Awash in Squash!

The squash vine borer (SVB) is a terrible pest.  It's a red and black moth that lays eggs at the base of the squash.  The eggs hatch and the larvae bore into the stem, hollowing out the plant, depriving it of nutrition.  One day everything in the squash patch is wonderful.  The next day, you walk out and the big beautiful leaves are wilted and the squash plant is dead!

I wanted to get ahead of the squash vine borers, so I planted early.  An ill-timed frost wiped out the big leaves, but they grew back.  I administered some of my homegrown liquid fertilizer and they grew like bad weeds.  I even had to put up some barriers so they don't crowd out my tomatoes!  And the harvest is really coming in.  This is a daily haul!:  

We are giving them away left and right, but we're eating a bunch of them, too.  We always like to try new recipes.  I'll show you two things we did recently that were hits and will be added into our rotation of dishes we cook.  I'll post links of the recipes if you'd like to try them out for yourself.

The first is zucchini bread.  It has nuts and cinnamon along with 2 cups of shredded zucchini.  If you have kids or grandkids that are picky about vegetables, well here's a sure-fire way to "sneakily" get them to LOVE zucchini!

I cut a slice about 10 minutes after removing from the oven and slathered some butter on top.  Delicious.  Click on the link for the recipe: Zucchini Bread

We had a whole bunch of shredded zucchini left over since the zucchini bread recipe only called for two cups.  So tonight I made zucchini fritters with the rest of them, and I'll be darned if I didn't just about eat them all myself!  Just a few simple ingredients and easy to do.  Here they are frying in a cast iron skillet.  One note: Next time I'll use a smaller zucchini.  You can see the seeds in the fritters below and they can be a little tough.  Zucchini grow really fast, though, so you have to keep and eye on them or they'll get huge overnight.

I like to let them get dark brown and crispy.  They still retain the bright, colorful green.  Fresh stuff from the garden is so tasty and colorful.

You can put sour cream on top, but I poured some homemade hot sauce we made using Anaheim Peppers.  It was scrumptious!

Here is the recipe that I used: Zucchini Fritters Recipe   Unless the squash vine borers wipe us out, we'll have a bumper crop of both zucchini and yellow squash.  If we find any recipes that we like, we'll share.  Maybe a zucchini martini?  Or a zucchini milkshake?  Perhaps not.

Take it To the Limit

I hesitated telling this story for several reasons.  One, you might think I'm embellishing since this just doesn't happen.  Two, I don't want to disparage the town because of the, let's say, overzealous nature of one particular officer enforcing the law.  Three, I'm a 'back the blue' kind of guy.  I thought 'defund the police' was stupid.  I want police to enforce the laws and keep us safe in our communities. And Four, because I did something that sometimes happens in small towns when you know someone.  That'll be explained a little later.

It was a beautiful October day, 8:02 AM and I'm driving to my first stop for work heading west-bound on I-10.  The speed limit is 70 mph, and I'm abiding by the posted limit, traveling in the right hand lane.  As I approach a town that is notorious as a speed trap, I double check my speed.  All good.  I know the spot where they like to hide under the overpass and cite unsuspecting motorists, so my eyes are wide open.

It just so happens, I'm directly behind an 18 wheeler carrying totaled vehicles.  Bumper covers of wrecked vehicles are flapping violently in the wind.  They are not wrapped with mesh or crash wrap, so I'm concerned that some piece will fly off the truck and hit and damage my vehicle.  I routinely inspect vehicles that have been damaged by hitting obstructions on the highway or that have had unsecured items fly off of trucks and damage the vehicle, so my concern is not unwarranted.

I realize then that I'm in a pickle, though.  The truck was doing 70 mph.  If I speed up to pass and get around him, Barney Fife that is hiding in the bushes with his radar detector fired up will ticket me.  If I stay behind the truck, I'm confident my vehicle will be damaged.  I make a calculated decision and put my blinker on and get the the passing lane so I'm not hit by debris from the car carrier.  I maintain the speed limit of 70 mph in the passing lane until such time that I can safely pass the truck.  I waited until the police was a couple miles behind me, speed up to about 74 mph, pass the truck and get back in the right hand lane.  All is right with the world, right?  I made it through the gauntlet.

