The Mower's Garden

Seed Money

2011-08-13T21:17:00.000-07:00

While Texas swelters in the unending heat, I have headed out to Las Vegas in order make some seed money for next years garden. The temperature here is a cool 105 and a little muggy. Hopefully, my departure will allow Texas to finally get some rain. Bad weather tends to follow me, so by next week it will be 130 here and 75 with a few days of rain in East Texas. Sadly many farmers have been hit hard by the lack of rain and the price of corn for animal feed has nearly doubled. Every where around us is a brown as could be and I would guess that at time when ranchers will need supplemental feed the price of that will be going through the roof as well. The hot, sunny weather has mostly been good for my gardening. Other than having to use a good deal of water, most of the garden grew has grown well this year.
When I left a few days ago I had bell peppers, cherry and Roma tomatoes, and egg plants growing. The sorano and pablano peppers were just about to produce, new cucumber and zucchini sprouts coming up. Unfortunately the six cantaloupes where torn to pieces by raccoons. This year I made a earthen dam around each plant in order to hold the water right where it was needed and let it soak down to the roots and watered each plant with watering can. This both fed the plants better and keep the garden from having many weeds.
Next spring I want to get even more planted and hopefully I can use my time in Vegas to plan for the 2012 planting. This has to be a big one since I have to prepare for December because according to the History Chanel the Mayans predicted the fall of civilization that day. Since the History Chanel is never wrong I better get prepared.

it ain't sunshine and pretty flowers

2011-06-06T06:19:00.000-07:00

Gardening can be down right disgusting at times, with a hint of discouraging and disappointing. The stem of the pumpkin plant has been eaten by some type of bug, maybe ants. When I pulled on it slightly the stem became completely detached. I am not sure if I should have left it down, but I pulled the whole thing up and chucked it into the compost pile after I pulled the two pumpkins.

I am not sure how long these will survive, but I will keep them in the house in the hopes that they last until Halloween. I was hoping to get four pumpkins. Two for the kids, one for our niece, and one so that I could try to make a homemade pumpkin pie.

And the Survey says!

2011-06-04T12:41:00.000-07:00

When you live in the concrete jungle you usually have a pretty good idea where your property lines begin and end. Of course there are many a neighbor who have had a dispute over small patches of land, but it gets even harder when the boundaries are out in the woods covered with over grown brush in areas where a fair number of poisonous snakes are found. The survey crew has been out in the woods over the last week trying to big up these old markers.

Some of the points are fairly easy to locate because the corner posts from the old fence are still standing in a couple places, but just getting back to those corners can take a whole bunch of hacking through brush with a machete. Even more to get a clear signal for the GPS devices that they use to mark these spots. Luckily the kind of survey we are have done does not require them cut a line of site from one corner to next. If that had to happen I would have to cut the lines myself due to certain budget restrictions.

Most often each spot is marked with some type of buried metal. Pipes, old tools, sometimes old rifle barrels where used to mark property corners. Working from the field notes on the deed they have to locate each one and clear enough area to get a GPS signal. Most often the marker hasn't got any actual marking on it at all, but since that should be the only reason to bury an old piece of rusty pipe out in the woods you know when you have found it. With two machetes and a metal detector they have found all the marked corners of the property and are drawing up the survey.

Some of the markers are from when this property used to be part of one large piece owned by the Kirby lumber company. The survey crew says that a few of these concrete markers should have had some brass plates on them with field notes them from way back when, but the plates have come off. They don't need to find the plates if they locate the marker, but I am going to check around these areas with our old 1970's metal detector and see if I can dig any of these up. I figure that in ten years I will be able to do the survey with an app on my iphone. It might be sooner if they ever figure a way to get a better signal out here in the boondocks.

Old Fashion Organic Pest Control

2011-05-23T14:54:00.000-07:00

Going through the garden over the last month I have spotted a couple of these weird patches of eggs. Most are on the top of one of the upper leaves and easy to spot. I rip the section of leaf off and feed it to the chickens. I am not sure if they even notice when they eat these tiny eggs. Yesterday, I filled over a pumpkin leaf as I was tearing open a section and realized the underside was covered with these things and they had just hatched. Tiny gray insects with short black legs were swarming all over the leaf. The chickens may have enjoyed eating that one. Today, I went through all the plants in the garden trying to look under the leaves for these eggs. I only found one other leaf that was covered on the underside. Mostly, they appear on the leaves and are easy to spot.

The meat market

2011-05-22T21:35:00.000-07:00

Saturday morning we took the kids and drove up to the Kirbyville auction barn. It is one of the few livestock auctions left around here. A good number of the small towns around here had livestock auction barns at one point, but over the years most of them have closed down. If you Google Kirbyville auction barn a the first thing you find is a site called Manta that says the it is estimated at doing five to ten million in sales, but somehow I can picture this place doing that kind of business. It is easy to see this place as it must have been in the early sixties when it was built, filling up all the pens and churning through the sales, but now only a couple pens had cattle inside.

This one is about forty minutes away and is probably the closest one left in the area. I would guess it had around a hundred and fifty seats and on our visit probably forty people were inside. Definintly an old school kinda place, one of the few places left where you can smoke while you do business inside. In nineteen sixty five this place was probably packed full a chain smoking, cowboy hat wearing, ranchers and farmers every Saturday. These types of places were the center of comerce for a rural areas, but even when this was built the small farmers and ranches were probably fading fast as businesses and really only surviving as hobbies.

We mostly came to see the goats and pigs. Both, sold for for twenty to thirty dollars each for young ones and the grown goats could go up to a hundred and fifty. The only grown pig for sale was a boar and since you can't eat it it only sold for thirty bucks even though it was a big fella. Most people were interested in buying feeder pigs. They will fatten it for five or six months and then butcher in the winter. We aren't quite ready for livestock yet, and when the girls realized we were serious about not buying anything today they were not interested in waiting through the cattle auction.

The first harvest

2011-05-20T07:13:00.000-07:00

As the girls eagerly await the first cucumbers and tomatoes of the year the squash and zucchini has exploded. This is one day of picking and there will be at least this much tomorrow, possibly the same the next day. I may have planted just a little to much this. I didn't expect to get this much out of what I planted. Next year I will stagger each group of four zucchini and squash seeds by a week so that they roll in a little more evenly. One week I will plant a group of each kind for about a month maybe five or six weeks. That should help spread out when things are ready to pick. If I had much more I would have to find somewhere to sell some of this stuff.

The only thing fresher, than fresh, FRESCHETTA

2011-05-20T04:39:00.000-07:00

This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of FRESCHETTA® for SocialSpark. All opinions are 100% mine.
Living in the deep dark woods of south east Texas we are mere hatchet throw away from a big, plate of super fried chicken and biscuits at couple dozen so called restaurants, but for pizza our options are limited to something that comes from a hut. Since I haven't perfected a homemade crust we often consume a slice of the frozen pie. I do like to heat it up a bit first. The good folks at FRESCHETTA were nice enough to send me a sweet coupon for one of there pizza by the slice products.
FRESCHETTA® By the Slice

They got four fantastic flavors of single slice pizza options: BBQ chicken, vegetable medley, chicken-spinach-mushroom, and the SIX CHEESE MEDLEY!!!! Since I like my chicken deep fried, dipped in butter and my veggies come from the garden, I went for the SIX CHEESE MEDLEY. Cheese is what pizza is all about and this slice-a-pie was tasty. It's a darn good thing there was only one slice in there or this would have contributed to my overwhelming gluttony cause I could have eaten a whole big ol' pizza pie. It was tough to resist the temptation to use the second coupon they sent me so that I could get another slice of this tasty pizza, but that one I am giving away to someone who leaves a comment on this post saying they would like to try the new Freschetta By the Slice.

What you thought this was over, no chance man, because Freschetta also sent me this six piece LaCuisine locking round storage container set. No way! Yes way! With the gardens booming I know someone could use this to hold some of the their veggies.

FRESCHETTA® By the Slice
http://www.facebook.com/freschettapizza That link your gonna need cause when your finished with pizza your going to want to head over to Facebook and give it the thumbs up.

Eating Wasp Larva

2011-05-11T10:05:00.000-07:00

Not for me. I watched some survival show where they ate wasp larva after they snatched the nest during a rain storm. That was the first thing I thought about when I saw this thing a minute ago.

No way I could snack on these things unless the options where pretty limited. I think I might rather end up like the cannibals in that book The Road than slurp down some of this.

Put down the sprinkler and step into the garden

2011-05-11T04:58:00.000-07:00

Our main garden is pretty big and we also have the raised beds, plus another little spot where the yard was all torn up big the chickens. Normally, I hook up a couple big ratcheting sprinklers or use a couple of those that shoot up into the air and rock from one side to another, the kind the kids love. I think the best thing that happened this year for the garden is that the kids broke that sprinkler the last time they played with it. This year the garden is getting its water the old fashion way, with the two gallon green watering can. Turns out this is the way to go.

I planted the zucini and the squash in little groups of four and when they had come up out of the ground I mounded dirt around each group as well as each tomato, and pepper plant. That way the water is only going right to where it is needed. The sunflowers, green beans and cucumbers had to be planted into a row, but for these I mounded the dirt around the entire section. When everything had come up I sprayed the whole garden and gave it good soak. This a bunch of remaining seeds from weeds germinate and after a week or so I started to see little green spots everywhere. After hacking up all the dirt outside the little wells, I resumed only watering the little rows and the places where I had made little wells.

The result is that the weed factor is almost gone. Everything died after I hacked it up and then withheld the water. The few things left where easy to pick from the base of the plants by hand. I thought the drought conditions that we are experiencing in Texas would be a problem, but this is the most productive garden I have had and I am using a fraction of the water I normally do. It is time consuming, but seems to be paying off in zucchini.

Why Get Burned?

2011-05-02T19:00:00.001-07:00

This is a compensated post written by me on behalf of Walgreens. All opinions are 100% mine.

Walgreens Brand Health & Wellness Products

The garden needs soil, water and sun, but the sun can do as much damage skin as it brings life to my plants so I was pretty stoked when I got a sample of Walgreens Brand SPF 50 sunscreen lotion. Being kind of a pale guy I have to be careful not to fried when I am in the garden. Besides being pale I can be one sweaty dude especially in the nasty east Texas heat and humidity which can wash off sunscreen in a heart beat. With the lack of rain sunscreen has gotten more important and the Walgreens Brand SPF 50 sunscreen lotion fits the bill and has kept me from getting my usual beginning of the season back of the neck burn. I can even go without a hat because this stuff works great on the old chrome dome I've been sporting for some time now.

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And then there were none

2011-04-11T20:42:00.000-07:00

You do get a connection with nature living out here in the middle of the woods. Often it seems it is a connection I could live without involving massive swarms of bugs. During the time I lived in Las Vegas I never truly appreciated the absence of little critters. For the last three nights we been swarmed by Junebugs. If a light was on to close to a window they would thump on the window like zombies trying break into the house and driving at night sounds like a hail storm as the fly towards the headlights and meet their fate on the grill of my truck. Last night I accidentally flicked on the back porch lights when I turned on the lights in the kitchen and they exploded into a frenzy. I sat their and watched the swarm just engulf the back porch. This morning I swept up piles of them and feed them to the hungry chickens, but tonight nothing. I clicked on the lights out back and nothing. Not a even a couple little remaining clicks. If it happens again I am going to put a light inside the chicken tractor and turn it on after dark and let the chickens feast. I don't know if the little solar pathway light attract the Junebugs or not, but I will have to see.

It was the best of times, It was the end of times.

2011-04-09T06:59:00.000-07:00

I watched a show about the impending doom of 2012 and realized I need to fortify the homestead to survive the end times. Well, maybe not, if was going to be paranoid about events to come I would probably be more worried about the devaluation of the dollar and the potential for sky rocketing inflation. Of course if that happens and it takes a wheel barrel full of dollars to buy a loaf of bread the my cucumbers should go up in value. If one tomato sells for a kazillion, trillion, monopoly money dollars then I will at least have some tomatoes. What I have realized about myself, however is that I prefer living in earthquake country to a hurricane zone. By that I mean that growing up in California you get use to earthquakes and when they happen, they happen. Not much you can do about it, no sense worring about it. Hurricanes, on the other hand, are on the news for weeks with predicitions about where they going to land. Of course those predictions don't really mean squat until the last little bit. You can get prepared, seal up the house, pack the car, and run for life only to have it turn and head somewhere else.

Of course when we moved here everyone said don't worry about hurricanes they don't come this far inland. Uhhh, well, in the six years we have lived here two have come through. Probably, my fault bad weather seems to follow me around. In the six years the ran fall here has also significantly dropped off and the branch that runs behind the house has dried up every summer, which it never did in all the time my wife lived here as a kid. If there was some kind of societal collapse we would be in a better place than many to feed ourselves and survive, but one thing I learned living here is that people moved to the city to get work because having to kill, grow or gather everything to feed a family would be a huge pain in the ass. I would be a much slimmer fellow than I am now.

Little by little I have been putting in this years garden. So far I have some zucchini, squash, green beans, carrots, shallots, tomatoes and cucumbers in the ground with about half of it poking up through the soil. In the next couple weeks I have to get peppers, eggplant, herbs, and possibly some corn and melon in the ground. I had kind of been finding it hard to muster the enthusiasm to the planting done, but some squash plants had come up on their own in the garden either from seeds that didn't sprout last year or some squash that got forgotten in the garden. The smell of those plants gave me the shove I needed. I never thought it would matter, but that sort of earthy smell always make me want to spend more time in the garden. The smell conjures up memories of being in my grandfathers garden as little kid in Delano. I don't remember much from before I was around ten years old so I am always surprised when I smell the squash or tomatoes and it instantly takes me back to that house. Now I wonder if grandpa was getting ready for the end times and just didn't want to spook a little kid by letting on that the world was gonna end.

The aspargus is trying to tell me something.

2011-03-17T21:42:00.000-07:00

This is year one of our asparagus plants. All of the shoots I planted have come up again this year and I am happy to see they are still alive. Asparagus needs about three years of growth before you can harvest anything to eat, but the stalks coming up is a good sign that I need to get the garden in gear. I started the tiller after its long winter nap which always requires a spark plug socket wrench and a hefty spray of carburetor cleaner. Ah spring, the bees, the flowers and sweet smell of carburetor cleaner. I can't imagine trying to do a large garden with out the tiller.

Tastes like ass

2011-03-09T21:49:00.000-08:00

Ok, actually it was delicious. I cooked a hunk of venison butt roast in the crockpot today. I just chucked it in the pot this morning with some carrots, onions, green beans and a little hunk of bacon. It cooked all day and when we got home the house smelled great. The first one I did in the oven was ok, but this was the way to go.
The kids loved it and even came into the kitchen while I was putting up the left overs and ate every last bite. According to Underhill Farms Online Store they sell Venison roast for 14 bucks a pound so that was the best deal on a home cooked meal we have every had. I think it works out to be a dollar or two for the bullet and since I missed once I saved around ten bucks. I really couldn't tell much difference between the venison and beef and wouldn't have known if I hadn't cut it up myself. I never thought I would say this, but it is kinda satisfying to eat something you killed.

woodville bass club

2011-02-21T06:53:00.000-08:00

Sometime country life is all about a relaxing, but I have never been much on fishing. My wife's grandmothers place has a couple big ponds so we took the kids fishing this weekend. My dislike of fishing may be the result of my general failure to actually catch fish. I find it hard to be quiet and wait for a long a enough time to land a fishy, but not this weekend. This time I got one a nice fat, wide mouth bass. I think I had a little help. A power provided to me by the energy of the patch. I found this totally retro Woodville Bass Club patch in the house the other day. I think the members of this now presumably defunct club open the universe for just a moment and granted me this tasty little fellow.

