A Foul-Smelling Concoction

If you'd take a peek down into one of many 5 gallon buckets I have in the garden, I'd like to show you something.  Let me take the lid off of it first.  It's a good thing you cannot smell this loathsome "brew of poo."  When I tell you it stinks, I'm not exaggerating.  Some of it splashed on my hand, and I learned a valuable lesson to be more careful next time.  

We're trying our hand at producing our own liquid fertilizer.  In order to do so, I filled a bucket halfway to the top with rainwater.  Then I added a whole bunch of chopped up cabbage leaves as well as weeds that I had pulled from the garden along with some chopped up tomato plants that froze this winter.  Then I walked out to the pasture with a shovel and harvested a shovelful of fresh cow poop and added it to the bucket, chopping up the contents repeatedly, and finally topping off with more rainwater to fill.  I closed up the bucket.

The bucket sat in the sun, percolating, fermenting, baking and aging.  Once a week, I'd pull the top off and stir up the concoction with an old broom handle.  Over time it turned into a slurry of sorts.  You couldn't really tell what the contents were as it all turned into this thick, malodorous liquid.

After months, I want to test out our liquid fertilizer.  I gasped at the smell once I removed the top and then dipped out a third of a gallon of the smelly stuff and poured it into a smaller one gallon bucket, trying to leave any solids in the 5 gallon bucket to continue to break down.

I filled the remaining available space in the gallon bucket with rainwater to dilute the homemade liquid fertilizer.

I poured this concoction at the base of my crookneck and zucchini squash that had been burned by a recent frost.  The leaves on the squash were yellowed and looking sickly.  I was unsure if they would be able to be saved or if we'd need to replant the entire squash crop.  Well, in a little less than a week, the squash responded favorably to our homemade liquid fertilizer!  Look how healthy the plant is!:

Last week I transplanted some straightneck yellow squash in the last row near the sugarcane.  The plants are small and, as you can witness, the leaves are yellowed.  They are needing something.  I'm thinking it is calling out for some homemade liquid fertilizer.  You asked for it, you got it.  I poured some at the base of the squash plants.

We will keep checking on the squash in order to see if it reacts the way that the other squash did.  We still have some experimenting to do regarding concentration rates.  I don't want to burn the plants, but on the other hand, I don't want to dilute it so much that it doesn't provide the plants with the food they need to be healthy and grow.  If this works, just think about it.  We're able to create fertilizer with garden scraps and a cow patty - an affordable circle of fertility for our garden.

Making Chèvre

Chèvre is French for "goat."  Bunny, one of our Nubian goats is in milk now.  We milk her twice a day - once at 6 am and another time at around 5 pm and get almost two quarts.  Here is Bunny all cleaned up in her stanchion.  It holds her head firmly in place while she eats and we milk.  While cows have four teats, goats only have two.  The milking goes very quickly.  Agnes is one of our other Nubian goats that is in milk, but her baby is strong and drinks every drop of her milk, so we don't have to milk her out.

For the past couple of decades, we've milked cows and goats through a muslin cloth filter placed over the bucket (for cows) and over a quart jar (for goats).  Tricia just purchased stainless steel funnels with a paper filter that fits in the bottom.  We find it works much better.  The muslin cloth filter is used day after day and had to be cleaned and disinfected, while the paper filters are disposable and a new one is used for each milking session.

Today we'll be making Chèvre cheese using a half gallon of Bunny's goat milk and a half packet of Chèvre starter.  Our starter was old, so we were unsure if it was going to work.  You'll find out at the end of the post if it works.  Here's the starter:

Here is the recipe that we're using.  Chèvre is a creamy, soft cheese similar to cream cheese.

Following the directions, we heat the milk to 86 degrees and add the starter and stir.

Then we cover the milk and let it sit at room temperature (not below 72 degrees) for 12 hours.  When we open the lid in 12 hours, we'll know if the starter was still active.

