We had a BERRY good day

The boys and I made plans to drive Russ' truck to Oberlin to pick up the cattle trailer.  We need it to bring Stryker to the sale.  I'll talk more about that escapade tomorrow.  We loaded up fishing poles, drinking water, and a sack of fresh dug potatoes to bring to my Mom and Dad and we hit the road.

We arrived in Oberlin at the farm in about 30 minutes and Mom & Dad were there with five of my sister's six boys.  I got out a sling blade and cleaned up an area on the bank of the pond and the boys fished for a while.  They didn't get any bites, but had a great time with a BB gun shooting snakes and turtles swimming in the pond.  I remember doing the exact same thing 35 years ago or so in the same exact spot.  Whoa, is my math right?  I think it is - unfortunately.

After the boys were out of BBs, we got a bucket and all went blackberry picking.  What a sight to see.  Seven boys picking blackberries, depositing most of them in little mouths stained black from eating them.  The few that weren't eaten on the spot were collected in a Sonic cup, hands, and baseball caps turned upside down and then were poured into the community bucket, which happened to be a cat food container.  (We make do with what we've got.)


Blackberries

When I was a little boy we foraged around the same fence rows picking blackberries.  The blackberry bushes have stickers that will tear you up if you're not careful.  You also have to keep a watchful eye out for wasp nests and snakes.  I remember getting stung by wasps and there was a man named Joe that worked for my dad that would spit out his chewing tobacco and put it on the wasp sting as a remedy to take away the stinging sensation.  I'm assuming the nicotine acts as a local anesthetic, maybe?  It seemed to work.  Anyway, the reward of the bounty of blackberry picking was that my great grandmother would make delicious blackberry pies with sweetdough crusts.  She'd make a 'white sauce' to pour on top of the pie that was absolutely delicious.  Any blackberries left over would be frozen, except my great grandmother didn't us ziploc bags.  She would freeze them in Evangeline Maid bread bags.

One other thing about this treat that I recall is that me, my brother, my sister and my cousin would all eat a slice or two of homemade blackberry pie with white sauce and chase it down with a cold drink.  My grandmother always had "Shasta" drinks in assorted flavors like lemon-lime, cola, grape, orange, black cherry, ginger ale, root beer, or my favorite, strawberry - we called it Pop Rouge.  On a hot summer day the drinks would be sooo cold because of these aluminum drinking glasses that my grandmother had:

You would drop a few ice cubes in those bad boys and they would make the drink so cold that your lips would practically stick to the aluminum cup when you tried to drink from it.  Did any of you have these cups?  Man I remember those things.  After eating a piece of pie and drinking an ice cold Pop Rouge, you were good to go again and could go back outside and run around until you were good and sweaty and tired. We didn't need 'Energy Drinks' back in those days.  Well, I guess the sugar in the sodas effectively gave us the same rush.  

Here is a good shot of my sister's little boy (We'll call him Huck Finn) after a big day of blackberry picking and eating.  He was a very dedicated picker and eater.  If he's smile, his purple tongue would attest to this.



Huck Finn with a bucket of fresh picked blackberries

We got the cattle trailer home and as I was walking in I saw a red ripe strawberry on one of our strawberry plants.  I picked it to bring inside to wash it and eat it.

Strawberry

Good thing I turned it over before popping it in my mouth.  A slug was enjoying my strawberry.



Someone beat me to it!

You gotta act fast around here.  If you aren't on your toes, there are numerous birds, slugs, bugs and other critters that will gladly eat the fruits of your labors.


Where's that salt shaker?

All in all though, it was a BERRY good day!

Extra small egg

Gathering eggs is a fun thing to me.  It is Russ' daily job which will be assumed by Benjamin when Russ moves off to college.  Although fun to me, it probably isn't Russ' idea of entertainment.  I see it sort of like fishing.  You don't know how many you'll get, where you'll find them, or how many you'll get on any particular day.

A half dozen in one nest

We collect them in a wire basket as that lessens the likelihood of breakage, but let's be honest, we're dealing with eggs.  We experience breakage from time to time.  Sometimes we fall and break them, but most often the broken eggs are caused by nosy animals knocking over the basket or head-butting the basket. 


Egg Basket

Ever so often, we come across some oddities while collecting eggs.  The other day I showed you a soft egg that was weird.  Today we have another odd egg - a very, very small egg!  This happens ever so often.  The photo below shows the tiny chicken egg right next to a normal-sized egg, so you can see the scale.  The small egg is maybe an inch and an eighth long.

