Putting Things Off 'Til the Last Minute

I'm talking about the fall tomato crop.  Last fall we had a tremendous fall harvest of tomatoes.  Tricia informed me today that she used the last of the frozen tomatoes in our lunch.  As I looked out on our back patio, I see the seed pots containing 56 tomato plants.  Actually, the photo below shows 32 plants because I transplanted 24 of them into the garden yesterday on a very hot afternoon.

See, that's the main reason for the procrastination - the hot, dry summer we're experiencing.  The month of August and so far, September have proven to be so hot and dry, everything is just baking out there.  It is a terrible time to plant anything in the garden, except a cactus, maybe.  I kept hoping we'd get a good soaking rain or a cool front, but none seems to be coming.  The tomatoes are getting so long and leggy.  It's time to get them in the ground.

So yesterday I got a post hole digger and 12 Cherokee Purple tomato plants and 12 Pink Brandywine tomato plants and headed out to the garden.  I picked a space between two garden rows I planted in the spring.  In this way, it's sort of like rotational planting in that you're not planting the same type plant in the same soil year after year.

I dug holes with the post hole digger and dug them deep.  You can plant tomatoes real deep and the stem sends out roots.  This eliminates the "leggy" problem.  Once I put the plant in the hole, I backfill the hole with soil and composted chicken litter.  I put mulch around the soil at the base of the plant to combat evaporation and then I watered each plant in real good.  Finally, I started the sprinkler going to really soak the soil to give the plants a good chance at making it.

A day later, I checked in on them.  Two don't look too good and one had all the leaves eaten off of it by some critter.  Hopefully, they'll make it, but we have 56 plants in total.  I always plan to lose some.  I'll plant the remainder maybe tomorrow or the next day.    

Copper for the Goats

Goats can be tough to manage.  Around this time of the year, you can notice their coat becomes dull instead of its normal shiny appearance.  It also has a coarse feel to it.  Then they get a "bottle jaw" look to them and diarrhea which indicates the presence of parasites.  They are quite prevalent in our locale.  In addition to treating with Ivermectin, Safeguard and Valbazen, we give them copper boluses.

When I say copper, I mean copper.  The heavy metal comes in the container and you make up capsules by measuring out prescribed amounts.  They feel heavy in your hands.

The trick is to get the goats to take the copper boluses.  I use a device that's normally used to worm cattle and horses.  I first coat the capsules of copper with peanut butter and put in in the wormer gun followed by a generous helping of peanut butter as the chaser.

We straddle the goat, pulling their heads back.  Then I gently insert the worming gun as far down her throat as I can get it and push in on the plunger.  This pushes the two copper capsules down their throats.  We hold their heads back until they've swallowed it all.  We did have cases in which two of the goats recognized something was up and spit it out.  We just do it again until they swallow it.

Copper has a life of 4 - 6 months.  Perhaps this will do the trick and will say farewell to the parasites.  We'll keep monitoring the goats daily.

Waiting on Fall to Get Here

As I was out walking yesterday evening, I was doing some thinking.  I don't know if it's like it where you live, but this summer has been long, hot, and dry.  Summer is always like that, you might say, but this one seems worse.  Is it that I'm getting older?  I don't know.  I like to have lots of projects to work on, but the hot humid weather just saps all the strength out of me.  

I am looking forward to Fall!  I can't wait until we're not sitting at 80 degrees at 8 in the morning, with temperatures in the mid-90's and the doggone heat index saying "feels like 105."  When that first cool front comes in, we will be so very happy!  Perhaps the cooler temps will give me some energy to get some things done.

1. Get the tomatoes transplanted into the garden.

2. Plant all the cole crops (broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, Brussels Sprouts, etc.)

3. Our fall crop of meat bird chicks (50 of them) get mailed to us on Sept 16th.  I need to get the chicken tractor checked out and brooder ready to go.

4. Betsy is getting bigger.  Time to put a breaking halter on her so she'll walk with a rope.

5. Insulation in the attic.  The old fiberglass batt insulation is 26 years old.  It's fallen down and there is no remaining insulation upstairs.  Need to install new batts.  This is DEFINITELY a job for cooler weather!

