It is Hard to Beat Fresh-Picked Green Beans

At some point in April is the time that we normally harvest our first mess of green beans.  I always look forward to this time.  The nights are still kind of cool and enjoyable and a respite from the sweltering days to come.  These nice temperatures are kind to the beans enabling them to not be as stressed from the overbearing heat that will cause them to fade and droop in months to come.

I come in from work and try harvest two rows of beans before the big ball of burning gas dips beneath the western horizon.  The hens cackle as they scurry to their appointed roosting spots for the night.  Soon I'll head to my roosting spot, too.

Healthy Green Beans

This year I planted my favorite varieties: Contenders, Blue Lake, and Italian Roma II.  In the photo below you can see the Romas.  They are a flat, tasty bean and are my favorite.

In a short time, I pick a bucket full of perfect, unmarred green beans (haricot verts).  Later in the season, I have to cut off bug damage from some of the beans.  Not so, today.  They are beautiful beans, crisp and fresh.  Since we're using wood chip mulch in the garden, the vegetables all stay so clean, but I still like to give them a good washing before snapping off the ends.

I like to pick most of the beans when they are young.  I like them tender.  Sometimes the bigger ones are tough and can be "woody."  A few were larger than I like, but after a rain, I find they grow so quickly.  It is important to pick every other night to keep on top of the harvest and not let them get too big.

This weekend we lit up the fire pit with a lot of live oak and pecan branches that we picked up in the yard after the recent storm.  The fire pit has a grill and we like to cook over a real wood fire.  We put plenty of butter in the bottom of a cast iron dutch oven, sliced some onions and let them saute for a bit.  Then we added the fresh snapped green beans.

In no time they were cooked to perfection.  We just added some salt, cracked black pepper and a little cayenne.

I like to space out and stagger the plantings of green beans, so that when these plants "play out," another planting of green beans will be blooming and I can soon harvest those.  I learned this from a good friend that moved to north Louisiana.  He told me one time that his Daddy aimed to keep green beans growing for months using the staggered planting model.

I like that technique.  I can eat green beans and never get tired of them.  I've asked Tricia to cook them soon using one of my other favorite green bean recipes - bacon wrapped green beans.  (Of course anything tastes good with bacon wrapped around it, right?)

2020 Meat Birds - Week Five

Week 5 in the annual 8 week meat bird project was an interesting one.  We lost one bird.  It was a runt.  After its death, Tricia did an autopsy on it, wondering if it had parasites or something to keep it from growing.  She found nothing.  Doctor Tricia's lab report was inconclusive.  That brings our total fatalities so far to 3.  If we can hold that figure, we will have a 6% mortality rate.  Normally, the hatchery sends an extra 2 or 3 as lagniappe to account for things like this, but not this time.  Oh well.

The other notable event this week was the weather.  We had two consecutive days of thunderstorms bringing lots of rain and lots of straight-line winds.  The chickens are in a chicken tractor that we push to fresh grass several times a day.  You can see the tractor below:

It is made with a 2x4 frame on wheels with PVC frame, covered with lightweight welded wire and a tarp.  We have learned from prior calamities to tie down the corners with stakes driven in the ground or the chicken tractor will flip.  We always check the weather and plan accordingly.  The weather report showed wind gusts of 9-10 mph.  We got gusts much higher than that.  Tricia estimates 60 mph!  Here are my stakes.  Only one was remaining secured, but it saved us:

Tricia ran to the tractor in the pouring rain when she saw it about to flip.  She stood on the frame for 30 minutes holding it down while torrential winds blew, shifting the tractor's location.  Tricia held it all together and saved all the birds.  When I got home, she had quite a story to tell!  I call her my pioneer woman.  She was soaking wet and not too happy...  You know the old saying, "She was madder than a wet hen?"

So it is Wednesday Weigh Day.  I brought the bird in the garage in a bucket.

And then I put it on the scale...

