Harvesting Potatoes with my Boys

From the day we plant our seed potatoes (around mid February each year), we eagerly anticipate the day that we harvest them.  We watch them as they grow, noting when they bloom and then when the plant itself starts dying back, letting you know it is time to get the shovel and call the potato digging crew.  Harvesting potatoes is a fun job.  It is kind of like digging for buried treasure.  Since potatoes grow beneath the soil, you never know what you have until you put the shovel in the ground and turn the soil over.

The potato plants were the biggest and healthiest that they've ever been this year and I attribute that to the composted chicken litter that a friend gave me.  I incorporated that into the garden and it really grew some beautiful plants.  But as stated earlier, the success of a potato crop lies below the ground.  Let's see what we've got:

Pay dirt!!!

The first shovel unearthed a nice bounty of beautiful potatoes of all different shapes and sizes.  My job is to dig them and Russ and Benjamin are spotters.  As I turn the soil over, they look for potatoes and throw them into a crate.  These new potatoes are just the perfect size.  After just a few hills were dug, we knew that it was going to be a nice harvest.

Varied sizes of new potatoes

I planted mostly red potatoes, but also planted a few Yukon Gold potatoes for variety. The red potatoes proved to be the better producers this year as they have in previous years.  The soil was so rich and easy to turn over, thanks to the compost and organic matter.  With each passing year, you can see visible results that the soil is getting better and better.  This guy gives evidence to the health of the soil:

Earthworms & Healthy Soil

Here is a photo of the process, we me digging and Benjamin and Russ gathering the potatoes into a bucket. Crocs and socks aren't exactly fashionable, I know, but when you are digging potatoes, you really aren't trying to impress anyone!

You've got to be real careful not to cut the potatoes in half when you're digging.  I messed up on a few and we'll eat those right away.  Sometimes you have to turn the soil over several times to make sure that you don't leave any potatoes in the ground. If you do, it is not a real big deal.  The potatoes left in the ground will re-sprout and grow new potatoes for you.

Digging as much as we can before the sun goes down

Tricia took a picture of us when we were done for the afternoon.  In all we had to break up the harvest into 3 separate days as the daylight ran out on us each afternoon after work.  Even ol' Big Boy came and joined us for the picture.

The Potato Harvesters

There was no Potato Famine at Our Maker's Acres Family Farm this year.  Our harvest was bountiful, thank the Good Lord!  In fact last night I posted about our harvest of Italian Roma Beans and I mentioned that we'd couple those beans with some of our harvest from the blog post tonight with what might be the world's most perfect side dish.  And here it is - Italian Roma Green Beans steamed in butter with fresh-dug new potatoes!

Talk about good!

Rice & Gravy with smothered steak and fresh green beans and side of new potatoes is a meal fit for a king, I tell ya!

Mmmmmm!

At the end of the day, we had a good time uncovering some nice potatoes from 4 1/2 rows.  The boys enjoy harvesting them and so do I.  Now the potato patch looks so barren, so empty, and it is, but I'll add some composted chicken litter that I just removed from beneath the roosts in the chicken coop and we'll plant some more beans in this very spot.  It won't be barren for long.

Ready for a new crop to be sown...

Tomorrow I'll show you our entire harvest of potatoes.  Well, at least those that we haven't devoured yet. We learned last year that if you don't wash the potatoes and you store them in a dark place in a crate like a milk crate that allows for air flow, potatoes will last for a long, long time.

Harvesting Italian Roma Beans

Italian Roma beans are by far my favorite fresh green beans to eat.  They are flat in shape, but FULL in flavor!  After the goats got into the garden the other day and feasted, I initially was concerned about the beans were finished, but I am so happy to announce that they've made a recovery.  Of course the goats have put a pretty good dent in the yield, but I'm pleased that they were kind enough to leave some for us.  It didn't look favorable at first, but once I pulled the leaves back to see what was behind the canopy...

Behind the Leaves

I saw a nice crop of Italian Roma Beans!  The goats didn't eat them all and after I watered them real good, they really perked back up and recovered.

Italian Green Beans

An zoom in shot shows you just how flat these green beans are!

These beans are a bush type bean that we've planted for the past few years and if I was going to recommend one bush type green bean to grow, this would be the type. We also grow Contender green beans and Dragon Tongue beans, but these are the best in terms of yield, ease to grow and most of all, taste.  These beans are delicious.

Blooms mean more beans are on the way...

So bent over and straddling a 30 foot row, it didn't take long for me to fill up a colander with some nice beans.

