Putting Vegetables Up

Ah!  Gardening is so relaxing.  Why, look at this pastoral scene.  I'm sitting on a concrete bench in the shade in an area we call the grove, and I'm looking at the garden growing.  The sweet potatoes are vining, the cucumbers are blooming and producing.  The yellow squash and zucchini are yielding such that we can barely keep up.  Same with the snap beans.  The corn is tasseling in the background.

There are times that gardening is relaxing.  It is rewarding, to be sure.  But once you plant it and harvest it, the work is not done.  In fact, you've got to eat it, give it away, or preserve it, because you'll flat run out of room.  You can't sit around once it's harvested.  There's work to be done.

We're on the third picking of the snap beans, and I picked a fourth time today.  We plant Contender green beans and Purple TeePee beans (just to keep things interesting).  We washed them up and chilled them and while they were still fresh, snapped off the ends.

Green beans are one of those things that are just favorites of everyone.  Even if you aren't a vegetable person (we all are), if you have someone a little finicky, well, they'll eat green beans, especially if you cook them with some tasso or bacon or sausage to amp up the flavor.  We did cook some for the Mother's Day meal, but the rest of this portion of the harvest, we'll freeze.

To freeze them, you'll want to blanch them.  This stops the enzyme action from breaking them down.  It also keeps a great texture and vibrant color.  Except for the purple beans.  they turn dark green upon blanching.  We blanch for 3 minutes.

We immediately ladle the blanched beans into the kitchen sink, which is full of ice water & ice.  This stops the cooking process.

Once completely cool, we drain through a colander.

And then we bag them all up in quart-sized zip loc freezer bags.  This is the perfect size to pull out of the freezer and voila, you have a side dish that only needs to be warmed up.  Best part of it is, it is healthy, fresh, and delicious.

The second picking yielded ten quarts of beans.  

Getting the Hen House "Mink-Proofed"

Anyone following our blog has heard us lamenting over the fact that we lost 39 laying hens to minks over a year ago.  Though long ago, it is still fresh on my mind.  Under cover of darkness, those murderous minks crept onto our property from neighboring rice and crawfish ponds, burrowed under the hen house walls where the hens all roost at night, popped up in their safe resting place and killed them.

Since that time, we've locked all our hens up in rabbit hutches that are completely off the ground and protected by hardware cloth.  Each night when they get in there to roost, we put the latch on to ensure their safety.  The trouble is, it is cramped in those cages for 40-something birds to fit comfortably.  It was high time to 'mink-proof' the hen house.

I'm 58 years old.  I'm not an elderly person, but I'm not a spring chicken, either.  Every so often, I throw out my lower back.  My plan to mink-proof the hen house was to pour concrete all across the floor.  This would prevent the minks from tunneling in (unless they had jack-hammers).  Pouring concrete, however, is laborious and hard on the back.  All that mixing and shoveling.  There has to be a better way.  Turns out there is.

Dry pouring concrete.  That's the ticket and I'll show you how its done.  I measured the floor of the henhouse and used an on-line concrete calculator to determine how many 80 pound bags of concrete mix I would need.  Then I used a wagon to move the bags close to the hen house.

I split the project into 3 parts since this is a working hen house.  Hens are in and out all day long laying eggs and I didn't want to disturb them.  I made a crude form, using 2 x 4's and first poured the section you see directly under the roosting bars at the far end of the building.

On the second day, I did a shorter section under the smaller roosting bars right up to the nesting boxes.

And the third day, I finished up the section underneath the roosting boxes, right up to the door of the structure.  The photo below shows how I've worked my way out of the building.  It shows the process, too.  All that concrete you see below is powder.  It is dry concrete that I've poured out of the bag and used a rock rake to spread it, 2 1/2 inches deep across the floor area.  Then I use a 2 x 4 to screed the dry concrete until it is level as possible.  Working my way out of the building so I don't paint myself into a corner, you can see how it's done.

Finally, when its all dry poured, NOW you apply water.  First, setting your sprayer to the MIST setting, you mist the concrete powder until it has changed colors.

Then, you come back in an hour, set your hose sprayer setting to the "shower" setting and spray pretty liberally.  Repeat the same thing in an hour and then repeat again in another hour.  Then you are done.  The next day, you can remove the forms and your hens are good to go.  So easy.  No back-breaking mixing or shoveling.  

We began moving the hens back in the henhouse last night.  We're pleased with how it came out, but the proof is in the pudding.  Can the dry pour concrete defeat the bloodthirsty minks?  Time will tell.