However, in my rear view mirror, I see blue flashing lights.  "Well," I say to myself, "the Town of _____ just made some more money from someone to buy a new Tahoe or a drone to surveil things around town."  And then he pulls behind me!  I pull over to the shoulder, gather my license, proof of insurance and registration and wait for him to sidle up to my window.

He introduced himself as Officer L____ and presents me with the following citation: 

Right in the middle of the ticket, you can see the infraction.  I was doing 69 mph in a 70 mph speed limit.  (You read that right)  He told me that I was impeding traffic, but there was no one behind me.  I thought of a million things to say, but then I bit a hole through my tongue while telling him thank you.  This is no joke, after handing me the citation for meritorious driving, he told me, "I hope your day gets better from here on out," as he strolled back to his cruiser.

I have a hard-headed streak in me as Tricia will attest.  I committed to myself right there on the shoulder that there is no way in hades that I was going to pay that ticket.  I would go to jail instead on principle.  I would never spend another penny in this nearby town so they wouldn't make any sales tax revenue from me for life.  In the end, after all, I spoke to someone who lived in the town, and they called someone they knew in city government and the ticket was cleared where I wouldn't need to pay it or show up at my court date.

All's well that ends well, I guess.  But every time I drive by there, I know that there is no grace, not even 1 mph over or UNDER, so I set my cruise to 70 mph.  It kinda reminds me of the old Eagles song with the following lyrics:

So put me on a highway, and show me a sign,  (like a speed limit sign?)
And take it to the limit one more time

I know this isn't what Randy Meisner of the Eagles was thinking when he wrote that song, but I would be remiss to warn you, if you are ever driving 10 miles or so west of Jennings on I-10, "take it to the limit one more time."  Take it right up to, but not over, the speed limit of 70. 

Now I'm gonna have that song stuck in my head! 

Homegrown Fertilizer

In a post back on April 5th entitled a "foul smelling concoction", we described how we're turning weeds and garden waste into liquid fertilizer by inoculating with cow manure, rainwater and letting it ferment in 5 gallon buckets in the sun.  Homegrown fertilizer.  It has proven itself.  We've never had bigger, healthier, more productive yellow squash and zucchini!

We have another way that we produce homegrown fertilizer.  It's derived in our henhouse.  You might call it a "fowl" smelling concoction as well.  It is in the hen house where the chickens roost at night on roosting bars on the eastern wall.  You can see the sun filtering in from the western sky as I stand in the doorway.  Over time, the poop piles up underneath the place where they roost.

If you allow it to pile up, the henhouse has a strong ammonia smell.  It reminds me of how they describe bat guano in caves.  Every so often, in order to gather fertilizer AND to freshen up the aroma in there, I shovel the chicken litter into a wagon and pull to the garden.

On this particular afternoon I was able to fill two 30 gallon molasses tubs with composted litter.  I'll cover with a lid to keep it sealed off and dry.  If you look closely at it, in addition to chicken poop, there is straw and feathers mixed in as well.

Chicken litter is high in nitrogen and must be composted or cooled down for about four months until it is "cooled off" enough for use around plants to ensure that you don't burn the plants.  The tricky part of this is that most of the chicken manure in the tub is composted.  However, some of it on the top layer under the roost is fresh.  What I've always been able to do is to mix the litter thoroughly in order to incorporate the fresher manure with the composted manure and then either top dress or incorporate in the soil before planting.  It's an inexact science and it could (pardon the pun) burn me, but up to this point, it hasn't bothered the plants in the garden.

Free fertilizer made right here on our little farm.  It beats the pants off of buying it!

An Easy Spring Dessert

We are right smack dab in the middle of the best strawberry harvest we've ever had.  Very early in the year I planted some bare root strawberries - a ten foot row of them in the very back of the garden by the sugar cane.  They have thrived!  In past years, we struggled because the slugs and snails would eat them before we could harvest them.  A nice lady from our church gave me a plastic shopping bag full of crushed up egg shells to sprinkle around the base of the plant (see below).  She told me that the sharp eggshells cut the slugs undersides when they slide to eat strawberries and die.  I did what she told me, and it appears to work!  

