Making Chevre

Chevre is cheese made from goat's milk.  Our Nubian goat, Annie, provides the milk.  Tricia normally milks Annie.  She is temperamental, stubborn, and hard-headed.  (Of course, I am talking about Annie the goat.)

In her goat stanchion, we feed Annie a little dairy ration to distract her while Tricia quickly milks her.

We milk through a rag filter to keep hair, dust, bugs, or hay from falling in the milk.

Tricia added a chevre culture she got from Cultures for Health to the milk after warming the milk to 86 degrees and then covered and let it sit for 12 hours. 

Starter packet & Instructions

As you can see, the whey has separated from the curds.

We poured off the whey into a jar, leaving mostly the curds.

Then we spooned the chevre into a colander lined with muslin cloth.

We hung the chevre and let it drain for 7-12 hours.

In the morning the bag was opened and all of the liquid had drained off, leaving chevre!

Goat cream cheese.  Tricia normally spices it up by adding some herbs and we eat it with crackers.  Good stuff!

Winnowing Out the Chaff

The Lemon Queen Sunflowers we planted were nice.  They had multiple flowering seed heads and filled the garden with yellow flowers.  Check out a photo of them FROM THIS POST BACK IN JUNE.  The flowers faded from their once glorious state and I clipped them from the stalks and let them dry on the patio.  The seeds were open-pollinated and I wanted to save some seeds for planting even more next year.  

Dried Lemon Queen Sunflower Heads

Observing the patterns of nature is, to me, evidence of God.  He is a God of order and He created things of beauty and was intentional in His design.  You can praise Him by singing, or in prayer, or by admiring His creation.

Genesis 1:12 The earth produced vegetation - seed bearing plants...

I pulled the dried seeds from the sunflower heads, but immediately found that I had a problem.  Intermixed with the sunflower seeds, was chaff - a lot of it.  "Well, this is no good, I thought."

Chaff mixed with sunflower seeds

In the past, with other type seeds, I've run them through a sieve and the smaller seeds fall through the sieve, leaving behind the chaff in the sieve.  It wasn't a perfect process, but the resulting seeds were relatively clean.  That process does not work with larger seeds like sunflower seeds.  What could I do?

And then I had a brainstorm of sorts.  In the Bible, there is the following verse:

Matthew 3:12 King James Version (KJV)

Whose fan is in his hand, and he will thoroughly purge his floor, and gather his wheat into the garner; but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.

And there was my answer!  I positioned a pan in front of a fan and began dropping handfuls of chaff-seed mix down into the pan with the fan blowing on the high setting:

Separating the "wheat" from the chaff

The fan blew away the lighter chaff, along with seeds that had nothing inside.  It made a real mess on the cement floor of the garage...

But the winnowing process yielded clean seed.  I was impressed with the finished product!:

Clean Seed

The old fan was in the barn to cool us off during the hot summer milking.  Recently, however, the mosquitoes have been thick by the back door.  Every time we open the door, those boogers fly in and bite us all night.  Tricia has positioned the fan to blow mosquitoes away from the door.  That fan played double duty - blowing away mosquitoes and blowing away the chaff.

I'm a fan of our old fan

These seeds will be stored away for next year's crop.

I labeled the container and dated it and will store them in a dark, dry spot.  If anyone wants some, just let me know.

So while the winnowing process learned from the Bible worked remarkably well to clean my seeds, I didn't want to miss out on the spiritual concept contained in the verse.  Do you see this farmer in Jean-Francois Millet's painting below?:

Image Credit

He is doing (manually) what I was doing with my Lasko fan.  The heavy seeds fall into the basket while the lighter chaff blows away.  In Matthew 3 John the Baptist was telling that the Kingdom of God was at hand.  He was preparing the people for the Messiah and telling them to repent.  He was likening the winnowing of grain the the coming judgment.  He was contrasting the truly repentant (the heavier wheat) against the Pharisees and Sadducees (the chaff).  The wheat would be brought into His barn, while the chaff would be burned in a fire.

He wishes that no man should perish.  I desire to be like the wheat and not the chaff.

Rosie is a HOG!