And at week five, here are the results:

We have five years' documentation of the Cornish Cross Meat Birds' weight for comparative purposes:

Week Five 2020: 3 pounds 12 ounces, a weight gain of 10 ounces over last week.  I think if you average it out, we are right where we need to be at this stage of their development.
Week Five 2019: 3 pounds 4 ounces
Week Five 2018: 3 pounds 14 ounces.
Week Five 2017: 2 pounds 15 ounces.
Week Five 2016: 4 pounds

As I read more and more about possible meat shortages due to the reaction to the virus, we are happy to have our own meat right here at the house.  In 3 short weeks, we'll process them.  Our slaughterhouse will be fully staffed and transportation to 'market' involves walking the carcasses in from the backyard and into the deep freeze.

We'll meet here again next week to see results of the meat birds' growth and development.

We Are Gonna Hit Our Goal

Each year we do the same old thing.  We are creatures of habit.  One of the things we do is try to see how long we can go before cranking up the lawn mower.  We've posted many times about our routine to avoid mowing.  It is not really that I dislike mowing - that would be weed-eating.  Man, I hate weed-eating.  I guess it is just a challenge to see how long we can go without mowing.

This year, I set the goal at May 1st.  For a couple of months now, I routinely hear the neighbors cranking up their mowers.  Mine is still in the garage, covered by a tarp.  I know I'll have to charge the battery to make the engine turn over.  Our secret.  The cows and a solar powered Gallagher Fence Charger with temporary poly wire and step-in posts set up in the yard.

Each day I move the paddock once section over in the yard.  After a week, the cows have rotated through the entire yard, and we start over again.  This, while keeping the yard trimmed, also helps the grazing pressure in the pasture down until the grass really comes in strong.

Cows grazing in the back yard

Now, the goats - they are not allowed in the backyard.  They are escape artists.  They don't respect the fence and would be eating Tricia's flowers down to the dirt before you could say, "Doggone goat!"  We leave them in the main pasture outside of the yard.  We do still have to protect certain plants.  As you can see in the photo below, I have our Anniversary Oak protected behind the electric fence.  The cows would love to eat those leaves.

The cows edge around everything.  While they don't exactly manicure the yard like a golf course, it does look neat and tidy when they are done.  They contentedly eat grass all day.  We do have water for them in a big tub that we put in a wagon and will pull it around so they have fresh, clean water.

Rosie eating in the backyard

Cows eating grass in the yard is kind of like a redneck Roomba.  You know, that robot vacuum cleaner that vacuums your house while you watch TV?  Cows do that too.  They walk around and scarf down every tall blade of grass.  Then they'll do it again.

Clarabelle did not get invited to the BBQ

Sometime next week or this weekend I'll likely fire up the lawnmower.  The cows won't like the competition, but once the grass in the pasture can fully sustain them, I'll begin using the mower powered by an internal combustion engine.  I will miss doing other things while the lawn was being mowed by the cows.

There are positives about mowing the yard with a mower.  Mechanical lawn mowers don't leave this all over the yard!:

After the cows mow, you gotta watch your step...

Planting the Anniversary Oak

In THIS POST FROM 2015 I talk about and show pictures from our engagement in San Antonio and anniversary almost 30 years ago, our germinating a live oak acorn from the Alamo and our ordeal with our 'Anniversary Alamo Oak.'  The story takes a tragic turn, but things are salvaged and good comes out of bad.  Click the link above to read it for background.

As described in the link above, the handful of Alamo Acorns (part 2) resulted in one of them germinating.  I nurtured it and now it is healthy and 3 feet tall.  We decided on a beautiful day this past weekend, to take it out of the pot and root it into good soil.  We loaded the wagon with all the gear needed for planting and walked out to find the perfect spot.

My Smiling Bride

We picked a spot in the lowest part of the yard where the soil will stay the dampest during droughts.  It is also close enough to the pasture where it will provide some shade to the farm animals as it grows taller.  I dug a nice hole, pulled the tree out of the pot, put it in the hole and put some good potting soil mixed with regular soil into the hole.

Tricia snapped a photo of me with our anniversary oak. 

And here is my wife posing with our anniversary oak.  Who knows how big the first one would be right now - 30 years.  It would be a nice-sized tree! 

The Queen and her tree

The little live oak is in a nice spot so that we can view it while swinging, sitting around our fire pit, or sitting on the back patio.  Yes, the tree just belongs here!

