It's Citrus Time (Again)

A couple years ago, we were hit with some really cold weather for Louisiana.  It was in the low 20's and I was worried about our citrus trees.  We have navel oranges, tangerines and grapefruit.  Prior to the freeze, I heaped mulch around the trunks, hoping to insulate the tree.  They are too tall to effectively tarp for protection.

Once it thawed, many of the limbs died.  We held out hope, though, as there was green growth above the graft.  We pruned all of the dead branches off the trees and waited.  Last year the trees were still in stress, recovering, and they did not bloom.  We had ZERO fruit off of our trees all last year.  This year, however, we saw blooms and smelled the heavenly aroma of orange blossoms.  Now it wasn't near the blossoms as in previous years, but the trees are still knocked back.

As the year went on, fruit began to develop.  Here are some of the navel oranges on our one orange tree.  They won't be ripe until late December or early January.  They are just starting to turn to a tinge of orange from the green color.

Here are the tangerines.  They are a fluorescent orange color.  They are tart and tasty.  We have two of these trees remaining.  We lost one of them to the freeze.  We've begun to pick a few of these.  They taste SO good, especially after not having any all of last year.

And here are the grapefruit on our one grapefruit tree.  It is a small tree.  We only have four grapefruit on it.  We'll have to savor each bite!

My intent this spring is to plant more fruit trees.  In addition to the citrus, we also have a pear tree, a number of blueberry bushes, muscadine vine, persimmon tree and thornless blackberries.  One of the things on my to do list this winter is to compile a list of additional fruit trees I'd like to put in.  It would be beneficial to have an orchard of various fruit trees from which to harvest - a food forest, you might say.

Tucked In For The Night

I might have told you that about a year ago when I began new employment, I started on a self-directed health program.  Here's why.  I just turned 56.  Although I'm not on any medication, my doctor was telling me to watch my blood sugar.  The numbers had been increasing.  Despite us eating very healthy eating mainly things we grow on our little homestead, I've never met a sweet that I don't like.  Snacking on sweets was going to hurt me sooner rather than later if I didn't make a change.

I don't like lifting weights.  I don't have time to go to a gym and don't like running.  So what could I do?  I could walk.  I set a step goal of 10,000 steps a day.  That seemed simple enough.  So a year later, I hit my goal 99% of the time, going out at night and walking the perimeter of our 5 acres and have lost 20 pounds.  I listen to podcasts while I walk.  My favorites are: Art of Manliness podcast, Victor Davis Hanson podcast, and Jordan Peterson podcast.  

I also look up at the sky.  It is peaceful and serene.  At least once or twice a week I see shooting stars.  It's unfathomable to try to understand in my little pea brain that when I see a shooting star, I'm looking at something that happened many, many, many years ago.  But I don't just keep my head in the stars, I look around, too.  Tonight, I saw the cows sitting down and resting in the pasture.

After a full day of eating grass and hay, Rosie, Elsie, and LuLu are taking it easy.  As we discussed last night, Nick is gone.  Hopefully, all three of them are bred.  I was looking at them sitting peacefully in the pasture, I began to fast forward my thoughts 8 or 9 months from now.  Right now it is crisp and cool.  When the calves come, it will be hot, humid, and the landscape will be swarming with mosquitoes and deer flies.  I welcome the cool weather we're experiencing now.

I began to think about the possibility of having three more calves.  What would they be?  Bulls or heifers?  Heifers are nice because there is a demand for registered Jerseys.  More people are seeing the benefits of having a family milk cow.  We could sell the heifers.  However, bull calves would be fine, too.  Our deep freeze is almost empty.  Raising a bull calf for a year and a half and then sending him to slaughter would refill our stores of fresh meat.  We wouldn't complain about that either.

We will watch them closely for the next month to ensure they don't come back into heat, signaling that they weren't bred.  During the winter we keep them fed with hay and a little bit of sweet feed.  We supplement with some of the smaller sweet potatoes from the garden.  This weekend I'll be planting some turnips, too.  Toward the end of January and February, I like to pull up turnips and cut them up with a pocketknife and feed them to the cows.  They love turnips.  Me?  Not so much, but I love turnip greens.

Well, the podcast is over.  As I look down at my step counter, I'm at 11,348 steps.  Time to go in and get tucked in for the night, sort of like the cows.

Nick Goes Home

Nick is a Jersey Bull that we've "borrowed" from some friends down the road.  He had a very specific job to do and that was to seduce our Jersey cow, Rosie and our two Jersey heifers, Elsie and LuLu.  Exactly four weeks ago today, we picked him up and brought him to Our Maker's Acres Family Farm.  He is a big dude and he's not halter broken.  My immediate concern was, "How in the world are we going to load him back up in the trailer when it is time for him to go?"  We don't have a corral or loading chute.  It might end up being an adventure - or impossible.