Garden number three

2011-02-18T21:02:00.000-08:00

    With a day of warm tempatures I spent the day planning out this years gardening attempt and cleaning up some of last years remains.   The scarecrow came down, some tomato stakes that stood abandoned finally got pulled up, a soaker hose completely lost to weeds was recovered and the pepper plants that look like skeletons got torn from the ground. I had hoped to winter the peppers, but I had to go to Vegas before I managed to get them covered up and safe from the few days of freezing weather.
      This year I am going to spread out some and till up two more areas for growing. One will have tomatoes only and I haven't decided on the other one. Either green beans or squash I am not sure which yet. The tomatoes have to go somewhere else. Luci thinks they will get tomato blight if we plant them in the same area again. I figure around 120 square feet should be enough for the tomatoes. We will actually have less tomatoes, but I think we will get more out of them if they are spread out and easier to get to. Last year we couldn't barely get into the rows once the pants got big and it made picking them a huge hassle. The longer they stayed on the vine the more damage form bugs.
      I need to get the tiller going and get everything tilled under a couple times before planting time come around. I had the chickens in the garden to tear everything up and add a little fertilizer before I moved them back to the yard, but I will probably buy a little bit of manure and maybe some compost to add to soil. I should plant a cover crop, but I never get around to it.

My lesson in Cartography

2011-02-14T20:57:00.000-08:00

This is a picture I took of a survey map at the appraisal district office this morning while I was trying to sort out how our property taxes had gotten jacked up. When you live in the city the boundaries of your property are usually pretty clear. At our house in Vegas I could have measured the whole lot with a three hundred foot tape measure in about a half hour. There is of course always easements and once and a while neighbors have issues about where the lines begin and end, but it get more complicated when you can't actually walk along the property lines or see from one corner of the property to the other because there is a tons of trees and brush in the way.

According to the appraisal district, which is who decides how much you owe, a portion of our property had never been included in the tax roles. When they added it and created a tax ID account for that section it was no longer considered land with agricultural value and was taxed much higher than some of the other parcels. The problem comes in when you have to figure out which parcel is which. No where on the ground does it say this is parcel 777777. I had to go over all the maps and aerial photographs with the mapping guy who at first assured me that no mistake had been made. The problem is that the lines are often left on the maps for separate parcels even when those parcels have been combined into a single tax account number. Lines are also sometimes removed when parcels are bought from different people by one buyer.

In order to determine which parcel is which you have to go over the field notes on the deeds which basically say start at one agreed upon point and then say turn south 97 degrees go 85 feet turn east 56 degrees go 79 feet etc, etc, etc, The only way to find the points is to take a metal detector and look for the scrap that is usually buried as a marker. According to the mapping guy rusty rifle barrels were once a popular marker that would be hammered into the ground by the surveying crew. Why survey crews had piles of rusty rifle barrels laying around I will never know.

Each chunk of land here is divided into files by the origanal surveys ours falls into the Robert Conn survey and you can dig through the file which is a collection of maps, photos, field notes, legal documents, etcs. One survey from the sixties clearly showed how the land was originally divided and made the problem clear. A piece of our land had not been properly accounted for, but not the piece they tried to add. The good news for us is that since they can't tax us twice on the same piece we get a break this year, but have to file to have the newly added section classified as agricultural timber land. What a pain in the @$$.

The big freeze has ended.

2011-02-13T21:02:00.000-08:00

The weather has finally taken a turn for the better. The freezing tempatures have been a pain since we aren't used to it and the house isn't really built for it. The lowest I tempature we had was 19 degrees, but for us that's a pain. I had to put a couple lights in the pump house to keep the compressor and the well pump from freezing. Even with those the connection between the pump and the pipe got a small crack somehow and it currently dribbling a small amount of water constantly causing the water in the house to occasionally spit and sputter from air getting into the line.

The first day of the freezing weather a storm took out power lines all over the area and around twenty thousand people were out of power. It is actually pretty amazing that everyone had power restored by that night. We were in the last group to have the power restored because the line ends at our house. If the line goes through and affects more people then it will be fixed sooner. We realized we need to have a bigger stockpile of seasoned wood available just in case. It would be fairly easy for the roads to get messed up leave us stranded for a few days without power. When all you have is the fireplace for heat you quickly see why pioneer houses were so small.

With the weather turning for the better I know I have a lot to do in order to get ready for this years garden. Today I had to fix the chicken tractors because the poultry netting had degraded in the sunlight and the now the chickens could claw through it and climb out. I added a layer of metal chicken wire to each one and now they are safe to move around the yard again. This week the girls are out of school and I need to get some tilling done and start some peppers and tomatoes.

Back to the farm

2011-01-16T21:22:00.000-08:00

After a month in Vegas, getting a few other things done, everyone being sick and a week of total slacking I need to turn my attention back to the garden and all things agricultural. Hunting season is completely over including black powder season, I don't own a musket anyway, but of course the deer come in herd every evening behind the house. Now that I have some deer meat in the freezer it would be nice to get a little swine. For one you need to mix a little fat into the ground meat in order to make decent burgers. The deer is just to lean for that. I tightened the line on the pig trap and have been dumping corn in, but so far they haven't set it off. I am going to have to set up a camera in order to determine if it is pigs, raccoons or squirrels that have been eating the corn and apples.

As for growing all I have left is my carrots. The neat little rows are still slowly growing. I had been building a quick little hot house for my peppers to try to keep them alive until spring, but my wife got sick right before I went to Vegas and didn't have time to finish. I will probably finish it now and use it to start off some early plants because we are sure to have more freezing before it is actually time to plant anything.

Heat & Meat

2010-11-16T20:45:00.000-08:00

With a quick cold front destroying my cucumbers, green beans and the last of the tomatoes things have been slow lately, but there are other things I have been trying to get done. This is an old beech tree I have finally gotten around to sawing up for fire wood. I have two of these and a Walnut tree to get to, but I should have cut them up much sooner and we will end up buying at least some firewood. This might be ok, later in the winter if I can get it split and put up. I used a cheap electric chainsaw and a generator to cut this thing up. The key with a cheap saw is to keep the file close at hand and sharpen it often.

The main happing around here is that I finally got my first deer. A little doe. I was just happy to hit what I was shooting at. I had fired a few practice shots, and they were about four inches low so the first thing I shot at I aimed a little high, but not enough and I put a slug into the leg of tripod stand that holds up the corn feeder. My practice shots had only been about seventy yards and the feeder is about a hundred and twenty yards from the house. So I had to aim even higher and I finally hit it. It went straight through, but didn't drop it so I had to wait an hour and track it into the woods. It hadn't got very far before it collapsed.

I carried it back to house and strung it up so Luci and I could skin it. Since I had no idea what I was doing and since Luci hadn't done it since she was a teenager we had to get mom's to tell us how to get started. I thought getting the skin off was the most disgusting thing I had ever done until I had to reach in to get some of the guts out and I lost my lunch all over the place. Luckily I managed not to barf on the meat. I have now come to have a new Indian name. Puking Bear. We got it skinned and cut up. Tonight we ate some of the loin which was fantastic. Nothing tastes better than death. Even though I will probably puke my way through gutting the next one I will probably try again this weekend. If I can't bring myself to do at least do some of the killing and cleaning I should become a vegetarian.

Blood on the Corn

2010-10-27T21:07:00.000-07:00

Yesterday morning as drove the girls to school I thought I saw a little black shadow inside the trap so I checked on my way back home after dropping the girls off at school. This guy perked right up when he heard the car door slam, and by the time I got up to the cage he was slamming from side to side trying to get out. I was going to go in the house and grab the .410 to shuffle him off this mortal coil, but decided to wait so the girls could see him when they got back from school.

By the time they got home one of the other guys who hunts out here had solved the pig problem and the girls were very disappointed. I wanted to show them the black pig because these come from the truly wild pigs that have been here for ages. The pink pig that was killed a while back came from domestic pigs that have been released. Apparently at one time here people would trap the hogs, notch there ears to claim them and then let them go again. I guess it was common courtesy not to kill a hog someone else had notched.

When me and the girls walked out there all that was left was a splattering of blood on the corn which the pig had been continuing to eat even as I watched it try to bang it's way out. They didn't seem to be bothered by the blood although I wouldn't shoot one when they are around I don't think they are ready for that yet, but death is just part of country life.

my home amongst the trees

2010-10-24T21:25:00.000-07:00

With rifle season opening up in a week I have been thinking a lot about what I can do to get a better chance at taking at least one deer this year and improving my odds for next year. Looking around the back porch I had a little bit of left over 2x4s so I decided to take a walk around to see if I could find a good spot to put up a small tree stand. Behind our house there is an acre or so of very dense pine trees and then behind that it opens up into larger more spaced out trees and I found a couple of trees that were clumped together. After hacking off the inch thick poison ivy vines that work there way up the trees I started building. This may even be too late for me to use it this year. With all my tromping around and banging the deer may stay clear of this area, but by next year they will be used to it and pay no attention. The stand itself is about ten or eleven feet off the ground and goes from 16 inches wide to three feet. I still have to put on the deck and build some sort of railing. I will probably buy a ten dollar hunk of camo burlap to use to cover the stand so I will have a good hiding spot. If I get lucky and take one early next to the feeders on the highline then I think I need a second spot to switch to because I am not sure if they will come to the place where a deer was just killed. I think they might avoid that area for a while. If that happens I will bait this area with corn, but otherwise I will wait until next year to bait this spot.

Waiting for bacon

2010-10-20T20:44:00.000-07:00

With bow season started and rifle season coming up in a few weeks sacks of corn are flying off the pallets at the feed store as hunters try to create place where the deer will come for a snack and stay for dinner. The problem is that everything loves to snack on a nice pile of dirty corn. The area by the house I have squirrels, rabbits, crows, deer, and my own chickens stopping by and getting their fill. The problem is the hogs. The hogs are large in number, large in size and eat a ton. They love to eat the corn that is put out to attract the deer and they are making the rounds from feeder to feeder. I would imagine the same hogs are also visiting the feeders on the hunting lease land next to us. I have a very small feeder that takes on sack of corn at a time, but the more serious hunters have large tripod feeders that take eight to ten bags to fill up. No one wants to see the hogs eat seventy bucks worth of corn.

Unlike deer, hogs can be killed year round by with either bow or rifle and anything else that would do the job. This is one of the most common ways to get some hogs. The wife's cousin put this hog trap out near the spot where he normally bow hunts because they are costing him to much cash in corn and not leaving enough for the deer. The trap has been out for about a week and has been tripped once, but so far hasn't caught anything. The same trap was used down the road and they trapped ten or twelve hogs, so it's really just a matter of time. With lots of corn on the ground it will take a while before they get hungry enough to go inside. If the ground was bare it would take less to get them inside.

Checking the trap has become part of my morning routine. Yesterday I clear some brush with the machete so that I could get a clear look from the road as I take the kids to school. For now anything trapped in here will just get one in the back of the head and trip into the woods to be coyote food. When it's hot outside it is hard to butcher the hogs because the meat will spoil so fast, but a little further into winter and these will be put on the menu.

Disney Land for Bambi

2010-10-11T21:04:00.000-07:00

This morning I went wandering around the property looking for a place to build a little tree stand to have a second spot to deer hunt. Everything here is dry. The grass is dying and none of the small branches that flow through our property have any water in them. I guess this is going to be more and more common if the summers have longer dry spells. When we used to just come here to visit they were never completely dry. At this point they aren't even mud holes just dry sand. When I went to the branch that flows along the south side I heard the deer making their weird noises to warn each other as they took of through the woods. I know they are close which made me wonder how far they have to go to find a pond or creek that still has water. The creek that flows into my wife's grandmothers place has water, but its a couple miles from here. I thought they might like a little drink along the way. So I filled this plastic turtle that used to be the girls sandbox when they were little with about thirty five gallons of water.

This means that in this little area is a mineral lick, a feeder full of corn and this smiling turtle full of water. This starts about sixty yards from the house at the feeder and extends about another twenty yards, just beyond that is one of the dry branches. This tripod feeder that my wife's cousin put out is about another twenty yards and puts out like ten times as much corn as mine. He is going to put a chair up one of the nearby trees and go bow hunting in this spot. If Bambi doesn't like all this something will. So far I have seen lots of squirrels and rabbits visiting both feeders, but haven't seen a deer stopping to munch a little corn. I was hoping they might apperciate the water, but of course as I write this I can hear the thunder coming so we will probably have an epic rainstorm tonight that fills everything up.

Fall Chores

2010-10-06T17:56:00.000-07:00

The unbearable heat has finally lifted in East Texas and we will hopefully have nice fall days for at least a month or two before it starts to be freezing all day long. The weather here is unpredictable and last year all of December was cold with a very small amount of snow. Since that was the first winter I spent here since we moved out here five years ago I thought it would be warmer. Sometimes is it 72 degrees on Christmas day. During this short time of pleasant weather I have a big list of things I want to get done. I have another couple of weeks before rifle hunting season starts, but my shooting lane is pretty well cleared out.

In the next four weeks I need to:
Clear all the down limbs from around the pump house:
        These have been down since Huricane Ike and this will make the third time I have cleared this area       because both times before were followed by Huricanes that knocked down a bunch more tree limbs.

Clean out the cistern and the pump house.
The concrete cistern holds about three hundred gallons and gets a layer of silt that comes up out of the       ground with the water and needs to be cleaned out from time to time.

Clear the area next to the old garage for a goat area.
      Around Easter it looks like we are going to be adding a rabbit because our youngest is not gonna let up, but I want to get a couple goats in the early spring. It should cost around three to four hundred bucks and I need a good spot to put them in.

Build some type of green house.
     This will probably be a 4x4's framing out a base, a metal canopy that we already have and some plastic       sheeting. Hopefully, it will be enough to let us have tomatoes in the winter.

This little piggy

2010-10-02T21:12:00.000-07:00

I had intended to write about our trip to the county fair this afternoon, but on our way home this evening we came across my wife's cousin who was just about to head home from his evening bow hunt. Archery season opened on Friday so we expected he would be out here hunting. When we pulled up we asked the typical did you get anything question and he said he had a killed a pig so we had to have a look.

This area is right on the fence line of a fifty acre track that the owner doesn't use. Since it is one of the few places that is total secluded and has not been logged tons of wildlife uses that land for their home base. On his trail cam he has seen up to forty of these at once so it really is time to thin out the ranks. pigs can be dangerous as well as using up resources and space that could be taken up by more deer. We are hoping to take a pig or two this winter and butcher them, but right now it is warm enough this little thing would be spoiled before we got it cut up. Tonight it will be food for the coyotes that have been howling like crazy the last couple nights. I thought I was going to have to load up the shotgun and hangout on the porch last night because they were so close, but I think tonight at least some of them will be munching on this little piggy.

The New and Screwed up HughesNet

2010-10-01T21:05:00.000-07:00

I just paid five bucks to have my internet service turned back on. Why is that you might be wondering? Well, because some dill hole came up with a new way in which our service works. Living in the middle of nowhere you have pretty limited internet options. Dial-up blows even in a city with good phones and out here with lines put in in 1962 it blows even harder. Cable and DSL are not going to come this way. There is just no way they are ever going to bother running lines just so the four of us who live on this particular dirt road can have service so pretty much your stuck with HughesNet Satellite service if you want your pages to load when your try to open them. There use to be one competitor AgriStar which oddly enough had exactly the same pricing and services as HughesNet, but they were recently purchased by HughesNet.

