot - a calcium deposit?  Anyhow, I wanted to show it to him.  He felt it and said, "Nothing to worry about.  It's called a ganglion cyst.  The old-timers call it a Bible Bump Cyst, because they would take a big book, most often a family Bible, and thump it down on top of the cyst and it would break up the cyst, causing it to rupture and dissolve.  It's not cancerous, but it could continue to grow and get bigger and cause pain eventually." He told me that he could remove it if it caused problems in the future.

I thought about this when I got home.  I like family remedies from old-timers.  I called Tricia into the sun room where I have my Bible on a table and said, "Watch this."  I took my boot off and took my sock off, too\.  First, I grabbed a church hymnal, but I wasn't going to sing old hymns at this time.  I picked it up, aimed, and held my breath, and then slammed it down hard on the bump.  It hurt.  I looked down and the bump was still there.  I thought, "Maybe you have to use a Bible to cure a Bible Bump Cyst?"  It seemed a little sacrilegious to use the Bible as a weapon or crude tool, though.

I have a paperback book I'm reading that's about an inch thick.  It's an old book called, "The Bible Made Plain."  I figured, "It's not the Bible, but it's a book about the Bible.  Let's give this a try."  Rather than hitting the bump with the book flat like I did with the hymnal, I aimed the hard edge of the book, the spine, right on top of the cyst and brought it down hard.   "THWACK!"  I'm not gonna lie.  This caused initial considerable pain.

I looked down at my throbbing foot.  To our amazement the area where the dime-sized cyst was was flat.  The Bible bump cyst was gone!  It was no more to be seen!  Two days later my foot, where the cyst was, is still flat and it remains no where to be seen.  I surmise my body absorbed the offending issue.  What can we glean from this?  Several things.  First, the old time remedy works.  Secondly, I won't have to spend time and money to have this thing removed.  Two good things to know.

But more importantly, it reminded me of Hebrews 4:12, which states that "the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and intentions of the heart."  I believe that with all my heart.  I take the Bible literally.  In addition to piercing soul and spirit, joints and marrow, it can also pierce Ganglion, or Bible Bump Cysts!

Riches in the Ditches

Beauty is truly found in unsuspecting places.  All you gotta do is have your eyes open to see it and appreciate it. I think I've already told this story, but every year I see it and it reminds me.  About 24 years ago I was farming rice on our family farm.  I distinctly remember driving my truck down a gravel road between Carrier Road and Cotton Gin Road.  I was on my way to check the irrigation well we called the "big well."  It pumped cool, clear water from 180 feet below the flat, hot surface above.  

The well, powered by a big engine with straight pipes, was loud.  It roared.  The horsepower of that engine was impressive, lifting columns of water from the underground aquifer to the rice field where the fields were kept with a good flood of 6 inches of water for months.  Rice likes its feet wet.  When you got out of the truck, the noise of the engine would hurt your ears.  If you went at night time to check the oil in the engine or make sure that the dripper was still dripping hydraulic oil to lubricate the bearings, the manifold would glow cherry red. 

On this particular day, it was around noon.  It was a sultry summer day.  The air heavy with humidity, the mosquitoes buzzing, hungry for a feast of blood from some unsuspecting beast or man.  The sun beat down in punishing fashion.  As I was about to turn in, I noticed it in the ditch.  It was a clump of beautiful flowers.  Now, I'm not a flower guy, not a bit.  But it was hard not to admire this flower.

The Louisiana Iris.  It's the state wildflower of Louisiana.  The state flower of Louisiana is the magnolia flower.  It's flower is pure white, with a fresh, clean fragrance that you can't stop sniffing to get just one more scent in your nostrils.  The downside is that if you cut it off the tree to bring it inside, it turns brown very quickly, as if to communicate that it's better to leave it on the tree and admire its beauty in the outdoors.  The Louisiana iris is a vibrant purplish blue color, the color of royalty.  It has hints of deep gold that accent its beauty.  

How could something so beautiful be in a ditch and not in a manicured garden?  Because, like rice, the Louisiana iris likes its feet wet and what needs beauty more than a roadside ditch?  A couple decades ago, every rice farmer worth his salt had a Pony #2 shovel with an ash handle in the bed of his pickup truck sharpened to a razor edge to cut through levees and the tough leathery bodies of the cottonmouth moccasin, our arch enemy in the rice fields.