The proof is in the pudding - or curds, to change the saying up to fit.  We open the lid, tilt the pot and...  The cheese has set!  There are curds that have formed and the whey is on the bottom.  Remember Little Miss Muffet?  The nursery thyme says "She sat on a tuffet, eating her curds and whey."  I had to look up what a tuffet is.  It is a small foot stool.  Along came a spider that sat down beside her and frightened Miss Muffet away...  Well, no footstools or spiders involved in our cheesemaking or eating adventure.

We pour the curds and whey into a cheesemaking strainer to separate them.  The whey flows to the bottom over time, leaving the curds in the basket.  We'll save the whey to use later in lacto-fermentation of vegetables.  Here are the curds in the basket, slowly draining the whey off.

You can add herbs or spices to this.  Tricia just eats it plain.  We also use it to make smoothies with by adding berries.  It came out really good!  It'll store in the fridge for about a week, but we've completely finished this batch already.  Perhaps in a post next week, we'll be making another type of soft goat cheese.  Bunny, unfortunately, lost both of her babies.  One was stillborn and the other was so weak that she died after about a week.  Bunny is still in milk and making lots of milk, so we'll continue milking her and making cheese.  We're also going to attempt to make goat milk cajeta.  Cajeta is a goat milk caramel.  Can't wait to make that.  

To Restore the Door, And Several More

Lift up your heads, O gates, And be lifted up, O ancient doors, That the King of glory may come in!  Psalm 24:7

Speaking of ancient doors, The doors to our home aren't exactly ancient.  They will be 26 years old later this year, but they LOOK ancient.  Although they don't get direct sunlight as we live beneath trees, they are weathered, dull and dried out.  Every so often we'll apply some Old English Lemon Oil to the doors and it will liven them up for a brief time and then they revert back to the same sad-looking doors.

From a distance, you might think that the doors don't look that bad, but when you zoom in, you can see clearly that something must be done!  Each morning when I pray, after I call out names of family, friends, and needs to the Lord, I also pray for all that He's given us stewardship over.  Our animals, garden, trees, and yes, our home.  I pray that we'd be able to keep things maintained and that things don't break and stay in good repair.  Well, our doors are in poor repair, and it was high time that we did something about it.

I went to our local hardware store and got some helpful advice on how to restore the doors.  The front door was worse for wear, but all eight doors needed a facelift.  It was a tedious process, but you have to start somewhere.  I got some 220 grit sandpaper and used a palm sander to sand all the flat areas and a piece of sandpaper wrapped around a foam brick to get all the nooks and crannies sanded.  I didn't sand all the way to the wood, but just to rough it up a little.

Then I stained the doors with a stain called Provincial using a foam brush.  I came back in a bit and wiped the stain off with a rag.  We had some low humidity days which worked in our favor.  When the stain dried, I used a 320 grit sandpaper to gently rough the surface up and then applied a coat of polyurethane.  Once that was dried, I sanded gently again and applied yet another coat of polyurethane.  Once that was dried, it was done!

Here is the finished product:

We are pleased with the outcome.  It's certainly better than they were.  Here is the side door once it was redone:

The ancient doors look somewhat new again!  It was good to get this project completed before the hot, humid days arrive.  When they arrive, the stain and polyurethane would have taken a long, long time to dry.  We'll try to be better stewards and keep the doors in better shape from now on.  

One of Our Favorite Options for an Abundance of Cabbage

We've either eaten or processed most of the cabbage crop.  We still have 3 heads in the fridge and 3 heads still growing in the garden that I need to harvest this afternoon.  As the weather warms, we find that snails get into the cabbage and eat them.  Coleslaw has been standard fare for over a month now.  We also made four quarts of kimchi (Korean sauerkraut).  We also have been eating a cabbage & sausage jambalaya, which is really deconstructed cabbage rolls.  We also made a batch or two of eggrolls, but thought we'd make a bunch of eggrolls and then individually freeze them, so that we can pull out a few at a time to eat over the coming months.  Who doesn't like a delicious, quick meal?