6. Cooler weather will get LuLu out of heat stress and enable us to begin milking her again.

Hopefully, a reprieve from the heat is on its way.  So tired of the dog days of summer!  

Soil Cover - An Important Consideration in Soil Health

Covering the soil is one of the most basic things you can do in soil conservation.  If you walk in the woods, you always see the ground covered with decomposing logs, leaves and understory.  Small trees thrive under the canopy followed by grasses.  Bugs and worms thrive beneath the rotting organic matter as rich moist topsoil is being formed.

The photo below just west of our barn was taken five years ago.  There is one tiny patch of grass seen on the bottom right.  What Happened?!  This entire area was once covered with bahia grass and bermuda grass and now this...  It's all dirt.  In the summer, the sun heats up the dirt and dries it out.  When rains come, the soil is washed away.  When winds blow, the dust (our topsoil) is blown away.

In trying to figure the genesis of this problem out, I think it all started with bonfires.  When winds would blow limbs out of the trees, I would stack up a big burn pile.  The pile would continue to grow, and when it got HUGE, especially in the winter, I would light it up and we'd sit around it and enjoy its warmth.  The fires were so big, one time the neighbors called the fire department thinking that our barn was on fire!

I love sitting around a fire, staring into the coals, but the fires killed the grass, exposing the dirt.  The chickens scratched holes in the exposed dirt to take their dust baths.  When tiny grasses started to grow, they dried up quickly in the heat and chickens plucked out the grasses to eat.  The situation went from bad to worse.  I had to change this!

A barren wasteland

We have cows, goats and chickens all grazing on 3 acres.  Soil health aside, this barren wasteland needs to have grass growing on it to feed all the hungry barnyard critters.  I stopped burning the big bonfires and then planted sprigs of bermuda grass in the dirt taken from cuttings.  Our chicken population, due to the minks, was cut in half, taking pressure off of the barren area and allowing the grass to take root and grow.  Moreover, and I can't quite explain it, but for some reason the spring after a very hard freeze, the grass started coming back - first gradually and then quickly.

I took a photo of the same area yesterday.  Although there is still work to be done in bringing this area back to its former glory, a good start has been made.  Grass almost completely covers the old desert-like area.  The animals and the humans are happy with the progress.  Imagine how it would look if we hadn't been in a drought!

A return of our grass pasture

The grassland now gives additional grazing capacity to our animals.  The roots hold the soil together, reducing erosion.  The grass keeps the soil cooler, and gives bugs and worms a place to hide and do their work.  As organic matter decomposes, the soil and its microorganisms thrive, doing their job.  We'll continue to do our part to rehabilitate the area that I negatively affected by unwise choices.  More work to do, but I like before/after photos that show evidence of good stewardship of the land.

Bottling the Summer 2026 Honey Harvest

It was high time we get the honey out of the five gallon buckets and into jars as we're out of the 2025 summer and fall crop of honey.  The summer 2026 crop yielded 17.8 gallons of honey that we've stored in 5 gallon buckets.  We dehumidified it down to 18.5% moisture and now its ready to bottle.  We sterilized all the jars and arranged the empty jars on the island along with lids and began pouring.  You can click the arrow below to watch the video of the smooth, sweet honey coming out of the honey gate and into the jars.

We bottled the honey in 3 separate batches.  I liked the red tinge of the honey in this photo as the morning sun is shining in through the kitchen window.

As we are bottling and going from jar to jar, sometimes honey gets on the side of the jars so they must be wiped down with a dishrag with warm, soapy water on it.  No one likes getting a sticky jar of honey.  We found an online label service called VistaPrint a couple of years ago and designed some labels that we affix to all the jar lids.

Here is an up close photo of the labels that we put on each jar of honey.

In all we got 152 jars of honey ready to sell.  Last year our bees yielded 170 jars.  We attribute the lower production to a big rain event we got right smack dab in the middle of the "flow" when the Chinese Tallow trees were flowering.  This really messed things up, but we're not complaining.  In fact, if we sell all of our honey, this year (our third year as beekeepers) will be the year we get out of the red and into the black.  Beekeeping is an expensive hobby!

