The Sun in the Sky And Homemade Pie

 

From the rising of the sun unto the going down of the same the Lord's name is to be praised.  Psalm 113:3 KJV

Coming out of the garage looking due east in the morning, a few things catch your eye.  First, the sunrise really stands out.  The sun's rays at first yield a pinkish hue and then, as if to catch everyone's attention and announce, "It's morning.  Get a move on!" The yellow-red beams shine brightly.  They light up a bazillion acorns that have fallen overnight from the live oaks overhead.  It is amazing how many acorns are on the ground.  

The squirrels are going to be SO fat.  There are two less squirrels in the population.  My neighbor popped two out of the live oaks in the front.  It's squirrel season and we'll be thinning out their number.  I'm okay with them eating acorns, but when they get in the pecan trees, that's another story, entirely.

The Toyota Tacoma is in really good shape for a 2000 model, but it is in dire need of a polish.  We've done it before, but it seems to fade quickly.  That's my project for the fall.  I'm going to watch some You Tube videos on how to make your paint job come alive again and I'll use compound and a rotary buffer and then wax to make it look like new again.

It was my birthday on the 12th.  Tricia asked me what kind of cake I wanted.  Instead of a birthday cake, I chose a birthday pie.  There is nothing like homemade pie and a cup of coffee.  She asked me what kind and I answered, "Chocolate pie with meringue."  She surprised me with two pies!

The first is chocolate pie with homemade crust and meringue.  Look at the peaks on it!  It was so doggone good.  We finished it up tonight.

The second pie, the lagniappe pie, was a homemade pecan pie.  The pecans were from our trees and they were harvested before the squirrels got them.  So good and the crust was buttery and flaky.

In the late afternoon, I took a walk to check the mail at the mailbox and kept walking out into a field in front of the house and took a photo of the painting that God was doing on the canvas of the western sky.  Breathtaking!

We are so blessed.  We may not have everything we want, but we have everything we need.  Yes, from the rising to the setting sun, His Name is to be praised.

Everyone Loves Goat Milk

When I managed the family grocery store, we stocked canned goat milk.  I always wondered, "Who buys this stuff?"  I found out later.  Many people who have lactose intolerance and other problems digesting cow's milk have no problem with goat milk.  Goat milk is easily digestible, especially good for babies.  

We have a whole herd of dairy goats, Nubians, to be specific.  They've all been weaned.  Only Agnes is still in milk.  We are drying her off.  Tricia has frozen a lot of her milk in ice cube trays and we'll use that eventually to make goat milk soap.  We still milk her each day and night so that she doesn't get mastitis and we feed her milk to our laying hens.

We are hoping that the extra protein they get from the goat's milk will boost their egg laying numbers.  They are only laying about 10 eggs per day.  We've had to turn customers away, but that's normal this time a year.  As the number of daylight hours decrease, so does the hen's egg production.  They absolutely love the goat milk and immediately surround the bowl that I pour it into and drink it until it's gone.

Only one problem - Belle loves goat milk, too.  She comes rushing into the barn area, tail wagging and the chickens run off, feathers flying.  Some of the hens are missing their feathers as they are molting.  That has nothing to do with Belle.  She used to play with the chickens too roughly when she was a puppy and would kill them accidentally.  She's so big and doesn't know her strength. We are so glad she outgrew that stage.  (So are the hens.)

Belle sits there and laps up the milk vigorously.  I snapped the photo and then quickly ushered her out of the pasture so that the chickens can have the milk that Belle left behind.

Goat milk is good!  It is smooth and sweet.  Unfortunately for Belle, it's for the hens and not for her.

Zooming In (On Goldenrod)

I like mysteries and action films.  Spy movies.  At some point I remember watching a movie that showed a series of photos taken from a satellite.  The first photo showed the earth from outer space, a big beautiful orb.  The next showed a photo from space of the United States.  The next, a photo from the same satellite zoomed in on buildings outlined in a city.  The next showed, from the same satellite, of the outline of a man sitting on a park bench reading a newspaper.  Finally, the next photo showed the headlines of the newspaper the man on the park bench was reading.