I didn't capture step by step instructions as I remembered that we had done that several years ago.  However, when I searched the blog, I found this: Post from 13 Years Ago  Unfortunately, the photos are gone!  The recipe and steps are still there, though.  Making eggrolls seemed, initially, to be something outside of our expertise and comfort level, but making them/rolling them is a process that you pick up fast.  

So here is a photo of our egg roll filling all made up.  It contains shredded cabbage and carrots and seasoned ground meat, but the filling is up to you.  We've made them with mushrooms or chicken.

We set up a little assembly line in the kitchen, laying out the egg roll wrappers, putting two heaping scoops of filling into the center and rolling them up.  We line them up like little soldiers until the oil is hot and ready for frying.

We use coconut oil or beef tallow for frying.  The eggrolls are dunked in the oil and a spoon is used to roll them around until all sides are golden brown.

When done, we pull them out and arrange on paper towels to absorb the excess oil.

When you get in the groove, you can really get things going in a smooth, efficient process.

In this instance, I was rolling them and Tricia was frying.  As soon as she had some coming out of the oil, I had some waiting in line to be fried.

We allowed the eggrolls to completely cool and then arranged them on baking trays.  Our objective was to put them in the deep freeze and freeze them individually, so that they don't stick together and we could take out one eggroll for a snack or 10 or 20 at a time for a meal.  We learned that if you don't individually freeze them, the oil makes them stick together and when you try to remove them, they'll tear.  This process fixes the sticking together/tearing.  Into the freezer all of the trays of eggrolls went...

Once completely frozen, we removed each one and stacked into several Rubbermaid containers, sealed them and placed them back in the freezer.  Here is one of the containers:

We ended up making just about 60 eggrolls!  We'll likely make more as we do have 6 more heads of cabbage to do something with.  This will work out nicely.  With a little preparation and planning on the front end, we now will have quick, delicious meals at our convenience.  All we need to do is take out however many we want and warm them up.  Pass the soy sauce, please!

The Old Ways

 

Image Credit

As I drive down farm roads this spring, I notice acres and acres of recently planted rice fields.  The rice is sprouted and is coming up in perfect, symmetrical rows, shimmering kelly green in the moist soil as the sun rises in the east.  Most of the fields are drill planted these days.  What a difference!  This time of year in the past, you would be awakened by crop dusters (arial applicators) flying over your house en route to plant this year's crop of rice.  I scarcely heard a single one this year.

Growing up on a rice farm as a kid, I remembered the old process well.  All rice was planted in the water.  Levees were pulled and fields were worked to loosen the soil and then flooded.  Then the fields were water leveled.  Tractors would drag water levels across the field.  The soil would become a muddy slurry, and you would pull the high places down to the low.  Gravity would level the area to somewhat allow for a pinpoint flood.  Laser leveling has GREATLY increased the accuracy of this process these days.

Planting in the water and water-leveling served another purpose - to try to keep red rice in check.  Red rice is an insidious thing.  It grows taller than the other rice, with a red or black seed that makes your sample of rice ugly and you would be docked in price for having rice with red rice in it.  Since it is taller, as the rice ripens and winds blow, the red rice would fall down (lodging), and it would knock down all the good rice with it, making harvest a slow, arduous task.  Planting in the water in a water leveled field attempted to bury the red rice seed so that it wouldn't germinate.  Red rice reminds me a lot of the wheat and the tares parable in the Bible.

We would purchase seed rice that would come in 100 pound burlap sacks to plant in the fields.  We would flood an irrigation canal and unload each sack into the flooded canal to soak.  After a few days, the rice would 'pip out,' meaning a small sprout would emerge.  Once this occurred, we would use a conveyor belt tilted into the flooded canal.  We would lift each sack onto the conveyor belt and others would remove the water-soaked sack of rice and stack it on the back of the truck.  It was so cold to be in the canal lifting those HEAVY sacks of rice.