We'll take these in and wash them up.  The neat thing about Italian Roma II Beans is that they are stringless. Some beans require you to string them, but these have no strings.  You can cook them whole or you can snap them.

Tomorrow I'll show you something else that we harvested and then paired with these beans for perhaps the most perfect side dish ever imagined.  Tune back in tomorrow.

Whitewash

Tom appeared on the sidewalk with a bucket of whitewash and a long-handled brush. He surveyed the fence, and all gladness left him and a deep melancholy settled down upon his spirit. Thirty yards of board fence nine feet high. Life to him seemed hollow, and existence but a burden. Sighing, he dipped his brush and passed it along the topmost plank; repeated the operation; did it again; compared the insignificant whitewashed streak with the far-reaching continent of unwhitewashed fence, and sat down on a tree-box discouraged. Jim came skipping out at the gate with a tin pail, and singing Buffalo Gals. 

“Say, Jim, I’ll fetch the water if you’ll whitewash some.”  From Chapter 2 of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain

Image Credit

I remember that story well.  Tom Sawyer was a shrewd character and not only did he 'encourage' all his friends to do his work for him, but he actually got them to pay him to do his work for him.

He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it – namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.

Tom understood supply and demand, public relations, and marketing.  He also sounds like he'd make a great politician!

I started thinking about whitewash because the other day I fixed 3 pickets on the picket fence that had rotted.  I'm far from being a craftsman, but I like to tinker around and try to fix things.  When we built our barn, it was constructed using wood and corrugated tin from other barns that had been torn down.  I saved the left over lumber and used a lot of it to cut out pickets to make the picket fence you see below.

The picket fence

I used the Tom Sawyer technique with Benjamin in order to get the fence painted, but it didn't go over quite as well.  I just used some old white paint that I had left over from when we built our house in 2001.  I ran across some information regarding whitewash that I didn't know.  I had always thought that whitewash and white paint was the same thing - Not True.

From Wikipedia: Whitewash, or calcimine, kalsomine, calsomine, or lime paint is a low-cost type of paint made from slaked lime (calcium hydroxide) and chalk (whiting). Whitewash cures through a reaction with carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to form calcium carbonate in the form of calcite, a reaction known as carbonation.  When the paint initially dries it is uncured and has almost no strength. It takes up to a few days, depending on climate, to harden.  It is usually applied to exteriors; however, it is traditionally used internally in food preparation areas, particularly rural dairies, for its mildly antibacterial properties.

Reading further, it says it goes on thin and translucent, but thickens and hardens after a few days into a thick coating and is hygienic and sanitary.  It also repels bugs. This gives me a good idea for the milking parlor in the barn.  I found this recipe for making whitewash and I've put this on my To Do list.  

The only thing I learned is that you have to reapply the whitewash once a year or so as it tends to rub off. This brought back some memories.  Growing up in South Louisiana, people would whitewash the trunks of their live oak trees. Playing around the base of the trees, I can remember getting the chalky, white lime (now that I know what it was) all over my hands and clothes.  I assume the old-timers did this for the insecticidal qualities of the lime, but I also read on the Live Oak Society website that you can be expelled from the Society for whitewashing your trees!

Image Credit

Anyway, the fence got painted and I learned a thing or two about whitewash that I didn't know.

Our White Picket Fence

And speaking of pickets, our fence turned out more successful than the ill-fated Charge.

Bill to allow Sale of Raw Milk in Louisiana Dies in Senate Committee

As you might recall from a blog post back on April 26th that you can re-read by clicking here, proponents of Raw Milk Sales have been testifying before the House and Senate committees of the Louisiana legislature. Louisiana is one of 10 states where it is illegal to sell raw milk.  Tricia and Benjamin were able to attend the House committee hearings and take part in a real-life home school civics lesson up-close and personal.  It passed and now was to go before the Senate Health & Welfare Committee for deliberation.

Well, the vote was taken and it failed.  You can read more about it from this article from the Advocate, a Baton Rouge newspaper: Senate Committee rejects raw milk sale.  The vote was 1 to 4 against passage and therefore the bill died in Senate committee.  From the article:

State Agriculture and Forestry Commissioner Mike Strain predicted people would get sick from drinking raw milk. He said the health risk is 150 times greater than drinking pasteurized milk.  “We are charged, you and I, with public health, protection of public health,” Strain said.