We fertilized it, made a 'well' around it with a berm and watered it in.  Each day I'll add water until we get a good rain.  It has been unseasonably dry in April, only raining 1 inch all month so far.  The spot we planted it in is close enough to the house where we can pull a hose out to it to water, if needed.

So now, we'll just let time tick on and watch our live oak tree grow.  Perhaps birds will eventually build their nests in the branches.  Maybe our great grand kids will climb its limbs.  Perhaps a grandchild will swing on a tire swing in its shade.  Maybe none of that will happen.  Perhaps the memory of the tree's meaning is the important thing - like the acorn growing a mighty oak, a marriage starts out with great hope and promise.  There are set-backs, droughts, rainy seasons, catastrophes.  But over time, if that tree is nurtured and the couple is patient and kind, a monument that stands the test of time can grow, blessed by God and built on the foundation of love.  And that legacy of love can be enjoyed by the couple as well as generations to follow.  Grow strong, little oak!

She Never Saw it Coming

Saturday morning Tricia, Russ, and I were up at the working on a project with some other members of the church family.  We were enjoying ourselves, and it was nice, once again, to get out and be social.  Russ received a telephone call from Benjamin, who was at home.  I only heard one half of the conversation, but it didn't sound good.  Russ said, as he closed the call, "Okay, I'll tell 'em."

He hung up and told us that Benjamin went outside to check on the cows as they were mowing the grass in the front yard and saw an act of violence taking place in the pasture and that we needed to get home quick.  When we arrived, we found that the perpetrator was under house arrest.  The suspect was Belle.  She is being held in the garage on a cable tie-out until her arraignment.  She crawled under the car in embarrassment for her crime and is looking mighty guilty, if you ask me. 

After taking a statement from Benjamin, who witnessed the entire episode, he stated that he walked out to see Belle catching a Barred Rock hen in the pasture and tossing it into the air.  When Benjamin ran out to the pasture, the hen was in Belle's mouth and was barely alive.  We put her temporarily in a wagon full of hay, hoping she will be able to heal from this ordeal, but the prognosis wasn't good.

In looking over the hen closely, she was certainly traumatized.  She was bleeding from the leg and was shaking and unsteady on her feet.  I really don't know if she'll make it.  After looking closer, I noticed that she was our hen with only one eye.  We found, and reported on, "Old Cyclops" many years ago in THIS POST FROM MAY 2016..  Old Cyclops never saw it coming.  Belle probably came up on her on her blind spot.

Belle, while she is a livestock guardian dog, is just a puppy.  She likes to play with the chickens and goats and cows.  She didn't intend to kill the hen - she just played too rough.  We'll have to be more careful and not leave her unattended with the chickens until she grows up.

Old Cyclops

I regret to inform you that Old Cyclops passed away.  She'll now be composted and have the opportunity to grow some nice vegetables for us in the garden.  As far as Belle, she is on parole now and will have to visit with her probation officer frequently.  We think we can rehabilitate her.  She needs to learn that she must guard the chickens and protect them from danger - not kill them!

Someone Else Likes Our Blueberry Bushes

It has been a dry April.  We've only gotten nine tenths of an inch of rain so far this month.  As a result, the grass is a little slow to grow.  One of the things I was wondering about regarding the low rainfall totals was how our blueberry crop was going to turn out.  We've found that in times of little rain, our blueberries were smaller and harder.  In times of plentiful rainfall, they are larger and more plump and juicy.  Tricia has been making blueberry smoothies, blueberry pancakes, blueberry coffee cake, and blueberry muffins as she tries to use up our store of frozen blueberries in the deep freeze.

Night before last, I walked out to the blueberry bushes to inspect the berries.  Surprisingly, they looked pretty good!  While I was looking at the blueberries, something else caught my eye.  Can you see it?

Springtime arrived and brought with it nice weather that coaxed bright green leaves and fresh growth to the plants, blooming flowers brighten the landscape, and honeybees doing their job.  The silence of winter is replaced by chirping of songbirds.  Those songbirds meticulously build their nests by picking up twigs, hay, and feathers in order to fashion the perfect home to lay their eggs and raise their young.  One such bird picked the perfect place within the dense foliage of the blueberry bushes.



