Warming it Up!

Our heat pump just doesn't do the job in winter.  I'm not a fan.  It just doesn't do an adequate job of keeping the house warm.  We've kind of thrown in the towel and keep roaring fires going in our fireplace as we sit in front of it each night.  Our nightly routine while warming in front of the fire is watching "All Creatures Great and Small" and then playing Solitaire together.  I think we have one more cold snap this weekend and then it looks to be more balmy for at least the next week.

We're not the only thing that's cold.  Our honey is too!  Raw honey will crystallize in the winter.  Although a nuisance, it's the way you know you're getting the good stuff.  We have case after case of honey that has all crystallized.  Just like this!:

Many people just put it in the microwave and nuke it, but don't do that!  You'll cook all the good stuff out of it.  You want to gradually warm it, but never let it get more than 104 degrees Fahrenheit or you'll destroy the nutrients, enzymes and health benefits you naturally get from raw local honey.  Some people will put it on the dash of their vehicle in the sun to liquify it, some have built solar heat boxes to liquify it.

We've come up with an idea that works for us.  We use our egg incubator to gently warm the honey.  The issue we dealt with is that the incubator has warming coils on top but not at the bottom.  This resulted in the honey liquifying on top but not on the bottom.  To solve this, we placed a bread proofing heating pad on the bottom.  Now the honey is getting heated from top to bottom and we're monitoring the temperature that's on a thermostat to ensure we never get the honey too hot.

Let's peek in the incubator to see how things are going.  Compare the first photo above with this one.  You can see that the honey in the incubator is about three quarters of the way toward becoming liquid again.

As we sell the honey, we rotate crystallized jars of honey from the box and into the incubator so that the honey goes from the solid state to a liquid one.

For the Bees, From the Bees

We're just coming out of 20 degree weather with more chilly stuff to come, but it did get up to 50 degrees today.  When the sun came out, the honeybees came out of their hives and gathered at the water trough to drink water.  I know it's early yet, but in just a few weeks, it will be time to set out swarm traps to catch wild swarms and also split our hives.  It's hard to imagine, but it won't be long until the bees become very active.  

Many people are feeding their bees now.  They take a bunch of sugar and mix with water in 5 gallon buckets.  The bees come and drink the sugar water and take it back to the hive.  So the bees don't drown in the bucket, folks put a bunch of pine straw in the bucket so that the bees can land on the pine straw and drink without falling in the sugary syrup water.  The idea of feeding the bees like this is to stimulate the queen.  When the queen sees worker bees coming into the hive with (fake) nectar, she is tricked into believing that the flow is on.  If she believes the flow (production of nectar) is on, she begins to lay eggs in abundance so there will be workers to bring in nectar and pollen.  This "jump starts" the hive.  This way, once actual flowers are blooming, the hive is up and running with lots of workers ready to go and theoretically, more honey will be produced.  Makes sense.

We like to be more natural.  Week after next, we'll begin feeding, but with honey that came off of their hives.  When we pull honey, we render down the beeswax in a crock pot.  Once the wax is separated, you're left with a lot of honey mixed with water.  We bag this up and freeze it.  We have several gallon bags of it in the deep freeze.  We will thaw this out, pouring it into a pan and set it out for the bees to feast on.  We'll show photos or a video of this.  It's something to see.  They'll bring their own honey back to the hive to feast on and the queen will do her thing and lay eggs in preparation for spring.  

So the honey water is for the bees.  Let's talk about something from the bees.  With the beeswax cappings we got in the honey extraction process, we heat it in a crockpot with water.  That's how we got the honey water discussed above.  With the beeswax, we plan on making candles.  Tricia tried her hand at making lip balm:

Our inaugural lip balm production was mainly for personal use and for Christmas gifts.  We plan on making more to sell alongside our honey.  The lip balm is a combination of beeswax, coconut oil, castor oil and eucalyptus and orange essential oils.  It came out great!  When we make another batch, we'll show you the process.

Louisiana Grass Roots - The Cajun Prairie

 

Our town has an old theater in the downtown area.  We've gone to see plays that are put on there by a community theatre.  They'll also show old movies from time to time.  The last one we saw was "Roman Holiday" starring Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck.  The other day, though, we were invited to a screening of a film called "Louisiana Grass Roots" that a friend of a friend produced.

