Savagery

For some strange reason I'm in a philosophical mood...

Benjamin and I have been reading the book, Lord of the Flies, by William Golding.  It has been 27 years (where does the time go?) since I last read this disturbing book.  Benjamin is 11 years old, and during various parts of the book, I asked myself if perhaps the subject matter was too intense.  I think the book shows, however, in events that a young boy can understand, some important learning points about human behavior.

In a nutshell, here's a brief plot summary if you haven't read the book or if, like me, it's been a coon's age (raccoons actually don't live that long) since you've read it:

A group of young British boys survive a plane crash on a deserted island with no adult survivors.  They pull themselves together and drawing on skills they've been accustomed to in a civilized society, they elect a leader, Ralph, and organize themselves with assemblies, tasks necessary for survival, and rules that govern their "society."  Ralph is the leader, but Piggy is the brains behind the operation.  Piggy also has the spectacles used for starting fires.

All seems to be going well until a rival leader emerges, some of the boys don't want to work, and they become fearful of a "beast" that supposedly inhabits the island.  These conflicts drive a wedge in the initial unity.  The rival leader, Jack, organizes a hunting party that kills wild pigs.  Instead of keeping a fire going to alert rescuers, the hunters let the fire go out in order to go hunt pigs.  These hunters, led by Jack, become more and more bloodthirsty, begin painting themselves, and develop a dance and chant.  The "Lord of the Flies" is actually a pig's head on a stick that the hunters put as an offering to the beast, showing their descent into savagery. 



Peter Brook - Oldschoolreviews.com

One of the boys, Simon, discovers that the Beast is not a beast at all.  He understands while standing in front of the pig's head, that "the beast" is inside them all.  Actually, they've created the beast.  Simon hurries to the beach to tell the others but stumbles out of the jungle and into the midst of the frenzied, chanting, dancing "savages" who promptly stab and kill him, mistaking him for the beast.  There is a heaviness about their action, but no one wants to speak of it.  Jack's mutinous 'tribe' separates themselves from Ralph and Piggy and a few others.  They attack Ralph's small tribe in the night, beat them and steal Piggy's spectacles.  He can't see without them.



lordoftheflies.6.wikispaces.com



The next day Ralph and Piggy go to meet the other tribe at Castle Rock to get Piggy's glasses back.  One of the boys leverage a large boulder that falls on Piggy and kills him.  This time there is no remorse.  In fact they all chase Ralph with spears and hunt for him like a wild hog, intending to kill him.  Just prior to Ralph being killed, a British cruiser arrives and a British officer saves Ralph from the savages and tells them that he expected better from British boys.

Heavy stuff, I know.  The book is full of symbolism and I'm certainly not smart enough to figure it all out, but it deals with the conflict between group and individual thought and goals and between civilized, moral behavior and savage behavior.  The author of the book, Mr. Golding, stated the theme of the book as follows:

"The theme is an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature.  The moral is that the shape of a society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system however apparently logical or respectable."

This is very, very interesting to me.  I try to view things through a spiritual lens.  I try to filter events of the day through that lens.  Everything I do from farming to life, I want to view from that lens, specifically a Biblical Worldview.  I see the parallels of the boys on that island to the current culture we live in.

The boys initially had rule of law and operated under a code, an order and guiding principles, but they soon fell away from those constructs due to the corruptness that resided within them - their fallen nature.  I feel that this mirrors our present situation.  As a people with laws based off of Scripture and time-tested Judeo-Christian values, we had a touchstone, a North Star, if you will to help us determine right from wrong.

We've strayed.  We are now immersed in a post-modern culture engrossed in moral relativism.  You have your Truth.  I have mine.  I think about the last verse in the Book of Judges that says:

In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes.  Judges 21:25

Aren't we there?  Everyone does what is right in their own eyes.  Our spiritual moorings to Truth have been cut and we find ourselves drifting farther and farther away, driven like savages or barbarians toward our base desires, lusts and greed.  Like Ralph, Piggy and the boys in "Lord of the Flies," we started off good, but we've gotten off the path and are well on the way to savagery.  We know better - or we should know better than the depravity we've fallen into.  We're better than this.  We need to return to our spiritual moorings.  I believe in the Absolute Truth found in the Bible, God's Holy Word. 

