Random Observances

Whether you are driving around or walking around, there is always something interesting to see if you take the time to notice.  Sometimes life happens so fast, that you don't take the time to appreciate things.  I want to make a conscious decision to take it all in or like Henry David Thoreau said: 

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms...”

What a great quote!  Don't you want to suck the marrow out of life?  While driving through Roanoke, Louisiana the other morning, an observance transported me several decades back.  Out in front of an old Bell building, I presume it was, was an old pay phone.  The really old pay phones were boxes with doors that you could walk into.  They had phone books hanging from a cable that you could use.  How times have changed.  You no longer need pay phones or phone books.  You can now talk to anyone at anytime without dropping a quarter in the slot.  The only problem is, I can't tell you anyone's number to save my life since I just press a button with the person's name.    

A "modern" phone booth (the one that followed the box-style phone booth

At home, we are in the peak season of blueberry harvest.  Approximately half of our blueberry bushes died last year in the drought.  The ones that survived are really producing this year.  We are getting about a quart of blueberries every single day.  I know that the birds are eating their fill too, doggonit!  The blueberries are plump and delicious.  I purchased some rooting hormone and I've been watching videos to teach myself to start cuttings rooting from our blueberry bushes to replace those we lost.  I'll attempt that in the next week.  We'll see if we can successfully get some starts from cuttings.  That would save some money, but I know it'll take several years.  We'll learn how to root blueberries and how to be patient at the same time!

Speaking of being patient, behold the work of the spider.  Overnight this spider constructed a masterful architectural wonder.  The dewdrops decorated the spiderweb like tiny jewels sparkling in the morning sunshine.  Think about the time that the spider meticulously built this web.  Amazing, really!  I wonder how many bugs were captured in this spider's trap?  Reminds me of the saying, "Oh what a tangled web we weave, when we practice to deceive."  When we do that, we get caught up in our own web.  Why does a spider not get caught in its' own web?  Have you ever thought about that?  It's because she walks on her tiptoes.  She's very careful.  In a few minutes the dew will be burned off her web and it will be more hidden.  Some unsuspecting bug will fall prey to her web and will be brunch.

I was driving south of Bell City, Louisiana, and saw a Baptist Church that was damaged from one of the hurricanes and not reopened.  It's a sad sight to see.  There are many, many churches that did not re-open after the hurricanes.  Their frayed blue tarps on the roofs blow in the wind, the facilities falling in disrepair.  Many insurers left the state after the storms.  Those that stayed increased premiums substantially.  Many churches cannot afford insurance anymore and are self-insuring their structures.  It's a sad situation, for sure.

Here's a glass half full story, to close.  Growing up, I hated Chinese tallow trees.  We called them chicken trees because chickens would roost in them.  They are an invasive species and will take over a fallow field or pasture in no time.  Birds eat their seeds and distribute them along fencerows.  Soon your fences are overtaken by the trees.  You must constantly clear them.  However, if you don't pull the trees up by the roots, it seems to make the trees mad.  They grow back from the stump with renewed vigor, determined to grow back stronger and faster than before.

But there is a good side to the tallow tree.  Honeybees love them!  Behold the flowers of the tallow tree!:

When you see this sight you know that the "flow" is on!  Bees will be gathering nectar and bringing it back to the hive to make honey.  You'd better make sure you have enough supers on top of your boxes to hold all the honey!  We were adding supers to the top of our four boxes last week.  The existing boxes are heavy and full of capped honey.  We added to the top so that they can continue filling the new boxes with honey while the flow is on.  Why, if you look to the very center of the photo below, you can see a honeybee busy working, collecting nectar from the tallow tree's flower:

If you weren't paying attention (or staring into your phone) you'd miss a lot!  Let's not miss anything.

The Momma Hen

The first broody hen we had setting on eggs hatched out 4 chicks.  We do have another broody hen that is setting on 7 eggs.  Just yesterday, we saw that she hatched out 4 chicks.  Evidently 5 hatched out originally but 1 died and two eggs must have been not fertilized as nothing hatched.  We'll wait until those chicks are a few days old before moving them.

Since the meat birds are in the freezer, our chicken tractor has vacancy.  It's a perfect place to move the first momma hen and her four chicks.  It is interesting to watch her instinctively teach her little biddies to scratch to look for bugs, worms and seeds.  They are all very active.  We did have to put some guards so that the chicks couldn't get out.  Two had gotten out by squeezing under the bottom the other day.  Had Ginger, our cat, seen them, well, it would have been disastrous for the two chicks.  For Ginger, it would have been a great day for a two piece chicken dinner.

