Trying a New Remedy for Coughing

It's early spring.  Leaves are coming out on trees and the bright green growth in the woods is wonderful to see.  We welcome spring and the beautiful weather it brings, and it means we'll be out in the garden putting in the spring garden.  One thing, however, that spring brings is allergies and a persistent cough.  These tassels you see below hanging from the branches of a water oak tree will soon be full of yellow pollen.  It's at that point that allergy season kicks into overdrive.

We're trying a new (for us) remedy this year that is really an old remedy - Fermented garlic honey.  All you need is two garlic bulbs with skins removed and cut in half.  Put them into a mason jar and cover with local honey.  Since we won't be pulling honey from our hives for a few more months, we bought some honey from a beekeeper in our club.  

Stir up real good to ensure that the garlic is coated with honey and covered.  Then put a lid loosely on the jar and set aside on the counter where it is in a cool location.  Every day, open the jar and "burp" the jar's contents.  The honey/garlic mixture will ferment and create pressure that needs to be relieved.  Can you see the bubbles in the jar below?  Allow it to ferment on the counter for 2 - 3 weeks.  The honey will become more liquified during this process.

At the end of that period, you can begin taking the honey as a cough medicine and eating the garlic.  Good for you and (supposedly) good for a cough.  We'll test out to determine if it works and report back.

Putting Together Frames For the Bees

Here's a look at one of the two bee hives that we have on the property.  It's been about a year since we caught two swarms - one in Jefferson Davis Parish and one out at the farm in Allen Parish.  I took this video, but wish I would've gotten film of the bees' activity today.  The video below is really tame compared to all the bees this afternoon.

We plan on expanding in the bee business this year.  We'd like to put out some additional swarm traps to see if we could be successful in catching more that way.  Primarily, though, we'd like to expand by making splits.  If your hive is healthy enough, you can make a split by taking a frame of eggs/larvae, a frame of honey and pollen and plenty of nurse bees from the existing hive and placing them in the center of another box surrounded by frames.

What happens is remarkable.  The bees immediately know that there is no queen.  They begin "making" a queen.  (You can also purchase a queen cell to speed things up.)  The queen will hatch, make her virgin flight, be bred by drones and return to the "new" box and begin laying eggs.  This will be a first for us.  We'll see if we're successful.

First, we need more equipment:  boxes, frames, bottom boards and tops.  Russ has a friend in a nearby town that had some new frames for sale.  We drove over last weekend and picked them up.  They came in pieces, requiring assembly.

I got some wood glue and put the frames together.  Once the glue had dried, Tricia began popping the foundation in place.  The foundation is coated with beeswax.

In a jiffy we had the 20 deep frames put together.  On Thursday afternoon, we'll head to Lacassine to purchase some boxes, bottom boards, and tops from a gentleman in our beekeeping club.  Then we'll be ready to go - either put up swarm traps OR make splits.  Our beekeeping club will be making splits in early March, so we'll try to glean as much knowledge as we can.

What To Do With a Bunch of Carrots

We harvested yet another row of carrots.  We had already pulled the Cosmic Purple variety, the Kyoto Red variety and now it was time for the Danvers variety.  These are the normal (boring) orange carrot that we're all familiar with.  Some of these carrots aren't so boring after all.  Like these for example.  I call them the love carrots.  They're snuggling.

I scrubbed them all up real good with a vegetable brush and washed them.  They were loaded into bowls and brought inside.

The tops were cut off, but we don't peel them.  There are a lot of nutrients in the skins.  As long as they are clean, we leave them on.

We shredded a number of them in the food processor.  This reminds me of the carrot salad with raisins that you used to see in cafeterias like Piccadilly or Luby's.  (But we're not making carrot salad.)

Today, we're making Ginger Carrots.  It's a favorite recipe of ours from the Nourishing Traditions cookbook.  This is made using lacto-fermentation.  Here is the recipe:

We grated up some ginger...

And we got out some whey that we had in the fridge from the last time we made kefir...

