My Nemesis - Fire ants

I hate fire ants.  Seriously.  Our pasture is full of them.  Mounds and mounds of fire ants litter the landscape.  In the yard, I've thrown up the white flag and will purchase a bag or three of Amdro and poison them as I don't like to be bitten by them.  The pasture and garden, though, is another matter. We try not to use any pesticides where our animals roam and eat since we don't want the chemicals around things that we're going to end up eating.

This has led to an interesting dilemma.  The fire ants build huge mounds.  Some of them are over a foot tall.  Being that chickens love to eat bugs, I thought that maybe the chickens would eliminate them.  That proved to be a faulty assumption.  The ants don't seem to bother the cows, goats and chickens, but they bother me.  When it rains the ants ball up and float until they get to higher ground and inevitably I'll step in them and my ankles will be covered with bites.  Or they'll seek someplace high and dry like the nesting boxes in the chicken tractor.  When we go to collect eggs, the nesting box will be full of fire ants.

A huge fire ant mound

Even when they aren't biting you, they cause other problems.  For one, their tunneling pushes up weed seed and bitterweed and other pesky weeds will grow from the middle of the ant pile.  I'll pull those so they don't produce seed and proliferate across the mostly weed-free pasture.  Then, and arguably the most troublesome is just the existence of the mounds.

I have 3 chicken tractors in the pasture that are on wheels.  The meat birds will reside in one and the pullets will reside in the others until they are old enough to lay and then I'll open the doors and let them free range.  The problem with the ant mounds is that when you go to push the chicken tractor to fresh grass each day, you hit an ant pile and you must either lift the tractor up and over the pile or move the tractor to avoid it.  It's just troublesome.

Dadgum ants!

I've tried several 'natural' ways to eradicate them.  Someone said sprinkling instant grits on the ant pile would get 'em.  The theory is that the ants eat the grits and then when the grits get wet in their stomach, the grits expand and blow up, thus killing the ant.  We tried it and had no success.  Not only was it not successful, it was wasteful and blasphemous for a Southerner to do such a thing to grits!

I tried another method that told to use the ants' territorial nature as a weapon against them.  This was indeed a 'shovel-ready job' but wasn't funded by any government stimulus dollars.  You were to take a shovelful of dirt and ants from one mound and put it on a neighboring mound and vice versa.  The theory was that the ants from neighboring "tribes" would battle each other and kill each other off.  No noticeable effect.  Benjamin and Russ have been known to put firecrackers in ant mounds and light them.  This is great fun.  The mound is blown up and it kills many ants, but this isn't really an efficient way to get rid of ants.

We tried putting fresh cow poop on top of ant piles.  We have plenty of that around! You know what?  This actually works - not to kill them, but they all pack up their little suitcases and move (to another location nearby), so it is not a real panacea. One thing that works is pouring boiling water on the mounds.  I'll boil 8 cups of water in the microwave and then carefully carry the bowl outside and pour on top of the mound.  This cooks the ant pile and ants and kills the colony.  This is loads of fun if you are bored, but really isn't practical if you have numerous ant piles spread out over acres of pasture.

So bottom line is, I'm still looking for a natural way to kill all the fire ants on Our Maker's Acres Family Farm.  At this point I'm still searching for a solution and I can't seem to find one of these guys for sale on Amazon.com.

Image Credit

If you have any natural ways to kill fire ants, I'd love to hear from you.

Picking up Pecans

The arrival of Fall means that leaves begin falling from the trees.  We'll mow those leaves eventually and then rake them up and work them into the garden soil.  There is something else falling from the trees besides leaves, though.  Pecans!  What is Fall and Thanksgiving without a piping hot from the oven, delicious pecan pie made with Steen's Cane Syrup? We are blessed to have four pecan trees in our yard and at least three in the pasture.  We end up having much more that we can use.

