An Infestation!

Last night I talked about listening to a James Herriot audiobook called, "Every Living Thing."  If you haven't read Herriot's books, I highly recommend them - All Creatures Great and Small, All Things Wise and Wonderful, All Things Bright and Beautiful.  In these books, Herriot, a country vet in England recounts true stories (with names changed) of his patients and the humans that owned them.  Very funny stories that are also tender, beautifully written anecdotes about Mr. Herriot's experiences as a vet.  The descriptions of the countryside and the simpler times in the late 1930's through early 1950's are heartwarming.

In "Every Living Thing" chapter 48, Herriot recounts visiting the Colwell's home to check on a dog with a fractured femur that had not set properly.  While in the home, he is attacked by fleas and carries them home with him.  He undresses at the door and tells his wife, Helen, that he is going to take a bath to try to get rid of them.  He immerses himself in the bathwater and sees the little black critters on the water's surface, drains the tub and repeats the process.  Poor James Herriot is  tormented by them for days. 

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It reminded me of a poem I once read:

I think that I shall never see
A beast as loathsome as a flea.

A flea whose hungry mouth consumes
All the blood that it exhumes.

A flea that makes me scratch all day
And irritates in every way.

A flea that gets into my hair
And makes me scratch 'til I am bare.

Poems are made by fools like me.
But God should not have made the flea.

-Terry Hoffman

I have a flea story of my own.  In my job that I've been doing for close to five years now, I drive around and inspect vehicles that have been damaged.  I take photos and then write estimates for repair and deliver the estimates to the adjuster for payment to the insured or the claimant.  When I was being initially trained, I was warned about dogs.  My trainer told me that he was chased on top of a fuel tank after being bitten.  He was bleeding and had to call for help!  I've heeded the warning for dogs, but I was not warned about fleas!

I daily see a myriad of vehicles of all types - from Porsches to Pickups, from $1,800 Toyotas to $88,000 Escalades.  Around a year ago, I was assigned to see an old Toyota Tacoma.  Driving up, I could see that the vehicle was in poor condition, even before the collision.  There was not a single panel on the vehicle that did not have prior damage - dents, scratches, rust, missing trim.  I could see this was going to be a total loss.

In order to properly value the vehicle, I must get the odometer reading.  I opened the door and was struck with a strong smell.  I gingerly eased into the driver's seat, pushing over a paper plate of half eaten chicken that had been there for a few days, put the key in the ignition and quickly got the mileage.  The interior of the vehicle was full of debris and so very dirty, I rushed to finish up and got in my car and used antibacterial gel on my hands to try to clean up.

I drove away, happy to move on to my next stop.  I was driving down the highway at 55 mph when something caught my eye on my khaki pants.  It was a black speck on my lap.  Must be some dirt.  I went to flick it off, but it jumped!  Oh no!  Five minutes later I felt a sensation on my ankle.  I pulled off to the shoulder of the road, got out, pulled my pant leg up, lowering my sock and... There is was.  A flea!  I shook my legs and did a little dance on the side of the road that surely amused other passing motorists, but I didn't care.  Driving home I found several more in the cab, jumping around on me and the seat of my car, happy to be in a new surrounding.

I got home and undressed like James Herriot.  I cleaned up and the next morning, got into my car to begin my day and found that I had little passengers that now infested and inhabited my car.  That afternoon I used a leaf blower to blow out the interior of my vehicle and over time, I haven't seen anymore.

The moral of the story: Watch out for dogs, but watch out for fleas, too!

Bunny's Baby

I'm re-reading James Herriot's books and am in the middle of "Every Living Thing."  He's talking about lambing season and going out in the countryside in the cold, windy weather to help ewes deliver in problem pregnancies.  Most of the farmers didn't have any enclosures and he delivered lambs out in the cold.  He said his hands and arms would get so raw from washing his hands so much and the wind whipping on his skin, chapping them thoroughly.  

It makes me happy for us in kidding season for goats, for when we begin to see their bags 'bloom,' we bring them inside the barn.  Even though it's not cold, it isolates the expectant mothers from nosy cows and chickens who won't give them a moment's peace.  Bunny is named bunny because she has a pink nose and a white stripe down her face, giving her the appearance, somewhat, of a bunny.  Bunny's bag has bloomed.  It is tight.  She is close.

