Scare Guns - It's For the Birds (Literally)

It's rice planting time in the area.  Like clockwork, gigantic, monstrous, humongous flocks of blackbirds show up.  The sheer multitude of these birds make it hard to farm.  If you don't do something about it, they will fly in in large waves and eat up every last grain of rice.  As soon as you plant it, they gobble it up.  Here is a very small representation of what I'm talking about in my neighbor's pasture that borders a rice field.

When I was farming, we would ride around in pickup trucks with a 12 gauge shotgun and pepper them to kill them or at least keep them moving.  To give you an idea of the size and scope of the problem, a good friend of mine once headed up a taskforce at a local USDA office that dealt with problem wildlife like birds around airports and, yes, birds eating farmers' rice.  This time of year was very busy, hiring people to try to eradicate or at least scare the birds away.  The blackbirds roost in cane and nearby trees.  They make a lot of racket and when the fly over you, it is amazing how many of them there are.

One of the things that we would also do when farming was the use of scare guns.  A scare gun is a mechanical device on a timer that is powered by a propane bottle.  You set it on the edge of your rice field in areas with heavy black bird pressure.  The gun fires off every so often to hopefully keep them moving and stop their all you can eat buffet in your rice field.  It is a successful strategy at least early on, until the birds get immune to the noise.  It's better to have a gun that knocks some down instead of merely making a loud noise.  I think they need to see some of their dead brethren on the ground for it to be some sort of a deterrent.

What's going on increasingly is a migration.  Not only the migration of blackbirds, but the migration of people moving out of the city to enjoy country life.  The sunrises and sunsets.  The serenity of the great outdoors.  The slower pace of living and wide open spaces.  But when they move, I don't think they completely understand that they are moving out of neatly manicured neighborhoods and in the midst of working farms where crop dusters fly overhead early in the morning, where dust from tractors blows when plowing, where cows moo, roosters crow, and the smell may not always be appealing.  There is also the noise from irrigation wells running 24/7, from dryer motors running all day and night for weeks on end during harvest times, and yes, from scare guns during planting time.

Tensions came to a head at a recent Jefferson Davis Policy Jury meeting in which upset residents expressed displeasure with the noise of scare guns.  The Police Jury listened to both sides of the argument.  Fortunately for the farmers (and unfortunately for the people who recently built homes in the middle of a rice field), there are existing "Right to Farm" statutes sitting on the books that protecting the farmers' right to farm.  In other words, they can continue to use the scare guns to prevent their crops from being eaten by the birds.

While I enjoy a peaceful night's sleep as much as the next guy, I also like to eat rice!  Moving to the country has it's positives for sure.  That's why I'm here, but before one moves, he or she should consider all the pros and cons.  I remember a couple that moved out to Hooterville from Manhattan.  Things were sure different for them, weren't they?

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Green Acres is the place for me
Farm Livin' is the life for me
Land stretchin' out from far and wide
Keep Manhattan, just gimme that countryside...

I'm Popeye The Sailor Man

I would say there is an awful lot of propaganda today, but there was some of that when I was younger, too.  Take for instance, Popeye the Sailor Man.  We'd watch cartoons and it blew my mind how Popeye's success was tied to... spinach!  When he needed strength or to help Olive Oil, he'd pull out a can of spinach, squeeze it, and the spinach would go into his pipe.  Soon, with bulging forearms, he was able to handle anything.  Spinach gave him strength and who wouldn't want to be like Popeye?  He didn't have to work out or be particularly healthy.  He just had to eat spinach at critical times to get the results he needed.

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As a child I remember this can in our pantry...

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Also Del Monte had cans of spinach.  Mom had some of this in the pantry.  Of course spinach is healthy, but canned spinach is not the way you want to eat it.  You want to eat it fresh out of the garden. We grow an heirloom French variety, Monstrueux de Viroflay.  The leaves are big and bright green.  You just know its healthy for you.

For supper the other night, Tricia asked me to pick a pound of spinach.  The spinach leaves were big and thick with almost a leather-like feel to them.  The wife was going to make Cream of Spinach soup.  It's a simple dish, with fresh ingredients: Spinach, onion, garlic, broth, and cream.  You can see old Rosie in the background.  I fed her some spinach so she wouldn't feel left out.

