Warming it Up!

Our heat pump just doesn't do the job in winter.  I'm not a fan.  It just doesn't do an adequate job of keeping the house warm.  We've kind of thrown in the towel and keep roaring fires going in our fireplace as we sit in front of it each night.  Our nightly routine while warming in front of the fire is watching "All Creatures Great and Small" and then playing Solitaire together.  I think we have one more cold snap this weekend and then it looks to be more balmy for at least the next week.

We're not the only thing that's cold.  Our honey is too!  Raw honey will crystallize in the winter.  Although a nuisance, it's the way you know you're getting the good stuff.  We have case after case of honey that has all crystallized.  Just like this!:

Many people just put it in the microwave and nuke it, but don't do that!  You'll cook all the good stuff out of it.  You want to gradually warm it, but never let it get more than 104 degrees Fahrenheit or you'll destroy the nutrients, enzymes and health benefits you naturally get from raw local honey.  Some people will put it on the dash of their vehicle in the sun to liquify it, some have built solar heat boxes to liquify it.

We've come up with an idea that works for us.  We use our egg incubator to gently warm the honey.  The issue we dealt with is that the incubator has warming coils on top but not at the bottom.  This resulted in the honey liquifying on top but not on the bottom.  To solve this, we placed a bread proofing heating pad on the bottom.  Now the honey is getting heated from top to bottom and we're monitoring the temperature that's on a thermostat to ensure we never get the honey too hot.

Let's peek in the incubator to see how things are going.  Compare the first photo above with this one.  You can see that the honey in the incubator is about three quarters of the way toward becoming liquid again.

As we sell the honey, we rotate crystallized jars of honey from the box and into the incubator so that the honey goes from the solid state to a liquid one.

For the Bees, From the Bees

We're just coming out of 20 degree weather with more chilly stuff to come, but it did get up to 50 degrees today.  When the sun came out, the honeybees came out of their hives and gathered at the water trough to drink water.  I know it's early yet, but in just a few weeks, it will be time to set out swarm traps to catch wild swarms and also split our hives.  It's hard to imagine, but it won't be long until the bees become very active.  

Many people are feeding their bees now.  They take a bunch of sugar and mix with water in 5 gallon buckets.  The bees come and drink the sugar water and take it back to the hive.  So the bees don't drown in the bucket, folks put a bunch of pine straw in the bucket so that the bees can land on the pine straw and drink without falling in the sugary syrup water.  The idea of feeding the bees like this is to stimulate the queen.  When the queen sees worker bees coming into the hive with (fake) nectar, she is tricked into believing that the flow is on.  If she believes the flow (production of nectar) is on, she begins to lay eggs in abundance so there will be workers to bring in nectar and pollen.  This "jump starts" the hive.  This way, once actual flowers are blooming, the hive is up and running with lots of workers ready to go and theoretically, more honey will be produced.  Makes sense.

We like to be more natural.  Week after next, we'll begin feeding, but with honey that came off of their hives.  When we pull honey, we render down the beeswax in a crock pot.  Once the wax is separated, you're left with a lot of honey mixed with water.  We bag this up and freeze it.  We have several gallon bags of it in the deep freeze.  We will thaw this out, pouring it into a pan and set it out for the bees to feast on.  We'll show photos or a video of this.  It's something to see.  They'll bring their own honey back to the hive to feast on and the queen will do her thing and lay eggs in preparation for spring.  

So the honey water is for the bees.  Let's talk about something from the bees.  With the beeswax cappings we got in the honey extraction process, we heat it in a crockpot with water.  That's how we got the honey water discussed above.  With the beeswax, we plan on making candles.  Tricia tried her hand at making lip balm:

Our inaugural lip balm production was mainly for personal use and for Christmas gifts.  We plan on making more to sell alongside our honey.  The lip balm is a combination of beeswax, coconut oil, castor oil and eucalyptus and orange essential oils.  It came out great!  When we make another batch, we'll show you the process.

