Getting the Gardening "Itch"

Last week had conditions that were below freezing for a week long.  It was gloomy, grey, cold and wet outside.  We kept our fireplace roaring and stayed in front of it.  This time of not being able to do anything outside coincided perfectly with the time of the year that the mailbox begins to fill with seed catalogs.  I love looking through seed catalogs!  Even when it is too cold and rainy outside to do anything, you can dream about this Spring's garden.

I heard a quote I liked once that said something to the effect of "No garden is as good as the one that you are going to plant NEXT YEAR!"  If you think about it, it is true.  The garden in our mind has 100% germination, perfect spacing between plants, healthy, green, lush growth, weed-free rows, ample walkways and no insect pressure or disease.  The garden in reality doesn't quite measure up to the one that we spend the off season thinking about!  But it doesn't stop me from dreaming about it.

So as I sat in front of the fireplace dreaming about the spring garden, I figured that there were actually some garden tasks that I could get done right where I was seated.  First, I took all of my purchased seed out of the freezer and opened an excel spreadsheet where I maintain my seed inventory.  I took stock of what I had AND what I needed to order.  Then I did the same with my inventory of seed I had saved myself that I had stored away in various medicine bottles.  I took inventory of those too, updating my spreadsheet.  This essentially made my seed order ready to go.

Then I got out some of my favorite seed catalogs and began comparing prices, package sizes, shipping costs and varieties.  I ensured that I was comparing apples to apples and that I was ordering open-pollinated seeds.  Then I made my orders.  I always order a new item or two to try in the garden.  It is always nice to experiment with something I've never grown, something colorful, exotic, or weird.  I actually placed my order from 3 different vendors this time.

Over the next week the garden ground began to dry up a little.  They are raised beds so at least the northern side stays high and dry.  I pulled up the pepper plants and egg plants and turned the soil over with my shovel.  With some baling twine as a guide, I measured out rows.  They are 15 feet long, 20 inches wide, with an 18 inch walkway.  These rows are reserved for my onion and potato crop.  My onion sets came in the mail this week, and I have seed potatoes left over from the crop I harvested in May 2017.  I'll be planting both of these possibly this weekend.

Our mail carrier began to deliver some of the seed I ordered this week.  Two of the three orders have arrived.  I like to open the package and shake the seeds.  There's something magical about "dead" seeds in an envelope in the middle of the winter.  The transformation that occurs once they are dropped into the soil is a true miracle.

Before you know it, it will be time to stop dreaming about the garden and start gardening.  I can't wait!

One More Trick To Try to Get the Hens Laying Again

Yesterday we talked about our hens suddenly stopping laying eggs.  I think it is largely a nutritional deficit, but part of the egg deficit is no doubt due to short days with gloomy, overcast weather.  A chicken needs 14 hours of daylight in order to lay eggs.  Okay, we're going to do something that goes against everything we've always said to help 'jump start' the hens into laying eggs for us.

We're putting a light in the hen house.  GASP!  We have always felt that artificial lighting is what the big egg producers do with their 'warehouse hens' to keep the eggs going 24/7 365.  We want to be more natural with our birds, allowing them a rest.  In doing so, it has given our chickens a long life.  Chickens have a finite amount of eggs that they will lay inside them when they hatch.  If you keep them in an artificial lighted facility, their productive life will be over in a short period of time. 

So that made me wonder, how many eggs can a chicken lay?  I found THIS ARTICLE that said the hen's laying lifetime depends on many things: breed, feed, environment, etc.  The Department of Agriculture puts the figure for American birds at 276 eggs per year.  Due to the rest I spoke about in the first two paragraphs, a backyard chicken in England lived a very long life and squeezed out her last eggs at the remarkable age of 17!  Wow.  As far as a prolific layer, a chicken named Cornell Endurance died when she was 12, having laid 1,232 eggs.

Our hens are old.  I really don't know how old since I don't mark them to track their ages.  We replace about 20 each year with new birds for the ones that die or get eaten by predators.  It would be interesting to know how old our oldest chicken is.  We've had them for about 16 years now. 

Here is the light that we put in the hen house to hopefully encourage them to lay:

As soon as the days get longer and they begin to lay, we'll turn it off.  It is merely a heat lamp that we've replaced the heat bulb with a regular 75 watt incandescent bulb.

