The Serpent in the Hen House

14 And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life:

15 And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.  Genesis 3:14-15

That, of course, is the Biblical story of the fall.  Adam and Eve were beguiled by the serpent and ate of the fruit that they were forbidden to eat.  It all started from questioning the Creator when He knows best.  Good wisdom for us today.  Life has a way of humbling most folks and we come to realize that God knows what he's doing.  He's put safeguards, commandments, and standards in place to protect us.

The woman on Our Maker's Acres Family Farm had a run-in with a serpent in the hen house this week, and yes, there was enmity between the serpent and the woman.  Tricia opened the nesting boxes so that the hens could begin laying their (precious and expensive) eggs.  When she opened one of the boxes, there was a chicken snake in the box.  We call them chicken snakes, but I think the official name is the Texas Rat Snake.  Snakes, apparently, are no respecter of borders, as he's about 70 miles over the border.

The snake was almost as frightened of the woman as the woman was of it.  The serpent tried heroically to make an escape, but alas, it was not to be.  For the snake had swallowed a ceramic egg that we keep in the hen house, and when he tried to slither through the fencing that lines the bottom of the boxes, his girth was now too wide to get through the fencing.  His greed had trapped him.  Ordinarily, if it was a real egg, it would have burst.  Ceramic eggs don't burst.  Tricia picked up a shovel and then a steel pipe and killed the snake.  

The Battle of the Bulge

That bulge is the ceramic egg.  Ordinarily, the ceramic egg will give the snake a really bad case of constipation and he would die.  Sad, but our land borders some woods.  If you don't somewhat control the snakes, you won't get eggs.  I've got to get my ceramic egg back.  Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle, right?  I cut the snake in two right above the bulge.

I used my foot to coax the fake egg out of the snake.

And here we are.  I got our egg back.  I tossed it right back in the box.  You'll notice it has an "X" marked on it with a Sharpie.  They look so real that we were picking them up when we picked up eggs each afternoon.  The X lets us know that it's a fake egg and to leave it alone.  Apparently, snakes haven't cracked that code, yet.

We welcome the snakes to come eat the rats.  We have plenty of those in the barn and hen house.  Rats move, however.  An egg is a stationary target and is easier for the snakes to get a quick meal.  This one paid a high price for his egg breakfast in the drive thru line.

Another Seven Years

When I was a young man growing up on the farm, a guy named Joe worked for my Dad.  He was larger than life in so many ways.  He spoke Cajun French and taught me quite a few words - some I remember today and some of them he probably shouldn't have taught me and aren't fit for polite conversation.  He always had a big wad of chewing tobacco in his mouth.  He would mix Levi Garrett with Five Brothers Pipe Tobacco, stick it in his cheek until it was gone.  Serious.  I rarely saw him spit.  He would teach us things like how to be a man, how to be tough, how to work hard.  

He drove an old Ford pickup truck that had a big rusted spot on the door because he would drive with the windows down resting his wet, sweaty arm out the window.  His truck had a spare tire in the bed with a bunch of empty Dr. Pepper cans and assorted tools in the back.  Riding with him, you'd hear the crinkle of aluminum cans moving because he would pick up numerous turtles in the ditches and they would climb slowly around in the bed seeking to escape.  He'd drive to a country store and come out with a honey bun and a Dr. Pepper for us.  

We would laugh and joke throughout the day teasing each other, making a hot, miserable day bearable.  When we did something wrong, he wasn't afraid to give us a good cussing.  In the rare occasions when we did something right, he'd praise us and would be proud of us like we were his kids.  He was very good to us, and I remember him fondly.

I was thinking about him this weekend.  Russ and I were working on a project Saturday at the church that involved moving dirt and working with shovels.  Working on a rice farm, you use a shovel every day.  We would go walking through the fields and cut levees with Joe when it was almost time for harvest.  Cutting levees is a tough job.  Now tractors do it, but back then, we did it with shovels,  He would get on the top side and I'd get on the bottom side and we would cut a ditch in the levee to allow the water to flow from one cut down to the next lower one.  We would continue so on and so forth until we had cut all the levees and the water flowed on out of the field so that the land could dry for harvest.