The spinach wasn't picked for 10 minutes before it was processed and cooking in a dutch oven on the stovetop.  What a brilliant green color it is!

We've go lots more spinach to harvest.  Tricia pulled out a recipe for Creamed Spinach.  Perhaps we'll have this soon!  Ruth's Chris Steakhouse has this as a side dish.  It is rich, cheesy, and delicious.  I also found a recipe for spinach and cream cheese crepes.  We've never cooked that and the recipe looks really good.  If spinach does make you stronger, we'll be beneficiaries of that strength because we have lots of spinach to eat.  None of it will be coming from a can!

Running Out of Room

Right inside our back door, first room on the left, is our utility room.  That room was the washroom. It is where the washer and dryer resides along with a big sink for mopping.  The room has cabinets to store household cleaning products.  At least that's how the room was designed.  That was before we got cows.  And goats.  And chickens.  And honeybees.  And everything else that goes along with having a little homestead farm.  

Now, that little room is bursting at the seams.  We've tried to start living with a new rule that states that if we purchase something new, then something old has to go - a policy for managing space.  For example, if I buy a new shirt, then an old shirt gets donated to the thrift store or gets converted to the rag bin.  That policy doesn't always work though with items other than clothes.

Had we known that we'd be getting into the homesteading life, our house would have been designed differently with a much larger pantry, room for additional freezers and definitely more storage space.  Let me show you the utility room to give you an idea.  The struggle is real!  Here's the counter when you walk in.  The incubator does hatch eggs, but it is currently being used to liquify jars of honey that has crystallized over the winter.  The washer and dryer is on the left.  Countertop is full of anti-parasite meds for the animals.

To the left when you walk in stands an organizer shelf with tools, battery chargers, and veterinary supplies.  We ran out of space and a bin of beekeeping supplies sits on the floor with frames of drawn comb wrapped in bags and some rendered beeswax sitting on top.  There's also soapmaking supplies and candle-making supplies.  It makes it next to impossible to open the door and move around the room.

Here's the sink on the right when you walk in.  When we're milking cows, this space gets busy as it's where we bring the stainless steel pails in and pour milk into gallon jars and then wash the buckets.  Our unopened seed packets and gardening supplies clutter the countertop.

The cabinets over the washer and dryer are full.  Empty jars for honey production line the windowsill and dirty clothes hampers sit on top of the dryer, along with other items.  Oil lamps for hurricane season are stored above the cabinets, along with kerosene.

Above the sink, we have a shelf for picnic baskets, garden harvest baskets, pressure canner, and ice chests we use for carrying milk when we're milking.  That got some stuff off of the floor.

Just last week I got a 1x12 pine board and some brackets and stained the shelving and put up yet another row of shelving above the entrance door for additional storage capacity for this little room.

To be sure, we are full.  We're planning on making splits and catching swarms to expand the beekeeping operation a little bit, but of course, that means we'll need additional room for storage.  Storage units.  We've never rented storage units.  In fact, that wouldn't work for us since it's off-site and we need access here when we need supplies.  I read that the storage units are a relatively new invention.  The first one was built in the 1960's in Texas.

We've become a people that have a lot of stuff.  I heard a podcast the other day that discussed this, saying that nomadic people don't value material things.  Because they are always on the move, they value items that are portable and quickly discard things that tie them down.  It was the agrarian mindset that changed this.  People became anchored to the land.  As they traveled and saw things, they'd say, "Hmm...  I think I'll take that home.  I can use it."  This mindset became prevalent as people not even in agrarian settings began to accumulate stuff.  Personally, I think it's okay if it is stuff you use.  If not, it's best to get rid of it or give it away.

So that leads us to think about storage, and at some point we'll look at buying some sort of an outdoor shed that we can use as a Honey House for all the beekeeping supplies.  We'd like to find one that is a "repo" building that perhaps we could get for a good deal.  Finding one is on our radar, and we are looking to purchase one - perhaps sometime this spring or summer.  We don't want our utility room to look like we are hoarders!

Trying Out the New Garden Sink

We have two rows of carrots in the back of the garden.  It's past time to pull them.  I pulled one of the rows yesterday.  You can kind of see where that row was in the lower part of the photo below.  I planted seven hills of zucchini and seven hills of crookneck squash between the carrot rows.  I hope I didn't jump the gun as I saw that after a week of temps in the upper 70's this week, early next week we'll see low temps at 33!

