Update on the New Hen House Gate

In the last post, we told you about a purchase we made in which we installed a solar powered automatic hen house door.  Currently, each night we go out and manually close the gate and each morning, we open the gate.  This keeps them safely protected from minks that have plagued the birds.  We had gone out the night of installation and discovered that the gate was closed and all birds were safe and sound.

In the photo below, you can see the solar panel mounted on the wall of the hen house above the door.  There are several settings and a remote control.  You can set it to close at sunset and open at sunrise.  Alternatively, you can set it like an alarm to open at any certain time (6 AM, for example) and close at any time (8 PM, for example).  Or you can use the remote control to open and close at will.

This morning we walked out to the barn to do our morning chores and...  The door was closed.  It was still before sunrise, but we were a little concerned that it wasn't going to open.  As we finished chores, I noticed a green light came on and the door opened.  It was 6:24 AM.  All the birds began filing out, one by one.  A white hen and a red hen zoomed out as you can see!

How about that!  This evening, we walked out at 8 PM to check on the doors.  It was quiet in the pasture.  All the hens were in the hen house, but the door was still open.  We decided to sit out and wait and watch.  At 8:04 exactly, a red light appeared on the door's indicator light and the door slowly closed.

What a lovely contraption!  We opened the door to the hen house and everyone was inside and on the roosting bars.  It's hard to see with the shadow, but there are 47 birds in here, all settled in for the night.  In addition to laying eggs in the nesting boxed that are all closed up for the night, the birds are doing an additional job for me.  They are making fertilizer.  All the poop that falls to the ground will be swept up and used as fertilizer in the garden after allowing it to 'cool down' a little bit.

So far, this is working out to be a good purchase.  No fowl play at all with installation of this hen house automatic door.  Two thumbs up!

The High Tech Hen House

We splurged a little and bought a contraption for the hen house.  Total price tag was $44.  We'll see if it works.  It is a solar powered chicken coop door.  It opens at sunrise and closes at sunset.  The current arrangement goes like this:  At night after all the chickens are roosting in the hen house, I go and close the door so that the minks don't kill all of them.  After they killed 39 in total, we've finally built the flock back up to 40 in total.  Each morning, we go back out to the barn and open the door to the hen house so that they can run around on 3 acres and forage for bugs, worms and grass.

This is not a new invention - I remember my friend in Hathaway had one of these on his hen house many years ago.  I was impressed with it.  It was delivered to the door yesterday and today after work, I got the instructions out and began the installation process.

I took the existing hen house door off and took measurements, using the old adage, "Measure twice, cut once."  It fit like a hand in a glove.  I began screwing everything in place and brought the charging apparatus inside to charge with electricity since it would soon be getting dark. Tonight, we'll manually close it once its charged and then tomorrow we'll begin the automatic sunrise open and sunset close feature.

It's about 6:30 pm and some of the girls are checking out the new door.  "How's this gonna work?"  The opening is four times smaller than it used to be.  Will they figure it out?  I'm sure it will, but after it gets dark, we'll check and see if they all made it in.

It's 9:30 pm and we went out and manually closed the door.  Let's check in and see if they all made their way in to roost:

They did!  The hens and roosters are all up on their roosts and ready to call it a night.  As am I.  Good night everyone!

The Green Light on the Dock

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“And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter—to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning—— So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”  F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby

My job is such that I'm on the road a lot.  It's a good thing I have a company vehicle.  I'll put 200 miles a day on the odometer.  That's a lot of miles on a vehicle.  But similarly and as time marches on, we find that we have a lot of sand that's fallen through the hour glasses on our frail, human bodies.  That's sort of what I want to talk about today.  What's it all about?

King Solomon, the smartest man to ever live, wrote about that in Ecclesiastes:

"Vanity of vanities," says the Preacher,

"Vanity of vanities!  All is vanity."

What advantage does man have in all his work which he does under the sun?

With my daily drive time, I pray, then I listen to podcasts.  I have 3 favorites of which I never miss an episode:

1. The Art of Manliness

2. Bear Grease

3. Victor Davis Hansen

That is quite a variety, you might say!  I also have a library card and have downloaded the Libby App on my phone.  That way I can listen to audiobooks.  I like mysteries from the likes of authors like James Lee Burke and Michael Connelly.  But lately, I've pledged to go back and re-read a lot of the classics.  I just finished up with "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley.  It was written in 1932 and it's amazing how true to life that book is with 2025 America.