The movie was about Louisiana's Cajun Prairie.  Growing up in Louisiana, when you travel to other places, they always have this idea that you wrestle alligators in the backyard.  That's only partially true.  Those Cajuns definitely exist.  We are prairie Cajuns.  We do have bayous and alligators and bullfrogs all around, but mostly the land is flat.  Very flat.  

The film describes a time in our area before commercial agriculture and intensive cattle grazing when the Cajun Prairie was wild.  It had prairie grasses and wildflowers, some sending down roots 16 feet.    This held the soil together.  The land teemed with insects and pollinators.  Over time, with land being plowed fencerow to fencerow and cattle grazing the land, the native prairie grasses disappeared.  The topsoil also disappeared, eroding into bayous and rivers, silting them up.

A professor from LSU and a biologist from Louisiana Department of Wildlife and fisheries spoke about a time back in the 80's when some people were walking along a railroad right of way and found some prairie grasses and wildflowers - the plants that formerly populated vast acreage across Louisiana.  The railroad right of ways were the only areas left that retained some of the old prairie grass landscape.  They began gathering seeds and growing a seed bank.  Over time, they've converted parcels of land back to the Cajun Prairie of time past.  It's been slow going, but they are recruiting people to take portions of their non-productive land and re-populate it with prairie grass seeds to bring the prairie back.

Back to the erosion, according to the professor, 130 years ago our topsoil was many feet thick, but when the prairie grasses went, the topsoil was carried away too, leaving just the clay hardpan.  I have no way of knowing if this is correct, but they told of a time when our bayous whose water look like chocolate milk once flowed clear with sand bottoms like the Ouiska Chitto River.  I have no way of proving or disproving this.

This water, now laden with chemicals and fertilizer runoff from farming practices, flows into bayous and rivers and into the Gulf of America, creating an algae bloom and a Dead Zone, negatively impacting our fisheries and estuaries.  Adding insult to injury.  The thick topsoil that once thickly covered the clay hardpan acted as a sponge, retaining rainwater and fertility.  With the topsoil sponge gone, the rainwater quickly runs off.  Farmers who need water to grow rice and crawfish depend on deepwater wells that pull water from underground aquifers.  These aquifers are being depleted and must be drilled deeper and deeper.  Now some of those wells are producing salt water, resulting in acreage that can no longer be used for agriculture.  They describe a crisis at hand.

I've never liked alarmist claims, striking fear into people.  Remember back in the 70's we were told that we were going to be going into an ice age?  Or how about the population explosion?  Or Y2K?  This professor told the group after the film that in 50 years, there would be little agriculture as we now know it because of no water.  Like I mentioned, I don't like the alarmism, but this water issue seems to have some validity to it.  

The purpose of the film was to educate people on the Cajun Prairie, how things used to be, and encourage people to take a portion of their land and revert back to the Cajun Prairie.  It showed various groups of people planting seeds and taking steps now to help save the land and help future generations.  Materials, seeds, contact information and links to websites were handed out.  A breakout session was held at 221 Bistro down the street where many were going to discuss it further, but it was getting late and we headed home.

It was an interesting film and introduced us to some things that we'll talk about and study.  We're already working on building the soil and have our own regimen of doing so.  It's exciting to see others getting involved in a different method of building soil and stewarding the land that the Good Lord gave us.

Winter Harvest Before the Ice Comes

Forecasts show lows of 23 degrees overnight into the morning and tomorrow lows down to 19 degrees overnight and into the morning.  This has sparked a flurry (pardon the pun) of activity in getting things taken care of and ready.  Yesterday, I wrapped all the pipes in the attic, the faucets attached to the house, and then all the water pipes and spigots in the garden and out in the pasture.  It took quite a while but we got prepared as best as we can.  Hopefully we can make it through the cold weather without any broken pipes.

Late this afternoon after church, we bundled up and got all the tarps out, covering everything that's out in the garden, trying to save what's there.  I'm not really worried about the root crops, so I'm leaving the beets and carrots and turnips alone.  The cabbage are said to fare very well through a freeze, too.  I did check on the cauliflower.  We have a LOT of cauliflower that's ready.  I learned that if your cauliflower freezes, it gets mushy and is ruined.  Not gonna take any chances with the cauliflower.  Gotta pick 'em!