Whether or not that is possible, I don't know.  I do know that our idea of privacy we once held is a distant memory.  Let me get back on track here.  Today I want to do something similar, but I don't have a satellite or even a drone.  You'll understand when I get to the end.  This photograph is the column on our side porch, and it is home to a colony (we call it our columny) of bees.  They've lived here for about a decade.  Sometimes they move out and then move right back in.  The entrance is at the very top.  If you look closely, you can see them coming in and out.  Our other four hives are in boxes on the other side of the house.

In the second photography, you can see the bees flying in the column, but you can see off in the distance, with the camera looking north and east, across the grape trellis and the persimmon tree.

The next photo shows large live oak trees across LA Highway 26.  Below them in the foreground is a telephone pole and something yellow running horizontally.

Behind the lines of the previous photo is a field of yellow.  That's what you could see from the bee hive in the column on our side porch.

Let's look a little closer.  What is it?  Well, in year's past, I would have just called them weeds.  Bad weeds, in fact, for these are Goldenrod, and Goldenrod cause lots of people with allergies a whole lot of problems.

But now, I look at them different.  The honeybees love goldenrod.  In fact, they are making a beeline (sorry) from the column and our four hives to this field of goldenrod.  They are getting pollen and nectar and bringing it back to their hives.  Most bees gather within a mile or two of the hive, but I've read that they can fly up to 5 or 6 miles away!

In the fall, you know when your bees are gathering pollen and nectar from goldenrod.  The way you can tell is from the smell.  Or shall I say, stench.  Golden rod honey smells like sweaty gym socks.  The first time we smelled it walking in the door to our side porch, we thought that the honey in the column had soured.  Then we learned more about it.

A lot of people don't like it because they don't like the smell, but it is supposed to be really beneficial and healthy for you and will actually HELP your allergies.  We can't get honey from the column, but from our bee boxes, our goal is to pull fall honey this year, which will largely be goldenrod honey.  We can't wait to try it.

So that was my lame attempt at a "spy blog" zeroing in on the target from a long way away.  Instead of 007's Goldeneye, we'll call it Goldenrod.

Patricia Picked a Peck of Peppers

When I got in from work I didn't see Tricia and didn't know where she was until I went out and began filling the cow and goat water troughs with water.  Then I saw her.  She was in the garden with her baskets.  She came inside after a little bit with a nice-sized harvest of various peppers.  From October until December or the first freeze is our best time for pepper production.  Although we didn't weigh them, it's a pretty good haul.  We've already picked and eaten and pickled and dehydrated a bunch and there are a bunch more on the way.  This doesn't count the jalapenos.

This basket are our Hot Banana Peppers.  I have these planted in a row far from the others as I didn't want them crossing with the mild banana peppers.  These boogers will surprise you.  You expect them to be a regular banana pepper and bite into it and it's not!

These are the regular banana peppers.  They are mild and crunchy.  We have pickled (lacto-fermented) quarts and quarts of these this year with many more to go.  We like eating them as a side dish at lunch.

Here are the Anaheim Peppers.  We like cooking with these and often use them instead of bell peppers.  They have a little bite to them - not as hot as a jalapeno, but more spice than a sweet bell pepper.  They add some good flavor to the pot.

And here is a mystery pepper.  I think it is some sort of habenero cross.  It sends you scrambling for milk to put out the fire in your mouth!  We've resorted to dehydrating these and then grinding into a fine powder for making a homemade creole seasoning blend.  It's very good.  You just have to be careful that you don't overdo it.

The jalapenos should be producing more and more now.  We eat those as fast as we pull them.  The shishito peppers, a new variety we planted this year, were a big hit, and we enjoyed blistering them and eating with some lime juice and kosher salt with grated cheese on top.  Sadly, all three of the plants all died at the same time.  We'll definitely plant more of those this spring.

What are your favorite peppers?

The Mystery Catfish

 

Image Credit

This week I traveled through Allen Parish and crossed over the Kinder Canal on both Highway 190 and Highway 165.  The Kinder Canal is an irrigation canal dug by the Kinder Canal Company decades and decades ago in order to provide water for farmers to irrigate their rice.  There was a large relift station on the Calcasieu River in which water from the river is pumped into the canal and flowed for miles and miles.  Farmers bordering the canal are able to use the water without investing in a deep water well.  They simply pay shares of their production to the Canal Company.  It is quite an engineering marvel, in my humble estimation.

