Prepping for the Arctic Blast

The Arctic Blast sounds like a new slush that they might offer at Sonic, but we're taking it as seriously as we know how.  They are predicting cold weather.  The last time Tricia looked at her phone, she told me that they said it would be 9 degrees in Jennings.  9 degrees.  At that temperature, I don't know if it even pays off to cover plants, but I've got some tarps.  We might as well try.

The turnips that I had planted may be a lost cause as I didn't have quite enough tarps for them.  The greens were going to be for me.  The turnip roots for the cows.  We'll see if they survive.  Under the blue tarps you see is the spinach and radishes and some mustard greens.

The cilantro and the green onions are going to be left uncovered.  I don't know if they will survive.  The broccoli and brussels sprouts are covered.

The swiss chard, kale, kohlrabi and cabbage are all covered up, too.

Here is my new experiment.  Last time it reached the low 20's I lost two tangerine trees and a satsuma.  The navel orange tree and the tangerine that survived took 2 years to recover.  While the navel orange produced again this year, the surviving tangerine did not.  I had them covered, too.

This year I tried something.  In addition to covering them, I ran heat lamps to each one.  This is the heat lamp under the tangerine tree.

The new satsuma tree was small enough for me to flip the garbage can over it with the heat lamp inside.  Who knows?  It may make it so warm under there that it cooks the little tree.

And finally, here is the heat lamp under the covered up navel orange tree.  This is the one that I had just picked all the fruit off of it.

Will they make it?  Only time will tell.  I'll uncover them in a few days and we will report if the heat lamps did the job.

While we were out walking to the barn to do the evening chores, we began to hear sirens.  One after the other.  They turned off the main road and onto ours and stopped at our next door neighbor's house.  We could see flames and then the firemen jumped out and started spraying things down with water.

We didn't want to be nosy neighbors, so we didn't walk over.  The firemen had it under control quickly.  It didn't seem to have spread to their home.  It looked like it was confined to a barn behind his house.  I'll find out for sure, but I didn't see his heat lamps on his chickens like he always has on.  If I had to guess, it could be that he moved his birds into the barn and somehow the heat lamp caught the barn on fire.

No one was injured and their home was saved.  It's a good thing to live exactly one mile away from the Hathaway Rural Volunteer Fire Department.  They were on site in three shakes of a billy goat's tail and got it put out quickly.

The First Fire Pit Fire of the Season

The morning sun stretched its rays across the yard early this morning, welcoming a beautiful, glorious day.  By mid-day winds were whipping across the landscape, ushering in the coolest weather we've seen this fall.  After we picked up eggs, fed the animals and milked LuLu, I took the tarp off of the fire pit.  It seemed like the perfect evening to build a fire.

We have quite a few trees in the yard, mostly live oak, with some water oak and pecan thrown in there for good measure.  With each passing storm, the trees drop numerous branches, some small and some quite large that have to be cut into pieces.  Throughout the year, we gather up all the debris and pile it beside a big live oak next to the fire pit.  This pile serves as fuel for the fire pit as well as the barbecue pit.   

I started a roaring fire as I checked the temperature.  It was 54 degrees out, cool enough for a fire.  Overnight, the weather app we use said it'll get down to 39.  I tossed in a bunch of sticks and pulled the bench up close to the fire.  Tricia came and sat with me as we stared into the fire and talked.  The fire cracked and embers flew high up into the night sky.  Even Belle came up and visited us.  Her thick white coat keeps her warm on cold nights, and we thought fire scared her, but her desire for an ear rub outweighed her fear of fire.

The sticks and logs burned down and a nice bed of red hot coals glowed in the fire pit, reminding me that I should have picked up some sausage.  The fire pit has a grille that swings over the is perfect for cooking.  As I stared into the fire, I began to remember being a young boy in Boy Scouts.  We'd cook over campfires all the time.  As a side note, why does food cooked over a campfire always taste better?

In Scouts, one of the more popular meals we cooked was a dish called "Foil Meals."  Foil meals were simple to prepare and clean up.  You simply tore a square of foil and put a big patty of hamburger meat, heavily seasoned in the middle of the foil.  Then you'd slice onions, potatoes, carrots and anything else you wanted in there and you'd fold up the foil around the meat/vegetables in the middle and seal.