Commissioner Strain is a veterinarian and certainly understands the risks from bad bacteria much more than I do.  However, there are 0 deaths from drinking raw milk in the last decade.  On the other hand, according to this link, there are about 32 cases of people becoming sick each year from eating raw oysters, with half of those cases resulting in death.  Yet the sale of raw oysters is legal.  Hmmm...

Here is a gallon of our delicious raw milk in our refrigerator.  It has a big head of thick cream on top that can be skimmed off to make butter or used in coffee, or whipped and put on top of fresh fruit.  Note the thermometer at the bottom left to ensure the refrigerator stays at the correct temperature.

The Cream always rises to the top!

One only needs to look at the news right now regarding the Ground Beef e coli recall in which they are recalling 2 million pounds (wow!) of ground beef, to see that problems can and do occur in even the 'safest' and most heavily regulated food industries.  If improper food handling techniques are employed and/or the process has sanitation problems, harmful bacteria can be present in raw milk, including Listeria, salmonella, e. coli, brucella, and campylobacter.  These can give you food borne illnesses.

Since we drink the milk, we always want to be at the very top of our game and are constantly looking at our process.  One thing we had never done was have our milk tested.  We went to our local veterinarian whose office is about a mile from our farm. He knows our animals and makes farm calls to our place when needed. He assured us that the "fermentation vat" of the cows will ward off the bad bacteria and a cow that is eating good grass versus grain in a feedlot is going to have healthy rumen activity and good bacteria.  It is the good bacteria that keeps the bad from growing.  It's also important as an extra safeguard to give the cows pro-biotics to ensure the growth of healthy bacteria in the cows' gut.

Delicious Milk from pastured Jersey cows

Being curious, we asked him if we could have the milk of each of our cows tested.  He said it would cost $60.  Unfortunately, Daisy and Rosie aren't covered on our Blue Cross Blue Shield Plan.  He wrote out an order and we took two separate samples of sealed cups containing Daisy's milk in one and Rosie's milk in the other.  We took those samples to our local hospital that has a lab where they grow cultures to see what types of bacteria grow.  We called after 24 hours to get the results and nothing had grown at that time.

A week later the reports came back - one for each cow.  Each test result was identical:

Coagulate negative Staph isolated

Gram Positive Rods isolated

No Pathenogenic organisms noted

Now I probably slept through some of my biology classes so I contacted a good friend whose wife works in the very lab that tested the milk.  I asked him to get a translation from his wife on the test results.

Test results are in

Interpretation of lab results is as follows:  Two kinds of microorganisms were detected.  These are both normal flora found on the skin and neither one would be a cause for concern.  The test did not indicate any type of infection at all.  He also said that she said, "Bottom line is you have nothing to worry about.  I do know that if you leave a agar plate laying around long enough exposed to nothing but the air, eventually something is going to grow on it; bacteria are everywhere.  You know the two most bacteria infested spots in your house?  The counter next to the kitchen sink and the sponge you use to wash dishes; not the toilet seat like most people think."

Very interesting!

Back to the Raw Milk Bill, I think proponents will try again during the next legislative session.  From the Advocate article:
“Good legislation sometimes takes time,” state Sen. Fred Mills, R-St. Martinville, told disappointed raw milk supporters as they gathered their belongings and left the committee room.

It is a little perplexing to me that something that used to be so commonplace is now a health risk.  The reason it is more dangerous now is that after the Industrial Revolution animals began to be raised in 'factories' (feedlots), standing in their feces instead of out on green grass.  These animals, due to confinement, tended to get sick and had to be treated with antibiotics and other medicine.  The milk from all the cows was commingled and the safest thing to do was boil it to kill any pathogens.

But animals raised in green pastures and milked/bottled in a clean environment provide a safe, delicious, and healthy product - one I'm proud to serve to my family. Cheers! 

Barns Filled With Plenty

Are your barns full?  Mine aren't filled at the moment.  I don't purchase hay to fill the loft for another month or two.  Some people may not even have barns, but this post is not about literal barns.  Consider this:

Proverbs 3:1-10

My son, do not forget my teaching,

But let your heart keep my commandments;

For length of days and years of life

And peace they will add to you.

Do not let kindness and truth leave you;

Bind them around your neck,

Write them on the tablet of your heart.

So you will find favor and good repute

In the sight of God and man.

Trust in the LORD with all your heart

And do not lean on your own understanding.

In all your ways acknowledge Him,

And He will make your paths straight.

Do not be wise in your own eyes;

Fear the LORD and turn away from evil.

It will be healing to your body

And refreshment to your bones.