This was all combined in a large stainless steel bowl and now the fun part occurs.  We get out a meat tenderizer, which for all practical purposes is a stainless steel hammer. and we beat the carrots while stirring, this releases all the carrot juice that mixes with the whey, salt, shredded carrots and ginger.

We pack this very tightly into quart-sized mason jars, ensuring that the carrot mixture is submerged beneath the liquid.  We left this out on the counter for two days.  I opened the jars to check on them and they were fermenting.  The bubbles were coming up through the liquid in the jar and it overflowed on the counter.  After two days, we put the jars into the fridge.

We'll forget about them in the back of the fridge for a couple of months.  Then we'll pull them out and eat as a side dish.  It is tangy, refreshing, cool and tasty.  To top it off, Ginger Carrots are good for you!

A New Bicycle For Tricia

Now that the weather is getting nicer, it's time to get outdoors and start getting busy.  The garden is ready to be planted and lots of projects are begging for our attention.  One of the things on our wish list has been to get bicycles.  As more sand goes through the hourglass, it is important to stay active.  We began looking for bikes.  Tricia was interested in a 'beach cruiser' and I was looking for some sort of a mountain bike even though we are miles and miles from any mountain. 

My job takes me through several cities that have pawn shops.  I check out the bikes that are out on their racks out front.  Most that I saw were in disrepair.  I began shopping on the internet and man, bicycles are expensive!  The bicycles we would be interested in start at $250.  No thank you.  Tricia has Facebook Marketplace.  I'm not a FB person, but she began to search there.  In no time at all she found a Beach Cruiser for $100 only 30 miles away.  The call was made and I met the seller in a Walgreens parking lot and loaded the bicycle in the back of the car and brought it home.  Tricia was very happy with her purchase!  

The frame is a vintage turquoise color, I guess you'd call it, with cream-colored fenders.  It has a big basket on front and a rack with a nice bag on back with a bicycle lock it in.  

A couple days after she made this purchase, she found a Mongoose Excursion mountain bike for me on FB marketplace for only $70.  What a bargain!  We drove about an hour away to pick the mountain bike up.  Both bikes were in great shape and way better than buying a new one.  We've been riding several times already.

I'm thinking about purchasing a flashing LED light for safety to put on the back of both of them, and I joked with Tricia that I would buy a horn for her bike.  I took a photo of Tricia as she was riding her bike down the driveway.  It reminded me of something, but I couldn't, for the life of me, put my finger on what it reminds me of.

Oh yeah, now I remember...

I didn't just do that, did I?  Someone must have hacked into the Our Maker's Acres Family Farm account.  Perhaps?  Maybe I should just own up to it.  We've been enjoying bike riding together.  I'd hate to be forced to ride alone.

Spring On the Way!

 

In the past few days it has warmed up into the 70's in the afternoons.  The remaining hens that we have left after the marauding minks massacres, are laying.  We are collecting about 18-20 eggs each day.  That's enough to where we've put the For Sale sign out in front of the house again.  We sold 5 dozen today.  The sales help us with barnyard expenses and we eat PLENTY of eggs as well.  

As you can see in the photo above the hens lay primarily brown eggs but we do have some that lay beautiful eggs in various shades of blue and green.  The photo also evidences the white Dutch clover that is coming up all over the yard.  Neighbors are already mowing, but I'll put off mowing until maybe May.  We'll cycle the cows through the yard to clean up the clover and other winter grass.  We'll allow our honeybees to frequent the blooms in the yard as well.

This early spring has me itching to get in the garden.  Here's what we've done so far:

This is my first year to plant bare root strawberries.  I ordered about 40 Ozark Beauty plants and got them planted in the garden in two rows, planted about 12 inches apart.  It's only been three days and almost every plant has new leaves.  I'm anxious to see how these do.  I've planted strawberry plants in the garden before, but slugs and snails have given me fits.  I'll anticipate that problem this year and find a solution.

On a 16 foot long trellis, I planted 8 feet of Sugar Snap Peas with the remaining 8 feet split between Boston pickling cucumbers and Marketmore cucumbers.  On a separate 8 foot trellis, I planted some Suyo long cucumbers.  All from seed.  The growing calendar showed a March 1 plant date from seed for all of these, but I looked at the 10 day forecast and jumped the gun a little.