Most of the cauliflower are very nice, bigger than the size of your hand.  I pick the head of the cauliflower off and feed all the leaves to the cows.  How they love that!  Cauliflower is one and done.  By that, I mean once you harvest the head, no more will grow.  Broccoli is a different story.  Once you pick the main broccoli head, little broccoli florets pop up all over the place, so you can continue harvesting as long as you have patience to get out there and pick.  Pound for pound, you probably get more broccoli from the little florets cumulatively than you do from the main head.

In pulling all the cauliflower off so they're not ruined in the freeze, we got a huge haul.  I don't really have anything for perspective, but that's a big basket in the photo below.  We'll be busy eating cauliflower and blanching and freezing it.

I like to also pull some beets (bull's blood and chioggia varieties) and carrots (Danvers and Cosmic Purple varieties).

As a kid, I often turned my nose up at vegetables, but no more!  We eat lots of them.  One of our favorite things to do is roast cauliflower, broccoli, beets, and carrots in the oven with some olive oil, butter, salt and minced garlic.  I cannot stress how delicious this is.

Fresh spinach is coming in too, right now in the garden, so Tricia made a beautiful spinach, ham, pecan and cheese quiche.  That paired nicely with lettuce from the garden and the roasted vegetables.  It made for an enjoyable lunch.

After two days, we'll take the tarps off the garden and see where we stand.  Will everything we covered survive?  Tune in and we'll report toward the end of the week.  Stay warm!

Got the Onions in The Ground

Last week we got our onions in the mail from Dixondale Farms in Carizo Springs, TX.  We received one bundle of the Short Day Sampler.  The Sampler includes 48 plants that are a mixture of the 1015 Texas Super Sweet, Texas Early White, and the Red Creole.  We like to plant this one as it is a nice variety.

We also got two bundles of the Yellow Granex Onion plants.  That contains 96 onion plants.  The Yellow Granex onion is the hybrid that most people would recognize as the Vidalia sweet onion.  I got them out of the box and prepared the soil, using the onion planting guide provided.  We grow these each year and have had great success with them, usually able to grow all the onions we'll need all year.

The guide contains helpful information on how far apart to plant them, how deep, and how far apart the rows should be.  We've always found that if you follow the instructions, you'll have no problem growing delicious onions.  I got busy with the hoe working the soil and started planting.  I was racing the sun, but by the time the sun was dipping over the horizon, I had the job completed.

And then...  Then we got the news that we'll be experiencing a winter storm early next week, bringing temps to around 20 degrees.  Dixondale Farms helpfully sent out an email with instructions on preparing for extremely cold weather and freezing.  They suggest covering the plants with a tarp and watering thoroughly before a freeze as moist soil holds heat from the day and insulates the bulb and tender roots.  You can bet we'll be doing both of those things prior to the deep freeze.

Hopefully, we'll save the onions and will enjoy delicious onions this summer in yet another bumper crop.

Road Kill Reminiscences

Yesterday I was traveling slowly to an appointment south and east of Lake Charles.  It was down a two-lane blacktop road bordered by rice fields and cattle pastures.  Something caught my eye and I slowed down, checking my rear view mirror for anyone following me.  The road was clear in both directions.  I put the vehicle in Park in the middle of the road and opened my door.  There was a marvelous creature in the middle of the road, dead.  The blood was fresh.  The beast had been struck by a motorist early this morning, probably around daybreak.

A bobcat!  Much larger than the common housecat, it's fur was beautiful, with spots running down the legs and underside.  You can see it's short tail and understand why it's called a bobcat.  This cat wasn't skinny.  It was agile and muscular and fit, probably fattened on rabbits, rats, squirrels and maybe even a chicken from a farmer's pen.

I was sad that this ferocious feline was dead.  As I looked at the teeth on this cat, I shivered to think that if this thing would come to life, he'd tear me to pieces.

It reminded me of a time twenty five years ago when I was crawfishing.  A part of the 120 acres that I was crawfishing on bordered some woods on the north and east corner of a small patch my Dad rented from my Aunt Ida.  It was from this patch of woods that raccoons would come out at night and feed on my crawfish.  They would knock the traps over when robbing the crawfish out of them.  The turned over traps sunk beneath the water and since you couldn't see them, you'd run over them with the boat, crushing the trap.  Each trap cost $8.  With each ruined trap, my anger toward the raccoons intensified.