Let's take a quick look inside.  Two blue eggs speckled with brown spots.  I'll back away soon so as not to anger the momma bird.

We will keep our eyes on the nest and the bird family that enjoys our blueberry bushes as much as we do.  We found the nest camouflaged and hidden within the branches of our blueberry bushes.  I hope that another member of our animal family (Ginger) does not find the nest.  That could be tragic.

SOON!

2020 Meat Birds - Week Four

Ahh... Week 4.  The halfway point in raising the meat birds for slaughter.  Each day we push the chicken tractor to fresh grass, ensuring that their environs are clean and fresh and that they have plenty of fresh grass to eat on in addition to their 18% chick grower.

In addition to moving them to fresh grass each day, we also began thinking about where we would move them once we butcher them.  I estimate that we have about 9 birds left in the freezer from last year's meat birds.  Before butchering in four or five weeks, I'll move those 9 birds out so that we use what's left of them first.

Okay, now's the time of the week when I walk out and pick up a random bird and bring it into the garage and weigh it to compare with last week and the same week in previous years.  I brought the bird in the garage in a bucket, but the old boy filled up the bucket.  I'll have to get a bigger one next week!

The bird was flapping his wings and squawking, but I got him calmed down enough to set him on the scale for the weekly weigh-in.  Normally, when you get on a scale, you want to see a reduction in poundage, but in this case we want weight gain - each and every week.  Our goal is an 8 pound bird at the end of Week 8.

Let's see how we did.  Week Four weight was....  3 pounds and two ounces.

How did that compare to previous weigh-ins?  Let's see:

In Week Four 2020, the birds weighed 3 pounds 2 ounces.  Last week they weighed 1 pound 14 ounces.  That's a weight gain for the week of 1 pound 4 ounces and a record weight for us at this stage, beating our previous record by 3 ounces.

In Week Four 2019, the birds weighed 2 pounds 8 ounces. 
In Week Four 2018, the birds weighed 2 pounds 15 ounces.
In Week Four 2017, the birds weighed 2 pounds 4 ounces..
In Week Four 2016, the birds weighed 2 pounds 15 ounces.

Not too shabby.   Let's see if they can continue this record-setting performance next week.  Tune in next Wednesday for our next report.

The Snapping Turtle On the Pine Island Road

Sunday afternoon we were on a 30 minute drive to my hometown of Kinder, LA.  We bought a lemon tree for my mom and were going to plant it in her yard.  The tree has little lemons, and we hope it makes a ton of 'em.  We turned west in Hathaway and began driving down the Pine Island Highway.  The two-lane road is a lonely stretch, cutting between rice fields and crawfish ponds on the north and south sides of the road.

When we passed by the Thornwell Warehouse Association, there was a large object in the road.  I swerved to avoid it, looked in my rear-view window, and found a place to turn around.  I drove back to the obstruction in the road and got out of the car leaving the car in the road.  Here's what it was:

A big, fat snapping turtle

I carefully picked up the big snapping turtle by the tail.  I held it up to Tricia and the boys.  The big turtle opened his mouth, hissed and let out an awful smell.  You can get some size perspective on the turtle by looking in the photo above and beneath just below the turtle's left front foot.  It is a raccoon track.  This was a big, old turtle!  He was fat, too.  Just look at the fat bulging out from underneath his shell!

Teasing the Turtle

Of course, in the photo above, you can tell that I picked up a stick and teased the turtle into snapping at me.  (You know you would have done the same.)  It is a snapping turtle.  It's what they do.  The old-timers say that if it bites you, they don't let go until it thunders or lightnings.  Don't worry, I don't wish to test the veracity of that theory.

When I was rice-farming, I would catch many big snapping turtles like this when we were water leveling.  I would get out of the tractor, wade out and pick the turtle up and keep it in the cab of the tractor with me until quitting time.  Man, could that thing stink up a tractor!  Then we would bring the turtles to a relative named Blanc.  He was a good cook and he would butcher the turtles and make Snapping Turtle Sauce Piquant.  That is a 'turtle stew' with a red gravy served over white rice.  We would go over to Blanc's house for lunch and he would feed us.  Boy, was it good!

