One Call, That's All

We are down to the last 20 square bales of hay up in the loft.  That's about a 10 day inventory.  We rolled out the last round bale of hay in early February.  The spring grass that's coming up in the pasture is being gobbled down just as quickly as it comes up.  I planted seven rows of turnips, so we're supplementing the cows and goat's hay and feed with turnips and turnip greens.  Probably this weekend, I'll put up the temporary electric fencing in the yard and let the cows graze down the winter grass and white Dutch clover growing in the yard.  It's a stretch to get us to spring when the grass comes in.

So for 'insurance' I called a friend that we always purchase our round bales from and on Saturday morning, he delivered 10 round bales to us.  We rolled them off of the trailer and lined them up ready to be rolled out to the cows and goats.  We may not even need these bales until late fall this year if the grass comes in, but it's best to have them just in case.

You can't just leave good hay exposed to the rain, sun and weather and expect to have good bales for your animals if you don't protect them.  Our old tarp made from a recycled outdoor billboard lasted 20 years before it deteriorated.  Time for a new one.  I went to the outdoor advertising office to inquire about buying one.  I found our that they don't sell them.  Somehow or another (thank you, Lord!) at the end of the conversation, the gentlemen kindly had me drive around back, and I loaded a HUMONGOUS tarp (recycled vinyl outdoor billboard) into the back of my car to take home.  As it turns out, I used to go to church with a nice lady that worked there at the billboard company.  

I got the sign (tarp) home and Saturday night I unrolled it and covered all ten bales with the new tarp.  The tarp should keep the hay well-protected and dry until we need to uncover and roll them out.  I need to do a better job of weighing down the tarp with something to keep it from blowing off of the hay in high winds. 

There's only one downside about the tarp:  It's the sign advertising the services of a personal injury lawyer.  "Hurt?  Call the hurtline."  "Call So and So and Get it Done"  "One call.  That's all."  Everyone's gotta make a living, I get it, but these guys are a prime reason why no one can afford car insurance.  I wish they'd all go away.  Since I don't want to see the ambulance chaser's face everyday telling me "no fee paid unless settlement is made," I think I'm going to flip the sign upside down tomorrow.

Besides the bright yellow sign is a little too gaudy.  The back side is white, I think, and will blend in a little better instead of standing out.  Have you ever wondered why billboard attorneys use signs with yellow, red, and black on them?  Studies have conclusively proven that billboards with yellow, red, and black backgrounds are the most eye-catching signs.  They grab your attention at high speeds because they contrast with most surroundings.  Red communicates urgency and excitement and passion, studies show.

Yeah, I'm flipping the sign over with the quickness.  We (and the cows) like a more peaceful, pastoral atmosphere.

Winter Harvest Before the Ice Comes

Forecasts show lows of 23 degrees overnight into the morning and tomorrow lows down to 19 degrees overnight and into the morning.  This has sparked a flurry (pardon the pun) of activity in getting things taken care of and ready.  Yesterday, I wrapped all the pipes in the attic, the faucets attached to the house, and then all the water pipes and spigots in the garden and out in the pasture.  It took quite a while but we got prepared as best as we can.  Hopefully we can make it through the cold weather without any broken pipes.

Late this afternoon after church, we bundled up and got all the tarps out, covering everything that's out in the garden, trying to save what's there.  I'm not really worried about the root crops, so I'm leaving the beets and carrots and turnips alone.  The cabbage are said to fare very well through a freeze, too.  I did check on the cauliflower.  We have a LOT of cauliflower that's ready.  I learned that if your cauliflower freezes, it gets mushy and is ruined.  Not gonna take any chances with the cauliflower.  Gotta pick 'em!

Most of the cauliflower are very nice, bigger than the size of your hand.  I pick the head of the cauliflower off and feed all the leaves to the cows.  How they love that!  Cauliflower is one and done.  By that, I mean once you harvest the head, no more will grow.  Broccoli is a different story.  Once you pick the main broccoli head, little broccoli florets pop up all over the place, so you can continue harvesting as long as you have patience to get out there and pick.  Pound for pound, you probably get more broccoli from the little florets cumulatively than you do from the main head.

In pulling all the cauliflower off so they're not ruined in the freeze, we got a huge haul.  I don't really have anything for perspective, but that's a big basket in the photo below.  We'll be busy eating cauliflower and blanching and freezing it.

I like to also pull some beets (bull's blood and chioggia varieties) and carrots (Danvers and Cosmic Purple varieties).

As a kid, I often turned my nose up at vegetables, but no more!  We eat lots of them.  One of our favorite things to do is roast cauliflower, broccoli, beets, and carrots in the oven with some olive oil, butter, salt and minced garlic.  I cannot stress how delicious this is.

Fresh spinach is coming in too, right now in the garden, so Tricia made a beautiful spinach, ham, pecan and cheese quiche.  That paired nicely with lettuce from the garden and the roasted vegetables.  It made for an enjoyable lunch.

