The Hay Gets 'Em Through

 

This photo was taken about a month ago.  It was warmer, with temperatures reaching up to 90 degrees.  Today, the weather has changed.  It was in the 30's this morning with a brisk north wind.  There was a light frost on the ground and then the rain began to fall.  We always say, "The animals don't mind the cold and they don't mind the rain, but when it is BOTH cold and rainy, then they have trouble."

When the temps fall, the grass stops growing and the animals clip down every blade of grass in the pasture.  They depend upon the hay we give them.  A month or two ago, we reported how we put 70 square bales up on the hay loft in the barn.  We keep round bales out in the hay ring so that they can free choice eat at their leisure.  Normally a round bale will last a week, but now that we have Nick, the bull, here with us, the round bales don't last that long.  He's a big dude.

Speaking of Nick, we're thinking that Rosie, Elsie, and LuLu are bred, so we'll be trying to load Nick in the cattle trailer to return him to where he's from.  Hopefully we'll be successful.  He isn't halter-broken, so it's not as easy as putting a lead rope on him and walking him into the trailer.  We'll have to get creative and coax him into the trailer with some sweet feed in a bucket.  If we're not successful, we'll have to borrow some cattle panels and build a corral.

Back to the hay, I've arranged for a friend to deliver us 8 round bales at some point next week.  Once Nick is gone, that should last us through December and the better part of January.  In addition to the round bales, we'll begin giving them square bales each day along with sweet feed.  We generally ration the square bales so that it lasts until the spring grass comes in.

Should He Stay or Should He Go?

We've had a visitor in our barn almost every night for the past couple of months.  He's leaving his calling card - piles of poop all over the hay.  It looked like possum poop to me.  Funny thing is, there were no chickens missing.  Possums kill chickens.  When they do, they leave most of the carcass behind.  It's always frustrated me because I think, "If you're gonna kill my chickens, eat them.  Clean your plate.  Don't kill them and leave most of the body behind.  That's very wasteful."

So our culprit was not killing our laying hens, but was in the barn.  Why was he coming in the barn?  I got to thinking about it and discussing it with Tricia and we both noticed that we haven't seen ANY rats in the barn.  We researched and found that possums DO eat rats.  So perhaps this possum is doing us a favor and cleaning out the rats.  But there's another variable.  We know that there is also a big rat snake in the barn taking care of the rats, too.  We were' leaving him (or her) alone until it goes in the henhouse, then it must die.

In the photo below, you can see the hole that the possum has made to enter into the corner of the northwest corner of the barn.  If you zoom in, you can see several of the many piles of possum poo.

What to do?  In the words of a song by The Clash back in the 80's, "Should he stay or should he go?"  If he goes, then our rat problem will rebound, especially with wintertime coming and the snake won't be hunting until it warms up.  If he stays, there will come a time when the rat population is diminished (like it is now) and the possum will shift his prey to one of the laying hens in the hen house.  We can't have that.

So with that decision made, I baited up my cage trap with some Pedigree Dog food.  Possums are the easiest animal to catch.  In two days, I had a big, hissing possum in the cage.

Benjamin was home, so I had him grab his rifle and go put him down and compost him.  We will keep an eye on the rat population in the barn.  Hopefully, in the possum's absence, we won't see a population explosion.  Possums poop on the hay and the animals don't like that on the hay.  I wouldn't either!  However, rats poop and pee on the hay and the animals don't like that either.  It's tough to balance these things out!

Home Sweet Home

There is a small town twenty miles north of us.  We pass through this town many times and have friends that live there.  There is a good little spot that we like to stop at and buy boudin and boudin balls.  There's one other thing that I learned about this town that I wanted to pass by and check out.  It just so happened that I had an appointment for work in this town and was able to drive by this site.

Know what it is?

Do you remember the Sears & Roebuck catalogs that would come by mail?  I remember the Sears Wish Book that would come out and we'd go through it with a marks-a-lot and circle what we wanted for Christmas.  It was exciting.  Sears was like Amazon before there was Amazon.  The reason I'm telling you this is that Sears didn't only sell toys and clothes from their catalog...

The home in the photo above is a Sears & Roebuck Mail-Order home. Now, I felt a little creepy taking photos of someone's home like this, so I made it quick. I didn't want them to come out and "pepper my tailgate" with some buck shot.

I did a little research on these homes.  This website right here had an informative write-up of these homes.

From the article:

"From 1908 to 1940, the Sears Modern Homes Program offered complete mail-order houses to the would-be homeowner — what would come to be called “kit homes.” Customers could select from dozens of different models in Sears Modern Homes Catalog, order blueprints, send in a check, and a few weeks later everything they needed would arrive in a train car, its door secured with a small red wax seal (just like the seal on the back of a letter)."

