Meat Birds - 2021

Checking out the deep freeze, we tallied up the count of our frozen chickens in inventory.  There are only six left!  With the supply chain issues and inflation and general craziness in our economy, we don't want to be running out of protein.  So, I made an order from Ideal Poultry in Cameron, Texas for Cornish Cross meat birds.  They are a hatchery that we like to use.  

The price has gone up since the last time we ordered, but what hasn't gone up?  The price per chick was $2.64, not counting the "tax, title, and license."  All in cost was $2.78 per bird.  We ordered 50 baby chicks from them and they shipped out last week, December 8th, to be exact.  Over the next 8 weeks or so we'll be raising the chicks.  At the end of eight weeks, if all is on schedule, they'll weigh 6 pounds and yield a 4 pound carcass.  We'll report their growth each week along with a report of how things are going.

The chicks are shipped by the US Postal Service and when they arrive, we get a call telling us to come pick up the package quickly.  The hatchery guarantees their birds to arrive alive or they'll make them good.  Usually, they'll throw in one or two lagniappe.  We got 51 birds.  After two days, however, one of the chicks looked noticeably smaller than the others.  It was kind of getting pushed around by the others.  I told Tricia that as soon as we got back from church I was going to put it by itself to allow it to get bigger and stronger by itself.  By the time we got back from church at noon, it was too late.  Sad?  Yes, but it's part of the deal.  You lose some sometimes.

I have the chicks under a heat lamp in the garage in a temporary brooder we like to use until we move them out on grass.  You'll notice that the chicks are scattered, pretty much evenly distributed.  That is a good sign that the temperature is right.  If they are too cold, they pile up on one another.  You don't want them to be cold.  They'll expend calories trying to stay warm versus GROW.  Since we're raising them in what is our winter, this will be an important thing to watch.  We have two waterers in the brooder as well as two feeders.  You'll see that the capacity of feeders and waterers grow along with the birds.

One other thing you'll notice in the photo below is the fencing that we have spread across the top of the brooder.  Why do we have that, you ask?  (Scroll below for the answer)

Answer:

Ginger the cat would like a two piece chicken dinner, I'm sure.  Tricia doesn't think she'd kill our chickens.  She trusts Ginger.  I tend to take the position that Ronald Reagan took in the Cold War.  "Trust, but Verify."  So 50 birds are on site.  Let's see how things go.  We'll report back weekly.

Enjoying Fall Colors

It was a very nice day last week.  I came home for lunch and we decided to have coffee outside on the front porch in the rocking chairs.  We sipped our coffee, waved at people as they passed by on the road.  I wish that I could have captured the event on video and zoomed in on it, but I didn't.  So, you'll have to use your imagination.  In the photo below, I captured "Fall" in our neck of the woods.

If you had an eagle eye, you could see that leaves were falling out of the pecan trees.  Lots of leaves.  As the wind continued to blow, a lazy stream of leaves fell slowly, but steadily toward the ground.  Those leaves did their duty all spring, photosynthesizing, providing shade, and now their work was done - almost.

I suggested to the wifey that we walk out and check the mail.  I walked out barefooted.  It was nice to feel the cool earth beneath my feet and feel the crunch of fall leaves under me.  I don't know what it is about Fall, but it is as if you can just look out and tell that there is not as much humidity in the air.  The air is crisp.  The sky is blue.  The sunshine is brilliant.  Life is good.

The leaves were beginning to gather on the ground beneath the trees.  Tricia reminded me of when the kids were little and I'd rake up the leaves in great big piles and the kids would run and jump in them.  It was great fun for them.  Simple things like a pile of leaves or an empty cardboard box can sometimes provide more entertainment that costly gifts.

These leaves won't be raked and bagged up.  Instead, I just mow them.  They compost into the lawn.  That's why I said their work was almost done.  The leaves will fertilize the St. Augustine grass under the trees and hopefully provide some fertility that will yield a good pecan crop again next year.

Right outside the back door is another pecan tree.  It yields bigger pecans than the ones in the front and they are easy to shell.  We used to call pecans like this, "paper shell pecans."  While the trees in the front yard have brown leaves that are falling or mostly fallen, this tree has leaves that are still hanging on the tree and are yellow.

I think it is a beautiful color.  We have friends that just got back from a trip to New England for two months.  They went as far north as Maine and said that they hit the Fall colors at their peak in North Carolina.  This pecan tree right here in south Louisiana ain't so bad, though.

I liked the way the sunlight filtered through the leaves, highlighting the yellow against the blue sky.

But alas, my coffee cup was empty and it was time to go back to work.  Glad I got a chance to see Fall take place, because it doesn't take long.  If you aren't paying attention, this is what the tree will look like in just a skinny minute:

Barren and sad until spring.

