LuLu's Time is Approaching

When the cows go into heat, we put them in the same pen as the bull.  The bull, for safety reasons, is kept in a separate pen that we call the 'bull pen.'  We've communicated that while Jersey cows are the most docile, gentle creatures, Jersey bulls are a different story.  As they get breeding age, they become mean.  Jersey bulls kill more farmers and ranchers than other breeds.  We keep a wary eye on Nicky the bull for that reason, not wanting to add to the statistics.  Once bred, we move the cows back into the general population and mark down the days until calving.

Cows gestate at the same time period as humans - nine months until labor and delivery.  LuLu's due date is July 12th.  We've been keeping our eye on her.  The last time she delivered Nicky a couple of years ago, it was in July - the peak of the summer heat and it was in the middle of a drought.  I moved the water sprinkler out to the pasture to keep some bermuda grass alive for her to eat on.  She was in much distress.  We supplemented with sweet potato vines and molasses.  She made it, but we were worried for a while.

LuLu is in good conditioning, but she's hot.  She breathes heavy and lays around in the shade and in the mud.  Hopefully this will be an easier calving for her.  We're hoping for a little heifer this time as Rosie is too old to breed and Elsie looks like she's not going to be able to get pregnant.  It's a shame about Elsie because she is a beautiful A2/A2 heifer, but we're not going to keep her on pasture to just eat grass.  LuLu, for her first calf, didn't have a very big bag and was not a big milk producer, making only enough for our family (and her calf).  We're counting on this second time, that she'll be a bigger producer.

If you look at LuLu's back end, you can see that she's "bagging up."  Her udder is filling with colostrum and later, milk.  This is a sure sign that things are progressing and her time is getting close.

One day soon, we'll see her in labor and we'll have a new little one on the farm.

For now, we watch and wait.  In the meantime, I've got to get the barn roof patched.  Last year a storm put a big limb on top of the barn that punctured the tin roof, allowing rain to drip through directly over the milking stall within, filling the eating trough with rainwater.  We can't have that going on, but looking back, it would have been better to fix this issue in cooler weather.  I'll be up there like a cat on a hot tin roof, patching the hole.  We'll keep you posted on LuLu's calving and the 'gender reveal party' for her little one.

Sweet, Creamy, Chocolate (Goat) Milk

Isn't cold chocolate milk about the best thing?  It's so rich and creamy and sweet and chocolatey!  I just love it.  Early in our marriage I drank Borden chocolate milk like I was a school child, but haven't had any recently as I switched to coffee as a morning beverage.  Right now our cows aren't in milk.  It won't be but a couple of weeks and LuLu should be calving, so we will have plenty of fresh cow milk from here on out.  With no cow milk for a while from our girls, we've been making do with goat milk, drinking about a quart of goat kefir smoothie with raspberries, honey and cinnamon every morning.  Goat kefir is great, as is goat cheese and goat milk caramel.  I'm not a big fan of drinking straight goat milk.  It's not bad, it just has a different taste that I can't quite seem to get accustomed to. 

To mix things up and make things interesting, Tricia decided to make some chocolate goat milk, and let me tell you - it's delicious.  Velvety smooth.  Here's a quart of it right here, freshly made for consumption:

The recipe is simple and easy to make.  You'll need the following:

• 1 quart raw goat milk (of course you can swap out cow milk)
• 2 Tablespoons maple syrup
• 2 Tablespoons cocoa
• 1 egg yolk
• 1 pinch salt

Beat the yolk and pour everything in the quart jar with the milk.  Put the lid on top and shake vigorously.  Chill the chocolate milk to the desired coldness.  Make sure you shake one more time as the cocoa likes to settle on the bottom.  

The only thing left to do is drink it.  Bottoms up.  Delicious!  Nothing left but a chocolate bubble in the bottom of the mason jar.

We'll be making more of this for sure!  

Like a Pig in a Mudhole

Our Jersey cows hail from the Isle of Jersey in the British Isles.  They don't deal well with the summer heat and humidity in South Louisiana.  Just for grins, I looked up the average summer temperature on the Isle of Jersey.  Daily highs in July is 71 degrees Fahrenheit and lows are 59 degrees.  I guess that may be the temperature that their genetics are programmed for and why they struggle so in this tropical environment.  I mean, I feel sorry for them.