The one I finished before that was "The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald.  As stated, I've read all these before, but I it interesting to re-visit them in the eyes of a middle aged man.  This audiobook is almost 5 hours long, which is pretty short.  Here's my take on the book:

I told my wife after listening to 3 hours of it, that I hated it.  The characters in the book were wealthy, worldly, hedonistic, and fake.  They lived for themselves and their selfish pleasures, feeding their physical desires.  They were constantly at parties, drinking, and it seemed like most were having affairs, living lives of excess and no one was really happy.  They all seemed to be very lonely people.

You see, Gatsby was from a very humble upbringing.  He fell in love with a woman of great wealth named Daisy Buchanan.  He knew in order to have her, he would need to be rich and successful.  He was very driven and commenced to doing just that and he succeeded in bootlegging during Prohibition, along with other illegal schemes and enterprises.  Doing this enabled him to amass great wealth and a big mansion on Long Island.  Many people would come to his parties, drink his alcohol, dance to his music, and enjoy seeing and being seen.  Gatsby would gaze longingly across the sound and see the green light on Daisy Buchanan's dock, so far away.

Spoiler alert:  At the end of the book, Gatsby dies!  Nick, his only true friend, is calling people to tell them the time of the funeral, but everyone has more pressing plans.  All of the "friends" that were eager to attend his parties and drink his alcohol while he was living, abandoned him once he had no more to give.  No one attended his funeral.

Thinking about the green light on Daisy's dock that Gatsby would stare at, I think it symbolized several things - first Gatsby's quest to be someone successful, to have money and power and esteem.  He put all his energies in their pursuit.  I think he attained that in many ways, but having them didn't satiate something deeper within himself.  The green light was also a representation of Daisy's love.  It was there, but so far away, just beyond reach.

This is a picture, to me, of life that King Solomon wrote about so many years ago.  Everything is futility and striving after the wind.  The pursuit of wealth, riches, fame, success, at the end of life, is indeed hollow.  Maybe, like Gatsby, you never get the love of your life and maybe, no one will come to your funeral.  The chase of these material things is elusive.  Our lives are, the Bible tells us, a momentary vapor - here today and gone tomorrow.  No matter how close you come to achieving all the goals you set, true happiness seems just out of your grasp.  You never reach it, just like the green light in the distance on Daisy's dock.

"His dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him."  Nick Carroway thinking about his friend, Gatsby.

I think that's why Jesus told us not to lay up for ourselves treasures on earth where moth and rust destroy and thieves break in and steal.  Instead lay up treasures in heaven where there is no decay or loss.  Where our treasure is, there will our heart be also.  Instead of seeking happiness, we should find contentment.

Gatsby died alone.  Was it all worth it for him?  I would say no.  We have an opportunity to go down a different path than Gatsby.  Unless Jesus returns during our lifetimes, we'll all die.  But death is not the end.  For the believer, that "green light" is within reach, without a doubt.  It's promised to us!  We will live in eternal bliss with our Savior.  While Gatsby died alone, we've been promised that our Lord will never leave us nor forsake us.  We won't be alone.  And, everything we've hoped for is there for all eternity.

In the Back of the Refrigerator

Before I get to today's topic, I wanted to show you one thing that my wife reminded me about the honey harvest.  Obviously we got honey and lots of it.  We also got beeswax and honey water.  The one thing I neglected to tell you that we also got was fire starters.  When we strained the impurities out of the beeswax, it left us with muslin rags filled with a waxy-debris substance.  These make great fire starters for a campfire or fireplace and we've put them into a zip loc bag to save for cooler weather and fire building.

Back in April when the weather was nice and cool, we posted THIS POST that explained one thing that we were going to do with the last of our cabbage crop.  We made kimchi or Korean sauerkraut.  If you click on the link highlighted in blue in the first sentence of this paragraph, it will take you back to that post and show you just how we did it, using lacto-fermentation as a food preservation method of choice.

We pushed the two quarts to the very back of the refrigerator.  The best thing to do is just forget it's there.  Then, on a hot, summer day, you reach back there and pull out a jar of kimchi that's been aging for months.

I guess ordinary folks would throw this out.  It looks kind of sketchy.  When you open the cap and sniff it, it smells very strong.

When you take a fork and dig into it, magic happens.  It's packed in there tight.  You have to work at it to get it unpacked and out of the jar and onto your plate.

Now for the taste test.  It's cool and tangy, effervescent and tart. It's also spicy.  In short, it's delicious and perfect for taking a few bites before your meal to get your digestion into gear.  We've been eating some for lunch each day and I suppose we'll be opening the second jar that's hiding in the back of the fridge.

