Soil Cover - An Important Consideration in Soil Health

Covering the soil is one of the most basic things you can do in soil conservation.  If you walk in the woods, you always see the ground covered with decomposing logs, leaves and understory.  Small trees thrive under the canopy followed by grasses.  Bugs and worms thrive beneath the rotting organic matter as rich moist topsoil is being formed.

The photo below just west of our barn was taken five years ago.  There is one tiny patch of grass seen on the bottom right.  What Happened?!  This entire area was once covered with bahia grass and bermuda grass and now this...  It's all dirt.  In the summer, the sun heats up the dirt and dries it out.  When rains come, the soil is washed away.  When winds blow, the dust (our topsoil) is blown away.

In trying to figure the genesis of this problem out, I think it all started with bonfires.  When winds would blow limbs out of the trees, I would stack up a big burn pile.  The pile would continue to grow, and when it got HUGE, especially in the winter, I would light it up and we'd sit around it and enjoy its warmth.  The fires were so big, one time the neighbors called the fire department thinking that our barn was on fire!

I love sitting around a fire, staring into the coals, but the fires killed the grass, exposing the dirt.  The chickens scratched holes in the exposed dirt to take their dust baths.  When tiny grasses started to grow, they dried up quickly in the heat and chickens plucked out the grasses to eat.  The situation went from bad to worse.  I had to change this!

A barren wasteland

We have cows, goats and chickens all grazing on 3 acres.  Soil health aside, this barren wasteland needs to have grass growing on it to feed all the hungry barnyard critters.  I stopped burning the big bonfires and then planted sprigs of bermuda grass in the dirt taken from cuttings.  Our chicken population, due to the minks, was cut in half, taking pressure off of the barren area and allowing the grass to take root and grow.  Moreover, and I can't quite explain it, but for some reason the spring after a very hard freeze, the grass started coming back - first gradually and then quickly.

I took a photo of the same area yesterday.  Although there is still work to be done in bringing this area back to its former glory, a good start has been made.  Grass almost completely covers the old desert-like area.  The animals and the humans are happy with the progress.  Imagine how it would look if we hadn't been in a drought!

A return of our grass pasture

The grassland now gives additional grazing capacity to our animals.  The roots hold the soil together, reducing erosion.  The grass keeps the soil cooler, and gives bugs and worms a place to hide and do their work.  As organic matter decomposes, the soil and its microorganisms thrive, doing their job.  We'll continue to do our part to rehabilitate the area that I negatively affected by unwise choices.  More work to do, but I like before/after photos that show evidence of good stewardship of the land.

Bottling the Summer 2026 Honey Harvest

It was high time we get the honey out of the five gallon buckets and into jars as we're out of the 2025 summer and fall crop of honey.  The summer 2026 crop yielded 17.8 gallons of honey that we've stored in 5 gallon buckets.  We dehumidified it down to 18.5% moisture and now its ready to bottle.  We sterilized all the jars and arranged the empty jars on the island along with lids and began pouring.  You can click the arrow below to watch the video of the smooth, sweet honey coming out of the honey gate and into the jars.

We bottled the honey in 3 separate batches.  I liked the red tinge of the honey in this photo as the morning sun is shining in through the kitchen window.

As we are bottling and going from jar to jar, sometimes honey gets on the side of the jars so they must be wiped down with a dishrag with warm, soapy water on it.  No one likes getting a sticky jar of honey.  We found an online label service called VistaPrint a couple of years ago and designed some labels that we affix to all the jar lids.

Here is an up close photo of the labels that we put on each jar of honey.

In all we got 152 jars of honey ready to sell.  Last year our bees yielded 170 jars.  We attribute the lower production to a big rain event we got right smack dab in the middle of the "flow" when the Chinese Tallow trees were flowering.  This really messed things up, but we're not complaining.  In fact, if we sell all of our honey, this year (our third year as beekeepers) will be the year we get out of the red and into the black.  Beekeeping is an expensive hobby!

Last year's crop crystallized during the winter months.  This year we hope to mitigate that by storing all of our honey in our new "hot box" that was given to us by someone going out of the honey-selling business.  It's an old refrigerator fitted with a couple of light bulbs and a thermostat that helps keep the honey at a temperature high enough that it never crystallizes and low enough that the beneficial enzymes in the raw honey are not damaged.

We've already sold 36 jars and have a stockpile of honey inventory for our customers.  We're mostly on the honor-system where our loyal customers come and get jars of honey out of the garage and leave money in the box to pay for it.  We'll likely harvest honey again this fall.  The fall crop is a fraction of the summer crop.  We like to leave some honey for the bees to eat over the winter though.  It is the bees' honey, after-all.  We erected our Honey for Sale sign by the road.  We'll leave it up until we run out.

The summer 2026 honey crop is all done!

The Masked Bandit

A couple of month's ago, I re-read "Where the Red Fern Grows," a great novel about 10 year old Billy Colman and his two coon dogs, Old Dan and Little Ann.  I tell you, if you don't get choked up reading that book, you have ice water running in your veins.  Billy loves his dogs and his dogs love him.  They all love treeing coons, too.