She delivered twins Sunday afternoon, right before church.  Here is the smallest kid, a doeling, that Tricia is making sure that she gets a belly full of colostrum.  It's very important that they get this.  The baby is very weak and frail.  We worked with her for a while until her sucking reflex or instinct kicked in.

Unfortunately, her twin, also a doeling died during birth.  Tricia said that she was still in the sack and thinks she may have suffocated.  She was bigger than her twin sister by a long shot.  So yes, we buried yet another goat once we got back from Evening Worship services.

Bunny's baby girl is solid black with a white spot on her head and on her left foot.  We're working hard with her to try to get her to get up and get active and nurse on her own.  So far, it's slow going.  Hopefully, things will get better day by day.

Little goats are the cutest thing!

Here is Bunny and her baby, yet unnamed - we're still thinking.  Any ideas?

Agnes, another goat of ours, is now on the clock.  Her bag is growing, but I don't think she'll kid in the next day or so.  I'm watching her closely.  Tonight I milked out the rest of Bunny's colostrum that her baby didn't drink, and we'll freeze that for later use, should we ever need it.

Finished with the Fall Carrots

It's March 7th, and it is warming up.  It feels like summer already with mid-day temps hitting 83 already.  What that means is I have to get moving!  Warmer temps means the cabbage all needs to be harvested.  If you don't, the snails will wreak havoc on the heads - nasty critters, I tell you.  I harvested all of the heads, except for three.  I have one big bin of cabbage heads in the outdoor fridge.  I see coleslaw, homemade egg rolls, cabbage/sausage jambalaya (yum - I call it deconstructed cabbage rolls), cooked cabbage and yes, jars of sauerkraut in the near future.

Then there is yet another row of carrots.  We harvested the first row a couple of weeks back.  We've been roasting them in the oven and using them to dip into homemade radish dip (finely chopped radish, cream cheese, garlic and other seasonings.  This second row of carrots must come up today.  They're already too big.  The soil is soft and they are easy to pull, so let's get this show on the road.

Halfway through and I filled up a plastic bin.  All of the beautiful tops were thrown over the fence to hungry cows and goats that greedily gobble the greens down.  See those carrots?  They are mighty dirty.  This is a perfect time to try out the garden sink.  I spent the morning working on the sink.  Unfortunately, the hard freeze in late January - early July played a number on the plumbing to the garden sink, breaking the head to the sprayer.  We'll try out the sink to see if it works once we get that second row of carrots pulled.

I filled both sinks with water and everything seems to be working nicely.  I'll let the carrots sink in order to clean them up and wash off all the topsoil.  I'm catching it all in a tub beneath the drain.  I'll also use a vegetable scrubber to get the carrots super clean before bringing them inside.

And here we go: Two tubs of terrific tubers.  How's that for alliteration?  These will be stored in the outdoor fridge as well.  I plan on putting these up, blanching and freezing them, canning them, and making Ginger Carrots (sort of a carrot sauerkraut - cool and tangy)!

It's good to have the carrots and cabbage harvested.  That frees up room to plant sweet corn and okra as well as the tomato, pepper and eggplant seedlings that I'll be transplanting from our seed starting trays in about another week.

Busy As A Bee

It feels like spring outside and the honeybees are doing their thing - flying around, getting pollen and nectar where they can find it and... getting ready to swarm.  As a result, we'll be going into the hives probably tomorrow, inspecting the frames and (hopefully) making splits BEFORE they swarm.  We have four hives to go through tomorrow.  After dark, I tipped the hives over to see how heavy they were and there is a good population in each hive.  That means the queens are doing a good job.

Why do I say the bees are getting ready to swarm?  Well, the photo below shows the column by our side door.  A number of colonies of bees have made their home in that hollow fiberglass column over the years.  It has to be absolutely full of honeycomb.  Generally, in the summer, the bees leave.  I'm not sure if it gets too hot in there for them or they fill it up and run out of room.  Perhaps it's a combination of the two.

The column has been absent of bees for the past 8 months or so.  This morning, we began to see scout bees checking out the place.  They have been sent by the colony to house hunt.  They went into the open house and (I'm sure) had little tape measures and measured out the square footage and amenities that the column offers.  They'll bring that data back to the hive for a vote, and we'll see if we get a swarm of bees to move back in.  What's that strapped on top of the ladder, you might be asking?

