Our Maker's Acres Police Blotter

A crime has occurred on our homestead farm.  We've got to get to the bottom of it.  Earlier this week I planted a 40 foot section of the garden in the side yard with Irish Potatoes.  I had them cut up and they scabbed over and 1/4 growth from the eyes of each section began growing.  The soil was just right, and I got them all planted in one afternoon.  It was one of those times where you put your hands on your hips and look over your handiwork with satisfaction, thinking about seeing the fresh green growth of potatoes peering out of the soil and leaf mulch I had covered it in.

The next day, I noticed one of our white chickens outside the pasture fence in the side yard.  Upon seeing me, she ran and found a gap in the wire that separates the pasture from the yard and wriggled through, scurrying back to the barn.  As I walked back by the potato patch, I saw that this hen had scratched up where I had planted the potatoes.  Several of the seed potatoes were exposed and this one in the photo below, in particular, had a peck mark in the bottom from her wicked little beak.

It made me angry.  It seems every time that you try to do something, there is an equal and opposite reaction of something trying to destroy what you attempted to do.  Such is the state of our fallen world.  But you don't give up.  You keep trying.  I went looking for the perpetrator and encountered a gaggle of hens by the barn sitting on a rail.  It was almost as if this was a police line up where, from behind one-way glass, you pick out the perp.  I notice that 3 of the 4 hens face me in the line up and look innocent.  But there's this one hen, who has a guilty look about her.  She won't even face forward for identification.

As I looked her over closely, my stare provoked her to hop down.  She looked down in shame for the devastation that she had wrought over our potato patch.

What should I do?  I'm not going to lie and say that capital punishment wasn't thought of.  She would make a mighty fine chicken gumbo and our profligate poultry potato perpetrator would have her career of mischief nipped in the bud.  It would satiate my need for vengeance.  However, she lays eggs.  I had to take a long view of the situation.  I did a quick cost-benefit analysis and determined that she is more valuable to me alive than dead.  The hen was brought before the courtroom for sentencing and received a pardon.  She is on probation, however, and if other misdeeds are found, we'll deal with her swiftly. 

So how do we keep her honest?  The hog wire on the perimeter fence of the pasture is approaching 18 years old.  It's rusty in places and will eventually have to be replaced.  That is a costly job and just too big of a job for me to tackle right now.  So I did the next best thing.  I got some electrified poultry netting down from the rafters of the barn and strung it around the potato (and garlic and lettuce) patch.

Will it work?  We shall see.  Can the hen be rehabilitated?  Or will she be a recidivist and lapse into her former criminal deeds, resulting in re-arrest, conviction and incarceration?

Our electric netting will attempt to keep her honest, but it's up to her.  If she falls off the wagon, the big pot is waiting near the stove, and the weather is still cool enough to make a roux and get some sausage and green onions and make a big chicken and sausage and okra gumbo!

Giving the Honeybees a Jump Start

It is 79 degrees right now and feels like spring (or even early summer).  It won't be long now until we see new growth on trees and other plants.  The songbirds were singing loudly this morning, signaling their happiness in the change of seasons.  That's not saying that we won't get another freeze or frost, but the long range forecast through February 25th shows the lowest temps at 52 degrees with highs in the upper 70s on most days.

It's time to feed the bees!  We want to make sure they have enough stores of food to make it until the pollen and nectar starts flowing, especially since we pulled honey this fall.  Many bees starve in the early spring.  Lots of beekeepers feed their bees with sugar water, but we opt for a more natural food source.  We are feeding them back some of their own honey.  

When we pulled honey, we processed the beeswax in a crockpot with a little water.  This process separates the honey and water from the beeswax as the beeswax, upon cooling, will solidify at the top.  The remaining honey/water mixture is frozen in gallon-sized Ziploc bags for what we are about to do.

Honey water thawed and ready to feed to the bees

We use a large rubber feed tub in which we fill partially with pine straw.  The pine straw is used as a flotation device so that the bees have something to stand on while drinking the honey water.  If you don't do this, and we learned the hard way, many bees drown in the sticky concoction.  I then poured the honey water over the pine straw into the feed tub.