Tomorrow I plan on planting an 8 foot trellis of Blackeye Butter beans and a 15 foot row of snap beans.  We harvested the last row of Danvers carrots today, so that makes some room for additional planting that we'll be doing in the next week.  We'll put up the carrots tomorrow or this weekend.  I keep checking the progress on the Irish potatoes that we planted on February 14th.  So far nothing has popped up out of the ground.  I'm a little impatient, so I'll be walking out and checking every day.

Spring is such a lovely time.  We're looking forward to enjoying some spectacular weather!

Disbudding Our Baby Goats

When one of our goats named Agnes was born, time got away from us and we didn't de-horn (disbud) her.  Never again!  We vowed never to make that mistake again.  Agnes' horns grew, and she is the only critter on the homestead with horns.  It gives her an unfair advantage.  She bosses all the other animals around (including the cows).  She uses those horns as a weapon to force her way in to the feed trough.  She bullies the other animals.  Never again.  No sir-ee.

When out two latest kids were born, we made a mental note to get the clippers out and the disbudding iron and get the job done.  Tonight was the night.  We still haven't named the little kids yet.  We'll get around to it soon, I'd imagine.  The two just love playing with one another.  They were about to get settled in for the night underneath the feed trough, but we threw a monkey wrench on those plans.

Tricia grabbed the black one first.  She's jet black except for 3 strands of white hair on her forehead.  If you look closely, you can make them out.

We plugged in the disbudding tool.  In just a few minutes, it was warmed up, glowing cherry red on the tip.  Tricia donned leather gloves and sat on the little kid and held her firmly.

But before we got to that part of it, let's rewind.  First, you have to get the clippers and cut the hair away from both the horn buds.  This enables your disbudding iron to get down to the area around the horn buds.  The little black doeling has a nice haircut now and that enables you to see the little horn buds.

The tool is applied for about 4 seconds on each side.  Yes, the babies cry at first.  Then we come back a second time for about 3-4 more seconds until a copper-colored ring appears around the horn bud.

Now it's time for the little spotted goat.

It doesn't take long at all.  The babies cry.  The momma goats are concerned about their babies.  But in just a few minutes, we reunite them together and everything goes back to normal.

The heat from the disbudding tool kills the horn roots and they don't grow.  That's a good thing.  No bullying the others.  No getting horns stuck in the fence, either.  By tomorrow these kids will have forgotten all about this experience.

Inspecting The Hives

We have two hives in the side yard.  One of them we call the Jeff Davis hive since we caught the swarm in our backyard here in Jefferson Davis Parish.  The other hive which sits just to the north of the Jeff Davis hive, we call the Allen Parish hive since we caught that swarm out at the farm in Oberlin (Allen Parish).  For a long while we were opening up the boxes several times a week, checking out the growth and health of the colonies.  This hobby is kind of addicting.  Once it gets cold, you are not supposed to open the boxes as the bees work real hard to regulate the temperature in the hives.

The drought this summer was hard on the bees and then a few weeks ago, we had temperatures that plummeting into the low 20's.  We figured it best that we get into the hives and inspect things with a seasoned veteran of beekeeping - our friend.  Tricia invited him over and he brought his smoker and got into both boxes.  Here is what we learned:  The queen moved up vertically rather than horizontally.  That means that she filled up the foundation frames toward the center of the box, but the frames on the outside had not been filled out yet.

Both queens appear to be very strong, though, laying lots of eggs in beautiful patterns.  More on that in a minute.  With spring coming and lots of nectar and pollen soon to be available, we look for both hives to really thrive.  We'll pull honey in July, if all goes according to plan.

The queens in each box are laying lots of eggs and they are in all stages of growth.  In the photo below, the bottom center portion that looks like the sun is capped brood.  These capped brood worker bees take 6 days to hatch.  Just on this one frame, that's a lot of new babies.  The hives are about to explode with activity.  The rainbow portion above the capped brood are eggs that have been laid.  The egg stage lasts for 3 days and then it becomes a larvae.  Those cells will then be capped and will hatch out.  The upper left and right corners are capped honey.

