Passover 2025

You may have been thinking as you read the title to this post, "I thought they were Christians."  We are.  For the last twenty-something years, we celebrate the Passover, but from a Christian perspective.  It's an exciting event we look forward to each year.  Tricia busies herself in the kitchen the day before, roasting lamb with rosemary and herbs, preparing wild rice, roasted beets and kohlrabi, snap beans, cole slaw, squash with chicken, tabbouleh, hummus, with homemade cheesecake and coffee for dessert.

The table is set in the dining room with fine china and silver.  After church we gather for our Passover Seder.  Both Russ and Benjamin joined us for the festivities.  Unfortunately, Laura Lee was unable to join us, but we pray next year she will.  Over the years, we've invited numerous guests to join us as it is a special event to share and celebrate.

We gathered around the table and got ready to begin.  

Mother lights the candles to get things started.

The seder lasts about an hour and we follow a guide called the Haggadah, or the Telling.  It orders the meal, and it is read as everyone follows along.

There are special foods that symbolize different things in the story, there are prayers and rituals, and the audience is invited to participate as we put dots of wine on the plate as the 10 plagues are read aloud.  The story from Exodus is read that recounts Moses leading his people out of Egypt.

Each person participates in reading and asking questions.  Four cups of sparkling grape juice are poured signifying, The Cup of Sanctification, The Cup of Deliverance, The Cup of Redemption, and The Cup of Praise.

The significance of the matzoh being unleavened and striped and pierced is discussed.  We learn and remember the significance of Passover to the Christian.  Just as the Israelites applied the blood to the doorposts of their home so that the Angel of Death would pass over their home, we remember that the blood of Jesus, the Passover Lamb, applied to our hearts give us freedom from the slavery of sin and give us life eternal.

In John's Gospel, John 1:29 to be exact, John the Baptist, when he saw Jesus walking up, said, "Behold the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world."  It was a very important thing to say.  Jesus is our Passover Lamb!

Image Credit

Passover.  A day of remembering.  A day to enjoy faith, family and food!  Next Sunday we'll celebrate Resurrection Sunday, where we'll celebrate the high point in the Christian life, when Jesus rose from the grave victorious over sin! 

Round Bale Delivery

How are you at rationing things?  You know, like that half gallon of ice cream in the freezer or that homemade cheesecake in the refrigerator that you want to make last for a while.  Well, we do the same thing with hay.  We have a finite amount of hay and when the grass in the pasture is gone in the winter, we have to manage our resources of hay.  We have 75 square bales of Bermuda up in the hay loft and 10 round bales lined up right outside the pasture gate.

In normal years, we can't count on the grass in the pasture to come in strong so that we don't supplement with hay until right around May.  At about the second week of March, we had run out of round bales.  I think we have around 36 square bales up in the loft.  I made a call to a friend that sells me round bales for a delivery.  He told me it was a good thing that I called as he was just taking inventory of his hay stocks in his barn and had exactly 10 bales left.

Mr. Broussard loaded up 10 bales on his truck and delivered them to me.  We rolled them off of his truck and I lined them up between the wood chip mulch piles and the cattle trailer.  While inflation might be raging elsewhere, his price ($40 per bale) was the same as it was last year.  After unloading, I paid him and had him walk to the garden as I gave him a big bag of mustard greens.

Mr. Broussard manages his hay field expertly, taking soil samples and amending the soil with whatever it needs.  The hay is clean and weed-free.  Once he bales it, he stores it indoors in a barn where it is dark so the sun can't damage it.  It is dry in his barn.  The hay arrives in pristine condition.

As it turns out, the lime applied to our pasture appears to be helping out the pasture.  As a result, the grass is coming in earlier than normal.  All the cows, goats and chickens spend all day in the pasture with heads down, eating.  As it stands now, I won't be needing any of these 10 bales until much later this fall.

That leads to a challenge for us.  We don't have a barn to store the bales inside and in the dark and away from moisture.  The best that we can do is cover it up tightly with tarps.  That's what we began to do, covering it and staking the tarps down with tent pegs so the tarps stay secured on top of the hay, sealing it off from rain, sun, and wind.