Inevitably, working together with shovels, he on the top side and me on the bottom, facing each other, our shovels would hit.  "Oh, no!" he'd say, punctuated with a term of endearment that isn't appropriate to write in this day and time, "You know what it means when our shovels hit, don't you?"  "It means we're gonna work together for another seven years."  My son, Russ' shovel and mine hit this weekend.  I instantly thought of that, and I told him the story of what Joe said it meant.  (I hope Russ and I work together for much more that seven more years.)

The old Cajun Creole superstition about working together another seven years didn't turn out to be true for Joe and I, sadly.  It's been a number of years since Joe died.  Dad called me and told me that Joe was driving the tractor and had a stroke and died.  We miss Joe!  The lone shovel stuck in the dirt in the photo above is my memorial to him and his memory.  I still smile when I think of the good times we shared. 

Did a Little Sweet Potato Diggin' on Sunday

Each year for as long as I can remember, sweet potatoes sprout up on their own in the spring.  My guess is that they were originally rooted from sweet potatoes that we composted.  Now each year when we dig them, we'll invariably miss some and they'll sprout up the following year.  It's kind of neat - a crop you never have to plant.

So each October I have a process in harvesting them.  It goes like this: I begin pulling on the heavy sweet potato vines that cover the ground, breaking them off or cutting them with a shovel.  I'll toss them over the garden fence where the cows are impatiently waiting.  They absolutely love sweet potato vines.  They'll first eat all of the leaves off of the vines.  Then they'll go back and eat the vines themselves.  We like to think that it makes their milk taste sweeter the next day, but it may just be a figment of our imagination.

Then I'll get a shovel or garden forks and begin turning over the soil.  This exposes the sweet potatoes and I'll gather them and put them in a bucket.  Sometimes the sweet potatoes are completely underground and you can't see them and you'll cut right through them with a shove.  But sometimes, like in the photo below, they're somewhat exposed, and you can carefully pry them up out of the ground.

It's kind of like digging for treasure!  With a little digging, some nice sweet potatoes can be exposed.

Any small roots, or those I've accidentally cut into, are saved in a bucket to feed the cows.  They like sweet potatoes more than I do.  The nice ones, however, are saved for us!

Here is a little perspective on the size of these sweet potatoes.  This is a nice-sized one.  To be honest, I like the medium-sized ones the best, as the giant ones tend to be a little "stringy."

It took no time to fill a 5 gallon bucket.  I have many more hours of sweet potato digging to do, however.  We have a cool front blowing through, so it will be nice sweet potato digging weather.

Tricia came out and kept me company while I dug some of them.  She'll be cooking all of the sweet potatoes.  It is truly farm to table and honestly, sweet potatoes are one of the easiest crops to grow.  The photos above all show Beauregard variety, but I also have some "Golden Wonder" heirloom variety that pop up each year.

I estimate that I have maybe four or five hours of digging up the rest of the sweet potatoes.  The cows will certainly be very happy to eat more vines.  I hung the sweet potatoes from the rafters in the garage in an onion sack, and they'll cure there for a couple of months.  Can't wait to eat 'em up!!

Another Load of Topsoil

About a year and a half ago, we posted in THIS POST about higher ground about ordering a load of topsoil to raise the level in the garden.  The torrential rains we experienced in August 2016 reinforced the fact that we needed some more soil.  The rains soaked the garden and it seemed to never dry out. That resulted in sickly plants and even worse, a delayed fall garden.

I was determined to not fall prey to a low-lying garden area again, so I ordered a dump truck load of topsoil.  I thought it was a steep price at $220 for 14 yards of soil, but I talked to someone in Lafayette today that paid $275, so I guess it is all relative.  I moved the trampoline to the south and west and asked the dirt service guy to drop the load of soil on top of the craters that Big Boy dug underneath the trampoline.  He obliged and now I had my work cut out for me!