For a long time I was pretty happy with the service. The dish is pretty tough and didn't even need to realigned after either hurricane Rita or Ike. We pay the minimum of sixty bucks for their base level of service and the speed has always been sufficent. They have always had what they call a "fair access policy" which is a download limit of 200MB which doesn't sound like much, but I am online quite a bit blogging, selling on Ebay, using Quirky, surfing around etc and my wife finished her college degree by taking classes online through Lamar University. Basicly we have always found that we could do anything online except watch videos. Which of course means that I have missed out on all the great joys YouTube has to offer. If you download software you can do it at two in the moring when they give you a free time. If all the years we have had this service we had maybe gone over this limit five times, about once a year.

It used to be that when you went over they would slow your service down so much that you could maybe get your email to open, but that was it. If you called they would sometimes let it go and reset it and other times you just had to wait twenty four hours. Recently they came up with a new system where if you go over you could pay five bucks and bingo your speed has been restored or you can wait twenty four hours. Since they started two months ago we have somehow gone over our limit around ten times. A few days ago I spent an hour on the phone trying to get the tech support guy to tell me what the hell they had changed so that I could avoid this. He of course assured my that nothing had changed and as a sign of good faith reset my service without charge, but I know they messed with something. Somehow they changed the way they count the megabytes in order to get customers to pay a little more. Right now I have no options because they have a monoploy on the market. I don't really miss living in the city, but I can't explain how much I miss my cable modem right now.

Walnut Harvesting in East Texas

2010-09-28T07:09:00.000-07:00

Inspired by a post on the Homegrown.org social network about walnuts I decided to go to the walnut tree outside our yard and gather as many as I could find. Rarely does anyone go to this part of our property except for my occasional mowing which keeps if from turning into mess of thorny vines and small trees. I also wander past once and while to a check a section of the branch to see if it has flowing water. I have seen a fair amount of snakes right under the tree and when I got under the cover of the tree I scanned the open area for fallen walnuts and snakes. Being so vigilant about these things I failed to notice that I was standing in a pile of ants. The worst part of standing in a ant pile is that your boots will be covered in ants before you feel the first bite. East Texas is full of bugs that bite or sting. Growing up in California I never appreciated the lack of fire ants.

I have no idea what kinda of bug this is in my picture. I had reached up and grabbed a branch to pull it close enough to get at the walnuts and when I pulled it in front of my eyes I saw this guy. Not paying attention I had almost wrapped my hand around it. I guessing some type of caterpillar and I don't think it would have a bite, but around here everything else does. It was while I was trying to take his picture when I felt the first ant bite and saw them crawling all over my boots. I had to go the kids from school in a minute so brushed off as many as I could and finished filling my bucket. I will have to back tomorrow to fill another bucket. Since they are black walnuts they will take a good deal of work to get the nuts out, but like most things out here it is worth the a couple ant bites and a little extra effort.

My first Mulch

2010-09-22T14:33:00.000-07:00

Everyone has different natural resources on their homestead and one of the resources we have is a forest covered with a thick blank of pine straw that keeps everything, but the trees from growing. I finally decided to take advantage of this and do my first mulching on the cucumbers I just planted. I know now that if I am watering it this small dead spot it will quickly come back to life and be covered with five foot tall grass shoots.
If this works well I imagine I will end up doing this in my regular garden because weeding has to be the worst part of gardening. I would never buy mulch. I just don't think I could bring myself to fork over the money to buy something to cover the dirt, but I will definintly wander out back and grab a load. I don't own a wheel barrow, so I had to adjust and used the girls radio flyer to haul my loads from the dark forest out back to the spot where I have my cucumbers planted.

After spreading it out I sprayed the whole thing down so that the mulch wouldn't blow away in the massive windstorm which is been ready to fire up all day. I am not sure how close to the plants you are supposed to get so I left a good bit of space for watering. I have enough I might try to dig up a left over bubbler valve from my sprinklers in vegas. Then I can bury everything except the actual plant under the mulch and it will still get water. I was hoping that this would start to make my garden beds look better, but when I uploaded this picture I realized that I am going for practical, not pretty.

Magic Beans

2010-09-20T20:16:00.000-07:00

I don't think I really understood where the story for Jack and the Bean Stalk came from until I actually planted some beans. Last night I went out to see how everything looked because we were about to get hit with nasty thunderstorms and pounding rain. I thought everything would be smooshed or washed away, but was very pleased to see that the rest of the cucumbers had come up and the beans are two and half inches tall!!!! From a half inch yesterday. They grew two inches over night. It would be easy to see how that quick growth would work its way into your stories when your life was in the fields. Nothing else I have planted grows even close to that fast. I wish could have a time lapse film of it, but probably it has been recorded for jr. high science classes films many a time.

Small Town Entertainment

2010-09-19T20:45:00.000-07:00

When we lived in Las Vegas we lived right down town about five minutes from the strip on the West side right off Valley View. We both worked for casino's and didn't want the long drive into town just to go to work so we picked a smaller house in a old neighborhood instead of going for the cookie cutter house out in north Las Vegas. With both us working in the entertainment business we got a fair amount of free tickets to shows, at some point or another went to most of the casino attractions, we liked to go out to dinner, on rare occasion we went gambling and never drove more than twenty minutes. I love the movies and Vegas has great theaters with huge screens, great new seats, and amazing sound systems. It is pretty hard to find a foreign film or independent movie because people in Vegas don't like much culture in their entertainment, but that can be said for this place too. Besides the occasional fair or rodeo, a night out with the kids is most often a trip to the movies. Normally we go to the Jasper twin cinema, but since they were playing the Last exorcist and no one wanted to watch the kids freak out for a week we settled for Nanny Mcphee at their sworn enemy the Fain Theater in Livingston. This was my first trip to the Fain so I had to take a picture of the fantastic sign which I could just imagine looking all super shiny back when it first opened. I do miss the super comfy seats and selection of the Las Vegas movie theaters but when I can take two adults and three kids to the movies on a Saturday night, load up on popcorn and drinks for only forty bucks I feel a little less deprived.

WD-40 contest and fanclub

2010-09-16T20:41:00.000-07:00

This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of WD-40. All opinions are 100% mine.

WD-40 has created a new fan club section on their website and to kick if off they are having contest to give away three awesome prize packs each consisting of the Now & Then WD-40 twin pack, a Smart Straw can wall clock and a Nostalgic can wall clock. WD-40 has been around for fifty years and the classic WD-40 can is an american Icon, but the new with the new smart straw you lift the straw up to aim it or you flip it down to use a wider spray so that you never lose the straw. I use to take the straws and chuck em in the top of my tool box in case I lost the next one, but I guess I will have to use those to stir my coffee now.

By joining the fan club you will get exclusive promotions and you can share your uses for WD-40 and check what others are doing with WD-40. It's free and you can get the WD-40 badge which looks great on your blog, myspace page or as a sweet tattoo. Ok, maybe you think twice about the last one, but you should definitely sign up for the fanclub. Follow the link below to join the fan club.
Join the fun in the WD-40 Fan Club

When I started my blog I was beginning my battle with my tiller and my ten year old craftsman mower which hadn't been touched for five years. WD-40 was high on the list of tools to get them running again. When I first changed the back tires they were locked tight and I use it to get everything unstuck. East Texas is humid and every thing metal rusts so fast I have come to rely on WD-40 to keep everything around the homestead clean and protected. There are thousands of projects that can use some WD-40 and it tastes great on pancakes. Ok, please don't put WD-40 on your pancakes, but let em know how you do use WD-40. Need some inspiration check out the latest video release from WD-40: Watch the latest WD-40 video release

To enter this contest you have to leave a comment on this post and tell us what you do to save time and money on your DIY projects. I know anyone could use the WD-40 around the house and two count em, two WD-40 wall clocks that would be a great addition to any shop, office, or home. For anyone who is a stickler for details you can find the contest rules right here: contest rules

Fall Planting

2010-09-14T20:31:00.000-07:00

Here in east Texas there doesn't seem to be much of a fall because it is just as hot now as it has been for the last four months. I know carrots will grow because I tried them last year and even though they didn't get huge they did produce. If it was slightly cooler I would try a bunch of salad greens, but I think I have to wait a little while.

Today I got carrots, radish, turnips, and green beans in the ground. Tomorrow I hope to get some cucumbers planted I think I can get some to grow before it gets to cold. Somehow we didn't get enough jars of pickles put up to last the girls until next summer so this is a big priority. I am pretty sure I might be able to get some Zucchini as well. With Garden in disrepair not nearly enough veggies are going from yard to table. It surprises me how much I miss being able to just wander out and pick something to fix for dinner. The availability helps with my cooking decisions as well. Instead of having to decide what sounds good or what the family might want I just have to go see what we got.

I could see how if you were producing your own food for a long time how hard it would be stop and just go to buying all your food at the store. I know I really didn't think that there would be much difference in what I could grow and what I could buy. I thought that modern agri-business with all it's years of experience and science would be able to get better produce to the store than a guy who had never planted anything before.

MegaMuffin

2010-09-13T20:43:00.000-07:00

East Texas is covered in mushrooms. These big boys were waiting in the yard this morning. They were huge. Enormous, bigger than the muffins you get at the nine dollar muffin shop. The inside had the texture and the look of chocolate cake, but without the flavor. Ok, I didn't try to eat one because I have no idea if is safe or not. About five or six of these were scattered across the yard. If you knew for sure that these were safe to eat you would have quite a meal.

A Free Lunch

2010-09-12T20:44:00.000-07:00

So I decided to buy a sack of corn this morning and set up my feeder even though I have a full month and a half until rifle season opens, but I figured I see if they will come this close to the house or if I need to move my feeder a little further down the line. The corn cost 5 bucks for a fifty pound sack and this year I am going to try to keep track of what I spend on hunting season so I can see if it is cost effective. Bow season opens in a couple weeks and I am tempted to pick up a bow on Craigslist and give it a shot, but so far I haven't been able to bring myself to spend the money. A new bow goes for a minimum of two hundred fifty bucks with the average around four hundred and the top end around a thousand bucks. You gotta put up a lot of meat to make a thousand dollar bow pay for itself.

The feeder has a light sensor which will set it off about a hour after sunrise and an hour before sunset. The little metal plate spins around allowing the corn to flow out and be scattered around the feeder. The black box holds the light sensor, a six volt battery and a controller that allows you to test the motor as well as set the amount of time the feeder spins. I have it set to the minimum so that I won't have to fill the five gallon bucket as much. I know the deer are out there so really I am just trying to lure them a little bit closer and hopefully at a convenient time. Apparently they have never gotten the message that there is no such thing as a free lunch.
The main reason I put it out now was to see if it draws the hogs into the area. On the the east side of the creek where Luci's cousin bow hunts all he seen are hogs, at her grandmothers place a little ways down the road they have trapped ten or twelve this year. If the hogs come I will have to take the hunting more seriously. You can't have them to close. They tear up gardens and can be dangerous.

This feeder has to wait a full twenty four hours to set its internal timer for sun-up and sun-down so it wont be until the morning after next that I will hear the clinking of the corn and I can start watching to see how long it takes for them to go for the snack.

Face to Face with Bambi

2010-09-12T08:03:00.000-07:00

Last night after moving the chicken tractors and making sure they had enough water I decided to go down my shooting lane to check on the little branch and see if it had any water flowing. I walked around past the old garage and through the small gate that leads down the highline to where I have my DeerCane mineral site and where I just put up a pole to hang up my little deer feeder. As soon as tromped around the corner I looked up and saw a doe come out of the tree line on the other side of the branch. Apparently she was off to see if there was any water in branch too.

We both stopped moving and starred at each other. There was no way the deer could miss me since I was wearing a bright orange shirt and light blue shorts. I guess I must have stopped first because instead of bolting off into the woods she just starred at me. Dripping with sweating and itching like crazy from the humidity I tried to stand as still possible. After about a minute the doe shook it head and made a loud WHSSSSSST noise and then went back to staring at me. Determined to see how long this would play out I kept as still as i could. After waiting for a few seconds to see what I would do the deer did a combined foot stomp with the WHSSSSSSST. Like it was trying to say "hey dumbass, move so I know what the hell is going on". I stayed put and the doe did this a couple more times until she finally turned her head and did it in the direction of the opposite tree line where she was answered back by several other deer. Finally she got tired of this game and bolted back into the woods.

I didn't want to chase them out of the space that I am hopping to find them during hunting season so I headed back into the yard. I started to pull plants out of what had been the kids small garden so that I could mow the whole thing down. I realized that the tomato plants were still alive and decided to give them a little helping hand and see if we get any more tomatoes. I took all the tomato vines and laid them up on the trellis separated them and gave them some room. After picking off the few rotten tomatoes that had grown covered by weeds I started to clean out the beds. First thing to go was the squash plants which stopped producing a while ago. I had most of them out when I saw a medium sized patty pan squash that had probably been their for a month.

Figuring this thing had to be hard as a rock I picked it up and threw it as far as I could out into the woods. As soon as the thing went into the woods I hear this really loud WHSSSSSSSST and something bolting through woods. I have to wonder how close did I come to bouncing this squash off one of Bambi's relatives. I'd feel bad about it if I did, but since I am going to try to put a rifle slug in one these animals I guess my sympathies are ridiculous.

my mower battle continues

2010-09-05T21:21:00.000-07:00

For a while now the tire on my mower has had slow leak that has been getting faster every time. It had gotten to the point where mowing was like racing and I would have to pull into the garage and air up the tire ever twenty minutes. It takes a couple hours to mow the yard so it's a good five or six pit stops just to get the whole thing mowed. This tire had to ten to years old. When we first moved here it was messed up and I had tube put in it for ten bucks instead of going for a new tire.

It is a sad state of affairs when the highlight of my day is installing a new tire. I don't think I can equate that to country living, just my own shift in personal interests. The low part of my day was forking over fifty bucks at the tire shop in Jasper to get a new one and have them put it on the rim. It will be nice to be able to mow without having to turn on the air compressor.

Thankfully, changing a mower tire is a lot easier than changing a car tire. If you have something stable enough to slide under the back you could simply lift the back end onto a block, but I use a car jack to lift it up. The shaft goes through the rim of the tire and is then held on by retention ring. The most important thing is that when you take the old tire off you don't lose the Key. The Key is a square strip of metal that goes into that notch on the top of the rim. The shaft has the same notch and when you slide the key in it connects the two.

Salty Dirt, YUMMM!!!!!

2010-09-04T08:33:00.000-07:00

Nothing says snack time like salty dirt!!!!!!! I went out to check my mineral spot this morning because it is supposed to rain off and on for the next couple of days. Last time I went out they hadn't found the spot yet, but this time they have definitely added it it their list of places to stop. Some how when I reinserted the memory card in the camera it changed the settings so I didn't get any pictures, but the tracks are clear. I sprinkled a little bit of corn that had laying around from last season and that may have brought them in, but they are definitely digging through the dirt for the minerals. Last year they never dug up any of my corn sites.

The tracks are doe tracks, but since I am not really concerned with getting a big set antlers or a head to mount on the wall then a doe will do just fine. It will be just as tasty. Of course the website for Deer Cane says that bucks will want the minerals for "overall health and rack development". Somewhere out here is a big ol buck with good sized rack. Last year we spotted his tracks and this year Luci caught a glimpse of him on the edge of the road. Of course they have this rule about if you take a buck the antlers must have a width of at least thirteen inches which is pretty hard to determine. The best advice on determining width I have found is from Wild Ed's Texas Outdoor Blog. I will probably just stick to taking a doe for meat if I can get one. Last year I never could get even a look at the buck while I had a gun in my hand let alone a good shot.