It's Fire Pit Season!

I check the weather report and tomorrow, December 9th, the weather prognosticators tell us that we will be knocking on the door of 80 degrees for the high and 70 degrees for the low.  But, on the several cool evenings we've had, we've lit a few fires in our fire pit.  There are few things more relaxing to me than lighting a fire in the fire pit and sit around and watch it burn.  

Sometimes I'll get the fire stoked up too hot and we'll have to scoot the bench back a bit.  Other times the fire will die back a bit and we'll scoot it back up close.  Other than that it's just sitting there, peacefully watching the embers, listening to the coals crackle and pop.  The scent of burning hardwood is nice and the roaring fire takes the chill out of the air.

We're constantly gathering limbs that fall out of the many trees in our yard and stacking them by the fire pit to use as fuel.  Sometimes we'll wait for the wood to turn to red-hot coals and the daylight to turn to dark.

Then we'll swing the grill back over the fire pit and cook something for supper.  On this particular night, we warmed up some leftover homemade soup over the fire.

Maybe it's just me, but it seems like everything cooked outside tastes better!  (Many) more fire pit fires left to come.  With it being 80 degrees tomorrow, we'll likely not light the fire pit up tomorrow, though.

A Quick Pictorial Tour Through the Fall Garden - December 2021

We haven't posted any photos of the garden in a while.  I thought tonight I'd give you a tour.  These photos were taken a week ago, so things have changed a bit since then.  We've had temperatures in the upper 70's so things are really growing!

These is the last thing I planted - Turnips.  We'll eat the greens and feed the turnip roots to the cows, unless I can develop a taste for them.  I love the greens.  Hate the roots.  Oh, you'll also see the first of the oxalis rearing its ugly head in the center of the photo.  We'll be battling oxalis again this year, it appears.

Behold the Lilac Bell Pepper!  A beautiful pepper for sure.  The peppers are really coming in right now.

Dinosaur kale.  These will be producing heavily over the next few months.

Purple Kohlrabi.  A bizarre looking vegetable, indeed.  This was some free seed that I got from rareseeds.com with an order last year.  I'm gonna be honest.  I've never eaten kohlrabi.  I don't know how to cook it.  I don't know when it is ripe, but I'll learn the answer to all of those questions and report back.

Fresh broccoli.  The warm weather has it growing fast and just about to bloom.  We're racing to pick it before it is full of yellow flowers.

Tomatoes.  Hopefully, we can get these ripened before a frost hits.  It would be nice to have some fall 'maters.

Green kale on the left.  Cabbage on the right.  

Plenty of green onions for winter "stick to your ribs" dishes like Gumbo!  Red Beans and Rice!  Homemade soups.

Sugar snap peas growing on up the trellis.  No blooms yet, but they'll be coming any time.  Nothing like eating these raw, right off the trellis.  Sweet as honey.

Carrots.  These should be done next month!

Here is one of the two varieties of spinach we have growing - Monstrueux de Viroflay is the name.  As you can tell, it comes from France.

And here is the second variety.  This one from Israel - Galilee is the name.

Here is the row of mustard greens.  Yum.  Get the pan of cornbread cooking to pair with this.

French Breakfast Radishes.  (That's what they're called.  I've never had radishes for breakfast.)

Lollo Rosso Lettuce.

Red Wing Lettuce Mix.

Oak Leaf Lettuce

And finally, Black Seeded Simpson Lettuce.

Fresh veggies incoming soon!

RIP Cupcake

As the title of this blog post suggests, it was a sad morning on Our Maker's Acres Family Farm.  When I walked out to milk Clarabelle this morning before church, I found Cupcake dead by the garden gate that leads into the pasture.  You might remember our posting about Cupcake, our disabled goat.  You can click the hyperlink and read about her disability.  She was about 10 months old.

Frankly, I don't know what caused her death.  Other than her front two legs which didn't work normally, she was the picture of health.  Tricia spent hours splinting her legs and doing 'rehab' with her.  Here lately, she was walking on her own (bowlegged, of course and limping) about 300 feet to eat grass in the pasture.

Although she didn't really need to, it became an afternoon tradition that Tricia would walk out across the pasture each afternoon, pick up her little Cupcake, and carry her back to the barn.  Last night was the first night in months and months that she didn't do it.  We are guessing that perhaps one of the other animals (one of the milk cows, or Buckwheat, the buck goat) head-butted her and fatally injured her.  They were really rough with her at times, and Tricia would rescue her and put her in one of the stalls in the barn to segregate her from the others.  For the most part, she made it just fine on her own.  She and Tricia were closely attached.

