A Successful Experiment

I remember reading about 10 years ago how Monsanto was suing small farmers to protect its patents on genetically modified seed.  No seed saving allowed.  That was their property.  I'm not big on genetic modification.  Call me old school.  That's one of the reasons why we plant open pollinated, non-hybrid heirloom seeds.  Each year we're able to save our own seeds.  Some seeds require different processes or techniques for saving the seed.  

Over the years we've saved many different seeds and had great success.  Off-hand, we've saved the following seeds: carrots, lettuce, cowpeas, squash, tomatoes, kale, spinach, dill, parsley, peppers, okra, etc.  Funny thing is, we've never saved the simplest one.  The seed we all learned to grow in Kindergarten by planting these in some dirt in a Dixie cup.  Yep, green beans!  This year we aimed to do that.  We showed in an earlier post how we saved three varieties of snap beans: Contender, Italian Roma and Purple Teepee beans.

In the midst of the drought, we aimed to test germination of the saved seed.  Let's see what happened.  

Well, you know if you are seeing blooms, it's all good.  The purple bloom above is from the purple teepee beans.  The bloom below is from the Contender beans, or it could be the Italian Roma beans now that I think of it.  You can see the tiny bean pods developing.

Nearly every bean germinated, so I would say the experiment was a success.

We're already harvesting a few.  In the basket below, the Purple Teepee beans are at the top (of course!), the Contenders are to the right and the Italian Romas (my favorites) are to the left.

Our goal each year is to have fresh picked green beans for Thanksgiving Dinner.  Looks like this year we've achieved our goal.  With our experiment being a success, I now know that I have enough seed saved so that I don't need to purchase green bean seeds for this spring.  The only hard part in saving seed is having the discipline to save your seed and not eat it all!

Fall Spuds: The Good and the Bad

Earlier this fall, IN THIS POST we introduced an experiment we were trying for the first time: Fall potatoes in pots.  We'd never done this before as we normally plant them in the ground.  This year, I figured, due to lack of space in the garden, we would plant in pots.  This would enable us to move the pots in the event of an early frost.  We learned that lesson from an early freeze years before in which we lost our crop before they were ready.  

We harvested all of our potatoes this past week.  We'll show you the results today.  If you click the link above, you'll note that we planted 12 potatoes that we had stored successfully from the spring crop.  Those 12 potatoes were planted in 12 landscape pots under rich mulch that had composted down from 3 year old wood chip mulch.  I incorporated some composted chicken litter from the hen house for fertilizer.

Here is one of the plants we harvested.  You'll notice a brown material right at the base of the plant.  Those are coffee grounds.  I'll tell you a little story about that.  We read somewhere a natural remedy for fire ants is to spread some used coffee grounds.  The grounds provide compost as well as repel fire ants.  Or so they say.  This did NOT work in our Potato Pots.  It may have even caffeinated them, making them more aggressive in reproduction and growth. 

Back to the potato harvest.  I simply turned the pots over in a wagon to capture the mulch and then sifted through the mulch to pull out the potatoes.  (This resulted in being bit by the ants numerous times.)  Here are a few of the potatoes:

They were nice looking, new potatoes and we'll eat them up.  The photo below shows you the extensive fire any colony that was in the bottom of the pot.  The fire ants are always looking for high ground.  In times of rain and wet soil, the highest ground proved to be the soil in our Potato Pots.  We'll have to think this through better next time.

Here are a few more of the potatoes that we harvested as they are shown stored on our drying wagon.  This allows air flow to get around them and it is shady and cool, perfect conditions to store potatoes.

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I wish I would have weighed or counted the potatoes, but I forgot.  I was hoping for a better yield.  Oh, we definitely got more than the 12 potatoes that we planted, but if I had to guess, I'd say we got 36 nice sized potatoes and a bunch more small ones.  If I would have waited a couple more weeks, the small ones you see may have grown to golf-ball sized potatoes, but the ant infestation made me wonder if there were even going to be any potatoes.  In hindsight, I should have waited until the plants died or frost killed them.  In summary, a disappointing harvest, but we'll do it again next fall.  I have another nine months or so to learn about killing fire ants without pesticides.  It's probably not a good idea to eat potatoes laced with Amdro or Spectracide.  We've tried boiling water as an organic fire ant mound treatment option.  That works, but it would also kill the potato plants.