The truck would be driven to the landing strip where a crop duster pilot would meet us in his plane.  He'd go over the maps to ensure the correct field would be planted.  The burlap sacks were cut open and all of the rice would be dumped into a loader on a truck that would be lifted up and loaded onto the crop duster.  The pilot would fly over the field, releasing the rice that would scatter into the water-leveled field.  

After a few days, the water would be drained from the field and the newly planted rice would grow.  Today, the land isn't worked as intentionally because weeds are "burned down" by using Round Up and seed rice is directly drilled into the unworked soil.  Red rice is controlled by chemicals and the  The 'old way' was a lot more labor intensive and manual in nature.  

As we try to examine the cost-benefit analysis of then versus now, it's a complicated calculation.  Yes, the old ways involved many people doing hard work.  Compared to today, the process wasn't as accurate nor efficient as it is done today.  On the other hand, we've largely replaced people with machines.  Expensive machines.  Expensive machines that you can't work on anymore.  Expensive machines that only a few can afford.  Farming increasingly implements the use an array of chemicals and the small family farm has largely been replaced by corporate farms.

The amount of capital outlay, amount of risk, and number of mostly foreign workers that must be employed in order to farm today makes farming look nothing like it did in the past.  I guess I'm nostalgic for the old ways.  I wish I'd hear more crop dusters flying overhead and see a farmer walking his levees with a shovel slung over his shoulder.

Trying a New Variety

I'm not exaggerating when I tell you that for the last 20 years we have sweet potatoes that come up volunteer each and every year.  We never have to plant them and yet receive a nice harvest every fall.  It all started from composting one Beauregard Sweet Potato.  That one sweet potato expanded and multiplied.  To that, we added an heirloom variety called Golden Wonder, that we picked up from a guy called "The Barefoot Gardener" in Tennessee.  The Golden Wonders were prolific, producing a nice tasting sweet potato, but not as rich of a color and flavor as the Beauregard.  To add insult to injury, the Golden Wonder's crowded out the Beauregards.

Just to the east and north of us in a community between Evangeline and Iota is a farming family named Garber.  Everyone else around here grows rice.  They grow sweet potatoes.  I picked up a box of a variety they grow called Evangeline from our local feed store.  Admittedly, I purchased them to eat.  We made sweet potato fries, and I'll vouch for the flavor.  Yum!  But the other reason I bought the box was to attempt to get a local variety growing in our garden again.

No matter how thorough you are when digging sweet potatoes, you always miss a root.  From that root comes new sweet potato plants.  Here is a Golden Wonder growing up this spring.  My idea this year is to pull up 2/3's of these to allow room for the Evangeline's to get a foothold.

I picked out eight sweet potatoes from the box that were on the smaller side - we want to eat the big ones!  I also picked the ones that had "slips" or sprouts growing out from one end.

This sprout will grow out a vine.  Now you can put the sweet potato in water and the slips will grow out.  You can then clip them and they'll develop roots and grow.  I think I'm just going to plant the potato whole.  That's what we did with the Beauregard a long time ago and it grew without planting individual slips.  We'll see if this works.

I dug a shallow hole in the north part of the garden and planted the potatoes with the sprouts sticking up.

I watered them in and marked where I planted them with blue flags.

I'll keep a close eye on them.  We will hopefully experience a good growth of the Evangeline variety of sweet potato in our garden, allowing them to establish themselves so we can enjoy them year after year.