Last year's crop crystallized during the winter months.  This year we hope to mitigate that by storing all of our honey in our new "hot box" that was given to us by someone going out of the honey-selling business.  It's an old refrigerator fitted with a couple of light bulbs and a thermostat that helps keep the honey at a temperature high enough that it never crystallizes and low enough that the beneficial enzymes in the raw honey are not damaged.

We've already sold 36 jars and have a stockpile of honey inventory for our customers.  We're mostly on the honor-system where our loyal customers come and get jars of honey out of the garage and leave money in the box to pay for it.  We'll likely harvest honey again this fall.  The fall crop is a fraction of the summer crop.  We like to leave some honey for the bees to eat over the winter though.  It is the bees' honey, after-all.  We erected our Honey for Sale sign by the road.  We'll leave it up until we run out.

The summer 2026 honey crop is all done!

The Masked Bandit

A couple of month's ago, I re-read "Where the Red Fern Grows," a great novel about 10 year old Billy Colman and his two coon dogs, Old Dan and Little Ann.  I tell you, if you don't get choked up reading that book, you have ice water running in your veins.  Billy loves his dogs and his dogs love him.  They all love treeing coons, too.

I have a lot of bad experiences with raccoons.  They are a very smart, formidable foe.  Back when I was crawfishing for a living, they cost me lots of money.  At night they would forage through my ponds, eating crawfish out of my traps - crawfish that I could have otherwise sold.  To add insult to injury, they would turn over traps.  Being unable to see the traps, I would then run over with my boat, flattening them out at a cost of $8.50 per trap.  In the early mornings, I would walk through a patch of woods that bordered my crawfish ponds.  The coons, with bellies full of crawfish, would sleep in the crooks of trees.  I would see them and shoot them out of the treetops and they would plummet to the ground with a loud thud.  They gave me fits.

They also, I've learned, will kill your chickens.  This afternoon late, I walked to the henhouse to collect eggs.  The girls' laying has diminished.  Many are broody and the rest are just hot and tired.  I picked up 8 eggs today.  When I came out of the henhouse with my basket, I heard a rustling noise in the grass in the woods adjacent to our property.  It was a juvenile raccoon trying to get in through the fence.  I scared the rascal.

I'm unlike Billy Colman in that I don't have two redbone coonhounds.  I opened up the back gate running after the coon.  The coon did what coons do - he scampered up a tree and watched me.  Can you see him in the 'V' in the tree right in the very center of the photo below?

I ran as quick as I could to get my 12 gauge shotgun and ran back.  Without dogs like Old Dan and Little Ann at the bottom of the tree, I was worried the masked bandit might have climbed down and escaped.  But no - he was still up in the crook of the tree looking down at me.  Waiting, I'm sure, for me to leave so that he could have a nice chicken dinner.

The rascal will not be eating chicken dinner tonight, or any night in the future.  I took aim, pulled the trigger - BOOM!, and the raccoon fell to the forest floor with a resounding thud.

Tricia said he was cute and maybe she's right, but this cute fellow is a chicken eater, and I can't abide with that type of neighbor.  I have to think that Billy Colman, Old Dan and Little Ann would agree.

The Predator Becomes the Prey

A while back we lamented the fact that we lost 39 hens to mink.  Those critters savagely slaughtered our egg layers.  It was only after I killed some squirrels and baited the traps with their blood and guts that I was able to catch the male and female in the trap.  They were summarily executed by firing squad.  We haven't had an issue with mink since that day.  I still drive around and see mink that have been killed while crossing the road.  Perhaps I shouldn't, but every time I see a mink carcass on the road, I do a fist pump and break in to a grin.  Mink are vicious killers and they get no sympathy from me.

This morning Tricia hollered, "Kyle, there's a mink on our back porch."  I'm mostly deaf, so I had to confirm what I thought I heard.  Yes, I heard her correctly.  We do have wild creatures like possums and coons and armadillos that will venture near the house, but never mink.  I ran to the gun shelf, pulled down the 12 gauge and loaded it with shells.  I ran out to the back patio and sure enough, that rascal was between the french doors and the back of the fireplace.