I hated to tell Tricia this morning, but she said, "I'm a farm girl.  This kind of stuff happens.  Before you bury her, I want to tell her goodbye.  She had such a cute little head."  We had church today and caroling for shut-ins this afternoon, so it was after dark before I could tend to Cupcake.  I got a shovel and measured her footprint and dug a 2 1/2 foot deep hole in the very back of the garden.

As Tricia watched, we laid little Cupcake to rest.

I heard a rustling behind me and turned around to see the saddest thing.  Agnes, Cupcake's mom, had come by to bid her farewells to her little girl at the impromptu ceremony.  It was kind of touching.

We'll miss little Cupcake.  She was a fighter and determined not to let her disability keep her from living a somewhat normal life.  It will be different without her on the pasture.  But, newsflash!:  The does are all getting fat.  I think they are all bred and we'll be having a lot of baby goats on the farm this spring.

Cilantro Salad with Kalamata Olives, Avacado and Limes

Our cilantro plants last year went to seed (coriander seed, technically) and every single doggone one of them germinated.  We have a FIELD of cilantro!  We've made a bunch of salsa and pico de gallo with it and cooked it with scrambled eggs, and we'll continue to do that, but I was looking for something else to do to use up this excess cilantro.

I searched on the internet and found a recipe for Cilantro Salad with Kalamata Olives, Avocadoes, & Limes.  It is a middle-eastern dish and seemed interesting.  We made it up last night.  I'll share the recipe and give you my review.  Here is the credit for the recipe: SAVEUR

Ingredients

4 packed cups cilantro leaves, coarsely chopped

2 poblano chiles, stemmed seeded, and thinly sliced (2 cups)

2 cups red onion, quartered and thinly sliced 

1 medium lime, peel and pith removed, flesh quartered and thinly sliced

1/4 cups fresh lemon juice

1/3 cups extra-virgin olive oil

1 teaspoon kosher salt

1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

10 pitted kalamata olives

1 firm ripe avocado, thinly sliced

Here is the peppers, red onion and lime all thinly sliced in a big bowl.

Then we added the cilantro leaves.  I just realized that we didn't coarsely chop the cilantro.  We did sit out in the garden and pick out all of the stems.  Coarsely chopping the leaves would probably enhance this dish.

We sliced the olives and avocado.  The peppers just north of the knife were some Anaheim peppers that Tricia didn't want in her salad, so I reserved them for mine.

Then we whisked the lemon juice, oil, salt, and pepper together for the dressing.

We tossed it all together, gently in the big bowl.

We garnished with kalamata olives and avocado slices.

And we served with Roasted Sweet Potato Soup with sweet potatoes that had just finished curing.  Delicious!

Review:  The salad was good.  The cilantro was a little over-powering (and we love cilantro).  I think in the future, we'll substitute half of the cilantro with lettuce to tone it down a bit.  The recipe makes A LOT!  We have a field of cilantro in the garden, so we have a lot more to go through!

Still Harvesting Eggplant

Sometimes things work one year and absolutely flop the next.  No matter how you try to think about it, there are too many variables to isolate on what made it work or what made it fail.  This can apply to many things, but tonight I'm talking about eggplant.  Each year on January 1st I start all my tomato, pepper and eggplant seeds indoors in seed pots.  (Hard to believe I'll be doing this again in less than a month!)  Once germinated I move beneath grow lights until the last date of frost has passed and then I'll transplant into the garden.

Eggplant have a particularly long growing season.  You want to get them going early.  Last year, same as every other year I planted.  The eggplant germinated, languished, and gave up the ghost.  This year, using the same seed and doing everything else in similar fashion, they absolutely thrived.  Three eggplant plants have yielded more eggplant than I can count.  We've eaten caponata, oven fried eggplant, eggplant parmesan many times.  We've given some away.  They keep producing.  It is a good problem to have! 

Eggplant have an interesting history.  They are native to China and India.  It was brought by the Spanish into Europe.  Explorers brought the eggplant to the New World, but it did not catch on in American immediately.  As part of the nightshade family (along with potatoes and tomatoes), people thought they were poisonous.  One brave soul finally tried it and didn't die and, well, here we are today, cultivating them in our gardens and eating them in our kitchens.

It is December 1st and the eggplant are still blooming, still producing.  We'll undoubtedly harvest quite a few more before we have our first frost.  I think the flowers are very pretty on this plant.  It is a pinkish flower that the honeybees like to visit.

I took this last photo of another bloom on one of the eggplants and as I looked at it closer, I want to share something with you.  If you look directly beneath the center of the bloom, you can spot the silhouette of a dreaded garden pest I didn't see when taking the photo.  A Stink Bug!

Had I seen that booger, I would have squashed him on the spot.  He (or one of his offspring) will find a place to over-winter and will be attacking our tomato plants next spring.