You'll notice it is an Aracauna egg.  These are the hens that lay blue and green eggs.  The small egg, however, has nothing to do with the breed as we've collected plenty of small brown eggs layed by Barred Rock hens and Rhode Island Red hens. 


Very small egg

Here is another one that I picked up on another day from a brown-egg layer that I've placed a penny beside it for perspective.  These are strange little boogers!


Little bitty egg

So what causes this?  Inquiring minds want to know!

This is actually called a "Fart Egg."  Not appetizing, I know.  They are also known as a "wind egg" if you want to be nice and proper.  Sometimes they are a pullet's first effort at egg laying.  In mature hens, they are caused when a piece of reproductive tissue inside the hen (the lining of the oviduct) breaks off and fools the glands that produce eggs.  The glands think that the mass of tissue is a yolk and starts forming an egg around it, wrapping it in albumen, membrane and shell!

The real question is, "Is a fart egg safe to eat?"  I think if you don't mind eating something called a fart egg, it is fine.  We eat ours.  There will be no yolk in the egg so it will be only the egg white.  These would be helpful in a recipe that calls for just egg whites.  You could save up a bunch of 'fart eggs' and save all kinds of time spent separating out the yolk!

Angry at the Birds

On the first day of Summer
My true love gave to me,
A blackbird in my orange tree.

This is not a good thing.  As I was out doing the chores in the late afternoon, I observed a commotion within the branches of one of our navel orange trees.  As I walked over, three large blackbirds exited the tree.  As I inspected the golf ball sized fruit that is currently growing, this is what I see:


Scarred Fruit

As I searched on the Internet for why the blackbirds are doing this, I found an article saying that blackbirds have developed a taste for orange rind.  They will keep scratching and pecking at the fruit until the fruit drops from the tree.  What I've noticed from past years, is that even if the fruit doesn't fall, the fruit on the inside closest to the scarring is damaged, dry and inedible.  That's for the birds...literally.
  

I didn't ask for grated orange rind.

The only remedy for the problem, according to the article, is to purchase netting and place it over the tree to keep the birds out.  I do have some netting, but I'm calculating whether or not it is too late to put it out.  It seems like the damage is already done.  The funny thing is that the article says netting is the "ONLY" control mechanism for this problem.  Not true.  I can think of another:

My neighbor, before he passed away, used to shoot the blackbirds left and right.  Blackbird carcasses littered both my yard and his.  In fact, I got tired of picking them up and would simply mow over them to "compost" them into my lawn.  Black feathers would fly out from beneath my lawnmower on a fairly consistent basis.  The other neighbor, however, is a bird lover and would not like it when Mr. Bill shot at them.  Sometimes after I heard Mr. Bill's shotgun go off, I could hear a scream from the other neighbor.  I may employ Mr. Bill's tactics and get my 12 gauge out, but have you seen the price and availability of ammunition lately?  It might be cheaper to hang a couple of these from the citrus trees:



Rubber Snakes

It seems like that may scare the blackbirds and might be worth a shot.  If it didn't work, it wouldn't be a total loss.  I'm thinking I could use them to play jokes on my wife!  :) 

Caught red-handed!

You can see that the bird left incriminating evidence on the leaf beneath the scarred fruit.  It doesn't take master sleuth-work or CSI Miami to prove without reasonable doubt that the blackbirds are responsible for the damage.  One way or another, I'll bring the perpetrators to justice and try to salvage the orange harvest.

If you let continue to let the birds have free reign, they may eventually try this:  (Run for your lives, kids!)


Alfred Hitchcock's "THE BIRDS"



Flowers in the bed - Tomatoes turning red

Around the base of our live oak trees and intermixed with lariope, Tricia plants caladium bulbs each year.  She digs them up after they are done and stores the caladium bulbs over the winter in a pair of old panty hose that she hangs in the garage and then pulls the bulbs out and replants in early Spring.  They are looking nice right now.  The leaves look like a big heart.  In fact, I read that some people call them Heart of Jesus.



Caladiums

In the flower beds around the house, she also has planted some agapanthus.  They are also known as Lily of the Nile although according to Wikipedia they aren't a lily and they are indigenous to South Africa.  Maybe Lily of the Nile is easier to say than Agapanthus?  The name Agapanthus is from greek words, Agape "love" and Anthos "flower".  So the Love Flower.  We do love the color of them. 