Wish it was Bigfoot

2010-09-02T20:51:00.000-07:00

The deer is hard to see behind the weeds, so a little mowing on the shooting lane is in order. I know these guys will be out during the day time at least until hunting season starts and the bullets start flying. Everyone tells me I gotta be ready when the season starts because the twenty or so guys that hunt the deer lease next to us will be shooting on opening day and whatever they don't kill will definitely have the Spidey sense kicked into over drive.

Deer Season 2010

2010-08-27T21:15:00.000-07:00

Last year my few weeks of deer hunting effort did not go well. I was only able to get a clear shot once and clicked my safety off so loudly the damn things bolted off into the woods without my bullet lodged inside. Last year I waited until deer season had already started before I did anything much, but this year I am going to try to up my odds by laying the ground work. On the actual ground. On my birthday I got a couple blocks of deer cane as a gift. They are blocks, about the size of a brick, made of compacted salts and minerals that supposedly deer like to chew the dirt to get at.

This year I picked a new shooting lane to focus my efforts on. The place I laid my corn last year was right along side the road and we had to drive past it several times a day. This year I am going to use an area beside the house down the powerline. It is a big clear gap between a very thick grove of pasture pines and the area that was replanted a few years ago. The area is rarely disturbed and I can get a decent view of it from the laundry room window so I can get an idea of the times the deer might be out there before I wait on the porch or in a blind a little bit closer. I have two months now so the idea is to get them as comfortable as possible crossing that area and give them reasons to linger about so that I can get a shot.

I know the deer come through here anyway because it is the path they follow in order to get to the peach and pear tree as well as to drink from the branch that runs across this area. I haven't decided if I am going to hang my corn feeder back here or simply put corn out on the ground.

This is what the block looks like after sitting for a couple of days during the rain. Your supposed to put it out and let it dissolve in the rain and soak into the dirt. I will probably go out pour some water on it to get it to dissolve sooner. I went out about a month ago when I first got it an laid out an old plastic green turtle sandbox that the kids have outgrown and let the grass under it die off. Right now the deer tracks are about ten feet way from this spot, which is where the directions say to put it. If they don't seem to notice I will pour out a little corn right around it because I know they will find that. I may try going to buy some fertilizer which would make the grass in the area more interesting to the deer.

I shall find out if this is a more effective strategy or not. The only problem I see it that is puts me slightly closer to the Blue Bonnet Investment Group land that is leased out for hunting to a large group that come up to hunt every year. These would be the very nice people that I frequently refer to as the dill holes.

Got Salmonella?

2010-08-20T22:27:00.000-07:00

Nope. Thanks to Brewster the rooster and his flock of egg laying beauties we are salmonella free. For now. I hope. I am not positive where the outbreaks and recalls have been because we don't buy eggs. The new flock has really started laying in the last few weeks and it won't be long before we are over run with eggs. Chickens are probably the easiest way of providing your own food that we have found so far. You don't have to feed them much if you give them enough room to forage for bugs and such. Throw a rooster in the mix and you will end up with chicks. You also end up with fertilized eggs for breakfast which is nasty so I recommend keeping the rooster separate if you have one.

If you were trying to get ready to hole up and wait out the next global disaster then a bunch of birds of one the first things you want. If you look at stuff survivalist talk about you would think you need lots of ammo and some sort of concrete bunker, but really if you can't eat that doesn't do you much good so really you need a way to get water; either a way to pump from a well, a spring or stream although streams can easily be damned up by the a-hole with a ammo and the concrete bunker. I would think the best thing you could have is a small flock of a chickens including at least one rooster, a couple of goats both boys and girls, and some seeds to start growing stuff from which you could save more seeds.

Twenty chickens provide a lot of food if they are all laying. The eggs will be piling up soon even using the eggs for three households we will have way more than we want. I may try to sell some, but selling is not my strong point. That is one thing about any kind of farming; no matter what you grow in order to make money off it you have to have basic business skills like selling. Almost all businesses live or die on the quality of salesman ship. Even bad business can make money with a good salesman. I am not a sales guy, just don't have those natural people skills. That's probably also why I will end up in a feud with a a-hole who stocked up on ammo and I will find my self locked in a basement for food like those people in The Road.

the only thing left

2010-08-16T20:57:00.000-07:00

After work, vacation, strep throat and the ridiculous heat a air of neglect has settled into the garden. The majority of stuff is crispy toast either starved for water or choked out by other weeds. The peppers, however, seem to not only still be alive, but actually thriving. The same goes for the two water melons which are twice the size we got last year. The patty pan squash are the diameter of dinner plates and probably taste as good as a piece of 2x4 covered in garlic and olive oil. Bigger doesn't usually mean better in the squash/ zucchini family.

That is the one problem with gardening or any other agricultural enterprise: There are no sick days. We have disscussed getting a milk cow, but you have to milk the dang things everyday. Even the I feel like I am going to die days or the I have to work fourteen hour days, everyday. I can deal with being sick and I can deal with it being freaking hot, but you put them both together and I am out.

With convergence of my illness being over, my census work ending and the kids going back to school I am hoping to do some late summer planting next week along with getting ready for hunting season. That's right large pallets piled high with 50lbs sacks of corn have begun popping up all over town. From Wal-mart to the quickie mart there is few places you can't buy a sack o' corn as the season comes near. I need to clear my spots and get set up so that I am not disturbing it when it gets closer to season open.

The Mystery of the Missing Sunflower

2010-07-25T22:16:00.000-07:00

This is what the most of the sunflowers in the garden look like right now. Beautiful bright yellow being explored be a swarm of big black happy bees. They are coming along nicely although not as huge as the ones that grew last year. If all goes well I should be able to get a couple a bags of seeds out of these, but there is a problem. The problem, besides me being able to take a properly focused photograph, is that something is eating or in some way destroying the freaking flowers. Where are they going? There is not a pile of flowers on the ground around these stems. At least seven sunflower plants look the same way. Right at where the flower would meet the stem it simply ends in a frayed mess. Are they all going to disappear? The only positive is that I think I could use these for make shift paint brushes for the kids to play with, but there gonna say "Hey Dad, where did the flowers go" and the best answer I got is maybe big foot at them. Nature would be great if it wasn't for all the bugs and animals and stuff.

making a new chicken feeder

2010-07-23T18:03:00.000-07:00

Not much going on around the farm these days except the unbearable heat. In a few weeks I may try to get some goats, but for now it's just us and the chickens. They should be getting ready to start laying, but lately they have been knocking over their food or standing on the feeder. Luci had a great idea for some new feeders and despite the heat I managed to hang around outside long enough to get these made.

I took some 4" PVC that Luci had picked up at the hardware store and cut out one quarter down the length of the pipe. A couple screws hold the caps on each end and now the chickens have a new feeder that should keep out the rain.

The chickens are much happier now that the feeder is long enough for them to all get to it at the same time. We just noticed a few days ago that we had a rooster in one bunch of hens. Still deciding what to do about this guy. We don't want fertilized eggs, but it is tempting to just let things go and see if they make some chicks on their own.

Rambler's Way, The Sustainable Way

2010-07-10T05:43:00.000-07:00

This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of Ramblers Way Farm. All opinions are 100% mine.

The dude that founded the Tom's of Maine Toothpaste has a commitment to quality that I appreciate for a few minutes every morning and evening, but I didn't know that he lived in the country surrounded by sheep.

Rambler's Way Farm produces high-quality sustainable wool apparel . They are having their business reviewed by CleanAir-CoolPlanet - which works with small and corporate businesses to help them develop and implement emissions reductions - to find more ways to cut down on their carbon footprint. In a tough ecomony for businesses, this is a decision that puts the long-term vision of global health square up against the balance sheet. The idea that whatever resources being consumed now need to be available for a limitless future is concept that is really in its infancy, as most industries are based on the consuming resources at the lowest possible cost while reaping the greatest possible profit.

In fact, most of us live this way, without an eye on the future. That's why Wal-Mart is so popular.

CleanAir-CoolPlanet is undertaking a review of all the components of Ramblers Way Farm, from sheep grazing in the fields, through the entire process of getting their end product to you (shearing, transportation, scouring, combing, spinning, knitting, sewing, ordering and distribution).
Choosing to support sustainable, energy-efficient, carbon-neutral businesses will allow them to grow and pass on the sustainability model to other businesses. Rambler's Way Farm is making tough choices, and the more time I spend with the chickens or in the garden learning about agriculture production on my own little farm, the more I see the need to understand how these sustainable businesses can survive. We all know that a petroleum-based economy can't last forever. And really, we need programs and groups like CleanAir-CoolPlanet working in affiliation with households, small businesses, and corporations to figure out how we will survive when the days of cheap oil are over.

One thing I have learned living in the country is that this type of work is undervalued in America. Being a shepherd or farmer was left behind as large agribusiness made the family farm obsolete. This is changing as more and more sustainable businesses are created, but those sustainable businesses are dependent on individuals making the same types of choices. We all have to do what we can now to ensure that our future, and that of our children, is secure.

Here on our little patch of earth, we teach our children to recycle, we drive fuel-efficient cars, and we try to work our farm with very little waste and few chemicals. We utilize rainfall for watering our garden and orchard. We use the animals to fertilize, and we feed them from our own garden. We are really big on using found, non-recyclable waste such as old tires to grow things in. But there's always the question of, can we do more?

Rambler's Way Farm is in the process of answering that question for their business.

sustainable wool apparel
http://www.ramblersway.com/

Horsing Around

2010-07-09T15:37:00.000-07:00

Both girls have spent the week riding horses in the morning. They have decided this is better than soccer, gymnastics, dance or any other activity we could throw at them. They have had a taste of life in the saddle and they want more. I have always thought that if we live in the middle of nowhere and have the room then maybe some day the girls could have a horse, but that day is a long way away. This was a week long horse camp where they ride every and learn about horses from eight to twelve each day. They learn to groom, feed, ride and I believe even scoop up the horse stuff. The stable is about ten miles outside of town and does a good job of teaching kids how to ride as well as the responsibility that it takes to care for a horse. Somerset Stables will start lessons in September and I have a feeling these two will end up going.

Pesto season starts today

2010-07-08T20:53:00.000-07:00

Every year since we moved here we have grown basil to make pesto, A food that once upon a time I wouldn't even eat. I remember the first time I saw it was at my friend Joe's house and at the time it did not sound good, but since then I have become a big fan. Seriously big, I'm fat as a house for those who don't know me. Anyway even when we didn't have the garden there has been containers growing on the front porch. Being that we are up for saving a buck or two we buy our seeds at the Wal-mart for a a buck. This year my friend Chris sent me some Basil seeds from Burpee. They took a little longer to take off, but the pot in the middle is one planted with those seeds and the one's on each side are planted with Wal-mart seeds. The Burpee seeds were planted a couple weeks after the others in the same soil. They have have had exactly the same amount of water and sunlight as the others. The Burpee plant is almost twice the size with larger leaves and a much darker green color. Of course we haven't had the all important taste test, but I think I can guess how that will turn out. This has sparked my interest in seed catalogs and I have been looking on-line all week. I would never have guessed that there purple carrots and all sorts of freakish looking things to grow. This year we have also grown the garlic for the pesto and bought nuts from a local grower.

Luci's Pesto Recipe:
Basil, Garlic, Walnuts (we skip the pine nuts), Parmesan Cheese and Olive oil.

The first eggplant in the neglected garden

2010-07-07T08:54:00.000-07:00

Working for the census bureau has been taking up my mornings which is the best time to work on the garden because by afternoon it is so unbelievably hot that it is hard to be in the sun for to long. People that came before me must have been a lot tougher because if I had to live here without air conditioning I would loose my mind. After a just a second in the humidity it feels like shower time. It was hot in Las Vegas, but now I know what people meant when they said at least it is a dry heat. That is my best advice for moving to the country and gardening, do it somewhere with nice weather.

The garden is full of weeds and tomatoes. One of the gardeners I know told me that as soon as I am done with the tomatoes I should use some roundup to cut down on the amount of grass growing in the garden, but I just bring myself to go with the roundup. I would imagine that the tomatoes might grow better if they were not competing with the grass for water and nutrients, since there are growing anyway I don't plan on changing my weeding habits. Normally I go around with sharpened hoe and hack down the grass in the rows and then attempt to hand pull what is growing directly at the base on the plants, but with the heat I haven't done as much weed control as possible. We also have been having a hard time keeping up with processing the tomatoes into sauce in time. Next year I think we need to go down to 40 plants.

Among the weeds I found the first eggplant. About time, I have had my fill of squash so it will be nice to give something else a try. Last year we didn't grow eggplant so I am not sure what to expect as far as how fast it grows. According to Wikipedia 20 pounds of eggplant has the same amount of nicotine as a cigarette so I need to build a huge drying rack if I am ever gonna a get a smoke out of these things.

Buckets and cans

2010-06-30T21:32:00.000-07:00

Now that the garden is cranking out the veggies we have more than we can possibly eat. Not enough to set up a stand on the corner of the highway, but definitely more than a family of four can use in a couple days. Luci has been busy in the kitchen putting everything in jars. So far the stock of pickles is filling up with bread and butter pickles, green tomato dills, whole garlic dills, dill hamburger slices and pickled peppers there is salsa, tomato sauce and blackberry jelly and strawberry jam. We also picked plums and squeezed out a gallon or so of bright hot pink plum juice that's in freezer until were ready. These pickles got put up tonight and in the morning we sauce the tomatoes and use half for salsa half for pasta sauce.

We use a lot of pasta sauce and salsa so if nothing else this will mean a whole bunch of jars will no longer end up in land fills. I tried to keep all the jars we buy when we are done so I could recycle them, but there is no where to take them with in an hour of us so I ended up pitching them out. I have wonder if it uses less resources to can at home or to have them centrally mass produced. For instance if everyone made pickles at home the vinegar has to travel to each house in small containers rather to one location in a huge container. The cost of making it ourselves is definetly effective on the second round. If you add in the cost of the jars, you are probably just barely under what it would cost to buy things like pickles at the store, but the second time around when you already have the jars you begin to save some money.

What's in your yard?

2010-06-25T21:08:00.000-07:00

Since moving here I found all kinds of crap in the yard as I am clearing brush, digging or mowing. The most common is broken glass and spent shotgun shells, but I have also found bottles from the forties, a tractor spedometer, tools, baseballs, coffee tins and bones. We have a really old metal detector that I Luci and I used around the front once just to see what we would find, but instead of coins we pulled up a good size pile of bottle caps, shell caseing, and sockets before we called it quits.

Today as I began to clear an area near the garden I came across this little skull. Not sure what it is, but I am sure it made a fine meal for something. Before I moved here I would definitely been grossed out by this type of thing, especially the wavy part where the two halves of the skull meet in the back, but now I just regard it with a mild curiosity. When I started cleaning out the old garage it had two or three deer skulls with antlers sort of hanging in the rafters that had not been completely stripped of flesh and had bits of leathery hide clinging to the cheeks and scalp. That was way nasty and all I could imagine was what it would be like to touch the skin of a mummy which I have seen people do on TV a thousand times. I never gave it much thought, but that is seriously disgusting.

A New Hunt

2010-06-21T22:33:00.000-07:00

When we moved here, I had no idea that one of my neighbors would be Bigfoot. Like most people, I foolishly believed that Bigfoot only existed in the Pacific Northwest or in Yeti form somewhere in the Himalayas.

Apparently the nearest and most recent Bigfoot sighting in our area was in 2008, about ten miles away. Ten miles is nothing for Bigfoot. If he can survive for a few hundred years in North America without someone dining on his flesh and not taking a picture of it first, then a ten mile hike over to my neck of the woods should be a piece of whatever Bigfoot eats.