After two days, we'll take the tarps off the garden and see where we stand.  Will everything we covered survive?  Tune in and we'll report toward the end of the week.  Stay warm!

Success & Failure After the Deep Freeze

Prior to the deep freeze that rolled through our area, bringing 10 inches of snow and temperatures in the single digits, we listened to a gentleman at our bee club meeting tell us about a technique he used to save all of his citrus trees from temperatures in the low 20's from the year before.  We've always piled mulch real deep around the base of the trunk.  That didn't work out so well.  We didn't lose the trees, but it hurt them so badly, the next year we had no blooms, thus, no citrus.  We had to prune back all the dead branches.

I was interested in this man's tactics as his trees were loaded with satsumas and oranges where our poor trees were barren.  This guy purchased tarps at tractor supply and covered the entire tree.  Then, he ran extension cords to each tree and put a heat lamp under the tarp.  That's it!  So we endeavored to do likewise.  Note to self:  Purchase tarps in advance of the freeze.  Don't wait until the last minute because the shelves will be bare.  

Let's look at each of our three citrus trees.  We had more, but had lost them in previous freezes.  Here below is a small satsuma tree.  It's only about 3 1/2 feet tall, so what I did was turn a heavy plastic trash can over it and put a heat lamp underneath.  Look at the results.  The heavy trash can did a pretty good job of keeping the heat inside.  The uppermost limbs and leaves are dead, but there is green growth toward the bottom where the heat lamp was positioned.

Looking more closely at the bottom of the satsuma tree, you can see fresh, new, green growth along with LOTS of blossoms.  We WILL have satsumas this fall!

Here is our navel orange tree.  As I told you, it is big.  Too big, in fact, to get the tarp over it and fastened tightly at the bottom.  We did the best we could.  I wonder if it would be beneficial to prune the tree back to ensure the ability for the tarp to completely go over and seal good with bungee cords at the bottom.  We were able to put the heat lamp underneath, but from a distance, the navel orange tree looks bleak.  We may have to chop it down.

Not so fast, my friend.  As you look closer, there is green growth coming out of the central trunk!  That's great news.

Looking closer, you can make out orange blossoms.  What a nice fragrance!  We'll have oranges this winter.

Well, things are looking pretty good.  Let's check in on the tangerine tree.  It had been hurt badly by the previous freeze, so it was smaller.  We wrapped it completely with a tarp and put a heat lamp under the tarp.  Uh Oh!  There's no growth.  This thing is toast.

We'll have no tangerines this fall.  These were so tart and tasty.  Their color was what I describe as "electric orange."  We'll have to buy another to replace this one.  I'll chop this one down.  Things were looking pretty good with our new freeze protection protocol.  However, I try to be a glass half full kind of guy.  And like ol' Meatloaf sang, "Two outta three ain't bad."

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.

Un-Tarping the Garden

The freeze is past us.  At last!  Saturday morning, I quickly went out to the garden and began unfurling the big tarps off of the garden vegetables.  I was curious to see what we had remaining.  The lowest our temperatures got was 14 degrees, but it stayed well below freezing for a number of days.  In reading about plants' ability to survive in frozen temperatures, much mention was made not only of the low temperatures, but of the length of time that the frozen temperatures persisted.  Both variables do not stand in our favor.

I've already resigned myself to the fact that we may have lost everything.  In a "glass half full" perspective, this just means we'll have more room to plant the spring garden earlier.  I think we'll give the plants a few days under the sunshine and warmer temperatures to decide what to do.  Let's look at each row and the prognosis.

I harvested all of the turnips and radishes in the midst of the freeze.  The cows and goats enjoyed eating the greens and the roots.  I added some additional mulch atop the rows of those harvested crops.  Moving to the left, the swiss chard is hurt pretty bad.  After this photo was taken, we cut them down to the ground to see if fresh growth will come.  The Brussels sprouts look fairly unaffected.  Good news.

The carrots look green and relatively healthy.  The greenery is just flattened as the water/ice on top of the tarp mashed it down.  I'll give them a few days to see if the sunshine perks up the greens.  It is about time to harvest the carrots, blanch them and freeze them anyway.  Probably tomorrow I'll pull a carrot to ensure the root itself wasn't damaged by the freeze.

In the upper left hand corner, you can see the Galilee Spinach.  I had been allowing it to go to seed to save seed for next fall crop.  I will give it a few days, but I think I lost the seed!  Unfortunate, but c'est la vie.

The lettuce is a mess.  We pulled it all up and tossed it to the chickens.  They enjoyed the tossed salad.  We had our most productive lettuce crop ever.  All good things must come to an end, I assume.

The bull's blood beets' foliage are flat and freeze damaged.  Similar to the carrots, I'll give them a few days to see if they bounce back or if I need to harvest the beet roots.

The dinosaur kale (lacinato kale) looks fairly unaffected.  The cabbage is damaged, however, and we'll have to see if they survive.  You can see they have a yellow, sickly tinge to them.  The broccoli is still standing.  We'll see if they continue to produce little florets that we have been enjoying.