There were often arguments about whether to put the shiny side in or the shiny side of the foil facing out.  I think it cooks both ways.  You'd gently set the foil meal directly on the coals.  After about 10-15 minutes, a delicious aroma would waft across the campsite and it would beckon us to circle around the fire and pull our meals out.  We'd carefully unwrap them and eat the delicious meat and potatoes and vegetables directly out of the foil with a fork.  When you were finished, you balled up the foil and threw it away.  Good memories of meals eaten around a campfire!

After a while the fire burned down and we reluctantly went inside.  Before leaving, we vowed to enjoy many more evenings seated around the fire, weather permitting.  Next time we'll cook while we're sitting around it, though!

The Fire Pit Patio

It's almost "fire pit season."  That's the time of year that we build fires in the fire pit and sit outside and stare into the flames.  Peaceful.  Relaxing.  The photo below shows our fire pit.  The river rock square is a trip and fall hazard.  We normally put benches on the inside of the square and then back up when the fire is roaring.  The rocks do nothing but remind us that we have Build Fire Pit Patio as an item on our to do list.

Might as well do it since the weather is conducive to a little manual labor.  We marked out the size of our proposed patio, squared it up and got ready to drive in stakes to mark our corners and build our form.

I got out a mattock and began to work up a two inch indention in the rock-hard soil.

Finally we had it all done and moved the dirt out of the way in wagons!  That was more work than I thought it was going to be.

The form was constructed and we went to the local hardware store and bought 80 pound bags of gravel mix concrete.

Pouring concrete is hard.  The last time I did it I threw out my back mixing it with a shovel and shoveling it into place.  There has to be an easier way.  We found on You Tube a method called "Dry Pouring Concrete.  After watching the videos, we felt like this was the thing to do.  I'll show you the process.

First, you pour the bags of concrete into the form.  Use a long 2 x 4 to screed.  Our problem was that our form was bigger than any 2x4 that we had.  This meant that we were unable to level it properly, even going side to side from the corners.  I would have liked it to have been smoother, but it wasn't to be.  Once we had it as level as we were going to get it, we used a paint roller to smooth out the bigger ridges.

The powder is there.  Now you take a water hose and set it to mist.  Mist the concrete until it turns a darker color gray.

In exactly an hour, you do mist it again.  An hour following that, you set the garden hose sprayer to "shower" and shower the concrete real good.  An hour later you do it again.  An hour later you do it again.  (For every inch of thickness, you shower it in one hour intervals.)

Once that was done, we decided to dress it up a little by soldiering pavers on the surrounding edges.  We laid a base of sand and leveled the pavers with the slab.

We were going to put a plastic edging around the entire thing, but decided to make a concrete retainer.  We used the 'dry pour' method with this as well.  We poured the concrete powder and used a concrete edging tool to put the powder at a 45 degree angle about halfway up the paver.  We misted and sprayed.  This edge will keep the pavers from sliding.

Between the pavers, we poured polymeric sand, packing it in, sweeping it in and then used a leaf blower to blow off the excess.  Then we showered it in.

I pulled the dirt over the outer concrete retainer so that it met with the edge of the pavers.  We like the way it turned out.

We intend on spending many upcoming evenings outside enjoying the new fire pit patio.  It's not a perfect construction project, by any stretch of the imagination, but the job is complete and I'm sure we'll enjoy it.

Making Biochar for the Garden

It was chilly and building a fire sounded nice.  I also had on my to do list to make some biochar for the garden.  Two birds.  One stone.  We have a BUNCH of tree limbs from all the storms that are piled up in numerous piles.  I gathered some up into a pile away from the hay bales and trees and lit it up.  I kept piling the branches on the fire.  The coals were glowing.  The fire was kicking up some real nice heat.  While the north wind blew, I huddled by the fire,  The hens scratched the ground where the big pile of branches used to be.

I let the branches burn until everything was grey ash with coals underneath.  Then, I got out a water    hose and stopped the burning process quickly.