I know I've talked griped about this before, but today I have documentation so I'll show you a pictorial presentation of Rosie's preoccupation with mud holes.  Rosie is pregnant and it has been hot.  We do have shade for the cows in all of their paddocks that we rotate them through, but Rosie has found that laying in a mud puddle beats the pants off of laying in the shade when it comes to cooling off.  Here is Rosie's favorite mud hole, complete with Rosie's imprint of where she laid.

We would empathize with her and just let her be a hog on these hot days, but it is not hygienic to milk a muddy cow.  If the mud is dry, you can brush her off and get most of it off.  However, you should do this outside of the barn.  The resulting dust will fly all over the barn and contaminate the milking buckets.  Lately, Rosie has been coming in covered in wet mud.  That leaves us no choice but to tie here up by the fence, get out the hose and give ol' girl a full bath.  I got Tricia the big push broom in the barn and she turned the water hose on and soaked her.  I think she like it - Rosie, that is.

Tricia uses the broom head to get in all the "nooks & crannies" that harbor mud from the mud hole.



But the job is not done.  Tricia dutifully dries Rosie and uses a squeegee to really get her completely dry.  You don't want her to be wet.  There's nothing quite like being swished across the face with a wet tail.  Speaking of tails, washing the mud off of Rosie, though necessary, is kind of like chasing your tail.  The run-off from the water creates a bigger mud hole that Rosie will lounge in tomorrow, and that necessitates another bath.  And on and on it goes.  Come on, cool weather.  Get here quickly!

Saving Seeds from Our Glass Gem Corn

This afternoon Tricia and Ginger the cat helped save seed from our Glass Gem Corn.  Glass Gem Corn was one of those experimental things I tried.  It is a sweet corn that makes an ear with multi-colored kernels.  While not a prolific producer, the ears were stunningly beautiful!  I ate one ear raw out in the garden, but to be perfectly honest, we didn't eat a single ear and I ended up drying them all for seed.  What I found was that if you picked the Glass Gem Corn when the silk turned brown, the kernels were all white/light pink.  Conversely, if I left them on the cob to ripen, they turned out with beautiful colors, but were too ripe/hard to eat.  Soooo, they all became seed corn.  We dried them on the patio for several weeks and then twisted the kernels off the cob.

Different cobs had varying amounts of color.  Some were multicolored and some were mostly yellow.

Twisting the kernels off the cob, you could see a wide assortment of colors.

I selected a representative sample from all of the color groups I could find, from red, yellow, pink, purple, green, blue, and white.  I'm sure there were different hues that I just didn't have the patience to pick out.

I stored all of the dried kernels of Glass Gem Corn in a container where they will sit in the dark in dry storage until next year, when I'll pull a few out and plant maybe a row of them.  I like to plant a few novelty items each year.  They are beautiful and a nice conversation piece.

Thank God I'm a Country Boy

This weekend I came inside to get some cold water after working in the garden.  Tricia was in the kitchen and had music playing on a speaker from her phone.  She was listening to John Denver's Greatest Hits.  Did that ever bring back some childhood memories!

Image Credit

Growing up, we had John Denver's Greatest hits album and I think my brother, sister and I knew the words to most every song.  In fact, I fondly remember that when my cousin, Patrick would come visit us from Dallas, we would have concerts in my Grandma's living room for my parents, grandparents and my aunt and uncle in which we'd sing:

• Thank God I'm a Boy (I got me a fine wife, got me old fiddle...)
• Grandma's Feather Bed
• and Country Roads (Take me home, country roads, to the place I belong...)

I laugh and think that it probably took the patience of Job for them to sit and listen to our 'concerts!'

John Denver's music was so good.  As I stood in the kitchen on Saturday and listened to him sing Leaving on a Jet Plane, Rocky Mountain High and Annie's Song, the memories of childhood flooded over me.  Annie's Song is perhaps the most sincere love song I've heard:

You fill up my senses like a night in a forest,

Like the mountains in springtime,

Like a walk in the rain, like a storm in the desert,

Like a sleepy blue ocean.

You fill up my senses, come fill me again.

Come let me love you, let me give my life to you,

Let me drown in your laughter, let me die in your arms.

Let me lay down beside you, let me always be with you.

Come, let me love you, come love me again.