I couldn't hardly shoot him there - I'd break the windows and splinter the wood.  That little devil looked at me and bared his teeth.  I bared mine back.  Ginger, our cat, was around and I didn't want her in the crossfire.  The mink made a break for it around the back side of the house, but I had a bead on that beady-eyed creature.  BOOM!  Or you might say, "Pop, goes the weasel."  

Look at the teeth on this varmint!  He can tear some chicken up.  I quickly ran back to the pasture and around the henhouse to see if he had killed any of our chickens, but I found no dead or injured birds.  I put my foot in the photo below for perspective, so that you can see the size of this animal.

What would cause him to come up to the house?  Was he sick?  Rabid?  Did he just have a death wish?  We'll never know, but I'm happy Tricia happened to see him and called me so that I could take care of business.  That's one less mink to kill our chickens.

The Indians, I read in history, helped the pilgrims by teaching them to bury a fish underneath corn seeds to provide slow release fertilizer.  I grabbed a shovel and buried the mink in the garden, sort of next to the goat.  We'll see if mink works as good as fish as a garden fertilizer.

Boot Hill

This morning walking out to the barn at 6 AM something caught my eye by the firewood stacked up.  I thought it was a dead chicken.  How could that have happened?  All our hens are locked up in the henhouse at night.  The sun hadn't risen yet, and it was still sort of dark, so I walked over to check out the situation.

There was a dead animal, alright, but it wasn't a chicken.  It was Spotty.  One of our little bucklings.  Spotty has been in poor health for a while.  The goats struggle mightily with parasites, and Spotty seemed the most susceptible.  For the last month, we've been doctoring on him.  We alternated treating him with Valbazen, Safeguard, and Ivermectin.  We gave him Vitamin C and copper boluses and other treatments.  Initially they seemed to work and then a day later, we'd find him regressing again.

Popcorn is our buck that handles all the ladies of the herd.  We had picked Spotty to be Popcorn's heir apparent, primarily because of his genetics.  This little dude was spotted from head to toe - a really remarkable looking little creature.  Well, our plans for Spotty aren't going to materialize.  Popcorn will have to keep on going.  There is another baby buckling, but he's almost solid black with a few random spots here and there.

Before the sun got overhead in the sky, I told Tricia that I was going to lay Spotty to rest.  I took Spotty's collar off of his neck and carried him into the garden.  It hasn't rained here in a month of Mondays, so the ground was hard as granite.  My shovel went down about six inches until it hit a clay hardpan.  I went back to the garage and got the mattock and used that to dig a deeper hole.

When I got it deep enough, I positioned poor Spotty in the bottom of the hole.  Since rigor mortis hadn't fully set in yet, it was easier to get him to fit in the hole.  Then I began back-filling the hole with all the dirt and then woodchips and mulch.

Boot Hill for Goats

When I was done, you could hardly tell where Spotty lies in his unmarked grave in the garden between the green onions and the sweet potatoes.  Can you spot the small rise in the center of the photo above?  Sad?  Yes, but if you raise animals, you've got to be prepared for this type thing and get used to loss.  We gave it our best shot.  It just wasn't meant to be.  And who's to say that Popcorn doesn't have a recessive "spotty" gene that will come out next kidding season.

A Quick Peek at the Fall Starts

Tonight I took a couple of photos of the fall starts that I'll be transplanting into the garden at some point in early to mid September.  I want to let the temperatures at least get into the lower 90's versus 100 degrees to give the seedlings a fighting chance.  Here are a couple of trays of tomatoes of various varieties that I planted from seed in early August:

I like to plant a number of different varieties.  Here's what we are planting this fall:  Black Krim, Pink Brandywine, Cherokee Purple, Big Rainbow, Campari, Creole, and Chadwick Cherry.  In the past several years, I've actually had a better fall crop of tomatoes that in the spring.  I attribute that to less bug and disease pressure.  It's also due to the fact that it is more comfortable to garden in the cooler temperatures!

These are horrible photos, I know, but I took them at night.  They are a lot of cole crops that I seeded that are just coming up: Broccoli, Cauliflower, Brussels Sprouts, Cauliflower, Romanesco, and Cabbage.