'Therefore remember from where you have fallen, and repent and do the deeds you did at first; or else I am coming to you and will remove your lampstand out of its place-- unless you repent.'  Revelation 2:5

God's a God of second chances.  As believers, we can repent and turn to Him and He, like the British officer will "rescue" us.  If we don't know Him, we can turn to Him, trust Him and be rescued as well.  As the author of the Lord of the Flies stated, no political system can save us, no human institution or association can protect us from the beast within.  Our very society depends upon the ethical nature of individuals.  I submit that those ethics are driven by Truths from the Word of God and we'd be wise to return to them.

Spreading it on thick

Well it is election time.  The mailbox is full of political ads.  Our answering machine is full of robo-calls from various politicians bad-mouthing one another.  Radio and TV ads are full of candidates making campaign promises.  This reminded me that it is time to spread manure on the newly planted ryegrass:)  Ha Ha! 

I had a large tub full of chicken manure (litter) that I had saved for top-dressing the ryegrass that we planted a couple of weeks ago.  This will give the young ryegrass a "jump-start."  Unfortunately, the lid had blown off of the tub during a thunderstorm we had in September and the tub filled with rainwater.  In order to broadcast it, I needed to dry it out so I spread the smelly stuff out on some sheets of tin to dry.


Drying it out to spread

What I couldn't fit on the tin, I left in an old wheel barrow to dry.  The wheel barrow has a hole in it.  I propped a bucket underneath it to catch the "tea" that dripped out.  I'll use that to water some of the older plants in the garden, providing liquid fertilizer.


"Tea" time

Once it was completely dry, I shoveled the manure into my little fertilizer spreader and began to broadcast it over the newly planted ryegrass.  Once we catch a little rain, the manure will provide a beneficial boost to the ryegrass, enabling it to grow with vigor.  The last several years, we simply haven't had a good stand of ryegrass.  Hopefully this extra chicken litter will provide the nutrients that the ryegrass needs to really take off and grow.


Broadcasting the chicken manure

The manual spreader has a gate that opens on the bottom.  As the manure drops out of the bottom, it falls on a spinning wheel that slings it out evenly as I push the spreader across the pasture.  I made sure that I overlapped it and spread it on good and thick so that the grass gets good fertilizer coverage.
 

Fertilizer spreading in action

Here's a close-up of a few shoots of ryegrass that have taken root and are growing.  The ryegrass sprouts are the thin, skinny shoots of grass in the foreground.


Ryegrass sprouts

We're counting on the ryegrass to provide the cows with some good green grass this winter when the bahai and bermuda grass has died for the winter.  I'm confident that The manure I'm spreading, unlike some political promises, will yield positive results for everyone here on the farm in the near future. 

From Dragonflies to Sweet Potato Pies

Yesterday afternoon I walked outside just to take in the beautiful fall weather.  Summer in South Louisiana seems to go on for most of the year, so when the few days of Fall and Spring appear, we get out and enjoy them!  I ran across a gazillion dragonflies flying around, lighting on the barbed wire fence and different plants and snapped a few pictures.  You can see in the photo below how intricately detailed the Creator has designed the dragonfly's wings.  Pretty neat.


Here is a greenish colored one

I always called them "mosquito hawks" growing up.  Turns out it is for good reason they're called this.

Here's one with a reddish hue

According to Wikipedia,  dragonflies are very important predators that eat a lot of mosquitoes.  (Where were all y'all when we really needed ya this summer?!)  They can fly up to 34 miles an hour.  Wow!  They are actually aquatic for most of their lives in the nymph form and swim around eating mosquito larvae in ponds, ditches, and rice fields. 