I had quite a pile of big fat carrots on the ground in front of the garden sink.  I couldn't actually put them in the sink as I have it against the garden fence and the cows were craning their necks over to try to eat the carrot greens.  Patience, cows!  I'm gonna feed them to you, but I have to cut the greens off the carrots first!

In the last week of January we had hard freezes for several nights with lows in the low 20's so I had turned the water valve off that controls water flow to the rear of the garden.  To wash up the carrots, I turned the valve back on.  Oh boy!  When I did that, water sprayed everywhere!  The sprayer portion is made of plastic, of course, and split right down the middle in the hard freeze.  I was sure that I had drained all the water out of it, but apparently not.  I'll have to replace the sprayer as it is beyond repair.  I was still able to wash all the carrots, in workaround fashion as I just held the carrots up to the busted sprayer handle.  Not exactly what I hoped for, but I was able to complete the job.

These are Danvers carrots and I waited too long to harvest them.  They'll still be good to eat, they're just fat and some are misshapen.  This happens when they are overcrowded and compete for nutrients.  I need to do a better job of thinning them out.  It's all good though.  We'll eat every last one of them.  I need to harvest that last row next week.

After washing them all up, I brought a big basket of carrots inside.  The basket must have weighed 15 pounds.

We'll roast most of these in the oven, but will also make Cream of Carrot soup, eat some of them raw on a vegetable platter with dip, shred some of them for use in cole slaw and sauerkraut, make fermented ginger carrots and finally make a big carrot cake!

I have to put another item on my to do list:  Fix the sprayer on the new garden sink before I harvest the other row of carrots.

What To Do With Too Much Cilantro

We let cilantro go to seed in our garden each year, so it comes up on its own year after year.  Which is a good thing for tacos or pico de gallo.  But when the cilantro becomes a jungle of cilantro, what do you do?

It's good!  The flavor is so powerful; the fragrance so pungent.  Some people don't like it and say it tastes like soap, but we like it!

I decided we'd try to find something else to do with cilantro besides the same old same olds.  We love basil pesto.  I wonder if you could make cilantro pesto?  Why, yes you can!  You'll need:

1/2 cup pecans,
2 cups cilantro
2 garlic cloves
1/2 cup olive oil
1 1/2 TBS lemon juice
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon pepper
1/4 cayenne pepper

This takes all of about five minutes to pull together.  Mix it up for a bit in the food processor.  It has a nice bright green color to it and is very fragrant!

The wife got some angel hair pasta going and added the cilantro pesto to it.  Delicious!

She also cut some baguettes up into little slices and toasted them to make crostini.  We spooned some cilantro pesto on the warm crostini.  That's a nice little appetizer, I tell ya!

Although the official recipe didn't call for it, I think if you'd grate up some Parmesan cheese into the pesto, it would kick the cilantro pesto into overdrive.  We're going to try that next time.  I don't think it is possible to eat all the cilantro that is out there in the garden, but this recipe gives us another option.  Warm weather will cause the cilantro to bolt to seed.  That means more cilantro for next year!

More About Wolves

As I drive the backroads and even main roads of Louisiana, I see lots of roadkill on the highways.  Lots of raccoons, possums, deer, armadillos.  I see many mink that lay flattened and dead and do a little fist pump and rejoice as I pass them due to what they did to our flock of chickens.  We're still recovering from that.  Predators are just a fact of life.  If you have animals, there are always other animals higher on the food chain that are just obeying the instinct that the Good Lord gave them.

Fortunately, as human beings created in the likeness and image of God, we're higher on the food chain than they are, and many times, we are forced to take matters into our own hands.  Many predators are buried in our garden and grow wonderful vegetables for us.  A t-shirt I would love to have states, "Compost Your Enemies" on it.  That's not very Christian-like, now is it?  By enemies, I mean mink, raccoons, owls, possums, red tailed hawks, and coyotes.  Those do a lot of damage to livestock and birds around here.

In our last post, I said a comment about wolves.  I want to talk a little more about wolves.  Wolves have been extirpated in Louisiana.  That means none exist in the wild.  They disappeared in the area due to losing their habitat, being mixed with coyotes, and hunted out, despite once being numerous.  I've seen foxes in the area, but never a wolf.