As I passed over the canal, it brought to mind memories of riding my bicycle down to the canal to fish as a kid.  I smiled as I remembered one particular adventure.  I had a friend named David who lived right on the side of the Kinder Canal east of town.  He invited me over to his house to campout one weekend almost 50 years ago.  We pitched a tent on the side of the canal and dug worms and began setting out trot lines, baiting the hooks with worms, frogs, grasshoppers, and crickets.  We had lines set all down the banks of the canal amidst the cypress trees.  Every 30 minutes or so, we would go down the bank and check our lines for fish, rebaiting as needed, keeping our eyes peeled for snakes.

We started a campfire and sat around it in the interim, telling stories.  It was great fun, except we didn't bring any water.  The water from the canal was too muddy to drink.  What to do?  It was then that my friend, David, began to inform us that his Dad was a Green Beret and had taught him a trick if you were thirsty.  You would simply get a small stone, like what we call "pea gravel" and put it in your mouth.  It fools your mouth into making a bunch of saliva.  The theory is that this quenches your thirst.  Me and David and his little brother, Michael, that had joined us, ran down to the side of the road and found some small, smooth stones to put in our mouths.  Spit soon filled our mouths, but I can't testify that it made me any less thirsty.  I can't recommend it.  I give it one star out of five.

With stones in our mouths, we ran to check our trot lines.  We had caught a catfish on one of the lines.  There was a lot of whooping and hollering.  Success!  It was a blue cat.  We quickly skinned it and gutted it.  In addition to having no water to drink on this campout, we had no cooking utensils or seasoning.  That didn't discourage us.  We stuck a stick through the catfish and would spin the catfish on the stick over the fire, rotisserie style.  After a bit, the fish was done, or so we thought.  We were tired of spinning the fish, and we were hungry.  We passed the fish stick (ha ha) around the fire and we would each take a bite of the bland, unseasoned, and half-cooked fish, being careful not to eat bones.

At this point clouds of mosquitoes descended upon us like the plagues of Egypt.  David told of another trick to avoid mosquitoes.  You were supposed to coat your body with mud.  Based on the efficacy of his previous trick, I opted out of coating my body with mud.  Our campout at this point had hit rock bottom.  It was hot.  We were sweating.  Without water to drink, I was getting dehydrated, and I spit out the rock.  Green-beret trick or not, it wasn't working.  I also had a fishy taste in my mouth, mosquito bites on every square inch of my body.  I longed for the comforts of home, but it was too late in the night to back out.  I climbed in the tent, zipped it up and went to sleep.

The next morning, David and I were awakened by his brother.  He told us that HE had caught the biggest catfish he had ever seen.  It was a huge catfish!  He was making fun of us because we were older and yet he had caught the biggest fish.  He was trying to tell us that he had caught it on his fishing pole.  But something wasn't quite right.  As we looked at the big mudcat he was holding, we realized that he was pulling a fast one on us.  The fish still had a hook in its jaw along with thick black trot line tied to it that Michael had cut with his pocket knife off of OUR trot line.  It wasn't monofilament line like that on a rod and reel.  He had stolen our fish!  Mystery solved.

We were mad at him, but it was morning and we weren't hungry for catfish for breakfast.  Especially not bland, half cooked catfish, so we let him run on back to his house with the fish.  

Feeding the Fishes

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday.  I love the family time, the festivities, the crisp fall weather in the air, the focus on thankfulness and the food.  One of the things that we always shoot for is fresh green beans out of the garden as a side dish on the menu.  We grow snap beans in the spring.  In the fall, it's a little more tricky, but it's worth it.  I'm thinking about fresh snap beans wrapped in little bundles bound by bacon, topped with brown sugar and cooked in the oven.  Delicious!

But we have to work hard to get them there.  For one thing we planted two rows of Contender Snap Beans.  It's still 90 degrees a week into October.  That means the pests like army worms, caterpillars and other bugs are feasting on all the fresh foliage.  You can see some evidence of worm damage to the sweet potato leaves in the right corner of the photo below.  In looking at the forecast, on Tuesday, we'll have lows in the lower 60's and highs around 84 degrees.  That'll be the best the weather has been in a while.  Hopefully it will send the pests into hibernation or at least slow them down.