I was very worried about our onion crop.  They were looking SO good!  The onion tops are flattened somewhat and there is leaf damage.  A few days will be needed to see if they are resilient and bounce back.  Boy, I sure hope so!

Finally, the mustard green row had some leaf damage, but they'll make it.  I picked off some of the damaged leaves and the cows and goats were appreciative.

All in all, it could have been a lot worse.  We'll report the verdict for those crops that the jury is still out on in a few days.  Meanwhile, our goal is to get our potato crop in the ground this week.  We're about a week late right now, but who's counting?

Preparing for the Cold Weather

 “Out of the south cometh the whirlwind: and cold out of the north.” 

                       Job 37:9

I believe with my whole heart that the Bible is inerrant, factual, and inspired by God.  I found a tidbit of truth this morning I put above.  Isn't that true?  In the last six months, we've had TWO whirlwinds (Hurricanes Laura and Delta) from out of the south and now we have icy cold coming out of the north.  Being southerners, we're prepared for hurricanes.  Winter ice storms?  Not so much.

We started preparing the best we know how, wrapping pipes, putting animals in the barn, installing heat lamps for the chickens, bringing potted plants indoors, and piling lots of firewood on the back patio.  This is one benefit I can think of of the hurricanes.  We now have more firewood than we can shake a stick at.  We'll burn it!

The next thing we began to do is harvesting the remainder of the oranges off of the navel orange tree.  Once we finished, we had about two 5 gallon buckets full.  We'll bring it inside and either eat it or make fresh squeezed orange juice.

One thing that concerns me is what the photo shows below.  Our orange trees were just about to bloom.  Temperatures could be down close to ten degrees.  We are not only worried about losing the blooms and thus, fruit for next year, but we're concerned about losing the trees!

We also picked the last grapefruit off the tree.  Our tree is young and only made 3 grapefruit this year.  We were rationing them and this is the last one.  We'll enjoy it, for sure.

Here are the blueberry bushes.  You'll notice the blooms are about to open on them.  Hmmm...  I pray we still have blueberries this spring!

Another good thing about hurricanes is that we have tarps.  Lots of blue tarps!!  I stretched them out over the plants (carrots, beets, brussel sprouts, spinach, lettuce, kale, kohlrabi, chard).  It may not save them, but it's the best we could do.

On this side, I covered the cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, and onions.

Looking back toward the front of the garden, you can get an idea of just how much of the garden we were able to cover.  I hope it saves the vegetables.

After thinking about it, I made another last ditch effort to save some fruit trees by piling mulch deeply around the base of the plants.  I also put a couple of trash cans over the limbs of the grapefruit tree.

It will likely stay frozen from Sunday night through Wednesday.  Precipitation (sleet, ice, snow) is forecast for early this morning.  We rarely have weather as cold as this for this long.  We'll report back how we fared.  On the bright side, I DON'T HAVE TO DRIVE IN TO WORK TOMORROW!

2019 Meat Birds - Five Weeks Old

I saw a funny T-shirt this week that said, "I dream of a day when a chicken can cross the road without having its motives questioned."  Pretty funny.  Speaking of chickens...

Here are the meat birds in the chicken tractor.  Notice how we've put a large tarp over the tractor to protect the birds.  We had monsoon rains today, but the heat lamp never went out and the birds survived high winds and rains due to the preparations we took.  It may not look so pretty, but it got the job done.  I'm not sure that this apparatus would be approved in a gated community with an HOA.  Ha ha!

We were happy that our birds survived the storm.  One year we were not so fortunate.  We experienced 60+ mph straight line winds in the middle of the night.  The chicken tractor had a tarp on it as well that year, but the winds treated the tarp like the sail on a ship and it flipped the chicken tractor over.  By the time we got outside, there were dead or dying chickens scattered all over the yard.  What a sight to see!  Well, we weren't going to let that happen this year.  We were more prepared.  Last night we took some long tent stakes and tied some baling twine to them and each corner of the chicken tractor.  Then we hammered the stakes into the ground to anchor it.

The stakes held the tractor down despite high winds.  All of the birds survived.  Good news!

Okay, it is time for the weekly weigh-in.  Let's go.  I picked up 3 birds and put them in a bucket and carried them to the back patio where I've placed the kitchen scale.

In just looking at the birds, I don't see where they have grown a whole lot over the last week.  Let's see what the scale says:

I weighed 3 different birds that I picked up at random.  Last week the three birds I picked up averaged 2 lbs. 8 oz.  This week the three birds I picked up averaged 3 lbs. 4 oz.  So they gained 12 ounces over the last week.  Good, but not great.

Here's a comparison with where they are now (3 lbs 4 oz.) compared to previous years at this same time frame:

Week Five 2018: 3 pounds 14 ounces.  
Week Five 2017: 2 pounds 15 ounces.
Week Five 2016: 4 pounds

We'll see where we are next Thursday.  Hope to see you back.