I just finished checking out the Texas Bigfoot Research Conservancy's map to see where he has been sighted. My first thought is to call them up right now and get some of these guys out to my house in the middle of the night to listen to my tale of an angry Bigfoot shaking his fist at me as wanders out of the yard while ripping his sharp teeth into one of our chickens, but that would be rude. Hilarious, but rude. My other thought is how could I get one of my neighbors convinced that they had just seen Bigfoot. I'd make a big Ape suit, but I think I would end up taking a bullet to the head.

This comes just a few days after the game wardens told the kids at the library that the black bear population is rising in East Texas. Now, they were very clear that one is not allowed to shoot a bear unless it is about to eat your face and you better have some claw marks to prove it was about to eat your face. They never mentioned Bigfoot, but I figure that if he's out there it's open season on any tall hairy things that come within range. Much like Bigfoot, if you see a bear or bear tracks or bear poop you're supposed to give them a call so they can track them to estimate population and their movements. I have never seen a bear that wasn't going through a dumpster looking for Cheetos and discarded Bar-B-Que chicken, so it would be kinda cool to see one roaming wild (except I suspect they are just looking for a reliable source of Cheetos). The Black Bear Conservation Committee is trying to help provide education for the public who might encounter these bears in order to keep them alive. I would love to see both the bear and the Bigfoot population skyrocket so that we can once again dine on these magnificent creatures.

The Purple Wall

2010-06-20T22:58:00.000-07:00

Although I have spent a good deal of time sweating to death in the nasty hot weather trying to grow tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers, our real crop grows silently and unattended on the rest of the property that we own with my wife's sister. The property is actually a tree farm or timber plantation. This gives us the tax status of Agricultural land without having to do much. The trees really grow without much help and what help they did get came from the timber management company that planted them for us. Recently I have been wondering if there is anything else we should do to encourage this long term investment to pay off so I have been looking through forestry and timber websites.

Since our property was logged three years ago I have learned a bit about the subject and was aware that timber is marked with paint to indicate which trees are to be harvested and which are off limits to the logging crew. Accidentally harvesting a tree on the wrong property can cost a logger quite a bit so they often avoid taking the trees on property lines to prevent problems. When trees are marked they should put a mark around eye level and then one on the base so after the tree has been cut you can be sure it was a tree that was supposed to be harvested. What I didn't know is that purple marks mean stay out. The old fences on our property have been down in some areas for so long that you can barely find them in the underbrush even when you know that they are there somewhere, but often large tracts of forested land are impossible or unnecessary to fence so they created the purple paint law. You can mark your property against trespassers with signs, fences, or purple paint.

30.05. CRIMINAL TRESPASS

(2)  "Notice" means:

(D)  the placement of identifying purple paint 
marks on trees or posts on the property, provided that the marks 
are:
    (i)  vertical lines of not less than eight 
inches in length and not less than one inch in width;
    (ii)  placed so that the bottom of the mark 
is not less than three feet from the ground or more than five feet 
from the ground;  and
    (iii)  placed at locations that are readily 
visible to any person approaching the property and no more than:
     (a)  100 feet apart on forest land;  or                                    
     (b)  1,000 feet apart on land other 
than forest land; 30.05.

In some areas this is how land owners mark the line between national forests and bordering private land. I am curious to know how much paint I would have to buy in order to mark our property, but if I was going to do it I would use a can of Design Master Loganberry.

Not even enough to make pancakes

2010-06-16T20:36:00.000-07:00

This is the result of four years of growth for our blueberry bushes. This is the second handful of berries the girls have eaten this year. Last year the birds got most of the berries, but for some reason they have left them alone so far. To be fair, this is only the second year that we really watered them, we have never used fertilizer on them and only once a year do I pull the weeds out that surround them. Now each bush has around two hundred berries. Luckily there is great pick-your-own blueberry orchard about fifteen minutes away where it costs $1.50 a pound if you pick, so we will going there for a few more years. If I could wind it back and have a do over we would have planted differently.

First, I would have at least planted another ten to twenty bushes, possibly as many as forty.

Second, I would plant them close together instead of spread out around the yard like decorations. There location makes them take more time to water and harvest.

Third, I would plant all them on the slope instead of on level ground. The bushes at the bottom of a slope are so much easier to water using a rain barrel and gravity to move the water.

I am thinking about ordering some pecan trees from Willis Orchard Company, but I am trying to figure out what regrets I will have in four years.

Eating the Profits

2010-06-14T20:31:00.000-07:00

We are eating something from the garden every day. Cucumbers are probably the fastest-growing, most productive thing we grow and it is hard to pick them at the size we want because they grow so fast. Most of these will end up as pickles which the kids will eat all year. I don't get it personally. A little pickle on a hamburger maybe, but I can't just eat a pickle by itself. I am not sure if it is a southern thing or what, but people love pickles here. You can buy pickles in the movie theater and in the elementary school they have a Pickle Day every week as a fund raiser. When we took the girls to the movies in California they were both upset that they couldn't get a pickle. This year Luci has also put up a couple jars of pickled peppers. Using both cherry peppers and banana peppers, these have also become a big hit with the kids.

This is the first and possibly the only crop of potatoes. Something messed up the plants and we're not sure they are going to live. A lot of homesteader/ farm blogs write about trying to produce 80% of their own food which means they grow a lot more and eat lot less than I do. Not eating things in season or trying to store things like potatoes for months a time would be a huge shock for us. We are, like most people, in the habit of buying tomatoes in December. We are harvesting cucumbers, tomatoes, squash (which seems to grow second behind cucumbers), potatoes, and peppers. I am still waiting on the eggplant.

Crab before the storm

2010-06-08T20:51:00.000-07:00

Right now the Texas coast is clear of oil, but we figure the first hurricane of the season should blow in a nice thick layer of death. Before that happened Luci wanted to take the girls crabbing down at the coast. We went down to bridge city with an ice chest full of chicken necks and got directions from a bait shop to a good place to go with the kids. I felt bad for the guy running the bait shop because he knew his business was gonna get screwed and that it was just a matter of time. We bought a couple of bait fish and were on our way.

We caught a dozen or so before we gave into the intense heat and headed home. The girls had great time trying to scoop em up with net while they try to eat the chicken neck. Emma learned the hard way not to try to play with crab in the cooler and got a pinch that drew blood. This little fellow that Hannah caught got a free pass because he's not five inches wide. Seems a shame since it'll just end up covered in black gold. 12 of these little guys doesn't give much food, but it was one of the best things I have ever eaten. The girls can't wait to go back.

Finally, a real rain

2010-06-03T21:25:00.000-07:00

I suppose I should get a rain gauge because whenever I talk to other gardeners they always seem to know how many inches of rain they have gotten lately, but I simple measure how much rain by weather or not I can fill up my rain barrel. It has been much drier this year than last and I am glad I bought one rain barrel and I wish I had stopped by the feed store this morning and picked up another one like I had planned on doing. Hopefully this will not be the last rain for a while, but I would hate to depend on the weather. One of the gardeners I know pumps water out of a creek on his property but the creek has gotten so low he was going to have to give up the garden if we hadn't gotten this rain. In Texas surface water belongs to the state, but as long as you are not interfering with the flow of water you are normally allowed to use water that flows through your property. Of course if we suddenly had a loss of infrastructure and every property owner was pumping water for crops it would be a problem.

By the end of the summer I would like to have at least five rain barrels set up. This way I could water everything outside the garden as well as have enough emergency water in case another hurricane comes this way. After hurricane Rita we were out of power, and since we have our well, out of water for almost a month. Luckily we have relatives in town to stay with who had water even if it was freezing cold. A solar system for the well would cost around two grand, but would probably be well worth the investment. We can hook the generator to the well compressor and pump, but after the hurricane gas was impossible to get for a week or so. The dirt roads will be tore up tomorrow, but I am always glad to see the rain.

Battle Racoon

2010-06-01T21:10:00.000-07:00

There is a raccoon outside right now happily snacking on what was supposed to be the bait for the my trap. If my wife didn't have to go to work at five in the morning I was try to slip out and take a shot at the little fellow, but that will have to wait until a Friday or Saturday night. After he killed the chicken I moved the chicken tractors under the bedroom window and twice I saw him on top of those trying to pull open the corrugated plastic roofs, but he couldn't get in. A few nights ago my youngest saw him hanging on the larger chicken coop, before every one went to sleep so I went out with the 20 gauge, but I he was moving and I missed. I guess more target practice is in order.

I have been trying to trap the creature for a couple days now, but of course I can't bring myself to drop the sixty bucks to buy a ready made metal trap from the hardware store. Sadly our last Basset Hound died the Christmas before last and we have a couple of these old crate laying around the house. I decided to try to make a trap out of it, but if it actually worked he might be able to chew his way out pretty quick. At first I put eggs in it for a few days to get him comfortable going in and out and then I put peanut butter on some sticks attached to strings. This didn't work. So tonight I used a chicken carcass, a delicious lemon pepper I must say, which the raccoon is currently enjoying out in the yard. How,the hell, the little bastard got the damn thing off the string I can only guess at while I listen to his faint laughter and the jiggle of his full tummy.

Battle Raccoon Score
Blood thirsty homeowner: 0
Crafty little creature just asking to made into a hat: 3

A boom year for the garden

2010-05-28T20:15:00.000-07:00

So far this is turning out to be a boom year for the garden. Everything is growing like crazy. In part this might be because we amended the soil by adding compost and manure before we planted while we were tilling the soil. I think it may be either the weather or the amount of pollen that was in the air this year as well. Even the fruit trees and blueberry bushes are putting out way more than they did last year and I don't really know why. Last year the peach tree had maybe twenty to thirty peaches, most of which were eaten by deer, this year there is at least a hundred maybe a hundred and fifty. The girls and I picked cucumbers and green beans for dinner tonight and they ate every bite.

This is the first of the squash to grow in the girls little garden. These are the biggest plants out of everything we planted. This area that had a large chicken tractor over it for months is well fertilized and doesn't have to many weeds. By planting everything close together the veggie plants have choked out a good portion of the weeds. This seems to be working so well that I am planning on moving chicken tractors onto areas I want to garden and letting the chickens eat everything inside before using it as a growing area.

Last year our tomatoes were devastated by bugs. The little bastards made me so mad I could scream. So far I have only seen a few and I am trying to catch one so I can show it to the extension agent. I am hoping she will have a good suggestion as to how to get rid of these things with out using to much DDT. Watching a small crop get torn up blows big time. This year we have eighty or so tomato plants so we have even more to lose. Between some new tomato cages, the starter plants, and compost I figure we have about two hundred bucks invested in the tomatoes. I never liked gambling in Vegas because after I lost a hundred bucks I wanted to kick myself. I certainly don't want to lose money, time and hard work. That is the real difference between a farm and garden, accounting. I am not a the point yet a which I am trying to make money, but I at least want to break even while providing healthy food for the kiddo's.

Two feet in sixteen inches

2010-05-24T08:06:00.000-07:00

This is all that is left of one of our Dominickers. A couple bones, a pile a feathers and two feet. Last night we were out late and when we got home we had to try to get the kids to bed because it was already 11pm. Since we were so late I forgot to do my usual check on the chickens to make sure they have water. In the morning I often leave the bungee cords that hold the roof down unhooked on one side because I know I am going to open it again. When we went outside this morning we found this pile about fifteen feet from the chicken tractor. Something had managed to get through the top or crawl under and drag this one out. Raccoon, maybe a fox, I am not sure if possums will go after the chickens or just the eggs. Whatever it is it will be back since it had nice chicken dinner. I kinda feel bad for the chicken, but if I think of the amount of chickens I have eaten in my life it would be silly to stress over this one. Mostly I feel bad we didn't eat the little lady.

The Worm Roundup

2010-05-23T21:23:00.000-07:00

A couple of years ago we tried to a little worm farming using an old turtle shaped sandbox that the kids have outgrown. The worms didn't last long and although we have talked about trying again in order to have plenty of worms for fishing we just never got around to it. This is the thunder stick that Luci made this morning. It is an old rake handle with notches cut into one side. The other piece of wood is an old broom handle that is rubbed back and forth across the notches to make noise and vibration.

The worms just come right up out of the ground. Not sure if it is the noise or the vibration, but it works. If anybody know why this works let me know. Luci said this is how her grandfather would get worms for fishing and I think we saw something similar on DIRTYJOBS one of the girls favorite TV shows. The harder part will be finding an area of the property that has a larger variety of worms. The chickens thought these were a great snake and the handfull chucked into the garden into the garden will help loosen up the soil, but these little guys would be hard to thread onto a fishing hook.

If you don't like the weather....

2010-05-17T19:39:00.000-07:00

Down here, everyone says if you don't like the weather in Texas, wait an hour and it will change. At noon it was hot sunny bright day, but by two o'clock it looked like this:

The storm hit hard and then by four it was hot and sunny again. In the hour it rained, I collected about sixty gallons of rainwater, filling the rain barrel and all of the buckets. If we have another long dry spell, this will help water the figs, blueberries, peach and pear trees. I never paid much attention to the weather until we moved here, but if you want to a grow anything you have to hope for the best. The wind and the rain battered the garden pretty hard and the chickens all hid in their boxes.

Spent the evening standing up and staking the tomato plants and standing up the squash. I can't imagine watching an entire crop get wiped out from some crap weather.

Compostapalooza

2010-05-17T16:53:00.000-07:00

Quirky is probably my favorite website. The site is a crowdsourcing product-development site where users submit ideas for new products and then try to guide the products picked for production by voting, rating and leaving feedback. Normally Quirky charges a $99-dollar submission fee, but participating is always free. Every member who influences a product gets a small percentage of the profit from those products when they go into production. I have tiny amounts of influence on nine products and my account goes up by a few cents every day.

Right now they are looking for an idea involving composting--this being one of their special promotions, they are allowing free submissions, so there is nothing to lose if you have an idea. With no registration fee, Quirky is one of the few sites that really allows you to make money with no initial investment. Some of the ideas are good, some are interesting and some submissions are so ridiculous that they are hilarious. Even if you don't care about compost (although how is that possible??) Quirky is worth the time to check out.

THE TIMELINE

May 17
Launch idea submissions
May 17 - 26
Submissions accepted
May 26 - June 4
Ideas evaluated
by community
June 4
Announcement of
winning product
June 4 - 15
Regular product
development cycle
June 15
Product launch

a reconnaissance mission to the east

2010-05-16T21:42:00.000-07:00

Tonight, not under the cover of darkness I slipped through a wide-open hole in a fence that has been down for years to check on the great berry patch to the east. Right now, what I am picking are called dewberries in East Texas. They are different than true blackberry vines--their canes are soft and trail on the ground...not that the prickles are any different. My oldest always says, when she gets a thorn, "Ow! The berry picked me back!"

On our property we have tons of these things and the bags of frozen berries are piling up. Off the road we have several patches where the vines have been growing and producing for years where they will be covered in slightly larger blackberries. These patches are a little harder to get to and require that I tromp off through the grass and weeds to get to the patch. These ripen later than the dew berries, so after I start picking dewberries I have to keep an eye on the them to make sure I don't miss them starting to ripen.

I actually find the easiest way is to check the berry patch growing on the hunting lease next to our property. This is not something one does during hunting season. That's a good way to end up with your head stuffed and mounted on some dillweed's wall. The land is pretty much vacant except near hunting season, so I figure I'm safe--although I should have pulled out the orange vest I have left over from my FEMA job after hurricane Rita. The berries are just starting to have a little blush of red so it should be only a few days before bucketloads are ready to be picked. I know where the patch is because I have had to go take a look to see where our gun-happy neighbors had set up their hunting stands. A couple were way too close to our house and I asked them to pick a different spot. They agreed and we try to keep things friendly. Since at certain times of the year we are thirty or forty yards away from each other with hunting rifles, so it is best to keep things civilized.

