A Stroll in the Garden in early May (Part 1)

When I get home from work, I like to change and go for a walk in the garden.  Once the temperatures start rising, it is truly amazing at how quickly things grow.  You can see a difference from day to day.  Let's go to the very back of the garden and work our way forward.  Here is some Swiss Chard of the Rainbow Variety.  It has bright pink stems that catch your eye.  This is a holdout from the fall garden and it is still going strong.  In a few weeks, though, bug pressure and the heat will cause its demise.  Until then we'll continue eating the leaves and feeding the lower, overgrown leaves to appreciative cows.

I have some mistakes I make in the garden that I seem to repeat every single year - planting things too close together and not thinning out plants that I didn't space correctly.  Why kill a perfectly fine vegetable plant, I always say.  Well, the cucumbers are growing like kudzu.  It is truly a jungle to walk near the vines AND to try to locate ripening cucumbers in that jungle.

The cucumber tendrils are impressive to me.  The Eddie Money song, "Baby, Hold on to me" comes to mind as I watch the cucumber tendrils holding on to the trellis for dear life.  It provides an almost elastic springiness when the winds blow, allowing the cucumbers to sway back and forth without falling.

Cucumber blossoms cover the plant, promising an over-abundance of cukes to eat, pickle and give away.  Tricia is not a big fan of cucumbers, but even she enjoys homegrown ones.  She likes to ferment them with whey and salt.  She has a half-gallon of them on the counter now that will be ready in about 3 days.

I have several varieties of corn planted this year.  The variety below is called Glass Gem corn and I can't wait to see the ears.  If they turn out like I think they will, it will be a sight to see.  I found evidence of some worm damage in the corn, and was able to find the little booger and pick him out and throw him to the hens.  They made quick work of the worm.

I have one row of two varieties of zucchini and one row of two varieties of yellow squash.  Since this photo was taken, the leaves have closed in and all you can see is lush green leaves.  Blooms are a plenty and tiny squash sit atop the bed of hay underneath the leaves.

The Contender beans are real strong this year.  Their green leaves and bushy plant spans a 15 foot row, taking up 3 full feet.  I LOVE eating fresh green beans with new potatoes and butter.  It is a favorite of mine.

Since this photo was taken, we picked a half bushel of beans and they need to be picked again.  We'll eat all we can and then blanch and freeze some, can some, and pickle some.  White blooms promise many more.  As these plants play out, we'll plant more so that we have a never-ending supply all summer.

Our bell pepper plants are short right now, but they have nice peppers on them.  Tricia has already made stuffed bell peppers for us.  Delicious!

The jalapeno plants aren't playing around.  They are producing in prolific quantities.  We have lots frozen from last year.  I may have to find some new recipes to use them up.  I saw jalapeno brownies the other day as well as chocolate chip jalapeno cookies.  Interesting!

Finally, the banana peppers.  I used my noggin this year and planted them far away from the jalapenos.  Last year the banana peppers were near-by and they crossed with the jalapenos, making very hot banana peppers. 

I like to pickle these and keep them in the fridge where they are cool and crispy.  They complement rice & gravy perfectly well.

Tomorrow, we'll stroll a few rows up and see what else is going on.

2018 Onion Harvest

The onions look a little tired, don't they?  Some of them are laying down.  Actually, that is the sign that it is time to harvest them.  The weight of the onion greens just cause the neck of the onion to bend over.  Not all of them will bend over at the same time.

Onions ready for harvest

You can see how the neck bends over on this white onion...

Same thing on a yellow onion.  This one is a 1015 Texas Sweet.  It is supposed to be similar to a Vidalia onion.

After pulling the leaning onions out of the ground, I lay them on top of the row to cure a little bit.  The only thing is, you don't want the onions to "sunburn."  So what you have to do is zig zag the onions so that the onion tops lay over the bulb of the onions. 

I recommend leaving them out for one day.  I left them out for two days like this and a few of the smaller ones started getting soft.  I took them inside quickly and cut them up and froze them in zip loc bags.  Some were a real nice size, like this Texas Sweet...

The Creole Reds were a little disappointing in size, but I've never been able to have much luck getting them to grow into a nice size onion.

The white onions grew to a good size!

I trimmed the roots and snipped the necks of the onion about an inch above the bulb and brought them inside.  Then I put them into milk crates to allow air flow.

I'll keep checking on them to ensure we don't lose any.  If they start getting soft, we will quickly cube them and freeze them.  It is always nice to have a good bit of onions around the house.  I love to cook with them.  Hopefully they will cure and will last in our pantry so that we can enjoy them for a long time to come.