Honor the LORD from your wealth

And from the first of all your produce;

So your barns will be filled with plenty

And your vats will overflow with new wine.

Every so often, usually during my lunch break, I'll do some thinking. Time for some honesty and transparency.  Do you ever catch yourself comparing your present station in life with others?  Maybe with co-workers, friends, family members? I do.  It doesn't take long doing that to find yourself hosting your own pity party.  

Fact of the matter is "keeping up with the Joneses" seems like it is on steroids these days when used to be it was just your immediate next door neighbor you'd compare yourself with.  Social media has exacerbated this, and although I'm not on Facebook, I'm guilty of finding myself, from time to time, looking at other peoples' assets, free time, entertainment, discretionary income, health, youth, careers, family, etc. etc. and being covetous. There is a reason the Thou Shalt Not Covet is one of the 10 Commandments. Coveting your neighbors' stuff highlights our selfishness.  We make things all about ourselves.  When we become envious of others, we become increasingly discontented and miserable people.

So we try to look for things that will make us happy.  What can we buy to accomplish this?  The thing about it is, whatever we buy, we're not happy for long.  We keep seeking the next new toy or purchase that will bring satisfaction.  But none of this can ever make us happy.  We lose focus on the one thing that can keep us happy - God.

In the Proverb above, it states, "...so your barns will be filled with plenty and your vats will overflow with new wine."  The word 'so' is a coordinating conjunction that links two clauses.  (Remember conjunction junction what's your function?)  In this case the second clause points back to the first.  The second clause is a consequence of doing the first.  Hmmm...

So the proverb tells us that in order for our barns to be filled with plenty and our vats filled with new wine, we should honor the LORD and give Him our first and best. That is so illogical in today's consumerist society isn't it?  How does giving away things increase our store?  I don't know.  God's math, I guess.  If we are a blessing to God (and our neighbors), God will in turn bless us.

That is a promise.  It seems God knew we'd scratch our heads about this and in the book of Malachi, He addressed it as a test!  In other words, He essentially said, "I know this sounds crazy, but I'm telling you, test me, see if I won't come through!":

"Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, so that there may be food in My house, and test Me now in this," says the LORD of hosts, "if I will not open for you the windows of heaven and pour out for you a blessing until it overflows.  Malachi 3:10

So after reflection, I need to first ensure that I am a giving person - giving to God and others and NOT clinging tightly to things of this world.  I'll readily admit, that can be a high hurdle for me.  Then I need to realize that I shouldn't compare myself with others' and shouldn't covet material things since 'barns filled with plenty' doesn't necessarily mean tangible goods.  The Apostle Paul understood this all too well as Paul wrote the following while sitting in jail:   

I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. Philippians 4:12

After second thought, I realize that I need to strive, like Paul, to learn to be content despite whatever circumstance I might find myself in.  True contentment, true blessing, although it can be related to material goods can also be a state of mind, a peace that is lasting regardless of what this old world throws at you.

The Perfect Trap

Three blind mice,

Three blind mice,

See how they run,

See how they run, 

They all ran after the Farmer's Wife

Who cut off their tails with a butcher knife,

You've never seen such a sight in your life as three blind mice.

That is a crazy nursery rhyme.  It is sung with such upbeat happiness and the mixture of joy and violence sung to young children is odd, really.  You know the tune as it was the theme song for the "3 Stooges" television program.  But then there's the story of Hansel and Gretel, where the witch was fattening up the children to put them in the oven to eat!  Talk about a macabre thing to read to children.

Back to the rodents.  No, Tricia is not cutting off their tails with a butcher knife.  But it is Spring and the rats are having babies.  Lots of them.  Last year we were having a rat problem in our barn.  I was shooting them off the rafters with my .22 loaded with rat shot.  It was great fun, but I was unable to get them all.  I caught a few in a cage type trap.  You might remember I researched and saw that others were having great success catching rats in this trap that I wrote about building it in this post:  A Better Rat Trap  That trap caught exactly ZERO rats.  I don't know why it didn't, but with persistence and help from a couple of hungry cats, I was able to almost eliminate the rat problem last year, but as described above, they're back.

I resorted to an old, trusty, cheap, tried-and-true method of killing rats.  It only involves a bucket, a board, and some rice.  I've killed 6 young rats in three days and I've seen two more scurrying away as I opened the feed room, so I know there's more.  See the little critters?  No, they're not cute.  They're not sleeping either. When I open the door to the feed room and see the victims in my trap, they quickly meet their end by the end of a 2x4.  Then they are tossed out, along with the rice, for the chickens to devour.