I pulled my shovel out of the back of the truck and walked to the ditch, pushing the ubiquitous empty beer can floating in the muddy water out of the way.  I dug deep into the soft mud and scooped out a big scoop of mud, making sure I had all the roots of the iris.  I had to rescue it and bring it to our new home 30 miles north.  I did leave some behind, though, as that roadside ditch needed beautification as well.

I planted it in a low area where a ditch on our property carries rainwater.  It always stays sort of wet and I figured it would be a good home for the Louisiana Iris, bringing beauty to our home.  And it has.  Each year, I look on it and smile and remember finding it.  The iris has thrived, multiplying and filling the ditch.  It blooms each April, never disappointing.  The wife and I always look for its blooms and announce to each other when the first bloom appears.

We even used a shovel to move some of it near the sidewalk on our back patio.  It announced its happiness to be in that location by spreading quickly to fill that bed.  Now we can enjoy it in two locations - the back patio and the ditch that runs through the grove.

We enjoy their blooms while they last.  Soon their beauty fades, however.

But we're left with the anticipation of the blooms next April, signaling spring and bringing back remembrances of finding riches in the ditches.

Free Seeds!

In Louisiana there's a Cajun French word, lagniappe.  It means a little something extra.  Something free that you get when you make a purchase, like a baker's dozen (you get 13 when you buy 12).  I always like stuff like that.  Murray McMurray hatchery used to have something like this.  When you purchased 25 baby chicks, they would throw in one mystery chick for free.  You wouldn't know the breed of the bird until it grew up and you could match it with photos and discover what type of bird you got.  It was fun.

Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds has a policy when you buy ten packages of seeds, they throw in 1 package for free.  Lagniappe.  You don't select the free seed that you want.  They select it.  It comes as a total surprise.  Over the years I've been introduced to many types of vegetables and herbs and flowers that I would NEVER have purchased.  Some have actually made it into our crop rotation.

Let me show you the latest offering we got in our free package of seeds.  Here's a clue.  It's a type of tomato.  You can see a photo of the unripe mystery tomato variety right here.  I wonder what they'll look like when they are ripe?

Well, they'll look just like this when they are ripe!:

My hands aren't huge.  Those tomatoes are tiny.  In fact, the free seed offering was a tomato variety that are appropriately named "spoon tomatoes."  They're called that because you can put a whole bunch of them in a teaspoon!  Tricia said they taste good.  She's been putting them in a cucumber and tomato salad.  I told her they should re-market them as "Pearl Tomatoes" since they're about the same size.

Putting Vegetables Up

Ah!  Gardening is so relaxing.  Why, look at this pastoral scene.  I'm sitting on a concrete bench in the shade in an area we call the grove, and I'm looking at the garden growing.  The sweet potatoes are vining, the cucumbers are blooming and producing.  The yellow squash and zucchini are yielding such that we can barely keep up.  Same with the snap beans.  The corn is tasseling in the background.

There are times that gardening is relaxing.  It is rewarding, to be sure.  But once you plant it and harvest it, the work is not done.  In fact, you've got to eat it, give it away, or preserve it, because you'll flat run out of room.  You can't sit around once it's harvested.  There's work to be done.

We're on the third picking of the snap beans, and I picked a fourth time today.  We plant Contender green beans and Purple TeePee beans (just to keep things interesting).  We washed them up and chilled them and while they were still fresh, snapped off the ends.

Green beans are one of those things that are just favorites of everyone.  Even if you aren't a vegetable person (we all are), if you have someone a little finicky, well, they'll eat green beans, especially if you cook them with some tasso or bacon or sausage to amp up the flavor.  We did cook some for the Mother's Day meal, but the rest of this portion of the harvest, we'll freeze.

To freeze them, you'll want to blanch them.  This stops the enzyme action from breaking them down.  It also keeps a great texture and vibrant color.  Except for the purple beans.  they turn dark green upon blanching.  We blanch for 3 minutes.

We immediately ladle the blanched beans into the kitchen sink, which is full of ice water & ice.  This stops the cooking process.