An interesting thing I learned from Wikipedia is that in Europe, dragonflies have often been seen as sinister. They are sometimes called a devil's darning needle and are linked with snakes.  Supposedly, although I've never heard this and I live in the South, they are sometimes referred to as snake doctors because of a Southern old saying that dragonflies follow snakes around and stitch them back together if they are injured.  That's not true, of course, and if it were, I wish they'd spend more time eating mosquitoes instead of stitching up snakes!

Speaking of snakes, this little harmless guy, a garter snake, had somehow gotten himself trapped in the rain barrel.  I let him out and he slithered away slowly.  The colder weather had him moving in slow motion. 


Garter snake

While we're talking about things in slow motion, the sweet potato harvest continues.  Each day I try to dig a few more sweet potatoes, but with the days getting shorter, I don't have much time to get it done.
   

A shovel and a bucket of sweet potatoes

I have a plot of garden area about 30 feet by 10 feet left to dig.  You can see how dry the ground is in the plot to the left that I've just dug up.


Just a little bit left to dig

As I dig them, I hang them in an onion sack outside in a tree or in the garage to cure so that they are sweeter.  As discussed earlier, curing helps trigger sugar creating enzymes.  Once they've cured for a few weeks, we bring them inside to the pantry and to ultimately eat them.  Talk about good.  I know you can't get a good perspective on size, but some of the sweet potatoes in that sack measure as long as 18 inches long!  Crazy.


Curing Sweet Potatoes

Tricia has been baking some of the sweet potatoes to eat for supper.  She'll also make empanadas (sweet potato pies) for dessert.  That is some good eatin'.

Green Energy

The cooler weather seems to have reduced the bug pressure on the different things growing in the garden.  Although it is dry, things are growing nicely.  Several days ago, we made some homemade Ranch Salad dressing.  It is a perfect time to enjoy a fresh, healthy, green salad.  Seems like that would give you green energy, doesn't it?

Let's put together the salad.  First, there are baby basil plants sprouting up all over the garden from the seeds dropped by the mature basil plants.  A few of these tender basil leaves ought to add some flavor to our salad.


Baby basil seedling

On the same row, the kale is really coming on strong.  Let's pull some of the smaller leaves for our salad.  Kale is one of the most healthy plants there is.  We've really grown to like it. 

Fresh Kale

Next row contains Oak Leaf Lettuce.  After eating a bunch of this right off the plant, I added a good bunch of this to our basket. 


Oak Leaf Lettuce

We'll pull a few radishes and slice them up for a peppery flavorful punch to our salad.   

Radishes

On the next row is a lettuce mix called Mesclun Mix.  This mix of young salad leaves originated in Provence, France.  It contains chervil, arugula, endive, leaf lettuce, Swiss Chard, mustard greens, dandelion, frisee, lamb's lettuce, radicchio and sorrel.  We've found that this is good when the leaves are young.  If you let them get too large, the smell is pungent and the taste is very hot and peppery and overpowers your salad. 


Mesclun Mix

The next row contains some Black Seeded Simpson lettuce.  This is an all around good, productive lettuce that we enjoy all winter long.  It is good to eat and good to use its big leafy leaves for garnishing platters of food at Thanksgiving.


Black Seeded Simpson Lettuce

And finally, we'll snip off some nice leaves from this pretty lettuce which is one of the lettuces in the row of Rocky Top Lettuce Mix.  All you need to do is snip off the leaves you want with a pair of scissors to allow the plant to continue producing delicious leaves for your salad bowl.
 

Rocky Top Lettuce

And after washing up all the leaves and putting it in the salad spinner to dry, here is our salad bowl with sliced radishes.  If you listen closely, you can almost hear it calling for some salad dressing. 


Salad Bowl

I pulled out the homemade Ranch salad dressing we made a couple of days ago and drizzled some of that goodness over the top of it, added some pickled banana peppers and then ground some black pepper and sea salt over it.  Let's grab a fork and say Grace and I'll tell you how the fresh salad was.  

Mmmmm...  Mmmmm!

I'll let the picture below explain what we thought about the salad.

'Nuff said!