Experimenting With Celery

For several years, I tried to plant celery seed to grow our own celery.  We like celery.  It is part of the holy trinity of Cajun cooking (onion, bell pepper, and celery) that serves as the base for many dishes we enjoy.  We grow onions, and we grow bell pepper.  I've never been able to grow celery from seed, despite trying several times.  It's not due to our locale, because we have friends that live 30 minutes away from us that can grow it just fine.  They even dug some plants up for us and gave them to us.  I planted them.  They promptly died.  

So we've resorted to buying it from the store.  My wife happened to see that you can grow celery from what's left over from your store bought celery.  We decided to give it a try.  She cut the celery we were going to eat off the stalk, leaving about 3 inches from the bottom.  Then she used a knife to barely cut off the bottom where the roots were.  She placed the celery, root side down, in a bowl of water and placed on the window sill.

In just a couple of days, fresh, new, green growth popped up out of the old celery scraps!  Over the next few days, fresh root growth appeared on the bottom of the celery in the water.  This thing wanted to live!

We prepared a nice spot in our herb garden, right between the ginger and parsley and oregano plants and planted it and watered it in.

Each day we check on it and keep it well-watered since it is so dry right now.  I moved some mulch around the base of the celery plant to keep the soil moist.  Celery loves cooler weather, so hopefully this one will flourish.  Tricia's already gotten another one sprouting on the window sill.  We'll see what happens.  Maybe, even though I never had success growing celery from seed, we will see success growing celery from the grocery store.  We'll keep you posted as the experiment progresses.

Putting Some Stuff in the Ground in August

We march forward toward September and the gradual reduction in temperature and humidity that will be welcomed with rejoicing by yours truly.  The okra continues to produce in abundant fashion.  As I write this, Tricia is 'cooking some okra and onions down' that she'll freeze and we'll use in gumbos throughout the winter months.  Cucumbers, believe it or not, have had a rebound and are producing once again.  

Speaking of cucumbers, I've got to tip my hat to an elderly gentleman who dropped by the house this spring and gave me some cucumber seeds.  They were of the Marketmore Heirloom variety, and I've got to report that they were the stars of the show, producing steadily throughout the hottest of months when my Boston Pickling and Suyo Long varieties faltered.

Anyhow, I planted a few seeds in some seed pots to get the fall garden underway.  Here are some zucchini and yellow crookneck squash:

And here are some spaghetti squash.

In a little experiment, I planted 12 Boston Pickling Cucumber seeds from some seeds I had saved back in 2016.  What do you know?  All 12 sprouted.  We achieved a 100% germination rate on some seeds we saved 6 years ago.  Not too shabby.

Having that all planted, I got out my Vegetable Planting Guide to see what else I could get my hands dirty with.  Well, it told me that it is time to plant Irish Potatoes.  Right now.

Our feed store does not sell seed potatoes for fall crops.  What we must do is save seed potatoes from our spring crop.  I dug through the bin of potatoes and picked out a dozen small red potatoes (Lasoda variety).  All of the potatoes from the spring are holding up good, stored in the dark in a well-ventilated hallway.

You can see that most of them have (at least one) nice eye growing on them.  That gives me optimism that we'll have spuds this fall.  It is always a risk, right?  The choice is, I could eat these 12 potatoes and really enjoy them.  Or, I could put them in the dirt and see if I could multiply a dozen potatoes four or fivefold?

I'm taking a chance.  I won't put them in the cooking pot.  I'll put them in the planting pot.  I'm trying an experiment this year.  Instead of putting them in the ground, we will try our hand at growing them in pots.  The area where I normally plant them is already populated with purple hull peas and blackeyed peas that are about to put on pods.  No room for potatoes out there.

