If Life Gives You Lemons...

Our next door neighbors are so good to us.  We look out for one another and help each other when needed.  On Thanksgiving morning, we received a call from them telling us not to worry if we heard anything, because everything was alright.  She then proceeded to explain that her husband and son were out duck hunting on the bayou in their bass boat.  It was before daylight and they made a turn and the wind was blowing real hard.  The waves lapped over the edges of the boat and swamped it.  It sunk and they had to be rescued by Wildlife & Fisheries.  They had a lot to be thankful for, though.  No one was injured and, believe it or not, they were able to return the next day and recover the boat!

They called us again on a happier note.  Their lemon tree had produced more than they could eat.  They invited us to go pick all we want.  Tricia walked over and picked a basketful.  We plan to go get some more or they'll all go to waste.  I wish I would have something to put beside them so that you could see their size.  These lemons are double the size of the store-bought lemon.

Here's what we like to do with them.  We slice them in half on a cutting board.  We use an old fashioned juicer to extract all the juice from the lemons.  We do this also with oranges and tangerines.

We pour through a sieve and into a 4 cup measuring cup.  This strains out the seeds an pulp.  I use a spoon to press any remaining juice in the pulp through the sieve.

I pour into ice cube trays.  Remember ice cube trays?  We don't use these to make ice anymore, but they still serve a number of purposes.

When they are full, i put them in the deep freeze for four hours or so.  You've just got to be careful, because if you spill some, it makes a sticky mess.  Ask me how I know.

Once frozen, we pop the lemon juice ice cubes into a gallon sized zip loc bag.  Then, whenever recipes call for lemon juice, we grab the bag out of the freezer and thaw out however many cubes we need for the recipe.

When life (or a good neighbor) gives you lemons, make lemon juice (or lemonade, if you wish).

The Pecan Crop - 2024

We have husband and wife pecan trees in our yard.  A husband and wife tree is an old custom from New England where a (you guessed it) husband and a wife would plant two identical trees side by side by the entrance of their home, and they would grow together as a testimony of their love and fidelity.  I don't know who planted our husband and wife trees, but they are quite large.  Their boughs have grown together such that their outline is as one large tree instead of two.  

The two trees make great pecans (puh CAHNS), but they are small.  They are, however, good and rich because they're full of oil.  They're just hard to crack, so we generally take them to the feed store in town where they have a pecan cracking machine that cracks them.  We then take them home and sit in front of the fireplace all winter shelling them for pecan pies!

Mom and Dad came over the other day and we laid out a blanket and walked around the trees, filling up a 5 gallon bucket.  From those trees, we've picked 4 1/2 five gallon buckets of pecans.  We also have a wagon filled with pecans as well that Ginger, our cat, has decided is a nice place to lounge throughout the day after hunting all night.

Our neighbors had made a coconut dessert Sunday afternoon and wanted to share a couple of slices with us.  They walked over and we visited.  They are real busy with a construction project.  So busy, in fact, that they don't have time to pick up pecans.  They offered that we could pick up all we could and were going to leave their "pecan-picker-upper" out by the tree.

That contraption is a back-saver.  As you get older, I've learned, you come to appreciate things like this so you don't have to constantly bend over.  This is like the slinky we used to play with as kids,  you roll it and the pecans go inside until its full.

It's so easy, it almost feels like you're cheating.

Tricia was using an older model of the same device.  This one, I think, was my great-grandmother's.  When it's full, you simply pull back the wires and allow the pecans to tumble out.  We began to quickly fill the wagon...

Our neighbor's pecan trees are LARGE pecans.  I'm telling you, we felt kind of funny picking these compared to ours.  Tricia said, "Man, our pecans are about 1/3 the size of theirs!"  It's true.  Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's pecans, came to mind.

The neighbor's pecans on the left.  The largest of our pecans on the right.

We will let the pecans sit for a couple of weeks and after a cold front comes through, we'll begin shelling them.  I enjoy sitting and shelling pecans.  It is an enjoyable pastime in the fall.  Pecans freeze well, so we'll freeze them, but we'll turn many into pies and will roast and salt others.  The neighbors have a recipe with cinnamon and sugar pecans.  Looking forward to all of that!