We're eagerly awaiting them to start laying.  Our inventory of eggs is down to about 60 eggs now.  C'mon hens!  We'll call your hen house Motel 6 and "we'll leave the light on for ya!"

Putting the Chickens on A High Protein Diet

Our hens have been laying steadily, even through the shorter days with less sunlight.  In past years, their egg production has shut down to virtually none for a month or two during the winter.  Everything was going well until...  We left for a couple of days during the holidays to visit family and when we returned, the hens stopped laying.  It is as if they decided to go on strike and march around with picket signs.

The light definitely does play a role in the diminishing number of eggs we're collecting.  A hen needs 14 hours of daylight to lay eggs.  The number of hours of daylight should be increasing now since we've passed winter solstice.  The other factor is nutrition.  Normally, our hens roam around on 3 acres of land scratching for bugs, worms, and tasty morsels they find scratching through the cow poop.  During the winter, the number of bugs and worms for them to eat goes down considerably.  Besides the hen scratch and laying pellets we feed them, they are looking for things to eat in order to supplement the bugs and worms that were more prevalent in the spring and summer.

Today I found the holy grail of protein for them!  I was splitting some firewood and look what I found:

The larvae of a beetle that bores into oak trees burrows holes in the wood, eating the wood and getting big, fat, and juicy.

Can you see their tunnels?

As I split the log open, giant worms spill out.  You can see one in the hen's mouth, two on the ground beneath the log and one curled up in its burrowed out tunnel in the log.

Here's a closer photo of it.

While these worms look gross to you and me, there is nothing that excites a chicken more than the sight in the photo below!

After I swing my ax and expose more worms to the chickens, I step back in awe as I watch the hens devour the worms.  The worms are much too large to eat in one bite, so the hens grab one in their beak and run off.  The race is on though, because the other hens want to eat what they've got.  They don't want to share, so they race off in the pasture. 

Other hens' patience pays off as I swing my ax again and more worms spill out, providing tasty treats for the hens.  It is similar to a pinata!  Hopefully this additional protein will supplement their nutrient deficiency and encourage them to begin laying once more.  We only have 6 dozen eggs in inventory left.  We don't want to have to buy eggs from the store with 100 hens in the pasture.

Saving Citrus From The Freeze

With temperatures dipping into the low 20's, I quickly did some Internet research about citrus.  My question was: Do you need to pull oranges and tangerines off of the tree prior to a freeze?  I read many different articles.  Most said that citrus remaining on the trees will be fine during a freeze and there is no reason to pick them.  However, and this is key, it said that if temperatures drop below 28 degrees, the fruit needs to all be removed prior to this or you will lose the fruit.  I also learned that if you pick an orange before it is ripe, it will not ripen any more.  In other words, they aren't like tomatoes.  They only ripen while attached to the plant (tree).  But all of our citrus is ripe, we just don't want to lose them as it will be well lower than 28 degrees.

So that meant that we had some work to do.  Sunday afternoon after church and in advance of the cold weather moving through, I mobilized our citrus picking crew.  The navel orange tree is so loaded up with fruit that the branches would break if I didn't support them.  Last year with some old pieces of iron that I re-purposed from the kids' swing set when they were younger, I made some supports that hold up the branches nicely and keep the fruit-laden branches from breaking.  It also keeps the fruit from the lower branches from touching the ground and beginning to rot.  In their inaugural year last year, they did the job, so I pulled them out again when the fruit loaded up.

The navel oranges are quite large and are loaded up to the top of the tree.  I had to get out our ladder to pick the ones on the uppermost branches.  I did try to shake the tree to get some of the fruit down, but some of the fruit won't shake off and I didn't want the large oranges to hit Tricia or Benjamin in the head.

We had a good citrus picking system going.  I was on the ladder and as I circled the tree, getting the oranges and tangerines off the top of the tree, Benjamin and Tricia got everything below that was within arm's reach.  I got the chance to explain the expression "picking the low-hanging fruit" to them.  That expression is always used in a business setting, explaining hitting easily achievable goals or targets without expending a lot of effort.  Makes perfect sense when you are actually picking low-hanging fruit.

We were successful in harvesting our citrus.  We filled a 30 gallon molasses tub full of navel oranges.  Some of them were almost the size of cantaloupes.  We'll bring them out of the weather and will eat many of these.  We will also juice some and freeze it so that we have fresh squeezed orange juice to drink throughout the year.