You move 16 tons and whaddaya get?  Another day older and deeper in debt...

Armed with a shovel and a gorilla cart and a hankering to do some good, honest physical labor, I began my task.  I wanted to get the job done before a rain came so that I could spread the soil easily throughout the garden.

My plan is to continue the job I started back in 2015 in the post I referenced in the first paragraph and that is to fill in the furrows between the rows.  I have an infestation of nutsedge or cocograss that keeps me busy in an endless weeding process.  I laid down some cardboard between the rows and began dumping the top soil on top of the cardboard, filling the furrows and then using my shovel to spread the dirt out evenly.  Perhaps the cardboard will frustrate the weeds to keep them from coming up, but I'll keep my expectations real low.  Nutsedge (cocograss) is a pernicious weed.

It took me a while, but I keep at it diligently and before you knew it, I was almost finished.  You can see the progress below.  In the garden where you can see Bull's Blood Beets and Chioggia Beets in the foreground and Swiss Chard on the next row, there aren't really rows anymore.  The ground level is all flat now.

Here is another shot looking straight down the row.  Now I ordered top soil and I must say that I was a little disappointed in this load.  If you look closely you can see dirt 'clods' and in chopping them up with a shovel, there was a bit of clay in my 'top soil.'  I wasn't real excited about putting any clay in the garden but most of the top soil was okay.

It will be beneficial to have the soil level raised by several inches.  Although drainage is certainly key, having a higher soil level will help to dry out the garden quicker.  I will say this - I was happy when the dirt pile was completely moved. Stay tuned as tomorrow, in a topic related to this post , I will give my nomination for the greatest invention ever made.

A Groundbreaking event - Literally

Last weekend, even though I ordinarily get this done a couple months earlier, I set out to begin breaking ground for the fall garden.  Normally, I would be doing this in mid to late August, but the torrential rains that fell throughout the month of August changed my plans!  Finally, the ground dried out and I circled October 8th to do the work.

I checked my Louisiana Vegetable Garden Planting Guide and to my delight, I discovered that I was still within range of planting dates for many of the fall crops that I like to plant.  Most of the crops had a cut-off date of October 15th for planting fall seeds.  My goal was to work up the entire garden on Saturday, plant what I could and continuing to plant each afternoon after work until the work was done. Some items like mustard greens, radishes and turnips don't have an October 15th cut-off date, so I can afford to wait on those.

I have 24 foot rows that are roughly 42 inches wide.  With my garden shovel, I can turn over the soil four shovel widths, chop up the dirt and then step back and repeat until I'm at the end of the row. Then I start on the next row.

Hey look, I found a SHOVEL-READY JOB!

Since during the spring and summer, I don't have a big hay inventory, the huge tarpaulin that is actually an outdoor billboard sign, got used in an experiment.  I draped it over a big portion of the garden.

Late summer ground covering

The experiment was to see if the tarp would suppress weed growth that normally appears.  I was hoping that the tarp would block the sunlight and eliminate weeds. The result?  Well, look below. You can see the area that was once covered by the tarp.  There were much fewer weeds under the tarpaulin than on the untarped garden area.  Also keep in mind that the difference in weeds between the tarped and un-tarped area would probably be much more pronounced if not for chickens.  If you recall, you'll know that my other experiment was allowing chickens to graze in the garden area and cut the grass.  Had the chickens not been there, I think you would see taller grass in the bottom of the photo, amplifying the good work that the tarpaulin did in covering the ground.

Rolling away the tarp (top half of photo)

The other noticeable difference in the tarped and untarped soil was that the soil that had been under the tarp was soft and easy to turn with the shovel.  The soil exposed to the weather was more compacted and hard to turn.  The tarp made my shovel-work easier.  There is a slight downside to the area covered by the tarpaulin, though.  The chickens that roamed the garden for over a month put down fertilizer everywhere except the area covered by the tarp.

