Horton Living

A Hot New Hobby

2012-02-15T14:15:00.003-06:00

Hubby took an 'Introduction to Blacksmithing' class from the local junior college in the spring of 2011 and he was hooked (and also the fall of 2011 and the spring of 2012...). Three short hours each week was just not enough blacksmithing time, so in November, he bought his own propane forge and set up shop in our back yard.

Apart from the huge mess right behind my back door, it was a lot of fun to watch him work from the comfort of the warm house.

It is neat to watch the iron get red hot in the forge and then to watch him bang, twist and ease it into shape.

He is very prolific in his creations, in fact, a good portion of our Christmas gifts this year were homemade:

House numbers for Lin and Joe

Treble Clef for Randy

Huge Iron 'J' for Ted

Leaf Door Knocker for Barbara

To further encourage and support his hobby (and to encourage the grass to grow again by the back door), we cleaned out the area behind our garage and set up a proper smithy for him. I miss getting to see him in action as I putter around the kitchen, but I do like having my back yard back.

October 2011 Garden Upate

2011-11-02T13:28:00.003-05:00

The fall garden is coming along nicely, after a dry September (and a high water bill--9000 gallons of water... our typical use is 3-5 thousand gallons per month) October came in with a decent rain storm often enough that I was able to use just rain barrel water on the gardens.

Squash, the plants are pretty small, but starting to produce... small squash

Cucumber

I thought I had planted at least half a dozen cucumber plants, but only one came up (and squash came up in most of the places I expected cucumbers... hmm, maybe letting a 4 year old plants the seeds was not the best idea). So far, the cucumber is doing great, and has a few baby cucumbers starting.

Beans

I love green beans, these guys are coming along nicely and it should be a bumper crop with all of the blooms I see. The plants seem a bit spindly, but seem to be blooming like champs.

Hyacinth Bean (not edible, just pretty)

SO pretty this year, even if it refused to grow over the arbor and instead took over a 5 foot section of fence on each side of the arbor instead.

The bean pods are numerous this year and since I can't (or won't) eat them, I've started using them in floral arrangements (and by 'floral arrangements' I mean the 1 bunch of measly stems and herbs I gave to an elderly friend of mine).

Basil

"MOMMY! My seeds are growing! My seeds are growing!" Boy is thrilled, I have more basil plants to harvest from, we are all happy and eating our weight in pesto on a weekly basis.

Swiss Chard

Still my #1 favorite garden green. I tried a new way to cook Swiss Chard last week and we all love it: Swiss Chard "chips". I'm still working on the method, but so far, my best attempt involves washing the leaves, rubbing them with olive oil (with my hands) and then sprinkling them with garlic salt and baking at 400F for about 5 minutes until they turn crisp, but not burn--a very fine line. The result is a crisp, crumbly, salty snack that is somewhat like the Nori sheets that come wrapped around sushi rolls. I have seen a similar method for cooking Kale, but never tried it. A few things I need to work out, so far, only about half the leaf turns crisp, the rest stay kind of floppy (tastes just like sauteed, not bad, just not what I'm going for). I crumbled one of the chard chips over my baked potato the other day and it was delicious. I have not figured out how to make this in quantity either, the leaves are so huge, that I can only fit about 3 on a normal sized cookie sheet. It is a work in progress.

Herbs

The herbs all looked scraggly at the end of the long hot summer so in September I cut them down to the ground. They have grown back up with a flourish and are doing great. I knew the Oregano would do well with this treatment, but the flat leaf parsley came back nicely as well.

The weather is holding nicely. On an almost weekly basis we have had cold front that drops our temperatures into the 40s with rain, then within two days we are back up into the 70s again. I love Texas in the fall.

Sparkle Pasta! (Pasta with Pesto Cream Sauce)

2011-10-11T10:22:00.003-05:00

I made fresh Pesto for the first time this summer and WOW, I am in love. There is no comparison to the bland jarred sauce I have tasted before. I knew this would be a dish enjoyed by the adults of our house, but I was not too sure how the kiddos would take a green sauce that smelled like garlic. I forged ahead with the meal anyway and gave it a fun name in hopes that the kids might at least try it: Sparkle Pasta! (said with a flourish and waving fingers to make it sound amazing and magical to kids)

I needn't have worried, after they got over the initial shock of green pasta (Look at the sparkles, kids! Can you see the sparkles?!) they loved it, and now beg for sparkle pasta for dinner all the time.