This was done at 8:06AM

The honeybees weren't moving until around 10AM, but at that time they found it.  Like a bad rumor being spread, the first bee that located this feed source reported back to one of the four hives and before you knew it, all the bees in all four hives were clamoring to get it.  There was a steady stream of bees from the hive to the honey water.  You quickly understand the term beeline.  They made a beeline for the honey!

It was a little dangerous to be this close to them without my bee suit.  The buzzing was loud and they were getting after it.

Here's a close-up shot of the bees getting their fill of the honey:

We took the photo below at 12:45PM, right after lunch.  There was absolutely nothing left.  Even the pine straw that once was a sticky mess had been scoured dry.  We have a few more bags of honey water and we'll be feeding them once a week until our supply runs dry.

By 12:45PM the cupboard was bare!

They bring all this back to the hive and fill cells in the frames and they'll use this as a feed source.  What feeding the bees also does is "fool" the queen into thinking that the bees are bringing in nectar - that it is spring.  She'll immediately begin to lay more eggs as she knows she needs more workers to gather pollen and nectar since it is spring, even though it's not quite spring yet.  This gives the hives a jump start, so that when spring actually arrives, there are enough bees to do all the work.  In economic terms, it is 'full employment.'  This also relates to more honey production, which is good for the colony and good for us too!

Come Sail Away With Me

It was vacation time for our family.  Last week we departed on a 5 day cruise out of Galveston on the Royal Caribbean's Mariner of the Sea.  I think there were around 3,100 passengers and 1,800 crewmembers aboard.  We headed down for stops in Costa Maya and Cozumel.  The ship got to a top speed of 20 knots as it traveled through waters as shallow as 30 meters and as deep as 3,600 meters (over 2 miles deep)!

We just couldn't resist doing the "King of the World" pose that Jack and Rose did.

We caught some breathtaking sunsets on the deck of the ship!

For most of the trip, the seas were calm, but one night they fastened all the deck chairs and wouldn't let anyone out on deck. The seas got rough and they distributed barf bags.  It was very loud that night with the waves hitting the ship.  

The water in the Gulf was a beautiful blue color!

We were able to see the beauty of God's creation and yes, I did think of Noah's ark!

Our cabin attendant kept our room clean and fashioned little animals out of towels to keep us entertained.

There was lots to keep us entertained though.  We went to see wonderful shows with singers and dancers and ice skaters.  We watched karaoke and pianists, reggae and jazz musicians.  We took part in trivia contests and logged a number of miles on a walking trail.  We went to a gym and worked out and sat in a sauna and steam room.  We watched the movie F1 on the pool deck one night.  Tricia even took part in a country line dance class on the promenade.

And did we ever eat!  We started off eating at Jamie Oliver's restaurant and then ate at the dining room where we got spoiled with 3 course meals on white tablecloth.  I can't explain how good the service was.  Wow!  On the last night, the head chef came out and said that when they left port, they left with 235,000 pounds of food and when they get back, there will be none left!

Here we are at the first port of call:

Costa Maya:

Our next stop was Cozumel:

We had a snorkeling excursion booked, but it was canceled due to strong winds moving in, so we rented a taxi for 3 hours and had him take us to the nicest beaches to go swim.

The water was beautiful and we enjoyed going out, catching waves and body surfing back to the beach.

It was a real nice time, for sure!

I don't know how this became a thing, but passengers bring ducks on the ship and hide them for you to find.  We found many, many ducks.

We had left on Monday morning and on Saturday morning, we pulled back into port at Galveston as the sun rose in the eastern sky as we overlooked the scene on the balcony of our cabin.

It's nice to get away, but it's also nice to get home!  There's no place like home.  (Except at home, we have to actually cook and clean and there's no one to serve us.)  Thanks Dad and Mom for taking care of the animals while we were cruising!

Preserving the Cauliflower Harvest

Gardening can be a funny thing.  Some years, even though you do everything you've always done, the yield is less than desirable.  This year the sweet potato harvest was lackluster, at best.  Some years, though, everything clicks on certain crops.  This year the cauliflower harvest can best be described as a bumper crop.  That term originates from the 19th century when things exceptionally large were termed as "bumper."