It normally takes the cows and goats around a week to finish off a round bale.  So we have at least 10 weeks of inventory of round bales, meaning we shouldn't need any additional round bales until perhaps February of 2026.  In the meantime, we'll continue working our way through the 36 square bales as we'll be taking delivery of more square bales in a couple months.  

It's Kidding Time!

Springtime is exciting!  Hens laying more eggs, grass is growing, foliage on trees is a vibrant green.  And, goats begin to kid.  Tricia keeps close tabs on the goat family.  Agnes seemed to be first in line.  When I arrived in the barn, I was greeted by odd sounds coming from within.  Agnes was in labor, pushing, digging holes in the ground.  She was in obvious pain.  We watched as another contraction came on, followed by another.

Two tiny hooves emerged.  We always check to ensure they are facing the correct way.  We don't want to encounter breech.

It didn't take long for Agnes to push out the newest arrival on Our Maker's Acres Family Farm.  A brown goat!  How does that happen?  The doe and the buck look nothing like that.  I would guess that might be from a recessive gene, but I wasn't paying that close attention back in biology class.

Agnes' motherly instinct kicked in and she began cleaning up her baby.  She diligently licked and licked and gave the little one a proper spit bath.

I lifted up the little goat's legs and exposed two teats and no male 'equipment.'   It's a girl!  A little doeling.  How nice.

We left the barn and walked back to the house to allow the two of them to bond.  The baby was struggling unsuccessfully to stand only minutes after delivery.  She just needed a little time.  When we returned to the barn in 15 minutes, the little critter was up.  Baby goats are funny.  They always try to find the teats, bumping around the wrong end of the momma.  Tricia reached in and gave here some instruction.  Everyone needs a little help sometimes.  She quickly latched on and began drinking the nourishing colostrum which will give her antibodies and a good head start.

She didn't need any help after that.  The little doeling (as of yet, unnamed) was drinking to her heart's content.  We also spotted colostrum-tinged stool, confirming she's getting what she needs for good health.

We have several more goats whose girth is widening.  We'll be on watch for the next to come into labor.  Our goat herd is increasing.  We'll need to sell some of these little ones as they are weaned or they'll eat us out of pasture!

I Built a Little Something For the Bees

There is a lot of trouble to be found out there on the internet.  You don't have to look very far to see things, read things that you wish that you had never seen or read.  Some of it is wickedness.  Some of it is more innocuous, like a song you hear that, like a brain worm, gets stuck in your head and is on a non-stop loop!  Argghh...

But there are other things, specifically on You Tube, that are marvelous.  I recently looked up how to build a nuc.  A "nuc" is a nucleus colony.  It is a small colony used by beekeepers to raise new hives.  The former president of our bee club told us he loves to make splits into nucs.  It is his opinion that bee colonies grow faster in nucs.  He feels that they like to fill small spaces quickly.

After not many clicks, I found plans and was busy with my cut list.  The best part was it was free.  Everything needed to make it I already had on hand from the screws to the 1 x 12 that I had up in the rafters in the barn leftover from a project ten years ago.  I am not a carpenter.  My cuts aren't square.  The finished product is never pretty.  But I've found over the years that the animals don't care, and I don't think the honeybees will care either.  It didn't take long and the nuc was finished.

This is a five frame nuc.

There's the nuc in all her glory, ready for action.

I'm going to pull out two of the frames and use the nuc as a swarm trap.  This is peak swarm season.  I'll show you how I baited it in a couple of minutes.

I set the nuc in the crook of a big live oak tree, facing south and in the shade.

The nuc in the crook of the tree is approximately 30 feet from the colony that is currently living in the hollow fiberglass column you see below.  Every year, the bees fill up the column with comb and then they swarm.  The old queen, with half the hive leave.  This year when it happens, I want to catch them.  That's our goal.

The first thing you want to have in your swarm trap is frames with old drawn comb.  Bees smell it and they feel comfortable where bees used to be.

The second thing you want to use in your swarm trap is an attractant.  We use lemongrass oil.  Bees love it as it resembles the pheromone that the queen puts out.  We put a couple of dashes of lemongrass oil on a cotton ball, put it in a zip loc bag, leaving a crack in the bag.  We put it in the back of the box.  It acts as a slow release attractant.  We also put a couple drops of lemongrass oil at the entrance.