We also have a pecan orchard on the family farm that was planted by my Great Grandfather.  The pecans at the farm are bigger than the ones that we have at home and they are easier to shell.  Our pecans are very small and difficult to shell, but they are rich, fat, and full of oil.  Our local feed store has a mechanical pecan cracker, but our pecans are so small, they won't work in the machine.  That's okay, though.  I enjoy sitting in front of the fireplace on cold nights and cracking and shelling pecans.

Before you begin cracking and shelling, you've got to get out there and pick them up.  The shortened days don't allow me the daylight to pick up pecans on weekdays, so Tricia and Benjamin go outside and pick every day.  Just look at the ground.  You can't find a square foot area without a pecan or two.  And more fall by the day!

Pecans 'a Plenty!

Now you can pick them up the old-fashioned way - by bending over and picking them up and tossing them in a bucket.  Or you can use a couple of back-saving methods.  We have two different contraptions we use that are both based on what I call the "Slinky" technique.  I purchased this first one from a local hardware store. You simply hold the handle, point the pecan picker upper right over a pecan on the ground, and push down on the device.  The 'slinky' will open, allowing the pecan to enter the holding area.  Rinse, wash, repeat until the 'slinky' is full.  Simple as pie. Pecan pie.

Pecan Picker Upper #1

This second contraption is one from my childhood.  It is the same general principle, except instead of stabbing down on the pecan, you roll it.  When you roll over the pecan, the 'slinky' opens to accept the pecan and closes and will fill quickly.

Pecan Picker Upper #2

On Saturday Benjamin and I got outside for a few minutes and it didn't take long for us to fill a 5 gallon bucket.  He used one of the picker-uppers and I used the other.  It was quick work and soon we had picked up everything under the tree right outside the back door.  A quick glance skyward tells me that there will be more to pick tomorrow, and the day after, and so on and so forth.

Emptying Pecans in the Bucket

You can work fast or you can be slow and steady.  Both methods enable you to collect pecans that we'll eat on for the next year.  We'll also give some away and allow our neighbors to come pick pecans from our trees.  The only reason that you don't want to go too slow picking them up is that you are competing with critters for the pecans.  We have lots of squirrels in the trees that are interested in the commodity that falls from the treetops.  If you work too slow, they'll put a serious dent in your pecan harvest.  You can see some evidence of the squirrels' eating pecans below:

Evidence of Squirrels

So far we have 3 onion sacks (we call them crawfish sacks) full plus a half-filled five gallon bucket. We'll still pick up a few more, but this should be enough for our family for the year. 

2014 Pecan Harvest (so far)

We'll hang the bags from trees on low humidity days and allow them to dry.  One year I jumped the gun and began shelling pecans before they were dry.  I looked in my bowl of beautiful shelled pecans the next day and noticed that they were all molded.  Such is life in a high humidity zone, but I won't make that mistake again. From what I read, you are supposed to let them dry on screens or in mesh bags for 2 weeks.  You can test to ensure they are dry enough by shelling a few.  If the pecan half breaks, you're all good.  If it bends, you need to leave them out hanging to dry some more.

It's a lot of work between picking them, cracking them, and shelling them, BUT when you take that first bite of homemade pecan pie, well... you'll know immediately that your labors were worth the effort! 

Goldenrod Honey

We have a vacant field across from our home that used to be planted in rice and most recently in soybeans, although the field has been left fallow for the past several years.  That is just fine with us. Dewberries grow up wild on the outside levee and me and Benjamin and Tricia are able to go right across the road and pick buckets full of the plump, sweet berries and we turn them into jelly or freeze them whole to make wonderful goat milk and dewberry smoothies for breakfast.  Or pies...  Or cobbler with homemade ice cream on top!

In the summer, beginning in July, the same field that provided gallons and gallons of dewberries also provides something else.  Goldenrod.  Goldenrod is often blamed for giving people allergic reactions. Actually goldenrod season coincides with ragweed season and gets the blame for a lot of what ragweed causes.  Here is a picture of our goldenrod field just north of our mailbox.  A rich golden color glows and if you look closely...