Once completely cool, we drain through a colander.

And then we bag them all up in quart-sized zip loc freezer bags.  This is the perfect size to pull out of the freezer and voila, you have a side dish that only needs to be warmed up.  Best part of it is, it is healthy, fresh, and delicious.

The second picking yielded ten quarts of beans.  

Getting the Hen House "Mink-Proofed"

Anyone following our blog has heard us lamenting over the fact that we lost 39 laying hens to minks over a year ago.  Though long ago, it is still fresh on my mind.  Under cover of darkness, those murderous minks crept onto our property from neighboring rice and crawfish ponds, burrowed under the hen house walls where the hens all roost at night, popped up in their safe resting place and killed them.

Since that time, we've locked all our hens up in rabbit hutches that are completely off the ground and protected by hardware cloth.  Each night when they get in there to roost, we put the latch on to ensure their safety.  The trouble is, it is cramped in those cages for 40-something birds to fit comfortably.  It was high time to 'mink-proof' the hen house.

I'm 58 years old.  I'm not an elderly person, but I'm not a spring chicken, either.  Every so often, I throw out my lower back.  My plan to mink-proof the hen house was to pour concrete all across the floor.  This would prevent the minks from tunneling in (unless they had jack-hammers).  Pouring concrete, however, is laborious and hard on the back.  All that mixing and shoveling.  There has to be a better way.  Turns out there is.

Dry pouring concrete.  That's the ticket and I'll show you how its done.  I measured the floor of the henhouse and used an on-line concrete calculator to determine how many 80 pound bags of concrete mix I would need.  Then I used a wagon to move the bags close to the hen house.

I split the project into 3 parts since this is a working hen house.  Hens are in and out all day long laying eggs and I didn't want to disturb them.  I made a crude form, using 2 x 4's and first poured the section you see directly under the roosting bars at the far end of the building.

On the second day, I did a shorter section under the smaller roosting bars right up to the nesting boxes.

And the third day, I finished up the section underneath the roosting boxes, right up to the door of the structure.  The photo below shows how I've worked my way out of the building.  It shows the process, too.  All that concrete you see below is powder.  It is dry concrete that I've poured out of the bag and used a rock rake to spread it, 2 1/2 inches deep across the floor area.  Then I use a 2 x 4 to screed the dry concrete until it is level as possible.  Working my way out of the building so I don't paint myself into a corner, you can see how it's done.

Finally, when its all dry poured, NOW you apply water.  First, setting your sprayer to the MIST setting, you mist the concrete powder until it has changed colors.

Then, you come back in an hour, set your hose sprayer setting to the "shower" setting and spray pretty liberally.  Repeat the same thing in an hour and then repeat again in another hour.  Then you are done.  The next day, you can remove the forms and your hens are good to go.  So easy.  No back-breaking mixing or shoveling.  

We began moving the hens back in the henhouse last night.  We're pleased with how it came out, but the proof is in the pudding.  Can the dry pour concrete defeat the bloodthirsty minks?  Time will tell.

Riding The Bus

Image Credit

Up until I was 10 years old, we lived in town.  In fact, we lived in a house right behind the elementary school.  I walked to school, so I could sleep a little later than other kids.  As you walked to school, you could hear the swings creak as kids were swinging and hear the bearings whine as the merry-go-round spun round and round until children became queasy and needed to throw up.  The big water oak tree with its trunk stained white was right between our house and the school.  It was stained white because that's the tree that teachers would send kids out to "dust the erasers" on.  No one does that anymore, but when there were chalkboards and chalk, you'd have to erase the board.  Pretty soon the erasers filled with chalk dust and needed to be dusted.  Kids would bang the erasers on the tree trunk and the chalk dust would fly.  Weird memories, for sure.

But in 1976, everything changed.  We moved to a house in the country.  There was no more walking to school 10 minutes before the bell rang.  We rode the school bus.  Since we lived far out of town, we'd have to get up early and wait at the bus stop (sometimes in the dark).  The bus stop was an old wooden, musty-smelling structure with a tin roof that my parents had moved out and positioned close to the road.  It had a bench in it.  It kept us dry on rainy days as we waited for the bus.