The initial recipe came from the Pioneer Woman website, but it has evolved somewhat as I have made this dish over and over and over for my family and friends. I use the original recipe as more of a guideline than a hard and fast rule of how much of each ingredient to add. With pesto, garlic, cheese and olive oil, it is hard to go wrong. The pesto itself is amazing, so fresh and wonderful tasting, but the addition of cream (or half and half, which tastes better to me for some reason) takes this dish to the level of food perfection. Make way more than you think you'll need, it is really, really good.

Pesto Cream Sauce
(source: www.thepioneerwoman.com)

Ingredients
• 3/4 cups Fresh Basil Leaves (I use about 2 cups)
• 1/2 cup Grated Parmesan Cheese
• 3 Tablespoons Pine Nuts
• 2 cloves Garlic, Peeled
• Salt And Pepper, to taste
• 1/3 cup Extra Virgin Olive Oil
• 1/2 cup Heavy Cream (I prefer half and half)
• 2 Tablespoons Butter
• 1/4 cup Grated Parmesan (additional)
• 12 ounces, weight Pasta (we use bow tie, or homemade pasta)
• 2 whole Tomatoes, Diced
Preparation Instructions
Cook pasta until al dente.
Add basil leaves, 1/2 cup Parmesan, pine nuts, and salt and pepper to a food processor or blender. Turn machine on, then drizzle in olive oil while it mixes. Continue blending until combined, adding additional olive oil if needed. Set aside.
Heat cream and butter in a small saucepan over medium-low heat. Add pesto and stir.
Drain pasta and place in a serving bowl. Pour pesto cream over the top. Toss to combine. Add diced tomatoes and toss quickly. Serve immediately.

Growing, Harvesting and Using Sweet Basil

2011-10-11T09:23:00.003-05:00

Growing: This is the first year that sweet basil ( Ocimum basilicum ) has really taken off in my garden. It is located in the border outside the main garden. This spot gets sun most of the day, with a bit of shade in the late afternoon from the arbor just to the NW of the plants. The soil is heavy clay, with some compost added each year. The plants survived the drought conditions here in Texas very well with only minimal watering. Toward the end of the summer, the leaves were small, about the size of my thumb, but still tasted great. In September, we began to water this patch heavily and the plants quickly responded by putting on a new flush of large (almost palm sized) leaves.

Harvesting: The leaf is the edible part of the basil plant. To harvest for meals (usually pesto cream sauce, mmmm) we simply plucked leaves from the plant as needed.

Near the end of the summer, the plants bolted and began to flower and set seed. Since this has become a favorite cooking herb of my family, I decided to harvest and save some of the seeds for next years basil crop (if it does not self seed for next year, which I hope it will).

After it flowered, I allowed the blooms to dry on the plant (this was more of a happy accident and the result of garden neglect more than any actual planning or foresight on my part). We collected the dried flowers put them in a colander, which was then placed over another bowl.

Using pre-school labor, we crushed the dried flowers and seed pods to release the tiny black seeds. Shaking the colander gently to allow the seeds to fall through to the bowl below.

Once most of the seed heads had been crushed, we gently blew the chaff away from the seeds, leaving about 1/4 cup of dark black basil seeds.

Uses: Our favorite use is to make Pesto and Pesto Cream sauce (recipe to follow). I also add leaves to spaghetti sauce, stir fry and salad dressings.

Another fun Basil use is to prepare seed packets for friends. In this case, I wanted to share seeds with the attendees of my bread baking class (we made pesto with dinner) so we prepared several seed packets.

I used tiny zipper top bags (like the kind that come with the extra button when you buy a new shirt) and portioned off about 1/2 tsp of seeds per bag. We cut a sheet of plain white paper into small rectangles, folded them in half, and then stapled them onto the bag. My son drew a picture of a basil leaf and I labeled each packet Sweet Basil.

Summer Garden Update 2011

2011-10-10T16:18:00.002-05:00

It was hot, it was dry (record from 1980 for number of 100+ degree days was broken this year), and the garden suffered.

One good thing about everything dying is that I felt no remorse about ripping out the spring garden in early September to start over for fall.

Plus, it made for lots of new digging and playing areas for the kids and chickens.

As of September 3rd all but 1 section of the garden was ripped out. The sweet potatoes were limping along and so they were allowed to live on.

Sept 5th planted squash, cucumbers, turnips, carrots, spinach in east garden bed.

On September 8th, I got 1 load of Texas Native mulch from SBS and 1 load of 'Dairy Top Dressing'. These were mixed and then tilled in to the existing soil. Put 2 wheelbarrows on top of east side bed as a top dressing--did not till it in.

The dairy top dressing is aged/composted cow manure and looked like some really nice soil. It did have a strong smell, but that dissipated after a while (sorry neighbors).