Our Goldenrod Field

You'll see that not only is the field glowing, but it is buzzing.  Bees are flying all throughout the goldenrod field going absolutely crazy with the pollen.  In fact you can scarcely find a stalk of goldenrod without a honeybee or two on it enjoying the intoxicating goldenrod nectar.

Image Credit

The reason I bring this up is something odd happened the other day.  We were having our home re-roofed.  It's a painful subject to be sure.  If you've read our blog before, you know that we have a colony of bees that live in a hollow column that supports the roof over our side door.  They access their hive through a small gap between the top of the fiberglass column and the roof.  If you stand by the column at night, you can hear and feel the vibration of thousands of bees.  It is kind of scary.

Our bees have never stung us, but sometimes they're very active and on those days, our guests don't enter our house through the side door, but through the garage. When the roofers were working on our roof, the bees were very active.  So much so that they put off roofing the side of the roof near the bees because they were afraid of getting stung.  Actually, one of the roofers did get stung when they started removing the existing roof.  I guess the bees didn't go for all the hammers banging and they were going to wait until winter to finish up on the roof.  But Tricia told them that it would be best to begin roofing that side very early in the morning when it is still cool and the bees aren't as active. That's exactly what they did and they got it done without running from a swarm of angry bees.

Entrance to the bee hive

So, what in the world does this have to do with goldenrod honey?  Well, one of the roofers told us that something smelled like spoiled milk near the column of bees. Odd.  We got close to the column and sure enough - it smelled like cheese or something going bad.  What could it be?  I asked my beekeeper friend and he smiled and told me that it was goldenrod honey.  He said his wife absolutely hates it because of the smell, but that he loves it!  Here's an excerpt from This Article regarding Goldenrod Honey:

Nectar sourced from Goldenrod produces a distinct honey. Fellow beekeepers warned to not be alarmed when Goldenrod is in bloom. Even when opening the hive and before harvesting honey, the smell is markedly different. Without this advance notice, I would have been concerned something was wrong. Some written descriptions categorize this as a spicy smell. Others suggest a faint licorice aroma. The leaves of Goldenrod (actually a member of the herb family) do smell a bit like licorice when crushed so perhaps that is a nice way to characterize it. Honestly my best descriptor for the smell of Goldenrod honey is "cheesy".
Goldenrod-based honey is a rich amber color, much darker than honey harvested after the bees have foraged on spring flowers such as clover. It is almost as dark as maple syrup. There is a slightly spicy taste and, thankfully, nothing cheesy. The honey is truly delicious.

A Column-full of Bees AND Goldenrod Honey

I'd like to try some goldenrod honey.  Although the honey smells, it is said to be delicious.  (I've never known honey that wasn't!)  There's only one problem.  I don't know of an easy way to rob the honey out of our column.  I guess the only way I'll get to sample the distinct taste of goldenrod honey is to purchase a jar from my buddy.

The Last Hurrah

The cows have picked through the remaining grass in the pasture.  What remains is the long, mostly innutritious grass with seed heads.  I contacted the gentleman that sells us round bales of hay each year and asked him to reserve about 24 round bales for us.  He'll deliver 6 bales at a time and we roll out one bale at a time into the pasture and put a hay ring around it and the cows eat it at will.  It normally takes them about a week to polish off a bale.

Our hay man will deliver the first delivery on the weekend following Thanksgiving. We normally try to start feeding hay beginning on December 1, but this year is a little different.  We've already had a light freeze last week and expect a heavier freeze on Tuesday.  This will knock out the remaining grass and we'll supplement with the square bales that we have up in the hayloft until the round bales arrive.

Not appetizing to the cows

We do have a little spot where the grass is still green.  We call it the 'sacrifice pasture' and it is right south of the barn.  I ran a 'jump wire' from the perimeter fence to electrify a temporary electric fence around the sacrifice pasture and moved Daisy, Rosie, and Amy into the area.  They ran into it and stayed, heads down eating, all Saturday.  In the late afternoon, all 3 of them were sitting down, full, chewing their cud. They were very happy and had all eaten their fill.  Later that afternoon, I opened the gate and they lazily walked to the barn.