Yesterday, now that the snap beans are getting some size, I figured it was high time to give them some fertilizer.  They were started with some composted chicken manure, but now it's time to give them a little boost.  This time I'll hit them with some fish emulsion.   I use a powdered fish emulsion that calls for 1 Tablespoon per gallon of water that I put in my garden sprayer.  The leaves are covered until they are wet, giving them a good foliar feeding and then a spray the ground around the stem until the soil is wet.

I learned from experience to try to use it all up, leaving no leftovers.  If the fish emulsion is left in the sprayer, it heats up and 'cooks.'  The concoction turns green and smells absolutely awful - like raw sewerage.  So now I use it all up, emptying out the sprayer.  Although the fish emulsion stinks, the plants love it, and it is an organic, natural way to fertilize your plants.  I'll try to do this once every week.

Hopefully, this will keep the snap beans growing and pretty soon we'll see blooms and then a little later, pods.  And you know what that means?  We'll be swimming in snap beans come Thanksgiving.

Holding a Grudge

The Good Book tells us not to let the sun go down on our anger.  It also has a lot to say about forgiveness and not holding grudges against people.  And we shouldn't!

But what about creatures?  Is it okay to harbor anger toward a murderous varmint?  Let me explain.  At Our Maker's Acres Family Farm, we have the Blue Bell Ice Cream philosophy with the commodities we raise: "We eat all we can and sell the rest."  People stop by and purchase eggs, milk, and honey from us.  We have a sign out by the road and our neighbors stop by and "shop."

Lately, we more of a demand for eggs than we have supply.  As the daylight hours shorten, hens lay less.  We have regular customers that routinely purchase a set amount.  We routinely eat a set amount.  As the supply of eggs from the hens are reduced, the math doesn't work.  So why don't we have more hens?!  Well, you're going to get me wound up tight asking that sort of question...

Minks.  Bloodthirsty, vicious, murderous varmints.  They ate most of our birds.  I'll show you a nightly chore we must do.  This is the hen house.  In total we lost 39 laying hens to minks.  One night there were 8, I think, killed in a bloody pile beneath the roosting bars.  This was the murder scene months ago.  Now each night, we must round up the few birds that habitually go into the hen house to roost.  

We pick each one up and bring them to a couple of rabbit hutches that we've repurposed as hen habitats for humanity.  The hardware cloth that the rabbit hutches are lined with are small enough to keep the minks out.  We put the hens in the rabbit hutches at nightfall and shut the latches.  Safe for the night.

These are battle-hardened hens (and two roosters).  They've watched in horror as their friends were killed one by one like the people on Soldier Island in Agatha Christie's "And Then There Were None."  If I believed in therapy, these girls would probably need several sessions on a therapist's couch.  But they keep going, day by day, looking death in the eye.  Well, truthfully, they're not that smart.  They depend on us to live another day.

I almost forgot.  Here are the 6 new birds we hatched out.  They roost each night in a dog kennel.  We shut the door to the kennel so they are safe.  In hindsight, with our egg shortage, we should have purchased more laying hens to replace the ones lost.  We did hatch out some of our own eggs by letting broody hens lay, but that's not a prescription for building your flock back up quickly as roughly half of them will be roosters.

Don't get me wrong, the roosters are great for gumbos.  We have some in the freezer waiting on "gumbo weather" right now.  But the fastest way to build the flock back up is to buy some chicks that have been 'sexed' so that you're buying only pullets.  That way in about 24 weeks, you have a good egg supply.

But C'est La Vie.  Such is life.  There are predators and unfortunately, our birds are prey.  We learn to cope and adapt and fight back.  Perhaps one day I'll forgive the minks for their deeds of darkness, but it won't be today.  The minks should have heeded the wisdom in Proverbs!:

If they say, Come with us, let us lay wait for blood, let us lurk privily for the innocent without cause: Let us swallow them up alive as the grave; and whole, as those that go down into the pit: We shall find all precious substance, we shall fill our houses with spoil: Cast in thy lot among us; let us all have one purse: My son, walk not thou in the way with them; refrain thy foot from their path: For their feet run to evil, and make haste to shed blood.  Proverbs 1:11-16