Bringing Back Sally From the Abyss

After rains we catch three or four hundred gallons of rainwater.  I turn the water off that feeds the cows' water troughs and fill their trough with the rainwater until we've exhausted the supply of rainwater.  There is a risk to doing this, though.  By the time I get home in the afternoon, the cows have been drinking a lot of water and have reduced the water level in the trough by about a third. This is not a problem for the cows as they can crane their necks down inside the trough and drink to their hearts' content.

The problem is the chickens.  Normally, they hop up on the edge of the cattle trough and dip their beaks down in the water to drink.  Except when the water level is only 2/3's full, sometimes chickens fall into the water and can't get out.  Most of the time, the dogs will hear the chickens thrashing about and will bark and alert us. Sometimes though, they don't.  One evening I came in and found Sally, the hen, floating in the trough.

I picked her up and sat her down on the ground.  She fell over on her side very, very weak.  She stunk, too.  Wet chickens stink! Even though it was warm outside at around 80 degrees, the hen was cold to the touch and she was shaking. Hypothermia.  She had been in the trough long enough to where she was unable to maintain her body temperature.  We've learned that unless action is taken, the hen will die.

Here's what we do:  We dry her off with a towel and bring her into the garage and put her in a big molasses tub.  This keeps wind from chilling her wet feathers. Then we put a heat lamp over her.  Not too close, but not too far away, either.  At first she couldn't even stand on her legs.  Over the course of about 20 minutes, she was up on her feet!

About 10 minutes later, I heard her clucking and standing erect.

Ten minutes later she had knocked the heat lamp to the side and was perched on the side of the molasses tub, presumably to roost there for the night.  That signaled me that we were successful in bringing Sally back from the brink of death.  She is out on the pasture now eating worms.  Had we not taken immediate action she would be about a foot deep in the garden feeding worms.

While We Are on The Subject of Solenopsis

Solenopsis is the scientific name for the fire ant.  Solenopsis is too nice of a name for those cursed ants that inhabit almost every square yard of our soil.  Last night I posted about how I took great joy in boiling a colony of ants alive with water left over from processing pickled beets.  I looked on with glee as the pile of ant carcasses sat atop their once thriving colony.  Boiling water is a cheap and effective way of killing ants if you don't mind killing the grass around the ant pile.

While boiling water works in eradicating most every ant in the mound, you can't use it in the garden as the boiling water will also boil your plants.  I wanted to show you an experiment I tried using Starbucks Coffee coffee grounds.  Starbucks has a program called "Grounds for Your Garden" in which they will give you (FOR FREE!!) used coffee grounds for use in your garden.  All you have to do is go pick them up.

Below you can see a huge ant colony that has built their sprawling estate on my pepper row.  If I sprayed poison to kill the ants, some of that poison would undoubtedly end up in my peppers.  It is not a wise idea to eat ant-killer flavored peppers.

But that is where my experiment comes into play.  Rather than use poison, I'll use coffee grounds from Starbucks.  I poured out the bags of coffee-drenched coffee grounds along with the drenched paper filters and spread them liberally on the fire ant mound.

Did the Starbucks Coffee coffee grounds kill the fire ants??  No, sadly, it did not kill the fire ants..   However, I thought I could see the ants loading up their tiny ant luggage and hitting the open road with the pepper row in their rear-view mirrors.  It is clear that fire ants do not like coffee grounds, but coffee grounds doesn't  kill them.  But by the next day, when I moved the coffee grounds away, all of the ants were gone!  There wasn't a single ant left!  They picked up their stuff and moved. They likely moved somewhere out of the garden and into the lawn and that's where they made their fatal mistake.  I"m not afraid of using ant poison in the yard - just not in the garden.  If they moved to the yard, I'll sprinkle some ant poison on the mound and eradicate the whole mound.

Starbucks coffee grounds scared off the fire ants.  Just sprinkle a generous portion of coffee grounds over  a fire ant mound and you'll send them packing!