We All Need Somebody To Lean On

The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”  Mark 12:31 NASB

Neighbors.  We have some good ones.  Always so caring and generous and kind.  The Bible has a lot to say about neighbors.  In fact, The Parable of the Good Samaritan, is an answer to the question, "Who is my neighbor?"  It is easy to put limits on who our neighbor is and it is easy to provide a multitude of excuses for why this person cannot be considered our neighbor.  Jesus cleared it up by saying that our neighbor is anyone in our proximity with whom we can share the love of God.

I'm sure you can think of examples of when you've experienced someone being a good neighbor.  I'm thinking of two examples with a farming context that come to mind that I can share.

When I was farming with my Dad back in the year 2000, times were tough - input costs of the crop were sky high and prices for your harvested crop were low.  People were in a pinch.  I remember as a grown man crying in my crawfish boat, wondering how the bills were going to get paid?  How was I going to support my family?  It was hard for everyone.

But there was a certain brotherhood in farming.  If a tractor broke down, well, you'd drive to your neighboring farmer's shop and borrow his.  If you were stuck in the mud, you'd flag down the farmer down the road and he'd come with a tractor and a chain and pull you out.  Harvest time was always a little stressful.  The crop was ripening in the field and bad weather sets in, bringing the harvest to a halt.  A combine breaks and requires major work that sets you behind.  What to do?

At about 11 AM when the dew had burned off the rice, you'd look down the road and here comes the neighboring farmer in his combine, with his workers driving a tractor and cart and truck following close behind.  They would give you a day's work or whatever it took to get you out of a bind.  They wouldn't accept pay.  At the end of the day, you'd fill their tanks with diesel and they'd drive off into the sunset like the hero with the white hat.  It was a sacrifice of their time, their money, their labor, but they did it because they were honorable men that had great love for their neighbor.  You'd do the same for them, too, and when the opportunity arose, you did.

I remember I was renting a farm a little south of Oberlin.  Dad was helping me get my crop in.  A terrible storm arose and lightning struck my Dad's combine in the field while he was sitting in it.  A scary situation, for sure.  As I recall, the cab filled with electrical smoke and it fried the circuit boards in the electronics, requiring expensive and time consuming repairs.  Lots of things were going wrong.  We were falling behind.

My brother-in-law's Dad farmed south of Kinder, easily ten miles away.  He heard of our plight and drove his combine on a busy road ten miles up Highway 165 to come help me.  It put a big lump in my throat when I saw that John Deere turning down the dirt road to come help us.  How do you repay that kind of service?  The words, "Thank you," seem so lacking, so trivial, so useless in such times.  The recipient of something like that (I'm speaking from experience), feels so ill-equipped even to respond.  The fact that I'm remembering these examples two and a half decades later speaks volumes about the impact that neighbors have had on my life.  It's things you never ever forget.

The fact of the matter is neighbors don't do things for neighbors for a thank you or for a full tank of diesel or a plate lunch or a cold Dr. Pepper.  It's an expression of love, of selfless service to a fellow human being.  It's lending a helping hand to someone who needs it.  Taking responsibility for the well-being of another and living out the words of Christ, loving your neighbor as yourself.  I have had a lot of people in my life that have modeled that type of behavior.  Giants, in my eyes.  I hope to be able to live up to their example.

Seventy Square Bales up in the Loft

 "I ain't as good as I once was, but I'm as good once as I ever was." - Toby Keith

It's a startling and humbling discovery when you find and must admit that you just can't do what you used to do.  Your body tells you, "You can't do this, boy.  But your pride says, "Oh, yes you can."  I say this to preface today's posting.  We walked down past the neighbor's Jiggs Bermuda pasture and saw that they had cut it.  I called them and they said, "Yep, we'll be baling at 2 pm on Wednesday."  The price was $6 per bale picked up in the field or $7 in the barn.  We are frugal farmers, so you know which price point we selected?