Louisiana Grass Roots - The Cajun Prairie

 

Our town has an old theater in the downtown area.  We've gone to see plays that are put on there by a community theatre.  They'll also show old movies from time to time.  The last one we saw was "Roman Holiday" starring Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck.  The other day, though, we were invited to a screening of a film called "Louisiana Grass Roots" that a friend of a friend produced.

The movie was about Louisiana's Cajun Prairie.  Growing up in Louisiana, when you travel to other places, they always have this idea that you wrestle alligators in the backyard.  That's only partially true.  Those Cajuns definitely exist.  We are prairie Cajuns.  We do have bayous and alligators and bullfrogs all around, but mostly the land is flat.  Very flat.  

The film describes a time in our area before commercial agriculture and intensive cattle grazing when the Cajun Prairie was wild.  It had prairie grasses and wildflowers, some sending down roots 16 feet.    This held the soil together.  The land teemed with insects and pollinators.  Over time, with land being plowed fencerow to fencerow and cattle grazing the land, the native prairie grasses disappeared.  The topsoil also disappeared, eroding into bayous and rivers, silting them up.

A professor from LSU and a biologist from Louisiana Department of Wildlife and fisheries spoke about a time back in the 80's when some people were walking along a railroad right of way and found some prairie grasses and wildflowers - the plants that formerly populated vast acreage across Louisiana.  The railroad right of ways were the only areas left that retained some of the old prairie grass landscape.  They began gathering seeds and growing a seed bank.  Over time, they've converted parcels of land back to the Cajun Prairie of time past.  It's been slow going, but they are recruiting people to take portions of their non-productive land and re-populate it with prairie grass seeds to bring the prairie back.

Back to the erosion, according to the professor, 130 years ago our topsoil was many feet thick, but when the prairie grasses went, the topsoil was carried away too, leaving just the clay hardpan.  I have no way of knowing if this is correct, but they told of a time when our bayous whose water look like chocolate milk once flowed clear with sand bottoms like the Ouiska Chitto River.  I have no way of proving or disproving this.

This water, now laden with chemicals and fertilizer runoff from farming practices, flows into bayous and rivers and into the Gulf of America, creating an algae bloom and a Dead Zone, negatively impacting our fisheries and estuaries.  Adding insult to injury.  The thick topsoil that once thickly covered the clay hardpan acted as a sponge, retaining rainwater and fertility.  With the topsoil sponge gone, the rainwater quickly runs off.  Farmers who need water to grow rice and crawfish depend on deepwater wells that pull water from underground aquifers.  These aquifers are being depleted and must be drilled deeper and deeper.  Now some of those wells are producing salt water, resulting in acreage that can no longer be used for agriculture.  They describe a crisis at hand.

I've never liked alarmist claims, striking fear into people.  Remember back in the 70's we were told that we were going to be going into an ice age?  Or how about the population explosion?  Or Y2K?  This professor told the group after the film that in 50 years, there would be little agriculture as we now know it because of no water.  Like I mentioned, I don't like the alarmism, but this water issue seems to have some validity to it.  

The purpose of the film was to educate people on the Cajun Prairie, how things used to be, and encourage people to take a portion of their land and revert back to the Cajun Prairie.  It showed various groups of people planting seeds and taking steps now to help save the land and help future generations.  Materials, seeds, contact information and links to websites were handed out.  A breakout session was held at 221 Bistro down the street where many were going to discuss it further, but it was getting late and we headed home.

It was an interesting film and introduced us to some things that we'll talk about and study.  We're already working on building the soil and have our own regimen of doing so.  It's exciting to see others getting involved in a different method of building soil and stewarding the land that the Good Lord gave us.

Winter Harvest Before the Ice Comes

Forecasts show lows of 23 degrees overnight into the morning and tomorrow lows down to 19 degrees overnight and into the morning.  This has sparked a flurry (pardon the pun) of activity in getting things taken care of and ready.  Yesterday, I wrapped all the pipes in the attic, the faucets attached to the house, and then all the water pipes and spigots in the garden and out in the pasture.  It took quite a while but we got prepared as best as we can.  Hopefully we can make it through the cold weather without any broken pipes.

