A Garden Experiment

Over the years we've built up our garden with loads of compost and decomposed wood chips, leaves and other organic matter.  As time passed the level of the garden rose with all the amendments to be six inches or so above the surrounding pasture.  That's a good thing as the garden isn't inundated with rain water that stands on the soil and floods the crops.  There's a downside to that as well.  After rains, fire ants seek high ground.  That means we get fire ant mounds in the garden.

In the yard, I mix up a batch of bifen and spray the mounds, killing the colony stone cold dead.  In the garden, we don't want to introduce chemicals and poisons for the obvious reason - all that works its way into the food we eat, and we don't want that.  We have an ant killer that we make with orange oil and some other ingredients.  It works!  It safely kills the ants without killing us.  The orange oil is expensive, however.

Can we make our own organic fire ant killer?  We'll see.  We ate a bunch of oranges and saved the peels.  We put them in a gallon container and filled with water and allowed to soak for a week.  Then we strained off the peels.  The remaining slurry smells great!  Just like orange juice.  Hopefully the orange oil leached out and remained in the water.  To this liquid we added 3 ounces of dish soap.  Here is the finished product:

A cardboard box had blown off the garden sink into the garden.  When I lifted it up, it was full of fire ants!

The ants were angry.  They boiled with rage.  Here, friends, is our first test subject for our fire ant killing concoction.

I poured the solution down the middle of the mound, making sure it flowed straight down to where the queen was.  Then I slowly poured all around the mound, covering the ants and dirt of the mound until it was an orange-smelling mud hole.

So now we wait to see if our concoction is effective.

I'll keep you posted in a few days if we had success.  If so, we'll continue to make our own fire ant killer.  If we fail, I'll use the expensive orange oil solution.

Growing Pains

We are just a few weeks away from pulling spring honey from our six bee boxes.  Two of the six are relatively new hives made from successful splits from the existing colonies, so they won't make a tremendous amount of honey.  We're getting all our ducks in a row, preparing for that day that we extract the honey from the frames.

Have I ever told you that beekeeping is an expensive hobby?  It is!  Even though I've made a lot of the bottom boards and telescoping tops, the other equipment you must buy is quite an investment.  Tricia and I live frugally and like to have this hobby support itself financially, so we've waited until we're 'in the black' before additional investments.

One pricey thing you need is the extractor.  When you cut the wax cap off of your frames of honey, you put the frames in an extractor and spin the frames.  Centrifugal force throws the honey out of the frames and onto the walls of the pot.  The honey drips down and as it fills, you open the honey gate to allow the honey to fill 5 gallon buckets.  From there, you bottle the honey up in pint jars for sale.

Up to this point we've been borrowing an extractor.  Well, a nice guy in our bee club is upgrading to a bigger extractor.  He told us to use his old extractor for as long as we want to use it!  We brought him a check to buy it, but he would not accept it.  What a guy!  Here is the machine:

Here's a problem you run into with beekeeping.  Are you keeping bees or are they keeping you?  Good question, because as you get all the boxes and frames, suits and smokers, hive tools, uncapping tanks, filters and jars, you quickly run out of space in which to store all the bee paraphenalia.

So we are looking forward to (perhaps next year once we sell all the 2026 honey) buying a honey house.  We've extracted honey in our garage and had no problem, but it would be nice to have a little storage building to serve as our honey house where we'll store all of the bee equipment as well as extract and bottle the honey we collect.

Here is one of two styles we're looking at.  I like this one.  Double doors, windows, solid flooring.

Here's the one I think I like a little better.  Same basic concept, but with a gambrel roof.  

A gambrel roof adds the benefit of having more storage area up on a loft.  There's storage up on one side:

And more storage up in the loft on the opposite side.

This would be ideal for us.  Now we're just shopping and probably won't make a purchase until next year some time.  These sheds are well built and they are expensive!

When I was a young boy, mom would take us shopping for clothes at a department store in Lake Charles called "The White House."  From time to time Dad would accompany us on these dreaded trips.  Mom would pick out a new outfit for us to wear to church on Easter Sunday and Dad would exclaim, "Good gravy, Kay!  Do you know how many barrels of rice I have to sell to buy that shirt?!"  As we age, we turn in to our parents, I'm finding.  

As I look at the price tag on this shed, I think, "Do you know how many pint jars of honey we'd have to sell to pay for this shed?!"  The answer is almost 412 jars.

Two Things From the Garden

Lots of rain outside and a big project we were working on inside that maybe we'll share with you a little later this week.  It's the first day of summer, and we haven't really talked a whole lot about the garden this year.  We've harvested so many yellow squash and zucchini that we were having trouble eating it and giving it all away.  We cooked and froze a lot of it in casserole dishes that we enjoy.  It'll make easy meals to just warm up.