Agapanthus - Lily of the Nile

It is not uncommon to see bees and butterflies around these flowers.

Now to some photographs of some items that you can eat!  The tomatoes are loading up and soon we'll have plenty to eat, freeze and can.  This is a mystery variety that grew volunteer in the garden in the late fall.  I dug it up and brought it in the garage and was able to get it to live over the winter.


Mystery tomato variety

After looking at them closely, I'm going to venture a guess that they are Money Maker variety tomatoes, one of the heirloom varieties we grow.  They are a prolific producer of nice, but smaller sized tomatoes.

Money Maker Tomatoes?

I like the color in this picture.  You can also see the concrete reinforcement fencing that I'm trellising these on.  The tomatoes are a vivid bright green color.  Which reminds me, Russ has a batter mix that he bought his mom to make Fried Green Tomatoes.  We're going to have to try it out.  Impatient, I guess, waiting on them to turn red...


Fried Green Tomatoes, anyone?

But as I brush back some of the foliage, I can see that we won't have to wait long. 

Tomatoes beginning to turn red.

We normally blanch the tomatoes, pull the skins off and freeze a bunch of them whole in gallon Ziploc bags.  I like to make salsa and can a number of jars to last us through the season.  We also can stewed tomatoes and tomato sauce as well as just eating them raw with salt and pepper.  Tricia also makes a Greek tomato salad with feta cheese, black olive, red onion, oregano, olive oil and fresh chopped tomatoes.

I almost forgot one of the things we like to make with them - Pico de Gallo.  In English that translates to Beak of the Rooster.  I have no idea why it is called that, but the dish uses fresh chopped tomatoes, cilantro, onion, jalapeno, and lime juice.  We eat it by the gallon! 

Unfortunately, as you'll see in the photo below, we'll have to buy cilantro to make it.  Our cilantro bolts to flower quickly as the plant is more of a cool weather plant and we can't time the tomatoes and cilantro to ripen at the same time.  We do eat a lot of it during the winter - just wish we had fresh tomatoes to pair them with at that time.


Cilantro plant bolting (flowering)

We don't even need to save cilantro seeds (called coriander) anymore as they come up on their own all throughout the garden every year.  

Ya learn something every day!

Okay, here is another post about harvesting potatoes and this completed the job.  Stick with the post to the end as there is a twist to the story and I learned something that I didn't know.  Saturday morning, I assembled my potato digging crew (Russ & Benjamin) and we dug up the remaining 5 1/2 rows of potatoes.  Most of them were red potatoes, although I did plant half a row of white ones.  The red potatoes produced a better crop.

I dug at the base of the potato plant, Russ pulled the roots, shook the dirt off and pulled the potatoes off, while Benjamin looked around in the loosened soil for potatoes that broke loose from the roots.  We filled bucket after bucket with beautiful potatoes. 

The potato harvest

The job is done!  Here are are the harvesters posing with a shovel in front of the spot formerly occupied by potato plants.  I'll wait for a rain and then plant purple hull peas, butter beans and more green beans in the same spot.

Work is done!

These buckets contain the potato harvest from Saturday.  Benjamin and I dug an additional bucket the previous Saturday and we've been enjoying them.  We especially like homemade hash browns to eat alongside our fresh scrambled eggs.


Look at all the potatoes, Dad!

Here is another view where the harvesters are tilting the buckets to show the yield.  This was probably our best potato harvest ever.  I didn't take the time to weigh them, but it is a lot of spuds.


Loads of potatoes

Here's where it got interesting.  An additional job of Benjamin's was to gather the potato plants and go feed them to the cows.  As he was picking them up he said, "Dad, look, this potato plant has a tomato growing on it!"  That was something I had never seen before.  Odd.


A tomato on a potato plant?

I took it inside and cut it in half and it looks exactly like a cherry tomato that is still green.



What is this thing?

I Googled it and got a hit on a Purdue University horticulture website: http://www.hort.purdue.edu/ext/pottoms.html

In summary, potato plants fruit and these green berries are the fruit!  They look like tomatoes since potatoes and tomatoes are in the nightshade family of plants.  Normally, you don't see them because it usually gets hot quickly.  We've had an unseasonably long and cool Spring (I'm not complaining) and those conditions promote fruiting in potatoes.  You can plant the seeds from the fruit and actually grow potatoes, but it is much easier to grow them by planting the potato where the new plants will sprout from the 'eyes.'

