The Heat & Humidity Reduction Act of 2022

When we're in sweltering heat, we look at each other and say, "How much longer do we have of this?"  The answer is right there.  September temperatures average a high of 88 degrees and low of 69 degrees.  Right now it's 91/73.  September is only 2 1/2 weeks away.  That's something to hang your hat on - something to look forward to.

Meanwhile we look for ways to regulate the heat.  Let me share one idea with you.  A tall glass of lemongrass tea with shaved ice with a sprig of fresh mint for garnish.  First, put the cold glass against your forehead and then take a sip.  Not too fast, though.  You'll get a brain freeze.  Sounds good?  Let's make some.

I started this clump of lemongrass from seed several years ago.  It dies back in the winter, but always pops back up in the spring.  It is big and unruly, with sharp leaves that'll cut you like pampas grass.  We have it growing in our little herb garden with some rosemary, ginger, oregano, French sorrel and parsley.  I'll reach over and cut some off.

If you could smell this, you would see why it's called Lemon Grass.  It has a wonderful aroma of lemons.  In addition to making tea, you can use it to cook with to make Vietnamese dishes.  We've never tried it, but I'd like to.

I washed it off real good, because there's ants and all sorts of critters that I don't want in our tea.  I cut it up into inch-long pieces, put in a pot and add water.  I put the top on, bring it to a boil and then turn the heat to simmer and let it steep.

I poured through a colander and funnel.  The stems and leaves will be composted.

We'll let the lemongrass tea cool in the windowsill for a while.  It's got a nice color to it and a nice fragrance as well.  In fact, the entire kitchen smells fresh like lemons.

Ready to beat the heat?  Lemme pour a glass for you.

*Takes a big, long sip*

Ahhhh.  That's real nice and refreshing.  This will go a long way in helping us make it to the cooler temps in September.  Stay cool, friends.

A Perfect Quick Meal Fresh (Frozen) From the Garden

We've done this post many times, but doing this in advance (a stitch in time saves nine, right?) has pulled us out of a bind many times when we ask ourselves "What's for supper tonight?"  Of course I'm talking pesto.  Time after time, we raid the leaves off of our basil plants and make pesto.  We freeze it in individual containers and pull them out and thaw and make some pasta and BOOM!  There's a delicious, quick and nutritious meal idea.  Today I added another ingredient that stepped up the pesto a notch or two. 

I moved a bench next to the basil plant and picked a bunch of the fresh tender, new leaves.

I picked 8 cups of basil leaves.  The secret ingredient I used this time?  Green onions.  You might call them shallots or onion tops.  I added a cup of these to the 8 cups basil leaves.

I grated some Parmesan cheese in a big measuring cup.

Here are all the ingredients.  You can see the green onions with the basil, the grated parmesan cheese.  Since we have pecans, we substitute them instead of walnuts or pine nuts.  Extra virgin olive oil.  12 cloves garlic.

Here's the recipe we have used for years.  You can see that we quadruple the recipe since we make batches for freezing.

This is the dry-looking paste that is made by mixing the leaves with the pecans in the food processor.

Then the cloves of garlic go in the processor...

And then the olive oil...

A delicious concoction indeed, but we're not done.

We add all the cheese along with salt and pepper to taste.

Then I spoon it into containers for freezing.

I wish you could taste how good this stuff is!

We have served this over pasta.  We've used it as a base (instead of tomato sauce) for homemade pizzas.  We've also made grilled cheese and pesto sandwiches before.  All were terrific!!

Saving Seeds

I'll start off the post today by showing you some flowers in the garden.  The seeds we'll be talking about are dull and drab.  Let's look at some color first.  This flower below reminds me of Chanterelle mushrooms - exactly the same color.  However, this plant has nothing to do with a mushroom.  These are the blooms of peanut plants.  Pretty soon we'll harvest them and make some homemade peanut butter.

The pretty flower below is a mystery to me.  It is on some variety of cow pea, but the plant came up volunteer from last year's crop.  It is either a blackeyed pea or a whippoorwill pea.  The mystery will be solved shortly when it sets its pods.  Then we'll know.  Until then, we'll enjoy its colorful flowers.

This flower below, can you guess what it is?  A clue is peeking out behind it.  It is a bloom on an okra plant (Clemson Spineless, to be precise).  Can you tell that okra is in the hibiscus family?  The flowers highly resemble a hibiscus blossom.

That's all on flowers for now.  Let's move to seeds.  It is important to save seeds.  It is a good insurance policy in the event you can't get seeds next year or the variety that you prefer.  Below is a beautiful butternut squash we harvested.  