But like I said, that wasn't always the case.  The news clipping below from the Basile Weekly from 1993 shows a group of serious looking characters posing with guns in front of a hotel in Oberlin, Louisiana in 1936.  They aren't playing around.  The article states that wolves had been killing sheep in the area and they were protecting the livestock.  The caption is cut off but there must have been a bounty on the wolves as it states "... for each wolf killed."  I wish I could find the first part of that sentence.  When I was crawfishing, there was a bounty on nutria rats.  You could bring in the tail of a nutria and get $5 for each tail!

The reason I have this clipping is because the gentleman second from the left in the overalls was my great-grandpa.  We called him Big Grandpa.  He was born in 1884 and died in 1973, making him 89 years old when he passed away. 

 I can barely remember him as I was young when he died.  I do remember going to his house and collecting eggs from a hen house with him, but that's about it.  He's buried in Durio Cemetery right smack dab in the middle of our family farm in Oberlin, Louisiana.  I tip my hat to these gentlemen.  If not for them, wolves might be hunting our goats as I type this on a Tuesday night.  I hear coyotes howl at night around our place, but fortunately no wolves.  Thanks Big Grandpa!

Tough Men in Tough Times

We like to play ice-breaker games - more on ice-breakers in a moment.  These are games we play around the table to spark conversation.  They usually start with, "If money was no object, where are the top 5 places that you'd like to visit?" or "If you could have any super-power, what would it be?" or "If you got a new vehicle, what color paint would you choose? or "What was your favorite family vacation that we've been on?"  The list goes on and on, but you get the point.  We go around the table and share our answers.  It spurs further conversation and/or changes in our original answers.

The other night before bed, Tricia remarked, "I like my name, but if I was to choose another name, I think I'd like the name Olivia.  It's such a pretty name."  She then asked, "If you could choose another name for yourself, what would it be?"  Good question.  I took my brain out of neutral and put it into low gear.  I began to think first of nicknames.  Have you ever had a nickname?  When I worked for the helicopter company, I had an office with my name outside the door.  It's the one you see below:

A coworker there of whom I'm still in contact with gave me the nickname "Cornbread" because of my 'country' ways, I guess.  He turned the nameplate over and wrote my nickname on my name plate and slid it back on the wall.  I still have it:

But I digress.  The question wasn't about a nickname.  Tricia asked me what name I would like if not Kyle.  I thought and came up with an answer.  I told her, "I think I'd like to be named, Wolfgang."  "Wolfgang?" she responded, "Really?"  "Yes, really," I told her.  "There are many famous Wolfgangs," I said.  She asked, "Who?"  I said "Well, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart for starters.  And then there's Wolfgang Puck, the famous chef.  You can't leave out Wolfgang Van Halen, the son of Eddie Van Halen and Valerie Bertinelli."  "But you would have been teased at school," she continued.  "No, they'd shorten it and call me "Wolf" and wolves are tough," I answered.

She thought my answer was weird, but that's okay.  I guess I'd be a lone wolf or maybe I'd join a wolfpack.  Back to ice breakers.  I just finished reading the following audiobook, and I highly recommend it.

Endurance.  It is a true story and it's named after the ship that Ernest Shackleton and his crew were on in their 1914 expedition to cross Antarctica.  The Endurance became caught in ice and the pressure eventually destroyed and sunk the Endurance.  That started a harrowing adventure in which the men lived on the ice.  In order to survive, they had to eat their dogs.  In order to live, they also killed and ate penguins and seals and sea leopards, which weigh over 1,100 pounds.  Their adventure lasted almost 2 years.  Most had given them up for lost but all 28 men survived!  They braved conditions so cold that you can't imagine it.  At some point, Shackleton and a few others left some of the men and sailed on a small lifeboat over 800 miles as it was their only chance for survival.  Well, they made it.  They organized a rescue mission to go get the men they had left on Elephant Island.  They succeeded!

This story was an amazing story about leadership, perseverance, and a positive, never give up attitude.  As the book ended, I was left with the thought that: "Those were men back then.  They just don't make 'em like that anymore."  As you read it, you just can't fathom what they went through.  You're left wondering what you would have done.  How would you pass the time?  I guess playing "ice-breaker" games while your ship was stuck in the ice would have helped build camaraderie while you waited.  At one point as they were starving, they went around the table and planned a menu for which time at which they'd be rescued, naming their favorite foods on all courses.