She then told me if the eggshells don't work, that there is another remedy for slugs.  Beer!  She told me to put plastic lids filled with beer around the strawberry plants.  The slimy critters are attracted to the scent, climb in and drown.  I have not tried this eradication option yet.  The last thing I need is a bunch of partying, drunken slugs and snails loitering in the garden.  That doesn't sound safe.

Each morning we can expect to get a handful like this.  I bring them in and Tricia makes us a nice strawberry breakfast smoothie with goat milk and our honey.

I'm going to share a new recipe we tried today that's a keeper: Honey-Lime Macerated Strawberries (a recipe from The School of Traditional Skills.)  Check 'em out!  

So macerated was a new vocabulary word for me.  It means softened while sitting in a liquid.  The acidity of the lime in this recipe pulls out the juice from the strawberries.  Here's what you need:

1 lb fresh strawberries

1 TBS Local Raw Honey

1 Lime zested and juiced

5-6 fresh mint leaves

Wash up the berries that just came out of the garden and pick the mint leaves and wash.

Cut up the strawberries in a glass bowl.  Drizzle the honey, lime juice and lime zest over the berries and stir to coat.

Here's where our new vocabulary word goes to work.  If you let the bowl of berries sit for 15-20 minutes at room temperature the berries soften and a bright red syrup will collect at the bottom of the bowl.  You might call it a maceration sensation.

When it's about time to serve, chiffonade your fresh mint leaves over the top and stir in.

After church we ate a nice meal and put coffee on.  We each fixed a little bowl with this easy spring dessert to go along with our coffee.

What a treat it was!  All the ingredients (except the limes, doggonit) were harvested right off of our land.  That makes it special - almost as special as the taste!  We'll keep this recipe and make more of this before the strawberry harvest ends.

Attempting to Make Splits

We've got big plans for our four honeybee hives.  Here it is April 16th and we're almost out of honey.  We pulled honey in July and again in the fall and our inventory is low.  I think we'll run out before we rob the hives.  So we got to thinking that we need a few more hives. If we had 6 hives instead of four, that would be perfect.

I do have swarm traps out to try to catch some wild swarms, but so far, no luck.  The other option is to make splits.  That's exactly what we did.  You'll notice the splits below.  Moving left to right, the third box and the last box are splits.  The splits come off of the existing four hives, and I'll try to explain what we did.

A quick description of making a split is as follows:  You get an empty box.  Then you open a healthy hive of bees with a strong population.  As you go through each frame in the brood chamber, you want to locate the queen.  On frames where the queen is NOT there, remove a frame of honey, a frame of pollen, a frame of eggs, a frame of uncapped and capped larva and put it in the empty box.  We attempted a split into a deep box and another split in the Nuc.

Within five hours, the nurse bees in the split hives realize that there is NO queen in the box by the lack of the scent of her pheromone.  That spells doom for a colony of bees, so they pick out a cell for the bee in which they'll make a queen.  To accomplish this, the nurse bees begin feeding it nothing but royal jelly that they produce from a gland in their heads.  I'll show a projected timeline below:

We made splits on April 6th, 

On April 9th the bees select the larvae that will become the queen cells
On April 11th, they cap the queen cells

On April 19th the queen hatches and leaves her cell
From April 22-April 26, the virgin queen takes orientation flights
From April 24-May 3 the queen takes her mating flight where she flies to meet a drone to get bred.
On April 26-May 3 you'll see your first eggs if mating was successful
By May 12, you'll want to investigate to ensure they've been successful in creating a new queen.

Here is the split hive that we put in a regular deep box:

And here's one that we put in a nuc.:

If the splits were successful, we should see a queen in the split hives as well as eggs by May 12.  We use bricks positioned on the top cover to tell the story about what's going on in the hive.  A brick laid longways tells us that we either saw the queen or we saw eggs.  A brick laid crossways, like the third and last hives tells you that no queen was located and no eggs were located.