I filled 12 nice sized landscape pots with the rich compost made from the rotted wood chips in our mulch pile.  It's black and moist and teeming with earthworms - a good medium to grow potatoes in.  Once the potatoes are up, I'll dose 'em up with some composted chicken litter.  Another plus is that, if we get an early freeze like the one that killed my potatoes a couple years ago, I can pick up the pots and bring them in the garage and save the spuds. 

Here are the potatoes planted before I put 3 1/2 to 4 inches fresh compost on top.  I'll be watching over the next several days to see when they sprout.

We have rain for the next 5 or 6 days forecast, but once that is past, I'll look to what else I can put in the ground.  I'm thinking it's time for a couple rows of snap beans.  Happy Gardening Fall Gardeners!

A Brief Work Excursion AND Planting More Protein

I was out of pocket for a few days.  Russ, our oldest son, looked after the animals, fed them, gathered eggs and everything else that needs to be done around the homestead.  Tricia and I journeyed out to Baton Rouge for a couple of days for a work conference.  The Company put us up in a hotel that overlooked the Mississippi River.  We watched tug boats push long lines of barges stacked back to back up and down the river.

I attended meetings, but there was some fun intermixed and good eating, of course.  One adventure was a bus trip to TopGolf.  Let me be clear - I am not a golfer.  Back in the 80's, I went golfing for the first time in my life.  I teed off and the ball sliced or hooked or whatever you call it.  I knew that you needed to holler something, so I yelled, "Fore!"  A gentleman on the next green got out of his golf cart, looked my way and yelled, "What?"  Just at that time, my golf ball hit him square in the forehead.  A lump immediately grew on his head like in the cartoons.  He was very angry.  I realized that golf was a sport that required a lot of practice AND that I was dangerous at this thing.  Someone could get seriously injured.  I have not been on a golf course since then.

TopGolf is different.  It is more like bowling than golf.  A ball comes out, you hit it and you get points if you land the ball in lit up circles.  There is some sort of computer tracking of the ball.  It reads your score on a computer screen.  Food is served and everyone has a nice time.  Here is Tricia teeing off.

There are hundreds of bays and hundreds of people playing.  We were on the third floor.  The smile on my face shows my relief in that I didn't hit anyone with an errant ball.

While a golf club is a strange implement in our hands, a garden hoe and rake is not.  Last week once the rains came through, I got busy and planted two more 45 foot rows of Ozark Razorback Peas and Blackeyed Peas.  With threats of food shortages and inflation, I figured we'd get some more protein planted.  Rice and Peas with a little smoked tasso for flavor is a nutritious, quick, hearty, tasty meal.  

This planting was an experiment of sorts.  I was checking the germination in some OLD seed I had saved many years ago.  Both of the containers of saved seed were labeled with the name of the seed (Ozark Razorback and Blackeye - both Southern cowpeas).  They were also labelled with the year I saved them.  2012!!!  You read that right.  I saved them ten years ago.  Counting on diminished germination, I planted them one inch apart rather than the normal four inch spacing.  Look what happened:

The germination on the decade-old seed was pretty doggone good!  There are a few gaps, but they'll fill in.  Not too shabby.  Once the peas were up three inches or so, I pulled the mulch around the plants to discourage weed growth and preserve soil moisture.

We're still picking purple hull peas, ozark razorback peas, and blackeyed peas from the current garden.  When those play out, these will be ready for harvest.  It will soon be time to start planting the fall crop.  I'm looking forward to that!

Planning the Fall Garden

We are in the midst of a heat wave right now.  Temps are in the upper 90's.  It seems summer is clawing and scratching and trying to hang on for as long as it can, not wanting to give up without a fight.  At work our Safety Guy sent out the following email this morning:

"We've been spared the excitement of Hurricane Dorian as you all know but the high pressure system that is protecting us brings in a new challenge: increased temperatures.
Over the rest of the week, the high temps are forecast to be in the upper 90s to triple digits. Add in the humidity and we are looking at 112-115 adjusted temperatures.
As bad as this is, our folks have now been operating in the heat for 4 months now. As we talk about in our meetings, our bodies and brains are tired due to prolonged heat stress.
Take extra precautions this week with our people. Make sure our drivers are reminded to hydrate and make sure personnel in our warehouse are drinking lots of water.
Ensure we have adequate supplies of water and ice. It isn't a bad thing to buy a couple of bags of ice.  Let's put some proactive leadership out and make it through the end of this summer without any incidents.
Contact me if you need anything."

