The Herb Patch

In all our years posting, I don't know if we've ever shown you our little herb patch.  Many years ago, we constructed a raised bed in the side yard with 2x12's and filled it with topsoil.  The idea was to plant herbs in one location to not take space out of the main garden.  We've kept this herb patch going for quite a while now.  We have a lot of different items in this bed.  We'll oftentimes come out and cut what we need and it's not that far of a walk back inside to the kitchen where the meal is being prepared.

Below you're looking at three separate celery plants.  They seem to be really happy and healthy.

Here is a close-up photo of the healthiest of the three.  If you've been following us, we planted these from store-bought celery stalks that we had eaten everything except a small 3 inch section of the base.  We rooted it in a cup of water and then transplanted it out here.  It's doing quite well.  We might get a bunch of celery after all.  This is our first time doing this.  

These two plants have similar leaves, but aren't celery.  These are flat Italian parsley.  These come in handy for gumbos.  We'll pick a bunch and the plants continue to re-grow.  We didn't plant these from seed.  They came up volunteer from last year's parsley plant that we allowed to go to seed.

This is French Sorrel and is two years old.  It continues to thrive.  I like to eat the leaves raw.  It has a unique taste.  We also put in salads.

This is lemon grass.  This group of plants was started from seed about three years ago.  We cut off bunches of it to make tea - either iced or hot.  It's delicious and has a real nice fragrance.  We aim to try to cook with it.  Lemon grass is used in lots of dishes, but we haven't tried any recipes yet.

Here is a pretty large rosemary plant.  It's four years old, I'm guessing.  We use rosemary quite often in cooking.  I love the fragrance.

Here is some ginger.  It is two years old.  The leaves look a little beat up.  I think it got hurt a little by the frost we had a couple of weeks ago.  I guess we'll need to dig it up.

And finally, here is what's left of the oregano.  This plant used to be quite large, but the drought this year really hurt the plant.  Where it used to fill up almost 1/4 of the entire bed, it's now just these small stragglers hanging on.  Hopefully it will recover.  We like its flavor in Italian dishes.

And that's a quick tour of the herb garden.  We'll plant some additional items in here in the spring.

Peppers and Plans

December 8th here and it hit 80 degrees Fahrenheit today.  Lots of fog in the morning, too, that didn't burn off until around 10 AM.  The plants are really growing.  A few days ago, I had the opportunity to plant some mustard greens and two rows of spinach.  The only thing I've left to plant is turnips.  I'll get that done this weekend.  I also dug up the rest of the sweet potatoes.  That will give us room for the onion crop for next year that I'll be planting in January.

The peppers have been producing nicely.  Here are some Lilac Bell Peppers showing off with their snazzy colors!

This year we've had a nice pepper crop and have frozen some, eaten a bunch, dehydrated some, processed some into dried peppers.  Since it hasn't frozen, they continue to produce and produce.

I mentioned plans.  We're planning for a new homestead venture this spring.  We'll be getting a couple of boxes of honeybees.  We've kept bees for the past 7 or 8 years, but they live in the hollow column by our side entrance.  We cannot access their honey, but they do pollinate our garden and fruit trees.  Once we get some bees in boxes, we'll get pollination and will also be able to get the benefits of honey.  Can't wait.

But we don't know much about beekeeping.  In order to learn, we were invited to join the local beekeeping club.  They meet the second Thursday of each month at 7 pm at a local diner here in town.  We went to our first meeting tonight.  There were about a dozen people in attendance.  We had a fried shrimp po-boy and fries and listed and learned.  The beekeepers were friendly and knowledgeable and willing to answer our questions.  Some have only a couple of boxes, while others in the club have 100 boxes.

It was very interesting learning about feeding, splitting hives, supplies you need, hive placement, how to not lose your bees, swarming, etc.  They are very motivated to get more people involved with beekeeping and aim to get beekeeping into the Ag departments at 3 local high schools.  Hathaway High School, the school Benjamin graduated from already has 8 bee boxes.  We are going to have the students come to a meeting and tell us what they've been learning.  

It's nice to have helpful folks like this to help get us involved in this new undertaking.  We are excited about learning something new to add to our homestead.  We plan to learn as much as we can for the next couple of months and purchase supplies and equipment we need and then will jump into this new endeavor this spring.  That's our plan, anyway.

Shading Out

I want to show you something in the garden that made me think about the term "shading out" that we would use on the farm.  First, take a look at the cole crop patch below.  From left to right (two different varieties of cabbage, cauliflower, two varieties of broccoli, and then kohlrabi, kale and bok choy.