How We Do Mother's Day

Mother's Day is a great day.  I've been blessed by God to have a GREAT Mother to raise me and to also have a GREAT Mother to my children.  We started off a day early in the celebration.  Tricia wanted a new rose bush - a hybrid tea rose called "Blue Girl."  After much searching, we finally found it at Natural Gardens here in Jennings.  It is called Blue Girl but is actually a very light pink.  Tricia appropriately wore blue to plant Blue Girl.

Russ and Benjamin got busy and dug the hole and prepared things so that their mom could get her rose planted exactly where she wanted it.

The rose was put into the hole and the hole was back-filled with garden soil, patted down, and watered.  I think this rose will really make Tricia happy!

On Sunday after church, we drove to Kinder.  Dad had prepared a big pot of crawfish etouffee and everyone came over to honor my Mom.  Laura even made it in from Baton Rouge.  Mom is on the right in the photo below, and I can truly say that God blessed me with a great mom.  I'll always be grateful for everything she's done for me. 

We ate, visited, took a few photos, but were missing Benjamin as he was out in the woods with his cousins.

What a great day!  But the day wasn't done.  What Mother's Day is complete without... potatoes and a potato gun?

My brother, Kristian, brought his potato gun in from New Orleans.  This thing is actually a potato bazooka or a RPG potato gun.  You unscrew the cap on the end and spray a bunch of White Rain Hairspray in the chamber.

Seal it up real tight...

Put the potato in the barrel and pack it in real good.

Put it on your shoulder, take aim and press the igniter button!

BOOM!!! The noise is deafening and the potato flies 100 yards, smashing into trees, the side of a barn or up and out of sight to the delight of all in attendance.  We had a real good time.  We had a blast - with or without the potato gun.  Happy Mother's Day, Mom and Tricia.  We love you both!

A True Free Range Hen (A Lot More Free Ranging Than We'd Like)

And He made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their habitation.  Acts 17:26

On Saturday mornings I like to walk around the yard and just observe things.  Usually on weekdays when I leave, it is still dark so I don't get to take in the sights and enjoy God's creation.  Saturday and Sunday mornings are a treat in that regard.

I guess you could call me a "home body."  Don't get me wrong, I enjoy traveling and seeing different places, but it is always nice to get back home.  Home is a safe place - a familiar place.  While walking in the backyard I was able to catch a glimpse of a creature that has no inhibitions about leaving home.  The Bible Verse quoted above talks about everything having boundaries of their habitation.  I present to you a hen that scoffs at boundaries.

She refuses to stay in her allotted space, preferring instead to blaze her own trail, engage in risky activity and defy her human caretakers.

This hen is an Aracauna.  This breed is a wilder breed than the others and interestingly lays blue and green eggs.  These birds are the most difficult we have.  We cannot keep this black hen within the perimeter of the pasture fence.  There is another Aracauna hen, a white one, that we call the "barn owl" because she roosts in the rafters of the barn.  We haven't had much success keeping the white out of the barn or the black one in her pasture.

The black one struts around and scratches through the flower beds.  She also scratches all the mulch out from under the blueberry bushes, exposing the roots.  It annoys me to no end.  I have to go rake the mulch back around the bushes so the roots don't dry out.

She causes me some extra work.  When I see her she runs wildly.  When I finally corner her, she squeezes through the space in the hogwire fence and gets back in the pasture with the other, well-behaved birds.  Then she looks at me over her shoulder and sneers at me in defiance.  Keep it up, hen, and you'll end up in a gumbo!

Like Pavlov's Dog

I remember in Psychology class in college we learned about Pavlov and his dog.  Pavlov began studying his dog's salivation while it ate.  Odd thing to study, I know.  He began to notice that his dog would salivate when he would walk in the room whether he had food or not.  His theory was that dogs salivate naturally, but they could be conditioned to associate food with different things.  For instance, he rang a bell when feeding his dog.  After doing that for a while, he observed that when he would ring the bell, the dog would salivate regardless if he had food or not.  In this way, he determined that dogs could learn responses and be conditioned to do certain things.

I noticed the same thing with our cows.  Now, dogs are way smarter than cows, but cows still associate things with food and learn responses to certain stimuli.  Our cows right now are hungry.  It hasn't rained for a while and the grass is not coming in strong yet.  They moo loudly even after being fed.

I use a rotational grazing system to cycle the cows through several paddocks, always moving them to fresh grass.  These paddocks are separated by electric fencing that I roll up using a reel.  The cows will eat most of the grass down in the paddock and then it is time to move them to the next one.  I roll up the reel that separates them from the fresh grass and they come running!