We scooped out the guts and the seeds and set them aside.

We separated the guts out and put the butternut squash seeds on the windowsill to dry.  It is important to save seeds from the healthiest of fruit.  Hopefully these seeds will produce a nice squash like their parent next year.

I was also saving some Whippoorwill peas.  We just set them on the windowsill for a week or two and let them fully dry out.

Once they are fully dried out, it is time to package them up.  I get a dark-colored bottle and label it with the variety and the date they were saved.

Same thing with these...

I store the bottles of saved seed in a jar in a dry shelf drawer in the utility room.  It's nothing fancy, but the process works.  I'll show you later this week perhaps, I planted some Boston Pickling Cucumbers from some seeds I had saved back in 2016.  We achieved a 100% germination rate.  Fantastic!  Saving seeds is rewarding and will save you money over the years and keep your heirloom and favorite varieties being passed down.

Eating Bugs

I thought it was a joke, but nope, it's not.  PBS is running numerous programs on why we should be eating bugs and worms to save the planet.  You can check it out here:  PBS - Why You Should Eat Bugs  I know that in the Bible, John the Baptist ate locusts and honey.  But I also know that at the Passover meal, Jesus and His disciples ate bread and wine and most probably lamb.  No insects or worms were on the menu.  Jesus fed the 5,000 by multiplying fishes, not bugs.  

Image Credit

If you want to eat bugs and worms, more power to you!  That'll mean more beef, chicken, pork, and seafood for me.  I'm not going to eat bugs and worms, no matter how many documentaries they run on it.  (Something tells me, the folks at PBS aren't chewing on mealworms in their breakroom.)  But, I'm all for freedom, I won't stand in your way if you want to eat that.

There's plenty of bugs being eaten at Our Maker's Acres Family Farm, though - just not by us.  Check out some photos I took of some random bug eaters.  This guy right here.  A banana spider.  There are hundreds of these around the place.  We take sticks and twirl their webs around the stick and feed the spiders to the chickens.  They love 'em.

The banana spiders construct their webs overnight.  The webs are super strong.  If you aren't paying attention, you'll walk right through the web and it will stick to you.  That big ol spider will get in your hair and make you run around like a schoolchild!  They are just trying to catch bugs to eat.

Sometimes, they catch the friendlies.  Here is a dead honeybee that a banana spider got in her web.

The next bug eater, although I don't have a photo, is bats.  We have a bunch of them around here.  They come out right when the sun's going down.  Tricia was on the back patio the other afternoon watching them fly and eat mosquitoes.  More power to you, Mr. Bat.

As I was trimming the Confederate Jasmine the other day, I ran into this guy.  He's a pretty green lizard.  Check out what is sticking out of his mouth...

I zoomed in so you can get a better look.  This beautiful lizard was successful in catching a dragonfly!  That is the dragonfly's tail and the tips of its wings sticking out of the lizard's mouth!

The moral of the story is this:  I'm going to leave the bug-eating to the spiders, the bats, the lizards and the folks at PBS.  It'll be steak and rice and gravy for me.

Childhood Chore War Stories

The July/August edition of Farm Journal contained the following poll on the last page.  I liked the graphic and the topic of the poll was thought-provoking.

As my wife and I sat outside on a concrete bench under a live oak tree finishing our coffee, I showed her the Farm Journal poll and she asked me what items would make my most-dreaded childhood list.  It didn't take me long to compile my list.  Here goes:

1.    Pulling red rice and coffee weeds in rice fields.  This tops the list.  In growing seed rice, you cannot have red rice or coffee weed seed in your sample.  Inspectors from the Department of Agriculture would inspect the field on horseback.  If they found some, your field failed and you could not sell it as seed rice.  Seed rice carried with it a premium in price.  To eliminate red rice, it involved the enlistment of childhood friends to spread out and walk the entire field, shoulder to shoulder and pull the offending red rice and coffee weeds.  It was swelteringly hot.  Mosquitoes were everywhere.  Your pants immediately got soaking wet and you would get chafed between your legs.  Your arms would get cut up by the rice.  You'd get stung by wasps.  It was exhausting work.  It is, by far, the childhood chore I don't miss.  It is amazing, though.  I have friends who are successful doctors and financial planners who worked with me as a kid pulling red rice.  They look back and always tell me that although it was a hellish task, they've never forgotten doing it.  The comradery we shared, songs we sang, egg fights with marsh hen nests we'd wage, and work ethic instilled made it an unforgettable and formative part of our youth.