Offering a pardon to the snapping turtle

I thought long and hard about putting the turtle in the trunk of Tricia's car and bringing it home with us and making a turtle sauce piquant for old time's sake.  It would be good eating, for sure.  But it is a lot of work to clean a turtle, and I'm a little short on time right now with work.  Not to mention the fact that it would really stink up the car.  I was jarred out of my ruminations by a truck coming fast down the highway.  I was still parked in the middle of the road with a big turtle by the tail.  I held it up and asked the motorist if he'd like to take the turtle home.  He declined the offer.  I carried the big old turtle to the roadside ditch and deposited him there so that he wouldn't get hit by a car or truck.  I've been responsible for turning many of these guys into sauce piquant.  Maybe it's time to let one get away.

A Rewind from the Crawfish Boil

On Good Friday we had a crawfish boil at the house.  We posted about it last week.  We ate until we thought we would pop, and then we peeled the remainder for crawfish scrambled eggs and a big crawfish etouffee that Tricia cooked up the next day.  Delicious! 

Family Crawfish Boil April 2020 

Crawfish always bring back a lot of memories...  Each and every year growing up, we had crawfish boils where we lined a table with newspaper and poured hot spicy crawfish on top.  We would encircle the table like vultures, elbow to elbow, peel and eat while laughing and visiting with family, friends, and neighbors.  A true social, back yard party that went on every year across the state.  In springtime you could just smell the spices wafting through the air when neighbors boiled crawfish.  The roar of the propane, festive music playing, and the anticipation of crawfish, corn, and potatoes about to be poured on the table.  Allons Manger!  (Come on, let's eat!)

Crawfish

As we were eating them on Good Friday, I was telling my family about how we would catch them as a very young kid - probably 6 or 7 years old, but I still remember it.  My family would ride out in a pickup truck to the farm in Oberlin, LA.  We would take a dirt road to a spot to the northern side of a rice field.  There was a pond there.  We would unload nets.  They were square cloth mesh supported on all four sides with stiff wire rods that met in the center on top.  There was a loop where we'd tie a string to lift the net out of the water.  In the center of the net was a string.  We'd tie chicken necks, "melt," or bacon to the center and drop it to the bottom of the shallow pond.  After a little bit, we'd pull the net up and remove the crawfish that would cover the net.  Rinse. Wash. Repeat.  After a while we would have enough for a boil.

A sack or 35 pounds of fresh caught crawfish

In the early 1980's, my grandfather hoped to instill in me an entrepreneurial spirit.  He had a welder in Eunice, Louisiana weld an aluminum boat for me.  He also purchased a number of sacks of 'seed' crawfish and we stocked a 24 acre pond (not far from the pond I explained in the paragraph above) with crawfish.  He also purchased a number of crawfish traps for me.

The boat was powered by hard-work, determination, and desire.  I would pull the boat and my brother, my sister, and friends would pick up the traps, dump the catch into the sorting tray, re-bait the trap with cut up fish, and fill onion sacks with crawfish we caught.  We would sell them to people in the community wishing to have crawfish boils.  This was several years before crawfish farming turned into the burgeoning industry that it is today.  My brother, to this day, never fails to bring up his grievances to me regarding this business venture.  He says that I was running a sweat shop and that he never was paid for his labor.  

I must have pulled him around that 24 acre pond hundreds of times, catching thousands of pounds of crawfish.  Sometimes the traps contained snakes, too.  That'll always give you a scare when you pick up a trap with a big, fat water moccasin in it.  It was fun, but it was honest work, too.  It was also smelly work!  Prior to crawfishing, I would chop up catfish heads, buffalo (carp), and other trash fish to use as bait.  The hot sun and sweltering heat would quickly make the tub of cut up fish and fish guts ferment.  The stench permeated the air.  It also was next to impossible to remove the scent from your hands.  I finally cut up lemons and washed my hands with them and that worked to some extent.

Twenty something years later, my crawfish pond would expand to be 124 acres big and my boat was powered by a Honda engine instead of pulling it manually.  Crawfish farming was a fun way to make a living.  It is one of those times where you enjoy immediate gratification seeing the sacks of crawfish pile up in the bottom of your boat.  You would always want to catch as much as you could before Good Friday as that is when the price usually falls. It always gave me a sense of pride, knowing I was providing the main ingredient to more than a meal, but an experience that everyone looked so forward to.