A Manicured Lawn

Someone showed me a funny meme the other day that showed a manicured lawn as compared to a beekeeper's lawn.  The manicured lawn was immaculate - not a blade of grass out of place, cut short.  Then the beekeeper's yard showed tall weeds and wildflowers.  So true!  We put off mowing our yard for a plethora of reasons.  First, the white dutch clover is flowering along with many other wildflowers, and the bees love them.  Second, our bees don't like the sound and vibration of the lawnmower.  They chase me and sting me.  Third, my lawnmower is broken and I need to try and figure out the electrical issue that won't let the mower blades engage.  Finally, we always like to wait and rotate the cows through the yard and eat the spring grass.  I think the record-setting year was one year when we didn't mow the grass until May!

For some of our long-time readers, I apologize.  This is a redundant post as we seem to make this post each and every year.  We have a Gallagher solar fence charger with some temporary step-in posts.  I break up the yard into different paddocks and unroll the poly wire using a ratchet reel.  Over the years, the cows have learned the sound of the reel clicking and, like Pavlov's dogs, they begin mooing LOUDLY when they hear the clicking of the ratchet reel unrolling the poly wire.

 And so it begins...  I moved Rosie and LuLu into the first paddock.  They excitedly run around, scoping out the various types of grasses, like you and I might scope out a buffet table.  They settle for the white Dutch clover first.  It's a favorite of theirs.

The cows have learned to have a healthy respect of the one strand of wire.  The solar powered charger pulses electricity through the line.  You only have to be stung by it once and you learn to avoid it.  I trust the charger, but I'd never leave the house with the cows in the yard.  I've learned to keep checking on the cows every few minutes.  One time after church, we were having pot roast and rice & gravy when someone came knocking on our front door to warn us that the cows were out!  Not good.  

We generally leave the cows in the paddock in the yard for a full day.  At the end of the day, they have the yard clipped down pretty good.  They we'll put them back in the permanent pasture, roll up the fencing, pick up the posts and set up another paddock right next to it.  Over the course of a week, the grass will be all eaten throughout the entire yard.  It won't look like the putting green on a golf course, but much better than before the cows grazed all day on it.

Preserving an Excess of Cabbage and Carrots

We have an overabundance of cabbage and carrots in the outdoor fridge due to bumper crops from the garden.  We've been cooking Cabbage and Sausage jambalaya, Egg rolls, steamed cabbage, roasted cabbage, coleslaw, Cream of Carrot soup, raw carrots, roasted carrots and on and on.  There's still a lot left, but we have a plan.

We've got a couple of recipes for lacto-fermenting cabbage and carrots that we always do, so we got busy.  First we are going to make a Korean sauerkraut (Kimchi).  It involves shredding cabbage, carrots, radishes, garlic, green onions and grated jalapenos.  We doubled the recipe to make four quarts.

We like to use a big wooden masher tool to bruise the cabbage and carrots and get the juices flowing.  You would think that an enormous stainless steel bowl would keep the contents inside, but we made quite a mess in the kitchen with bits of vegetables flying all over the place.

We tightly pack the kimchi into wide mouth quart-sized Mason jars.  The juices from the crushed cabbage and carrots coat the kimchi.  We also add salt.

Finally, we add 2 tablespoons of whey to each jar.  The whey is a by-product of making yogurt or cheese, and it is a preservative.  

Kimchi is put together.  Now we'll do Ginger Carrots.  We began to shred carrots and a bunch of ginger.

We've got loads of carrots to shred.  Our food processor got a work-out today.

All the carrots and ginger was dumped in the big bowl, and I once again got busy with the potato masher, working and working to crush the carrots and release the flavorful juices.

We spooned the gingered carrots in 2 quart sized Mason jars and added 2 tablespoons of whey in each jar.  For both the kimchi and the gingered carrots, it's real important that your vegetables stay beneath the liquid.  We purchased some glass weights that work perfectly for keeping the kimchi and the carrots below the level of the liquid.

We'll leave these on the kitchen counter at room temperature for about 3 days and then we'll transfer to the fridge.  It'll keep there for months and months and, believe it or not, gets better with age.

Very tangy, fizzy, and flavorful.  Very healthy for you, too!  We still have more cabbage and carrots.  I told Tricia that she should make a carrot cake!