The Honey Harvest (Part 7)

In the last installment of the honey harvest, we bottled up the honey for our sales department (Tricia).  If you thought we were finished, well, there's one more item of business.  See, honey isn't the only thing that was harvested.  There is a by-product that is very useful.  If you remember in one of the initial honey harvest posts, Benjamin used a knife to un-cap the capped frames of honey.  The wax cappings fell down into the table and most of the remaining honey flowed through a screen and we were able to get that honey.  

All that remained in the table was the wax.  We bagged that up into gallon zip loc bags and froze it for about 3 days.

We got out the old trusty crock pot and added about 2 1/2 inches of water to the bottom.  Then the wax cappings were put into a muslin cloth 'filter' and dipped into the water.  As it warms, the wax melts and flows out of the muslin and into the crock pot.

Any non-wax particles are captured in the muslin bag and we'll go give that back to the bees.  The beeswax and water is in the crock pot.

Now we turn off the crock pot and allow it to cool.  The wax rise to the top and the honey-water is on the bottom.

Once completely cool, you pull out the beeswax disk.  By the way, to the right of the beeswax is a fresh baking pan of sourdough bagels with everything seasoning on top, ready to slice in half and stick a fried egg in the middle for a nice breakfast bagel.

We repeated the process a couple of times and have two nice disks of beeswax.  If we wanted to, we could filter again and again to get clearer beeswax.

Out of curiosity, I put the wax on the scale and found that we got 3 pounds of beeswax.

But wait!  There's more.  The bottom of the crock pot contains the water that we put in and also the honey that cooked out of the wax.  We call this honey-water.  We bag this up and put it in the freezer.  In late winter and early spring, we put this in pans in front of the hive.  The bees quickly discover this and start drinking it and bring it back to the hive.  This mimics the "flow" and induces the queen to begin laying more and more eggs so she'll have workers.  This builds the population for when the real flow starts and gives you a head start on honey production.  They can hit the ground running.  It's a natural way to feed your bees.

We are finished with the 2025 honey harvest and have put a sign in front of the house to sell the honey.  With the beeswax harvested, we can make candles.  It'll be our first attempt, but we're anxious to try our hand at it.  One thing I've looked into is making herbal salves with beeswax.  The wax can also be melted and brushed onto the frames to give the bees a head start in drawing out comb.

All good things to shoot for.  We're also planning on pulling fall honey in October once the goldenrods are done.

Aim To Only Sweat the Stuff You Can Control

I try to be easy-going and not let things bother me.  Oh, problems arise daily, but most of them just require some creative thinking and/or old fashioned hard work and before you know it, the issue at hand is resolved.  I wish that was true of all problems.  We all have issues in our lives that we've prayed about for years that seem no closer to resolution than when they first occurred.  I'm talking about things that no matter how hard you work, no matter how you try to communicate, you're still at a log jam.  I cannot worry or lose sleep over things like this.  It's not that they don't bother me (they do!), it's that I trust in God.  He's told us to lay our burdens at His feet and that's what I'll do.

That being said, I want to discuss with you a couple of things that grind my gears.  The first is a local issue and the second, more of a national issue.  First the local:  We have a ditch that runs across the front of our property.  Although it is a lot of work, I weed eat the ditch twice a month.  We purchased some plastic signs and stenciled the words "NO SPRAY" and stuck them in the ground alongside the ditch.

The photo above and especially the photo below evidences the fact that the parish road crew (in Louisiana they are called Police Jury) ignored our signs and sprayed right over the signs that say NO SPRAY.  Can you see the yellowing and dead grass?  Perhaps they can't read?  More likely, they don't care.  They overspray the ditches and spray directly into the yard, killing St. Augustine grass.  The spray they are using is some type of Round Up (glyphosate) that kills all grasses except for bermudagrass.  It burns everything down to the ground, and we don't want that on our property.

Why?  There are at least a couple reasons why we don't want them spraying their herbicide on our land.  First, the herbicide kills all the grasses providing groundcover, leaving the soil exposed.  When the rains come, and they do (In July we had over 10 inches of rain!), the barren soil is washed down into the ditch.  The roots of the grass that once grew here and held the soil together are gone.  This topsoil runs into the ditch and before you know it, the ditches are stopped up with soil and so the parish police jury comes around with dump trucks and track hoes and scoops up the dirt (MY DIRT) out of the ditch and carries my soil away!  ARGGHH...

