And a Bull Comes 'A Courting

We currently have 1 cow (Rosie) and 2 heifers (Elsie & LuLu) on the pasture.  We have watched their activity of when they come in heat and marked it on the calendar.  At least we have for Elsie and Rosie.  They come in heat this week.  We don't really know when LuLu's cycle is.  Cows have a 21 day cycle.  It is important that you introduce a bull during this time for obvious reasons.

I called our neighbor that has a Jersey bull and asked if we could bring our 3 girls down to his place.  Unfortunately, he told me that he just sold his bull.  That's too bad for us.  It was only a short 7 minute drive to get to his home, unload the cows and have them bred.  We made some phone calls and it just so happens that some neighbors a little further down the road have a Jersey bull.  He was agreeable to allowing us to use him.  He told us we could pick him up from his farm and take him back to our place.

Today after church, we did just that.  Russ hooked up the cattle trailer to his truck and we made the ten minute drive, backed up to the chute and prepared to load him up.  After some cajoling, he was in the trailer heading to Our Maker's Acres Family Farm.  The bull is gentle, but he's not halter broken.  We got him unloaded into the pasture, but we're scratching our heads on how we're going to load him back up in the trailer when he's finished his work here as we don't have a corral or chute.  We'll cross that bridge when we get there.  We'll have to be real careful having him here, though.  Dairy bulls are a dangerous thing to have around.

We unloaded the fellow and he began checking our his new surroundings.  He's a young bull, but he's larger than our animals.  He very slowly walked around, taking it all in, scoping out the ladies.

Rosie, Elsie, and LuLu circled around him and he got acquainted with them.  There's no romance yet, but in a couple of days, things should start happening.  And if all is successful, we'll have late July/early August calves.

The friend who offered to let us use the old boy said, "We're glad he's able to serve a purpose.  He was kinda taking up space around here."  We're thankful to have him around and we'll be watching the courtship take place in the pasture.  We didn't even ask what his name was!  We might have to make up a name for him for the short time he's here.

The Fall Potato Experiment - An Update

 "The same boiling water that softens potatoes hardens eggs.  It's all about what you are made of, not your circumstances." - Anonymous

Not long ago I rambled on about an experiment I was trying with fall potatoes.  We save some of our potatoes that we harvested back in May from our Spring Crop and plant them for the fall.  We didn't have many potatoes left, but the ones we did held over pretty good.  The trouble with fall potatoes is that you are on a short leash with the weather.  If you get an early frost like we do from time to time, you run the risk of losing your crop.  

About the time it is fall potato planting time, I don't have room in the garden to plant anything.  A real dilemma.  I thought about some thing that we could try that would solve the early frost problem and the lack of space problem!  I planted the fall crop of potatoes in landscape pots.  That way they didn't have to go in the ground when I didn't really have the room AND if we get an early frost, I could pre-emptively take the pots of potatoes into the garage.  Portable potatoes, perhaps?  A win-win situation.  But would it work??

I planted them in three year old composted wood chips mixed with chicken litter.  The "soil" was wood chips three years ago.  Now it is a rich medium for growing stuff.  What will the experiment show us?  Well, we won't really know until we harvest, but take a look at some of them:

Man, they are growing like our national debt.  Or the inflation rate.  Or interest rates.  Let's change the subject and just say they are growing great.  But it's what's beneath the soil that's important.

When it is time to harvest, we'll rate the experiment.  I planted 12 whole potatoes that were a little smaller than the size of an egg.  Upon harvest we'll count the yield and see how we did.  Stay tuned and find out!  

Thankful For the Little Things

Thanksgiving isn't very far away.  It is my favorite holiday.  The others have all gotten so commercialized and lost a lot of their original intent.  Thankfulness is a virtue that is lacking in this day and age.  It does a soul good just to be appreciative to the Creator for the goodness that He showers over us.  We are told to count our blessings, name them one by one.

Today, I'll name one of them.  Fresh green beans.  Some call them snap beans.  Whatever you call them, what a treat they are!  It's one of my favorite things in the garden.  We planted a fall crop of them - two rows.  One of them Contender Green beans and the other, Roma II Italian beans.  Despite a few pests still eating on the leaves in the hot weather (still upper 80's), the fall crop has been healthy.  We are about 21 inches behind where we should be, so it is dry.  If I hadn't been turning on the water sprinkler every other day, these wouldn't be quite so lush and green, but maybe the composted chicken manure I collected from beneath the roosts and fed them with had something to do with it as well.

I like growing them in the fall also because one of my favorite Thanksgiving side dishes is fresh picked green beans wrapped in bundles of bacon and cooked in the oven.  Today I picked the first crop of green beans of the fall.  The Contender variety wasn't quite ready, but the Roma II Italian beans were coming in strong.