What Happens When You Rush Things

Gardening is an inexact science.  You win some and you lose some, and you definitely learn along the way.  For planting the spring garden, I use the average last frost date for our zip code.  Our average last frost date is March 22nd.  If you plant on March 22nd, you have only a 10% chance of getting a frost and injuring or killing your plants.  You can also use the Early last frost date.  That date is March 3rd.  If you plant on that date, you have a 30% chance of injuring/killing your plants.

Sometimes, I subscribe to the "you gotta risk it to get the biscuit" mentality.  I could gamble and plant early, right?  What could happen, really?  So, I pushed things this year, planting the snap beans, cucumbers, squash and cucumbers around March 10th.  Well...  Just so happens, it got down to 34 degrees.  I thought, incorrectly, that things would be okay.  We have lots of trees, the plants were mulched, they would make it.  I was busy doing other things and I didn't even go out and cover them.

All the plants were damaged!  Let's take a look.  Here are the snap beans.  The leaves are burned from the frost.  Fortunately, fresh new growth is being put on.  They'll be stunted, but most of the beans are going to make it.

But look at the cucumbers!  I have 3 varieties planted on a cattle panel trellis.  The cucumbers are hit a lot harder than the snap beans.  Honestly, I think I'll have to replant ALL of these except one on the very end.  I don't know how it avoided the damage.  I will wait for 3 more days to see if any new growth appears.  Then if nothing happens, I'll pull the trigger and replant.

This third photo shows the severely damaged squash, including hills of zucchini, straightneck yellow squash and crookneck yellow squash.  This right here was my main reason for rushing things.  I figured if I got a really early start, I could avoid the squash vine borers.  This pest usually kills all of my squash.  I theorized that by getting a jump on things, I could make a big harvest of squash before the onslaught of the SVBs.  The squash was absolutely beautiful, with big, healthy green leaves.  They would have been blooming in a week.  Then the temperatures dropped and all of the big leaves turned brown and died.

But I'm hopeful.  I see fresh new green growth.  There's an old adage that says, "That which does not kill you, makes you stronger."  If there's any truth to that, perhaps we'll have a strong squash crop.  We'll wait and see.

Finally, in the garden in the side yard, here are my butternut squash and spaghetti squash.  Burned by the frost? Sure.  But these plants will live to fight another day!

There are significant benefits to getting things planted early.  You get plants that produce prior to fighting the high heat and bug and pest pressure.  But there is significant downside risk that may cause you to have to replant everything.  Fortunately, I don't think that is possible.  However, I'm pretty sure I'll be replanting all the cucumbers.  I will try to rush things and plant early again, I'm quite sure, but next time, I'll cover all of the plants.

The Last Hurrah for the Broccoli

The big broccoli heads have long been harvested.  About every other day, I walk down the broccoli row and snip off the florets.  We've had broccoli in our fridge non-stop for at least a couple of months because of this.  All good things must come to an end.  But it's not really the end, is it?  When the florets aren't harvested, they flower.  Beautiful yellow flowers fill the garden.  Broccoli seed pods are forming and when these ripen and turn brown, I'll save a multitude of seeds since these are non-hybrid.  It'll soon be time to remove the broccoli plants and plant another crop, I'm thinking peppers, to fill that spot.  The broccoli flowers, apart from being pretty, attract our honeybees which are located just west of the garden.  During the day, bees dart this way and that around the broccoli flowers.

I like to watch the bees hard at work pollinating, flying greedily from one flower to the next.  You can hear the buzz as they work.  What an industrious creature is the bee!

Busy as a bee!  You can see why that phrase is repeated.

Stay tuned for more reports on the bees.  We've got lots to tell you.  Bees moved back into our hollow column on the side porch.  We also have a couple of swarm traps set in the yard.  Finally, we'll be attempting on our second try to make splits.  More to come on all this later.