They are growing nicely and are healthy.  It is late afternoon and the sun was shining in my face.  I walked around to the west side of the garden to take the following photo.  As you can see, the rows have about grown together so that it is almost hard to differentiate one row from another.  It almost looks like one big swath of green, verdant growth.

That's what reminded me of the term "shading out."  About 45 years ago, give or take we were growing soybeans on the Cottongin Road in Oberlin.  We weren't using a drill to plant at that time.  Instead, we were row cropping.  This required getting in the field with a cultivator to turn the ground over between the rows to stay ahead of weed growth.  You had to REALLY pay close attention or you'd run over the soybeans.  This had to be done until the soybeans "shaded out."

When the young soybean plants grew tall enough that you couldn't see the dirt between the rows, you were very happy!  You didn't have to cultivate anymore because the soybean plants had grown together.  The shade prevented any sunlight from getting to any weeds under the canopy of soybeans and this prohibited any weeds to grow and compete for nutrition.

As I looked at the winter crops in the garden, it made me happy.  Although I don't use a cultivator in my garden, it brought back some nice memories.  We've almost shaded out!

If the cows just over the fence could get in the garden, they would certainly "cultivate" my crop with the quickness!

Bee Healthy - Eat Bee Pollen

We've been learning about bee pollen and its benefits in order to learn how to perhaps be healthier.  Bee pollen, research has shown, decreases inflammation and boosts the immune system.  It is full on minerals, vitamins and antioxidants.  

It is an interesting journey on how bee pollen is collected.  Pollen is formed on the male part of flowers.  Bees fly through the air and build a positive charge on their bodies.  When they visit a plant, the negatively charged pollen sticks to their bodies.  They fly from plant to plant, getting a variety of pollen on their foraging journey.

The honeybees groom themselves and get all the pollen off their body.  They spit up honey and mix it with the pollen grains.  These grains, now stuck together, are put in "pollen baskets" and are brought back to the hive.  It is used to feed the young bees.

So how do humans collect pollen to consume for its health benefits.  That was my question.  Beekeepers install pollen traps over the entrance to the hives.  Essentially, it is a small opening just large enough for the bees.  When they squeeze through, the pollen falls off of their legs and into a trap, where it is collected daily by the beekeeper.

Since this pollen is vital to the colony for nutrition, beekeepers only leave the traps set for a short period of time.  If they didn't, it could severely hurt the colony.  Our colony of bees resides in a hollow column outside our side door.  We don't have a way to get to the honey or the pollen.  For now, we purchase our bee pollen from an organic co-op called Azure Standard.  Here is a bag of bee pollen that we keep in the freezer.

As you can see, there's only one ingredient - bee pollen.  I look at that bag and think how very hard the honeybees worked to get that.  How many miles did they fly?  It is amazing.  I've read that they will fly 4 miles from the hive to collect pollen and nectar.

So each day we take 1/4 teaspoon as a supplement.

It has a sweet taste and is slightly spongy in texture.  Bees are the only insect that create food eaten by humans - honey, and now, bee pollen.  This spring, we plan on purchasing a colony of bees to put in a bee box.  That way we can collect honey and bee pollen.

Feeding Plan for the Winter

With the bull back at his home, our hay inventory might last a bit longer.  That dude was big and could put down some hay.  Our three cows and herd of goats could go through a round bale in about a week.  With Nick, the bull, added to the animal family, the bale was gone in about 4 days!  In the past month, we've had some light frosts that effectively ended any new growth of grass in the pasture.  The cows and goats have methodically gone over the pasture, cleaning up little tufts of grass still remaining along the fence lines.  There's really not much left.

We rolled out the last of our round bales that were left over from last year and the cows knocked that out in no time.  I called for some more bales and the Monday after Thanksgiving, the gentleman who sells us hay showed up at the house with 10 round bales on the back of his trailer for $40 per bale, delivered.  I think that is very reasonable.  It is clean hay, stored in a barn.  We rolled it off of his trailer and then I covered it up with a tarp to keep it out of the rain.  The cows saw this process unfolding and ran, bellowing, to the gate.

The best I can figure, we have about 10 weeks of hay inventory on hand before we re-order.  Warm weather extends things a bit.  Cows can handle the cold and they can handle rain, but both cold and rain together is not a good combination.  They need the calories to keep them warm.  We've had weather approaching the 80's for the past couple of days.  The cows aren't even around the hay much.  They are sitting out in the pasture chewing their cud.

We do have the 75 bales of good Jiggs bermuda square bales up in the loft.  We haven't even touched that yet.  We generally ration that and feed a half a bale a day of this in addition to the round bale as it gets colder.  We also feed them some sweet feed and salt.