As I crank the reel to roll up the electric fence, the clicking sound of the ratchet on the reel attracts them as they associate that sound with fresh grass.  They come a running!  I'm sure it starts them salivating, too.

2018 Meat Birds - By The Numbers

Each year when we raise Cornish Cross Meat Birds, we track expenses and other data that helps us to better manage the process and get better each year.  We've learned, however, that there are many variables that are out of our control.  We like to find areas of improvement and I find that looking at trends and historical comparisons interesting.

Here are the numbers we compiled for the 2018 meat birds:

Date Received:		3/2/2018
Date of Slaughter:		4/30/2018
Days old at slaughter:		61
Weeks old at slaughter:		8.7

It still amazes me how fast these birds grow.  In 61 days they gained 6 pounds.  They went from a fuzzy yellow ball to a monstrous meat bird.

Ordered	60
Received	63
Mortality	12	19.05%
Butchered	51

We received more than we ordered and this is typical.  The hatcheries throw in a few extra to make up for a few that inevitably die during transit.  We ended up losing 12 birds.  A 19% mortality rate was troubling.  When they arrived they appeared healthy.  However, a few days later they started dying.  When this happened previously, adding apple cider vinegar to the water seemed to help.  We really don't know what caused them to die.  They didn't get "pasty-butt" like the last ones.  All I can figure is that these were flown in all the way from Missouri.  Perhaps they arrived in a weakened state and began dying a few days later?

The birds cost $2.75 a piece.  Truly expensive, but not as expensive as the feed.  We fed them 15 fifty pound sacks of feed.  You can see why if you are going to have birds die, it is best for them to die before they've eaten a lot of feed!  Our chicken tractor is almost depreciated out.  The rest of the supplies costs are nominal.  The total cost of the project was $495.57 or $9.72 per bird.

As we always say, it is cheaper (and certainly easier) to purchase your birds at the grocery store.  Why do we do it?  Well, we know the birds never got antibiotics or other medicines.  We know the birds lived outdoors for much of their short 8 week life.  We know the cleanliness of the slaughtering process.  We feel better about raising and processing our own food.

                                             2017                                  2018
Cost per bird:                       $9.52                                 $9.72

Cost per pound:                   $2.12                                   $2.22

Feed consumed per bird:   18.56 lbs                             14.71 lbs                                                                                                             

Feed cost per bird:               $5.32                                   $4.45

Feed cost per pound:           $0.29                                   $0.30

Total pounds Cornish Cross Carcass whole:           222.87 pounds 
Average pounds per bird:                                            4.37 pounds

Last year our cost per bird was $9.52 - a little bit lower.  We butchered our 2018 a full week earlier than last year, so that was good.  We also have 51 birds in the freezer that we'll eat over the next year.  That is a very good thing!

Image Credit

The Last Thing You Want to Find in Your Bathtub

Sunday afternoon we were all rushing out the door to make it to evening services at church.  I grabbed the keys and was on my way to the garage to get the car started when I heard Tricia call from the back of the house.  "Kyle, there's a snake in the house!"  I immediately thought that it was just a garter snake.  There are a bunch of them all around the back patio and they do get in the house quite often.  We just pick them up and toss them out the back door.

But then, as if she was reading my mind, she added, "And it's not a garter snake!"  That made me move a little quicker to where she was calling.  I followed her voice into our bedroom and then into the bathroom.  She was pointing to the bathtub and there I saw it.  It was a juvenile rat snake.  We call them chicken snakes.  They are harmless.  It was a little over two feet long.  I picked up a shirt and threw it over the snake and then threw them into the backyard.  As it turns out Tricia had left some windows open during the nice weather we've been experiencing and I'm sure the chicken snake decided to come indoors and get in our bathtub to give us a scare.  It didn't turn out well for the snake.  Come to think of it, this is how all our trouble started - with a woman and a snake!

This chicken snake was a small snake and they are good for cleaning out the rat and mouse population, but they will grow very large and then begin eating eggs.  We can't have that.  I have ceramic and wooden eggs in the nesting boxes to fool these snakes.  They'll eat one of those and it gives them a fatal case of constipation.

I picked up a piece of firewood and bludgeoned the snake.  I almost felt sorry for him.

I was thinking to myself and even told Tricia, "Where there is one snake, there's always another."  Sure enough, today I walked out of the garage and saw another chicken snake, this one a little bit bigger.  There was a pipe laying around and I picked it up and dispatched the snake with quickness.

I decided to throw this one out into the barnyard and let the chickens take out their revenge on the serpent.  They obliged.

Two down.  How many more to go?