Pickin' The Orange Tree Bare

We have some cold weather coming next week.  Like, cold weather that we don't often get down here.  On Tuesday the high will be 29 and the low will be 19.  We're just not accustomed to that. We can't drive in it.  Our pipes aren't wrapped yet.  Our plants and animals aren't ready.  I have a lot of work to do in advance of next week.  I'm praying it won't be as cold as they say.

I realized I need to get the navel oranges off of the tree.  This tree didn't make a single orange last year because the freeze the previous year almost wiped it out.  It did kill two of our tangerine trees.  We only have this navel orange, a tangerine tree that hasn't made fruit in two years because of the freeze, and a new satsuma tree.

I clipped all of the navel oranges off the tree, dropping them in a big bucket.  I have to find a way to make room in a refrigerator so they'll keep if it starts warming up before we can eat them.  A fall-back plan is to make freshly squeezed orange juice and freeze what we can't drink.  Fresh orange juice is just that absolute best.  There's no comparing store bought and especially concentrate to fresh-squeezed.

I can remember perhaps my first experience with fresh orange juice.  We were on a family vacation in Florida and stopped at a roadside stand smack dab in the middle of a huge orange grove.  Of course they were selling oranges, but they had these plastic 'straw-like' contraption that was sharp on the end.  You'd cut into the orange with the straw and squeeze on the orange and suck on the straw and delicious orange juice would flow into your mouth.  It was delicious!

The size of the navels on our tree this year are gargantuan.  Of course I'm picking out the largest one for comparison, but look at this monster!  I have this one side by side a huge lemon that came off the neighbor's tree.  Those lemons are twice the size of those you get in the produce department.  That navel on the left is ALMOST as big as a cantaloupe.

Here's the orange in the palm of my hand for perspective.

Citrus doesn't do well in frigid temperatures.  It's tropical and will easily die.  I've lost many a citrus tree to hard freezes.  I've tried all sorts of things to try to save them.  Mulching them DEEP and HIGH around the trunk, putting tarps over and around them, putting buckets of water stacked around them.  None of that worked.  The trees are all planted on the south side of the house, so the house serves as a wind break from the north winds.  To no avail.

At one of our bee club meetings, a fellow named Jim explained how he saved ALL of his citrus trees.  He put a tarp over all of them, ran an extension cord to each tree and put a heat lamp under the tarp.  He saved every last tree.  I'm going to try out his technique.  I don't want to lose our trees!

Our Baby is 24!

Today Benjamin turned 24.  He's our youngest.  It is hard to imagine.  What a journey.  Considering what happened to him, it is a miracle that he's still with us.  All praise to God!  We had the first part of our celebration tonight.  We made homemade brownies and ice cream, put on party hats, sang and acted goofy.  Even Belle was invited to the party.  She's definitely an "outside" dog.  It is only on very special occasions that she's allowed indoors.

Today would be one of those occasions as she shares a birthday with Benjamin.  Belle turned 5 years old today.  She was liking all of the attention and even wore a party hat to be in the festive birthday spirit.  

While we enjoyed our ice cream served over a warm brownie, we sang "Happy Birthday to You."  That's truly an awkward experience when everyone sings for you, but you know that everyone loves you, so it's a good experience as well.

Me & My Guys

Once the singing was over, everyone absolutely destroyed the dessert.  He's requested a chocolate marble Bundt cake, I think for Round 2 of the birthday celebration coming up on Saturday.

Momma & Her Dudes

Happy, Happy Birthday to Benjamin (and Belle, too!)

Making Homemade Sugarcane Syrup

Disclaimer:  Do not try this at home.  This project is a fool's errand.  It is an inefficient use of time and a surefire way to waste $20 and an afternoon.  I've done this before and should know better, but like a moth to the flame, I felt like I needed to do it again - for some reason.  I guess I'm just hard-headed and like to prove to myself that I can do something.

The heirloom Louisiana sugarcane that an old fellow from Jennings gave me continues to come up year after year.  I can remember my grandfather using his Case pocketknife to slice a sliver of sugarcane for me to chew when I was a little guy.  It was sweet!  This cane in the garden, and I'm not exaggerating grows 12 feet tall.  It begins to lean over, taking up valuable garden space.