In this photo, you can see the nuc swarm trap in the crook of the tree along with the swarm trap we've baited in the deep box.  We've since moved this swarm trap to the back yard by the four bee boxes.  We watched a swarm leave one of the boxes and they are balled up forty feet up in the branches of the tree.  We put the swarm trap right beneath it.  In no time we had many scout bees checking out both of the swarm traps.

We are hoping to be successful in catching swarms coming off of our hives or catch some wild swarms to bring some new genetics into our hives.  We'll keep you posted if we have some swarms moving in.

Best Laid Plans

"The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry" Robert Burns - To a Mouse

That quote from a poem lays out perfectly how even the most carefully made plans can fail due to unforeseen circumstances. That verse and idea is seen in literature, specifically in John Steinbeck's book "Of Mice and Men," illustrating to us how life is unpredictable and life teaches some real hard lessons.

There's a lot of fear and worry in the financial markets right now.  It's understandable.  I have to admit, I no longer worry about it.  I don't even check my statements.  That's probably a good thing.  I remember being in college studying Finance and on the wall of my apartment, I had graph paper filling an entire wall.  I owned Wal Mart stock and Anheuser-Busch stock.  Each day I would chart the stock prices manually.  I would fret over the slightest correction.  Can you imagine?

But, I think it was the onslaught of the Covid insanity that my eyes were opened and I stopped worrying about things (like the stock market) that were beyond my control.  Perhaps you could call it escapism?  Avoidance? Whatever you call it, I began being concerned about more pressing, underlying issues like cultural rot, division, downturn in morals, the middle class being robbed from, and the largescale abandonment of religion, values and the Godly underpinnings of our nation.

All this other stuff... is just stuff.  If you are able to afford a new car and the insurance that comes along with it, it loses its value in no time at all. Wages are stagnant, costs rise, and people find themselves between a rock and a hard place.  Our landfills are full of things that were once someone's pride and joy and now rust and decay.  Material things that we set our sights on and place our hopes in slip through our fingers like dust.  I was thinking about these things the other day as I drove to an appointment for work.  In rural Allen Parish I made a turn down a road and saw this:

Here's a better picture of it from a closer vantage point:

I don't know the story of this home.  What a remarkable, well-appointed home it was.  I would guess it's not 20 years old.  Two stories, plenty of windows, sitting on a large parcel of land.  It had all the amenities one could ever want.  At some point, a couple drew up plans and built this home surely spending a quarter of a million dollars on their dream purchase.  I'm sure they were filled with joy, dreaming of the pitter patter of little feet and the family they'd raise here.  And now...

The dwelling has a dystopian feel.  Grass has overtaken the once manicured lawn.  There is a gaping hole in the roof.  Shingles are missing, windows broken.  I see sadness.  I'm sure tears were shed and discouragement enveloped the owners as they watched their dreams shrivel up and die.  The people are gone.  Rats and raccoons and possums now dwell in this spacious estate.  I was sad as I took these photos and drove on to my appointment to meet a man whose neighbor's dogs had chewed up the front bumpers and wheel opening moldings on his new vehicle and scratched up the paint.

I have no idea what the story is on this house.  Perhaps it was damaged in the hurricanes and wasn't properly insured?  No clue.  What I do know is this:  We need to have the right perspective on things.  That which we hold dearly can be taken from us at a moment's notice.  Plans that we make, for whatever reason, doesn't come to fruition.  The life we planned doesn't turn out like we thought it would.  Happiness based on these things is as elusive as a greased pig.  Faith and family is where the real wealth in our balance sheet rests.  Everything else is window dressing.  It's best to have an eternal perspective and rest in the peace that only God gives.

 “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal.  But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys, and where thieves do not break in or steal; for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also."  Matthew 6:19-21

Bare Root Strawberries Are In!

It's our second year planting bare root strawberries that we ordered on-line.  Last year we had about 22 plants.  I was disappointed in the yield.  We were also plagued by slugs.  Those slimy critters found the berries before we could pick them and ate them up.  More on that in a minute.  This year, until we have a better process for growing them in place, we only ordered 5 plants.  In an act of kindness, the nursery in Oregon that we ordered them from included 7 plants.  Don't you love to get a little lagniappe?