A little John Denver trivia I learned:

• John Denver was born on New Year's Eve in 1943 in Roswell, New Mexico,
• He wrote the song Country Roads about West Virginia country roads, but had never been to West Virginia,
• John Denver's real name was Henry John Deutschendorf.  I think he picked a good name to sing under!
• There is a monument for him in Aspen, Colorado
• He died on October 12, 1997 near Pacific Grove, California when the experimental plane he was piloting crashed.

I was thinking about all the singers I could think of that died in plane crashes.  Right off-hand, other than John Denver, I can think of Jim Croce, Buddy Holly, Ricky Nelson, Patsy Cline.  I looked up on the Internet and it reminded me that Glenn Miller and Reba McIntire's entire band died in plane crashes as well.

Although John Denver died an early and untimely death, his music and the memories invoked by his songs still live on...

Divide and Conquer

The grass in our pasture is growing with the rain that has been falling.  I'm using rotational grazing in which I have the 3 acre pasture separated into 7 different paddocks and I move them either daily or every two days into a fresh new paddock of grass, depending on how much they are eating and how fast or slow the grass is growing.  By using this technique, I'm optimizing the usage of the grass.  Joel Salatin says that cows graze like people do at a salad bar, picking out the best stuff first.  But if you limit their access to just one section of the pasture, they end up eating most everything, instead of being like that family member that picks the shrimp out of the bottom of a shrimp and okra gumbo!

Anyway, over the past 17 years, we've never fertilized our pasture, unless you count the tons of chicken manure and cow manure that have fallen over those years.  In taking soil samples, we've learned that the pH is off and we are needing lime.  In fact, we need 1 ton of lime per acre to bring the soil to an optimal 6.26 level.  Getting the soil to the correct pH will allow the soil to 'unlock' the fertility that is already their so that the grass can access it and grow.

With just a 3 acre pasture, I'm finding it hard to get someone to come and broadcast lime on such a small parcel of land.  So I thought to myself, what's the best way to eat an elephant?  One bite at a time.  Tractor Supply Company was running a special on lime at 3 forty lb. bags for $9.  I measured the square footage of the first paddock and did the calculations based on a ton to the acre to determine how many bags to put out.  The first paddock required 10 forty lb bags. 

I got out my spreader and got busy after work.  1 paddock down, six to go!

I Should Not Have Done It

This afternoon we called the cows in at milking time.  It was a very hot day today, and of course Rosie was laying in the mud.  While Tricia gave her a bath outside the barn so we could milk her, I mixed up the feed in the feed room.  Something made me look in the corner behind the roll of barbed wire and on the side of the old freezer we use to store feed in.  Something was there that looked out of the ordinary.  Was it a rat?  It was too dark to see in the shadows.  I went and got a shovel.

My thought process went something like this.  What if it is a rat?  I hate rats in our barn and want to kill every last one of them.  What if it is a snake?  Even though they kill rats, they also eat eggs and most importantly, it could scare Tricia and that wouldn't be a good thing to have her afraid to come to the barn.  I quickly weighed the alternatives in my mind and made my decision.

One swift strike of the shovel resulted in a swift strike in return from a... chicken snake.  A big one.  It had a huge bulge in its stomach I assumed from eating some of our chicken eggs.  I picked up the injured snake and threw him out of the barn near where Tricia was finishing up washing Rosie.  She said, "That's a big snake.  I was wondering what was taking you so long in there!"  I told Tricia that the snake was fat and must have a few of our eggs in him.  Tricia didn't think it looked like eggs.  I cut the snake in half right above the bulge.  What is that thing?!

I stepped on the snake and something big and slimy oozed out.  Well, Tricia was right.  It was a big, fat rat!

I guess the snake had feasted on one of the rats in the barn and was settling down in the corner to digest its meal when I made the discovery.  How did the snake fit that big ol' rat in his stomach?  Better yet, how did it open it's mouth wide enough to eat it?

After my dissection of the snake was complete, Tricia told me that if the snake wouldn't bother her, she would have been fine with me leaving him alone so that he could wolf down more rats in the barn.  It was too late, though.  The chickens were already pulling the guts out of the snake.  Well, I'm sure there are more chicken snakes out there that will be attracted to the rats in the barn.  So maybe the next guy won't meet such an untimely end. 