I'm glad that we didn't eat the "tomato-looking thing" on the potato plant.  I learned in the article that potato fruits are likely to be high in solanine, a substance that is toxic to humans, particularly children.  Potato fruits should not be eaten, no matter how much they look like tomatoes!

Ya learn something every day!!

Cool Beans!

We like to grow some strange stuff in the garden sometimes.  This year was no exception.  In an earlier post I showed you how we were planting Chinese Mosaic Long beans.  Well, it is time to harvest a few of them.  True to their name, they are LONG!

Chinese Mosaic Long beans

According to the information I have on them, they are supposed to grow to a length of around 18 inches!  Wow.  They are a pole bean, meaning they vine and climb.  I have a section of concrete reinforcement fencing that they are climbing on and some of the vines are 10 feet tall.  The pod of the beans themselves are a pinkish color.

Chinese Mosaic Long Bean flowers



Pinkish-hued pods

So, we harvested a few of the beans that were ripened.  It was funny to say, "I'm going to go and harvest five beans for supper tonight," but that's what we did.  We also picked some other bean varieties as well.  When we picked them, I wanted to see just how long the beans were to see if they were indeed 18 inches long.



How Long?

They weren't.  They were longer!  18 1/2 inches long, to be exact.
 

The tale of the tape

So I coiled them up in a pot mixed with other varieties of green beans and some new potatoes that we harvested and started them steaming with some butter, salt and pepper.   

Fresh pot of flavor!

All of the beans were very good.  The Chinese Mosaic Long beans lose their color when they cook.  When done, they are green just like the others.  They tasted similar to regular green beans.  I might cut them up next time as Tricia said putting an 18 inch long bean on your plate sort of looks like a long worm.  

A Spiritual Cleansing

If you click on the link below, it will bring you to a short video that I ran across.  I thought it was good.  With each passing day, I grow more and more disenchanted with politicians of either stripe.  It seems as if this world has been turned upside down.  It feels like we've broken loose from our moorings and our ship is drifting out in perilous waters where the rocks are.  Everyone is looking for the captain to steer us back into a safe harbor.  The captain, whatever captain we have at the helm, can't seem to get the ship turned around.  In fact the ship seems to be speeding toward the rocks now.  In whom can we put our trust?  What can we do?  In this video, I think Rand Paul knocks it out of the park.  I also posted the transcript below, if you can't view the video.

Rand Paul says America needs a spiritual cleansing

Senator Rand Paul: “I think it’s important that people know that for the country to get better it needs more than just politicians. Politicians aren’t enough and it needs resurgence through churches, through revivals through a spiritual cleansing of the people."

Senator Rand Paul: “Changing a particular law is not going to make us a better people but that comes from the people themselves.”

Senator Rand Paul: “I don’t want people to think that salvation comes through elected leaders. It doesn’t.”

Senator Rand Paul:  “What’s the number one cause of poverty in America? It’s having kids before you’re married. Can you have a law to prevent that? I don't think any law even if you did have a law couldn't prevent it from happening. We have to convince kids that it's a big huge mistake not only from a religious point of view but from an economic point of view that it's not a good idea to have kids before you're married. The hard part is then people say you’re harsh and you’re against single moms. Well, I’m not against single moms. I just want to talk to them before they become the single mom. I want to talk to them when they’re 17 years old and convince them wait, get married and your life will be better and it’s a better way to do things.”

Senator Rand Paul: "People say you shouldn't talk about moral issues. Well, I think there are moral issues that no law will be able to fix but there's no reason why a political leader can't also have some impact in moral issues that really the law may not be able to fix but maybe by me saying that the marriage unit, the marriage unit, the family unit is an important structure, it's been with us for thousands of years and we shouldn't give up on that."

I think he's onto something.  Politicians aren't going to save us.  They can't.  They are flawed just as we are.  The morass we find ourselves in is not going to be resolved by a politician's agenda or plan.  Our only hope is in Christ and until we remember what our knees are for, humble ourselves and repent, we will continue down this hard road.

If you think about it, there were bad times, crooked politicians, and needy people when Jesus walked the earth.  He didn't tell people to look for government to save them.  Instead He sought to change men's hearts, knowing that true faith, a spiritual cleansing, could do more to revive a people and a nation than any ruler or king.

Thus says the Lord,
“Stand by the ways and see and ask for the ancient paths,
Where the good way is, and walk in it;
And you will find rest for your souls. - Jeremiah 6:16