They are long and leggy.  The problem is, it is so hot outside, if I put the trays in the direct sun, the seedlings will be dead within the hour.  Putting them in indirect sun helps, but makes them very leggy.  Hopefully, we'll get some cooler weather in the next couple or three weeks that could give us a break.

"You Don't Make a Cup, You Build a Pot"

We don't watch a lot of TV at all, but we have a free TV channel called Pluto, and they have all the Gunsmoke episodes on, and we went back to the very first one where the series was opened with John Wayne recommending it.  It turned out to be a good endorsement as Gunsmoke ran for 20 seasons!  So most nights after chores, we sit down and watch an episode.  It runs for about 26 minutes, but to finish up all 20 seasons, it'll take us until 2030, I suppose.  We enjoy watching Gunsmoke.  The only bad thing is the commercials that Pluto requires you watch.  (We don't watch.  We mute them all.)  All of them are pharmaceutical commercials, and it drives me nuts.

Watching Gunsmoke puts me in a time machine and transports me back to around 1976 sitting in my Grandma and Grandpa's house.  We're in the den that was paneled in knotty pine paneling and we're watching Gunsmoke.  My grandma would bring us bowls of Ozark Black Walnut ice cream - my grandpa's favorite, and we'd watch Marshal Matt Dillon save the day.  He put many a gunfighter on Boot Hill.  I didn't realize it at the time, but there was a budding romance between Matt and Kitty that never quite materialized.  Darn it!

The topic today is coffee.  I'll pull in why Gunsmoke is involved in just a skinny minute.  We enjoy coffee.  We'll put a pot on in the morning and another one after lunch.  We aren't coffee snobs with a fancy expensive coffee maker.  We use a simple Mr. Coffee drip pot.  However, when we get some good fresh roasted beans, we'll grind them coarsely and use a french press.  Talk about a good cup of coffee!

For the morning pot, we'll put three rounded tablespoons of coffee and make a pot.  In the afternoon, (you might consider us uncivilized savages), we put another two tablespoons of coffee on top of the morning grounds and make another pot for after lunch.  I thought that we were the only people that do this, but as it turns out, Chester from Gunsmoke does it too.  

Chester Goode famously said on Gunsmoke, "Shoot, you don't make a cup, you build a pot. You don't really get a good pot until you've been usin' it about a week. Then it's coffee!"   

Now, I don't know if we'll stretch it that far!! Ha Ha!!  We have an old fashioned drip coffee pot, and I think we're going to make a pot in this old family heirloom and enjoy a cup like Chester and Marshal Dillon and Doc Adams might have sipped right there in Dodge City!

Although Chester might have been run out of modern hipster coffee joints, he was a true connoisseur of coffee.  Here is an excerpt of Chester's doctoral thesis on the art of making coffee.  Click on the arrow in the middle of the image below and enjoy!:

It's time for me to get the heck out of Dodge!  Until next time...

What We Do With Drawn Comb For The Spring

After we've pulled the capped frames from the hives and upcapped them, put them in the extractor to spin all the honey out, we put the "wet" frames out by the hives and let the bees clean them up.  They'll bring any honey we didn't get back to the hives to eat over the winter or put it in frames and cap it and we'll get it back in the fall when we harvest fall honey.  The "cleaned-up" frames still need to be dealt with though.

We want to make sure there are no eggs or larvae from wax moths or other bugs on the frame that will hatch and wreak havoc on the comb that the honeybees have worked so hard to draw out.  The reason why is that we'll put these frames back on the boxes this spring.  The frames get recycled and reused, you might say.  We want to make things easy on the bees.  If the bees don't have to draw out all the comb making wax to hold the nectar/honey, they'll use that energy to make honey.  That's what we want!  Efficiency.  Making the most of your resources.  Working smarter - not harder.

The way we make sure there are no eggs from wax moths or any small hive beetles or other creatures on the frames hiding in the comb is we stack the frames in the freezer for three days.  Three days below freezing will kill any opportunistic pests that may be hiding on the frames.  Here they are in the deep freeze.  It can only hold 10 frames at a time, so it takes a week or so to cycle through the frames.

