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...

What We Do With Drawn Comb For The Spring

After we've pulled the capped frames from the hives and upcapped them, put them in the extractor to spin all the honey out, we put the "wet" frames out by the hives and let the bees clean them up.  They'll bring any honey we didn't get back to the hives to eat over the winter or put it in frames and cap it and we'll get it back in the fall when we harvest fall honey.  The "cleaned-up" frames still need to be dealt with though.

We want to make sure there are no eggs or larvae from wax moths or other bugs on the frame that will hatch and wreak havoc on the comb that the honeybees have worked so hard to draw out.  The reason why is that we'll put these frames back on the boxes this spring.  The frames get recycled and reused, you might say.  We want to make things easy on the bees.  If the bees don't have to draw out all the comb making wax to hold the nectar/honey, they'll use that energy to make honey.  That's what we want!  Efficiency.  Making the most of your resources.  Working smarter - not harder.

The way we make sure there are no eggs from wax moths or any small hive beetles or other creatures on the frames hiding in the comb is we stack the frames in the freezer for three days.  Three days below freezing will kill any opportunistic pests that may be hiding on the frames.  Here they are in the deep freeze.  It can only hold 10 frames at a time, so it takes a week or so to cycle through the frames.

Once out of the freezer, I put the frames back in the boxes and stack them criss-cross to dry out.  We'll leave them for a couple of days like this in our utility room.  We're quickly running out of space.  Had we known we'd be doing what we're doing (beekeeping, milking, etc.), we would have designed our home differently!  We might be in the market for a shed in the future.

Once we've ensured they are fully dry, we very gently put them in contractor bags.  We don't want to damage the drawn out comb, so the bees won't have to do a lot of repair.  In the spring, they'll clean out the cells and begin filling them with nectar.  The contractor bags are filled and we seal them up very tightly so that nothing can get in there.  Then we stack them in the garage out of the way.

They'll sit there safe and sound until the spring when the bees need additional honey supers.  At that point we'll pull these frames out, load them in honey supers and put them on top of each of the hives.  That's what a super is: a box of frames that sits on top (super) of the brood boxes separated by a queen excluder so that your honey supers contain exclusively honey - no brood.  Beekeeping is work, but it's rewarding and something that you always learn something new or a better way to do things.  Hopefully these frames will make it through the fall and winter and the bees will do their thing this spring and share their delicious, sweet honey with us!

Heat Stress in our Dairy Cows

Rosie cooling her heels

Summer time in the south!  It's hot.  Or as they say in Cajun French, "C'est chaud!"  It's hot for humans, but for cows?  Our poor Jersey cows are struggling mightily.  They just aren't built for this southern climate and don't deal with the heat well.  They get up early and slowly walk out to the pasture, battling mosquitoes, deer flies and horse flies.  They eat in the shade cast by the live oak trees against the rising sun in the east.  As the sun rises and the shade disappears, the cows slowly walk back and sit beneath the shade all day long until the process repeats but from the western side.

Here's the problem.  They are eating less and it puts them in stress.  Humans sweat and enjoy the evaporative cooling.  Jersey cows, on the other hand, do sweat, but much less than humans.  How do they handle the heat and cooling themselves?  Poorly.  They pant.  Their tongues hang out.  They drink lots of water.  Especially poor LuLu.  She's in milk since calving Betsy and that puts an additional load on her body.  We were splitting the milk with the calf by separating them allowing Betsy to get the milk all day and then after separating them in the evening, we milk first thing in the morning for us.  Well, we've stopped that temporarily until temperatures drop off.  It's been around 100 degrees for a number of days now.

We're doing a couple of things to assist LuLu.  First, in the early morning and late afternoon, we spray her down with a water hose.  She's taken a liking to this and eagerly walks to the spot by the hose in anticipation of the bath.  We're also making a drench with 1 cup of molasses, 1/3 cup of apple cider vinegar and 2 tablespoons epsom salt.  We mix this up and give her three 50cc drenches in a drench gun in the morning and the evening to give her an electrolyte boost.  Since she's not out eating as much due to the excessive heat, I'm picking sweet potato vines from the garden to supplement her minimal grass intake.  She loves sweet potato vines.  

I noticed Rosie (in the photo at the top of this blog post) standing in a puddle of water caused by the float valve not working properly because the water trough isn't level.  The water trickled over and caused a mud puddle before I caught it and shut the valve off.  Some say that cows will stand in the water to cool off their hooves and dissipate heat.  If that is beneficial short term, great!  It's generally not a good idea to have mud puddles as they are vectors for parasites and standing in water softens the hooves, making them susceptible to hoof rot and other foot ailments.  In this heat, however, that puddle will evaporate quickly and won't be a long term problem.

Tomorrow looks like we'll have a high of 97 degrees, but the days following look to have reduced temperatures down to a 'balmy' average of 94 degrees.  Not a huge drop but somewhat of a respite.  Hang in there, LuLu.  Cooler weather is coming.  In the meantime, we're doing everything we can to help her (and us) to cool off!