In the mornings, I would walk through the woods with my Marlin lever action .22 rifle.  Fat raccoons filled from their all-you-can-eat crawfish buffet all night would sleep in the crook of trees.  I shot them out of the tree, relishing the loud "THUMP" of the raccoon as he'd hit the forest floor.  But the population of raccoons exceeded my skill of killing them.  I began setting traps.  In talking to people, I had learned that raccoons are very curious critters.  I was told that if you put some aluminum foil, shiny side up, on the trigger pan of a snap trap, the curious raccoon would reach his hand to touch the shiny part and SNAP! - you'd catch him.  You did have to check traps often as they have been known to chew their leg off to avoid getting caught.

Within the next day or so, I came around the corner in my boat and heard quite the commotion going on.  There was a shrieking sound, followed by a tumbling motion with dust clouds arising from the water's edge.  I got a raccoon!  But as I got closer, I realized I was wrong.  I had caught a bobcat.  I killed the cat and ended up giving him to a relative that sold furs.  It was a beautiful animal, and I was sad that I had to kill it.  That cat wasn't eating my crawfish.  He was just in the wrong place at the right time.  Curiosity had indeed killed the cat.

Lache Pas La Patate

That phrase translated from Cajun French to English means, "Don't drop the potato!"  That phrase also means "Don't give up!" or "Hang in There!"  We won't be dropping any potatoes - at least not today.  Our phone rang right before 5pm and the caller id said, "Parsley's Feed."  I knew immediately what they were calling about.  Mrs. Johnette confirmed it when she said, "Your seed potatoes are in."  I told her I'd be over directly to pick them up.  A couple of weeks back I had put our names on an order list at our local feed store for 10 pounds of LaSoda seed potatoes.  Today they came in and we hopped in the car and drove over to get them.   

At the feed store, they had a notebook with several pages of names and numbers and how many pounds of seed potatoes the customer wanted.  As customers were called today, people were driving up to pick up their potatoes before closing time at 5pm.  A gentleman from our church that just turned 90 years old had ordered 50 pounds of seed potatoes!  (You read that right)  I hope in 31 years when I'm 90 I'm still planting potatoes!

I always have the same exact thought every year when I open the box and look at the potatoes:  "Should we just eat them?"  It's going to get chilly tonight and a potato soup with bacon, green onions and fresh parsley would hit the spot.  What if the yield on our potato crop is such that we harvest less than we plant?  That's always a possibility, but hope springs eternal.  We'll get these in the ground.

But something has to be done first.  We cut the potatoes and let them scab over.  You see the potato has a number of eyes.  From out of these eyes, a plant will grow.  Hopefully, each potato plant will grow numerous potatoes.  I use a knife to cut each potato in half, being careful (not to drop it!), but also not to cut through an eye.

When I finished the task, I had an entire tray of cut up seed potatoes.  I'll put the tray in a warm room and let the cuts scab over for about a week and then I'll put them in the ground in 10 days or so.

Constructing the Garden Sink

I've admitted many times before, I'm not a carpenter.  Sometimes, however, I get a hankering to complete a project that needs doing.  Wouldn't a garden sink be marvelous?  Tricia's old cast iron sink that was in the kitchen was removed after 25 years of service.  Although not a hoarder, I do like to save things that I think I may be able to repurpose.  I threw the old sink in the very back of the garden where it sat under the sugarcane patiently for over a year for me to make the decision to attempt the project that I had earmarked for it upon removal.  Last week, I pulled it from the garden and looked at it.  It didn't look good, but if I squinted my eyes, I could see potential there.  It's as if the old sink desired to be useful again.  Can we make that happen?

A garden sink would be so useful.  No more bringing in vegetables indoors for processing.  Vegetables that were dirty from harvest would get dirt and mud all over the place in Tricia's kitchen.  Vegetables that had stink bugs, spiders, slugs and snails clinging to them that would now be in the kitchen.  I searched and searched for plans online that would direct me on how to build it.  Oh, there were numerous plans and videos, but none were exactly what I saw in my mind's eye.  So I decided to build it without official plans.  I'd play it by ear, I'd fly by the seat of my pants, so to speak, in its construction.