What To Do About Daisy?

Daisy is the matriarch of our little dairy herd.  There is no question she is the boss.  Daisy came to us back in 2007 as a baby calf on the side of her momma.  Her mom was named Buttercup, but we called her momma cow.  She died and that leaves Daisy as the oldest Jersey on Our Maker's Acres Family Farm.

Here is the plot twist.  After having numerous calves, Daisy now is having problems getting pregnant.  She has been exposed to several bulls over the last 2 years, but for some reason, she can't get pregnant.  We've had the veterinarian come look at her and he can't find any cysts or any reason why she can't conceive.  Recently we took her down the road to a friend's home who has a Jersey bull.  Daisy came in heat, the animals bred, and we took her home.  We took a blood sample to test for pregnancy and... it came back negative.

Tricia and I are faced with a tough decision.  If she can't get pregnant, she is a taker and not a giver - just eating grass.  If she can't get pregnant, she can't produce milk.  If you are a "milk cow" and can't produce milk, you have a serious problem.  We can't keep her on the farm.  We can sell her to the sale barn or we can 'put her in the freezer.'  Although we've eaten bull calves off our herd, the thought of eating Daisy or Rosie, is not a nice thought to entertain.  However, selling her to the sale barn where she would be loaded on a big cattle trailer with dozens of other cows to be transported far away to be butchered is not pleasant either.

So...  We talked to our friend down the road with the Jersey bull and he wants to continue to try to have his bull breed her.  We brought Daisy back to his house today.

According to Tricia's calendar, Daisy should go into heat shortly.  As soon as we got her out of the trailer, she ran to the fence and the bull came near.  We put her into the pasture and the bull immediately started courting her.  Here he is rubbing on her rump with his head.

We are pretty sure that they will breed in the next few days, and we truly hope that Daisy is able to have a calf.

If Daisy only knew the pressure that she is under to have this calf!  She's on the clock.  If she can't get pregnant after a couple more attempts, we'll have to make some hard decisions.

Like A Rock

From time to time I'll get on You Tube and listen to a song that I've been wanting to hear.  You Tube, in a very smart and crafty manner, has songs that populate on the right hand side of the screen that are in the same genre or timeframe as the song you are listening to.  I have discovered that it is impossible to listen to just one song.  You have to listen to more songs.  In fact, I find myself going down a 'worm-hole' of songs only to emerge much later realizing that I have other things to do.  Isn't it amazing how songs can bring you back to memories and times you had forgotten?

Such is the case with the song, "Like a Rock," by Bob Segar.  It was recorded in May 1986 and hit #1 on the music charts.  In perhaps one of the most successful advertising campaigns in history, Chevrolet used the song, "Like a Rock" to sell many, many pick-up trucks.  In fact, when I hear this song, I think of watching a football game on TV and the commercial comes on.  In my memory, I can hear "Like a Rock" playing and see dirty pickup trucks driven by cowboys bouncing down dusty gravel roads or Chevy trucks at a construction site being loaded by guys with hard hats.  Sadly, the Chevy commercial is the first thought that comes to mind.

According to Wikipedia, Bob Seger said the following regarding the inspiration of the song: "it was inspired partly by the end of a relationship I had that had lasted for 11 years. You wonder where all that time went. But beyond that, it expresses my feeling that the best years of your life are in your late teens when you have no special commitments and no career. It's your last blast of fun before heading into the cruel world."

Just read the lyrics:

Stood there boldly
Sweatin' in the sun
Felt like a million
Felt like number one
The height of summer
I'd never felt that strong
Like a rock

I was eighteen
Didn't have a care
Working for peanuts
Not a dime to spare
But I was lean and
Solid everywhere
Like a rock

My hands were steady
My eyes were clear and bright
My walk had purpose
My steps were quick and light
And I held firmly
To what I felt was right
Like a rock

Like a rock, I was strong as I could be
Like a rock, nothin' ever got to me
Like a rock, I was something to see
Like a rock

And I stood arrow straight
Unencumbered by the weight
Of all these hustlers and their schemes
I stood proud, I stood tall
High above it all
I still believed in my dreams

Twenty years now
Where'd they go?
Twenty years
I don't know
Sit and I wonder sometimes
Where they've gone