Mr. Lambert was the first school bus driver I remember.  He was a kind man.  I would ride my bike out to his house and sell him seeds for our 4-H project.  When he retired, Mrs. Audrey picked up the route.  Mrs. Audrey had a large family and they were all talented bluegrass musicians and singers that could play and harmonize with the best of them.  They lived back in the woods and kind of lived off the land.

Mrs. Audrey didn't only teach her kids music.  Why, she taught everyone on the school bus.  She had an 8 track player on her bus.   She would play Ronnie Milsaps' "Smoky Mountain Rains" and Merle Haggard's "If we make it through December," John Conlee's "Rose colored glasses," and George Jones' "He stopped loving her today." Those were weighty issues in those songs for a 10 year old to digest, but as the bus rambled across the backroads with the windows down on the bus and wind whipping through our hair since there was no air conditioner, my young mind was pondering, "What if they don't make it through December?"  I was also thinking about the couple in "He stopped loving her today," wishing that she would have come to see him before he up and died.  That would have been better and the song wouldn't have been so doggone sad!

We made good friends on the bus and we'd sit with them and talk and even sing as we got to know the words to every song on every 8 track tape Mrs. Audrey had.  The older, cooler kids sat in the very back of the bus.  Sometimes we'd even see some older boys kissing their girlfriends, but they'd have to be sneaky about it.  Mrs. Audrey had a big rear view mirror that stretched halfway across the windshield.  She would watch what was going on IN the bus more than on the road ahead, and for good reason!  In addition to kissing, sometimes there would be bullying and fights.  You would see Mrs. Audrey looking back in that mirror with a glare in her eye and an ash about an inch long hanging off her cigarette.  She ran a pretty tight ship.  She was no pushover and wasn't shy about keeping her passengers in line.

I rode the bus for a long time, but one day my friend got his driver's license and invited me to start riding with him.  He had a yellow 1979 Monte Carlo, and he would swing through our circle drive and pick me up for the ride to school.  He had a good stereo system in his car AND had air conditioning.  That was a plus.  There were, of course, some downsides.  My friend would pick me up after eating a big scrambled egg breakfast.  I would jump in his car, and sorry, gentle readers, my friend was quite flatulent.

I would close the door and my olfactory system would be immediately accosted by the most sulfurous, acrid stench you could imagine.  It would singe the hairs in my nose.  You would really need to shelter in place after experiencing the foul fumes, the malodorous aroma.  I would begin rolling down the window (no power windows) in frantic fashion, hoping for fresh air to fill that interior.

It was times like that that made me long for Mrs. Audrey's school bus where Merle Haggard, in his song, "Rainbow Stew" taught me to be hopeful for a better future where life was simple, happy, utopian  and harmonious.  I think I might have learned more on Mrs. Audrey's Bluebird School bus than I did in school.  I tip my hat to you, Mrs. Audrey, if there is a bus driver hall of fame, you deserve to be recognized in it.

Birds of a Feather

Back in March we hatched out some chicks from fertilized eggs from some of our hens.  We have them in the chicken tractor.  They are growing.  I'm pleasantly surprised that a fair number of them appear to be pullets and not cockerels.  We are raising them to replace those that we lost to minks and those we normally lose to old age and predation.  Our flock (not counting these) is down to 22 hens.  That's sad.

Benjamin let us know that one of his friends had about 130 laying hens that he needed to sell.  He just didn't have room for them anymore.  They are already laying eggs.  The price was reasonable, so we agreed to purchase 20 of them from him.  He was going to deliver them to us on Saturday.

It was raining when they arrived and we used a dog kennel to shuttle them from the cattle trailer they were delivered in back to the barn.  We loaded them in the rabbit hutches that the other birds roost in every night.  As you can see, they are a wide variety of birds.

The plan was to let them slowly get acclimated to their new environment.  Then I'd like to clip the feathers off one of their wings off so they cannot fly over the fence.

I clip one of their wings back with a pair of scissors.  This trim keeps them from flying over the fence.  Early on, I would clip both of their wings, but I soon learned that you only needed to clip one.  With one wing clipped, trying to fly is very hard to do as they're off balance.

By the time that I was finished, the hens could no longer fly.  Look at all the feathers on the ground below.  I don't want the birds going over the fence to be eaten by predators in the woods.