Pickin' Pecans

This morning there was a strong wind blowing out of the north and it was chilly!  After I got the morning chores done with the animals, I dug some more sweet potatoes and then changed the oil in Laura's car since she's in from college this weekend.  We ate lunch and decided to go pick pecans.  We have one pecan tree in the backyard that produces big pecans, one pecan tree in the pasture that produces big pecans and two big pecan trees in the front yard that produce small pecans, but they are very oily and rich.

A few weeks ago, the pecans were looking like this:

About to split open and fall to the ground

With the windy weather last night and today, many of the pecans had fallen to the ground and are ready to be picked up.  You can see how they cover the ground:


Lots of pecans to pick up...

So we got busy and started picking pecans.  We have two, or maybe three methods.  The first is this one.  It is essentially a slinky with a handle that you roll over the pecans.  It is pretty old.  As you roll over them the pecans go inside the slinky and gradually fill it up.



This is a back saver

I roll it until it is full.  You can see below that I cant fit another pecan in it.



Full of pecans

Once it is full,  you simply open it up and the pecans fall in the bucket.  When it is empty you do it again.



Emptying the pecans

The second method is the newfangled slinky model, I suppose.  The wires are more rigid and you don't roll this one - you push down with the handle on top of the pecans and they fill up the device with pecans. 


New and improved model

This one fills up faster than the rollable one.



Filling up with lots of pecans

When it is full, you simply tilt it and pour all the pecans out.

Emptying pecans into the bucket

Oh, here is the third method.  I call it Patricia's Pecanmobile.  She sits down and rolls from place to place picking pecans and throwing them in the bucket.  You can see she has her hoodie on because it is cold!



Pecan Spinwheels!

Laura came out to give us company while we picked.  She brought her blanket and lounged in the sun.  The cat is checking her out.  

A cat nap?

Daisy, Rosie, and Magnolia had the same idea.  You can see Stryker grazing in the background.  The cows had visited me earlier while I was digging sweet potatoes.  I fed them a bunch of sweet potato vines.  Now they're just lazily chewing their cud.
 


Taking it easy

Tricia and I filled up a 5 gallon bucket in no time at all.


The first bucket of the day

We decided to have cup of coffee outside in the yard because it was so pretty out.  Laura peered out from beneath her blanket.  

Coffee Break

We filled up several buckets and bags for the day.  We'll leave these for a good while before shelling them to let them dry out.  One year we shelled them as soon as we picked them and they were moist and ended up mildewing.



Plentiful Pecans.

We'll continue to pick some more pecans over the next several days/weeks and we'll shell them over the winter.  I like to sit in front of the fireplace and shell pecans while watching college football.

Making Homemade Ranch Salad Dressing

With four different types of lettuce growing in the garden, we're about to start enjoying fresh salads each and every night with accompanying peppers and radishes.  In anticipation of fresh salads, Tricia set her mind to making some Ranch Salad dressing "from scratch."  Making something from scratch is an odd phrase.  I did some quick looking on the Internet and found it has British roots and means made from nothing, or in a food context, made without any pre-mixed or specially processed ingredients.

Rather than start with packets of seasoning, Tricia sliced up some onions and garlic and put them on the food dehydrator.


Garlic & Onions

She placed the sliced onion and garlic on the dehydrator and left them on it for a day or so until they were totally dry.  She then popped them in the food processor and chopped them both up together until they were pulverized into onion/garlic powder.  The scent was intense - bursting with aromatic flavor.  She poured the powder into a salt shaker.  


Onions and Garlic ready to dry

To a half pint or so of heavy cream from Daisy, she added an ice cube of frozen kefir.  This kefir was explained in a previous post.  Once you add one ice cube of kefir to the cream, you let it sit for 18 hours at room temperature.  This makes creme fraiche.  Creme Fraiche means fresh cream in French, but is actually a high quality of sour cream that is less sour - and delicious.


Adding kefir (the culture) to start souring the cream

Once your creme fraiche is done, you can make up your homemade ranch salad dressing.  Here's how you do it:

To one cup creme fraiche, add:

• 1 teaspoon of garlic/onion powder mix that Tricia just made
• 1/2 teaspoon (or less) of salt
• 1 tablespoon of chopped parsley (we had this frozen from the crop this Spring)
• 1/4 teaspoon of dried dill weed

For a dip to dip celery, carrots, broccoli in, leave it thick.  Add a little milk to thin it for a dressing.

