Don't Go Swimming For at Least 30 Minutes After Eating

Don't go swimming for at least 30 minutes after eating or you could get stomach cramps and drown! That is something that I used to hear all the time as a kid.  We didn't have the Internet in the 70's and 80's.  If we did, we could have googled it and learned as I just did from this article that that little piece of advice was a myth and that they can't find one documented death caused by swimming after eating. Just think of all the extra time we could have enjoyed swimming as kids in the summer if we had known better.

Well, for the past week I have found documented evidence that the "myth" that says that we shouldn't swim for 30 minutes after we eat may not be a myth after-all.  In fact I have documented proof of an experiment done using lab rats (okay, maybe they aren't lab rats) in the photo below.  This settled science has not been peer-reviewed, but the picture below is hard to refute.

This rat needed a life preserver

We showed you back in this post from June how we ferment rice to be used for chicken feed.  Each morning and night we soak rice in buckets of water.  Rats from the barn smell the fermenting grain, jump into the buckets of water to eat and then drown.  Over the past few days, I have extracted a total of four drowned rats from the rice bucket once I drain the water out.

Each morning, I toss the water-logged and very dead rats out in the barnyard to the omnivorous chickens who make a quick meal of the drowned rats marinated overnight in fermented rice 'wine'. Tasty!  Why, the fermenting rice bucket has turned into a veritable buffet line of grains and meats for the chickens! Remember kids, swimming and eating don't mix!  (For rats, at least.)

Soaking (Fermenting) Chicken Feed

It is remarkable how certain smells can bring you back in time.  In THIS POST from almost two years ago:  I mentioned 24 of these smells.  Although not a good fragrance, the odor I’m going to talk about today certainly turns back the hands of time and brings me back.

When I was younger, we had a job that was a bad one on the rice farm.  We had a concrete-sided pit and we’d dump truckloads of harvested rice into the pit where an auger would carry the rice up and into storage bins.  The trouble with this scenario is that in Louisiana, the water table is very near the surface.  The pit would always seep water, filling the bottom with water which created smelly, fermented rice once coupled with the hot summer sun.

With a pocketknife and an antifreeze jug, we’d fashion a scoop with a handle and our job was to shimmy down into the pit with the scoop and a 5 gallon bucket and empty the pit of the water and fermented rice.  The smell would get on your hands and was so strong that soapy water would not remove the smell.  Sometimes there would be a big bullfrog or a snake or turtle in the bottom of the pit that would scare you.  Other times an animal would have fallen into the pit and drowned, making the contents of the pit an even more foul and vile and toxic concoction than it already was.

Today I’ll talk about that smell again.  We feed our chickens rice – either rough (un-milled) rice or milled, broken grain rice.  We augment this by adding some laying pellets for higher nutritional content.  Recently, we’ve begun to soak the rice in order to ferment it prior to feeding the chickens. 

Why would we do this?  Well, in researching this I’ve learned that fermenting the grain can increase the protein and nutrient content of the feed as the grain germinates.  It also helps aid in digestion as the fermented grain adds probiotics and that also will make the birds more healthy, their laying performance increase, helps prevent some diseases and will ‘stretch’ your feed cost by giving more weight gain off of the portions of feed.

So, how do we do it?  Easy enough – I’ll show you.  First we start out with our ration of mixed rough rice/milled rice that we feed in the morning. 

Rice

We pour this in a bucket and cover it with water.  It will soak in the heat in the feed room until the evening feeding.

Covering it with water

When we are ready to feed them in the evening, this is what we are greeted with after the rice has fermented for about 10-12 hours:

Fermented Rice - smells like a brewery

As you might be able to tell, the rice has expanded, absorbing the water.  There are bubbles on top of the water and this shows that the rice is fermenting.  Oh, if you could smell the picture above, you would know how bad it smells!  It is the same smell I remember from years ago and it brings me back to memories of sliding down in the pit to remove the rotting grain.

Yep, it’s gross, but not to a chicken.  They love it.  It doesn’t smell bad to them.  It smells like supper!

Now what I didn’t show you is that the bucket of soaking rice sits inside another bucket.  I’ve drilled numerous holes into the bucket with a drill to drain the fermented water.  We have a rope with a hook on it hanging in the feed room and right before we start milking the cows, we pull the bucket with rice out of the water and place it on the hook.  The water seeps out of the bucket and is captured in the bucket beneath it.  

Drip, drip, drip while we milk

By the time we’re finished milking the cows, the water is completely drained from the fermented rice and the swollen grain is ready to be fed to the chickens.

This smelly water is used as a base for the next batch of rice that will be fed for breakfast the next morning after soaking all night long.  We simply add more water to the bucket to completely cover the rice.  It is an on-going cycle, similar to a sour-dough culture starter.

Then we go out in the barnyard and scatter the smelly rice to the chickens who promptly gobble it up and ask for seconds.  We’ve actually seen an increase in egg production since we started this process.

Soaking rice (or other grains) for chicken feed might not smell great, but the dividends yielded in terms of animal health and nutrition definitely passes the smell test.

Saving Cucumber Seeds (Part 1)

We had a nice crop of cucumbers going.  I say this in the past tense because in exactly one day some very hungry little green worms ate them all down to the vine.  I have some cucumber seedlings that have sprouted and I'll be transplanting them into the garden next week, but there were a couple cucumbers that I left out on the vines in order to save their seeds for next year.

Pick out a nice looking cucumber and allow it to just continue growing.  It will eventually turn yellow and start getting soft.  That's when you want to go ahead and break it off the vine and bring it inside.

An overripe cucumber for seed-saving

Cut the cucumber in half and get a spoon and scoop out all of the seeds.  The seeds are large and plump and have a jelly-like protective layer around them.

A scoop of cucumber seeds

Here is what it looked like before I scooped out the seeds:

And here are the cukes after I've scooped out the seeds. 

I placed all of the seeds that I scooped out into a bowl.  I tried to carefully pull out any pieces of cucumber flesh or any mis-formed or empty seeds, leaving only nice looking full seeds in the bowl.

Next I added an equal amount of water into the bowl as I have seeds and I set this down on the window sill.

Cucumbers are one of those seeds that you have to ferment prior to saving.  I'll leave this in the window for 3-4 days and then I'll show you what comes next in Part 2 of this blog post probably in a week or so.  It is a good idea to save your own seeds and as long as you're starting off with heirloom, open pollinated seeds, you can save your own seeds year after year and not have to depend on seed companies or the mail carrier to deliver your seeds.  You'll have your own!