What To Do With the Boiling Water After Processing Pickled Beets

Here at Our Maker's Acres Family Farm, we find ways to re-use almost everything. We can't have anything going to waste.  Once we finished making and processing the pickled beets that we talked about in Friday's Post, we had an entire stock pot of boiling water left over.  I could just pour it down the drain or let it cool and use it to water some plants.

Or I could use the entire pot of boiling water on a huge fire ant mount that is right outside our back door!

That's exactly what I did.  I very carefully carried the pot of boiling water outside and then stomped on the mound with my feet to get them all stirred up.  Once the fire ant mound was "boiling" with activity, I poured the entire pot of boiling water on top of them.

The mound instantly melted down, exposing the ants' tunnels and boiled ant carcasses along with boiled ant eggs.  You can see them if you look closely in the photo below.

I checked out the fire ant mound a little later and it appears that the undertaker ants had carried all their dead brethren to the surface for burial.  There were LOTS of dead ants on the surface of what used to be their mound.  Pardon me if I shed no tears...

We have lots of ant mounds in the yard and in the pasture.  Boiling water is a good way to "nuke" an ant pile in your yard.  Tomorrow I'll show you a technique to use in the garden to make the fire ants leave.

Making Pickled Beets

Many people - especially kids - make faces and turn up their noses when you talk about beets. Beets just aren't their favorite thing. I can understand that.  There are certain things that I'm not crazy about eating.  Turnips, for instance.  I happen to really like beets.  I like them cooked in broth.  I really like them roasted in the oven with olive oil.  But I'll show you tonight a way to prepare them that most everyone can enjoy.  Pickled beets.  My grandmother we called "Bumby" always served pickled beets as an appetizer at Sunday dinner and on special occasions.  I liked them as a kid and I still prepare and eat them pickled today.

First, you gotta pick 'em.  I grow two types of beets.  This is a bull's blood beets. The leaves look the color of bull's blood, I suppose.

Bull's Blood Beets

This is a Chioggia Beet.  It originates from Italy, and I'll show you something neat about this variety in a minute.

Chioggia Beets

I picked 10 pounds of fresh beets in a produce bucket since that's what the recipe calls for.

I brought them in and washed them to get all the dirt off of them.

Then I sliced the bottoms and tops off of them.  Chioggia on the left and Bull's Blood on the right.

Then I cut the beets all up - in chunks and slices.  Here's the neat thing I want to show you about Chioggia beets.  When you slice them, they look like a peppermint! You know, just like a starlight mint.  The others behind the "eye-catchers" you see below are the Bull's Blood beets.

If you cut the Chioggias 'long-ways' the red & white designs really stand out!

But enough about what they look like.  Let's make pickled beets, so we can talk about what they taste like.  Obviously, you'll need 10 pounds of beets.  You'll also need a couple of cups of sugar.  I used some pure cane sugar that is grown an hour south and east of here.  The recipe also calls for 1 Tablespoon of kosher salt, a quart of white vinegar and 1/4 cup of whole cloves.

A quick side-note about cloves.  I love the way they smell.  If I inhale deeply in the container of cloves, it reminds me of my childhood.  When I was a boy, my grandmother, Bumby, showed me how to make a craft with cloves.  It is a simple craft project that involves an orange and a bunch of cloves.  She had me press the pointed end of the cloves into the orange until it was pressed all the way in.  We repeated that with a bunch of cloves all over the orange until you couldn't even see the orange anymore.  It was solid cloves.  It was a sachet, I think you call it, to be placed in a closet or drawer to make everything smell nice.  Over time the orange got smaller and smaller, but it smelled GREAT!

Sorry for the diversion.  Back to making pickled beets.  Here are the ingredients ready to go.

Put the 10 pounds of cut up beets in a pot of water and bring to a boil, cooking for about 15 minutes or until they are tender.  I tested the tenderness with a fork.  When I could press the fork in easily, they are done.  Pull out 2 cups of the "beet water" to save for later.

Sterilize your jars, lids, and rings in boiling water.  In a separate pot (I made a big mess in the kitchen), add the sugar, vinegar, beet water, and salt and bring it to a boil.  While you are waiting for this to boil, fill your jars with beets.  Then pour the hot brine over the beets in the jar using a canning funnel.