The cucumbers have been coming in and we're eating cucumber and tomato salad every day.  The corn has come in and we have blanched and frozen lots of it as well as eaten corn on the cob.  So Sweet!  For Father's Day today we had corn maque choux - a favorite side dish for me!  Snap Beans.  What a crop of snap beans we had this year.  With the heat they were just about finished so I harvested one more time and then clipped the plants off at ground level and fed to the bull.  He liked 'em.

The tomatoes are still coming in.  I've been picking them when they are just blushed a little and let them ripen indoors.  The stink bugs and leaf-footed bugs are thwarted by this and don't have a chance to severely damage the tomatoes.  In the next couple of days, we'll likely put up some jars of salsa as we have a number of baskets of tomatoes building up in our ice box.

I planted the same old varieties we always plant: Black Krim, Cherokee Purple, Creole, Chadwick Cherry, Black Vernissage, Rainbow, Pink Brandywine, Campari and several others.

The cherry tomatoes are prolific producers and we always freeze great big bags of these that we cook with all year long.  They just keep coming in.  Pretty soon, though, the tomatoes will play out.  I'll take a short break and then plant more for the fall crop of tomatoes.

I always make the comment that I like to grow things that we can eat; however, since we've gotten into beekeeping, I've found myself planting flowers in the garden in the side yard near the six boxes of bees.  Just to the east of the rows of Ozark Razorback Peas and Purple Hull Peas, we have a row of mixed zinnias.  They are pretty, I must say.  Tricia picked a bouquet and made a nice centerpiece on the dinner table.

The zinnias are attracting the honeybees, but they aren't the only ones attracted to the vibrant colors!

What a nice papillon!

Making Beeswax Bread Bags

We go through a lot of sourdough bread. Tricia makes 2 big loaves every other week in addition to bagels, po boy buns and hamburger buns.  The loaves are kept beneath a cake dome, but the bread doesn't stay soft for long and starts getting stale and even begins to mold before we can finish it.  Tricia began looking for a solution and found one - Beeswax Bread bags!  She ordered some organic cotton fabric from Azure Standard and cut the fabric as she needed.

She began to sew the pieces of fabric into the shape of a bag.

These bags will have a drawstring on top for sealing up the bread and keeping the loaves airtight and fresh.

The next thing needed is beeswax.  Fortunately, each time we extract honey, we save all of the cappings and render the beeswax.  We end up with big disks of beeswax.  We make lip balm (chapstick or carmex) by adding essential oils (eucalyptus and peppermint) to the beeswax and castor oil.

But back to our beeswax bread bag project - the beeswax is melted in a crock pot.

The melted beeswax is poured over the cotton bread bags.

You must work fast as the beeswax cools and hardens quickly.

You want to make sure the entire bag is coated on both sides, so a bread-making tool is used to spread the beeswax on the entire surface area.

Once the bag is coated with beeswax, it goes into the oven at 250 degrees F for 10 minutes.  The oven is used as the heat evens out the wax and gets the edges coated.

We allow the bag to hang and dry for a bit.

And now for the test.  A big fresh loaf of sour dough bread goes into the bag for safekeeping.

The drawstring is pulled tight and the bread is now sealed up - better than Saranwrap.

Now we'll test things out and see if this keeps the bread fresher for longer.  Will it stop the bread from getting hard and going stale and molding?  We will soon know.

The Tail-end of our Mulch Inventory

We've talked at length before about Back to Eden Gardening where we use wood chips (4 inch layer) in the garden.  I won't bore you again with the details, but by doing this, you never need to till.  You hardly ever need to water.  You hardly ever need to weed the garden.  It makes gardening so easy.  Additionally, the chips decompose and become topsoil.  Each year you add another 4 inch layer and let nature take care of itself.

I don't even want to speculate as to how many loads of mulch we've gotten delivered to the house for free by right-of-way cleaning crews eager for a place to drop their loads of wood chips.  I stopped by a crew I saw working about 5 miles down the road the other day and left our address and contact information.  I've not heard back from them.  It is a new crew out of Texas that must've won the contract.  

We need more chips!  We are on our last pile and there's a reason we saved this one for last.  Normally the wood chips heat up and decompose quickly.  This last pile did not.  The reason for this is that it is largely made up of pine straw.  Pine straw is coated with a shiny, wax-like layer that contains high amounts of lignin.  This makes it resistant to decay, bacteria and fungi.  That's kind of counter-productive to our goal of mulch in the garden.

But we found a use for it!  The walkways/borders on either side of the garden have a dual purpose.  In addition to being walkways we use, they serve as a border or protective barrier for what's outside the garden.  That would be grasses and weeds, namely bermuda grass, bahai, and nutsedge.  These grasses are persistent, relentless and determined and require constant effort to keep them from encroaching into the garden.  You can see some of the grass on the eastern edge of the garden.  It so desires to get into the garden.

The grasses had invaded, filling half of the walkway with grass that we had mulched a couple of years ago.  That ended yesterday.  I removed all the weeds from the garden path on the interior eastern side of the garden and used a wagon and pitchfork to unload a 5 inch layer all the way down.  It's so nice and clean now - free of grass!