Here is LuLu seeking shade under the barn, praying for a breeze to blow in order to bring a respite from the heat.  On days like this, they remain inactive during the day and you'll see them at night grazing under the moonlight after the sun has tucked itself below the horizon.

Here is old Rosie.  Rosie is 17 years old!  She's playing a game the animals all play.  They seek out small areas or pockets of shade under the live oak trees, patiently waiting for the shadows to grow as the sun lazily works its way across the sky.  Over the course of the day, they know just where to be to enjoy the shade found on the eastern and western sides of the pasture, depending upon the time of day.  

Finally, here's Elsie.  Elsie has hit the jackpot.  Underneath a small live oak tree I raise from an acorn I picked up in Tallahassee, Florida, she's enjoying a little patch of shade, but the shadow made by the tree comes with a bonus - mud!  In the hot, baking sun, laying in a mudhole cools the old girl off.  She gets absolutely filthy.  It is fortunate that she's not in milk right now or we'd have to give her a bath before milking time.

In the summer, they just enjoy rolling in the mud.  In addition to cooling them down, I'm sure it also helps with the mosquitoes, flies, horse flies and deer flies.  This is the last little mudhole they have left, but have no fear, more rain is expected for the next several days and that will ensure additional mud holes in which to lay in just like a pig.

I look at Elsie as she pants in the heat, with drool running down her nose.  I won't even tell her that she's got all of July, August and September to go before she can expect any sort of a cool down.

She doesn't know where her ancestors are from, but I bet if she had the opportunity, she'd rather be living on the Isle of Jersey than in her home on Our Maker's Acres Family Farm in Jennings, Louisiana.  

Two Inside Projects Done

We've got lots we're working on in the barn to prepare things for LuLu's upcoming labor and delivery.  She's one of our Jersey cows that will be calving in July.  While we wait on her to calve, we figured we'd knock out some inside projects.  We had moved a big bookcase/cabinet from the east wall of the den to the west wall.  Tricia was tiring of the "orangish" look of all the wood in the den and wanted to change things up and paint it.  

I offered two objections as soon as this project was proposed.  First, it will make a heck of a mess, because we'd have to sand the entire thing.  This would send dust from the polyurethane and wood all over everything in the den.  Secondly, what if you don't like it?  It's hard to move from wood to paint, but next to impossible to move back from paint to wood if you don't like it.  My objections were overruled.

Time to get busy.  We emptied the piece of furniture, taking pictures of how everything was positioned so we'd know how to reload it once painted.  We used painter's tape to tape off the walls.  We sanded and sanded and then used the shop-vac to clean.  Then we primed the bookcase.  Of course we laid down makeshift drop cloths to protect the floors.

Tricia selected a pretty blue color and we put two coats on, let it dry and then reloaded the bookcase.  Here's the finished product.  Tricia said it was a little too blue, but had heard that when you make changes, give it three weeks to grow on you before making any decisions to change it.  Fortunately, three weeks passed and the blue "grew on her."  Oh happy day.

The next project was in the kitchen.  Our home was built 26 years ago.  The balusters on the staircase were wooden white balusters.  Even though they don't look bad, it was time for a change.

We purchased 38 cast iron balusters from a local hardware store.  The plan was to alternate a baluster with a twist followed by one with a double twist.  Some 3/4 inch holes had to be drilled with a paddle bit up above in the railing and down below on the stairs.  The balusters were 44 inches long, so each one had to be measured and shimmied into place.  Each measurement differed and numerous cuts had to be made.  Before putting them in place, I applied some epoxy in the holes above and beneath.  I had to protect the balusters with blue painters tape and taped the foot up until the epoxy had cured.  Then I'd drop them and tighten in place with a set screw.  And the job commenced...

In a little bit, we had the first portion done and the balusters on the landing removed.  I borrowed an oscillating tool from Benjamin to cut out the old wooden balusters.

It didn't take as long as I thought before the job was done.  I get overwhelmed by jobs like this because I'm not a carpenter and don't want to mess anything up.  But you can learn how to do most anything on YouTube, and I watched several instructional videos before deciding that I could do it.  Besides, if and when I mess it up, it can be fixed by a professional.

Overall, we're pleased with the new look.  I should have done it sooner!