Before putting the lids on, sprinkle the cloves and then seal up the jars.

Put a rack in the bottom of a stockpot so that the jars aren't touching the bottom and bring the water to a boil.  Put your jars of beets in the boiling water, making sure that the tops of the jars are covered.  When the water returns to a boil set your timer for 10 minutes as that is how long you will process them.

Pull them out and let them cool.  My pickled beets don't look traditional as the Chioggias are white and aren't the traditional deep red color, but that's okay with me.  They still taste great!

We'll snack on these before meal time and on special occasions.  Tasty pickled beets.  Nothing goes to waste.  The beet tops and peels get fed to the milk cows. They love the sweetness just like we do, I assume.  I even found an interesting use for the boiling water that I'll show you the next time I post.

2017 Meat Birds - 7 Weeks Old

The meat birds survived another rain storm this past week that gave us another 1 2/10s inches of rain.  This time we didn't get all the wind that resulted in 13 of our birds coming to a fateful end a few weeks ahead of schedule.  The chickens are clean and as white as a marshmallow.  I am still amazed at how easy it is to pull the chicken tractor.  Each day I'm faithful in pulling the tractor to a fresh spot, leaving behind a big rectangular "poop stain" where the chickens were the previous day.

They look healthy and happy, but something doesn't quite pass the 'eye test' with these birds.  As I picked what I thought appeared to be an average sized rooster up, he didn't feel like he weighed 5 pounds.  I placed him in the bucket and carried him through the backyard and into the garage where I have my scale set up on the table. I guessed that he would weigh 4 pounds.  Up you go on the scale, ol' bird.

I was right on target.  4 pounds and 1 ounce.  This is not good news.  I have been trying to do my best to pick an average sized bird each week.  Something is definitely wrong.  The bird from last week weighed 4 pounds 8 ounces.  Our goal is to raise them until they weigh roughly 6 pounds since that yields a 4 1/2 pound carcass.  The bird I selected last week must have been real heavy if this one, a week later, weighs 4 pounds 1 ounce.  If this rooster weighs 4 lbs, the hens must be a hair over 3 pounds.  I now calculate that we'll be butchering them at week 10.

Here are the results from Week 7:
*Week 7 2017:  4 pounds 1 ounce
*Week 7 2016:  5 pounds 14 ounces
*Week 7 2015:  3 pounds 9 ounces

To summarize, last week they weighed on average 4 pounds 8 ounces and this week 4 pounds 1 ounces. That means they lost 7 ounces over the last week.  They are not sick.  This indicates to me that I either picked an unusually large bird to weigh last week or a puny one to weigh this week. They are still 1 pound 13 ounces shy of where they were at this age last year, and 8 ounces heavier than what the 2015 birds weighed at this age.

We'll see how much they gained next week, but the butcher date will be very likely pushed out to either week 10 or 12.

The Staff of Life

Bread is called the "staff of life" because it is a very basic food that supports life and has been consumed by people for thousands of years.  Bread is eaten more than any other food in the world. It sustains life.

The Bible mentions the word bread 361 times!  It is an important staple to both the Israelites in the Old Testament AND to people today.  I was just reading about bread in the Book of Ezekiel:

“Son of man, behold, I am going to break the staff of bread in Jerusalem, and they will eat bread by weight and with anxiety, and drink water by measure and in horror, because bread and water will be scarce; and they will be appalled with one another and waste away in their iniquity."  Ezekiel 4:16-17

Matthew Henry's Commentary on the verse above states that Ezekiel was predicting the siege of Jerusalem because of the people's sins.  It was going to be bad.  Real bad.  Things were so bad that man was baking bread over human dung! Nasty. People were hungry.  During the siege, the supply lines were cut off.  Bread was scarce, but "God would not only take away from the bread its power to nourish, so that they should eat and not be satisfied, but He would take away the bread itself."

When you are hungry, the simplest of things - like bread, are so satisfying.  I love good bread.  We got a great loaf of french bread the other day from Breaux Bridge, Louisiana.  It is actually made in Jeanerette, Louisiana by LeJeune's Bakery.  It is wrapped in white paper with a blue printed label.