The coals smoldered and I kicked through them and sprayed them down, saturating them with water until they were cool.

This leaves you with charcoal - just like the hardwood chunk charcoal you can buy at the grocery store for barbecuing.  

Let's look just a little bit closer.  If you could see this under a microscope, you would be able to see that the charcoal is very porous.  There are millions of microscopic holes in the charcoal.

These little holes can be beneficial bacteria condominiums.  Let me explain what must happen to get to that point.  You must inoculate the biochar with bacteria.  Here's how I did it.  I took the charcoal I had just made, poured it into a big blue tub and chopped up the charcoal with a shovel.  Then I went to the barn and got a 5 gallon bucket of cow poop.  I poured the cow poop in with the charcoal and filled the tub with water.  Now I had a biochar - cow poop - water sludge.  I stirred up this concoction like a 5 star chef in a restaurant might do.  What I'll do is allow this 'brew' to ferment for a couple of weeks.  Then I'll dig a trench and bury it in the garden.  The 'charged' biochar will provide tremendous benefits to the soil.

This was first discovered in the Amazon.  The pre-Columbian Amazonians made this.  Its effects are good for the soil and good for vegetative growth.  It can reduce soil acidity and increase soil fertility.  I've got more piles to burn and thus, more biochar to make, inoculate and incorporate into the garden soil.

It's Fire Pit Season!

I check the weather report and tomorrow, December 9th, the weather prognosticators tell us that we will be knocking on the door of 80 degrees for the high and 70 degrees for the low.  But, on the several cool evenings we've had, we've lit a few fires in our fire pit.  There are few things more relaxing to me than lighting a fire in the fire pit and sit around and watch it burn.  

Sometimes I'll get the fire stoked up too hot and we'll have to scoot the bench back a bit.  Other times the fire will die back a bit and we'll scoot it back up close.  Other than that it's just sitting there, peacefully watching the embers, listening to the coals crackle and pop.  The scent of burning hardwood is nice and the roaring fire takes the chill out of the air.

We're constantly gathering limbs that fall out of the many trees in our yard and stacking them by the fire pit to use as fuel.  Sometimes we'll wait for the wood to turn to red-hot coals and the daylight to turn to dark.

Then we'll swing the grill back over the fire pit and cook something for supper.  On this particular night, we warmed up some leftover homemade soup over the fire.

Maybe it's just me, but it seems like everything cooked outside tastes better!  (Many) more fire pit fires left to come.  With it being 80 degrees tomorrow, we'll likely not light the fire pit up tomorrow, though.

Six Months Later...

A little more than six months after the hurricanes, we still have reminders of the carnage around us.  Our son, Russ, is about to move back into his home as the contractors will finish up shortly, remodeling his home following a large tree falling through his roof.  We still look around at broken branches ("widow makers") high up in our live oak trees - reminders of the storm.  We are blessed, though.  Many people lost their homes and livelihoods.  

This weekend we wanted to incinerate a big reminder of Laura and Delta that we walk by every single day on the way to the barn.  The "burn pile."  After the storm, we hauled all the branches, limbs, and assorted sticks to the pasture and stacked them in a big, long windrow.  This weekend we started the fire to bid farewell to the one of the last remaining vestiges of tropical wrath still on our property.

Buckwheat the billy goat with his long goatee looks on, as does Belle, our livestock guardian dog.  We separated the long windrow into an individual pile.  Lighting the whole thing up would burn our pecan trees to the east and our newly planted tomatoes to the west.  As the fire consumed the branches, we would toss more on, being careful not to let it get too high.

It didn't take long until the entire pile was burned down to a mere fraction of its original size.  In the photo below, the pile originally stretched almost to the t-post in the foreground.  Now there is lots more room to walk, roll out hay bales, and much less hiding places for hens to lay their eggs.  These new hens are crafty.  We'll discover 'hidden nests' after searching around when we don't collect as many eggs in the nest boxes.

We weren't done with fires or smoke just yet.  As the fire smoldered and smoked, we were about to start another fire.  First, we seasoned up one of the briskets from one of our Jersey bulls with a rub we like.

I started my charcoal chimney fire starter (an easy way to start charcoal without lighter fluid).