For the goats (and cows to a smaller extent), I jumped over the south fence two days ago with a machete and went to work on the privet and other weeds, tossing it over the fence for them to eat.  They absolutely love eating on this browse and the chickens gather around as bugs and worms are always on the stuff I throw over.  I'll do that from time to time throughout the winter and it serves a double purpose.  It gives them something to eat AND it cleans up a buffer zone between our property and the woods.  I'm guessing that may discourage some varmints from visiting as they have to pass through a cleaned out area to get to our pasture and that exposes them to hawks and other predators.

We keep a close eye on the animals' conditioning during the winter months.  Sometimes I'll get the lead rope and get them out of the pasture to eat on winter grasses in the surrounding ditches and fence rows.  Which reminds me, I need to quickly plant a big plot of turnips.  The cows LOVE to eat big, fat turnips and turnip greens in February and March.

Termite Troubles in the Barn

We got a call yesterday to alert us that the pest control folks would be here to do their annual termite inspection.  They have monitoring station/bait traps set up around the perimeter of our home.  The technician checked and could find no sign of termites around our home.  That is welcome news to us.  He couldn't find a few of the stations, but put out more to take their place.  All in all, we got a report that we wanted to hear.

Out in our barn, however, is another matter entirely.  In year's past, we've put out our own termite bait stations around the barn.  This station at the southwest corner of the barn is something that you don't want to see.  It means the termites have eaten through the bait and the fluorescent probe pops up to ruin your day and alert you that those terrible wood eaters are present.

A few years ago, the termites ate a hole in the floor of the feed room.  That was some good 2 x 12 treated lumber.  What a mess!  This winter, while it is cool, I'll try to re-deck the feed room.  The problem is, of course, that lumber is very expensive right now.

The hungry termites eat through the wood, like you see right here.  The piece of wood I'm holding is lighter than a piece of cork.  When I stepped through the floor and found the problem, I got some termite spray and killed all of them that I could find.  You just know there's more though.

I definitely don't want the barn to fall down, so we've got to do something about the infestation.  Tricia let me know that we had 5 more bait stations left over from the last time we treated.  Time to get these in the ground.

I see some signs of the termites eating in some of the support beams that frame up the barn.

The termite killer comes with a hand auger with which you use to drill the holes to set the termite stakes.

You simply turn the auger by hand until it's all the way in and then you pull up, leaving a hole.

Then you insert the bait station in the hole, and you check it periodically for the telltale signs of activity.

We had our barn built with used materials from other barns that were being torn down.  If I had to guess, we might have imported a termite problem with some of those building materials.  We'll do our best to combat the termites as we like our barn.  Unfortunately, the termites like our barn too!

Sweet Potato Harvest Part II

 

About a month ago we harvested about one third of our sweet potato crop.  We allowed the rest to grow and then a couple of days ago, I enlisted the help of my sweet potato digger/wife.  We have a segregation of duties.  I clip the vines and toss them to the cows, and she finds where the sweet potatoes are and digs them up, trying not to disturb the soil.  She puts the sweet potatoes in a bucket and has another bucket for the small sweet potato roots to feed the cows.  As you can see, they gather around the fence to eat.

As soon as we finish a section, I prepare the seedbed by pulling back the wood chip mulch to expose the soil.  Then I work up soil for planting with a hoe.  I planted a row of Monstrueux de Viroflay Spinach.  It is an heirloom spinach from France that dates back to 1866.  Then I planted a row of Galilee spinach from Israel that I saved from seed from last year.  Finally I planted a half row of mustard greens and a half row of a new crop I got as a Free Seed from Baker Creek Heirloom seeds.  It's called mizuna, a Japanese mustard.  I've never heard of it.  We'll see how it grows and how it tastes.  It's supposed to be like mustard greens, but peppery.

Here is an example of some of the harvest.  You can see that these are Beauregard sweet potatoes.  The majority of the crop that we have harvested is the Golden Wonder heirloom.  Tricia suggested that we try to pull up the heirloom and keep only the Beauregard sweet potatoes for next year's crop.  The Beauregard sweet potatoes are larger and prettier.

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As you can see in the photo below, we've been curing the ones we dug up a month ago by hanging them from onion sacks in the garage for a month.  We graded them and have four sacks like this hanging.

Since we harvested last, we have a new method of curing sweet potatoes (and potatoes, onions, peas, etc.)  A gentleman from our church dropped off a drying wagon that he made.  He made himself a larger one and offered to give this one to us!  

It has casters and wheels and a trailer hitch so we can pull it around.  

The frame is lined with hardware cloth so that it promotes good airflow around the potatoes. 

This will come in handy.  Once we harvest the rest of the sweet potatoes, we'll weigh them up to see the total weight of the sweet potato harvest for 2022.  The ones we dug last month ought to be cured and sweet and ready to eat!