The second reason we don't want them spraying can be seen right over the pasture fence.  Our cows, goats, and chickens eat all that grass.  We milk the cows and goats and our chickens lay eggs and we consume all that daily.  We don't want our food contaminated with poison.  Furthermore, if you look in the distance right between the t-posts, you'll see our four bee boxes full of bees making us honey.  I'd rather not have Round Up-flavored honey.  I have a suspicion that some of what is being called "colony collapse" is due to pesticides and herbicides being used indiscriminately.  

A second issue that grinds my gears is more national in nature.  I haven't flown in an airplane in more than 15 years.  After 9/11 and the implementation of the Patriot Act (which I originally supported "to keep us safe" but now vehemently oppose) travelling became such a pain.  Full body cavity searches, taking off your shoes, x-raying all your belongings, getting to the airport 2 hours early?  All that just takes the joy out of flying.  Make no mistake, the radical Islamists won.  We've just chosen to enjoy being local and not traveling but by vehicle and staying close to home.

Well, we dried up the cows and got invited to go with some friends to a western state.  We'll have to fly to get there and of course, my passport expired back in 2018.  Our state did not require the "real ID" until recently.  I realized that I needed to get a new passport.  Well, it takes four weeks to get a passport!  I have my old passport, my birth certificate, my driver's license.  How in the world does it take four weeks?  It's because there is no competition.  It is a monopoly.  There's no other game in town.  The paperwork below actually states, "Your application may not be in process until two weeks after you apply."

The cherry on top, though, is that I am a citizen of this country and have to pay over $100 and fill out forms, take pictures, go through security at the court house to get 'papers' to travel between states within my own country.  And yet, the back door of the country is left wide open and millions of  non-citizens flood through with no papers, passports, no fees to pay, no hassles and are then free to disperse across our country at will.  We live in an upside down world!  

Injustice.  This fallen world is full of injustice.  It's not a new thing, but that doesn't make it easier to swallow.  I guess at the end of the day, it's best to only sweat the stuff you can control.  And the rest?  Leave them in the hands of the Lord who created all and is in control of all.

It's Like A Jungle Out There

Summertime.  The long, hot, steamy, baking days of summer.  The crisp spring days are long gone.  Only the strongest survive.  Let's look today at one of the survivors of the dog days of summer.  This crop scoffs at hot weather.  It thrives in harsh conditions.  If Mars was ever to be colonized, the astronauts would be wise to plant this crop.  I must warn you, this portion of the garden in the side yard is not manicured.  It's not growing in neat, tidy rows.  It's a jungle.

"Kyle," you might say, "You let the garden get away from you.  Weed eat all that down and start planning your fall garden."  If I was to do that, I would miss out on one of my favorite meals.  You see, we're looking at a row of purple hull peas and black-eyed peas.  Okay, I'll admit, there's some morning glory growing in there too.  But can you see the purple hulls?  That means they are ready for picking.

The purple hull peas are planted dangerously close to four hives of pretty aggressive bees, so I've got to be alert, quick and sneaky as I quickly get in the patch and get back out.  Like a special forces operator, I get my gear which consists of a wicker basket I use for picking.  Up and down the rows I go, looking for purple hulls.  

In short order, my basket is full, and I'm on the back patio shelling peas.  Shelling peas is a relaxing and rewarding endeavor.  It's an old-timey activity evoking memories of sitting on a rocking chair on the porch shelling peas.  If you listen closely, you can hear the "ping" noise as the peas hit the bottom of the big stainless steel pot you're shelling them into.  The hulls go in a separate bucket to be composted.  There's almost nothing that we don't compost.  The garbage men must scratch their heads when they pick up our weekly garbage can that's almost empty.

Once you get in a rhythm shelling, it's a rewarding experience rescuing the peas from the confines of the purple hulls.  "Freedom!" the peas yell as they are liberated.

Before you know it, you have a 'mess' of purple hull peas.

I was happy this afternoon when, less than 24 hours from shelling, my wife had a pot of rice going, a black cast iron skillet with buttered jalapeno cornbread cooking in the oven, and a big pot of purple hull peas cooking on the stove with onions, peppers and green onion garlic sausage simmering.  I served a big "ant pile mound" of peas over rice on my plate, and my wife asked, "You goin' on a trip?"

That's a nice way of telling me that I was being gluttonous.  When she was growing up as a young child, her brother, David, was running away from home.  Word had gotten out to Tricia's Dad that David was planning to run away.  In his plan, he was going to eat one last meal - a big one, before running away.  As he sat at the table with WAY too much food on his plate, Tricia's Dad asked David, "You goin' on a trip?"  As for me, I'm not going anywhere, but I'll always serve a huge plate of purple hull peas over rice and homemade cornbread.