Picking beans, I notice as I get older, is getting harder and harder on the back!  Next year I'll try to space the rows out so that I can sit on a little chair with wheels and push myself while seated instead of crouched over.  Once done, I put them in the sink and washed them up read good.  I'll put them in the fridge and we'll eat on these and enjoy them.

You can see the difference in the two varieties below.  Generally, the Contenders are a producer of great volume while the Roma II's are more flavorful.  They're flat, wide beans.  Delicious.  I gave some to Russ and he was eating them raw.  

Tricia has been away for a couple days visiting her family in Texas, so I figured I would send her a photo to visually communicate to her what I've been doing:

She got a kick outta that!  The beans are loaded with blooms and small beans so hopefully they'll continue to produce through the fall.  I'm thankful for green beans!

Experimenting With Celery

For several years, I tried to plant celery seed to grow our own celery.  We like celery.  It is part of the holy trinity of Cajun cooking (onion, bell pepper, and celery) that serves as the base for many dishes we enjoy.  We grow onions, and we grow bell pepper.  I've never been able to grow celery from seed, despite trying several times.  It's not due to our locale, because we have friends that live 30 minutes away from us that can grow it just fine.  They even dug some plants up for us and gave them to us.  I planted them.  They promptly died.  

So we've resorted to buying it from the store.  My wife happened to see that you can grow celery from what's left over from your store bought celery.  We decided to give it a try.  She cut the celery we were going to eat off the stalk, leaving about 3 inches from the bottom.  Then she used a knife to barely cut off the bottom where the roots were.  She placed the celery, root side down, in a bowl of water and placed on the window sill.

In just a couple of days, fresh, new, green growth popped up out of the old celery scraps!  Over the next few days, fresh root growth appeared on the bottom of the celery in the water.  This thing wanted to live!

We prepared a nice spot in our herb garden, right between the ginger and parsley and oregano plants and planted it and watered it in.

Each day we check on it and keep it well-watered since it is so dry right now.  I moved some mulch around the base of the celery plant to keep the soil moist.  Celery loves cooler weather, so hopefully this one will flourish.  Tricia's already gotten another one sprouting on the window sill.  We'll see what happens.  Maybe, even though I never had success growing celery from seed, we will see success growing celery from the grocery store.  We'll keep you posted as the experiment progresses.

Protect the Boundary Stones

 

                                                                        Image Credit

Landmarks are a very important thing.  When I worked in the Sulphur/Carlyss area, the area was decimated by Hurricane Laura.  My dispatcher lost his home.  He told me that he couldn’t find his way down the backroads anymore as all the landmarks were gone.  In the past, you’d tell someone to turn left on the gravel road right by the old red barn and then make a right at the big water oak tree.  Well, now the old red barn and the big water oak tree was gone.  With the landmarks gone as points of reference, it was easy to get lost.

This past week I opened up Proverbs 23 and read the following: 

Proverbs 23:10-11 King James Version

10 Remove not the old landmark; and enter not into the fields of the fatherless:

11 For their redeemer is mighty; he shall plead their cause with thee.

Then one day later, we were reading in Job 24 and read about boundary stones again! 

I asked myself, what are these landmarks the Bible is talking about?  I had never really paid much attention to them, so I began to study.  The Bible actually says a whole lot about them.  Like this:

Deuteronomy 19:14  King James Version

¹⁴ Thou shalt not remove thy neighbour's landmark, which they of old time have set in thine inheritance, which thou shalt inherit in the land that the Lord thy God giveth thee to possess it.

Boundary stones were informal stone monuments regularly used to mark the corners of family fields.  Today, people will call a surveyor to set (or recover) the property corners and produce a detailed plat or map.  Surveying is an old profession.  In fact George Washington began his career as a young man in 1749 as a surveyor.  Between jobs about 15 years ago, I’d help a local surveyor part time in surveying.  We’d go out to a piece of land with instruments and find the corners.  We would use a metal detector, instruments, and shovel to find or set the corners and they were marked with metal rods. 

When we purchased our land and wanted to erect a fence for livestock, I found the corners and built the fence on the line.  I didn’t want to encroach on the neighbor’s property.

If you look at Proverbs 23:10-11, even back then, these informal stone markers were called “ancient” or old.  The property lines had been in place for a long time.  They marked the property lines of family land.  Land was used for growing grain or grazing livestock and was crucial to financial stability.  Moving the boundary stone to make your field larger, resulted in your neighbor’s field being smaller.  It was taking something that wasn’t yours.  It’s theft.  The Bible says God is watching.  The Redeemer is strong and He’ll hold it against you, especially if you stole from orphans and denied their inheritance.