I have a lot of bad experiences with raccoons.  They are a very smart, formidable foe.  Back when I was crawfishing for a living, they cost me lots of money.  At night they would forage through my ponds, eating crawfish out of my traps - crawfish that I could have otherwise sold.  To add insult to injury, they would turn over traps.  Being unable to see the traps, I would then run over with my boat, flattening them out at a cost of $8.50 per trap.  In the early mornings, I would walk through a patch of woods that bordered my crawfish ponds.  The coons, with bellies full of crawfish, would sleep in the crooks of trees.  I would see them and shoot them out of the treetops and they would plummet to the ground with a loud thud.  They gave me fits.

They also, I've learned, will kill your chickens.  This afternoon late, I walked to the henhouse to collect eggs.  The girls' laying has diminished.  Many are broody and the rest are just hot and tired.  I picked up 8 eggs today.  When I came out of the henhouse with my basket, I heard a rustling noise in the grass in the woods adjacent to our property.  It was a juvenile raccoon trying to get in through the fence.  I scared the rascal.

I'm unlike Billy Colman in that I don't have two redbone coonhounds.  I opened up the back gate running after the coon.  The coon did what coons do - he scampered up a tree and watched me.  Can you see him in the 'V' in the tree right in the very center of the photo below?

I ran as quick as I could to get my 12 gauge shotgun and ran back.  Without dogs like Old Dan and Little Ann at the bottom of the tree, I was worried the masked bandit might have climbed down and escaped.  But no - he was still up in the crook of the tree looking down at me.  Waiting, I'm sure, for me to leave so that he could have a nice chicken dinner.

The rascal will not be eating chicken dinner tonight, or any night in the future.  I took aim, pulled the trigger - BOOM!, and the raccoon fell to the forest floor with a resounding thud.

Tricia said he was cute and maybe she's right, but this cute fellow is a chicken eater, and I can't abide with that type of neighbor.  I have to think that Billy Colman, Old Dan and Little Ann would agree.

The Predator Becomes the Prey

A while back we lamented the fact that we lost 39 hens to mink.  Those critters savagely slaughtered our egg layers.  It was only after I killed some squirrels and baited the traps with their blood and guts that I was able to catch the male and female in the trap.  They were summarily executed by firing squad.  We haven't had an issue with mink since that day.  I still drive around and see mink that have been killed while crossing the road.  Perhaps I shouldn't, but every time I see a mink carcass on the road, I do a fist pump and break in to a grin.  Mink are vicious killers and they get no sympathy from me.

This morning Tricia hollered, "Kyle, there's a mink on our back porch."  I'm mostly deaf, so I had to confirm what I thought I heard.  Yes, I heard her correctly.  We do have wild creatures like possums and coons and armadillos that will venture near the house, but never mink.  I ran to the gun shelf, pulled down the 12 gauge and loaded it with shells.  I ran out to the back patio and sure enough, that rascal was between the french doors and the back of the fireplace.

I couldn't hardly shoot him there - I'd break the windows and splinter the wood.  That little devil looked at me and bared his teeth.  I bared mine back.  Ginger, our cat, was around and I didn't want her in the crossfire.  The mink made a break for it around the back side of the house, but I had a bead on that beady-eyed creature.  BOOM!  Or you might say, "Pop, goes the weasel."  

Look at the teeth on this varmint!  He can tear some chicken up.  I quickly ran back to the pasture and around the henhouse to see if he had killed any of our chickens, but I found no dead or injured birds.  I put my foot in the photo below for perspective, so that you can see the size of this animal.

What would cause him to come up to the house?  Was he sick?  Rabid?  Did he just have a death wish?  We'll never know, but I'm happy Tricia happened to see him and called me so that I could take care of business.  That's one less mink to kill our chickens.

The Indians, I read in history, helped the pilgrims by teaching them to bury a fish underneath corn seeds to provide slow release fertilizer.  I grabbed a shovel and buried the mink in the garden, sort of next to the goat.  We'll see if mink works as good as fish as a garden fertilizer.

Boot Hill

This morning walking out to the barn at 6 AM something caught my eye by the firewood stacked up.  I thought it was a dead chicken.  How could that have happened?  All our hens are locked up in the henhouse at night.  The sun hadn't risen yet, and it was still sort of dark, so I walked over to check out the situation.

There was a dead animal, alright, but it wasn't a chicken.  It was Spotty.  One of our little bucklings.  Spotty has been in poor health for a while.  The goats struggle mightily with parasites, and Spotty seemed the most susceptible.  For the last month, we've been doctoring on him.  We alternated treating him with Valbazen, Safeguard, and Ivermectin.  We gave him Vitamin C and copper boluses and other treatments.  Initially they seemed to work and then a day later, we'd find him regressing again.

Popcorn is our buck that handles all the ladies of the herd.  We had picked Spotty to be Popcorn's heir apparent, primarily because of his genetics.  This little dude was spotted from head to toe - a really remarkable looking little creature.  Well, our plans for Spotty aren't going to materialize.  Popcorn will have to keep on going.  There is another baby buckling, but he's almost solid black with a few random spots here and there.