This home sits about a half mile from the train tracks that run east and west, so the homeowner didn't have far to carry his building materials.

"This seal was to be broken on arrival by the new owner, who would open up their boxcar to find over 10,000 pieces of framing lumber, 20,000 cedar shakes, and almost everything else needed to build the home — all the doors, even the doorknobs."

I laughed when I read that, thinking of the times I've put a swing set or something together and it had missing parts or extra parts leftover once I was done.  Can you imagine all the parts (including door knobs) with a house?

"Sears promised that, working without a carpenter and only rudimentary skills, a person could finish their Sears mail-order home in less than 90 days."

My skills are far less than rudimentary.  I would hate to see the house that I would build!

But look at the Sears mail order home in the two photos above.  It looks GREAT!  Even after all these years.  It has character and charm.  In looking at some of the blueprints in the article I linked above, I think I found which kit they bought.  It looks a lot like the home at the bottom right of the brochure below:

Can you imagine?  Ordering your home from a catalog, having it come in on a train, and then putting it together on your lot yourself?  It's a quality home that's still standing today!  Home Sweet Home, for sure!

 

Fall Garden (Part 2)

Earlier this week we looked at the 'Salad Rows' in the garden.  Let's look in at the rest.  In this photo below, in the top right corner, you can barely make out the potatoes in bucket experiment we're working on.  The rest of the photo makes up a bunch of the cole crops along with some others.

Starting left to right:  The first two rows are cabbage (brunswick and Jersey wakefield varieties).  The next row is cauliflower (amazing and purple varieties).  The next row is Romanesco broccoli.  The next row is 'regular' broccoli.  The next row has baby bok choy, kohlrabi, and kale.

Here are some sugar snap peas that are beginning to trellis on a hog panel I have fastened to some t-posts.

Here is a big section of sweet potatoes that I haven't harvested yet.  To the right where you can see the dirt, that's where I have harvested some of the sweet potatoes to make room for planting three rows of carrots.

Below is a row of some French breakfast radishes.  These grow really fast.

Here is one row of Cosmic purple carrots I have planted that are coming up.  I have three additional rows of carrots (Atomic Red, Danvers half long, Uzbek Golden varieties).

I have a couple of rows of snap beans that are really producing, both Contender Green Beans and Italian Roma II beans which you see below.

Every couple days I pick a large bucket of beans.  We eat them with new potatoes and butter and they are delicious.  We'll begin blanching a bunch to freeze.

One thing I didn't show you is the beets and rainbow swiss chard.  We had poor germination on the Bull's Blood beets.  We had to get some Detroit Dark Red beets to fill in the holes in the row.  Probably this weekend I'll be planting turnips, spinach and mustard greens.

Like Sand Through the Hour Glass...

Time marches on, doesn't it?  A couple of Saturdays ago, Tricia and I went to a festival in our town.  They blocked off Main Street and people set up booths in the middle of the street selling arts and crafts, food and drink, baked goods and preserves - all sorts of things.  My wife pulled me into an antique shop as she had found some cups and saucers she liked.  While she made the purchase, I looked through little rooms filled with items from yesteryear.

Then I found this guy.  Little Professor.  I remember this thing.  We had one in 1976.  The Little Professor was a backwards calculator.  It would provide an equation like 2 x 4 and you would answer 8.  You had three chances.  If you missed the third try, it would print EEEEEE across the screen and then show the correct answer.  I'd like to say that the Little Professor helped me become better at math, but that would be a miscalculation.  EEEEEEEE.  I've never been strong at math.  I did take a photo of it and texted it to my brother, telling him, "You know you're getting a little age on you when you run across things from your childhood in an antique store."

In one additional nostalgic look back, I was listening to a Country and Western radio station last week.  The DJ was talking to someone and said, "You know how I can find out how old you are without asking your age?"  The lady said, "How?"  The DJ replied, "Do you remember when you could dim the brights in your car with a foot switch?"

I hadn't thought about that little silver button by your left foot below the emergency brake in a long time!  See it in the photo below circled?

Image Credit

The foot switch for dimming moved from the floorboard to the steering column in the 70's and early 80's when cars moved mainly from rear wheel drive to front wheel drive.  Well, time for me to take the brights off and put on the dimmers.  Tomorrow or the next day, I want to show you some more of what's going on in the garden.

Quick Look at the Fall Garden (The Salad Rows)

Let's take a look at the Fall Garden.  The spring garden is tailing off with only okra and butterbeans producing still.  Well, our many varieties of peppers and eggplant are starting to really produce after a dormant summer slump.  Today, we'll look at the salad rows.  We have one full row with various types of leaf lettuce.  We've enjoyed salads deep into winter by covering these rows during freezes.  Here is the most prolific variety of leaf lettuce - the Black Seeded Simpson.