The momma hen is a good mother.  If I walk in the tractor, she perks up, fluffs out her feathers and makes ominous, threatening noises.  Her little chicks huddle nearby and she provides protection like any good momma would.

I watched her as she methodically scratched at the grass.  Then she pecked and pointed with her beak.  She had unearthed a beetle and the little chick that was paying attention scored a nice meal.  The is teaching them life lessons that they'll need to survive.  These chicks likely aren't even hers.  She was broody and we just grabbed a few eggs and put them under her.  She sat on them for 21 days, hatched them out and now cares for them as if they were her own.

Yesterday, we had driving wind and rain that came through in the late afternoon.  I went out and held the chicken tractor down.  Once the winds subsided, I went back inside.  A little later I thought of the chicks.  Oh no!  If they get wet, they'll get hypothermia and die!  I went out to check on them and all were just fine.  The momma hen covered them with her wings.  She was soaking wet, but her little chicks were warm and dry beneath her, safe from the storm.

It would be nice if the little chicks were all pullets, but normally about 50% are pullets and 50% are cockerels.  We will probably get 2 little hens out of this batch to replace those that were eaten by minks.  For the roosters, well, they'll end up in a pot for supper in about 6 months.

In a few days we'll move the other broody hen with her four little chicks into the chicken tractor.  We'll raise the little ones in the tractor until around 20-24 weeks old.  That's when they'll lay their first eggs and we will move them out to the barnyard in the general population.  By then the momma hens will have taught them everything they need to know.

Finishing Up the Butchering - 2024

As the final bird in the chicken tractor is processed, there is still work to be done.  All the birds are chilling in tubs of water in the shade.  Meanwhile, we gather around the eviscerating table.  We dump out the bowl of livers on the table and spray them down.  They are mostly clean, but we make sure that they are clean and then pack them in quart bags for freezing.  We like to pan fry them in butter.  We also like to wrap them in bacon and broil them in the oven.  We did that today, in fact.  Liver isn't for everyone, but we enjoy it.  

Next, we pour all the hearts on the table, cut them in half and wash the coagulated blood out of them and bag them up to freeze.  It's just a muscle, so it's good eating.  I didn't get a photo of the hearts, though.  Livers and hearts are pretty easy to clean and freeze.  

The gizzards require a bit more time.  The gizzards are surrounded by fat.  We take our time and pull it all off of each gizzard.  We are kind of particular about getting them super clean.

Then we cut them in half and remove the yellow, plastic-like liner from the inside of the gizzard.  It is always interesting to see what's in the gizzard.  Chickens eat rocks and oyster shells to aid in the break down and digestion of their food.  You can see that these chickens weren't only eating feed and bugs.  They were eating their share of grass and clover.  Healthy birds.

All the gizzards are bagged and frozen.  But don't forget, we have tubs full of feathers, guts, blood, feet, heads, etc.  We've always put that right back in the garden.  I dig trenches in the garden, pour it all in, cover it back up, and it will rot and add good stuff to the soil.  There are sweet potatoes growing in abundance all around the 'gut pit'.  Healthy soil is the key to a good garden.

We go inside and take a break, while we are waiting for the next event of the day, I take the opportunity to sharpen the knives.  They've all been used all morning and have dulled.  I drip some oil on a whetstone and sharpen them and then use the steel to further fine tune.  In the end, the work results in a razor sharp knife, and we'll need that in just a little bit.

A final thing I want to discuss is the Buck knife at the bottom of the photo.  That knife was my Uncle Don's hunting knife.  It was given to me when he passed away, and we used it to butcher chickens today.  Don was a good man and while using his knife today, we talked about him and many fond memories of spending time with him.  I think he would have enjoyed all the flying feathers today.  We certainly miss him.

We brought the tubs holding 32 freshly butchered birds in the house along with the tables.  It was getting hot outside and the flies were bad.  We felt confident that we would be able to clean up any mess that we made on the tile floors.  The birds were on ice and went through the rigor mortis process during the afternoon.