We can mark two more projects off the list.  Next we'll shift to an outside task.  We need to get the barn ready.  Our milking parlor, specifically, needs some repairs and cleanup.

An Update to our Organic Homemade Fire Ant Killer

Last week we introduced you to Our Garden Experiment in which we poisoned some ants in our garden using the method discussed in the post in the hyperlink above.  It uses orange oil that we extracted from orange peels that we ate.  The post from last week tells you how we made it.  I wanted to give it a couple days and then check to see if the fire ant mound was affected.

Take a peek at the photo at the top.  The mound was destroyed, decimated, obliterated, wrecked.  There was not a single fire ant alive anywhere near it!  This is great news.  Now I want to repeat it at least one more time before I get my hopes up.  There's an outside chance that the ants simply don't like the fragrance of oranges and packed up everything in tiny suitcases and moved.  Except, that doesn't explain the pile of dead ants on top of the mound.  I scraped my foot across the top to see if the ants were dormant on top and alive underneath, but there was no sign of life at all.

If this is indeed indicative of the efficacy of our homemade ant killer, Tricia and I already discussed saving every peel from every orange we eat and making gallons of it to use in the garden.  It looks like we'll have a nice navel orange crop this year, so we'll have a big inventory of peels to save and get the oil out of them to use in our fire ant killing concoction.

I know it's a short post tonight.  More to come tomorrow!

Where Does My Help Come From?

 

Image Credit

Today my Mom was admitted into the hospital.  She has been having some health struggles and had a procedure done in New Orleans to stop a bleed in her stomach.  In her checkup this morning, she had a fever and was dehydrated and weak, so she was admitted for care in the local hospital.  They are administering antibiotics and giving her IV fluids.  The doctors and nurses have been doing a great job caring for Mom.  Friends came to visit her and we encircled her bed, held hands and offered prayers to Almighty God.  I also ask for your prayers for her recovery and complete restoration of her health.

My two favorite Psalms are Psalm 91 and Psalm 121.  Those have been on our hearts throughout many trials and speak of our faithful God who is with us in our times of need.  We don't walk alone.

Psalm 121 KJV

1 I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.
2 My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth.
3 He will not suffer thy foot to be moved: he that keepeth thee will not slumber.
4 Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep.
5 The Lord is thy keeper: the Lord is thy shade upon thy right hand.
6 The sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night.
7 The Lord shall preserve thee from all evil: he shall preserve thy soul.
8 The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth, and even for evermore.

We know our help comes from the Lord!  May His Name be praised!

A Garden Experiment

Over the years we've built up our garden with loads of compost and decomposed wood chips, leaves and other organic matter.  As time passed the level of the garden rose with all the amendments to be six inches or so above the surrounding pasture.  That's a good thing as the garden isn't inundated with rain water that stands on the soil and floods the crops.  There's a downside to that as well.  After rains, fire ants seek high ground.  That means we get fire ant mounds in the garden.

In the yard, I mix up a batch of bifen and spray the mounds, killing the colony stone cold dead.  In the garden, we don't want to introduce chemicals and poisons for the obvious reason - all that works its way into the food we eat, and we don't want that.  We have an ant killer that we make with orange oil and some other ingredients.  It works!  It safely kills the ants without killing us.  The orange oil is expensive, however.

Can we make our own organic fire ant killer?  We'll see.  We ate a bunch of oranges and saved the peels.  We put them in a gallon container and filled with water and allowed to soak for a week.  Then we strained off the peels.  The remaining slurry smells great!  Just like orange juice.  Hopefully the orange oil leached out and remained in the water.  To this liquid we added 3 ounces of dish soap.  Here is the finished product:

A cardboard box had blown off the garden sink into the garden.  When I lifted it up, it was full of fire ants!

The ants were angry.  They boiled with rage.  Here, friends, is our first test subject for our fire ant killing concoction.

I poured the solution down the middle of the mound, making sure it flowed straight down to where the queen was.  Then I slowly poured all around the mound, covering the ants and dirt of the mound until it was an orange-smelling mud hole.

So now we wait to see if our concoction is effective.

I'll keep you posted in a few days if we had success.  If so, we'll continue to make our own fire ant killer.  If we fail, I'll use the expensive orange oil solution.