Once out of the freezer, I put the frames back in the boxes and stack them criss-cross to dry out.  We'll leave them for a couple of days like this in our utility room.  We're quickly running out of space.  Had we known we'd be doing what we're doing (beekeeping, milking, etc.), we would have designed our home differently!  We might be in the market for a shed in the future.

Once we've ensured they are fully dry, we very gently put them in contractor bags.  We don't want to damage the drawn out comb, so the bees won't have to do a lot of repair.  In the spring, they'll clean out the cells and begin filling them with nectar.  The contractor bags are filled and we seal them up very tightly so that nothing can get in there.  Then we stack them in the garage out of the way.

They'll sit there safe and sound until the spring when the bees need additional honey supers.  At that point we'll pull these frames out, load them in honey supers and put them on top of each of the hives.  That's what a super is: a box of frames that sits on top (super) of the brood boxes separated by a queen excluder so that your honey supers contain exclusively honey - no brood.  Beekeeping is work, but it's rewarding and something that you always learn something new or a better way to do things.  Hopefully these frames will make it through the fall and winter and the bees will do their thing this spring and share their delicious, sweet honey with us!

Heat Stress in our Dairy Cows

Rosie cooling her heels

Summer time in the south!  It's hot.  Or as they say in Cajun French, "C'est chaud!"  It's hot for humans, but for cows?  Our poor Jersey cows are struggling mightily.  They just aren't built for this southern climate and don't deal with the heat well.  They get up early and slowly walk out to the pasture, battling mosquitoes, deer flies and horse flies.  They eat in the shade cast by the live oak trees against the rising sun in the east.  As the sun rises and the shade disappears, the cows slowly walk back and sit beneath the shade all day long until the process repeats but from the western side.

Here's the problem.  They are eating less and it puts them in stress.  Humans sweat and enjoy the evaporative cooling.  Jersey cows, on the other hand, do sweat, but much less than humans.  How do they handle the heat and cooling themselves?  Poorly.  They pant.  Their tongues hang out.  They drink lots of water.  Especially poor LuLu.  She's in milk since calving Betsy and that puts an additional load on her body.  We were splitting the milk with the calf by separating them allowing Betsy to get the milk all day and then after separating them in the evening, we milk first thing in the morning for us.  Well, we've stopped that temporarily until temperatures drop off.  It's been around 100 degrees for a number of days now.

We're doing a couple of things to assist LuLu.  First, in the early morning and late afternoon, we spray her down with a water hose.  She's taken a liking to this and eagerly walks to the spot by the hose in anticipation of the bath.  We're also making a drench with 1 cup of molasses, 1/3 cup of apple cider vinegar and 2 tablespoons epsom salt.  We mix this up and give her three 50cc drenches in a drench gun in the morning and the evening to give her an electrolyte boost.  Since she's not out eating as much due to the excessive heat, I'm picking sweet potato vines from the garden to supplement her minimal grass intake.  She loves sweet potato vines.  

I noticed Rosie (in the photo at the top of this blog post) standing in a puddle of water caused by the float valve not working properly because the water trough isn't level.  The water trickled over and caused a mud puddle before I caught it and shut the valve off.  Some say that cows will stand in the water to cool off their hooves and dissipate heat.  If that is beneficial short term, great!  It's generally not a good idea to have mud puddles as they are vectors for parasites and standing in water softens the hooves, making them susceptible to hoof rot and other foot ailments.  In this heat, however, that puddle will evaporate quickly and won't be a long term problem.

Tomorrow looks like we'll have a high of 97 degrees, but the days following look to have reduced temperatures down to a 'balmy' average of 94 degrees.  Not a huge drop but somewhat of a respite.  Hang in there, LuLu.  Cooler weather is coming.  In the meantime, we're doing everything we can to help her (and us) to cool off!

Shall We Gather at the River?

On Friday morning we arrived in Mittie, Louisiana for a day of family fun.  Right off LA Highway 26 is the Ouiska Chitto River.  As rivers go around here, the water is clear and cool as it is spring-fed.  The beaches along the shore are white-sand - what you see on Florida beaches.  We like to rent canoes and enjoy a leisurely paddle down the 8.8 mile river between the Hwy 26 concrete bridge and Carpenter's bridge.