I did the same thing on the western edge of the garden.  It is so clean and in order now.

But it will require vigilance.  Those grasses send out rhizomes that climb through the fence and try to get a foothold in the garden and creep forward.  Someone has to guard the wall.  Almost like Colonel Nathan Jessup in "A few good men" in calling the Code Red, ha ha.  We'll keep our eyes on any encroachment and put more mulch on top.

Three Things

First Observation:    It's been very hot and humid the past few days, but walking around the back yard I got to thinking about the very cold winter that we've had that killed all of our tangerine trees, our lemon tree and a satsuma tree.  It really played a number on our citrus.  Only one of our citrus trees survived.  It is a naval orange.  Although the orange tree survived, it was so injured by the freeze last year that it didn't blossom or fruit.  But early this spring, the fragrant blossoms filled the tree and fruit filled the branches.

We have a long ways to go until the naval oranges are ripe and a lot can happen between then and now, but it looks like we'll have a good orange crop for a change.  We did buy some replacement fruit trees to make up for the ones we lost.  Earlier this spring I planted a Satsuma, a Meyer Lemon and a Blood Orange.

Observation #2:    Speaking of blood oranges, Tricia was making something in the kitchen that was red like blood.  She's making a red velvet cake made with the last of the beets from the fall crop.  No food coloring in this cake.  It gets its color from the beets!  It tastes nothing like beets - just moist, delicious chocolate.  If your kids don't like vegetables, this is how you sneak some in!  They'll never know.

Final Observation:    I had a critter follow me home the other night when I was out walking.  It wasn't a raccoon.  It was this:

She's kind of cute.  We already have a cat named Ginger.  This kitten and Ginger don't get along very well.  There's been some hissing going on.  Tricia thinks we need a "barn cat" to keep the rate population under control.  We'll see how this goes.  We're going to wait a few days to see if she sticks around before we name her.  So far, we call her, "Kitty Kitty," but Matilda is probably on the top of the list of potential names.

She follows us around everywhere, even trying to come indoors.  We don't do indoor pets.  Kitty Kitty is not potty trained and has the garage smelling quite... aromatic, you might say.  Tricia got a box and filled it with dirt to see if she'd figure out it is her bathroom.  Like I said, this is a probationary period for Kitty Kitty.  She needs to work harder at making a good first impression.

The Cajun Prairie Revival

Several months ago we told you about attending a documentary screening at the Strand Theatre in Jennings, Louisiana about the Cajun Prairie.  The Cajun prairie once covered over 2 million acres of land in Louisiana.  It is home to native grasses and wildflowers.  Agricultural practices and cattle grazing, along with development has largely done away with it.  Only 1% of the Cajun Prairie remains.

A group of people is trying to revive it by saving seeds and propagating them in protected areas.  Moncus Park in Lafayette is one such area, along with a 10 acre plot in Eunice, LA, among others.  Our homesteading group was made aware of a small location of Cajun Prairie that was discovered in Jennings between Highway 90 and the railroad tracks just east of Jennings across from Seagraves Road. 

Those interested were invited to attend a prairie walk to identify native species of plants.  Louisiana Dept of Wildlife and Fisheries Robby Maxwell and a Phyllis Griffard, a UL Lafayette biologist led us on the walk.  The president of the Jennings Garden Club who is also running for District Judge, a local farmer and beekeeper and other interested folks joined the walk.

The area is a small piece of land between the railroad tracks and Highway 90 east on the right hand side of the road as you're on the way to Mermentau, LA.  Concerned individuals are working with the Louisiana DOTD asking them to not mow until the grasses are dormant so that the different native grasses and wildflowers can reseed.

I'll show you a few of the plants that we were able to identify, starting with milkweed.  Coincidentally, I was just reading a great book called "Theo of Golden" that mentioned milkweed.  In the book, the protagonist was lamenting the fact that this plant had "weed" in its name and proposed re-naming it to "Crown of many crowns."

Milkweed

Here is a familiar one, the Texas Coneflower.  This plant can grow 5 feet tall!

Texas Coneflower

This one is called "Rattlesnake Master," and was named as such as Native Americans thought it served as a rattlesnake venom antidote.  It turned out not to be effective, but the plant can be used for liver and bladder problems as well as rheumatism.

Rattlesnake Master

This plant is called the 'Hoary Pea."  You can see the flowers that are typical of peas and if you look closely in the middle right of the photo, you'll spot some little green pea pods.

Hoary Pea

This pretty flower is the Rhexia Virginica.

Rhexia

Little Bluestem

Here is rosinweed.  The native Americans used the roots of this plant to treat pains from injuries. 

Rosinweeds

We had an interesting time walking and identifying plants that they they told us was making up the Cajun Prairie, an ecosystem that is on life support.  They are saving the seeds from these plants in an attempt to bring the Louisiana Cajun Prairie back from near extinction.