I decided, against my better judgment, that it was time to make homemade cane syrup.  We are out of the Steen's Cane Syrup made down the road in Abbeville where it's been made since 1910.  I harvested several fat canes and trudged out of the garden.

The first thing you do is vigorously clean the cane.  I just use a bucket of water and an old T-shirt for a rag and I scrub.  Some of the cane is green and some has a purple tint.  At each joint, small roots emerge.  If you were to lay this cane flat in a trench, a new cane plant would emerge at each joint.  In fact, if anyone is in the area and would like to start this in your garden, stop by, I'd love to share a cane with you.

I use some pruning clippers to chop the cane into small pieces.  If I had the equipment, instead of doing this step, I'd feed the cane whole through a grinder or tool that mashes the cane until the juice comes out.  But I don't have that.  I got a 5 gallon bucket of cane.  It was heavy.

Here's an up=close look at the cane.  You can see the sugar in it.  If you would take your pocketknife and slice a piece off and chew, you'd be onto something real good, I'm telling you.

Here is my sugarcane apparatus.  It's merely a crawfish boiling pot, but it serves the same purpose.  There's $20 of propane in the tank and I've added 10 gallons of water to the pot.

I poured all the cut up cane into the pot of water that will be boiling.  The basket inside the pot normally is full of crawfish or crabs.  Today it's sugarcane.  We will boil it for two full hours.  By that time all the sugar should be removed from the cane and in the water.

Here's the depleted cane after I pulled the basket out of the water.  If I'm not mistaken, this is similar to something called bagasse - dry, pulpy residue that remains after the sugar is removed from the cane.

I boiled for another several hours with the lid off until my propane tank was empty.  I poured the liquid into a big gumbo pot and brought it inside to continue boiling.  It is quite a mess to do inside.  On the brightside, it makes your house smell great!  Notice the foam on top.

I continually skim off the foam and impurities using a big spoon.

When I first started boiling, the liquid looked like this.  The object is to boil off the water.  What's remaining is syrup.  Let's get the water boiling!

Notice the level of liquid in the pot is reducing and the liquid is getting darker.

I moved the liquid into a smaller dutch oven.  The liquid level continues to drop as the water boils off.  The color of the liquid continues to darken.

I moved the liquid into a saucepan now.  The liquid is more like a sticky slurry now.  You ought to smell it!

And finally. We are done.  Would you look at that.  Homemade cane syrup in a quart jar.  It is really strong.  Sweet, but with a slightly bitter taste.  It'll be perfect on biscuits or pancakes.

The problem is I started out with 10 gallons of liquid and although I made syrup, I made 1 pint of syrup.  It would have been cheaper and easier to drive down to the store and buy it.  But we proved that we can lose money and waste time.  But we also had a good time doing it and we have a pint of syrup that we produced, albeit inefficiently, on the homestead.

We'll pour this over biscuits and pancakes and tell ourselves that its the best syrup we ever tasted.  We'll believe it, too!

Brenda - The One that Got Away

The camellias are still blooming, and they are quite gorgeous.  The color looks like something that is fake, but it's real, I promise you.  The honeybees are working the camellias quite hard as there's not much else blooming.  I think they are using them as a pollen source.  Bees gather it to make bee bread.  Bee bread is a mixture of pollen, nectar, honey, and bee saliva.  The workers feed this to the honeybee larva.  I took some photos of the bees collecting pollen from the camellias.  I'll share those photos and also share a funny story from the Bayou Bee Keeper's Meeting tonight.

A worker bee doing her thing...

Our bee club meeting meets the second Thursday night of each month in a small cafe in town.  There are usually about 25 to 30 people in attendance.  We eat from 6 until 7pm while visiting with one another, and then we rise for the Pledge of Allegiance and Prayer and then the meeting is called to order.  The president of the club mentions things we need to be doing in our hives, sometimes there is a special speaker, there is a 'show and tell' time where people bring things they've made or helpful hints for beekeepers.  Sometimes they bring samples of honey, creamed honey, candles made from beeswax, and even mead.  The floor is opened for questions, and this is where it gets interesting because beekeepers are a strange breed, an eclectic bunch of somewhat eccentric people!