They are called bare root strawberries because they come in a bag with no soil - just the bare roots.  Somehow they survive.  You would think that the roots would dry out, but they come moist and healthy, with a green leaf peeking out near the crown of the plant.

The directions say to unpack the plants and let them re-hydrate in a 5 gallon bucket of rainwater.  That's exactly what we did.

Then we planted them in moistened, loose garden soil.  I'm always surprised in how fast they perk up after being shipped across the country.

Back to the issue of slugs.  We have many gardeners that attend our small country church.  Last year I was lamenting with a kind lady at church about our slug dilemma.  She said, "I've got just the thing for you, Kyle."  Next Sunday at church, she handed me a grocery bag, tied off at the top.  It was heavy.  I'm not exaggerating when I tell you it weighed 5 pounds.  I opened it up and looked at the contents:

A bag of cleaned, crushed eggshells.  She told me that she uses the eggshells to construct a sort of barrier around her strawberries.  "Tell me more," I said.  She instructed me to crush the eggshells up a little bit and "mulch" around each strawberry plant with the eggshells.  The resulting barrier creates a suicidal mission for slugs attempted to feast on our berries.  When the slimy slugs crawl over the eggshells, it cuts up their underbellies, causing them to dry up and die.  A macabre end for the slugs, but if it works, it will result in a more successful strawberry crop.  After a week, our strawberries are green, happy and sporting their first blooms.  Those will translate into berries.  You can see how I've built a sharp slug barrier around the plant.

Here you can see the small strawberry patch and if you look closely, the white dusting around each plant is the eggshell mulch.

I like to try new things.  In a week or so, we'll be able to see if it works.  I'll keep you posted.  While I was reading about this, I learned that if you do the same thing to tomato plants, the eggshells act as slow-release calcium and help combat blossom end rot.  With a full 5 pound bag of eggshells, I had enough to do the same thing around every tomato plant.  

One other thing about strawberries while we're talking, I read on a garden forum that people were having another problem in their strawberry patch - birds.  Pesky birds see the bright red succulent strawberries, and they just can't resist.  They swoop down and peck and the red strawberries and eat them up.  Their solution?  They found round stones in their driveway approximately the same size as strawberries, and they painted the stones bright red.  The birds see the red "strawberries," swoop down, and begin pecking at them.  Except they aren't strawberries, they're red stones.  This hurts the birds beak and they'll quickly give up and leave the strawberries alone..  Now, that's a sneaky trick!  We will update you later, regarding the success with the eggshells and the red painted stones.

An Experiment in Making Liquid Fertilizer

We haven't done the chemical fertilizer thing in quite some time.  Generally, we use a multifaceted approach to soil fertility.  We amend lots of compost into the soil, leaves, biochar, organic matter.  Then we use fish emulsion for foliar feeding as well as around the base of the plant.  Prior to planting, we incorporate composted wood chips with composted cow poop and chicken poop into the soil.

I've been looking at other ideas and wanted to do an experiment on a small scale prior to going full-throttle with it.  It has to do with making liquid fertilizer concentrate with things you have not far from the garden.  Weeds!  In my hand below is an assortment of winter grasses.  I got a sling blade and chopped a 5 gallon bucket full of weeds.  Weeds have everything you need to get started.

The next thing you need is leaf mold.  Leaf mold can be found in the moist forest floor.  I didn't even need to go to the woods.  I dug into the wood chip pile that is decomposing and found plenty of it.  Leaf mold contains mycelium.  Mycelium are the white thread-like fungi that are working behind the scenes to turn wood and leaves into topsoil.  In addition to your 5 gallon bucket of weeds, add a handful of leaf mold.

Put both the weeds and leaf mold into a bucket.

Fill the bucket with rain water.

Snap the lid on the bucket securely and set the bucket in your garden in full sun.