The very bottom of the frame are some cells that are bigger than the cells in which the worker bees' eggs are laid.  These cells are drone cells.  The drones are males.  The males do two things:  They eat and they breed with the queens.  During winter time, the bees don't like the drones eating, so they kill them.  It is a brutal, woman-dominated society.  The drones fly up to the "drone zone" which is approximately 300 feet in the air and meet up with queens and get romantic.  The appearance of drone cells tell you that spring is on the way and love will be in the air.

This frame has a bit more capped honey on the top and both corners.  Honey is heavy.  

This frame is almost completely capped honey.  The comb is capped with wax.

While in both the Jeff Davis and Allen boxes, the queens in each were located.  If you look to the end of the finger, you can see one of the queens.  Here body is a little longer and redder and she has a black, shiny dot on her back.

Since the queens were located in both of the deeps, we added another deep on top to allow for growth and put a queen excluder between the second deep and the super on top of it.  That will keep the queen from going up.  The brood that hatches out of the top will mature and the bees will clean out those cells and fill the supers with honey.  (That's the plan, anyway.)

The bricks on top of the boxes tell a story.  If they are laid long ways like they are, it means that we have seen evidence of a laying queen.  In the next month, we'll be setting swarm traps in the yard AND we'll also attempt to make a split out of each box.  

What that means is you remove a frame of brood, a frame of pollen and honey and put it in another box.  The bees will immediately determine that there is not a queen in the box and will "make a queen."  Once she hatches, makes her virgin flight and is bred in the drone zone, she'll return to begin laying.  At that point the split is successful and you've taken one box of bees and turned them into two.  We can't wait to try it out.  We've successfully caught swarms, but have never made a split.  We'll report back when we try it.

Seafood With My Sweetheart

On Wednesday it was Valentine's Day.  We don't normally go crazy on holidays.  We're sort of simple people.  After Prayer Meeting we came back home and did the evening chores.  That doggone mink has really put a cramp in our style.  Each night we have to be home at nightfall to lock all the hens in their 'safe house' enclosure.  If we don't, we'll find the remaining flock maimed and killed.  So once the hens were safely tucked in bed, we jumped in the vehicle and drove to Basile, Louisiana.

Basile is the home of DI's Restaurant.  Tricia thought that might be a nice place to go celebrate.  To top it off, Wednesday nights they have live Cajun music and one of our friends plays guitar in the band.  We figured it would be fun to go listen to some good music, support our friend and eat some top notch food.  DI's in in the middle of absolute nowhere, but the food is always off the charts.  When we drove up, the parking lot was chockerblock full.  The south end of the parking lot touches a grass air strip.  We looked at a plane parked on the airstrip.  Someone had flown in for a meal.  Wow!

We had to put our name on a waiting list as it was packed, but we sat inside.  Tricia peeked through the window and saw our friend, Warren, playing in the band.  They were playing "The Back Door" by D.L. Menard.  Soon they called our name and we were seated right near the band.  They brought our appetizer of fried green beans.  Yum!  We split the extra large seafood platter.  Delicious!

It was a simple Valentine's celebration, but an enjoyable one.

The Garden of Eatin'

Strolling through the garden as the fall crops are slowly getting picked to make room for the spring crops that will soon be planted.  Some of the crops have flowered and I'm waiting for them to go to seed to save seed for next year's crop.  Here you'll see a few bok choy plants than are all bloomed out.

The honeybees have located the plants and are doing their best to visit.  If you look closely at the bee's legs, you can see that they are full of yellow pollen that she's getting ready to bring back to the hive.

The Russian Red Kale towers over the Green Kale and there's some carrots in the background that REALLY need to be harvested.  Perhaps tomorrow?

The morning dew was all beaded up on the leaves of the kale.  Beautiful!

As we continue with the cole crops, here is a nice cauliflower.  We've been picking a bunch of them.

And here is a Jersey Wakefield cabbage.  This variety of cabbage makes a football-shaped head rather than a round one.  Coleslaw for lunch today.  