Although I no longer crawfish for a living, it remains a fond memory of my childhood that extends into my adult life. 

Practicing Social Distancing

"You just call out my name, and you know wherever I am I'll come running to see you again,
Winter, Spring, Summer, or Fall, hey now, all you have to do is call and I'll be there yeah, yeah, you've got a friend." - James Taylor

I spent a little time in the garden today checking out the okra seedlings that are just popping up above the surface of the soil.  The green beans are all blooming and we'll be picking fresh snap beans shortly.  The sugar snap peas are finishing up and I'm now saving seed to replant this fall.  The tomatoes are blooming like crazy and we're hoping to have a good crop this year.  Last year was a dismal one.

As I closed the garden gate and walked over the bridge, something caught my eye.  In my peripheral vision I saw movement where there shouldn't have been, high up in the fork of a tree.

Why, it's Ginger, our cat.  She wants to be a house cat, I think, and sometimes Benjamin brings her indoors, but she mainly stays outside.  She's brought rats, mice, and birds to us to prove that she is a hunter.  She is pretty independent and bold.  Why is she up in the tree?

Then I follow the gaze of Ginger's eyes and see immediately why she's up in the tree.  Belle, our 3 month old Great Pyrenees puppy was stretched out on the cool concrete by the garage trying her best to have an innocent look on her face.  "What? Me?"  Ginger and Belle haven't exactly warmed up to one another.  I thought that they could be friends.  I think Belle would like to be friends with Ginger, but the feeling isn't mutual.

Or perhaps they're just practicing social distancing from one another?                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 

The Scales of Justice

Proverbs 21:15 New American Standard Bible (NASB)

15 The exercise of justice is joy for the righteous,

But is terror to the workers of iniquity.

Image Credit

The Lady of Justice is a depiction of our legal system.  Ideally, she represents fairness.  She is blindfolded because the law is supposed to be free of bias or corruption.  She's holding scales to show that she's weighing the evidence.  She's holding a sword to show that sometimes justice can be swift and final.  Let's be frank with one another and go ahead and say that, for the most part, there is no justice on earth, and we won't see it until Heaven.

I was thinking about scales after weighing in the Meat Birds last night using our kitchen scale.  I always have to adjust a little knob to zero it out so that I get an accurate reading.  It is important for the scale to be right.

Our kitchen scale borrowed from my Lady of Justice

We were eating a delicious bowl of Shrimp and Okra Gumbo tonight.  Tricia was digging in the deep freeze and pulled out the last quart bag of shrimp and decided to make a gumbo on maybe the last cool night in many months.  We began discussing the shrimp and it brought to mind a great story I'll tell you.

Several years ago we were outside working in the garden and a pickup truck came down the drive.  Often, people will drop in to purchase eggs or visit.  This person wanted neither.  She was selling fresh Gulf of Mexico shrimp.  She opened her ice chest to show us what she had.  They were beautiful, big, fat shrimp.  I forgot how much she was asking for her shrimp, but it wasn't unreasonable and we bought some.

As the lady selling shrimp was weighing them out, I don't know what prompted this, but my wife walked in the house and came back out with an unopened 5 lb. bag of flour.  She put that in the lady's scale and what do you know?  The scale was showing that the 5 lb bag of flour weighed 5 1/2 pounds.  We were getting cheated due to unjust scales.  I don't know if the lady was trying to cheat us intentionally or if it was just a mistake.

When caught, the lady apologized made our shrimp purchase amounts whole.  She repeatedly told us she felt so bad about everyone she had sold shrimp to earlier and shorted.  We got a good laugh while eating those same shrimp tonight, remembering that story.  My wife is a shrewd businesswoman!  I don't know how she thought of the bag of flour calibration method.  I would have never thought of that.

There is a moral to the story:  Don't try to cheat Tricia out of shrimp.  Her eyes aren't blindfolded.  They are wide open. She's watching your scale and she's carrying a sword!