The name LeJeune is a popular French surname and comes from the french word jeune which means "young."  But LeJeune's Bakery is not young.  If you look at the label below, it says, "Baking the same French Bread since 1884."  Five generations of LeJeune's have baked this bread using the same recipe and production method. I think that is incredible!

Another thing that caught my eye is right in the center of the photo below.  The Ingredients.  They consist of 7 items: Flour, Water, Lard, Yeast, Salt, Sugar, and Malt. Do you notice something?  Simple.  Wholesome.  Good.  I can pronounce each word.  The longest word has two syllables.  That is a rarity if you compare it to  the ingredients on a loaf of bread on the grocery aisle.

We try to ration it, but good bread gets eaten quickly.  I kept making bread & butter sandwiches and then topped a slice with some of our tangerine marmalade.  That is some good snacking right there.

If you go to the LeJeune Bakery website, you can read about this family business in small town Jeanerette.  Click on the Bread Making Process on the left side of the page and you can watch the way they make bread.  I didn't see any automation or robots.  Just family members taking pride in what they do while making a quality product and carrying on a family tradition.  That's something to be proud of!

Building The New Chicken Tractor (Part III)

We had two previous installments where we showed the construction of our new chicken tractor:
Building The New Chicken Tractor (Part I) and
Building The New Chicken Tractor (Part II)

In Part II we finished building the tractor and we showed in Moving Day For The Meat Birds how we moved the birds into their new home.  Today I'll show you the last accoutrement of the chicken tractor that transforms the tractor into a 'mobile home' - WHEELS!

The design is not mine, but one that my friend Dale fabricated.  We pulled four of the inflatable tires off of the old chicken tractors and using a pivot on the axle that I'll show in the following photos, this design is versatile and genius!  Below you'll see the tractor in the down position, similar to when your car is in PARK.  In this case, the wheels are up and the chassis of the chicken tractor is resting on the ground, allowing no critters to get underneath and eat the chickens.

In this next position, you can see that the handle to the wheel assembly is in the horizontal position.  I call this the "Jacked Up Monster Truck" position.  In this position the chassis of the tractor is about as high as it will go.  This will come in handy when trying to roll over obstacles like fire ant mounds that are ubiquitous in the pasture.

In the next photo, you can see that the handle of the wheel assembly is at roughly a 45 degree angle.  There is a finishing nail nailed into the top of the handle and a chain with a hook on it fastens it in the DRIVE position.  Absent fire ant mounds, this position is perfect for rolling across the pasture.

Each day we move them to fresh grass so that they are able to forage on the grass while not sitting in their poop.  This also keeps the grass fertilized across the pasture.  In the DRIVE position, there is a small gap that makes it hard for a bird to fall underneath and get run over.  You still must be careful, though.  There is a rope on both the front and the back of the tractor so that you can pull it in either direction.  I pull while facing backwards so I can keep an eye on the birds.  They don't move too fast, you know.

The next photo simply shows the design of the off-set axle and you can get a better visual of how the pivot works.  Pretty cool, don't you think?  The birds are admiring the engineering of their mobile home.

The next and final photo shows a couple of things.  First you can see that we've fastened a blue tarp to the chicken tractor.  This provides some protection from the sun and rain, while still allowing airflow.  I simply attached it by using zip ties through the grommets around the wire fencing that makes up the outside of the tractor.  Next you can see the waterer that sits atop a blue tub and gravity feeds water via tubing into the bell waterer that is suspended from the 1x4 that runs along the top of the tractor.  Finally, you can see the "Trail of Smell" behind the tractor. The chicken poop initially kills the grass, but the grass comes back with great vigor, fed by the rich chicken poop.

And that, folks, is the new chicken tractor.  We have had some severe weather lately, including strong wind and hail, and Tricia and I discussed the possibility of wheeling the tractor, along with the chickens, into our garage to be safe. Fortunately, we didn't need to do that.

In summary, the new design of the chicken tractor is fantastic.  We will likely build another one that mimics this prototype design exactly.