Even though summer is on most everyone's minds, fall is just around the corner.  This weekend, I was looking at my seed inventory for both fall and spring crops and decided to make a small order to fill the holes in my inventory, as well as to try some new crops:

I was looking at my LSU AgCenter Vegetable Planting Guide.  It lists the following dates for planting  certain crops I'll be planting for the fall garden:

Snap Beans                 8/10 - 9/10
Beets                           8/15 - 10/1
Broccoli                      7/15 - 9/1
Cabbage                      7/1 -   9/15
Carrots                        9/1  - 11/1
Cauliflower                 7/1   - 9/1
Swiss Chard               8/15  - 10/30
Garlic                         10/1 - 11/30
Lettuce                        8/15 - 9/30
Sweet Peas                  3/1  - 8/10
Spinach                       10/1 - 2/28

I'll plant a few more items, but those are my mainstays.  I'll be planting most of those in seed pots this week and they'll be transplanted into the garden a little later once they're established.  I have a lot to do in a very short time!  I'm doing things a little differently this year.  First I'll be harvesting sweet potatoes in a few weeks.  The sweet potato vines have taken over the entire garden.  Once I dig those up, I'll have room to plant the seedlings, which by then will be ready to be transplanted into the garden soil.

This year I won't be pulling up rows.  I'll plant the seedlings directly into the garden.  We'll be completely no-till this year.  Once the seedlings are established, I'll mulch around them deeply with wood chips.  So far we have had 12 truck loads of wood chips delivered!  We barely have any room left to put them, but we'll keep getting it and find somewhere to put it.  The wood chips will retain soil moisture and hopefully make weeding the garden a less taxing task.  We like to experiment.  We'll see how it goes and will report our successes and failures with the "Back to Eden" gardening method.

 

Signed, Sealed, (But Not Delivered)

The other day, Tricia was busy mailing a photo to her mom.  She had sealed the envelope when she discovered that she should have enclosed two photos.  But the envelope was already sealed.  What to do?  Well, she could open the envelope, put the second photo in it, and tape it back up, but that would look tacky.

I remembered that I had read a Life Hack type deal that addressed this very item.  It said that you could pop the sealed envelope in the freezer for a couple of hours.  Then after 2 hours, you could take it out and immediately use a letter opener to open the sealed envelope without tearing it.  After doing this, you could put the second photo in and reseal the envelope by licking it!  By doing this, you would never be able to know that the envelope had been tampered with.  It is supposed to be less messy than steaming it.  This is some real spy stuff.  I decided to experiment with it.  Here's our opportunity to be Bond.  James Bond 007.  Let's do this.

We put the sealed envelope in our freezer.

After 1 and a half hours, we took it out and very quickly used a letter opener to unseal the letter.

So far, so good.

The letter popped right open, with minimal effort!

We enclosed the second photograph and licked it to re-seal the envelope.  No tape required.

Ready to be mailed!

How about that!?  James Bond, eat your heart out.  If I was to change anything, next time I would leave the envelope in for 2 hours.  There was one tiny portion that tore just a little bit, but was really unnoticeable unless you were looking for it.  We'll have to remember this little trick.  It saved an envelope, a stamp, and the work of re-addressing the letter.  A life hack, indeed!

Our Fall Tomatoes Experiment

Back on August 22nd, we embarked upon a new experiment for us - planting fall tomatoes.  We plant a lot of tomatoes in the spring.  I try to get them planted as early as possible in the spring, usually planting them from seed during the cold, gray days of January.  I nurture them indoors under grow lights until the lasts frosts have passed.