Before the sun got overhead in the sky, I told Tricia that I was going to lay Spotty to rest.  I took Spotty's collar off of his neck and carried him into the garden.  It hasn't rained here in a month of Mondays, so the ground was hard as granite.  My shovel went down about six inches until it hit a clay hardpan.  I went back to the garage and got the mattock and used that to dig a deeper hole.

When I got it deep enough, I positioned poor Spotty in the bottom of the hole.  Since rigor mortis hadn't fully set in yet, it was easier to get him to fit in the hole.  Then I began back-filling the hole with all the dirt and then woodchips and mulch.

Boot Hill for Goats

When I was done, you could hardly tell where Spotty lies in his unmarked grave in the garden between the green onions and the sweet potatoes.  Can you spot the small rise in the center of the photo above?  Sad?  Yes, but if you raise animals, you've got to be prepared for this type thing and get used to loss.  We gave it our best shot.  It just wasn't meant to be.  And who's to say that Popcorn doesn't have a recessive "spotty" gene that will come out next kidding season.

A Quick Peek at the Fall Starts

Tonight I took a couple of photos of the fall starts that I'll be transplanting into the garden at some point in early to mid September.  I want to let the temperatures at least get into the lower 90's versus 100 degrees to give the seedlings a fighting chance.  Here are a couple of trays of tomatoes of various varieties that I planted from seed in early August:

I like to plant a number of different varieties.  Here's what we are planting this fall:  Black Krim, Pink Brandywine, Cherokee Purple, Big Rainbow, Campari, Creole, and Chadwick Cherry.  In the past several years, I've actually had a better fall crop of tomatoes that in the spring.  I attribute that to less bug and disease pressure.  It's also due to the fact that it is more comfortable to garden in the cooler temperatures!

These are horrible photos, I know, but I took them at night.  They are a lot of cole crops that I seeded that are just coming up: Broccoli, Cauliflower, Brussels Sprouts, Cauliflower, Romanesco, and Cabbage.

They are long and leggy.  The problem is, it is so hot outside, if I put the trays in the direct sun, the seedlings will be dead within the hour.  Putting them in indirect sun helps, but makes them very leggy.  Hopefully, we'll get some cooler weather in the next couple or three weeks that could give us a break.

"You Don't Make a Cup, You Build a Pot"

We don't watch a lot of TV at all, but we have a free TV channel called Pluto, and they have all the Gunsmoke episodes on, and we went back to the very first one where the series was opened with John Wayne recommending it.  It turned out to be a good endorsement as Gunsmoke ran for 20 seasons!  So most nights after chores, we sit down and watch an episode.  It runs for about 26 minutes, but to finish up all 20 seasons, it'll take us until 2030, I suppose.  We enjoy watching Gunsmoke.  The only bad thing is the commercials that Pluto requires you watch.  (We don't watch.  We mute them all.)  All of them are pharmaceutical commercials, and it drives me nuts.

Watching Gunsmoke puts me in a time machine and transports me back to around 1976 sitting in my Grandma and Grandpa's house.  We're in the den that was paneled in knotty pine paneling and we're watching Gunsmoke.  My grandma would bring us bowls of Ozark Black Walnut ice cream - my grandpa's favorite, and we'd watch Marshal Matt Dillon save the day.  He put many a gunfighter on Boot Hill.  I didn't realize it at the time, but there was a budding romance between Matt and Kitty that never quite materialized.  Darn it!

The topic today is coffee.  I'll pull in why Gunsmoke is involved in just a skinny minute.  We enjoy coffee.  We'll put a pot on in the morning and another one after lunch.  We aren't coffee snobs with a fancy expensive coffee maker.  We use a simple Mr. Coffee drip pot.  However, when we get some good fresh roasted beans, we'll grind them coarsely and use a french press.  Talk about a good cup of coffee!

For the morning pot, we'll put three rounded tablespoons of coffee and make a pot.  In the afternoon, (you might consider us uncivilized savages), we put another two tablespoons of coffee on top of the morning grounds and make another pot for after lunch.  I thought that we were the only people that do this, but as it turns out, Chester from Gunsmoke does it too.  

Chester Goode famously said on Gunsmoke, "Shoot, you don't make a cup, you build a pot. You don't really get a good pot until you've been usin' it about a week. Then it's coffee!"   

Now, I don't know if we'll stretch it that far!! Ha Ha!!  We have an old fashioned drip coffee pot, and I think we're going to make a pot in this old family heirloom and enjoy a cup like Chester and Marshal Dillon and Doc Adams might have sipped right there in Dodge City!

Although Chester might have been run out of modern hipster coffee joints, he was a true connoisseur of coffee.  Here is an excerpt of Chester's doctoral thesis on the art of making coffee.  Click on the arrow in the middle of the image below and enjoy!:

It's time for me to get the heck out of Dodge!  Until next time...