Riding The Bus

Image Credit

Up until I was 10 years old, we lived in town.  In fact, we lived in a house right behind the elementary school.  I walked to school, so I could sleep a little later than other kids.  As you walked to school, you could hear the swings creak as kids were swinging and hear the bearings whine as the merry-go-round spun round and round until children became queasy and needed to throw up.  The big water oak tree with its trunk stained white was right between our house and the school.  It was stained white because that's the tree that teachers would send kids out to "dust the erasers" on.  No one does that anymore, but when there were chalkboards and chalk, you'd have to erase the board.  Pretty soon the erasers filled with chalk dust and needed to be dusted.  Kids would bang the erasers on the tree trunk and the chalk dust would fly.  Weird memories, for sure.

But in 1976, everything changed.  We moved to a house in the country.  There was no more walking to school 10 minutes before the bell rang.  We rode the school bus.  Since we lived far out of town, we'd have to get up early and wait at the bus stop (sometimes in the dark).  The bus stop was an old wooden, musty-smelling structure with a tin roof that my parents had moved out and positioned close to the road.  It had a bench in it.  It kept us dry on rainy days as we waited for the bus.

Mr. Lambert was the first school bus driver I remember.  He was a kind man.  I would ride my bike out to his house and sell him seeds for our 4-H project.  When he retired, Mrs. Audrey picked up the route.  Mrs. Audrey had a large family and they were all talented bluegrass musicians and singers that could play and harmonize with the best of them.  They lived back in the woods and kind of lived off the land.

Mrs. Audrey didn't only teach her kids music.  Why, she taught everyone on the school bus.  She had an 8 track player on her bus.   She would play Ronnie Milsaps' "Smoky Mountain Rains" and Merle Haggard's "If we make it through December," John Conlee's "Rose colored glasses," and George Jones' "He stopped loving her today." Those were weighty issues in those songs for a 10 year old to digest, but as the bus rambled across the backroads with the windows down on the bus and wind whipping through our hair since there was no air conditioner, my young mind was pondering, "What if they don't make it through December?"  I was also thinking about the couple in "He stopped loving her today," wishing that she would have come to see him before he up and died.  That would have been better and the song wouldn't have been so doggone sad!

We made good friends on the bus and we'd sit with them and talk and even sing as we got to know the words to every song on every 8 track tape Mrs. Audrey had.  The older, cooler kids sat in the very back of the bus.  Sometimes we'd even see some older boys kissing their girlfriends, but they'd have to be sneaky about it.  Mrs. Audrey had a big rear view mirror that stretched halfway across the windshield.  She would watch what was going on IN the bus more than on the road ahead, and for good reason!  In addition to kissing, sometimes there would be bullying and fights.  You would see Mrs. Audrey looking back in that mirror with a glare in her eye and an ash about an inch long hanging off her cigarette.  She ran a pretty tight ship.  She was no pushover and wasn't shy about keeping her passengers in line.

I rode the bus for a long time, but one day my friend got his driver's license and invited me to start riding with him.  He had a yellow 1979 Monte Carlo, and he would swing through our circle drive and pick me up for the ride to school.  He had a good stereo system in his car AND had air conditioning.  That was a plus.  There were, of course, some downsides.  My friend would pick me up after eating a big scrambled egg breakfast.  I would jump in his car, and sorry, gentle readers, my friend was quite flatulent.

I would close the door and my olfactory system would be immediately accosted by the most sulfurous, acrid stench you could imagine.  It would singe the hairs in my nose.  You would really need to shelter in place after experiencing the foul fumes, the malodorous aroma.  I would begin rolling down the window (no power windows) in frantic fashion, hoping for fresh air to fill that interior.

It was times like that that made me long for Mrs. Audrey's school bus where Merle Haggard, in his song, "Rainbow Stew" taught me to be hopeful for a better future where life was simple, happy, utopian  and harmonious.  I think I might have learned more on Mrs. Audrey's Bluebird School bus than I did in school.  I tip my hat to you, Mrs. Audrey, if there is a bus driver hall of fame, you deserve to be recognized in it.

Birds of a Feather

Back in March we hatched out some chicks from fertilized eggs from some of our hens.  We have them in the chicken tractor.  They are growing.  I'm pleasantly surprised that a fair number of them appear to be pullets and not cockerels.  We are raising them to replace those that we lost to minks and those we normally lose to old age and predation.  Our flock (not counting these) is down to 22 hens.  That's sad.

Benjamin let us know that one of his friends had about 130 laying hens that he needed to sell.  He just didn't have room for them anymore.  They are already laying eggs.  The price was reasonable, so we agreed to purchase 20 of them from him.  He was going to deliver them to us on Saturday.

It was raining when they arrived and we used a dog kennel to shuttle them from the cattle trailer they were delivered in back to the barn.  We loaded them in the rabbit hutches that the other birds roost in every night.  As you can see, they are a wide variety of birds.