Before the big freeze we harvested all the cauliflower as exposing the heads to a deep freeze causes the cauliflower to become mushy and damaged.  We ate all we could, but decided we would need to blanch and freeze the excess so that we could preserve the harvest and eat it throughout the upcoming weeks and months.

Cauliflower grows with large leaves that curl around the head, leaving the head mostly protected.  As a result, the heads are snowball white, clean, with no blemishes or damage.  Tricia and I formed a quick assembly line, cutting off any remaining leaves and stem bottoms.  The upper portions of the stem are tasty and edible. 

We disassemble the heads, cutting them into florets a little larger than a golf ball.  While we are working on this, we get a pot of water boiling.  We also clean the sink and fill with cold water and ice.  We're about ready to get things going.

With the water at a full boil, we drop a batch of cauliflower into the water.  Once the water is boiling, we start the timer for three minutes.  It takes 3 minutes to blanch cauliflower.  Blanching the cauliflower (or any vegetable) does a couple of things: it preserves the color and it preserves the texture prior to freezing.

The beeper goes off, alerting Tricia that it's time to take it out.  I say "alerts Tricia" because I can't hear the beeper.  The timer sounds at a frequency that I cannot hear.  Years of running a crawfish boat with no hearing protection (my fault entirely) have resulted in hearing loss of certain frequencies.  There are worse afflictions, I suppose.  

Once the beeper sounds, we quickly remove the blanched cauliflower into a colander, allowing the hot water to drain out, and then we put the cauliflower into the cold water bath.  We want to immediately stop the cooking process.  To do so, we add more ice to the sink as needed.  Simultaneously, we put another batch of cauliflower florets into the water and start the whole process over again.  Rinse, wash, repeat... Literally.

Once the cauliflower has cooled, we bag it up into quart-sized Ziploc bags and put them into the deep freeze.  We yielded nine bags.

Of course, we did hold back 3 or 4 cauliflower heads to put in the crisper in the fridge and we'll eat that over the next week or so.  We always like to eat as much as we can fresh from the garden, but it's always important to be able to preserve the harvest.

Just Browsing...

Directly behind our 5 acres is a little patch of overgrown woods with live oaks, willow, China Berry and Chinese Tallow trees.  It's also filled with privet.  Even though this land is not ours, I have to keep it in check as the invasive trees want to take over our fence line.  I do pray each day that this land stays "wild," though.  I like it even though it harbors more than its fair share of possums, minks, squirrels, rabbits and numerous other wildlife.

The hard freezes this week finally killed any grasses that were growing in the pasture and the animals are living off of hay that we have stockpiled.  This jungle behind us contains something that the goats simply love - privet.  Privet spreads like an infectious disease and it grows so fast, you can almost watch it put on new branches and leaves.  Fortunately, our goats can eat it almost as fast as it grows.

The wild jungle behind us

To harvest the privet I use some heavy duty pruners like you see below.  It has to be big, as some of the privet is about two inches in diameter.

Woody shrubs like privet is called browse, and goats simply LOVE browsing.  I clip the privet, throw it over the fence and the goats clip the leaves off the branches quicker than you could imagine.  This gives them a little variety in their diets and it also keeps the wild woods somewhat tamed.  In just a short while the woods will be teeming with dewberries that we'll harvest.  Cleaning up the woods will make dew berry picking easier, allowing grass to grow, and discourage varmints from wandering into our property.

Every once in a while I have to gather up the privet branches that have been denuded by the ravenous goats.  I stack the "bones" up in a big pile to eventually decay in the same woods where they grew.  I call 'em bones because they resemble the plate of bones after you've eaten your fill at a rib joint.

There's plenty more privet where that came from, and I'll gladly keep clipping it and throwing over the fence to keep those old goats happy.

One housekeeping item before I sign off tonight: We'll be going 'radio silent' until Sunday night, February 8th when I'll post again as we are spending some good family time together.  See ya Sunday!

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.