We hooked up the trailer and made the 1 mile drive west down our road and drove into the field.  My wife drove the truck and would position the trailer close to the bales and I would load the bales into the trailer.  To keep count, I would call out the number I was loading and Tricia would repeat the number.  After loading the first bale, I was chased out of the trailer by a nest of wasps that were hiding in there.  I was still fresh and full of vigor and ran quickly and didn't get stung.  We made a quick drive back home and killed 8 or 10 very angry red wasps.  Then we drove back and got down to business.

It was 3:15 by this time and we had church at 6, so we needed to really get down to business.

You can stack hay four bales high in the trailer and three wide.  With each bale put in, it's a shorter walk.  This is good hay - horse hay.  We use this sparingly during the winter.  We roll out round bales that they eat on all the time, but for the good square bales, we ration it, giving them a slice while we're milking.

 

Pretty soon, the trailer was full!  But there was still work to do.  We weren't at 70 bales yet.  I strapped the gate closed since it was too full to properly latch.

Our neighbors were fluffing, raking and baling right ahead of us.  Baling hay is always a beautiful sight to me.  

The hay field was full of square bales - much more than we could use.  They had customers that were loading like we were.  They also had a contraption that would pick up the bales, stack on a trailer being pulled by a tractor.  One man.  He'd drive it to the barn, tip the trailer over, and it was stacked perfectly without the exertion of any energy (by the man).

While we're on the topic of exertion of energy, well...  The trailer was loaded and the truck was loaded.  The old truck creaked under the load.  I tell you, it took everything I had to throw those last bales up on top of the truck.  I was, as they used to say, tuckered out.

I hopped in the truck.  My driver, the "hay maiden," was counting out money to pay the neighbors.  $420 to be exact.  The price was up $1 per bale this year, but it had been $5 a bale for years.  It's good hay.  They are our neighbors.  We like to buy local and it doesn't get more local than this!  I sat down and drank a full Yeti cup of ice cold water.  Ahhhhh!

We drove home very, very slowly and turned in the driveway.  I got a jack and disconnected the trailer.  Then we opened the pasture gate and backed the truck full of hay right next to the barn.  I climbed up into the loft and opened the doors and put the pulley and rope on the 4x4.  Now comes the really hard part.

Tricia clips the bungee cord hooks to the baling twine.  I grunt and groan and pull each bale up.  The rope has a ring on the end.  When the bale is even with the door, I put the ring on the nail to hold it while I grab the bale and swing it into the loft.

Just like in the trailer, I start stacking the hay.  I push the bales to the end.  The 2x12 wooden floor to the loft is smooth and shiny as it's been polished by pushing hay on it over the years.

We got 35 bales up in the barn before I looked at the clock and decided it was quittin' time if we wanted to make it to church.  Besides, I don't think I could've pulled another bale up.

After a good night's sleep, Tricia and I went out to the barn to conclude our work.  We were a little sore from the night before, but each bale put up was one bale closer to the end.  That's how you gotta think.  By and by, the work was done.  The hay was in the barn.  Another year done!  

The tired hay workers walked slowly into the house.  Part of us rejoiced as the work was finished.  The other part of us just wanted to lay down and rest.  Hay Day 2022 is in the books!

Fresh From the Bayou

"We can skin a buck, we can run a trot line, and a country boy can survive." - Hank Williams Jr. 

Our neighbors are the Williams.  No relation to Hank Jr. that I know of, but they can indeed survive by living off the land.  With the expansion in the neighborhood we talked about in this post, they have decided to purchase some land further out in the country to escape the encroaching sprawl.  We pray daily for all our neighbors and our rural neighborhood.

The neighbors have hoop nets on Bayou Nezpique and catch lots of catfish.  They skin them and gut them and sell to local fish markets.  They bring some to us, too!  They brought us several 1 gallon ziploc bags of whole catfish.  On Saturday afternoon, I made a salt water brine and soaked the catfish for a couple hours.  Then I drained the brine and patted the fish dry.