She's on the anther (part of the stamen that has the pollen)

Tonight a newcomer to our club raised his hand and had a story to share.  He last told us that he has violent reactions to bee stings and his throat closes up.  He got stung, called 911 and was driving to the hospital and had to pull over for the ambulance to rescue him as he couldn't breathe.  We told him that beekeeping might be a dangerous hobby for him!

Tonight's story was better.  He told us that he was catching a swarm of bees and caught the queen in the air mid-flight with his hands.  She got away and then he caught her again.  He gently placed her in a nuc and about 100 or so of her workers joined her in the nuc.  But it is cold outside, and he didn't want his new queen and her swarm to freeze.

Can you see the pollen she's collecting in her 'pollen basket' on her hind legs?

So he brought the nuc inside his house.  He thought that it was sealed.  Alas, it was not.  He came home and found that the queen and her little colony had escaped.  They were all over his house.  He caught the queen again.  He told us that this queen was so special to him, so he named her.  He used honey on a spatula to catch (again) all of her worker bees and put them back in the nuc and this time, he put them in a trailer out of his house that had a heater in it, but was ventilated.  He did not want his precious queen to die.

I raised my hand and interrupted his story.  I had to know something.  What did he name his queen?  He told us he named her Brenda.  He once knew a girl named Brenda and she had gotten away from him - twice.  The club erupted in laughter!!  So once he got Brenda and her workers in the nuc, they got really cold.  He checked in on them and saw Brenda laying on the bottom of the nuc and thought she had died.

She's using her mandibles and forelegs to place pollen in the pollen basket

He told us that he spent 6 hours constructing an elaborate bee coffin to bury her in.  He passed around photos on his phone.  People's eyes were as big around as silver dollars!  Well, he said he was about to place her in the coffin for interment, when she rose from the dead.  This story had achieved more than we had bargained for.  People were making sure he didn't put them back in his house.  Others were wondering if he sleeps in his bee suit just to be safe.  The president of the club tried to refocus the members on agenda items before adjournment.

Door prizes were announced a distributed.  I won a pretty neat item, but it wasn't nearly as nice as Brenda's hand-crafted queen coffin, that will go unused - at least for the moment.  He vowed not to let Brenda get away again!

A Nice Cold Snap!

For the last three days and continuing into tonight, overnight lows dipped near 30 degrees.  It wasn't nearly a hard freeze.  I didn't worry about winterizing the pipes.  In fact under the trees, I saw no ice in the water troughs.  I knew that the freeze would end the green beans, though.  They had a nice run.  Not only did we get fresh snap beans for Thanksgiving, but we were still picking green beans for New Year's Day.  We've never done that before.  After I picked the last of the beans, I used clippers to clip the plants off at ground level and tossed the foliage over to the cows.

The fall garden always produces some wonderful meals.  I get excited about vegetables.  What kind of a weirdo does that?  I showed you a nice cauliflower we harvested last week:

I neglected to tell you our favorite way to eat cauliflower (or broccoli).  Chop up the cauliflower into florets.  Place on a stoneware baking pan and add kosher salt and a bunch of minced garlic.  Drizzle olive oil and stir it all up.  Place in an oven and roast until they turn golden brown.  I would assume people just call this Roasted cauliflower.  We call it cauliflower candy.  It is so delicious that there are no leftovers.

The freeze wrecked the peppers and eggplant.  We picked all the remaining fruit off of them and cut down the freeze-damaged plants.  Everything is brown now in the garden, except for bright green leafy things like kale, swiss chard, mustard greens, turnips, and things like radishes shown below.  The red radishes contrasted against the radish greens in the morning sun are pretty.  I don't get that fired up about cut up radishes in a salad.  I'll enjoy them like that, but Tricia makes a radish dip that's quite addictive.  She'll take a few nice sized radishes and put them in a food processer and mince.  To that shell mix in a softened block of cream cheese and a little salt, pepper and chili powder.  