Growing Pains

We are just a few weeks away from pulling spring honey from our six bee boxes.  Two of the six are relatively new hives made from successful splits from the existing colonies, so they won't make a tremendous amount of honey.  We're getting all our ducks in a row, preparing for that day that we extract the honey from the frames.

Have I ever told you that beekeeping is an expensive hobby?  It is!  Even though I've made a lot of the bottom boards and telescoping tops, the other equipment you must buy is quite an investment.  Tricia and I live frugally and like to have this hobby support itself financially, so we've waited until we're 'in the black' before additional investments.

One pricey thing you need is the extractor.  When you cut the wax cap off of your frames of honey, you put the frames in an extractor and spin the frames.  Centrifugal force throws the honey out of the frames and onto the walls of the pot.  The honey drips down and as it fills, you open the honey gate to allow the honey to fill 5 gallon buckets.  From there, you bottle the honey up in pint jars for sale.

Up to this point we've been borrowing an extractor.  Well, a nice guy in our bee club is upgrading to a bigger extractor.  He told us to use his old extractor for as long as we want to use it!  We brought him a check to buy it, but he would not accept it.  What a guy!  Here is the machine:

Here's a problem you run into with beekeeping.  Are you keeping bees or are they keeping you?  Good question, because as you get all the boxes and frames, suits and smokers, hive tools, uncapping tanks, filters and jars, you quickly run out of space in which to store all the bee paraphenalia.

So we are looking forward to (perhaps next year once we sell all the 2026 honey) buying a honey house.  We've extracted honey in our garage and had no problem, but it would be nice to have a little storage building to serve as our honey house where we'll store all of the bee equipment as well as extract and bottle the honey we collect.

Here is one of two styles we're looking at.  I like this one.  Double doors, windows, solid flooring.

Here's the one I think I like a little better.  Same basic concept, but with a gambrel roof.  

A gambrel roof adds the benefit of having more storage area up on a loft.  There's storage up on one side:

And more storage up in the loft on the opposite side.

This would be ideal for us.  Now we're just shopping and probably won't make a purchase until next year some time.  These sheds are well built and they are expensive!

When I was a young boy, mom would take us shopping for clothes at a department store in Lake Charles called "The White House."  From time to time Dad would accompany us on these dreaded trips.  Mom would pick out a new outfit for us to wear to church on Easter Sunday and Dad would exclaim, "Good gravy, Kay!  Do you know how many barrels of rice I have to sell to buy that shirt?!"  As we age, we turn in to our parents, I'm finding.  

As I look at the price tag on this shed, I think, "Do you know how many pint jars of honey we'd have to sell to pay for this shed?!"  The answer is almost 412 jars.

Two Things From the Garden

Lots of rain outside and a big project we were working on inside that maybe we'll share with you a little later this week.  It's the first day of summer, and we haven't really talked a whole lot about the garden this year.  We've harvested so many yellow squash and zucchini that we were having trouble eating it and giving it all away.  We cooked and froze a lot of it in casserole dishes that we enjoy.  It'll make easy meals to just warm up.

The cucumbers have been coming in and we're eating cucumber and tomato salad every day.  The corn has come in and we have blanched and frozen lots of it as well as eaten corn on the cob.  So Sweet!  For Father's Day today we had corn maque choux - a favorite side dish for me!  Snap Beans.  What a crop of snap beans we had this year.  With the heat they were just about finished so I harvested one more time and then clipped the plants off at ground level and fed to the bull.  He liked 'em.

The tomatoes are still coming in.  I've been picking them when they are just blushed a little and let them ripen indoors.  The stink bugs and leaf-footed bugs are thwarted by this and don't have a chance to severely damage the tomatoes.  In the next couple of days, we'll likely put up some jars of salsa as we have a number of baskets of tomatoes building up in our ice box.

I planted the same old varieties we always plant: Black Krim, Cherokee Purple, Creole, Chadwick Cherry, Black Vernissage, Rainbow, Pink Brandywine, Campari and several others.

The cherry tomatoes are prolific producers and we always freeze great big bags of these that we cook with all year long.  They just keep coming in.  Pretty soon, though, the tomatoes will play out.  I'll take a short break and then plant more for the fall crop of tomatoes.