Let’s look at the sinister ways in which boundaries were moved.  Let's suppose there is a rock that will represent the boundary stone, the landmark.  Clever neighbors who wanted to expand their land wouldn’t move the stone all at once.  The neighbor would notice.  The place where the stone was would be easy to see as there wouldn’t be grass there.  No, you would move it a LITTLE at a time and would kick grass and dirt around the stone so that the movement wouldn’t be visible.  Over years, this stone could be moved gradually and considerable land could be taken, without notice.

God established boundaries and they are important to Him.  In addition to marking property ownership, He set boundaries to keep us safe, healthy, on the right path and to provide blessing.  We can ignore these boundaries, but we do so at our own peril.  When the children of Israel moved into the Promised Land, the 12 tribes were given land with boundaries.

In the past, boundaries were marked with stone like the one we talked about, but boundaries also came from stone tablets, right?  From God’s Word.  God also established boundaries in the created world.  They help us as we navigate through life.  Boundaries like this: Night and day.  The four seasons.  Male and Female.  Truth and Lies, Wisdom and Folly.  Life and Death.  Right and Wrong.  Trees you can eat from.  Tree you can’t.  The Serpent had Adam and Eve question the boundaries: “Hath God not said?”  "Will you really die if you eat the fruit of this tree?"

In the Old Testament, God sent prophets to warn people.  Judah had seized Israel’s territory, moving the physical boundary that separated them.  But their leaders also moved the moral boundaries as well:

Their deeds do not permit them to return to their God. A spirit of prostitution is in their heart; they do not acknowledge the Lord. Israel’s arrogance testifies against them; the Israelites, even Ephraim, stumble in their sin; Judah also stumbles with them.. Judah’s leaders are like those who move boundary stones. I will pour out my wrath on them like a flood of water.  (Hosea 5:4-5, 10) 

But we aren’t talking about Old Testament times only, are we?  After all this time, God’s timeless, ancient boundaries are still in place.  His moral boundaries are too.  See the human heart is desperately wicked, the Bible tells us.  People tire of objective truth and boundaries and want to move them or ignore them altogether.  People find clever ways to “move the boundary stone” a little bit at a time.

Examples (the moment life begins, definition of marriage, the necessity of a two parent home with fathers leading the family, fluid gender, sexual acts, language and innuendo in movies and TV.  In 1939, in the movie, "Gone with the Wind," Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh) tearfully asked, “Where will I go?  What shall I do?” Rhett Butler (Clark Gable) turned and said, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a &#$%.”  Look at how we’ve fallen once that boundary stone was moved.  The Slippery Slope exists and we are in a free fall on that slope, it seems.  

Proverbs 22:28  Do not move the ancient boundary which your fathers have set.

Truth be told, God gives us freedom to make our own decisions, but moving these boundary stones come at a high price.

 Job 24:1-4 King James Version

1 Why, seeing times are not hidden from the Almighty, do they that know him not see his days?
2 Some remove the landmarks; they violently take away flocks, and feed thereof.
3 They drive away the ass of the fatherless, they take the widow's ox for a pledge.
4 They turn the needy out of the way: the poor of the earth hide themselves together.

Look at the suffering that occurs when we ignore God.  God gives us boundaries for our own good.  If we heed them, we avoid needless pain and suffering and enjoy blessing.  God loves us and desires the best for us.

This is what the Lord says: “Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls. (Jeremiah 6:16)

Conversely, when our society encroaches the boundaries that God has set, God judges.  History is packed with examples of crumbled nations that were once strong and morally grounded.  Be on guard against society encroaching upon Biblical values and boundaries set by God’s word, backed up by parents and church and nations built upon Judeo-Christian principles.  Stand for Truth and God’s boundaries.  Guard them.

So how do we get back (if that is possible)?  If it’s possible, the only way is to restore the ancient boundaries.  We see where we’ve missed the mark as described in Scripture and we come back to those standards in our lives, our churches, and our nations.  Even non-believers benefit by believers heeding God’s boundaries.  Christians must guard themselves, and be diligent in our witness and in our prayers if this culture is to have a chance of returning to God’s original boundaries.

In closing, there is one more boundary we need to discuss – the boundary between Salvation and Condemnation, between spiritual life and death.  As with the other boundaries, the Bible clearly delineates the two.  And He provided a way to move from death to life through God’s Son, Jesus Christ.  Jesus Himself said the following:

John 11:25-26  King James Version

25 Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live:  26 And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. Believest thou this?

And that is the big question, isn't it?  There is a boundary between heaven and hell.  Between life and death.  And it hinges on how you answer that question.  Do you believe?