I had an idea in my head.  We love to eat smoked salmon.  Catfish is not salmon (or maybe it is the redneck salmon), but I don't see why it can't be smoked.  I searched around and found a recipe.  I made up a rub and coated the sides of the whole catfish.  I got the smoker fired up to 225 degrees, filled the water bowl and set the largest catfish on the bottom rack.

And the smaller catfish on the top rack.  I added some pecan wood on top of the coals and closed up the top.

Smoke was pouring out of the top vent.  I kept my eye on the temperature and adjusted the vents to keep it steady.

After an hour, I checked the internal temperature with my meat thermometer and 'flake tested' it.  They were done!

We brought them inside and asked God's blessing on our meal.  The smoked catfish was delicious!

We are thankful for good neighbors and their ability to "live off the land."  You never know, that may be a crucial skill in our brave, new world...

Taking in Afghans

We have kind of an empty nest here on Our Maker's Acres Family Farm.  It's just Tricia and I.  Our daughter has a career in a city an hour and a half from us.  Our oldest son has a career in a city 30 minutes from here and our youngest son is a junior in college.  He lives in an apartment there and works there as well.  The house seems quiet now that they are gone.  We have lots of room now that our little birds have flown from the nest.

At one time we talked about adopting or maybe fostering, but haven't really talked about it much since then.  We're still pretty busy around the homestead.  So imagine my surprise when I came home from work this week and learned that Tricia had taken in a couple of Afghans!  We didn't discuss it.  There was no agreement.  No planning or preparation.  I come home and there are two Afghans now living in our home, sleeping on our couch.

Tricia and I had a long talk so that I could gain an understanding of how this had come about.  She told me that she had received a call from our dear next door neighbor who asked my wife to go over.  Tricia walked next door.  We live close enough where you can walk right over.  Well, they visited for a while and then Mrs. Joyce gave Tricia two Afghans.  Here is a picture of them sitting on our couch:

This post went in a different direction, didn't it?  The blue one is the one Mrs. Joyce made for me and the fall-colored one is the one she made for Tricia.  Tricia asked how long it took her to make one.  She told her that she timed it one time and it takes about 40 hours to make one!  That is such a generous, kind gesture.  Can you imagine?  80 hours of work went into that.  Tricia said that she told her that she's made about 300 Afghans over the years.  That is very impressive!

So here is a close-up of mine.  Blue is my favorite color, so I really like it.  It will come in handy this winter.

And here is Tricia's:

Tricia's is fall-colored and can be decorated.  Above the functionality and beauty of the Afghans, it's the neighborly actions of Mrs. Joyce and her family that really makes me happy.  We didn't know them at all 20 years ago, but they've always been so good to us.  I hope we've been the same to them.  One thing's for certain, we'll take good care of the Afghans and give them a good home.

Wide Open Spaces

I stepped out on the front porch and took a photo looking due north.  The immediate front yard is pitch black.  The only light you can see 10 feet out is the backlight from the inside light.  I can recall when we moved in twenty years ago really liking the fact that you could see stars at night, that there was a sense of calm and quiet, other than occasional cars on the highway you could hear hoot owls in the oak trees, hauntingly hooting.

The bright lights in the background emanate from a recent real estate development.  A developer bought some farm land and has put up a master planned subdivision with 88 units on 18 acres.  The houses went up quicker than poop through a goose.  Most of the homes built are either occupied or sold.  

On the weekend we like to sit on the front porch in rocking chairs, drink coffee and look out over the wide open spaces, watching neighbors passing by and waving.  The farmland across from us was formerly planted in soybeans.  Then it laid fallow for a number of years before becoming a prime spot for picking dewberries for jelly-making.  In the late summer to early fall the field would be solid yellow from the goldenrod that grew thick in the open field.  The honeybees that inhabit our column would visit the goldenrod and their honey would take on a distinctive and strong smell of the flower.

Here's the view.  It is a little hard to see in the photo, but right above the blacktop road, running parallel with it is something white.  Can you see it?

It is a six inch pvc water main.  We understand that the same developer that purchased the land for the subdivision in the background that you can see the roofs of bought the land in front of us.  That wide open field may soon be filled with homes.  Does this make us sad?  Of course.  We like living in the country.  We would rather the field be agricultural land, or better, just a field.