2020 Meat Birds - Week Three

This past week continued more of the same for the meat birds.  As they grow, we make changes.  We removed the 3 small feed troughs and replace them with an eight foot long PVC gutter that we use as a feed trough.  We also removed the two 1-gallon waterers and replaced them with a bell-waterer that is fed by gravity flow from a 5-gallon bucket.

The chicks have been on grass since Day 1, and when we push the chicken tractor each day, they scurry to eat the fresh grass even before going for the Chick Grower feed.  We've had a few abnormally cooler evenings, but we've lowered the heat lamps and the growing birds bunch up together underneath them to stay warm. 

One night earlier this week we had some weather blow through with strong winds.  Several years ago, strong straight-line winds blew the chicken tractor over, killing many of the birds.  We learned our lesson.  This year when strong winds are forecast, I stake down the tractor to keep it from flipping over.   Crisis averted.

Weigh in time.  Tonight, I picked up and average bird and carried it into the garage.  I set it on top of the scale for accurate weighing.  Of course I line the top of the kitchen scale with paper to avoid dirtying the scale. 

And here are the Week Three results....

This week - Week 3 - the Cornish Cross weighed 1 pound 14 ounces.  (1 ounce off the 5 year record!)
Last week the bird weighed 1 pound 4 ounces, giving him a weight gain of 10 ounces.
In week 3 of 2019, they weighed 1 pound 10 ounces.
In week 3 of 2018, the bird weighed in at 1 pound 10 ounces.
In week 3 of 2017, they weighed 1 pound 9 ounces.
In week 3 of 2016, they weighed 1 pound 15 ounces.

See ya next Wednesday when we do this again.  At that point they'll be at the halfway point.

15 Calves on the Ground

Last year the cows at the farm in Oberlin decided that they didn't like fences.  They liked wide open spaces.  That created problems and they got an all expenses paid trip to the Sale Barn.  Fast forward to the end of the year and Dad and I decided, "Let's buy some more cows!"  We did.  We purchased 16 bred heifers and put them back at the old home place at the farm.

They had more grass than they could ever eat.  They remained fat throughout the winter and just recently began to bag up.  Calves began hitting the ground.  One after the other.  Before you knew it, we had 16 calves.  Let me correct that - 15.  One of the calves was born but the sac never burst and it suffocated and died.  Well, as someone smarter than me one said, "You can't lose 'em if you don't have 'em."

We decided to get out on Saturday.  We drove to Oberlin and opened the gate and drove in the pasture.  Right inside the gate is an enormous live oak tree like you might see in a painting.  I would think that if it could talk, it would tell you many stories.  My grandfather was raised in a house right on this property.  Now the house is no longer there, but the tree remains.  And the cows and calves do too.  We gave them a holler and they began walking toward us.

The Old Live Oak

The simplicity and serenity of the place is astounding.  It is easy to forget when you are sitting beneath the tree watching the cows that there is a pandemic.  Being out in the country is plenty of social distancing!  The cows curiously began to walk toward us and check us out.  I was quick to notice that they weren't following the "6 foot rule."  For shame!

The calves all bunched toward the front.  The momma cows and the calves are all healthy and butterball fat.  They look like they enjoy life in the country.  As we sat there watching the cows checking us out, we observed yellow flowers blooming across the pasture.  The wind gently blew and the flowers from the thistles growing in the distance floated in the air like little white parachutes.

Mom & Dad drove up and we pulled lawn chairs out of the trunk and we sat in the shade and talked for the longest time.  It was a pleasant afternoon.  The boys climbed up in the huge limbs of the live oak like I did as a boy.  The limbs are laden with Resurrection vine (appropriate for the day before Resurrection Day!)  Resurrection fern looks like it is brown and dead, but as soon as it rains, it greens up beautifully and completely covers the limbs with its lush foliage.

In the background of the above photo, you can see an old pecan orchard planted by my great-grandfather.  One of the old pecan trees has broken in half.  We'll cut up the wood for firewood.  It is a reminder to me that some things like the pecan trees succumb while other things like the live oak perseveres.  It is nice in a world of rot and decay that there are things that live on - like the live oak, like the memories.  And it is encouraging to know that new calves are on the ground and new memories can be made while enjoying those of the past.