A lot has changed in my life. A lot of surprising sudden changes. But finally I am ready to return to blogging. Really just sort of wondering is there anyone still out there?
Not that I blame anyone for giving up.....it has been a long time. There were things that hit me from the blind side that I had to deal and cope with. I'm not really sure if I am finished, but I am getting closer to the other side. Maybe one day I can talk about it.
There are some new things in my life. I am a Grandmother. This is my new little guy!
Also some new baby chicks. Eleven of them. My sweet little hen was such a good setter! So proud of her! She also is a good little Mama to her babies.
But..... Some things haven't changed....I still love Jesus and my family.....and I still adore gardening, chickens, frugality, cooking, canning, crochet, knitting, art, and a lot of other things.
I am looking forward to writing and sharing. I just didn't have the courage in the recent past. Just maybe...just maybe....this will help return the courage that sometimes I feel I have lost. Although I must not have....I am still here!
Interestingly enough there are people who will not eat the eggs I produce at home. For various reasons.
Some have the perception that store bought eggs are cleaner and have tighter quality controls. I've even had someone say they just couldn't eat brown eggs....they grossed them out.
Others are really bothered by the fact that I have roosters and well, the eggs may be fertilized and have little well you know rooster stuff in them.
Occasionally there will be a tiny blood spot in an egg, and I don't have those special lights that illuminate them so any "blooded" egg can be removed for the selectively squeamish among us.
According to my "Storeys" chicken raisin' book, this blood spot is only a tiny blood something another that gets enclosed occasionally during the chicken's internal shell making process. Anyway, the same people chow down on red meat that is full of blood...why does a little spot in a egg that doesn't even show once cooked make a difference. I'm sorry, I think people are weird!
I carefully looked and found the best and the worst chicken egg production facility videos I could find. The first tries to be as fair as possible while still casting it's philosophy in a more favorable light. The second, well, its not for the squeamish. I do recommend that you look at both.
Then look at the pictures of my chickens free ranging with their rooster keeping an eye out for predators. There's also a picture of them in their night time coop.
The fact that production farm chickens are kept 6 or so to a battery cage and are never allowed to be a chicken in the sense that God created them is enough for me to decide to keep them myself. It hurts me to see anything kept in squalid conditions. I hate to see a dog chained. I hate to see a horse kept in a stall day in and day out.......It really does break my heart. I wouldn't want to live like that.
It's also a proven fact that chickens that are allowed to free range and eat grass, bugs, and seeds produce nutritionally superior eggs....and ask those that do love to get eggs from me....mine taste better too. The yolks are bright orangy yellow and the egg texture is superior.
I have no problem with eating eggs and meat. I do have a problem with people who do so, but don't want to see how it's done.
Slowly the garden is returning to it's orderly neat appearance. Whew, I should have taken a picture of the mound of grass and weeds I pulled! It's quite impressive. The 8 square beds, the herb wheel, 3 of the long beds, and most of the paths are done. Each year that passes makes established garden beds easier and easier to weed as long as they are kept up. So persistence pays off.
A Black Beauty Eggplant developing nicely in the garden.
I believe this little volunteer melon is a Charentais.
Here are the banana trees I planted. Hopefully soon they'll start to bear.
This is the new chicken coop addition with it's temporary house. We still need to add buried wire to protect them from digging predators. In the next two weeks we plan to kill all but two of our roosters and possibly some hens. I would like about 10 to 12 hens and one rooster in each coop. Eventually I plan to try letting them out to pasture graze and seeing if they return easily to their house.
Good morning girls!
The pear trees are simply loaded. With three tropical storms threatening, I plan to harvest as many as possible to dry and can. Just in case. Last year I lost all of my pears and pecans to hurricane Gustav. He knocked every single one off. He also stripped my plants of most of their leaves and tattered the tropicals.
There are so many pears that a large limb broke and tumbled to the ground. Here's a pic of the break.
It's lime time! The limes are in. Here's a beautiful stash my neighbor Sandy gave me. I plan to juice them and then freeze the juice in ice trays for later use. After freezing in the trays I transfer them to a ziplock bag for storing in the freezer. I do this with lemons and grapefruit as well.
The soil in my recently plowed garden is absolutely fertile! The tomatoes, bell peppers, butternut squash and sorghum is huge and beautiful. The land along the Mississippi River edge is said to be extremely rich because of years of the Mississippi flooding and depositing silt. I'm finding this to be true.