Russ and Benjamin arrived at our house at around 9 AM and we loaded the ice chest with pizza and cut up cucumbers, cantaloupe, and oranges.  We packed along plenty of drinking water and some homemade peanut butter cookies.  We arrived at the canoe rental place around 10 AM.  Canoes rent for $45 per canoe.  They drop you off and pick you up.  It takes around 4 hours to paddle to the pickup, but we take a little longer as we normally stop off on sandbars to swim and snack.

About to cast off at the drop-off point under the Hwy 26 bridge

And we're off.  Tricia and I in the lead canoe and Russ and Benjamin following.

Water is a little low, but we never had to get out and carry the canoe like last time

In no time, the guys passed us up.  Since school started on Friday, we were the ONLY folks on the river.  I kid you not.  It was quiet and peaceful.  We didn't see another soul for 5 hours until we got to the end.

The "boys in the boat" overtook us

We kept a sharp eye out for sandbars in the shade.  We'd pull our canoes up and swim, relax and have good conversations with one another.

Russ on the log

Russ brought two pizzas that we had packed in zip loc bags.  We pulled up and ate them up.  The favorite was a Garlic Parmesan Spinach and Chicken pizza.  There was a gentle current in the river, and we would wade out and enjoy the cool water on a hot day.  Fortunately, we had sun screen on and escaped without sunburns.

Time for lunch

And we're off again.  I was nice enjoying the stillness - so peaceful and the scenery was beautiful.

There are lots of logs in the Ouiska Chitto.  The guy that dropped us off told me that from time to time, they have to ride the 8.8 miles in a boat with a chainsaw to keep the river passable.  After big rains, it takes a trackhoe to clean out the debris.  

Rolling on the river

The Ouiska Chitto is bordered by cypress trees and other big trees.  There's always shade to get under.

Looking Back when we reached the end

At last we reached Carpenter's Bridge.  This bridge used to be wooden and rickety.  They built a new concrete bridge a couple of years ago.

Russ, Benjamin, and Tricia

We called T&J Canoe Rentals to come pick us up and took more photos as we waited.

Tricia, Benjamin, and Russ

I can't close out this blog post without giving thanks to God for Benjamin.  It hasn't been that long since his accident.  He has two rods in each of his legs and rods in his back from when he fell and broke both legs and his back.  He sat in that canoe for hours, paddling with no pain.  All Glory to God!

Kyle, Benjamin & Russ

They'll close for the season some time in September.  Tricia has some friends coming in and she's thinking about doing this again with them.  If T&J is closed by then, we do have a 3-seater canoe of our own.  This is such a nice thing to do and only 30 minutes away from home.  We highly recommend canoeing the Ouiska Chitto!

It's Muscadine Time

While walking down our driveway to check the mail, Tricia and I noticed the skins from many grapes on the blacktop.  I immediately thought that the many birds in our yard (blue jays, cardinals, mockingbirds) had been eating our muscadines!  But upon closer inspection of the grape skins on the road, I realized that they were not muscadines but our neighbor's grapes that are on a trellis near our driveway.  Those birds have been plucking the grapes off their vines, then flying over and sitting in the limbs of our live oak trees while they eat.

Observing that reminded me that I needed to check on our muscadines.  The week prior when I inspected them, they were beginning to turn purple.  Close, but not ripe.  On the way back from the mailbox, we passed by the muscadine vine and looked in.  Some are now ready to pick.  Not all of them, but we'd better pick the ripe ones before the birds get them!

I began to prune back the branches with no fruit on them allowing us access to to the interior of the vine to pick all the purple fruit.  We had to keep a sharp eye for wasp nests in the vines.  Those things love to build their nests in there and then fly out to sting you if you don't kill them first.  Fortunately no wasps this time.  

As we pick, sometimes unripe ones come off with the ripe ones.

Tricia ate a few as she picked them.  Muscadines have 2 or 3 seeds in each one so there's a lot of spitting when eating these.  They are juicy and sweet.  Our first picking netted a good bit in a colander.

We'll snack on these and then head out in a few days for another muscadine picking session.