Late this afternoon after church, we bundled up and got all the tarps out, covering everything that's out in the garden, trying to save what's there.  I'm not really worried about the root crops, so I'm leaving the beets and carrots and turnips alone.  The cabbage are said to fare very well through a freeze, too.  I did check on the cauliflower.  We have a LOT of cauliflower that's ready.  I learned that if your cauliflower freezes, it gets mushy and is ruined.  Not gonna take any chances with the cauliflower.  Gotta pick 'em!

Most of the cauliflower are very nice, bigger than the size of your hand.  I pick the head of the cauliflower off and feed all the leaves to the cows.  How they love that!  Cauliflower is one and done.  By that, I mean once you harvest the head, no more will grow.  Broccoli is a different story.  Once you pick the main broccoli head, little broccoli florets pop up all over the place, so you can continue harvesting as long as you have patience to get out there and pick.  Pound for pound, you probably get more broccoli from the little florets cumulatively than you do from the main head.

In pulling all the cauliflower off so they're not ruined in the freeze, we got a huge haul.  I don't really have anything for perspective, but that's a big basket in the photo below.  We'll be busy eating cauliflower and blanching and freezing it.

I like to also pull some beets (bull's blood and chioggia varieties) and carrots (Danvers and Cosmic Purple varieties).

As a kid, I often turned my nose up at vegetables, but no more!  We eat lots of them.  One of our favorite things to do is roast cauliflower, broccoli, beets, and carrots in the oven with some olive oil, butter, salt and minced garlic.  I cannot stress how delicious this is.

Fresh spinach is coming in too, right now in the garden, so Tricia made a beautiful spinach, ham, pecan and cheese quiche.  That paired nicely with lettuce from the garden and the roasted vegetables.  It made for an enjoyable lunch.

After two days, we'll take the tarps off the garden and see where we stand.  Will everything we covered survive?  Tune in and we'll report toward the end of the week.  Stay warm!

Got the Onions in The Ground

Last week we got our onions in the mail from Dixondale Farms in Carizo Springs, TX.  We received one bundle of the Short Day Sampler.  The Sampler includes 48 plants that are a mixture of the 1015 Texas Super Sweet, Texas Early White, and the Red Creole.  We like to plant this one as it is a nice variety.

We also got two bundles of the Yellow Granex Onion plants.  That contains 96 onion plants.  The Yellow Granex onion is the hybrid that most people would recognize as the Vidalia sweet onion.  I got them out of the box and prepared the soil, using the onion planting guide provided.  We grow these each year and have had great success with them, usually able to grow all the onions we'll need all year.

The guide contains helpful information on how far apart to plant them, how deep, and how far apart the rows should be.  We've always found that if you follow the instructions, you'll have no problem growing delicious onions.  I got busy with the hoe working the soil and started planting.  I was racing the sun, but by the time the sun was dipping over the horizon, I had the job completed.

And then...  Then we got the news that we'll be experiencing a winter storm early next week, bringing temps to around 20 degrees.  Dixondale Farms helpfully sent out an email with instructions on preparing for extremely cold weather and freezing.  They suggest covering the plants with a tarp and watering thoroughly before a freeze as moist soil holds heat from the day and insulates the bulb and tender roots.  You can bet we'll be doing both of those things prior to the deep freeze.

Hopefully, we'll save the onions and will enjoy delicious onions this summer in yet another bumper crop.

Road Kill Reminiscences

Yesterday I was traveling slowly to an appointment south and east of Lake Charles.  It was down a two-lane blacktop road bordered by rice fields and cattle pastures.  Something caught my eye and I slowed down, checking my rear view mirror for anyone following me.  The road was clear in both directions.  I put the vehicle in Park in the middle of the road and opened my door.  There was a marvelous creature in the middle of the road, dead.  The blood was fresh.  The beast had been struck by a motorist early this morning, probably around daybreak.