It is a race to harvest them before the stink bugs and other pests take their toll on the quality of the tomatoes.  Once it heats up, swarms of stink bugs descend upon the tomatoes, stinging the fruit, making them ugly.  We still get a decent crop, but we were affected in a negative way by the very wet spring, very dry summer, and intense bug pressure.

So I wanted to see if we could grow some fall tomatoes.  I'm not talking 'hot house' tomatoes.  I'm talking tomatoes planted outside in the garden in the late summer/fall that will grow and produce a crop before the frost knocks them out. Sounds like a good experiment to undertake!  I planted my tomato seeds indoors on July 16th and then on August 22nd, the tomato plants were transplanted into the garden.  I experienced about a 20% mortality rate on the plants, attributable to some bug or worm that immediately cut the stems of the young plants in half.  The rest kept growing and by October 26th, the indeterminate vines of my heirloom tomatoes were loaded with tomatoes and blooms!

The plants were nice looking and due to the cooler temperatures, there was no competition with stink bugs.  The majority of the fruit was blemish-free, fat, and shiny.  I did pull a caterpillar off of one of the tomatoes that was eating, but that was the only one.  Sometimes in the spring, I'll have birds that like to eat on the tomatoes, but none of that so far this fall.

On November 19th, I harvested the first fruits off of Our Maker's Acres Family Farm's inaugural fall tomato crop. Big, fat beautiful tomatoes!  Overall, I'm pleased with the results so far.  There are many more green tomatoes that are burdening the vines right now.  Even if we catch a frost before they are ripe, I told Tricia we can have some fried green tomatoes.

Tricia cut the first tomato in half and it was meaty and (she said) very flavorful!

Review: I'm pleased with our fall tomato crop, and the results of the experiment tell me that we should definitely do this again next year.  I'll only make a few changes.  First, I'll plant more tomatoes.  This was merely a test plot to determine if we could do this successfully.  Next year, I intend on planting many more for canning stewed tomatoes and tomato sauce.  This will be insurance in the event that weather or bugs damage the spring crop.  I'll also plant the seeds a little earlier, setting my target seed planting date for July 1 - roughly a couple of weeks earlier than the July 16th date I planted the the test plot.

Sometimes our experiments don't work out.  This was one of those occurrences where we found success.  It only makes sense to do this.  Living in the deep south has its share of downsides with the heat, humidity, pests and mosquitoes that make enjoying the great outdoors almost intolerable for a gardener during the summer months.  BUT, the long growing season is also a blessing, enabling us to plant fall crops of tomatoes, potatoes, green beans, etc. to fill our pantries with delicious homegrown produce!

Crazy About Grass

Over the weekend we had about 5 inches of rain that fell over Our Maker's Acres Family Farm. During a momentary break in the precipitation, I hustled out there to check on the status of the rye grass that we planted on October 22nd and discussed in THIS POST.  Our previous experiments with planting rye grass by over-seeding without working up a seedbed with a plow were met with dismal results.  This year I changed up a few things and wanted to see if the new process worked. 

I got down on my hands and knees and surveyed the situation in the pasture. Whoa!  What is this I see?  I tried to contain the joy at what I saw!  Little sprouts! Rye grass was shooting up through the grass clippings that I had mowed on top of the broadcast seed.  Oh, the inhabitants of the barnyard are just gonna love this this winter when everything else is dead and brown!  Can you see the tiny green shoots?

Oh for joy!

As I was rejoicing out on my hands and knees in the pasture, I began to think how odd I must look to passersby with me out in the pasture on the ground on all fours. I bet I looked like Old Nebuchadnezzar as described below from the Book of Daniel:

Daniel 4:33 (NASB)

Immediately the word concerning Nebuchadnezzar was fulfilled; and he was driven away from mankind and began eating grass like cattle, and his body was drenched with the dew of heaven until his hair had grown like eagles’ feathers and his nails like birds’ claws.