EndAll at the beginning

2010-05-14T20:46:00.000-07:00

This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of SaferBrand. All opinions are 100% mine.

Last year we tried go totally natural and not use anything for insects except squashing them with our fingers (which is just plain gross). This plan really didn't work out very well and we lost tons of tomatoes, corn, and squash. All that hard work for nothing. I could have cried. Enter my new favorite organic pesticide, my new best friend, EndAll Insect Killer.

This year has been slow for the bugs to appear, probably because it has been drier than last year, but when we lost a Roma Tomato plant--totally loaded with tomatoes, of course--to cutworms, we knew we wanted to try to prevent the losses we had last year. I decided to go with EndAll Insect Killer from Safer Brand.
EndALL insect spray

Since I sprayed a week ago, I haven't lost another plant to cutworms, haven't seen the little green and brown things that ate the tomatoes last year and something has stopped eating the leaves. I didn't find EndALL Insect Killer to be a skin irritant the way I found the stuff I tried when we lived in Las Vegas.

EndAll has Neem oil in it, which gives it a smell that is familiar, but which you just can't place. Because it kills the larva and the adults, I am hoping it will prevent a lot of problems by reducing the population this early in the season. We've also increased the amount of Marigolds and Basil in the garden, because they are supposed to keep insects away too, but I think the EndAll might be give us the firepower needed to keep the veggies from being destroyed. If you're going for a pesticide, I would have to start with EndAll. When I sprayed with it last week, I noticed that it killed aphids and slugs too. It also killed the infestation of little bugs that were hanging out on the 70's Scarecrow. Woohoo, go EndAll!

Of course if you're looking for something old-school you could go with this guy, the Insect-O-Gun. Ever since we moved here I have seen this thing hanging on the wall of our barn and assumed it was a paint sprayer. Yesterday I took it off the nail it was hanging on because I was cleaning out the barn. It is a bug sprayer that you hook up to a water hose. On the handle it is actually embossed "INSECT O GUN". The top is an all-brass fitting that still has nice movement. This screws onto the same kind of jar you use to preserve food. This thing has probably been hanging on that nail for forty years and there's no telling what kind of Agent Orange you're supposed to use when you load it up. God help ya if you lost track of which jar you used with it and accidentally filled it up with peaches.

Broken Glass, Shattered dreams

2010-05-13T19:42:00.000-07:00

Ok, maybe it is not that serious, but when I saw the end of the Clorox logo sticking out of the grass I got excited and thought I found another bottle to add to the collection. It is not that old, but it has been a while since they sold bleach in glass bottles. I try to keep as much of the old junk as I can especially if it has logo's or branding. I even kept some of the little boxes that nails were in that had probably been bought in the late sixties early or early seventies. Fishing lures, bottles, tools, duck calls, dishes are all on the list of stuff I look out for to keep. I really love the stuff from the sixties. At some point we will take all the junk out of the Rubbermaid tubs that we have and make a display for all this crap. This hunk of glass will end up in the trash instead of in the keep pile. Probably for the best as we have too much junk anyway.

A camping trip you don't forget

2010-05-13T06:46:00.000-07:00

What do mean you don't want to go camping this year kids? Hiking around the lake, playing in the streams, making smore's on the fire. Afterwards we battle the undead. It's a family tradition.

Dying for some rain

2010-05-12T20:04:00.000-07:00

Every morning for about a month the weather has been cloudy and cool with high winds. Even on the days we have been warned that violent thunder storms are coming we haven't gotten but a few drops of rain. The dark clouds just don't open up and let it out. The good side is that with the wind the heat and humidty are tolerable, but the bad side is that the garden is requiring a lot of water. I decided that since this may keep up I should try to get ready to increase the amount of rain I can use at once buy setting up a rain barrel.
For twenty bucks at the feed store I got this plastic barrel that is labeled Diet Coke Base. There is also a CORROSIVE label, but since I couldn't survive without diet coke I have been pretending I didn't see that one. I rinsed the barrel and left the caps off to let the smell evaporate. I put the barrel under the eave of the house and cut out a ten inch hole to let the rain flow inside. I drilled a 1/2 hole in the bottom side and threaded in a PVC spigot. The next ones I buy I won't cut out a hole in the top. I will figure out way to get the water to flow through the holes that have caps so that I can reseal the barrel.

Unless the electricity were shut off there is no way that rain fall would become our primary source of water. We are so lucky when it comes to access to clean fresh water when other people have only access to unsafe water or have to pay a price that forces them to choose between food and water. I know in some states and worse in some countries where the world bank has privatized water it is illegal to collect rainwater. I know I would break that law in a heartbeat if I needed the water. I can't imagine depending on a product like the Watercone to have some clean fresh water.

The dwindling junk pile

2010-05-10T20:26:00.000-07:00

Most people who have gardening or county life blogs have pretty pictures of flowers, sunsets and cute farmyard animals doing adorable things. Not this guy. I spent the morning trying to get rid of one the last pieces of junk out of the yard. This old cistern has probably been in the same place since the 40's when the house was used as a hunting cabin. I thought for sure when I knocked it over I would find at least on snake under it or inside the rusty hunk of junk.

The damn thing weighs a ton and since I don't like to ask for help I had to figure out how to get it in my truck by myself. Well, my five year was with me, but when we carried it she kept dropping her end. Luckily I had pulled all these old tires out of various piles of brush and junk only to find out that it is a pain to get rid of tires. I had to stack them up like step and roll one end onto them. When I had the tip on three tires I had to move the others closer to the middle and roll it from one stack to the next in order to get a steep enough angle.

Of course it wasn't quite steep enough so I had to let a little air out of my tires before I could back up with the tail gate underneath it. When I got my tail gate a little closer than this to the center I was able to shove it inside the bed of my little truck.

I am pretty sure that this is the same way they moved the Easter Island heads, but they may have had more old tires and a bigger truck.

the 2010 garden

2010-05-08T21:54:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow we should be planting the last few things for the garden until the summer planting when a few things have died off. We still need to plant sunflowers, gourds, and a couple more rows of green beans. This year we left out the corn which just did not do well, the watermelons and cantalopes because I think they need a patch to themselves, and the okra, lets face it okra is just plain nasty. In the main garden we have around seventy tomato plants, a row of cucmbers, two rows of squash about fifteen pepper plants, and eight eggplants. We probably should have gone smaller with the tomatoes, but if we don't get destroyed by bugs this year we will have a bumper crop and probably have to put a bunch up as sauce. Since we planted we have had little rain and so everything is growing fast in the unusually hot weather. Last year when we had rain every couple days I thought that was great because we didn't have to water much, but the guy running the blueberry farm told me he would rather have all the sun all the time. He said he could get water, but couldn't make any sunlight.

The kids wanted their own patch and were happy to take this spot that had five tomato plants that had grown up on their own. I had to put up a male shift fence in order to let the chickens out. They could easily get over the little fence, but they won't bother because they have plenty of other easier things to eat. Unfortuntatly something already ate one the pumpkin sprouts in the corner, but I know it wasn't the chickens because the soil around it was undisturbed. Because this is where the chicken coop was for a long time, the small area is heavily fertilized and may end up producing the best plants. I am going to go off into the dark forest behind the house and get enough pine straw to heavily mulch this small area so that the weeds will die off.

We decided to grow onions and potatoes this year, but maybe should have put something else in the raised beds. The beds also have garlic and shallots as well as rhubarb and asparagus which will take years to produce. Onions and potatoes are so cheap it almost seems silly to grow your own, but a few people have said that the fresh potatoes will be great so I will have to wait and see if it was worth the effort. I had to take the herb containers and move them all inside the area because the chickens had decided they were the best place to dig. I wish I had put a little more thought into this and set it up in such away I could cover it with plastic to make a green house and extend the season.

While I was out

2010-05-04T20:54:00.000-07:00

When I came back from taking the kids to school two tractors were busy clearing the high line for the power company. The lines cross our property in a couple places, go across our neighbors land and then go back onto our place where it ends at our house. We're the the last on the line. Sam Huston Electric Cooprative or Sheco as it is known here has and easement that allows them to clear a certain amount of feet on either side of the line. The phone company has some type of easement that allows them run lines on certain areas and we also have a oil pipeline that cross piece of land that they keep clear pretty much all the time. If the world turns into some sort devastated post apocalyptic danger zone where the road was too dangerous to travel I would use the pipeline as a hiking trail to get around. Those guys are good at clearing brush.

They haven't been out here for at least two years so of course they had to come about a week before one of our best berry picking spots was ready. There is an area right along the dirt road by the old hay pasture where we picked all of our berries last year that they mowed down just like this section that leads from the mailbox to the old barn. That was the best place for the kids to pick berries because they could stand on the side of the road with me and pick without having to tromp off into the thicket of thorns. Both kids found it horrifying that someone would come along and mow down a patch of berries nearly ready to pick, but when I asked if they wanted to go home and turn off the AC they declined. Fortunately, This year the rest of the property is covered. I picked a couple pounds in about forty-five minutes while I listened to the tractors and waited for them to ask if they could get around behind the house.

the battle for the bottle

2010-05-02T09:47:00.000-07:00

When we first came here to visit I new we were kinda going to the south and I was vaguely aware that this was the inside the bible belt. I did not realize that as we drove down here from Dallas that we were traveling backwards in time. Back to a time before prohibition ended and you couldn't buy or sell any form of alcohol. I had no idea what a dry county was and when it was explained to me I couldn't help making tons of jokes about how I was gonna round up the Duke boys and run some shine down here in Hazard County.

Moving here from Las Vegas where it is perfectly acceptable to walk down the street with 64 oz Margarita, (hardly any booze in it, but don't tell the tourist that) I still find this entertaining. Now of course if you travel in any direction there is a liquor store just past the county line which means that tax dollar from the sale of booze goes to the counties in which it was sold. For the first time since we have lived here the county is going to vote on weather or not to lift the ban and allow business to sell. Of course those for it are local businesses including Wal-Mart which is the principal supplier of everything in Tyler county. Those opposed say it will encourage more alcohol related problems.

Personally, I don't really care either way. If they passed something that allowed only locally owned business to sell then I think it would make a slightly larger difference in the local economy. Either way I am planning on making some wine this year and I am not really sure if that is legal or not. Since I couldn't sell it anyway I don't think it matters, but since I was planning on calling it Dry County Wine it will spoil my fun if they allow liquor sales.

This year is the year of the berry. Our place is covered in wild black berries. Last year at this time you could pick a couple cups of small berries and it was only later on that I could could go out and fill a big bucket in couple hours, but in hour a picked these from a spot right next to our driveway that didn't even have berries growing last year. All the way down the 1/4 mile of driveway on both sides is fields of berries growing around the pine trees. Even the coyote poop that is normally full of rabbit fur is absolutely black from the coyotes snacking on berries.

I am not sure what caused them to take off so much this year, but we are going to have more than we know what to do with. Last year Luci took the berry's and made jam, but it wasn't until the end of picking season that we really had enough for her to make a batch. Even with the kids eating a ton we should have plenty for me to learn how to make my own wine. I hate for them to go to waste. When I was picking this morning I could imagine what it would have been like to find a field like this if you were a hunter/ gatherer tribe. It would be like wandering into the candy store.

Avocado Day

2010-04-30T07:22:00.000-07:00

Ever since the land around us was logged and replanted I have felt that we made a mistake. I understand that as a cash crop goes in East Texas it is pine timber, but I wish we would have set aside some space to plant a variety of trees. If I had the cash I would have a couple of acres bulldozed and plant the whole thing with fruit, nut trees and a variety of hardwood trees to provide future firewood as well as an environment for more wildlife. Not that we lack wildlife now.

I am not sure if these will ever survive in the ground, but my other ones are almost two years old. I am hoping that when they are a good size I can plant them and they will survive the couple of days a year that we have freezing temperatures. I don't think we really have the climate for avocado's, but I am going to try anyway. I am trying not to get to invested in these trees. If I start it myself and it dies all I am out is my time. If they live great, if not no big deal. I figure if I try enough different plants some of it is bound to do well. Someone told me you can grow banana's around here so I may try to get a couple banana trees.

Since a mass replant is not an option I am going to try to learn how to start my own trees instead of buying them from a nursery. I have a few more avocado seeds to try and I am going to try cuttings from our peach tree and then the pear tree. I should have just dropped a couple hundred bucks and bought some from the nursery that we bought the fig trees, but I want to see if I can do it myself. I am trying to take a more long term approach to thinking about the land around us. Normally I am have a hard time thinking twenty years ahead of time because I always think that we will have moved by then, but with two kids I don't see us going anywhere.

A trip to the feed store

2010-04-26T20:41:00.000-07:00

After dropping off 780 lbs of scrap metal pulled out of the brush this morning I decided to take my eighty three dollars and stop by the feed store. I wanted to get a plastic barrel to make into a rain barrel. Woodville has four stop lights and two feed stores Tolar's and Tyco. I feel out of place in both of them. In Tyco I always feel under dressed. I am not sure why, but whenever I am in there I always feel like I should be wearing a neatly tucked button up shirt and bright clean pair of wranglers instead of my stitched up cargo shorts that most people would have thrown away and black T-shirt with paint all over. It is the same feeling I get in whenever I have to go to church to see my daughter do something with her pre-school class.

Tyco sells just about anything you could need for a farm. I don't even know what half the stuff in there is for, but you can get parts to build an electric fence, irrigation supplies, saddles and tack. Tack, really, people still buy tack. Tyco is one of the few places to take an out of towner to see when they visit the great city that is Woodville. If nothing else just to check out the wide variety of animal heads attached to wall as decor.

Tolar's is where I buy my chicken feed on a regular basis. Mostly because it is closer to the school where I drop off and pick up my kids. This is a totally different kinda of store with pallets of feed sacks all over and a steady stream of customers who seem to know exactly what they want while I waffle around trying to decide if I need anything besides a sack of laying pellets and chicken scratch. Tomorrow I have to stop by Tolar's and get some chicken food, but I have no idea if I should switch from hen starter to laying pellets. That being the question on my mind is not something I would have planned on before we moved out here.

Carbon Neutrality at last

2010-04-23T21:30:00.000-07:00

Today when I checked my email, I opened one from a company called Kaufda. Now, let me tell you, I have gotten a bunch of scam emails, a couple of requests for link trade, and I even had one place write me and offer me the fat sack o' seed and another just sent me a bird feeder that they would like me to write about 'cause I love free junk, but this Kaufda....is just plain silly.

The marketing campaign they have created goes like this: If you write a post about them, they will have a tree planted for you in the Plumas National Forest in northern California. This tree offsets the amount of carbon my blog creates, thereby making my blog carbon neutral. Kaufda's main business is creating websites that take the place of the little supermarket specials pages that are inside newspapers declaring the price of roast beef to the hot deal of the week. This company, theoretically, would save paper and trees. I am not sure how this marketing campaign helps them, but then again, now I know that they exist, so I guess they have check mark in box number one.

So, I figure since we live surrounded by trees we should be able to do stuff like set a pile truck tires on fire and feel perfectly green since we have enough trees to offset the carbon. The idea of carbon credits is like buying an indulgence from the Catholic Church.... "Well, we have this nasty factory, but we spent a bunch of money to make sure this patch of forest cannot be used by the people who live nearby." The money spent on the carbon credit will (of course) not go to the people who can't benefit from the forest resource around them.

I think I should kick it up a notch and ransom trees. Cuff their branches behind their trunks, slap a hood on 'em and hold a chainsaw to their ,uh, necks? "Five bucks or little Johnny Brownbark here ends up in the chipper by morning." Choke on that.