Years ago, we attempted to buy a few acres of that very field across the road in order to graze cattle on, but the land was way, way out of our price range.  It would have been nice to have a buffer between us and further development, but it was not to be.  We do have neighbors to the east and west of us and we know them all and get along well with them.  They help us in times of need and we try to do likewise.  They don't mind the sounds and smells of our cows, goats, and chickens.  We're hoping that our new neighbors to the north of us will feel the same.

Like A Good Neighbor...

 

Harry Truman's quote is right, I think.  It is important to have good neighbors.  It is more important to be a good neighbor.  It is truly an impossible task to ever be as good of a neighbor as ours are to us.  We don't have a fence separating our property.  We visit often.  When they mow their yard, they often mow way over on our side of the property line to help us out.  When we go out of town, they watch over the place for us and feed the animals and collect the eggs.

They fish on the local bayous and routinely bring over fresh fish to us.  When hurricanes hit, they come over with a chain saw before the wind stops blowing and offer to assist.  When our power was out for weeks on end, they knocked on the door dragging a big extension cord and told us to plug in to their generator to power our freezer so we wouldn't lose our meat.  They have lemon, kumquat and satsuma trees and share all we can eat.

We didn't know our neighbors when we moved here.  We quickly learned to appreciate and love them.  I don't know if I could ever be one tenth the neighbor they are to us.  I thank God for our neighbors.

I submit that a little known survival technique in difficult times is to have good neighbors.  Why, just during the midst of this cold spell, we heard a knock at the door and our neighbors were there with a big rubbermaid container of homemade crab and shrimp gumbo.

We put some rice on and ladled big bowls of crab and shrimp gumbo.  Talk about warm your bones up!  Our family truly enjoyed the delicious gumbo and the kind neighborly gesture!

The cold didn't stand a snowball's chance in hell due to a warm bowl of gumbo and the warmth of neighborly love.

The Neighbor's Vineyard

And sow the fields, and plant vineyards, which may yield fruits of increase.  He blesseth them also, so that they are multiplied greatly; and suffereth not their cattle to decrease.  Psalm 107:37-38

Sunday afternoon our neighbors were in the yard, and we walked over to talk to them.  They had brought over some fresh fig cookies and several bags of apples, and we wanted to thank them.  It is so good to have good neighbors.  We were standing in the shade visiting underneath their vineyard.  They are taking care of their parents who aren't in great health.  This keeps them very busy.

As a result they mentioned that they wouldn't have time to pick their grapes and offered to us to feel free to pick as many as we'd like.  Well, that's an offer we can't pass up.  Our muscadine grape vines are juveniles.  Our neighbor's grapes are old and established and produce lots more than ours.  We took them up on their offer.  Tricia grabbed our ladder and a few buckets and started picking grapes in the neighbor's arbor.

Tricia finally gets a "raise"

I found a shady, comfortable spot to pick!  Mr. Bill, our neighbor's Dad who planted the grapes also built the trellis the grapes grow on.  He was a Drilling Superintendent for an oil company, so the trellis is made with drill stem.  This grape trellis will be standing for the next 200 years!

While our muscadines are dark red when ripe, these are a shiny golden-green when ripe.  Some have a pinkish tinge.  The ripe ones are also soft to the touch.

They are quite large - bigger than a shooting marble.  More like the size of the "plunker" marbles we used to play with.

In no time flat, we picked this Tupperware cake cover and two and a half bucketfuls!  We weighed them when we brought them inside and they weighed 32 pounds in total.

The grape vines are healthy.  Just look at all the foliage!

When picking, we clip the bucket on the hook on the top of the ladder meant for holding paint cans when you are painting.  That little hook works fine for this application as well.

We brought all the grapes inside.  What in the world are we gonna do with 32 pounds of grapes?  Well, on Thursday night, I'll post Part 1 with more details about our Great Grape Project of 2020.