There's Good Beans and Then There's Poisonous Beans

Without any rainfall in over a month now, I've been irrigating with my new sprinkler each and every day.  The snap beans are blooming and if we want them to produce in meaningful quantities that we can enjoy now as well as blanch and freeze some for later, well, they need some water.  So far, they are holding up and looking very healthy.  Good news is that the long range forecast shows a decent chance of rain next Wednesday and Thursday.  These are a row of Italian Roma II beans.  They are a flat bean that have a delicious taste.  I highly recommend them.

We have another row planted that are of the Contender and Blue Lake varieties.  These are pretty healthy, too, but didn't get quite the germination percentage as the Romas and they're experiencing some bug pressure.  Cooler weather on the way will help that problem out, I'm sure.  Hopefully, we'll be producing a good bean crop that'll take us through Thanksgiving.  I love fresh snap beans for Thanksgiving.

I want to show you another bean we grow.  These are hyacinth beans.  They are quite beautiful.  I got them at a seed swap one time.  They have a purplish vine with big leaves and beautiful blooms.  One problem with them is that the matured or dried beans are poisonous.  I guess this is a dangerous thing to have in the garden, but they're strictly ornamental.

I have them growing at the back gate of the garden that leads to the barn.  I made an arbor of sorts by leaning over a livestock panel for the hyacinth beans to grow on.  They make a nice canopy of leaves and blooms.  Tricia is not fond of the arbor.  She's worried that snakes might get in there and drop down or her head.

You'll notice the goats around the hyacinth bean arbor.  Those dudes and dudettes like to crane their necks over and eat the foliage off of the arbor.  That's why the hyacinth beans look more full on the side away from the pasture.  We don't have to worry about them getting poisoned because they eat everything they can prior to the beans getting mature or dried.

The flowers turn to purple pods.  I'll have plenty of seed to give away if anyone is looking to plant a pretty NON-EDIBLE bean.

I'm all about mainly growing things you can eat, but with our hyacinth bean arbor, I'll make an exception (as long as the snakes don't fall on Tricia's head.)  That event would result in me having to take it down.

Have a nice weekend everyone!  I'll be back Sunday night to post.

A Dry September

 17 Now Elijah the Tishbite, who was of the settlers of Gilead, said to Ahab, “As the Lord, the God of Israel lives, before whom I stand, there shall certainly be neither dew nor rain during these years, except by my word.”  1 Kings 17:1

The prophet Elijah shut off the rain for three years.  That must have been just terrible!  It was a very dry June.  It rained a decent amount in July and August, but now, it hasn't rained in a month.  I haven't looked at the rainfall data to see the trend on our little homestead, but I heard on the radio that we are 20 inches behind the average YTD rainfall totals.  That is a significant shortfall.

The fact that we keep a four inch layer of wood chips over the garden soil retains soil moisture.  In fact, we seldom have to do any irrigation at all.  But lately, without significant rainfall, I determined that if we wanted to have crops, I'd better water 'em.  I found the old oscillating water sprinkler that I hadn't used in over a year and hooked it up to the hose.  Well, it no longer worked.  It was pitiful watching it.

I went to the hardware store and picked up a new one.  It cost right at $20 and gave me sticker shock for a bit.  Walking by the clearance bin, I looked briefly at a sprinkler for $5.  I picked it up and came real close to bringing the $20 one back to the shelf.  Then I looked at the square footage of coverage for each.  The more expensive one would irrigate more land with less labor and time expended moving it around.  I purchased the $20 sprinkler and I'm glad I did.  I set it and forget it, and it waters 1/3 of the garden before I have to move it.

I have a big plot of sweet potatoes that are just about a week or two away from harvest.  I want them to grow to the fullest extent and have the soil slightly moist and pliable for harvest time.  Right behind that I have a couple rows of snap beans.  They are full of blooms and little pods.  Good watering will boost the harvest.  We always really enjoy fresh picked green beans wrapped in bacon for our Thanksgiving feast.

But the most important thing is to irrigate the rows of newly planted seeds that I need to keep watered so the seeds germinate and the little seedlings don't wither in the sun.  I have two rows of cabbage, 1 row of cauliflower, two rows of broccoli, two rows of beets, a half row of Swiss chard and two and a half rows of tomatoes.  Watering those things is crucial at this time until they get established, so I'll do it at least every other day until we have a soaking rain.  The 10 day forecast shows none.

In looking at the fall planting calendar, I still must plant (in this order): bok choy, lettuce, kohlrabi, radishes, carrots, mustard greens, turnips, and spinach.  I'll be planting several varieties of lettuce, carrots and spinach.  The sweet potatoes must be harvested first to make room for those items, though.