The plan was to let them slowly get acclimated to their new environment.  Then I'd like to clip the feathers off one of their wings off so they cannot fly over the fence.

I clip one of their wings back with a pair of scissors.  This trim keeps them from flying over the fence.  Early on, I would clip both of their wings, but I soon learned that you only needed to clip one.  With one wing clipped, trying to fly is very hard to do as they're off balance.

By the time that I was finished, the hens could no longer fly.  Look at all the feathers on the ground below.  I don't want the birds going over the fence to be eaten by predators in the woods.

Once all 20 hens' wings were clipped, it was time to set them free.  One by one, they cautiously exited the cages and ambled over to where I had chicken scratch in some gutters.  They were hungry.

The very next morning I was amazed to learn that the roosters had gathered them all up and got the hens to roost in the cages.  The next day the new hens kind of kept close to the barn.  Each day they are venturing out further.  The next project is to get the henhouse secured so that they can all roost in the hen house, protected from minks.  For the time being our flock now numbers around 40 hens, with surely a few more hens that will be joining them from the birds we hatched out.

Sweet Corn is About to Come in

A short while back I explained how some recent rain and winds had knocked down some sweet corn.  That's not a good thing when the corn is about to tassel.  If the pollen doesn't fall on the silk, you'll have "blank heads."  I made a redneck sweet corn propper-upper with t-posts and baling twine and the effort was met with success.  The corn is standing tall once again in our two-row corn plot.

Let's look at a couple of zoomed in photos of the sweet corn tassel.  Although you'd never know it, the tassel is the male reproductive organ.  It produces pollen.

If I had zoomed in on the following two photos, you'd be able to see the yellow pollen.

As the wind blows, the pollen drifts in the air, falling (hopefully) on the silk sticking out of the ears.  Each one of those silk threads shown below, goes into the corn cob and where it's attached to the cob, a kernel of corn will come to be.  Pollination done by the wind uses gravity too, and that's why it was critical that I stood the corn upright before corn tasseled.  If you ever shucked an ear of corn and the ear had a bunch of gaps in it, you didn't get good pollination.  It's another reason it is a good idea to plant your corn in blocks and planted close together.  We're not going to count our chickens before they hatch, but it looks pretty good so far.

A pretty redhead

I will be watching the silk.  Once it turns brown, the sweet corn is ready to harvest.  In a few days we'll be able to see if the sweet corn is healthy.  Fresh sweet corn lives up to its name.  So sweet.  So delicious!

Mother's Day 2025

God has blessed us with great mothers and mothers of our children and today was the day to celebrate them and show them our love for all they do and for the godly mothers they are.  We prayed and feasted and enjoyed conversation around the supper table.

L to R (Mom, my sister Jenny, and Tricia)

We had quite a menu: pastalaya with green onion and garlic sausage, spiral ham, pot roast and rice and gravy, fresh roasted vegetables, boudin, zucchini cake and ice cream.  We pushed away from the table with taut bellies, satisfied not only with the blessing of delicious food, but in the knowledge that God has given us wonderful Mothers.

My niece, Elle and daughter Mary Grace, Jenny, Mom & Tricia

All six of my sister's boys were here, but one son, Carson, had already left at the time of this photo.  Russ and Benjamin were here, but Laura Lee was unable to make it.  We missed her terribly.

Last but not least, my wonderful wife and mother of my children with her young men, of whom she is so proud:

Benjamin, Tricia, and Russ

Happy Mother's Day!

The Kidding Season Comes to a Close

We had five momma goats pregnant.  Popcorn, the billy, has proven to be quite the fertile fellow.  One by one, they kidded.  Bunny had a stillborn buckling.  But with three healthy baby goats running around the pasture, we were ready for the last one to be born.  It was time for Callie.  Her bags ballooned, letting us know that any minute, there would be a baby.  So far this year we have 1 doeling and 2 bucklings.

Tricia came around the corner of the barn and said, "We have a new baby.  It's a little buck."  Callie already had him all cleaned up.  They say the fruit doesn't fall far from the tree.  That means the offspring are often like the parents.  So is the case with Callie and her little boy.  This is Callie's face:

And this is her little buckling's face...  White, black and brown.  She marked him well.

The little fellow got right down to business, drinking his colostrum to ensure he gets a good start.  Since Bunny lost her baby, we're milking her twice a day and keeping the milk to make kefir and cheese.

We still have a little leftover goat milk that we feed to the laying hens.  They really enjoy it.

But they must drink fast.  Belle, our Great Pyrenees, has developed an affinity for goat milk.  She comes around the corner, chases off the hens, and makes quick work with her tongue of lapping up the goat milk!