Two Rats in the "Trap" Post Mortem

Here is the makeshift trap all set.  All it is is a bucket with rice in the bottom pushed against the wall with a board leaning against the bucket to act as a ramp.  The critters climb up the ramp, smell the rice, jump down in the bucket, eat their fill, and then realize that they cannot get out.  They jump and jump to no avail.  That's where I come in.

The one drawback to this trap: This works on young rats only.  Larger ones can jump out of the bucket.  It is amazing how high a mature rat can jump.  I've used taller buckets and caught bigger rats, but my rate of catch was never as good as the standard 5 gallon bucket on the young rats.  Probably because the younger rats are stupid and not as street-wise as the older ones, coupled with the fact that perhaps the taller your bucket, the further they have to jump down and maybe that discourages them and/or maybe the taller the bucket, the scent of the rice in the bottom is weaker and doesn't draw them in as much.  In any event, the 5 gallon bucket trap is the cat's meow (ha ha!) when it comes to rat killin'.

The trap is set

And here is a panoramic shot of the trap, showing bucket, ramp, rice and two dead rats. Lovely, isn't it? You can do this too with things you have at your house.  It works for mice as well as rats and it's great family fun.

A Panoramic view

Hey, if you can sing 3 Blind Mice to a child or read them Snow White in which the queen asks the huntsman to kill Snow White and bring back her lungs and liver in a box, you can surely teach them the very useful skill of rat killing that they'll be able to take with them into adulthood.  Rats left unchecked multiply and make a real mess, destroying property, stinking up the place, and potentially carry disease.  Happy Hunting!

Weekend Water Project

I'm not real energetic about mowing the grass.  It seems like a pointless, time-wasting exercise to me. Running the weed-eater is even worse to me.  Mostly I like to put the temporary fence up and create different paddocks in the yard and let the cows eat the grass.  One downside to not having a manicured lawn is that sometime the grass gets a little tall.  We have water hoses running from the house out into the pasture to fill up the animals' water troughs and also to water the garden.  Water hoses will be stretched out in all directions for a hundred feet.

Water hoses in the grass

Tall grass can completely camouflage a water hose and the picture below shows evidence that when we have mowed, sometimes we don't see the hose in the grass and run over it with the mower.  Never a good thing, but that's what hose splicers and hose clamps are for.  Not a big deal.

It's not quite a 50 foot hose anymore

I have had a project on my to do list, though, for quite a while to run some underground PVC pipe out to the pasture to eliminate the hose in the yard.  It is would be one less thing to pick up.  Having never done this, I got some advice from a friend who has extensive knowledge of running water line and he gave me some pointers.  But before we get going, right by where I was going to be working, I noticed a cactus blooming that I've never seen bloom before.  This cactus is growing in a terra cotta frog.  We kind of forget about it and it just continues to grow.  Here is the frog cactus:

Cactus in Bloom

I tried to get a close up shot.  Very pretty flower on it!

Yellow cactus flower

On to the project.  The length of the pipe run was exactly 53 feet.  The biggest job is trenching.  I used a shovel to do the work and have the callouses to prove it.  I'm getting soft in my old age.  My materials including pipe, cleaner, glue, and all fittings totaled $59, so it is costing me (excluding labor) about $1.11 per foot.  It took no time to cut the pipe, clean and glue it and assemble everything.

The trench looking north

Once I have it all together I'll move the big water trough back out into the pasture.  I just trenched it about 6-8 inches deep.

Trench looking south

At the end of the run, I just barely came out of the ground and knocked some concrete off of a 4 x 4 fence post so that I could secure it snug to the post with an old leather belt.  I don't want the cows OR GOATS breaking the line.  A shorter segment reduces the opportunity for breakage.  In cold weather, I learned that if the segment is short, you can just pile up a mound of dirt on top to insulate during freezing weather.  

I'll put a "Y" connection on the faucet and make a short, flexible hose to run to the water trough and connect the water hose to the other connection for watering the garden and running water further out to the barn.

The end of the line

Now all I need to do is allow the glue to dry, pressure it up and see that there are no leaks.  I only had to tighten up one fitting to stop a drip, but once that was done, we deemed the project complete and began to fill in the trench with dirt and pack it down.  In no time the grass will grow over it and you won't even be able to tell that work was done.

All is Good!

No more moving water hose in the yard and now that we realized how easy it is to do this, we'll eventually run both water and electricity to the barn.