Leave for several weeks and let it "cook."  Then use the liquid to fertilize your plants.  I'm told that you must dilute it, starting off weak so as not to burn your plants.  We'll update you in a few weeks when we pop the top off.  I'm told this stuff stinks to high heaven, so we were warned not to get it on your clothes.  Maybe this will be done by the time we need to fertilize the cucumbers you see behind the bucket.

Double for Your Trouble

Eggs.  Everyone is talking about eggs.  The price of eggs in the stores have people wringing their hands.  I heard today that Waffle House has increased their menu prices by $1 per egg.  What is this all about?  Well, last year due to 'bird flu' the government killed millions of egg layers.  Entire flocks were wiped out - regardless if they were infected or not.  How curious!  It seems natural that you would only destroy birds showing symptoms.  Why would you kill the survivors?  They have the antibodies to fight off the bird flu and thus could provide the answers to protection from further bird flu losses.  

We do have losses of our chickens, but not from bird flu.  Many from the #$%*! minks.  One the other day from a possum.  And one last week that had hopped up on a water trough to drink, fell in, and subsequently died of hypothermia.  The rest of the remaining flock is doing well and we're picking up between 12 and 20 eggs a day.

As I picked up eggs, something caught my eye in the nesting box.  It was a big egg.  A gargantuan egg.  Take a look:

I put it in the egg carton and it looked odd and out of place, like a peacock egg.  But we have no more peacocks, since Penelope, the pea hen was struck by a truck and succumbed to her injuries.

Look at how big that thing is!  Those other eggs in the carton are normal sized eggs.

I brought it in and showed Tricia.  I said, "Watch when you break this one.  I bet it is a double-yolk egg."  Sure enough!:

Double yolk eggs are said to bring good luck, but I don't believe in luck.  They occur when a hen releases two yolks in the same shell and is said to happen with a hen that has just started laying or an older hen at the end of her days.  As I watched the double yolk egg sizzle in the skillet, I wondered if you can incubate a double yolk egg.  I discovered that you can, but you shouldn't.  You're better off eating the egg like we did.  If you were able to hatch them, if any survived, they'd be small, undersized, and unhealthy.  We made the right call in eating the double yolk egg.  It was delicious!

A "Twist" of Lime

About a year ago, I collected soil samples from various spots in our pasture as well as in the garden and in the side yard where the potato patch was.  All in all, especially in the garden, the soil tests looked pretty darn good.  I attribute that to composting and soil amendments we've made in the garden.  However, we haven't composted in the pasture obviously and one thing that was low was pH.

A low reading in pH tells you that your soil is acidic.  Here's the thing to know about low pH as it pertains to trying to grow grass or many crops.  It doesn't matter how high your NPK is, all your fertility, everything good in the soil is locked up and the plants cannot use it.  What do you do to rectify this situation?  You must do what you can to raise your soil pH - make it more alkaline.

To do that, you'll want to apply lime to your soil.  I went to our local Helena Chemical office and ordered a ton of pelletized (fast acting) lime.  I borrowed a spreader cart from them and selected a day to broadcast it right before a light rain.  Here is what the pelletized lime looks like.  As opposed to Ag Lime, this will go right to work.

Since Dad has a 4WD truck, he graciously drove his truck to spread the lime in the pasture.

His tire tracks were a little hard to see in the grass, but he tried to line up 5 feet outside of the tracks to ensure an overlapping coverage.  I walked behind him to see that the lime was coming out fine and we were getting it put out.  It is not an exact science, but we were trying to get about 650 pounds to the acre.  My pasture is about 3 acres.

I walked behind the truck for a bit until the bees started buzzing around me.  I don't think they appreciated all the racket, so I got out of the way.

Once he finished, Dad dressed the corners and then entered the "bull pen."  It's a smaller pasture where we segregate the bull because, well, he's trouble.  This pasture is narrow and it was still a little wet.  I was a bit concerned that Dad would bog down, but his truck did a good job.  There's only one little spot where it was wet and his tire spun.

We got all the lime put out and returned the spreader cart.  The very next day we got a nice, slow, soaking rainfall of 0.9 inches and the following day, we got 0.9 inches again.  Not enough to cause run off, but enough to dissolve the pellets and send into the soil.  Now we'll patiently wait to see if the lime releases the NPK that was tied up to allow the grass to grow in the pasture.