An Update to our Organic Homemade Fire Ant Killer

Last week we introduced you to Our Garden Experiment in which we poisoned some ants in our garden using the method discussed in the post in the hyperlink above.  It uses orange oil that we extracted from orange peels that we ate.  The post from last week tells you how we made it.  I wanted to give it a couple days and then check to see if the fire ant mound was affected.

Take a peek at the photo at the top.  The mound was destroyed, decimated, obliterated, wrecked.  There was not a single fire ant alive anywhere near it!  This is great news.  Now I want to repeat it at least one more time before I get my hopes up.  There's an outside chance that the ants simply don't like the fragrance of oranges and packed up everything in tiny suitcases and moved.  Except, that doesn't explain the pile of dead ants on top of the mound.  I scraped my foot across the top to see if the ants were dormant on top and alive underneath, but there was no sign of life at all.

If this is indeed indicative of the efficacy of our homemade ant killer, Tricia and I already discussed saving every peel from every orange we eat and making gallons of it to use in the garden.  It looks like we'll have a nice navel orange crop this year, so we'll have a big inventory of peels to save and get the oil out of them to use in our fire ant killing concoction.

I know it's a short post tonight.  More to come tomorrow!

Where Does My Help Come From?

 

Image Credit

Today my Mom was admitted into the hospital.  She has been having some health struggles and had a procedure done in New Orleans to stop a bleed in her stomach.  In her checkup this morning, she had a fever and was dehydrated and weak, so she was admitted for care in the local hospital.  They are administering antibiotics and giving her IV fluids.  The doctors and nurses have been doing a great job caring for Mom.  Friends came to visit her and we encircled her bed, held hands and offered prayers to Almighty God.  I also ask for your prayers for her recovery and complete restoration of her health.

My two favorite Psalms are Psalm 91 and Psalm 121.  Those have been on our hearts throughout many trials and speak of our faithful God who is with us in our times of need.  We don't walk alone.

Psalm 121 KJV

1 I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.
2 My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth.
3 He will not suffer thy foot to be moved: he that keepeth thee will not slumber.
4 Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep.
5 The Lord is thy keeper: the Lord is thy shade upon thy right hand.
6 The sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night.
7 The Lord shall preserve thee from all evil: he shall preserve thy soul.
8 The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth, and even for evermore.

We know our help comes from the Lord!  May His Name be praised!

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.