The Sacrifice Pasture

There is still some good grass remaining in there and I'll move them in there the next time I'm home in daylight hours to watch them.  A couple more times into the sacrifice pasture and they will have it all grazed down.

Rosie, Daisy and Amy eating the last of the green grass

They'll have to be content with hay from now until Spring.  Usually we'll have some clover that will pop up out of the barren, brown, dormant grass and we'll let them enjoy that, but that's not until after the first of the year.  I have hundreds and hundreds of turnips planted that we'll supplement their winter diets with.  They love turnips.

Last night after milking, Daisy ambled up to the gate to get back into the sacrifice pasture.  We laughed and pulled her away from the gate and out of the barnyard and locked the corral behind us. Since the sacrifice pasture only has electric fence, we have to remain outside keeping watch over them as we can't have them escaping. There is a busy road not far away and the old adage about "the grass always being greener on the other side" is always true in a cows' mind. 

Curing/Drying Our Peanut Harvest

We talked about harvesting our first ever peanut crop in This Post.  Once Benjamin and I harvested our peanut crop, we did pop a couple out of the shell and eat them, but to really do them right, you gotta dry them.  I brought them in the garage and ran a rope from one end of our canoe to the other and hung the entire peanut plant with peanuts facing up, from the rope.  We allowed them to dry for about 3 weeks. You could tell that they were ready because the leaves of the plant got dry and crumbly.

Drying the Peanuts

I popped the peanuts off of the peg (or shoot) that the peanut grew on.  As we explained in the blog post about the harvest, we waited much too long to harvest our peanuts and a bunch of them sprouted in the shell and we lost them.  But we still have enough to eat.  Here is a handful of the freshly dried peanuts.

"Give me some peanuts and cracker jacks..."

All in all we only had 6 peanut plants, so our peanut harvest was very skimpy.  Any knowledgeable peanut farmer would laugh at our little bucket of peanuts, but this was a first for us and we're definitely going to try it again.

The entire peanut harvest

Once I ensured that there were no more peanuts clinging to the plant, I piled what remained up and brought the plants out to the compost pile.

Off to the compost pile

So our big dilemma was what to do with our peanuts?  Roast them? Boil them? Make homemade peanut butter?  Or save them for seed to replant peanuts this Spring?  We haven't made up our minds yet, but we'll definitely show you whatever we decide to do with them.  My vote is to make peanut butter.

Liquid Fish

Fertilizer.  We don't use normal fertilizer to encourage growth in the vegetables in our garden.  We mainly work to build healthy soil by amending it with organic matter and compost.  This attracts worms which in turn add fertility to the soil.  To that soil, we'll also work in composted chicken and cow manure into the soil between crop plantings.

In addition to those all natural fertilizers, we use another one - fish emulsion.  We use it in several forms - one is a powdered form, shown below, that you mix a couple tablespoons of the fish powder with a gallon of water and then pour the stinky liquid in a garden sprayer, shake it, pump it and spray it.

Powder form of fish-based fertilizer

Today, however, we're going to use not a powdered form of fish, but a liquid one. It's called Shafer Liquid Fish.  Liquid fish.  Think about that.  This bottle of brown sludge is exactly that.  It is fish caught out of the Mississippi River that is ground down and pureed into a 'soup.'  This soup is chock-full of nutrients and minerals that plants need to grow.  Remember how the Native Americans taught the early settlers to bury a fish by the newly planted corn?  This is the same concept.  As the fish decomposed, it released fertilizer that the corn utilized to grow.  Well, here is a bottle of liquid fish. Let's get busy!

Liquid Fish

As I popped the top and unscrewed the bottle a smell filled the garage.  A foul smell. It reminded me of the smell of the pogy plant south of Lake Charles around Cameron.  When I was a kid, we would go crabbing down there and I remember that awful smell.  Pogies are a small fish that were caught and then brought to the pogie plant where they would be ground and cooked.  It was a smell like no other and a smell I still recall years later.  This smell now filled by garage.