Growing up, I had never planted lettuce, so it was a new crop to learn.  In fact, when the lettuce got big, I'd pull it up by the roots.  Not smart!  My wife told me, "Why don't you cut the leaves off from the different varieties and they'll re-grow over and over?"  Why didn't I think of that?  This was the start of the "never ending salad bowl" during the fall and winter.

Here's a patch of Red Romaine.  It looks spiffy next to the Black Seeded Simpson (green leaf lettuce) that is it's neighbor to the east on the row.

Here is a mix of lettuce called Rocky Top Blend.  It must originate from Tennessee.  It has a nice mixture of different varieties and different colors.

And finally here is a variety of lettuce called Oak Leaf lettuce.  Yep, you guessed it.  The leaves mimic the appearance of an oak leaf.  The colors are different, the leaves are different, but I think that most lettuce tastes the same.  I'll admit I don't have a refined palate.  There was a salad mix I planted one time that was "spicy," you might say.  It had arugula, radicchio, and endive along with others.  It was just too strong for our tastes.  The varieties I have planted are all sweet and tasty. 

Along with every salad, you'll want to slice up some cucumbers.  This is the first time I've attempted to grow some in the fall.  If the frost holds off, we'll have at least ONE cucumber to cut up.  There's lots of blooms and lots more on the way!

Tricia likes to slice up homegrown tomatoes for the salad.  We've got lots of tomatoes coming.  I've trellised them using the Florida Weave method and they are happy, adding inches of growth each and every day.  Annie, the Nubian Goat, is coveting the tomatoes.  If she could, I promise you, she'd be in there making a mess of the garden.

We have lots of blooms and lots of tomatoes coming!  We'll see if we can get a harvest in before the first freeze hits.  The Old Farmer's Almanac shows November 26th to be the first FROST date for our area.  We can protect these from a frost, but not a hard freeze.  We'll watch and see what happens.

While I was pinching off suckers that grow in the tomato plant's 'elbows' and squeezing to death four or five late season Army worms that were feeding on the tomato plants' foliage, I saw one of our honeybees that was busy (as a bee) pollinating one of the tomato blooms.

That concludes the salad rows.  I'll show you some of the other rows a little later this week.  We still haven't planted a few fall/winter crops like mustard greens, spinach, and turnips.  Those will likely go in once the okra finishes up.

Another Water Oak Bites the Dust

Slowly, but surely, we're losing all the water oaks on the property.  We've discussed these trees before.  They make a nice shade tree, but they have a lifespan of about 70 years.  They begin hollowing out on the inside and become a haven for cockroaches.  Then they start dropping branches and ultimately die.  

They are susceptible to a borer worm that really does a number on them.  We've had a number of them that have died and we've taken them down at no small cost.  I was watching the health of one water oak that is by our barn.  When the kids were younger and we had a zip line for them, this tree was at the base of the zip line.  It has supported many a kid (and adults, too) over the years.

Tricia and I were walking and I pointed to the tree.  "Look over there," I said.  The leaves had turned yellow and brown, but this wasn't the normal thing that happens in autumn.  No sir.  This tree had died.

The other trees surrounding it have green leaves.  I walked around the base of the tree and could see holes in the bark.  She's a goner.  I'll have to make some phone calls and see if I can get a tree cutting service to come take it down.  It's a little tricky as I don't want it to fall on our barn.  The goat barn is directly south of it and the dairy barn is directly west.  If it was felled to the north and west, it may make it without falling on the garden.  I'll let the pros handle this one.

As you can see, our firewood supply is running on the low side, so its just as well, I guess, that we replenish the stock of firewood with the old water oak.  We only have a handful of water oaks left on the property.  Once this one's gone, it'll be primarily live oaks and pecans.  

Normally when we have a tree service take a tree down, I ask them to just lay it down and I cut it up.  That saves a little money (but increases lots of work.)  I'm thinking about possibly investing in a chain saw.  In the past, I've rented one at a Rental Shop in Lake Charles for $50 a day.  That way you don't have to worry about keeping one more engine running.  I'll check into rental prices and availability and then pull the trigger on whether or not to buy one.

And that last photo reminds me, I'll have to sharpen the ax and get out the wedge and sledge hammer and get to work on splitting these last remaining logs to get ready for winter.  The hurricanes that have knocked down trees and branches and the borer worms in the water oak trees have kept our stock of firewood full up until now.  I'll wait until it gets cooler to start swinging the ax.