The purple kohlrabi is a relatively new addition to our garden repertoire.  Growing up, I don't imagine I ever even heard the word kohlrabi, but I got some as Free Seed from Baker Creek and it looked like a vegetable grown on an alien planet.  We cooked it up and really enjoyed it.  I'll wait until this one's a little bigger and we'll feast on it.

We're also getting ready for planting.  My onion sets came in from Dixondale Farms, so some time this week or next, I'll be planting about 200 onions.  We harvested some Irish potatoes that came up volunteer from some that I guess we didn't find when we harvested back in early summer.  To that bed I'll be adding about four inches of mulch.  We'll be planting Irish Potatoes around Valentine's Day.

It's Never Too Late (Or Early) To Save Seeds

It's in the low 30's now and cool weather always means, "It's Gumbo Season!"  We had a delicious seafood gumbo at Mom & Dad's house the other day that was loaded with shrimp and crab meat.  Tricia made a shrimp and okra gumbo just a few days later.  You can't get tired of gumbo.  While I was eating it, I remembered!  I hadn't saved any okra seed yet!

Well, it's not too late.  The okra in the garden generally lasts up until the first frost.  We usually plant Clemson Spineless as those are the perfect size for pickled okra.  I can finish off a whole jar in one sitting.  We also plant Beck's Big Okra and Burgundy Okra.  However, you get the biggest bang for your buck planting Louisiana Long Pod Okra.  The okra stays edible up until it reaches about 10 inches long.  Clemson spineless would be "woody" and inedible long before that.  I had a long pod of okra that was drying on the plant so that I could save the seeds.  Before it shattered and I lost the seed, I went out and got it.

This is a non-hybrid old heirloom variety that has been passed down for a long, long time.   You can save the seeds and store them and keep passing them down.

From just one pod, would you look at all the seeds I was able to save.  They are plump and dry and in good condition.  I'm sure this spring, I'll soak these, plant them and get good germination.

Just for grins I decided I would count the seeds as I put them in the supplement container that I store seeds in.  I re-labeled the container and put the number of seeds.  119 seeds from that one pod!  That's a lot of okra plants.  I think I'll only plant 25 or so this spring.  The rest I'll save for future planting.

We generally freeze quart bags of cut up, cooked okra for making gumbos in the winter, AKA "Gumbo Season."  I hope we have enough to get us through...

Planting In January

"To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow."  - Audrey Hepburn

I agree with Audrey.  January is usually pretty cold.  I'm writing this as I hear winds roaring outside and temperatures are set to drop to 30 degrees Fahrenheit by 6 am tomorrow morning.  This is NOT the time to be planting seeds outside.  But it is the perfect time to be planting tomatoes, peppers and eggplant for your spring garden.

That's exactly what I did Friday afternoon.  I readied two trays chock full of seed pots and pulled all of my seeds out of cold storage (freezer).  I got a five gallon bucket of fully composted wood chips that were approximately 4 years old.  The mulch had composted into a moist decomposed planting medium that I mixed (cautiously) with composted chicken litter.

I filled each seed pot with the planting soil I made and carefully labeled each seed pot.  Here you can see that laid the seed packets of peppers I planted over the seed pots.  (Datil, Shishito, Craig's Grande Jalapeno, Anaheim, Banana, Lilac Bell, Emerald Giant, and Black Egg Eggplant.)

 I did the same with tomatoes: (Tomatillos, Spoon, Big Rainbow, Creole, Cherokee Purple, Pink Brandywine, Chadwick Cherry, Black Krim)  This is when tomatoes look their prettiest.  When you are looking at the photos on the seed packets of perfect tomatoes, you kind of forget the heat in which you pick them and the stink bugs that attack them.  But right now, your tomato garden is perfect in your imagination.

I plant two seeds to a seed pot and cover with about 1/8 inch of topsoil.  Then I use a water sprayer to liberally mist the soil with water so that the water soaks in and down to the seed.  Finally, I cover the soil with a cut plastic bag.  This ensures that the soil stays moistened so that germination is encouraged.

I brought both inside to ensure the soil stays warm and moist to encourage great germination.  We'll give progress reports several times a month until its time to transplant directly in the garden.