A liquid fish cocktail

The ratio of liquid fish to water is 1:20, so i poured the bottle of liquid fish into my garden sprayer and then poured 20 bottles full of rainwater in the garden sprayer that I fished (pardon the pun) out of the rainwater that I caught off of our roof after the previous days' rain.

Filling with rainwater

I shook the sprayer to mix the water and fish sludge and then pumped up the sprayer to pressurize it and then walked out to the garden and began to spray it on the plants.  As you can see below I began spraying all of the leaves of the plants. The picture below shows me spraying the row of broccoli with liquid fish.  This spray provides a good foliar feeding to the plant.  Foliar feeding is where leaves are given a generous spraying of fish emulsion so that their leaves are able to absorb nutrients in the liquid fish through their leaves.

Foliar Feeding of Foul Smelling Fish

As a cold front was coming in, some of the fish mist splashed up into my face, providing a reminder to always stand upwind when spraying!  When I was finished a strong smell lingered in the air around the garden. Despite the smell, this will give our plants a boost.  One thing of note, since we are currently harvesting kale and bok choy, I did not spray those rows as I wanted to ensure that our greens weren't fish flavored when we eat them.

A Chick Check Up

How do you like this new time?  I am not fond of it.  When I get home it is dark and it is difficult to get anything done outside.  That relegates my activities to indoor projects.  Ugh...  Yesterday I went to the garage and was just "puttering around." Do you ever putter around?  It takes great skill and patience to putter around.  To the untrained eye, when you are puttering around, it looks like you are just wasting time, but  unorganized action and lack of a clear goal aside, puttering can be therapeutic and somewhat productive.  I'm an accomplished putterer and it has taken years to perfect my craft.

Yesterday afternoon I was in the garage, deeply engaged in putterishness.  The outside temperature was dropping and I wanted to make sure that our 24 Barred Rock pullet chicks would continue to be comfortable in the brooder.  The thick bed of hay and the heat lamp provides a perfect environment for little growing chicks.  I added a little more chick feed to the tray and watched them jump in the tray and instinctively scratch with their little feet at the feed.

These are perhaps the most healthy birds that we've ever received in the mail.  They have been so lively since day 1.  They seem to be eating as much as we give them and drinking plenty of water.  At this point, they haven't soiled the hay in the bottom of the brooder such that the garage stinks and that is a good thing.  I have some repair work to do on the chicken tractors in the pasture before I move them out of the garage and that will require daylight, or Saturday or Sunday, to get that done.

But before we move them outside they have to have gotten feathers.  I decided to pick up one of the little chicks and inspect her 'featherization.'  (I think I just coined a word.)  When I tried to pick one up they all scattered, frightened by me.  Finally I snatched one little girl up and held her in my hand. While she's still mostly got the fuzz or down or whatever you call it, she does have something resembling feathers growing on the tips of her wings.  Can you see them?

"A bird in the hand..."

Let's take a closer look.  There.  I stretched out her wing and a uniform row of perfectly formed wing feathers appears, letting me know that our chicks are quickly developing.  That's a good thing.  The shortened days, molting adult hens, and reduced amount of protein available on our pasture have caused the adult hens' egg production to drop to about 2 dozen a day when we were collecting about 6 dozen a day previously.  These 24 chicks will be laying eggs in about 22 weeks, if all goes according to plan, and will supplement the egg production of our existing flock.

Wing feathers coming in

The little chick was getting impatient with me holding her and I put her back with her 23 other friends so they could eat until they were full and then bask in the radiant glow of the heat lamp. Other chickens sit under a heat lamp on the stainless steel counter at Popeye's.  Not ours.  These fortunate chicks will soon be out on pasture and will live out the rest of their days on green grass, eating bugs and worms, scratching through cow patties, taking dust baths and doing other important chicken activities.

It's high time I put the chick back in the brooder.  I have more puttering around to get done.