We're kind of "fly by the seat of your pants" folks.  I just thought that we'd deal with that problem when we had to deal with it.  First things first - we had to get our three animals bred.  Cows have a 21 day cycle.  It's been four weeks.  We see no more 'activity' so we're thinking the romancing is done.  But here's the thing: We saw evidence of the two heifers going in heat, but never Rosie.  Even with the heifers in heat, we never Nick and our cows consummate their relationship, if you know what I mean,  but, we weren't watching 24/7.  There was programming on a TV network Nickelodeon a long time ago called "Nick at Nite."  Perhaps Nick was amorous at night, hidden from view.  We hope so.

So today we had a window of time between morning and evening worship service to load up Nick and bring him back home.  How was this going to work?

We backed the cattle trailer to the gate and opened it up, chaining the gate to the trailer, so there was no way for him to escape.  Then I got a bucket of sweet feed to coax him with, because everyone knows the way to a man's heart is through his stomach.

Nick was very suspicious.  I opened an escape door in the back of the trailer and then walked backwards with the bucket, luring him to the open gate.  Slowly, slowly...  I got him to where he got his front two feet in the trailer.  Benjamin ran up from behind to shut the back gate in back of him.  Ol' Nick figured out what was up and he backed up in a hurry.

I'm not one to give up easily.  This time I led him with the feed and let him get a good taste of the molasses-laden sweet feed.  He liked it!  I pulled it away and walked into the trailer, setting the bucket in the very front.  I walked out of the side gate of the trailer and waited.  Nick jumped up in the trailer and Benjamin slammed the cattle trailer gate closed.  Got 'em!  Nick was not happy that he'd been hoodwinked.  We fastened the gates shut with ropes and began the ten mile drive back to Nick's home.

Three ladies bid Ol' Nick farewell.  They'll miss him, but it'll mean more hay and feed for them.

A cows' gestation period is nine months, so we'll hopefully have three calves somewhere around August of 2023.  That means we'll be milking again in September.  C'mon Nick.  I hope you did your job and our cows are carrying.

Ol Jack Frost

Tonight's forecast predicts our first freeze.  Will it happen?  I don't know.  We're around trees and cloud cover may prohibit the temps from dipping colder than 33.  Trouble is, sometimes we like to push the zone and plant things late just to see if we squeeze additional time out of the growing season.  For instance, we have been picking buckets and buckets of green beans lately.  Our peppers and eggplants are producing great quantities.  

And our tomatoes.  They look fantastic.  Fall tomatoes are always prettier and healthier than the spring tomatoes around here.  There's no bugs or worms to compete.  The issue you run into is an early freeze.  In 2017, we had a HUGE crop of beautiful tomatoes.  All were still green.  Then an early freeze came and decimated the crop.

I picked every single tomato and researched what we could do with them.  I came up with this:

Pomodori Verdi is a green tomato pasta sauce made with: Green tomatoes, onions, bay leaves, garlic, salt, pepper, oregano and lemon juice.  We canned a bunch of the stuff.  It still sits in our pantry.

The other day we were rotating the stock in our pantry and Tricia made a Cream of Tomato Soup with the pomodori verdi.  You know what?  Pretty doggone good!  (You gotta get past the green color of the soup, though.)

Speaking of Green Tomatoes.  Let's walk out and look at the crop.  The plants look great.  They are about 5 feet tall and still growing.  I have them trellised with the Florida Weave Trellising system.  They are happy plants.

The vines are loaded with blooms AND tomatoes.  Still a ways from harvest, but looking good and coming on strong.  In a few short weeks some of these bad boys would be ready.

But with the freeze coming,  I don't know if they'll make it to maturity.  I got a blue tarp out and threw it over the 13 plants we have.  Maybe it'll work.  Maybe it won't.

But at least we know if Ol Jack Frost comes, we can still make green tomato sauce.

Happy Big # 80, Dad!

Hard to imagine, but last night we met in Kinder for Dad's 80th Birthday celebration.  My sister made two cakes (coconut cake - Dad's favorite) and mom make two coconut pies.  We ate a huge pot of shrimp etouffee over rice, garlic bread and salad.  Mom, Dad, the kids and grandkids and family all gathered in the kitchen and we held hands and Dad asked God's blessing on the food and the family time we'd share.  I took a photo of everyone around the circle.

And more people...

And more...

And even more...

We sat around the table for a long time, eating and visiting and laughing about memories.  We thanked Dad for being such a good model for us as a leader, a husband, a father, and a grandfather always being there for all of us.  

Then it was time to blow out 1/10th of the candles.

And he got the job done!

Happy Birthday, Dad!  We love you...

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!