Now, I am all for using less paper, although I live in a community that is supported by the price of timber. If paper went out of style, this place would be abandoned in two weeks. I am not sure if Kaufda is really going to plant my tree or not after I send them my link to this, but with all the, er, STUFF grown in Nor Cal forests these days, I am not sure it's a safe place to raise a baby tree anyway.

biology class lesson number 2

2010-04-20T20:11:00.000-07:00

Every things got to eat.

This morning I was working around the yard when I decided to check on the bird eggs I found a few days ago. The broadcaster that the nest is in sits on the top of some shelves on the back porch above my head. I took it down to get a look at the eggs and realized that there was only one egg left. So I am standing there thinking what the hell they couldn't have hatched, grown up and flown away, but the nest looks fine. After thirty seconds or so of this internal dialog I finally notice the tiny snake that is staring up at me looking well fed.

This did not end well for the snake. He met his fate at the beaks of our five full grown chickens. Not only did they eat the snake they fought over which one gets to eat the snake. I found it satisfying to watch birds eat a snake full of bird eggs. Ah, the circle of life. Gotta love it.

Oh, and they ate the egg, too.

The trash man don't come round here

2010-04-19T20:19:00.000-07:00

The three things I miss about living in Las Vegas are having a cable modem, being able to do everything at three in the morning, and having a guy stop by the house one or twice a week an pick up the trash. Today I went down to the scrap metal yard with 620lbs of junk in the back of my truck for which I was paid the sum of eighty five dollars and thirty two cents. This at least makes up for some of the money I spent hauling junk out of here over the years. If could do it about 200 more times I might be close to breaking even. I think I have enough scrap for one more mixed load and then I have an old metal cistern that will take up the whole bed of my little truck. By the time the scrap is gone I figure I might make about $175. At least I didn't have to pay for it. In Las Vegas if you are a home owner the city will haul off almost anything because they don't want you to drive out into the desert in the middle of the night and dump it off.
Out here in the country you gotta get rid of your own junk. We take bags of our regular trash every other day and pay $1.25 a bag and then when I bring a pickup load full of junk it cost about twenty bucks. Some people choose the cheaper option. You can burn your trash here if you can believe that. Where I grew up in California you can't even have a fire on the beach anymore let alone pile up a bunch a stinky diapers and set them on fire. It also common for people to pick a spot on their own land and either fill in a hole with junk or simply make a pile off where no one will ever bother it. This is one such pile at our house. It's not really near the house and no one except me would ever know it is there, but I can't let it sit there. I just can't it drives my nuts to think about it. Luckily this pile I got a few bucks for, but the other ones have not been so profitable. I can't bring myself to pick a corner no one will ever see and pile up junk. I figure I at least have to clear out the stuff that was left before us. Then maybe I could make my own pile, but I doubt it.

I do like junk. That is one problem I couldn't quite bring myself to chuck everything. I decided to keep these sprayers and this old gas can. I have no idea what I am going to do with them. Most likely they will sit around for a few months and then I will throw them out. I am a binge and purge kind of pack rat. At some point everything has to go. I also kept the animal traps, like trapping for beaver pelt kinda traps, just in case I decide to become a mountain man. The only other thing I kept was this base that is for a cast iron woodstove. I am going to paint it and put a top on it and use it for a little outside stool or bench.

The Kids Mini Garden

2010-04-18T19:40:00.000-07:00

Our kids eat more types of veggies than most people we know. They each have there favorites, but on the whole our kids like vegetables. Partly this comes from being involved in the garden. Last year we would tell them what we were having for dinner and if them fussed all we had to do was say that came from the garden and they would get excited. This year they wanted a patch just for themselves.

A few days ago we were playing in the yard and noticed that six tomato plants are coming up in a patch of dirt that had a chicken coop on it for six months or so. With the girls help I cleaned out the rest of the weeds and planted the seeds they had picked. They both wanted the squash mix seeds so that they wouldn't know which kind of squash would come up. We also planted marigolds on the edges and giant pumpkin seeds at each corner. Emma is convinced that she will grow a pumpkin large enough to make a into a play house.
Tomorrow I am going to try to plant a row of cucumbers right down the middle.

Its fun to watch them digging and planting. I know they are learning and having fun at the same time. I figure if they are living in the country they should get the full benefits of living in the middle of nowhere. That's what I didn't like about living in Las Vegas. You get all the crap that comes with a big city, but none of the benefit. Same reason I think we are going to try to get some livestock in the coming months. Couple pigs, couple goats, nothing to crazy. I have been thinking of getting a milk cow, but it will take some time before I am ready for that.

The Chicktrac 3000

2010-04-15T19:26:00.000-07:00

I got the new chicken tractor in the yard today and divided up the chickens. This one is shorter and wider than the first with a door in the house part. I gave this one a coat of verithane that I had left over from when I refinished the hardwood floors. I couldn't bring myself to buy the kind of water seal that goes on decks when I had this almost full can rusting on the back porch. I would have waited and added a piece to keep the food off the ground so that I didn't have to pick it up each time, but I thought it was about to rain.

I put the five road island reds and the five dominickers in the new one. At first I just started grabbing the closest chicken, but then I remembered what happen last time. I figure if I keep the numbers even maybe they won't attack each other. Like prison gangs and nuclear weapons it's best if both sides are a even.

The birds and the bugs

2010-04-14T16:32:00.000-07:00

Living here is like taking the biology class I almost never went to in high school. I am not a fan of bugs, in fact one of the only things I liked about living in Las Vegas was the lack of bugs. These guys were all over the back porch this morning. The moth population changes constantly. One month it will be big huge greenish white Luna moths, the next big brown moths that are the same color as the house. This month I guess these guys will be all over the place. When I was a kid I would have never touched one of these things, but my kids have no fear of bugs and asked if they could start a butterfly and moth collection.

Immediately after showing the kids these moths they ran out into the yard and stepped into a pile of fire ants. This is another nasty pain in the ass I was lucky enough to grow up with out. Normally I would grab the jerry can full of diesel fuel and the mound would be dead in a few hours. I'm not sure if it is any less harmful than ant poison, but I was going to spread some fire ant killer with this broadcaster, but instead I found a delicious breakfast. No, I didn't eat them. I just teased the kids with idea of serving them for breakfast.
Now I have to keep this on the shelf and try not to disturb them so I went back to the diesel fuel.

Chicken Tractor number 2

2010-04-13T20:23:00.000-07:00

The twenty chicks we bought are growing quick. They about five time the size they were when we brought them home from the feed store. If I don't get the split up soon they will be pecking each other to death. The last time we bought chickens the dominickers and road island reds tore the other kind to shreds even though they had plenty of room. This is the second chicken tractor and I will probably build one more after this. This time I went shorter and wider with a door in the middle of the back. This took a couple hours this afternoon and I should have it finished tomorrow.

You don't really need much to build a chicken tractor. Any saw will do, a hammer comes in handy, and the most helpful thing would be to have two five foot pipe clamps which is about forty bucks including two fittings and two lengths of pipe. Most people would reach for the cordless Makita or DeWalt, but being as cheap as I am when it come to buying junk I use this 1950's Porter-Cable Homemaster drill that I bought at a flea market for ten bucks. I put the whole thing together with 3" screws, but If I had one I would use a finish nailer with 2 1/2" 16 gauge finish nails and it would take half the time.

My list of materials:

10 8' 2x2's Get the straightest ones you can even if you have to make the guy get down a fresh bundle
         to pick through.
1       4' x 8' sheet of 1/4" plywood
2 26" x 8' sheets of corugated plastic (we were going to use salvaged tin, but didn't want sharp edges)
1 Box of 3" screws used about 1/2 box per chicken tractor.
6 1" lag eyes to use as hooks for bungee cords to hold top on.
1 Roll of poultry netting or chicken wire ( you could make a bunch of these from the same roll since
   really only need about 15 feet)

I have looked through plans for chicken coops and chicken tractors online and this is my attempt at making this as cheap and simple as possible. The chickens seem to like it so far, but then again they like eating bugs so what do they know.

The garden begins

2010-04-10T16:47:00.000-07:00

This is really the beginning of the 2010 garden. After a trip to the store to buy poop, compost and plants the garden has been started. We spent the morning spreading and tilling in the cow manure and compost. Then in the afternoon we put the fence back up and planted the top half of the garden in peppers and tomatoes leaving a little space for Poblano peppers and eggplants when we can find them. We left out the corn that we had in one corner last year. It just didn't do well and after it was done it was hard to get in to till that section. I think the chickens ended up eating more of the corn than we did. I may try to find another spot to plant corn, but I don't know where I would put it yet.

Water is always an issue. I hate to use a big sprinkler and have water going all over the garden instead of just to the plants, but the bubblers and little drip sprinklers would be a pretty big investment in time and materials. We tried these sprinkler hoses but they just don't seem to be the trick, so they are getting moved over to the raised beds. I am always amazed at how powerful water feels in the heat of the day. I remember thinking that in Vegas when I would water my lawn late in the day during one of the endless 190 degree days. How quickly I felt better when that water is pouring out the hose. Such an unimaginable waste to water a lawn in the middle of a desert when there are people in the world who don't have water to drink. I always felt so American watering that lawn.

This guy came hopping along toward the end of the day as the sun was going down. I am sure he was headed out to do his usual business. Since the fence was down he has been leaving his pellets right between where the cucumbers and squash will end up. If I didn't think the girls would have freaked out I might of grabbed the .410 and had this guy for dinner, but I think they would have freaked seeing the rabbit guts. I need to get them to try eating it BEFORE they see it die. On Man Vs. Wild the guy killed a rabbit buy throwing a stick at it. I really want to try this, but I know it will just end up limping off in to the woods with a broken leg so that I feel like a A-hole for making it that much easier for a coyote to eat.

back to work

2010-04-08T21:20:00.000-07:00

After a week sick its time to get back to work if I am going to have four or five months of fresh grown veg. I thought I would get the garden planted this week since I think all the cold snaps are over, but all I could muster the energy for was planting these packs of seeds my friend Chris sent. When someone from California sends tells you that they are sending seeds this is not what you expect, but the girls where excited to get some basil going since they love the pesto and Emma likes basil and saffron rice. He also sent a pack of tomato seeds that I should have started a couple weeks ago, but I going to do this week when I replant my avacado seeds.

This coming week is when I really have to get busy. I need to plant the bulk of the garden, build at least one more chicken tractor, finish emptying the old garage, fence an area for the full grown chickens, build a couple rain barrels, get the mower running, and try to regrade a drive way into the pasture down the road. The kids have spring break so I should be able to get most of this done plus some.

Barn raising Swamp billy style

2010-03-31T21:17:00.000-07:00

When the Amish raise anything they gather up a bunch a hardworking serious guys to life heavy poles, but since I don't like to ask for help and since I once helped carry a twenty six foot long Ibeam with a bunch of San Francisco's finest homeless people I figured I would do this alone. After that I felt as if I had regrettably participated in the ultimate group lifting experience. I went after this swampbilly style.

One end of the old garage collapsed years ago and has been about five feet off the ground in the center ever since. So I gathered up all the car jacks I could find and went to work. I'm not sure why I had to do this today, but I guess I figured that after all the time spent hauling junk out of this thing I would be mad as hell if it collapsed and I had to get a bull dozer or a gallon of gas to get rid of it. I'm not sure if this is the right way to lift a wall and the Fedx guy who dropped off a package was giving my funny looks. Of course it could have been the angle that the bottle jack was at or the PJ Harvey playing on the CD player.

Of course I underestimated how much I would have to jack it up so I ended up having to move the third jack back and forth. I had to raise each end, add more blocks, and reset the jack. After a lot of creaking and moaning I got the whole thing back up into place and onto some spiffy new 4x4 posts. I probably should have bought some concrete piers to set them on, but as it is I went over my forty dollar budget by four bucks.
Tonight though I am happy. I got the thing back up and didn't even have a jack slip out and crush my face. Sweet.

Sip and Seed and then some

2010-03-29T07:25:00.000-07:00

This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of birdfeeders.com. All opinions are 100% mine.

The more I live here the more I realize that the more you support your wildlife the better. The birds serve a purpose just like everything else. I put up this great bird feeder we got just the other day. I like being able to have the option to put either water or food in this feeder. We had thousands of Robin Red Breasts in the yard this winter and I couldn't afford to feed all of em, but I could put water out. During the rainy parts of the year there is really no need to put out extra water so there may be time we fill both silos with bird seed. We actually fill our bird feeders with chicken scratch. Since we always have a bag in the house and it only cost ten bucks for a fifty pound bag this saves some cash. When my wife first told me we could use chicken scratch I said I didn't think birds would eat it and she had to remind me that chickens are, in fact, birds. Tasty juicy birds that go well with just about everything.

Hopefully this year our blue berry bushes will produce more and we may get another one of these Sip and Seed feeders to put near them. The guy at the blue berry farm told me that the reason he has feeders and a certain kind of bird house is because that kind of bird will drive out the ones that eat the blue berries. I will have to ask him what kind of birds they are and copy the bird houses that he has on posts at the end of his blueberry rows. I would have never thought I would be much of a bird watcher, but as I notice them more I actually find them interesting. This fall there were some birds eating out of my deer feeder that were almost neon green. That is the only time I have seen them and I find myself looking for the different kinds of birds.

sip & seed birdfeeder

When my youngest realized that I was filling up bird feeder she demanded I fill the bird feeder she made in preschool last year. She wanted to know if she could make a pretty bird feeder like the sip and seed when she got older.

Come and take It

2010-03-28T07:43:00.000-07:00

This is Western Weekend in Tyler County. Yesterday was parade and rodeo day, so we took the kids to both. They had a great time--they love seeing all the horses and wagons. The back road that we take to town is one of the paths the trail riders take into town so we even got our own private parade before the main event. There are probably a few dozen wagons that people build to look like covered wagons except they use truck tires and weld the frame out of tube steel.

Besides parades I'm not really sure where people ride these things. Most of them are part of trail riding clubs, but I don't know where these trails could be. After the parade, the fairgrounds have a rodeo with bullriding, roping, and group riding. For the entertainment of the adults, they also have a goat scramble where kids chase a goat and get a trophy if they manage to catch one. Our youngest tried this to no avail. Even more entertaining is what they call mutton bustin'. Take a bunch of six year old volunteers, slap on helmet, and put them on the back of a very unhappy sheep. Within seconds the kid is face down in the mud. You just can't that in the city.

Unlike the Dogwood parade next week that has floats people make, the main decoration for the western parade is shiny western clothes and flags. Texans love flags. Most Texans will tell you that you Texas is the only state that can fly its flag at the same height as the U.S. flag, but according to Wikipedia, the source of all true wisdom and knowledge, this is an urban legend. All state flags can be flown at the same height. Checking out the wiki for the Texas flag, I did find the flag I want, which is a flag with a star and a cannon with the phrase "Come and take It" across the bottom.

A place of their own

2010-03-27T07:06:00.000-07:00

They grow up and move out so fast seems like just yesterday they were in the house chirping all freaking night. Oh, that was yesterday. They have survived their first night outside. I'm not sure how cold it got last night, but we hung a light inside the enclosed part of our new chicken tractor. Probably for a week or so they will be able to all crowd inside this one. This week I will build another one so that we can divide them as they get bigger. Finding how many we can have in each one will be the key. Three in each one eventually seems right, but it is hard to tell. The hardest part at this point will be moving the tractor without smooshing a baby chick. They seem to be happy to have dirt and grass at their feet. Last time we had chicks it didn't take long after this age for the different breeds to turn on each other. I had no idea that even hens could be so aggressive.