Good Neighbors Share Their Figs With You

"Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let every new year find you a better man."  - Benjamin Franklin

"All will concede that in order to have good neighbors, we must also be good neighbors. That applies in every field of human endeavor."  - Harry S. Truman

"A good neighbor shares his figs with you" - Ernest Hemingway 

Okay, I jest.  I just made that up.  Hemingway did not say that.  It seems like something that he might say, but not that I know of.  Our neighbors have three fig trees.  They had a fourth tree, but it died last year.  The other day, the neighbors asked if we'd like some figs.  "Of course," we replied.  In two shakes of a billy goat's tail, Tricia, Benjamin and I were circling the three fig trees, picking the ripest ones.

The figs were plump and sticky sweet.  We sampled a few right off the tree.  They were real good!

An interesting fact about figs is that it is an inverted flower.  The fig itself is not technically a fruit, but is a flower.  Odd.  What's not odd is what we are going to do with the figs we gathered from the neighbor's tree.  We ate a bunch of them raw and fresh.  The rest we have frozen - about two gallons of figs are now individually frozen and stored in zip loc bags in the freezer.

We'll add the sweet frozen figs, peaches and local honey to goat kefir smoothies for breakfast.  Thank God for good neighbors who share their figs with us.

Good Neighbors

It was around seven o'clock yesterday evening when I slogged through ankle deep mud to go milk Daisy and Rosie.  When it gets dark all of the chickens routinely go to their spot to roost for the night.  After a grueling day of pecking and scratching, they're ready to bed down for the night at the Motel 6.  There must have been a shake-up somewhere in the pecking order because I was greeted with seven birds roosting in a new spot - the gate to the barn.

We'll leave the light on for ya!

I looked and saw that there were two roosters - a Rhode Island Red in the middle facing the camera and a Barred Rock Rooster on the far right with his tail feathers hanging down.  There were also three barred rock hens and two Rhode Island Red hens.  This guy needs to get with the program, though, and turn around. The rest of the birds are facing south and he's got his head toward the foot of the bed.  An odd bird, indeed.

An odd bird

They're all different.  Different sexes.  Different breeds.  But they all get along when it is bedtime.  Good neighbors, you might say.

Milking two cows by hand takes me 45 minutes from back door to back door, so I've got plenty of time to pray and/or think.  After seeing the birds all lined up close together and getting along, I started thinking about neighbors.  We've been blessed to always have good neighbors.  Many times I see people that live close to each other erect big privacy fences.  I understand that completely.  Everyone needs some privacy.  I've talked to some people, though, who live like this and the fences are obstructions that keep you from meeting your neighbors - or maybe the fence isn't the problem, it's a symptom of the problem.  Some people can live for years right next door to someone and never know them.

Or I don't know, maybe they are just heeding a verse from the book of Proverbs that I always think is funny:

Proverbs 25:17 Let your foot rarely be in your neighbor's house, Or He will become weary of you and hate you.

Neighbors are indeed a blessing and we've been fortunate to have some real good ones.  They'll keep an eye on things when you're not around.  During hurricanes we've worked together cleaning up each others' yards after storms, mowed each others' lawns, and helped each other out with projects.  We'll share fruits, vegetables, and baked goods.  One of our neighbors has fish fries and invites us over or will bring over a big plate of whatever they're cooking. Another neighbor is originally from Scotland and out of the blue she'll bring over piping hot homemade shortbread cookies or banana bread.

Growing up on the farm, we had great farming neighbors - the Smiths and the Monceaux's.  We all had shops full of tools and we'd share tools, equipment, and welding machines.  If your tractor got bogged down in the mud, you could count on your neighbor to come with a tractor and a chain and pull you out and you'd do likewise for them.  When you were finished harvesting and your neighboring farmer was still cutting rice, you'd bring your combine, truck and cart and help him out until the work was done and the rice was in the bins.

We like to think of ourselves as rugged individualists, and we are to a certain extent. But it is true as John Donne once wrote:

"All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated...As therefore the bell that rings to a sermon, calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come: so this bell calls us all: but how much more me, who am brought so near the door by this sickness....No man is an island, entire of itself...any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

 No man is an island.  We need each other in good times and we'll certainly need each other in bad times.  Thank God for good neighbors.