We also filled half of our Gorilla Garden Wagon with neon orange tangerines.  These are a little harder to peel than a satsuma, so we cut these up in eighths and eat them off the rind.  These are Tricia's favorites.  They are so flavorful.  We made marmalade with them last year (or was it the year before?) and we still have some put up in the pantry.  I ate some spooned on top of some bread right out of the oven just this weekend.

The trees will be okay, but according to the Internet, we stood a good chance of losing all this fruit had we not gotten busy prior to the cold weather.  I'm glad we got it done!

The Cold Came Around And Our Internet Went Down

So it got a little cold for us beginning on Monday.  The temperatures dipped down to about 20 degrees.  That is chilly for us southerners!  We stayed by the fireplace in the evening and then noticed that the internet was down, so I was unable to post last night.  I guess the hamsters turning the wheels of the Internet froze, but they thawed them out and things are back up and running today. 

This morning we got up to milk the cows.  It was cold.  The mud was frozen and the cows did not have a clue of how to walk on it.  Once milking was done, I walked over to one of the frozen water troughs and used a piece of a 1x2 to try to break the ice.  No luck!  The board bounced off of the ice.  Time to call in the heavy artillery.  I got a sledge hammer from my work bench and returned to bust the ice.  The cows need some liquid water.

Frozen!

I hit one time and the hammer glanced off the ice, leaving the type of scar that your windshield gets when you are following a truck that throws a rock.

Time to stop playing around.  I gave the ice a good "whack" and the ice began to break up.  But wow, how thick is the ice?

Clarabelle immediately came and began drinking water.  You could tell that she was uneasy with the ice in her trough.  As she drank, the ice tinkled together.  Pretty soon the other cows came to drink and I began to break the ice in the chicken's water trough and then the goat's.

So how thick was the ice in the trough?  Well, I went to get my tape measure to get an accurate measurement.  It was 2 inches thick!

I've seen water trough de-icers sold in the Jeffer's catalog and the Farm-tek catalog, but these frigid conditions happen so rarely in Louisiana, that I think the sledge hammer is a more economical option.

Signed, Sealed, (But Not Delivered)

The other day, Tricia was busy mailing a photo to her mom.  She had sealed the envelope when she discovered that she should have enclosed two photos.  But the envelope was already sealed.  What to do?  Well, she could open the envelope, put the second photo in it, and tape it back up, but that would look tacky.

I remembered that I had read a Life Hack type deal that addressed this very item.  It said that you could pop the sealed envelope in the freezer for a couple of hours.  Then after 2 hours, you could take it out and immediately use a letter opener to open the sealed envelope without tearing it.  After doing this, you could put the second photo in and reseal the envelope by licking it!  By doing this, you would never be able to know that the envelope had been tampered with.  It is supposed to be less messy than steaming it.  This is some real spy stuff.  I decided to experiment with it.  Here's our opportunity to be Bond.  James Bond 007.  Let's do this.

We put the sealed envelope in our freezer.

After 1 and a half hours, we took it out and very quickly used a letter opener to unseal the letter.

So far, so good.

The letter popped right open, with minimal effort!

We enclosed the second photograph and licked it to re-seal the envelope.  No tape required.

Ready to be mailed!

How about that!?  James Bond, eat your heart out.  If I was to change anything, next time I would leave the envelope in for 2 hours.  There was one tiny portion that tore just a little bit, but was really unnoticeable unless you were looking for it.  We'll have to remember this little trick.  It saved an envelope, a stamp, and the work of re-addressing the letter.  A life hack, indeed!

Happy New Year! 2018

Here's wishing everyone a happy, healthy, and prosperous New Year!

Image Credit

As I was thinking about the New Year, I do look ahead and have goals set for the new year.  However, I admit I look back and have many regrets of goals not achieved, relationships not restored, desires not met, health issues not resolved, prayers not (yet) answered.  I wish I would have done many things differently.  Not that it was necessarily bad, but I wish 2017 would have been better.  Life is too short to waste time and energy dwelling on regrets.  I am reminded by the letter of the Apostle Paul the the church at Philippi that I should forget the past and look forward!  There is a much better goal or resolution - that is to press on, move forward for the upward call of God in Christ Jesus and that is what I'll strive to do.

Not that I have already obtained it or have already become perfect, but I press on so that I may lay hold of that for which also I was laid hold of by Christ Jesus. Brethren, I do not regard myself as having laid hold of it yet; but one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.    Philippians 3:12-14

Happy New Year!