2.    Spreading the bins.  This comes in at #2.  After rice harvesting was done each day, there was one final job that needed doing.  We called it spreading the bins.  The bazooka carried the rice by auger up and into the bins leaving a big cone of rice.  The rice was dried by air pushed by large blowers.  If you didn't knock the cone down level, the air would go to least resistance (the edges) and the center would never dry.  We would climb in the bins with shovels and level them, going round and round shoveling the rice to the edges until it was flat.  It was oppressively hot and humid and dusty in the bins.  When we would emerge, it felt like air conditioning even though it was 90 degrees outside.  We'd remove our masks and blow our noses.  Black boogers would come out from all the dust!  We'd be soaking wet with sweat.  A shower or a jump in the pond felt so good!

3.    Cleaning out the pit.  The pit was a cone-shaped hole that the bazooka sat in.  Rice or soybeans would be dumped in the pit and the bazooka carried it up to the bins.  The pit would fill with rainwater.  The rice or soybeans in the pit would sour.  This all had to be removed prior to harvesting each day.  We would take a Prestone coolant jug and cut it with a pocketknife to make a scoop.  After pumping most of the water out of the pit with a pump, we'd shimmy down the pit with the scoop and a 5 gallon bucket and scoop the soured grain and water out to fill the bucket and dump outside the pit.  There was always a bullfrog or a snake or some other critter in there.  I remember the smell of the soured sludge!  It would get on your hands and stunk so bad that soap wouldn't remove it.  You just had to let time wear the smell off.

4.    Picking up pine knots on new land.  You always wanted to plant "new land."  Land that had never been planted in crops.  The soil was rested and yields would be great.  After clearing the land, you'd disk it up.  Numerous pine knots would arise.  We'd hood an old wooden wagon to the back of the John Deere 4020 and would walk the land, throwing pine knots on the back.  Disking the land again would reveal more knots and we'd repeat the process.  It was hot.  The sun was unforgiving.  The pine knots were innumerable.  One positive was that disking the land also exposed old timey bottles and homemade glass marbles.  I've got some of those treasures somewhere at Mom & Dad's.  Once the pine knots were removed, we'd empty the wagon by hand.  

I sent this list to my Dad and brother.  Dad looked at the Farm Journal poll and remarked, "Our list was much harder?"  I agree!  My brother remarked, "Ha.  Yep.  Good memories, though.  I learned about the dignity in hard work and what it takes to be a man.  Thank you Dad."

Indeed and Amen!

When the Poop Hits the Fan

 Oh boy, here we go...

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We've all seen images of Sri Lanka falling and their leaders being ousted from power.  Irate citizens storming the palace, swimming in the president's pool, and setting things on fire.  Costs are up, food and medical supplies are in short supply, people are hungry (and very angry).  Years of corruption led to a deep distrust in government.  The country is on its way to bankruptcy. 

What happened?  Their leaders bought into green energy.  Everything should be peachy, right?  Sri Lanka has an ESG score of 98 out of 100 - the highest in the world.  In April 2021, their leader, without notice, banned all imports of chemical fertilizers. This caught farmers by surprise and reduced yields of staple rice crops, driving prices higher.  Hunger is a great motivator.  It motivated regime change.

But look to the Netherlands...

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What is going on there?  The government sparked massive protests by proposing to cut the country's livestock in half to limit carbon emissions and agricultural runoff.  Dutch farmers also say that they feel disrespected the Dutch populace, media and politicians.  They are literally biting the hand that feeds them.

I'd like to talk about these two events for a moment.  Notice the similarity?  Poorly thought out government green initiatives caused this.  It is just my opinion and everyone has one.  Contrary to popular opinion, it is healthy and normal to think differently and have thoughts of your own.  We live on a little homestead farm where we grow approximately 90% of everything on our table.  It comes from right here off the land.  We don't use chemical based fertilizers or herbicides or pesticides.  (More on that in a minute.)  We generate very little waste.  We are about as green as it gets, but I abhor the green movement.  I love freedom.  The green movement is anything but.  I also feel that many green movement people don't practice what they preach.  These elites want to impose restrictions on you, while they're still living high on the hog. 

I want to show you how we grow our own fertility, but before I do, I want to tell you that since our country industrialized and most people live in the cities and don't grow their own food, chemical fertilizers are a must.  We won't use it on our little 5 acres, but if all the people in cities want food, and want it at an affordable price, synthetic fertilizers are a necessity to maintain yields and grow the amount of food and fiber needed to sustain life as we know it.