The big attraction

2010-03-24T20:46:00.000-07:00

Like most small towns there ain't squat to do in Woodville. This weekend was the Heritage Festival that they hold ever year at Heritage Village which is a couple miles out of town. Luci took the girls and they wandered around the old buildings and learned about traditional arts and crafts and saw some singing and dancing. Heritage Village is a collection of building maintained by the towns historic society that contain items from the early settlement of the area. I think there is around twelve buildings in various condition that include the typical school house, jail cell, barber shop and work shop buildings. My personal favorite is the building full of Buggy's.

Every time we go I think about my grandfather taking us to the museum he worked on in Delano. Every time we went as kids it felt like the first time. I can remember my grandfather telling the story of how the sheriff almost shot the mannequin in the general store when checking on a reported break in. I remember helping to move toilets and unstick doors when they brought in a new building while I was visiting. Not much to speak of I think I have the clearest picture in my mind of the jail cell, one of the oldest in California, which was like a tiny log cabin with a small window covered by iron bars inside and out. The door weighed a ton and peering inside the only thing you could really see was an army of spiders.

The kids enjoyed seeing how a loom works and how candles were made as well as the ever popular shingle splitting. I know they have seen the same demonstrations every year, but they always seem interested. Maybe because they see it from a new perspective every year as they grow up. Fourth of July, Heritage Festival, Dogwood Weekend and anytime someone visits from out of town usually require a trip to heritage village. Seems like Halloween would be a great time to go to a place like this I know I could scare the bejeezes out the kids with stories of the old man who still haunts the old saloon to this very day. They always fall for that one.

I'm like carbon Switzerland

2010-03-19T11:23:00.000-07:00

I got this Email this morning.

Hi,

thank you so much for participating in our initiative and making your blog carbon neutral! Your tree will be planted next month by the Arbor Day Foundation. We thank you for the support!

Best,

Christin
"Make it green!"-team

Now I can finally stop laying awake a night worrying about the amount of carbon created by my blog.

My Empire of Dirt

2010-03-16T17:19:00.000-07:00

It looks like giant mole came burrowing under the highline yesterday. On my way down the road yesterday to the kids to school this guy pulls up beside my truck and waves for me to roll down the window. He works for Texas Drainage and they are cutting out the ditches (never under estimate the importance of a good drainage ditch) and he wants to know if I need any dirt can they dump some on our property. I didn't realize how much "some" dirt means. When I came home for lunch they told me that they had dropped of one load, this load. If I hadn't come home they would have dropped off another four or five. It will take me quite a bit a time to move all this. Most will be used to fill they road, although it would be a good idea to mix in some gravel. The rest I guess we will use as a base for our raised beds.

CHEZ POULTRY

2010-03-15T15:28:00.000-07:00

With the little fella's growing up fast we had to have a place for them to wait for their day in the pot. The chickens we have now get let out of the coop most days freely running around the yard scratching and pooping. This works pretty good, but sometimes they wander off during the day or just don't come back when it gets to be dark. The chickens were just got will spend their days in one of these chicken tractors were building.

Every day or so we will move this portable coop so they have access to fresh grass and bugs and the massive amounts of poop will be spread out amongst various parts of the yard in desperate need of free fertilizer. Right now were thinking maybe three chickens to a tractor, maybe four. We figure this is a much better deal than they would be offered in a massive chicken factory. I call it a factory simply because I don't know what you call em. I know the raw chicken flesh filling grocery store meat isles didn't come from anything that could be called a farm and I am pretty sure a chicken ranch is only legal in certain parts of Nevada.

I figure if you include the 2x2', plywood and poultry netting we will spend about twenty five bucks making one of these. The sheet metal roof will salvaged from the old barn, but if we had to buy that we could chuck on a another ten bucks. A whole chicken ready for roasting is about seven, so only about four or five chickens have to die for us pay for our investment. With real estate and the stock market in the crapper that's a return you can't beat.

Can I deep fry em yet?

2010-03-15T05:53:00.000-07:00

Twenty new little pooper's came home with us this weekend. We took the kids to Tolars feed store and bought some new chicks and bag of starter feed. They chicks will stay in the house in a couple dog crates for a few days till they are able to deal with the temperature changes a little bit. The kids are very excited and want to play with the bunch of em. After a while I found the girls sitting in front of the cage trying to come up with names for all twenty. I told them that pets have names and live inside. Farm animals live it outside anonymously. I told the girls if they wanted to give names they could be things like "and dumplings" or "noodle soup" or "fried" anything you throw the word chicken on either side and come up with dinner.

We are not sure how many of these will be laying hens and how many will be lunch. On the same day we brought these home Luci found someone wanting to sell twenty broilers for a buck each to get rid of them. Next weekend we should be getting those. How many of those will go straight to slaughter is not clear yet, but the soil at the LongBranch Ranch may run red with blood. The only real question is should we let the little guys watch so they know what's coming or leave them in peaceful ignorance.

Growing Taters

2010-03-05T19:01:00.000-08:00

I have no idea if I cut up these seed potatoes the right way, but I am going to let em dry and plant them none the less. I was told I need to check to see if the moon is in root or flower or some such thing in the farmers almanac. I am not really putting much faith in that sorta thing, but it's tradition so I will give a look.

A fat sack of seed

2010-03-02T19:24:00.000-08:00

Seeds and bees are two things I never gave much thought to until I started trying to grow food in the garden, but you can't grow squat without either one. Today I got this pack of seeds in the mail from Hometown Seeds I can't decide if am going to chuck it in the freezer or open it up and plant the whole lot of em. When you look around at homesteading or gardening sites you come across quite a few places selling "survival seeds". The idea is you keep these on hand in case of some type of crisis that shuts down the supply chain so you can start your own garden. The pack I got is forty bucks for enough seeds to plant a 3/4 acre garden which is three times the size I have. Our garden was quite a bit of work so I imagine that would be enough for us.

We live in the boonies and should something happen that we couldn't get out of here we would need to fend for ourselves. Sounds silly, but just after Hurricane Rita it was a about a week before we could buy gas. Not to minimize the Hurricane, but in the scheme of things it was a small localized disaster. Should a large scale catastrophe happen on the gulf coast it could take even longer. Even if we couldn't get out for a couple weeks that mean a loss of income we could partially make up for growing our own food. Now I am not a survivalist. I don't plan on building any bunkers and although I have always secretly wanted a pistol grip AK, I don't plan on stockpiling weapons, but I can't see anything wrong with a having a little extra supplies laying around.

The unexpected rodeo

2010-03-01T07:50:00.000-08:00

I lived in Las Vegas for ten years and during that time I think I missed out on the chance to see a pretty wild sporting event. The National Finals Rodeo happens every year in Vegas and the city swarms with cowboy hats. Living out here in the country there isn't much to do so when something is going on you go. The kids insist upon it. Be it parade, fair or rodeo you go. I was skeptical at first, but even the small rodeo that happens on a the small grounds next to the airport is impressive. Growing up in the city I had never seen a rodeo before and TV does do the size and power of the animals justice. I wouldn't even think a getting on one those monster size things they ride in the NFR. I don't know if they have a goat scramble for the kids at the National Finals Rodeo in Vegas, but I know that everybody would have a great time. Buying tickets to any event in Las Vegas can be pricey, but the NFR is good deal for the money. When you figure it cost like sixty bucks to see Blueman Group do the same show you saw last year you can't go wrong with NFR tickets.

National Finals Rodeo tickets for sale

The 2010 garden

2010-02-28T20:27:00.000-08:00

Like a lot of kids I figured by 2010 we'd have jet cars, travel to the moon for a slice of lunar pizza, communicate telepathically, and transcend our human form to become a race of beings existing only as energy. So none of that happened, but we do have the Iphone, the internet, and and ten thousand channels a crap on TV. I do believe that as a kid I also figured that by almost age forty I would have better things to do with my time than play in the dirt, but that also did not happen. I spent the morning getting the garden ready for this season.

Luckily, the tiller that I had to tear apart and put back together last year started right up this year. Most likely because I have been going out every couple a months and starting it even if I don't have any tilling to do. All in all the Troy-bilt tiller has turned out to be a good buy. Even though the garden area is covered with weeds and grass the soil is much easier to turn than last year. Last year the grass would be in these rock hard clumps that the tines would bounce off instead of cutting into and I would have to fight the tiller to get it to dig into the soil instead of popping up.

This year we will try to expand production to include the same garden space as last year, six to eight raised beds, a patch for melons and pumpkins, and hopefully be the end of the summer some type of green house. Right now I need to the garden tilled a couple times and then plant some seed potatoes. This is not what I thought I would be doing in the future, but maybe by 2020 I can till the garden with a hydrogen powered, self directing, robotic tiller that also makes a nice cup of coffee.

The Not So OK Corral

2010-02-20T06:30:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I went back to the old barn with a machette and hacked my way into the old corral that sits besides the barn. Some places this would be an old fence with some grass growing around it and thick weeds, but here we get the cambodian temple effect. The whole thing just gets swallowed up in a few years of undisturbed growth. I wanted to see if I could salvage these old iron gates to use down by the house. Shouldn't take to long with a chainsaw to hack them out of the brush. One is crushed from a tree that fell during one of the huricanes, but two of them are good and will be good for sealing off a couple places that I don't want people driving 4 wheelers on.

This old feeder is in the center of the corral and if I can get it out I might be able to use the metal frame for something around the farm. The momosa trees grow super fast and if you don't kill it cutting a limb creates twenty other limbs that sprout out.

2010-02-16T17:14:00.000-08:00

This recipe is being posted by special request! Thanks to our friends in The Land Down Under. We're jealous of your surplus of summer veggies as we're freezing our butts off this winter.

Luci's Squash Relish

Ingredients

10 cups chopped squash (any kind or mix them-I have used pattypan, yellow squash, and zucchini with great results)
4 cups chopped onions
5-6 teaspoons salt
4 cups sugar
2 1/2 cups vinegar
1 teaspoon nutmeg
1 teaspoon dry mustard
1 teaspoon turmeric
1 teaspoon cornstarch
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1 jar pimiento, chopped

Directions

NOTE: I use a food processor for chopping the squash and the onions, but you have to be careful not to turn it to mush. Do it in small batches and buzz a little bit at a time, emptying the bowl of the processor between batches.

Mix the squash and the onion together in a large pot.

Add everything else, give it a good stir, and then bring it to a boil. Turn down the heat and simmer for 30-40 minutes. (Depends on the size of the chopped squash as to how long it takes.)

Place in sterilized jars and seal with sterilized lids.

Process for 10 minutes in a boiling water bath.

This relish is indescribably good on all manner of grilled sausage, hot dogs, or bratwurst, even on sandwiches. But I have to say, our favorite way to eat this is to scoop some up with a big spoonful of crockpot beans or peas (blackeye, pinto, great northern, navy...) and scarf it down with a big hunk of hot buttered cornbread.

Salvage from the old barn

2010-02-15T19:20:00.000-08:00

I went today up to the corner of the property where this old barn is still just barely standing. When we moved here it was in slightly better shape, but after two huricanes and a couple decades of neglect it looks as if it is just about ready to go. When the property was logged I told them not to knock this down and burn it, but I not sure why. I probably would have been better off, but then I wouldn't have been able to salvage these six sheets of tin from the side which look like they were only purchased a few months ago.

Old structures like this always make me think of the first guy to put it up. This barn is a made from a mix of materials including scraps from the old garage by our house, left of pine v-grove planks left over from the inside walls of our house and rough sawed pine planks that still have bark on the edges and were most likely the first parts of this old barn. I wonder what plans that guy had as he hammered it together. Was it just a necessity to keep hey and put up some animals in bad weather for keeping the family fed or was it supposed to be the beginning of an expanding farm. The beginning of a cattle empire that never quite played out. If I can get the time I am gonna try to brace up some parts of this so it will hang around a little longer maybe I find more things I can uses for the pieces.

The chickens have ended thier strike

2010-02-13T20:20:00.000-08:00

For the last month or so our chickens have been on strike. Not one egg for almost a month. This could have easily lead to a bunch of tasty pots of chicken and dumplings, but so far we have let them live in peace. Today the gave four eggs and may have bought themselves so more time on the big blue marble. However, their days are numbered.

Being almost three years old they have moved past their prime laying time and probably hould have been eaten by now. This year we are going to expand they chicken production around the yard, but we haven't decided how many we are going to go with. We will probably go for another twenty or so laying hens. Last time we started with twenty four, six of each of four different kinds. Now we have three rhode island reds and three dominickers left. One of the the groups of six that we started with was pretty quickly killed by the other groups. I guess the term pecking order means something after all. I had no idea they would go after each other, but they would pick a chicken and just peck at through out the day. Once it was bleeding they would just go after it more and more until it was dead. I am not sure if having a rooster keeps order or not. I know the rooster will help to round up strays and make free range chickens go back into the coop at night. Since rooster are mean we decided to wait till the kids are a little older.

This time we are going to start with two kinds, although we haven't picked them yet. One kind will be for eggs and the other for meat. Yep, gonna be some killing around the farm. Having never had to actually kill something to eat I am not sure how this is going to work out, but if I have a problem doing it I should settle in with a nice salad. I think the hard part won't be the killing it will be the nasty business of cleaning the carcass. All the blood, guts, feet, heads and such. I am so very used to my neatly shrink wrapped packets of flesh.

We are going to keep these more seperated for each other by building chicken tractors. The are like a long short framed box covered with chicken wire that you put the chickens in and then move everyday so they get fresh grass and bugs. Great for lawn, good for the chickens. Picking the eggs out of the coop today I realized I need to hurry up and get going or spring time will be here and past before I get any built. Tomorrow I am going up to the old barn on the corner of the property to see what supplies I can salvage. I know I can some corrugated sheet metal for the tops and maybe I can get a little wood too.

A big box a death

2010-01-30T20:01:00.000-08:00

I packed up the last of the deer antlers we have today. Our house was built in the forties as a hunting camp and has been building up a collection of antlers ever since. Most of the were outside either hanging in the corners of the support posts of the eve over the deck or in the old garage with the mountain of other junk. Most just had the top plate of the skull probably three or four had the whole skull one of which was still covered in drying skin. Of the ones outside quite a few were rotted in a nasty kinda way and others had been chewed upon by rats or raccoons I guess. We kept the one pair that was just plate mounted and gave away the two mounted deer heads to my wife's cousins so they would stay in the family, but neither one of us really wanted to have something staring back. Part of my get rid of all the junk that isn't ours program was getting rid of these things.

Last year I was on Ebay when I looked up deer antlers and found that they are easy to sell if they are in good shape. I don't know why, but I was surprised at the thriving trade in animal products for decoration and crafts. For the kind of antlers we have you can get thirty to forty bucks for the largest ones and then down from there. Elk antlers, Bobcat skins (which we have one in a box head and all), turtle shells, wolf pelts, etc. I guess I just never thought of this being something that people still did for a living. I was equally surprised when I got my hunting license and found out that you could also get a trapping license to trap things like otter in state and national forests. I thought trapping went out the mountain man. Not that it bothers me on some moral level, I was just a little surprised.

After selling a portion of them and chucking the rotting ones and into a burn pile I had a good size box left of all the ones that had big points broken off, chew marks, or other defects. I gave those away last weekend through an ad on freecycle which I am trying to use to get rid of more stuff to people who want it rather than trashing it. The man who wanted to antlers is going to turn them on a lathe to make pens. I kept this box to use for possibly making knife handle, knobs for jewelery boxes, etc. Last year I brought a pair to the shop I worked at in Vegas and we cut it up on the bandsaw. The smell was gut wrenching.

Mr. Smith gave me this great wood pen and pencil set that he had turned when I gave him the box of antlers. I know the antlers will go to good use.