In the late afternoon, we began the final task - cutting up the birds.  We do an 8 piece cut-up: 2 breasts, 2 wings, 2 thighs, 2 drumsticks.  It's actually a 9 piece cut up, because we keep the neck/backbone section for making broth.  I wish I would have taken some photos of that process, but my hands get so messy cutting up the birds that I didn't want to get all that on my phone.  We freeze them in gallon freezer bags.  We froze a couple birds whole (not cut up).  The rest we cut up and bagged either 1 chicken or a half chicken to the bag.

We weighed the final product and kept good records.  Perhaps tomorrow or the day after, we'll show you the results: total weight, average weight per bird, feed consumption, cost per bird, etc.

Blood, Guts, and Feathers - Chicken Butchering - 2024

Eight weeks from cradle to grave.  That's it.  That's how long it takes to raise a Cornish Cross Meat Bird for slaughter.  Saturday was butchering day.  Our sons came in to help with the annual process.  We were trying to figure out how many years we've done this and can't put our finger on it.  Our best guess is 15 years.  Each year we purchase day old chicks and raise them for slaughter and eat on these birds all year long.  In the past we've raised as many as 100 at a time.  This year, it's only Tricia and me at home so we raised 32.

Each day we made sure that they had access to feed and fresh water.  We also gave them an all you can eat grass and bug buffet by pushing the chicken tractor to fresh grass two times a day.  The night before the butchering, I pushed the tractor near the butchering stations I set up.  I stopped feeding them at noon the day before butchering so that their digestive system would be emptied.  This makes gutting them a cleaner process.  I got the whetstone out and steel and sharpened all the knives.  A sharp knife certainly makes the butchering process easier.

The Final Countdown

The first station is the "killing cones."  We use traffic cones that were abandoned on the side of the road and then screwed to two 2 x 4's.  The live birds are turned upside down in the cones with the head poking out.  The rubber cones hold them tight.  Buckets are placed beneath each cone to collect the blood.

Killing Cones

Benjamin runs the Killing Cone station.  After he's positioned the birds in place, he uses a sharp knife to slice the bird's artery on the side of its head.

One slice

The bird's heart will pump all the blood out of the bird and it will die.  We aim for the least stressful death possible.  This only takes a couple of minutes and the bird is pronounced dead.

A bloody job

Russ runs the scalding station.  We use our crawfish boiling pot that's been filled with water.  A propane burner heats the water.  A thermometer in the pot is monitored so that it stays between 145 and 150 Fahrenheit.  The temperature has to be just right.  If it is too cool, the feathers won't come off.  If it is too hot, it will cook the bird.  We add some dishwashing liquid to the water.  It is a surfactant and enables the feathers to come off a little easier.  We usually dunk the bird in and out of the water for about two minutes.  We make sure we dunk all the way down so that you get the joint of the let wet.  The test for making sure the bird is ready for plucking is to try to pull a tail feather out and try to pull a big wing feather out.  When each pulls off easily, you're ready for plucking.

Russ' Plucking Station

Teamwork makes the dream work.  Sometimes, when Benjamin is waiting for his four birds to die, he assists Russ in scalding.

Next up is the plucking.  Years ago we built this plucker.  It has rubber fingers mounted on the sides and on a disk on the bottom.  A washing machine motor powers this contraption.  You turn it on and the bottom spins.  Toss the bird in and spray it with water and while it spins, the rubber fingers take all the feathers off.  It's quite a time saver.

The plucker

The de-feathered bird is given to me.  I pull the head of the chicken off and cut the feet off.  Then I remove the gland on the top of the bird's tail, cut the neck and pull the crop and the windpipe out and make a cut across the bird's belly near the vent.

No head, no feet

Tricia runs the evisceration station.  She's quite the surgeon.  She reaches in the bird's cavity and pulls out the intestines, liver, gizzard, heart, crop and windpipe.  It all pulls out connected.  She cuts a U-shaped cut around the vent and the bird is gutted.  The liver, gizzard and heart are cut out and placed in iced containers for further processing later.  The gall bladder is carefully cut off the liver, being careful not to cut into the organ.  All the guts are put in a bucket.  She reaches in the bird and removes the lungs from along the back bone and, if a male, removes the testicles.  The gutted carcass is washed out good with a hose.

The surgeon in her OR

The birds then are cooled down.  They are thrown in tubs of cool water.  Keeping them submerged protects them from flies.  It also brings their body temperature down.  Toward the end of the process, we dump out the water and refill with cool, fresh water.