The other alternative is to have everyone do what I'm about to show you and grow your own food.  First, we compost everything.  All scraps go into a compost bucket that we walk out to the compost pile daily.  Egg shells, squash stems, onion skins, coffee grounds.  Everything goes into it.  

It all decomposes and rots down and attracts earthworms who do their thing in the soil and the soil fertility grows.  We also grow peas and beans that set nitrogen in the soil.  We're growing fertility.  We also make biochar and inoculate it with cow poop and bury in the garden.

At absolutely no cost, we have tree trimming companies deliver load after load of wood chips to us.  They dump them right there in the yard.  An eyesore, to be sure.  But it is gold.  For years trees pull fertility from the soil.  Then, when they are cut down and chipped, all that fertility remains.  It is imported to our 5 acres and I let it decompose.

After three years, this is what the wood chips turn into - black, rich, fertile topsoil!  I incorporate this into the garden.

We pick up dried cow patties and pile them in the back of the garden.  After they 'cool down' for a year, the cow manure is ready to be incorporated into the soil for fertilizer.

Here is our hen house.  You can see the roosting bars.  Chickens line the bars at night to roost, and they poop while they roost.  The poop falls beneath them, piles up and composts.  You've got to be careful with this.  It is so potent, if you put it directly in your garden, it will burn up all the plants.  It is wise to wait at least six months and preferably 9-12 months.

Here is some good composted manure that the hens produced.  Homegrown fertility.

This right here will grow some vegetables!

Those are just some of the ways we boost soil fertility and grow our own fertilizer.  We can do it on our 5 acre farm.  We're not trying to feed the world, though.  We're feeding our family.  We've also had years to learn and make mistakes and implement the new concepts.  How do you do this on hundreds of thousands of acres?  I don't know.  They want to drastically reduce the number of cows, so don't look in that direction.  Composting on that scale doesn't work either.  Chicken litter is used wider agriculturally for nitrogen application, but can't be currently broadcast as efficiently and economically as chemical fertilizers.

Before setting restrictions and making proposals about something like farming that most politicians know nothing about, government leaders would do well to have well-thought out alternatives drawn up and allow appropriate time to change.  Something (experience?) tells me government ain't gonna do that.  You can have the highest ESG scores in the world, but if there's no food to eat, your people are all in poverty, and your leaders are driven from power, what did you really accomplish?  When the poop hits the fan, you oughta pick it up and compost it and grow your own food.

Chanterelle Time!

It has been humid and afternoon thunderstorms have been cropping up in the afternoons once it gets really hot.  I thought that it might be a good idea to mow the lawn before the grass gets too tall.  I had about a two hour window to get it done before the potential rainfall was to start.  We aren't the kind of folks that have a manicured lawn.  Sometimes we put the cows in the yard and let them mow the grass for us.  It would embarrass the kids when they were younger for us to have cow patties in the yard.

Before I mowed, I had to do a little reconnaissance.  I don't want to mow over and ruin a precious commodity that grows in our yard from time to time - Chanterelles!  They grow time after time in a certain part of the yard.  It's our 'honey hole' and we got back to it again and again.  It's like fishing from a stocked pond!  I walked out to the spot and lo and behold...  There they are.  Chanterelles.  Only two, but there will be more to come.

Chanterelles are wild, edible mushrooms that are delicious!  We like to go out and forage for them.  At first we were scared of eating wild mushrooms, but then we just learned about the primary wild edible mushrooms in our area and how to identify them and we leave the rest alone.  In our area, the main wild mushrooms to enjoy are oyster mushrooms and chanterelles.

Here's how you spot chanterelles.  First, they are bright orange.  They WANT you to find them.  Next, they are shaped like a funnel or a flute.  Then, they grow directly out of the ground - NOT out of wood.  Finally they don't have true gills - they have folds that run down the cap toward the base.  One other characteristic is that when cut, they smell like apricots.

I clipped these off with some clippers.  I didn't want to pull the mycelium.  Mycelium is the root-like structure (threads) of the mushroom.  The mushroom itself is the "fruit," but the mycelium spreads out and helps decompose organic matter, absorbing nutrients from the environment.  The chanterelles will continue to produce in this area and I'll come back time and time again and pick them.

You don't want to store the chanterelles in plastic.  It's best to store them in a paper bag.  All I had at the moment was a paper towel.  We'll bring these in, wash them up, and sauté them in some butter and garlic and maybe a little cream for a delicious, if not decadent snack.

I'll go ahead and mow the grass now that I've determined that there are no more chanterelles that I'd run over, but now I'll keep my head on a swivel to spot these bright orange delicacies that grow in our yard.