A bobcat!  Much larger than the common housecat, it's fur was beautiful, with spots running down the legs and underside.  You can see it's short tail and understand why it's called a bobcat.  This cat wasn't skinny.  It was agile and muscular and fit, probably fattened on rabbits, rats, squirrels and maybe even a chicken from a farmer's pen.

I was sad that this ferocious feline was dead.  As I looked at the teeth on this cat, I shivered to think that if this thing would come to life, he'd tear me to pieces.

It reminded me of a time twenty five years ago when I was crawfishing.  A part of the 120 acres that I was crawfishing on bordered some woods on the north and east corner of a small patch my Dad rented from my Aunt Ida.  It was from this patch of woods that raccoons would come out at night and feed on my crawfish.  They would knock the traps over when robbing the crawfish out of them.  The turned over traps sunk beneath the water and since you couldn't see them, you'd run over them with the boat, crushing the trap.  Each trap cost $8.  With each ruined trap, my anger toward the raccoons intensified.

In the mornings, I would walk through the woods with my Marlin lever action .22 rifle.  Fat raccoons filled from their all-you-can-eat crawfish buffet all night would sleep in the crook of trees.  I shot them out of the tree, relishing the loud "THUMP" of the raccoon as he'd hit the forest floor.  But the population of raccoons exceeded my skill of killing them.  I began setting traps.  In talking to people, I had learned that raccoons are very curious critters.  I was told that if you put some aluminum foil, shiny side up, on the trigger pan of a snap trap, the curious raccoon would reach his hand to touch the shiny part and SNAP! - you'd catch him.  You did have to check traps often as they have been known to chew their leg off to avoid getting caught.

Within the next day or so, I came around the corner in my boat and heard quite the commotion going on.  There was a shrieking sound, followed by a tumbling motion with dust clouds arising from the water's edge.  I got a raccoon!  But as I got closer, I realized I was wrong.  I had caught a bobcat.  I killed the cat and ended up giving him to a relative that sold furs.  It was a beautiful animal, and I was sad that I had to kill it.  That cat wasn't eating my crawfish.  He was just in the wrong place at the right time.  Curiosity had indeed killed the cat.

Lache Pas La Patate

That phrase translated from Cajun French to English means, "Don't drop the potato!"  That phrase also means "Don't give up!" or "Hang in There!"  We won't be dropping any potatoes - at least not today.  Our phone rang right before 5pm and the caller id said, "Parsley's Feed."  I knew immediately what they were calling about.  Mrs. Johnette confirmed it when she said, "Your seed potatoes are in."  I told her I'd be over directly to pick them up.  A couple of weeks back I had put our names on an order list at our local feed store for 10 pounds of LaSoda seed potatoes.  Today they came in and we hopped in the car and drove over to get them.   

At the feed store, they had a notebook with several pages of names and numbers and how many pounds of seed potatoes the customer wanted.  As customers were called today, people were driving up to pick up their potatoes before closing time at 5pm.  A gentleman from our church that just turned 90 years old had ordered 50 pounds of seed potatoes!  (You read that right)  I hope in 31 years when I'm 90 I'm still planting potatoes!

I always have the same exact thought every year when I open the box and look at the potatoes:  "Should we just eat them?"  It's going to get chilly tonight and a potato soup with bacon, green onions and fresh parsley would hit the spot.  What if the yield on our potato crop is such that we harvest less than we plant?  That's always a possibility, but hope springs eternal.  We'll get these in the ground.

But something has to be done first.  We cut the potatoes and let them scab over.  You see the potato has a number of eyes.  From out of these eyes, a plant will grow.  Hopefully, each potato plant will grow numerous potatoes.  I use a knife to cut each potato in half, being careful (not to drop it!), but also not to cut through an eye.

When I finished the task, I had an entire tray of cut up seed potatoes.  I'll put the tray in a warm room and let the cuts scab over for about a week and then I'll put them in the ground in 10 days or so.