And sometimes late at night
When I'm bathed in the firelight
The moon comes callin' a ghostly white
And I recall
I recall

Like a rock. standin' arrow straight
Like a rock, chargin' from the gate
Like a rock, carryin' the weight
Like a rock

Like a rock, the sun upon my skin
Like a rock, hard against the wind
Like a rock, I see myself again
Like a rock

The songwriter draws a picture of youth.  Strong.  Lean.  Invincible.  Bulletproof.  It reminds me of the way I felt in high school, thinking the world was my oyster.  Running around with my friends, playing football, listening to music in my truck.  Eager, wide-eyed with anticipation about what life had in store.  With a few miles on my odometer now (to use an appropriate Chevrolet metaphor), I realize that a whole lot of the emotion in that song is illusory.  While we may, in the arrogance of youth, feel like a rock, we are not.  Or at least I am not.

In the comments in the bottom of the video of the song I link below, an astute writer named Kevin H. apparently feels the same way and captured what I'm trying to say more eloquently than I can.  I cut and pasted his comment below:

Life will destroy you. Work will grind you down, and you will fail as a husband and father. You will look back on the illusion of competence and control you once possessed and wonder how you could ever have been so naïve. One of the most heartbreaking songs about being a man ever recorded.

Although I'm standing on the Solid Rock, I have come to understand that I am not like a rock at all.  Maybe that is the point of it all.  Perhaps Chevy trucks are dependable, but truth be told, there's only One who is dependable.  He's not like a rock.  He is The Rock.  Click the arrow and listen to Bob Seger sing it:

And the Results are In...

If you are milking cows and goats, you must ensure your animals are bred year after year so that they 'freshen.'  If you don't have one, you must locate a bull, or in the case of goats, a buck.  Fortunately, we have friends with registered Jersey bulls and we have our own buck named Buckwheat.  So we arranged a date and hopefully the job was done.  Last week we posted about taking blood samples from several of our animals to determine if they were pregnant.  We mailed the vials of blood to LSU AgCenter in Franklinton, LA to see if we might have baby calves this spring.

It wasn't as easy as it might sound, though.  The first night, we were able to take blood samples from Rosie and Daisy.  We tried and tried to take samples from Clarabelle, but never could hit the vein to get a sample.  The next day we tried again and to our dismay, we never could hit the vein.  We are going to have to get Clarabelle palpated to determine pregnancy.

In the meantime, Tricia got an email from LSU AgCenter with some results.  Drum roll, please....

The cattle test is first.  Animal ID CR09 is for Rosie.  She was born in 2009. As the test shows, she is PREGNANT! This makes sense.  She is four months' pregnant and we've seed a marked decrease in her milk production as her body shifts to growing her calf instead of producing milk.  She'll be calving in January.  Animal ID CD07 is for Daisy.  She was born in 2007.  The test results show she is OPEN or not pregnant.  I'll delve into Daisy's situation tomorrow perhaps.

The next test results are for Annie, our Nubian goat.  Her milk production has fallen off as well and Tricia wanted to test her to see if she is pregnant.  The buck got out one morning and we were wondering if perhaps he bred Annie.  Tricia and I got a sample from the artery in her neck.  Here are the results from Annie:

INCONCLUSIVE.

So we know that we'll have one calf this spring for sure from Rosie.  I am 99% sure Clarabelle is pregnant.  We still need to test Luna.  Although it shows inconclusive, I am 99% sure that Annie is not pregnant.  The goal is to quickly get those animals pregnant that are not, so we will either perform another blood test or palpate the animals that we haven't tested.

First Fall Crops Are In the Ground

The cole crops (broccoli, cauliflower, brussel sprouts, and cabbage) are all sprouted in the seed pots.  I'll have to show you pics in a couple of days.  However, there are a couple of crops that I can plant directly in the ground - right now.  On Saturday, I fired up the weed eater and cleaned up the weeds that were knee-high.  I weed-eated (or weed-ate?) them right down to the bare ground.  I allowed the hot August sun to beat down on the barren ground for a day to dry things out.