The goal was to build it with lumber I had laying around.  This is what I roughed in.  As you can see, it's supported by a solid 4x4 frame supported by 2x4's, braced for sturdiness.  It would have a hardware cloth area for draining the cleaned vegetables.  I originally had ideas for a cutting board, but since this is going into the garden, I had a last-minute plan change to keep the garden sink reasonable in size.  I'll show you the workaround cutting board in a minute.

I was pleased with how this thing was taking shape.  Tricia liked that this would keep her kitchen cleaner.

I purchased the cheapest kitchen sink with sprayer from the local hardware store for fifty dollars.  Russ, my plumber son, helped me to pipe it all in.  The water run-off from the sink was plumbed to be caught in a blue tub.  That water that contained precious topsoil would be returned to the garden.  Either that or I would add chopped vegetable greens and stalks to the water and a little manure to manufacture my own fertilizer.  I'll show you that in another blog post sometime later.  The water source comes from a water hose connected by fittings to the sink.  It's not hard-piped in.  Since there's no hot water, I capped off the hot water portion of it.  I also added some 2x2 slats the have a shelf of sorts on the bottom for storage.  Doing so also added more stability to the garden sink.  We moved it out to the garden.

Time to test it out.  We had some Danvers carrots, Cosmic Purple Carrots, Detroit Red beets, and Chioggia beets ready for pickin'.  I pulled them, put them in the sink and washed and scrubbed them real good.

Using a makeshift cutting board that I placed over one of the sinks, I cut the greens off.  Of course with cows and goats nosing around, I fed the greens to them.

Chioggia beets remind me of Brach's Starlight Mints, one of my favorite mints, especially good to pop in your mouth when you are about to leave church in order to combat "church breath."  Church breath is a dreaded affliction one gets from sitting in church singing hymns and listening to the sermon, and starlight mints is the cure for it, I've found.  Chioggia beets, unlike starlight mints, aren't minty, but they are tasty.

The garden sink worked in splendid fashion to wash up the vegetables.  Total cost of the garden sink was less than $100.  As a result of having the sink, we were able to bring cleaned veggies into the house that were ready to be processed further without making a mess indoors.

Inside, we sliced these root vegetables into 1/4 inch slices, tossed them in olive oil and roasted them in the oven with butter and salt and pepper.  It was a good day and I've got to give the roasted vegetables AND the new garden sink good reviews.  The vegetables for taste and the garden sink for functionality.

Three New Hens

Since our oft talked about chicken catastrophe last year in which minks killed off half of our flock until I was able to trap them, our flock was cut in half.  We have 25 hens remaining.  So it was with great joy last week when our neighbor's grandson walked over and asked if we'd be interested in adopting three hens.  What a good neighbor!

His sister lives in town and purchased three hens at Tractor Supply.  At first her three hens seemed neat.  The newness quickly wore off and the hens wouldn't stay where they were supposed to stay.  They roamed around causing trouble and made lots of noise in the neighborhood and they laid eggs in different hiding places all around the yard.  Before long, it was determined that the 3 hens needed to be re-homed.

Of course, we'll take them.  Bring them on over.  They were wild and he had lots of trouble catching them.  I told him to wait until they're roosting at night and then he'd be able to grab them.  Sure enough, it worked.  He called me the next morning and told me that he had caught them the night before when they were roosting and he was bringing them over.

I asked him to put them in the cattle trailer and I'd introduce them to the rest of the flock when I got home.  The three birds are very healthy and will be a welcome addition to our dwindling flock.

Before putting them with the rest of the chickens, I used some tin snips to clip one of their wings.  This keeps them off balance should they decide to try to fly up and over the exterior fence.  After cutting the feathers off, I gently set the hens down with the rest of the flock.

It generally takes a while for new birds to get acclimated to the rest of the flock.  They tend to be standoffish.  The new birds don't know the routine.  Last night, they didn't go into the henhouse before the door closed.  That resulted in them being out exposed in a very dangerous place.  Mink and raccoons and possums prowl about at night on their nocturnal maneuvers.  We lost one hen just last year that didn't get into the henhouse before the door closed and a big barn owl was eating the hen when I went out the next morning to do the chores.