It's a homemade 5 frame nuc swarm trap.  I have it baited with lemongrass oil.  My goal is to tempt some of the scout bees to also look at this as a home to consider moving into.

But I have bad news to report.  The bees are ignoring the nuc.  There is just too much old comb in the column that they can smell.  Bees are opportunistic.  For every comb that they must build from scratch, it equates to less honey.  Bees moving into the column don't really need to make honeycomb.  It's already there.  More and more bees are checking out the column.  I'm certain within a week we'll have a new swarm inhabiting the column.  I've move the nuc swarm trap out into the yard where hopefully we can catch another swarm.

Random Things You Pick Up

This past October Tricia and I were in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana to celebrate our 35th anniversary at a little restaurant that we enjoy called Cafe' Sydnie Mae.  Prior to eating we walked down to the bridge and overlooked Bayou Teche from a deck.  The chocolate milk-colored water slowly drifted amongst the lily pads.

After a wonderful meal we walked down the main street and settled into a cafe on the corner and listened to musicians playing cajun french music.  It's just an impromptu thing the townsfolk do on Saturday morning.  There are all sorts of little shops up and down the street with crafts and antiques and whatnot.

I'm not a shopping type of guy.  I don't like to "just look."  I know what I want and I go in and get it and get out - quickly.  But it's our anniversary and I'm minding my p's and q's.  I follow Tricia in a little store to browse, but before we go in, something catches my eye on the porch.  It's old pieces of cypress sinkers for sale.  I just had to have it.  The one I picked out was $35 and it was our 35th wedding anniversary, so I guess it was meant to be.

I asked the lady in the little shop where the cypress came from and she said, "Right here in the Atchafalaya Swamp."  The Atchafalaya had tons of old growth cypress that was logged in the 1800's. As you drive over the Atchafalaya Freeway and look out, you can see a multitude of stumps that testify to the time when cypress trees covered the landscape.  Cypress is a quality wood that contains oils that make it resistant to rot, insects and decay.  We made our purchase and headed home with it.  Didn't you know that a piece of cypress wood is an ideal anniversary gift?

What in the world are we going to do with that?  Well, we're gonna hang it on our wall over my office.  And after sitting in the corner of my office for a little over 3 months, we hung it up.  I like to think it adds character to the room.

Speaking of character, if you want to see a character talking about cypress sinker logs and actually pulling one up that's been underwater for a century and then cut it up into lumber, click below.  Pretty interesting!

Our Daily Bread(s)

Can't remember the last time we purchased a loaf of bread at the grocery store.  When Tricia started making sourdough bread, we both decided that it would be homemade sourdough from then on.  It's just so good.  Generally, we go through two loaves a week.  We can eat through half a loaf when the two loaves come out of the oven, hot and steamy, slathered with copious amounts of butter.

But there's more than just regular loaves of sourdough bread.  The sourdough starter can be used in many different types of recipes.  In addition to the regular loaves, we make bagels and keep some always frozen.  They're easy to pop out, thaw and make a bagel sandwich for lunch, or spread cream cheese on for a snack, or to eat with breakfast.

Last week Tricia made focaccia with kalamata olives and fresh rosemary and olive oil drizzled on top.  Here it is about to go into the oven:

Here it is shortly thereafter, with only about a quarter of it remaining... Oops!  

Of course there's the sourdough cinnamon rolls with cream cheese icing.  These are top notch, I tell ya.

I remember in both elementary and high school, the lunchroom ladies were famous for their hot yeast rolls.  They were so buttery and delicious!  They weren't sourdough, but Tricia wanted to attempt to recreate the same roll, albeit with sourdough.  So a trial batch went in the oven.

We had to put a pat of butter on top and try it out.

So good, I tell ya.  For lunch we split a roll in half and picked some fresh lettuce that we laid inside the roll and topped with some egg salad.  As the days are getting longer now, we have more than enough eggs.  It made for a nice little lunch!  Sourdough is fantastic.  We were trying to figure out when we first started it.  We can't remember.  You have to feed the starter and keep it going.  Tricia doesn't think it's been 10 years, but 7 to 8 years for sure.  I hope we can keep it living for years and years to come.

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...