Turning the soil over

Even though September and definitely October have been drier months than August, the ground was still moist, with big clods of dirt sticking together that had to be broken with a shovel to work into a finer consistency.

Then I put on my work gloves and hand-scattered pelletized agricultural lime over the rows and worked the dirt with my trusty hoe.

I hand pulled any weeds remaining, trying hard to pull them up by the roots and throwing them over the garden fence.  Then I got out my seed inventory and the Louisiana Vegetable Garden Planning Guide and began sowing both purchased and saved seed.  I may go into that in a little more detail tomorrow.  I was very tired after turning all the soil, but I felt good and energized and I slept deeply and peacefully, happy to have the garden soil worked and anxious to start planting.

Buried Treasure

This past Saturday the weather was one of those "Chamber of Commerce Days" - a day where you get outside and you just don't want to go back inside.  The grass and trees are showing the bright green of new growth, flowers are blooming and the fragrance fills the air, and a soft wind was blowing.

Russ came in from college and wanted to get outside and help get the Spring Garden in.  One of my goals for the day was to put in a 50 foot row of sweet corn right next to the Irish potatoes.  We each got a shovel and began turning over the soil.  It was hard work doing it the old fashioned way, but it felt good working side by side.  This was indeed a 'Shovel-Ready Job!!'  Here is the result of our work:

Fifty foot row ready for corn planting

This soil is on a portion of land that sits just west of our house.  We haven't planted any crops on it before, so I figured the soil would be well-rested.  As we were turning over each shovel full of dirt and giving it a few chops to break up the compacted earth, I felt a "clang" against the blade of my shovel.  Something was buried in the soil and our digging unearthed it from it's previously undisturbed position.  What could it be?  Hmmmm...

I bent over and picked up the item you see in my hand below and wiped off years of dirt.  What is this buried treasure? Why, its a cobalt blue colored old-fashioned marble!

Buried Treasure!

I can remember when I was farming in Oberlin, we'd plow a field and pull up levees, preparing the land for rice planting.  Some of the land that was now vast fields, was previously home places decades before. After a rain, I could walk the levees and the rain would have exposed from the plowed soil, old fashioned bottles and old fashioned marbles like the one I'm holding in my hand above.  I'd put them in my pocket and bring them home.  I've got them in a box or a drawer someplace.

It's odd to think that the "boys or girls" that played with the marble I'm holding in my hand are probably long dead by now.  It shows how time moves on and things change.  Prior to computers and television and iPhones, kids played marbles outside.  This Link says that marbles were first manufactured in Germany in the 1800's and became popular in the US around 1870.  It also states that in England marbles were played around Tinsley Green for many centuries, dating back to 1588. Interestingly, it states that:

 "the marbles-playing season started on Ash Wednesday and lasted until midday on Good Friday: playing after that brought bad luck."

Well, I'm not superstitious, but if I was, I guess I still it is comforting to know that I have at least 3 more days to play marbles...

"Karl Witkowski - Game of Marbles"

I can remember in the 70's we played marbles at recess.  I had a pouch full of marbles.  If I recall correctly, we'd play a game called "keepsies".  This is probably where the saying "playing for keeps" came from.  In this game we'd draw a big circle.  Marbles would be placed in the center and if you shot your buddies' marbles out of the circle with your "plunker" (a bigger marble), you would get to keep them - hence the name, keepsies.  Of course we had marbles that we thought were the prettiest and we didn't like losing them.  You always hoped to fill your pouch with more marbles than you started with.

As I looked at the pretty marble in my hand that I dug up, I thought about the boy that lost it and how sad he must have been.  I thought about the much simpler times he lived in and those carefree times spent playing marbles under the sprawling branches of a live oak tree.  Buried treasure?  Not really, but a pretty cool relic and a nostalgic remembrance of a by-gone era.  Hopefully the same soil that yielded me the cobalt blue old-fashioned marble will, in about 100 days, also yield bushels of sweet corn for us to enjoy.  We are, after-all, playing for keeps!