Last night I went  out after dark to see if the new hens made it into the hen house.  Nope.  They didn't.  I used a headlamp to find them out in the pasture, huddled in a little group.  I caught one by hand and put her locked up securely in the hen house.  The other two were wise to my plans and were wild by then and were having nothing doing with me.  No amount of telling them that it was for their own good would help.  I went and got the net we normally use when we go crabbing and used it to scoop up the other two hens.  Believe it or not, I had to run out tonight and catch those 3 hens once again.  They just don't realize the danger they are in.  After I secured them in the hen house, I locked the door.  I hope they figure out the routine.  I don't want to have to go chasing hens every stinking night to safely secure them.  After losing so many hens and then being gifted three to make up for that, I want to keep the hens happy, healthy and laying many eggs for us.                           

Empty Nesters - Remember When

Today our youngest turned 25 years old.  I can't believe.  Where did the time go?  Not only that, but he bought a home.  It's about 35 miles away from us, but it is close to his work.  He was living in Welsh with his brother, Russ, but now he's on his own.  We helped move him in.  His Momma has been helping him clean and get everything in order.  We are proud of him and all of our kids.  Here he is standing by his front door:

I am positive that many of you who are reading this have experienced the same bittersweet feelings I'm trying to express.  Since welcoming them into the world, you try to do your dead level best to introduce them to Jesus, parent them properly, instill values and teach them skills so that they can make it on their own in a dog eat dog world.  You think you have all the time in the world.  But you don't!

And then the day comes when they pack up and leave.  And the house becomes big and quiet.  You are left painfully aware of the mistakes you made in parenting and wishing that you might have done things differently or better.  We are frail and faulty, right?  You've shot your quiver of arrows out into the world.  You pray for your kids who are forging their own way in a cruel world.

You are left with silence and memories of their childhood.  Time marches on.  It waits for no one.  It's a stark reminder that I should be a better steward of it.  Looking back I remember Benjamin as a young boy out in the side yard with his rifle and Confederate Kepi hat reenacting Pickett's charge.  He'd get shot by a sharpshooter and lay writhing on the ground.  We watched from a distance as he imagined various combat situations.  He and Russ fought many battles against the enemy and each other with Air-soft guns.  In fact, look what I found years later in the side yard:

Look right in the center of the photo

Can you see the bright orange air soft pellet?  I think decades from now someone will find one of these and wonder what it is.  Years ago in digging up the bed in our garden in the side yard to plant Irish potatoes, I unearthed an old blue porcelain marble.  Years and years ago, in the same place where Benjamin and Russ battled it out, another young man played marbles, enjoying times of imagination and fun, with parents looking on at the innocence and vivid imagination you have in childhood.

In that same general location, eighteen years prior I constructed a simple swing for Laura Lee and hung it in a live oak tree.  She'd swing and I'd push her.  Good times!  She (and Russ) have homes of their own now, and the swing sits dormant, swaying only when a swift breeze pushes it.

Alan Jackson sings a song called "Remember When," and it gets me in the 'feels' whenever I hear it.  

Verse 4 says:

Remember when
The sound of little feet
Was the music we danced to week to week
Brought back the love, we found trust
Vowed we'd never give it up
Remember when

Verse 6 says:

Remember when

We said when we turned gray

When the children grow up and move away

We won't be sad, we'll be glad

For all the life we've had

And we'll remember when

I think Alan Jackson puts it in the right perspective.  Although it's sad, we'll be glad, for we shared a lot of love and life.  We often talk on this blog about raising animals and plants and honeybees, but the most important, by far, crop we raise is children.

The Fall Tomato Crop

Our fall tomato crop was producing well, not in huge abundance, but good nonetheless.  And then in December temperatures dropped for one night to the upper 20's.  There were pounds and pounds of green fruit on the tomato vines and so on the night of the freeze, Tricia and I picked baskets and baskets of green tomatoes of all varieties.  

We arranged them on trays on the table and covered them with cardboard boxes that we had flattened out.  Each morning we would sort them, moving the pink ones to a separate tray.  As they ripened we moved them into the fridge.  Almost every single one of the tomatoes ripened indoors.  We knew we had to do something quickly with all these tomatoes as we barely had room for anything else in the ice box.  So we pulled them all out.  Here is an overhead shot of some of them:

And here is a big heaping basket full of Chadwick Cherry Tomatoes.  These tomatoes right here produce and produce!

Tricia likes to cook with these.  We bagged up all of the Chadwick Cherry tomatoes and put them in the freezer.  There were exactly 10 pounds of cherry tomatoes!