From the 'alien vegetables' department, here is a purple kohlrabi.  This has turned out to be one of Tricia's favorite vegetables.

Here's a gourmet French heirloom variety of spinach we grow called Monstrueux de viroflay.  As soon as it warms the bugs start getting to the leaves, so we pick them fast.

This is a second variety of spinach we grow.  Galilee Spinach from Israel.  We like them both.  We'll be letting these go to seed to save seeds once more.

A basket of cauliflower, broccoli and spinach.

This time of year, we oven roast fresh picked vegetables on a stoneware tray in olive oil and minced garlic.

We finished this entire casserole dish off between the two of us.

Sautéed spinach with grated parmesan.  A dish to make Popeye drool.

Have a nice weekend, everyone!

An Eye Examination

The first two weeks of February usually marks my goal of having potatoes in the ground.  Tricia went by our local feed store to inquire on seed potatoes.  We usually purchase 15 pound of Red LaSoda potatoes to plant.  The feed store employee said, "Would you look at this?"  He pointed to a notebook of names of people interested in purchasing seed potatoes and the corresponding amount of pounds.  He flipped the page to reveal the other side.  "This has never happened before," he remarked.  People feel like something is up.  More and more people are growing their own food.  The clerk told Tricia that there is no guarantee that we'll get what we order as the supplier sometimes cuts back the order.

Well, fortunately, we got a call.  "Your seed potatoes are in!"  Tricia saddled the mule and laboriously traveled into town.  Okay, I exaggerated for effect.  She actually got in her vehicle and made the 5 minute trip to Parsley's Feed Store in Jennings and picked up a box labeled as such:

I opened the box and admired a fine looking bunch of potatoes.  I immediately noticed that I was greeted by a number of eyes staring right back at me.

Most of the eyes were only a quarter of an inch in length, but that's better than some years.  They'll be easy to see for cutting.

I pulled out a sharp old Buck knife that I inherited when my uncle Don passed away.  It came in a nice leather scabbard.  As I was about to get to work, I paused and thought of  Don.  What a great guy he was!  My uncle Don kept a sharp edge on his knives and that was about to make my job a bit easier.

The job was to cut up the seed potatoes.  Rule of thumb I use, although it depends upon size, is to quarter the potatoes ensuring that there is at least one eye on each quarter chunk.  I originally intended to count the chunks of seed potato.  However, I'm easily distracted and lost count and didn't have the discipline or motivation to go back through and recount.

Normally I leave the cut potatoes to cure or scab over on the back patio or in our closet indoors on a high shelf.  However, a wise gardener from my church shared that he puts them up in the rafters in his attic.  He finds that's the hottest place and allows the eyes to grow and the cuts on the potato to scab over.  I figured I would listen to wisdom.  Here are our potatoes in a box in our attic.

I'm glad I listened.  In a mere 3 day period, the potatoes were scabbed over and the eyes had grown.  February 13th!  Time to plant!  Sometimes when I plant, the Mardi Gras floats pass by our house during planting, blaring french music.  This year that happened a day earlier.  I grabbed a can of composted chicken litter, a bucket of composted wood chips, and a digging knife and headed out to the garden in the side yard.

With amendments of chopped up leaves and composted wood chips each year, the soil just continues to improve year over year.  It's not compacted at all anymore and teems with earthworms.  It easily yields to the knife's penetration to a four inch depth.  At the bottom of the hole, I add a pinch of chicken litter, add a bit of fresh topsoil, drop the seed potato in, cover with composted wood chips and cover with topsoil.  Potatoes are planted four inches deep and 12 inches apart.

Tricia soon came out to help and it went faster.  I'd dig and add chicken litter.  Tricia would do the other steps.  Efficiency!  I love it. 

We were done in no time at all.  We now have a 45 foot row planted four deep.  It'll take a little while for the potatoes to break the ground, but I'll be checking regularly.

Nothing like digging in fresh soil on a beautiful early-spring day.  Nothing like anticipating the harvest of fresh potatoes that'll be dug in May.  Nothing quite like eating them, either!