 

All the ingredients of a delicious ranch salad dressing

Once you add all those ingredients, stir it up real good.  Now all that's left to do is pick some fresh lettuce and pour some of this deliciousness on top of it!  We'll harvest some tomorrow.  Stay tuned. 

  

Our Maker's Acres Ranch Dressing

Fall Garden Update

Let's check in on the garden.  After lots of rain throughout the late summer, the rains have been few and far between in October.  You can see how dry the ground is below.  It is starting to crack and I'm watering it every night now with the hose as my rain water I collected has long run out.  Oh well.  In the two photos below, you can see the garlic we planted is sprouting, sending green shoots up and out into the beautiful October weather we're enjoying now.


Garlic Sprouts

If we would get a rain soon, all of the garlic would burst out of the ground like this one:

Here are some mustard greens almost ready.  In fact, I think it's time to get out the cast iron skillet out and get a batch of homemade cornbread in the oven and cook down some freshly picked mustard greens with some bacon.  Can't wait.


Healthy plants - Healthy for you!

 Radishes ripe and ready to be sliced in a nice, fresh salad.
 

Radishes (with a healthy crop of weeds coming up, too)

Oak Leaf Lettuce that will be consumed this weekend:


Oak Leaf Lettuce

Once the rainwater has been depleted, it is back to watering the garden with a water hose.  This takes a while and the ground is so dry right now, the soil absorbs the water as fast as you can spray it.  The plants aren't in distress, though.  I still have some more sweet potatoes to harvest as you can see by the remaining "jungle" right past the freshly pulled/planted rows.  Those four rows were where the sweet potatoes were that we just harvested.  Now, in their place, I've planted garlic, spinach, blue-podded peas, cilantro and a second planting of mustard greens.  Once I've harvested all the sweet potatoes that you can see below, I'll probably plant that entire area in turnips for the winter.


Watering the newly planted rows.  Note the sugar snap peas really taking off.

We normally amend the soil by adding as much organic matter as we can: composted cow and chicken manure, coffee grounds and other composted vegetables, and as many chopped up leaves and hay as I can add.  We don't use regular fertilizer that most people use.  I like to use fish emulsion as a fertilizer sprayed on as a foliar feeding.  This stuff is made from dried fish, blood meal, bone meal, sulfate of potash and ferrous carbonate.  I mix about 2 tablespoons to a gallon of water and shake it up real good.



My cheap little hand pump sprayer

Make sure you use a dedicated sprayer for this job.  I only put sprayable natural fertilizer in this sprayer.  You don't want residue left over from other jobs to get on your crop and kill it.  Now if there is one down-side about using this stuff to spray on your plants, it is that it stinks.  It smells like dead fish, because, well, it's made of dead fish.  Remember how the Indians taught the pilgrims to bury a fish by each cornstalk?  That's essentially what you're doing.  And just in time for Thanksgiving!


Measuring and pouring the smelly stuff into my sprayer

 Here I am spraying it liberally on the all the leaves of the plants in the garden.  You'll note I'm doing it at night by the light of a lantern.  I spray it at night for two reasons: 1) It gets dark too doggone early now, and 2) If you do this during sunlight hours, it may burn the leaves or it may evaporate before being absorbed by the leaves.


Sugar snap peas getting a good dose of liquid fish.

If you look closely you can see the droplets of fish emulsion on the leaves.  The leaves will absorb the Nitrogen (N), Phosphate (P2O5), Potash (K2O), Calcium (Ca), Sulfur (S), and Iron (Fe) and get the plants a good boost and turn the leaves a beautiful, healthy, dark green.


Ready, Set, Grow!

As I was telling Tricia tonight, we have one more weekend of really hard work in the garden.  After that, it just involves weeding, harvesting, and eating.  Well, like Meatloaf sang, "Two outta three ain't bad!"