Put the brisket on the smoker...

And watched and patiently waited for 6 hours while the brisket smoked at around 250 degrees.  Our Weber Smokey Mountain Smoker does a great job.  It requires monitoring, though, to ensure your temperature stays somewhere between 210 - 250 degrees.  This is easily accomplished by opening or closing the air vents and tossing a few more chunks of pecan or live oak wood in on occasion.

We used cut up chunks of pecan branches and live oak branches we lost in the storms to flavor the brisket.  It turned out delicious.  

We Never Got Around to Getting a Gas Jet

One of the things that really helped us cope with the cold weather was our fireplace.  We stayed by our fire and set our thermostats to 66 degrees at the warmest.  The hurricanes gave us plenty of firewood and we burned a lot of it. In the days preceding the winter storm, we got lots of rain.  We brought the firewood under the patio and it dried out so that we could burn it.  The chickens were thankful that we picked up the wood and used the opportunity to scratch around for bugs and worms from where we had removed the wood.

When we built the house twenty years ago, we added an opening space for a pipe in the brick fireplace to run a natural gas line to help start firewood in the fireplace.  Our house, however, ended up being all electric.  I've tossed around the idea of adding natural gas or propane, but we've gotten around to it.  Part of the reason is that we really don't need natural gas or propane to start firewood.  We do it with lighter pine.  we have a stash of lighter pine that we have found and saved over the years.

In the photo below, you can see one of many lighter pine logs we have.  It is the one standing up vertically.  All we have to do to make kindling is to get the axe and slice slivers of kindling off the fat pine log.

I began to chop slices off the log and it opens up the resin drenched wood, full of sap.  It smells like a bottle of Pine-Sol.  The oil from the pine log burns easily, flames up, and quickly starts the other wood to begin burning.

I wish that this was a scratch and sniff photo so you could enjoy the scent!

It doesn't take removing a lot off of the log to make enough kindling to start fires for a week.  Where the log was dull and grey, once you open it up, the grains are red, yellow, and amber.

I fill a 5 gallon bucket with kindling and walk back toward the house and out of the mud and the muck.

It just took a little work with the axe in order to gather plenty of firestarters.

I generally take three pieces of kindling and put them on the bottom of the grate and then cover with five or six pieces of firewood.  I crumple a few pieces of newspaper under the kindling and scratch a match.  In no time, the newspaper has blazed up, caught the kindling on fire and before you know it, the rest of the firewood is ablaze.

The resulting fire is nice and warm and the heat was much-welcomed during the cold snap.

A Simple Outing on the Weekend

Now is the time of year that the garden is all in.  The work is done and now we wait for harvest.  Mustard greens, kale, lettuce and radishes can be picked every day and will continue until spring.  Other crops like spinach and sugar snap peas will be ready in less than a week.  Unfortunately, Luna died after her bout with Tetanus, so we are not milking right now.  No more babies expected until spring.

As a result, we've made a concerted effort to schedule outings.  This weekend we had planned to go hiking at Tunica Hills, a park about 2 1/2 hours away, but at the last minute decided to stick closer to home.  The day started out with beautiful sunshine, but quickly turned into a gloomy, grey, overcast, chilly day.  We decided to load up and head to the farm in Oberlin - 30 minutes away.

When we got there, we started a fire to warm up by.  There was plenty of wood to fuel a campfire with pecan trees that had blown over in the hurricane.  We set up lawn chairs around the fire, along with a blanket laid out on the grass and quickly got a nice fire burning.

We wanted an easy campfire meal, and there's nothing quite as easy as hot dogs.  Mom and Dad drove out and met us and visited with us.  We have a fold-out expanded metal grill we placed over the coals once the fire burned down a bit.  A can of chili was opened and put in a pot to warm up.  

The all-beef hot dogs were layered on the grill, and we used some tongs to roll them around to keep them from burning.

As the hot dog wieners were done, we put them in the pot of chili and allowed them to mingle with the chili for a while while the hot dog buns were toasting.

The simple meal was quickly done and we enjoyed them.  No mess.  Not many dishes to do.  Sometimes it is the simplest of things that are the most delightful.