On Sunday afternoon after church, we ate a satisfying meal and had coffee and planned out the week.  Then I talked myself into getting the shovel out of the garden and sharpening it with the grinder.  Hot sparks were flying.  I walked out to the garden and in about an hour, I had the side garden soil all turned over.  Sweet corn and green beans grew here this spring.  Turning over the dirt was labor intensive for sure.  Whew!  Good exercise, but hard work.  I slept good Sunday night.

Monday afternoon, I rushed back from work as fast as the traffic would allow me.  It was time to plant a couple of fall crops right in the ground.  The first item was Purple Hull peas.  We've already been harvesting some of these and have eaten several meals of peas and rice.  We are planting a fall crop so that we can put some up in the freezer and eat some fresh.

I also planted another variety of cowpeas - Ozark Razorback Peas.  These are saved seeds.  I like the way they look as they are speckled - either red & white or black & white.  These are seeds I saved from back in 2012 so the germination may be a little off.  To compensate, I planted them extra thick.

All in all we have four rows of cowpeas that are 22 feet long. 

The miracle of a seed in the ground

The peas were all in the ground, but we still had half of the side garden left to plant - totaling 23 feet.  I was going to plant more peas, but decided to put in a fall crop of potatoes.  The LSU Vegetable Planting guide lists the fall window of planting to be between August 15 - September 10th.  Last year I planted too late.  I gambled and lost and the frost killed my potato plants deader than a door nail.  I try to learn from my mistakes and planted early this year.

We have some small potatoes in our bin left over from our spring potato harvest.  We'll use those for seed potatoes.  I enjoy using our own seed as much as possible.

Seed Potatoes from our potato harvest back in May

I dug holes four inches deep and a foot apart.  My potato planting helper, Benjamin, helped me by placing the potatoes with the biggest eye sprouts into the holes.  It was nice having him help me.

Some of the sprouts on the potatoes were pretty good.  One nice rain and it will be popping up out of the ground.

I used a hoe to cover the peas and potatoes.  Planting, in my opinion, is an optimistic and hopeful exercise.  It is a leap of faith to put the peas and potatoes in the ground.  We could have just as easily eaten them, but with risk comes reward.  In a leap of faith we planted them.  Hopefully we'll have a healthy crop with a bountiful yield.  We'll keep you posted with the progress of the peas and potatoes in the side yard garden.

Sunday Morning Silent Garden Stroll

11 For as the soil makes the sprout come up and a garden causes seeds to grow, so the Sovereign LORD will make righteousness and praise spring up before all nations.  Isaiah 61:11 NIV

This morning after Sunday morning milking I wanted to walk through the garden.  Last night we had a family night out to the movies in Lafayette and didn't get to pick okra.  Okra grows so doggone fast.  If you miss a day picking, the okra goes from tender to woody and inedible.  I wanted to make sure I picked it early this morning.  The morning sun was filtering through the trees on the east side of the garden.   

Yesterday's refreshing rain had everything blooming.  Here are some beautiful lima bean blooms.

Just underneath the canopy of lima bean leaves that cover the trellis, you can see pods full of fat lima beans!

On the next row I see black-eyed peas blooming.

A luffa gourd that came up volunteer from last year's seeds is blooming as well.  Its bright yellow flowers full of nectar is attracting honey bees as you can see this one making a "bee-line" for the flower.

It landed and began filling itself with pollen.  The bee hive in our column is gone.  It makes me wonder where his hive is now.  It is good to know that there is still a colony of bees in the vicinity to keep things pollinated.

Just a few steps down and you can see purple hull peas blooming in the center of the photo, with a pod that will be turning purple soon.  In the top left corner of the photo is a dragon fly.  Can you spot him?

Towering above the garden near the end of the garden are the stalks of okra.  Big beautiful blooms announce the soon arrival of more pods of okra. 

It doesn't take long for a bloom to turn into okra pods.  You can see okra at various stages of development just behind the flower below.

More black-eyed pea blooms pop up in the Sunday morning sunshine.  Cowpeas and okra relish the warm, humid conditions prevalent here now.

They keep thriving, putting out pods that we'll be shelling soon.  Lots of work still remains to be done in the garden.  We'll be busy harvesting and then working on getting the fall garden in pretty soon.

I spotted this guy trying to blend in with an okra stalk!

It's Sunday morning.  He's not in any hurry... Nor should I!