If the splits were successful, we'll know about it and will be able to move the bricks on the 3rd and 6th hives longways.  We certainly hope we're successful in splitting and moving from four to six hives of honeybees.

Making Cajeta (Mexican Goat Milk Caramel)

We have well over a gallon of fresh goat milk in our ice box.  We've made pounds of cheese, made smoothies with it, use it instead of cow milk for everyday dairy needs and since we milk twice a day, it keeps piling up!  What to do with all this goat milk?  Well, we decided to make cajeta.  Cajeta is Mexican goat milk caramel, and it is delicious!

Recipe: (from Home Cheese Making by Ricki Carroll)

2 Tablespoons cornstarch
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
3 quarts whole goat's milk
3 cups sugar

You dissolve the cornstarch and baking soda in 1 cup of the milk and stir to dissolve.  Then add the remaining milk and the sugar and stir... 

Bring it to a boil while continuing to stir...

And stir...  You can see the color starting to change.

And keep on stirring.  The consistency of the cajeta will start to thicken over time and the color will continue to darken.  You've gotta be patient.

You have to monitor the color and temperature closely.  When it hits 220 degrees, it is a thin, fluid sauce that you can use for drizzling over ice cream.  Getting it to 245 degrees results in a firm, chewy caramel.  By now the kitchen is filled with a rich aroma that beckons you to stand over the pot in gluttonous anticipation of the final product.

Pull the finished product off of the fire and pour or spoon into jars.  3 quarts of goat milk made 2 pints of caramel.

Unfortunately, I was at work when Tricia put this together and wasn't able to participate in my favorite activity - cleaning up the bowl and spoons!  You can't let any of that go to waste.  I think my wife handled that task in my absence after she took this photo:

Cajeta is great on ice cream or for any other way you'd eat caramel.  We are going to cut up pears and top with goat cheese, pecans, and cajeta on top.  Apples would be a fine substitute as well.  Or heck, you could just dip a spoon into that jar and get a big dollop of cajeta and eat it like candy.  This might just be my favorite way to eat it.

The jars will keep in the fridge, but we'll be making more and more cajeta.  I seriously doubt we have to worry about it going bad in the ice box.  Tricia was thinking about making millionaires with it by rolling pecans in it and dip into chocolate to make everyone's favorite candy.  YUM!

Pretty Things To Look At

I'll be the first to admit:  I'm not a flower guy.  We overwhelmingly plant things that we can eat.  I take that back - I primarily plant edible things.  Tricia plants flowering plants.  As I walk around in the yard on a nice spring day before it gets too hot, I begin to take in the pretty view.  First thing I notice is one of our many azalea bushes.  Most of the others' blooms have long since faded.  Azaleas are short lived.  They explode in awesome blooms and then just like that, they are gone.  There is one bush that has some nice azalea blooms on it:

I call this one our "watermelon" azalea.  The black anther of the flower and the reddish color of the bloom remind me of what it looks like to cut open a cold Charleston Gray on a hot summer's day.  I think of cutting pieces off of the wedge of watermelon with a butter knife, sprinkling salt on the melon with a salt shaker, and then popping the cold, sweet watermelon in my mouth.  

As i continue to walk, there is a blanket of white Dutch clover covering most of the backyard.  It's nearing the end now, as the days warm to the upper 80's already, but the honeybees are still doing their job on the clover as you can see by the busy bee in the direct center of the photo below.

Speaking of clover, I planted a couple of pounds of Crimson clover in the backyard for the bees.  It's starting to bloom all over.  I'll try to get some photos of all of the crimson blooms.  It's really a sight to see.  I certainly hope the crimson clover seeds and comes up again next year and the years following.

Finally, the first of the Louisiana iris bloomed this morning.  What a regal flower!  As with the crimson clover, I'll share more photos when all the Louisiana iris is in bloom.

Again, I'm not a flower guy, but those flowers I noticed inspired me to stop and take notice of the truly beautiful things around me that I might otherwise ignore.  I hope you have an enjoyable day, taking in and savoring the things of beauty that surround you in your life!