The heirloom tomatoes are doing well so far. This year has been the year of the caterpillar. Advice ranges from sevin dust to BT organic spray. One thing all the advice givers agree on is to spray early to catch the caterpillars just as they hatch and are most susceptible and spray often. Otherwise, NO TOMATOES. Tomatoes has been my bane! Never have I grown a serious crop of tomatoes in an area that's famous for it's "Creole Tomatoes". Hopefully this year will be different. One thing is certain, I've already learned A LOT!
My neighbor, with whom we are now friends after a rocky start, stopped today to offer advice. His family has lived here long before he was born and he is almost 80. His family is well noted in south Louisiana as excellent farmers. The Becnels, as they are called. That's their last name. He wasn't at all sure about the heirloom varieties I am growing. He was quite puzzled and asked why wasn't I growing the great new hybrids that beat all the old ones to heck.
Errrr.......Ummmm....??? "I'm curious", was the only explanation I offered. How do you explain to an elder that you want to save your own seed, see different colors and shapes and taste different flavors........that um......frankly aren't found in the newer varieties. He did offer me quite a bit of great advice and patiently answered all my questions (which I am always full of). He also explained how to grow trees from cuttings from a great old old old pear tree I have in my yard.
I was also told by a friend that heirlooms weren't a good choice in Louisiana because Dan Gill said so. Look Dan Gill I still love you and have a crush on you, but you ain't the say all end all! Now I hope to prove Danny Boy and everyone else WRONG! Hope I don't have to eat crow as my Mother-In-Law sez.
Marzano Paste tomatoes Pink Accordion Tomatoes Red Strawberry Tomatoes Another variety of paste tomatoes.....I have many other heirloom varieties as well. I have high hopes for Pineapple (which I read was the tastiest of heirlooms), White Currant, Orange Banana, Cour Di Bue (I think), and Cherokee Purple.....If I could just get a few of each. I'll give a taste report if they make it through the rigors of Louisiana.
Here are the fig trees grown from cuttings. To everyone who would like to grow them.....This method works! They are growing beautiful with thick white roots protruding from the bottom of the pot. I'll have to put them into new pots or plant them.
This is a picture of the plant which contains a mommy bird and her four tensy eggs. The eggs are pale blue with brown speckles. And here is my naughty errent Rosalina (as the girls named her). She keeps getting out of the backyard fence somehow. I think she's enlisting the help of our dog Camira. Come on Camira....give me lift!!! I'll lay an egg for you! Camira loves to eat eggs. Maybe that's why she's as wide as she is long!
Isn't this one ugly chicken? I don't care that Byron thinks she's pretty. She's ugly.
Pea pickin' I love the open pod on the table cloth. The flower print behind it makes it look like a butterfly.
Spring chickies! These are a few of the 17 chicks we hatched in an incubator.
Of the 42 eggs we started with 24 were fertile, 17 hatched successfully, 2 died while trying to hatch and 5 didn't hatch at all. This 17 will bring our total number of chickens to 47.
Here's the patch my Brother plowed for me recently. In the future I'd like to use the no till method to keep it up. It's much larger than it appears in this picture, and often I find my self gazing across it thinking, "Am I crazy?" We'll see!
There are my neighbor's orange trees in the background. The soil looks pretty good. It needs a lot more organic matter. This little spot of ground is going to be used to grow all those large sprawling crops that need a lot of space to grow. Tall pole beans, pumpkins, watermelons.....
My Moonglow Iris is blooming now.
Doodles. I'm thinking about making this dress for my girls using fabric from Anna Maria Horner. I adore her fabric. It's so happy. It reminds me of one of my favorite artists, Matisse. Not so much that their styles are similar, but just because it's comfortable and happy.
I just picked these pretty little carrots from my garden. They are called "Cosmic Purple" carrots and I bought the seed from Bakers Creek Heirloom Seeds. They really look more red than purple. These are around six inches long.
The skin is red and the inside is a deep orange, and they taste....well...like carrots. I really didn't discern any exceptional difference, but they do taste good. They are also very beautiful, and I had no pest problems. Don't throw away carrot tops! You can cook them with your greens. See my basic recipe here.
This is my Mirliton (Chayote or Vegetable Pear) that has been stored on top of my refrigerator in a cardboard box for the past couple of weeks. Look close. You can see the little sprouts starting to emerge.