From the Field to the Loft

On Friday afternoon, I thought of one of Aesop's fables entitled the Ant and the Grasshopper that I used to read as a boy.  It taught of the virtues of hard work and expending effort now to plan for needs in the future.  I think that story is a good one.  The reason I was thinking of that fable was our task for the afternoon - picking up hay!

Right now, despite the heat and lack of rainfall, the cows and goats still have grass to eat.  That could quickly change if we don't get rain soon.  As insurance, I stopped mowing a portion of the yard so we will have some extra grass if the pasture peters out.  Putting in hard work now and planning now for the winter when there is no grass is always the smart play.

We have purchase hay from the same family down the road for a decade and a half now, and I got a call from out neighbor down the road that they'd be baling hay.  If we show up and pick up bales behind the baler, the price per bale is $8. If we pick it up from their barn after they collected it, the price is $9 per bale.  I told her we'd be picking up behind the baler.  They asked if we could be there shortly after lunch.

I checked the air in the tires of the old trailer.  I was doing the math on it, and I think my grandpa bought that thing in 1976, so it's 50 years old!  I also killed a couple of big wasp nests inside the trailer with some gas.  We hooked up the truck and drove a mile and a half down the road.  We drove down the long driveway and directly into the pasture.  They were busy baling.  The American Flag on the back of the baler was a nice touch.  God Bless America!

The hay had been cut and fluffed the previous day and today the baler was working, leaving square bales lying all over the field.

Tricia is the driver.  Her job description is to drive between the rows of hay and stop when the bales are lined up with the back of the trailer.

The rows are pretty close together so she has to be watchful.

When she stops, my job is to lift the bales into the trailer, stacking them up high and tight.  As I lift each bale I holler the current count of bales and Tricia repeats, so we keep accurate count.

It didn't take long before the trailer was full.  Then we started loading up the truck.  When we had 75 bales in, we called it a day.  The old truck had quite a load and I didn't want to risk breaking the springs.

We paid our neighbors (75 bales @ $8 per bale = $600) and visited with them for a bit.  We started off buying the hay from the Grandpa long ago.  He's passed away and now the daughter and grandson run the operation.  I told Danielle that her Daddy would be proud of them, keeping the family tradition going.  When we pulled out, the center part of the field was wide open.  It once was filled with square bales.  Now they're loaded up and heading a mile and a half east where we'll unload them.

That was hot, hard work, but the fun isn't done yet.  Our young men, Russ and Benjamin, volunteered to help us get the bales stored away in the hayloft in the barn.  This is old-fashioned, manual work!  We have a pulley and a rope on a 4x4.  The rope has a bungee cord on it.  Tricia and Russ unload the hay bales from the truck and trailer and hook them to the bungee cord.

Benjamin and I are up in the loft.  Benjamin pulls the hay up by tugging on the rope.  Each bale weighs around 50 pounds.  I guess I'll stop right here and tell you how good God is.  You are looking at a miracle.  Two years ago Benjamin broke his back and both bones in both legs.  He has titanium rods in both legs and in his back.  Yet here he is, doing work that lots of people can't do.  Praise God from Whom all blessings flow!!

As he pulls each bale up, I unhook it from the bungee cord and slide it down and stack it in the loft.  We both must be very careful to not bang our heads (it always happens!) on the rafters and to not fall through the hole in the floor where the ladder leads up.  That would be tragic.  I need to build a trap door.

We counted the bales, reminding each other when 25% of the bales were in the barn and so on and so forth.  When we finished up, we drank cold water and cooled off.  It always feels good to have this behind us.

The hay is in the barn!  There is something to be said about the satisfaction you get in having family together, working toward a common goal with good teamwork and completing the job.  The hay will sit here until December probably before we start feeding hay to the animals.  The ant works all summer in the fields gathering food for the winter months.  The grasshopper, on the other hand, sings and fiddles and dances all summer and makes fun of the ant for working.  But winter is coming.  We remind ourselves that we want to be like the ant and not the grasshopper.

Once the job is done, the ant also has the satisfaction of seeing a beautiful view looking out the opened doors of the hayloft at the top of the barn.

If the Good Lord is willing, we'll be doing the same thing next year at this same time.