The Turkey That Keeps On Giving

The day after Thanksgiving the skies opened up and it began to rain.  A slow, soaking rain that nourished the landscape.  In true feast or famine experiences, rain either refuses to fall (this summer) or comes down in refreshing abundance.  We had plenty of leftovers.  There was not much to do outside.  The options were slim.  So we stayed inside and ate.

Around the back of the house, I have water catchment that enables us to catch over 400 gallons of water with a 1 inch rain.  All of our rainwater reservoirs were overflowing.  You can see one below.  Our cup runneth over.

Look at this big ol' turkey wishbone.  I'm not a superstitious person.  I remember as a kid, we would each grab one side of the wishbone and pull until it broke.  If I recall correctly, the person holding the biggest piece of the wishbone was supposed to be able to make a wish and it would come true.  

One thing I was wishing for is to turn the carcasses of the fried turkey, the baked turkey, and the smoked specklebelly goose into stock.  My wife wasn't nearly as enthusiastic about that venture as it makes a big mess in the kitchen.  The results, however, are well worth it, in my opinion.  We make lots of broth and stock, primarily out of our grassfed beef and chickens.

It's a little different with store-bought fowl as you really don't know what's in the bird.  It's surely not near as healthy for you as the animals that come off your land.  At least the specklebelly goose was wild and we could be sure there was no antibiotics in him.  Stock and broth is really good for you.  It's loaded with nutrients, minerals, protein, amino acids.  It's got collagen which is good for your connective tissue.  Broth and stock is a big booster of your immune system, giving you power to fight off sickness!

So I pulled out the big pot and put the carcasses into the pot with some celery, onions, carrots and herbs.  I added water and got it boiling and then turned it down to low and let it cook for hours and hours.  The next day I heated it up again and then let it come to a luke warm temperature.  I poured through a sieve and captured 12 cups of turkey/goose stock!

We froze it in quart-sized ziploc bags.  We'll use it as a base for soups in this winter season.  I like to use it in place of water when cooking rice.  There were a couple more beneficiaries of the stock-making enterprise other than our family.  I completely picked all the remaining meat and fat from what was left of the carcasses, making sure no bones remained.  This was placed in a big bowl.  Belle, our Great Pyrenees, and Ginger, our cat, will get to enjoy Thanksgiving leftovers for a few more days than their humans.  They like it a lot better than their normal diets.  

Though making broth or stock can be a messy ordeal, resulting in a lot of dishes and countertops to clean, the dividends are great!

Thankfulness!

 "Give thanks to the LORD, for He is good; His love endures forever." Psalm 118:29

Thanksgiving Day 2022 has come and gone.  Time seems to be such a blur.  We hosted the celebration at our home and our immediate family, my Dad & Mom, My great aunt Julee Rae, my sister and her family and my brother and his family were here.  We held hands together in a big circle in the kitchen before serving and asked God's blessing on the food and our family.  We thanked HIM for all the blessings in our lives.  Things aren't perfect, but He, the Giver of all things, is so good.

We had more food than an army could eat, including a baked turkey, fried turkey, beef brisket, and smoked specklebelly goose, along with all the side dishes and desserts that you could ever imagine.

We had tables stretched across three rooms and we laughed and talked and enjoyed one another's company, stretching the meal out for easily more than an hour, telling funny stories and recollecting memories of times past.

Then we retired to the den and visited some more.  Here's Mom & Dad:

And here is our family:  Front (Tricia, Me, Laura Lee) Back Russ and Benjamin.

That was Thursday and today is Sunday.  We just finished up all the leftovers!  I hope you and yours enjoyed your Thanksgiving holiday as well.  God's given us another year.  He is so faithful.

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...