I always make the comment that I like to grow things that we can eat; however, since we've gotten into beekeeping, I've found myself planting flowers in the garden in the side yard near the six boxes of bees.  Just to the east of the rows of Ozark Razorback Peas and Purple Hull Peas, we have a row of mixed zinnias.  They are pretty, I must say.  Tricia picked a bouquet and made a nice centerpiece on the dinner table.

The zinnias are attracting the honeybees, but they aren't the only ones attracted to the vibrant colors!

What a nice papillon!

Making Beeswax Bread Bags

We go through a lot of sourdough bread. Tricia makes 2 big loaves every other week in addition to bagels, po boy buns and hamburger buns.  The loaves are kept beneath a cake dome, but the bread doesn't stay soft for long and starts getting stale and even begins to mold before we can finish it.  Tricia began looking for a solution and found one - Beeswax Bread bags!  She ordered some organic cotton fabric from Azure Standard and cut the fabric as she needed.

She began to sew the pieces of fabric into the shape of a bag.

These bags will have a drawstring on top for sealing up the bread and keeping the loaves airtight and fresh.

The next thing needed is beeswax.  Fortunately, each time we extract honey, we save all of the cappings and render the beeswax.  We end up with big disks of beeswax.  We make lip balm (chapstick or carmex) by adding essential oils (eucalyptus and peppermint) to the beeswax and castor oil.

But back to our beeswax bread bag project - the beeswax is melted in a crock pot.

The melted beeswax is poured over the cotton bread bags.

You must work fast as the beeswax cools and hardens quickly.

You want to make sure the entire bag is coated on both sides, so a bread-making tool is used to spread the beeswax on the entire surface area.

Once the bag is coated with beeswax, it goes into the oven at 250 degrees F for 10 minutes.  The oven is used as the heat evens out the wax and gets the edges coated.

We allow the bag to hang and dry for a bit.

And now for the test.  A big fresh loaf of sour dough bread goes into the bag for safekeeping.

The drawstring is pulled tight and the bread is now sealed up - better than Saranwrap.

Now we'll test things out and see if this keeps the bread fresher for longer.  Will it stop the bread from getting hard and going stale and molding?  We will soon know.

The Tail-end of our Mulch Inventory

We've talked at length before about Back to Eden Gardening where we use wood chips (4 inch layer) in the garden.  I won't bore you again with the details, but by doing this, you never need to till.  You hardly ever need to water.  You hardly ever need to weed the garden.  It makes gardening so easy.  Additionally, the chips decompose and become topsoil.  Each year you add another 4 inch layer and let nature take care of itself.

I don't even want to speculate as to how many loads of mulch we've gotten delivered to the house for free by right-of-way cleaning crews eager for a place to drop their loads of wood chips.  I stopped by a crew I saw working about 5 miles down the road the other day and left our address and contact information.  I've not heard back from them.  It is a new crew out of Texas that must've won the contract.  

We need more chips!  We are on our last pile and there's a reason we saved this one for last.  Normally the wood chips heat up and decompose quickly.  This last pile did not.  The reason for this is that it is largely made up of pine straw.  Pine straw is coated with a shiny, wax-like layer that contains high amounts of lignin.  This makes it resistant to decay, bacteria and fungi.  That's kind of counter-productive to our goal of mulch in the garden.

But we found a use for it!  The walkways/borders on either side of the garden have a dual purpose.  In addition to being walkways we use, they serve as a border or protective barrier for what's outside the garden.  That would be grasses and weeds, namely bermuda grass, bahai, and nutsedge.  These grasses are persistent, relentless and determined and require constant effort to keep them from encroaching into the garden.  You can see some of the grass on the eastern edge of the garden.  It so desires to get into the garden.

The grasses had invaded, filling half of the walkway with grass that we had mulched a couple of years ago.  That ended yesterday.  I removed all the weeds from the garden path on the interior eastern side of the garden and used a wagon and pitchfork to unload a 5 inch layer all the way down.  It's so nice and clean now - free of grass!

I did the same thing on the western edge of the garden.  It is so clean and in order now.

But it will require vigilance.  Those grasses send out rhizomes that climb through the fence and try to get a foothold in the garden and creep forward.  Someone has to guard the wall.  Almost like Colonel Nathan Jessup in "A few good men" in calling the Code Red, ha ha.  We'll keep our eyes on any encroachment and put more mulch on top.