I hope I don't look like that!  I got up from the ground and sheepishly walked out of the pasture. Although we grow many fine vegetables that we enjoy, I also get a thrill out of growing good grass that the cows, goat(s), chickens and guineas can enjoy, especially during the winter when in prior years they have had to make do primarily on hay and a little feed.

It is still a little early to pronounce success on the 2015-2016 rye grass crop.  I don't want to count my chickens before they hatch.  I'll wait a few more weeks until we really can see what type of a stand I have out there, but the initial reviews look promising - at least better than in prior years.

The grass is always greener

There were still a few minutes of daylight left, and I had a bit more energy in me, so I decided to do one more experiment.  I went and got my little Scott's Fertilizer Spreader that I planted the rye grass with and I got a bag and a half of Fertilizer made with pelletized Chicken Manure.  I quickly filled the spreader and began broadcasting the chicken manure on the rye grass.  The fertilizer I had wasn't enough to finish the entire rye grass plot, but I marked where I ran out.  I want to see if I can tell a difference where I fertilized versus where I didn't.  Since our chickens are constantly "broadcasting" chicken manure on the pasture, I want to see if broadcasting more fertilizer yielded incrementally beneficial results.  In a few weeks we'll be able to tell.

As I finished the sun faded, ushering in darkness and swarms of hungry mosquitoes ready to feast on my blood.  Time for Ol' Nebuchadnezzar to go inside for supper.  My wife has something prepared that is much better than grass for me to eat!

An Experiment with Oven Canning

It is great to have good friends.  Friends that bless you and you in turn bless them. Here is a story to illustrate:  A good friend of mine gave us several 60 pound sacks of milled rice.  We, in turn, gave him lots of eggs.  The trouble with rice is that there are weevils or eggs of weevils in the rice.  If you put it in your pantry, one day you'll wake up and open the pantry and be greeted with moths - many moths.  When you kill them, they leave a dark residue on your walls.  If I sound like I'm speaking from experience, I am!

We eat a lot of rice, but wanted to find a way to store the rice so that it will keep for an extended period of time.  We could put it in the freezer, but freezer space is at a premium.  Fortunately, another friend shared a type of canning that we weren't familiar with - Oven Canning.  She gave us an article explaining how to do it that was originally published in Countryside Magazine.  We'll show you the process.  Yet another friend had given us numerous empty Apple Juice bottles that have a ring on the neck.  They are gallon quantities and pretty handy for milk.  The only downside is it makes it near impossible to skim cream, unless of course, you use one of those turkey basters with a bulb.  The directions call for quart canning jars, but we altered to use gallon jars

Here's what you do to oven can:

First, after sterilizing the jars, we used a funnel to pour the rice into our jars.  We're using rice, but this method is recommended for storing dry goods like rice, beans, flour, sugar, corn meal, etc. and protects the contents against bugs, humidity, varmints and other things that might spoil your food.

Filling the jars

We didn't fill the jars all the way to the top.

Ready for oven canning

Preheat your oven to 200 degrees Fahrenheit.

Things are heating up!

Set your jar in the oven on a tray, without the lid!  The article called for it to stay in the oven for an hour.  We altered the instructions to leave the jar in the oven for two hours since we are using a much larger jar than quart size.  We figure that this will allow the contents to heat up enough to kill any bugs or eggs in the rice.

Oven can this for 2 hours

Use a rag to pull the hot jar out of the oven and set on a dish rag.

Removed the jar from the oven

Use a moist cloth to dampen the top of the jar.

Wiping the jar top

Then screw the sterilized lid onto the top of the jar.

In a short time, you'll hear a "Ping!" as the lid is pulled down and sealed.  I like that sound!

Ping!

And here we go: Oven Canned rice on our pantry shelf.  We've canned several jars of jasmine rice and several jars of brown rice.

Pantry full of rice

The rice is now stored for use later on.  We tested and the rice pours out fine.  The article says that this method will store rice and other dry goods for up to twenty years. Check back in with us in twenty years and we'll update you on the success of this method of long-term food storage!  (Smile) Thanks again to our friends for the rice, the storage method and the jars.  It is a blessing to have good friends!