Once all 20 hens' wings were clipped, it was time to set them free.  One by one, they cautiously exited the cages and ambled over to where I had chicken scratch in some gutters.  They were hungry.

The very next morning I was amazed to learn that the roosters had gathered them all up and got the hens to roost in the cages.  The next day the new hens kind of kept close to the barn.  Each day they are venturing out further.  The next project is to get the henhouse secured so that they can all roost in the hen house, protected from minks.  For the time being our flock now numbers around 40 hens, with surely a few more hens that will be joining them from the birds we hatched out.

Sweet Corn is About to Come in

A short while back I explained how some recent rain and winds had knocked down some sweet corn.  That's not a good thing when the corn is about to tassel.  If the pollen doesn't fall on the silk, you'll have "blank heads."  I made a redneck sweet corn propper-upper with t-posts and baling twine and the effort was met with success.  The corn is standing tall once again in our two-row corn plot.

Let's look at a couple of zoomed in photos of the sweet corn tassel.  Although you'd never know it, the tassel is the male reproductive organ.  It produces pollen.

If I had zoomed in on the following two photos, you'd be able to see the yellow pollen.

As the wind blows, the pollen drifts in the air, falling (hopefully) on the silk sticking out of the ears.  Each one of those silk threads shown below, goes into the corn cob and where it's attached to the cob, a kernel of corn will come to be.  Pollination done by the wind uses gravity too, and that's why it was critical that I stood the corn upright before corn tasseled.  If you ever shucked an ear of corn and the ear had a bunch of gaps in it, you didn't get good pollination.  It's another reason it is a good idea to plant your corn in blocks and planted close together.  We're not going to count our chickens before they hatch, but it looks pretty good so far.

A pretty redhead

I will be watching the silk.  Once it turns brown, the sweet corn is ready to harvest.  In a few days we'll be able to see if the sweet corn is healthy.  Fresh sweet corn lives up to its name.  So sweet.  So delicious!

Mother's Day 2025

God has blessed us with great mothers and mothers of our children and today was the day to celebrate them and show them our love for all they do and for the godly mothers they are.  We prayed and feasted and enjoyed conversation around the supper table.

L to R (Mom, my sister Jenny, and Tricia)

We had quite a menu: pastalaya with green onion and garlic sausage, spiral ham, pot roast and rice and gravy, fresh roasted vegetables, boudin, zucchini cake and ice cream.  We pushed away from the table with taut bellies, satisfied not only with the blessing of delicious food, but in the knowledge that God has given us wonderful Mothers.

My niece, Elle and daughter Mary Grace, Jenny, Mom & Tricia

All six of my sister's boys were here, but one son, Carson, had already left at the time of this photo.  Russ and Benjamin were here, but Laura Lee was unable to make it.  We missed her terribly.

Last but not least, my wonderful wife and mother of my children with her young men, of whom she is so proud:

Benjamin, Tricia, and Russ

Happy Mother's Day!

The Kidding Season Comes to a Close

We had five momma goats pregnant.  Popcorn, the billy, has proven to be quite the fertile fellow.  One by one, they kidded.  Bunny had a stillborn buckling.  But with three healthy baby goats running around the pasture, we were ready for the last one to be born.  It was time for Callie.  Her bags ballooned, letting us know that any minute, there would be a baby.  So far this year we have 1 doeling and 2 bucklings.

Tricia came around the corner of the barn and said, "We have a new baby.  It's a little buck."  Callie already had him all cleaned up.  They say the fruit doesn't fall far from the tree.  That means the offspring are often like the parents.  So is the case with Callie and her little boy.  This is Callie's face:

And this is her little buckling's face...  White, black and brown.  She marked him well.

The little fellow got right down to business, drinking his colostrum to ensure he gets a good start.  Since Bunny lost her baby, we're milking her twice a day and keeping the milk to make kefir and cheese.

We still have a little leftover goat milk that we feed to the laying hens.  They really enjoy it.

But they must drink fast.  Belle, our Great Pyrenees, has developed an affinity for goat milk.  She comes around the corner, chases off the hens, and makes quick work with her tongue of lapping up the goat milk!