Once the sprouts develop enough I'm going to plant them on their sides sprout up. They will turn into a fairly large climbing vine with cucumber like leaves. I'm going to use them to cover the chicken coop this year to provide the chickens with shade.
It's been said that Mirlitons do really well on coops benefiting from the manure. We will see. The chicks will get shade, the mirlitons will benefit and so will I with all the yummy fruit. In tropical areas mirliton is a perennial. If we mulch mirlitons well and protect them from our area's occasional freezes they will also act as a perennial in our sub-tropical climate.
Here is one of the "baby" chickens. Brownie hatched what was a little brood of six chicks back on October 1st. Now there's only five. Byron made one of the roosters into a "rooster stew" as he called it. I asked him to please just call it chicken stew!
The above hen cracks me up. She is such an ugly little chicken don't you think? Byron thinks she's cute. I think she looks like a bad science experiment! She's happy anyway.
I let them have run of the fenced in back yard, and just as Egghead said, they run back to their "tractor" as soon as the sun starts to set and Byron closes the door to keep out predators for the night.
So far we haven't lost a chicken to predators. Although we have seen a hawk and an opossum lurking around! I really adore seeing the hawks perched high up in the tree giving everything the eagle eye, so I'm not so sure I'd be that terribly upset to share a hen with them occasionally as long as they didn't make it a habit. If that happened, I'd just keep them in the enclosed coop.
Here is the second rooster from the "baby" chickens. I believe he is crossed with silver laced Wayandotte because of the long gray hair (his dad is a brown leghorn). He sorta reminds me a bit of myself with all that gray hair at such a young age!
My pak choy is going to seed. I plan to save seed from all of my heirloom veggies year to year.
This is Rosita romaine lettuce. Tonight there will be a salad to go along with the orange glazed roast duck.
Such a pretty little pea plant sprinkled with the heavy dew.
This is one of the two huge drumhead cabbages I have left. We still have six cabbages left in the garden. As long as it doesn't get to hot, I'll leave them and harvest them when I wish to use them.
This is a broccoli whose main head has been cut off. Broccoli will continue to make smaller bunches after the initial bunch has been removed.
Turnips, chives and daikon radish. I once roasted a mix of turnips and potatoes with a roast thinking to fool my kids into eating turnips. Well they weren't fooled. They picked all of the turnips out and left the potatoes. I found out they love roasted turnips.
Here are the little tomato seeds planted five days ago. Time to move them outside to get more sun!
Saturday Byron and I planted a forest. Well 23 trees anyway and 3 muscadine and 3 blackberries. I think the clover looks beautiful. Do you? It really bothers my Father-in-law and he gripes to Byron about his messy yard care! Me personally, I think it's much prettier than a manicured golf course looking lawn.
Even though it was in the low 40's last night, there is still much blooming. The Cassia tree is covered with bright yellow blossoms. Very beautiful. Remember these little scrawny helpless things two months ago? Here they are now doing just fine. There are four females and two males.
Even in the cold there are two African Irises blooming. The lantana is still putting out a few half hearted blooms.
My tomatoes are loaded with fruit. I'm hoping to ripen them on the vine. I concocted this homemade green house tent in hopes of raising the temperature around them a bit.
My tomatoes did so much better this fall than they did in the summer. I'm going to try and get them in the ground a few weeks earlier than I did these. After 15 years of gardening, although half heartedly at times (I was raising babies.), you would think I would have this all figured out.
It's still a work in progress. Although I admit I love each and every minute of it. With each success I am encouraged more and more. Don't give up, right?
Here is another view of my tomato tent. There shouldn't be any frosts until December. I'll have to get some additional bricks or stepping stones to hold the plastic tightly closed then.
My salad mixes are coming up nicely. I really feel like everyone should grow their own lettuce. It is one of the most simple things to grow. You just pinch off the baby leaves as you need them and leave the plant to keep producing. Here is one of the broccoli plants. They are just huge. I'm looking forward to seeing how large a head it produces. This is one of my cabbages. They also are very large. I planted two heirloom varieties. Drumhead and Dutch Wakefield Early (I think). I harvested my first lavender blossoms and they are extremely fragrant. As you can see I'm still picking Lima's. Although I believe the purple hulls are ready to pulled up, I still got a couple of pods from them. Just thought you might like to see a pic of my neighbor's citrus trees. They are sagging with fruit. That's with loosing quite a bit to Gustav. My neighbor has the most wonderful fruit stand. I'll have to do a post on it soon.