With some of the bigger tomatoes, we made pico de gallo.  Actually, I made it.  I call it Gringo Pico.  Simple, simple, simple.  Cut tomatoes, cut onions, cut peppers cilantro, salt and pepper and lime juice.  Good stuff!  We like to put it in the fridge overnight and let the flavors "percolate."

Here's the money shot: 

That's a little over 5 pounds of pico de gallo!  Tricia and I almost finished this off for lunch today with some chips.

For the rest of the tomatoes, we decided to can the cut up tomatoes into pint jars.  First we scalded the tomatoes, cored them, and removed the skins.  Then we roughly cut up the tomatoes so that they would cook uniformly.

After adding salt and pepper, we put the cut tomatoes in a pot and let them cook.

Tricia added salt and citric acid to each jar and then ladled the cooked tomatoes into the canning jars.

We put these jars in a water bath canner when the water was boiling.  When the time was up, we removed them and ensured that the jars sealed.  They were placed on the kitchen counter to cool.  Once cool, we'll remove the rings and stack the 12 jars of tomatoes to the pantry.

Between freezing, making pico de gallo, and canning, we put up 30 pounds of tomatoes!  That doesn't count all the fresh tomatoes that we ate or cooked with prior to preserving the harvest.  It was actually a better crop than the spring toms.  That's to be expected.  Less heat and humidity and less bug pressure.

As soon as we got all these tomatoes put away, we got all the tomatoes started from seed.  They should be germinating shortly and we'll see if we can have a good spring crop as well as what we just experienced in the fall.

Egg Production Data - 2025

On Friday we posted the 2025 Rainfall Data.  It was a look back at the entire year precipitation totals, by day and by month.  Today we'll look at egg production.  The first chart, shown below, is the daily log.  We actually keep a handwritten log and transfer it at year end to tally up the numbers in Excel.  I'm sure it would be easier to just log it into Excel each day, but this 'old school' system seems to work for us.  It's a total of 4,350 eggs for the year.  

Let's see how that stacks up against previous years.  We've kept egg production records since 2013.  I'm sad to report that at 4,350 eggs, 2025 was the lowest egg production year on record.  We still produced 362.50 dozen eggs.  The highest month for eggs was June and the lowest was December.  If you total up the numbers, May is historically the best month and December the worst.

It's kind of amazing to see that since 2013 98,030 eggs or 8,169 dozen eggs have been produced off of 3 acres of pasture.

This table simply shows the data in a different format and adds in the number of hens below to help estimate the average eggs per day and how often they lay.

It's interesting, but there are some variables that skew the data, namely predation.  In September, a couple of mink began murdering our hens.  You can see the fall-off in the chart above during that period.  By the time that the dust (and feathers) settled and I had caught the two mink in our trap and settled the score in Old Testament fashion, our flock was cut in half.  Our numbers would have been more in line with prior years.  Those mink really sunk any profitability in eggs this year.  We did, however, have enough eggs produced off the land that we never had to buy eggs and had enough left over to sell some too.  At some point this spring, we may incubate some more chicks to build the flock's numbers back up.

Rainfall Data - 2025

We always keep very detailed records about things at Our Maker's Acres Family Farm, partly because it's interesting, but perhaps moreso that we may be a little weird.  Take rainfall, for instance.  Rain is very important to everything we do.  Without rainfall, grass doesn't grow, vegetables don't grow, our entire ecosystem shuts down.  We thank the Good Lord for rain!  

In 2025, almost 66.5 inches fell.  That's 5 and a half feet of rain.  Just the top of my head would be sticking out if that all came on one day.

66.492 inches of rain is the highest total of rainfall since 2021 and is a couple of inches more than our 13 year average.  As you can see May is the month with the most rainfall, both in 2025 and for the 13 year average.  April of 2025 was the month with the least rainfall.  March is the month that is the driest month over the 13 year history

Finally, let's look at the daily log of rainfall.  It never rained on the 2nd, the 19th and the 20th of any month in 2025.  (Good days to have a picnic)  It rained the MOST on the 23rd of each month in 2025.  (Good day to sit inside and read a good book)

Just something fun we tally up and look at each year.  How much rain do you get in your neck of the woods?  Next, we'll be looking at yearly totals for egg production.