The chilling station

This whole process goes faster than you think.  We always say we're going to time it and always forget.  Finally, we look in the tractor and there's just one left.  The last of the Mohicans.  

Tomorrow, I'll show you Part II of this process.  It is a smooth operation that we've tried to perfect each year.  There's something to be said about processing your own birds in the backyard.  It's good to know what you are eating and what went into your birds.  No medications.  No hormones.  No antibiotics.  Join us tomorrow as we continue...

Repurposing An Underused Room

The onion harvest is on!  We are harvesting Yellow Granex (Vidalia), Texas White, and Creole onions everyday.  As the tops bend over at a 90 degree angle, it's time.  I pull them and lay them in the garden for a day to dry a little.  Then I bring them and drape them over a table on our patio, leaving some space around them for airflow.  More on that in a minute.

After a day or two, I snip the onion tops off and throw the "tails" in the compost pile.  Usually about the time that the onions are ripening is the worst time climate-speaking there is in South Louisiana.  It is hot and muggy and very humid.  These aren't conditions conducive to curing onions.  We check them daily and we'll find one or two getting a little soft.  Before we lose it, we'll bring it in, cut it up and freeze it for using later.  We have to solve this problem. In the past we've put fans above and below the onions to help dry them a little.  The problem with that is if the humidity is maxed out, you're simply pushing wet air around them.  That's not doing any good.  What to do?  What to do?

Russ had an idea.  Bring them inside.  Now, why didn't I think of that?  Where would we put them?  Well, we have an underused room in our house.  The living room.  We call it "the parlor."  The parlor is the room that we would assemble as a family after Sunday lunch and have meetings.  We called it our merienda, which means light meal or snack.  It was in this room that we'd have coffee and dessert and lay out the plans for the upcoming weeks activities.

When we had 3 kids at home with busy schedules, those planning meetings were crucial in communicating events, responsibilities and the timing to each family member.  Not to mention the fact that coffee and homemade pie was involved!  But now we're empty nesters.  The parlor doesn't get used as often.  In fact, I read that most people aren't building homes with living rooms/parlors.  They don't want "brown furniture."  Our parlor doesn't follow that line of thinking.  It contains mostly furniture inherited from my grandparents.

We did, however, scoot some furniture in the parlor aside.  The parlor has become our onion curing room.  We laid out the onions on a curing table and turned the fan on high.  As of yet, we haven't lost any more onions.  Aside from our home having the distinct scent of onions, this has been a beneficial arrangement.

The formal room has taken on a more utilitarian role.  That's okay.  We like flexibility.

Mirror, Mirror on the wall, Who's the fairest of them all?

My wife, of course.  :)

Life is Sweet

On Mother's Day, some bad weather blew through our area, bringing strong winds and hail.  It did a lot of destruction.  Not at our place, but neighbors across town.  I work for an insurance company and have been driving around counting hail dents on vehicles.  I have well over 100 hail claims to write estimates for.  I'll be busy for a while!  I feel sorry for the poor people I talk to that are heartbroken over their vehicles.  They can be repaired, though.

Life is still good, though, you know?  At the end of the day, things quieten down.  The sky gets real pretty.  Things are green and lush with all the rainfall.  We can take time to appreciate all the good things.  I walked out to the garden with a couple of 5 gallon buckets.  It was time to harvest the sweet corn.  The wind had laid some of it down on the tomatoes, but it was all good. 

I planted only two rows this year.  We still have ears of sweet corn from last year's crop in the freezer.  Last year we had a pollination problem.  Lots of blanks on the ears of corn.  This year the pollination problem was gone.  I planted the corn closer together this year.  That gives a better chance of fertilization.  All the ears were full and plump.

I have a little tradition that I started years ago.  When I pick the first corn of the year, I shuck it and eat the first ear raw, right there in the corn row.  Sweet.  Delicious.  You don't even need to cook it.

Of course I'm showing you a pretty ear.  I've got to be honest.  All the ears aren't pretty.  This is not an ear of corn that you want to eat raw standing in the sweet corn patch.

Doggone Worms!

I shucked all the corn and threw all the husks, silk and ends of the cobs over the garden fence.  The cows and goats feasted.  Nothing gets wasted around here.  The corn was ready for processing.  Tricia blanched it all.

Then, in a big bowl so as not to make a big mess, we cut the corn off the cob, scraping the cob good to get all the sweet 'milk' that we could.

Fresh sweet corn is such a treat!

We bagged it up in quart sized freezer bags.  They'll be put in the freezer and will be used to make corn maque choux, shrimp and corn chowder and other favorite dishes.

Simple pleasures like fresh sweet corn reminds you that despite all the problems in the world, life is still sweet!

Ruminations - Is Bigger Really Better?

Earl Butz, Secretary of Agriculture under President Nixon from December 1971 to October 1976, promoted policies that favored large-scale corporate farming and an end to programs designed to protect small farmers.  He essentially said, "Get Big or Get Out."  I was 10 years old at the time and much too young to be concerned with such things.  That thinking set into motion what seemed to be an unstoppable wave, and end to a way of life.  The death of the small family farm.

I was driving down the road the other day and something caught my eye that got me to thinking about this.  Look at the photo below.  You know what that is?

Those are Butler bins.  For those who don't know these are what harvested rice is put into in order to be dried and stored until sold and sent to the rice mills.  We had a small set up bins like this on our farm.  These bins seem like toys compared to the bins of today.  We eventually got rid of these little Butler bins and replace them with bigger ones that seemed grandiose compared to the little Butlers.  Oh my goodness.  With the sizes of the combines today, one combine load of rice would surely fill a Butler bin.

Once the old obsolete Butler bins were gone, the reminder of them were the circular slabs upon which sat the bins.  As kids, we'd keep those slabs swept and clean, because we used them as pads to park plows and planters and other equipment.

The bigger bins held more rice.  As I drive around today, I realized that our bigger bins seem like toys compared to the million dollar structures being put in today.  I'm told that they are computer operated and can be programmed by your phone.  You don't even need to get out of your truck.  You simply push buttons on your phone and magic happens.  

There are a lot of differences in farms of yesterday and today.  Farms of yesterday required people.  Farmers would walk the levees with a shovel resting on their shoulder, looking for muskrat holes that caused leaks.  That shovel came in mighty handy when you encountered a cottonmouth water moccasin aggressively coiled atop the levee, not wanting to yield his ground to you.  You always had to have your eyes opened for such things.

Springtime involved crop duster pilots flying overhead in AgCats planting rice in flooded fields.  Early spring is mostly silent now as a lot of rice is dry planted.  Instead of water leveling and working the land, a lot of grass is simply 'burned down' by Round Up.  Back then, you'd drive on the back roads and farmers would come upon one other and kill their trucks in the middle of the road, roll down the window (you would actually roll them down) and talk about what the crop was looking like, what kind of weather was coming, and the hopes of higher prices for rice.

The back roads were bustling with people on ditching tractors, old pickups or three wheelers, checking irrigation wells, fixing busted levees, scouting for weeds and disease.  Now things are different.  The workers you come across are imported from a different country.  They speak a different language.  They don't have familial ties to the land.  The small farming communities once had machine shops and parts houses that served the local farmer.  Farmers dropped by to trade and drink coffee and talk about hopes of a better crop next year.  FFA clubs were popular in the high schools, people proudly wearing those blue corduroy jackets. 

Much of the community was involved and intertwined in agriculture.  It was important to the identity of the town.  Things have changed.  The old storefronts down Main Street are either shuttered or have changed, serving different clientele.  You almost expect to see tumbleweeds rolling down the road.  Many of the old farming families' children have moved off to the city or at least commute to the city to work.  Dollar Generals, subdivisions, and solar panels now sit on once productive farm land. 

The machines have gotten bigger, enabling fewer and fewer people to manage larger and larger parcels of land.  The old John Deere 4020 tractors that once were the workhorse of the farm now sit rusting in the tall grass, looking like a boy's play toy compared to the behemoths that now pull huge implements across the ground. The capital involved in farming is prohibitive for most people.  The family farms of yesteryear are large corporate farms now.  Foreign governments are buying US farmland now.  Get big or get out has been achieved.  Mr. Butz' policies have come to fruition, a wild success some might say.

But I beg to differ.  Sure, farming is more efficient.  But what's the real cost?  The small family farms that were the glue that held communities together are rapidly disappearing.  The children reared on those farms, learning work ethic and civic pride have left, never to return.  The way of life we grew up with is gone, changed, like it never existed.  A distant memory in the cobwebs of your mind.  But some of us still remember what a good life it was.  Is bigger really better?  The answer, in my humble opinion, would be an emphatic NO.