Sept 8th planted green beans in North side bed and scattered old pinto bean seeds on South side bed.

Sept 21st, Cucumbers and squash up

and turnips

and beans

September 5th it was 61 degrees. Hooray for the first official break in the summer heat!

Still no rain until October 9th. Yikes.

Bread Baking Class, September 2011

2011-10-10T14:40:00.006-05:00

On September 28th I taught a bread baking class for 10 women from my small group at church. It took a lot of planning, but I (and I think everyone else) had a wonderful time. I love to cook, I love to bake, and I love being able to share these things with people who are excited to learn.

A friend of one of the women was coming to town and she had heard that I liked to bake bread (is that really such an odd thing now? I guess so). It began as a few women getting together to bake bread at my house, after about a week, the guest list had grown and grown and I decided to make use of the commercial kitchen at our church.

The idea also expanded from just learning to bake a loaf of bread, to baking two kinds of bread, making pasta from scratch, and also cooking a full meal for everyone who participated. (Once again, for a Horton, it is not done until it is over done!).

We made French Bread and Craisin Walnut Celebration Bread. For dinner, we all helped to make fresh pasta with pesto cream sauce and grilled chicken.

In order to make it easier and more accessible for everyone, I had typed out a copy of all of the recipes, some applicable bible verses (amazing how many times 'bread' is mentioned in the bible) and a packet of our own Sweet Basil seeds for each of the women. One of the things I really wanted to accomplish in this class was to show them that baking from scratch was easy, it just takes time. Andrew helped to draw the basil leaf on each of the seed packets.

It was a little crazy at first, I've really only ever cooked for myself, my family, and small dinner parties, and I had never cooked in the kitchen at church before. As a practice run, I dragged my family and all my gear up to the church one quiet Sunday night and we let the kids watch a video while Curtis and I did a run through of the class. It went well, I was able to manage the huge kitchen and the big commercial ovens without much trouble.

The day of the class, we began at 4:30 in the afternoon with a target of eating dinner at 7:30. I began the class by starting up a batch of french bread as everyone watched. I explained the process of weighing, mixing and kneading, then turned everyone loose to begin their own loaves in pairs.

Everyone began gingerly, but eventually got the idea and started to have more fun with it.

We moved quickly through the recipes. One problem was that my bread baking makes use of scales to weigh the ingredients and I only had two good digital scales, and there were 4 pairs of people baking. This caused a bit of slow down at the beginning of each new recipe.

Before the class, I had printed out copies of all of the recipes for everyone, so they were able to move along at their own pace without too much input from me. I was able to hang back and only step in to help when someone had a question or I had a suggestion.

It was so much fun to not only explain how to bake the bread (anyone can follow a recipe, right?) but to also explain some of the 'why' behind what was happening in the recipe. For example, one helpful cue I came up with (as I watched my hubby manhandle his poor batch of dough during the practice session) was to describe 'kneading' as being like rolling out a play dough snake -- an analogy which went over very well with a group of young mommies! The purpose of kneading the dough is to help form the gluten into long strands in the dough. These long strands will be what catches the air as the yeast activates and help to make the bread light and yummy with lots of air pockets. As you knead dough correctly, it forms a sort-of skin over the surface, the point is to stretch this 'skin' without breaking it and you can do that by kneading it correctly.

I was able to watch and see four different batches of dough as they were being worked and I was able to show the class how each was progressing and the different aspects of making bread. I tried really hard to let each group do their own thing, but I did jump in a few times and help more than I probably should have. (I have been baking bread well for about 2 years now, and it is amazing how natural it feels to me. I only realized this as I watched how unnatural it seemed for someone who was learning it for the first time).

The class progressed quickly and I had to work to keep us on the schedule I had set out (so we could eat by a decent hour).

We made pasta with fresh eggs from our chickens at home. We made 6 batches of dough, 2 eggs each. (I wish I had thought to make 1 batch with store bought eggs so everyone could see the difference in 'yard bird' vs commercially kept chickens--the color difference is striking. The yard eggs make a dough that is a pretty yellow color, and the store egg dough is pale white).

Once all the breads were rising, I could tell that some of the class was starting to get restless, but a few were still very interested. I had planned on cooking much of the meal myself, but I was able to ask a few of the more focused women to take on a different part of the meal. One helper cooked the chicken (my least favorite part, and she did great!). One helper rolled out and cut the pasta dough, one helped me to make the pesto and one cooked the endless stream of noodles we made.

The last hour was a blur as it all came together.

Finally, success! The meal turned out great, the bread was delicious (and most of it was still baking as we sat down to eat. Part of my reason for doing the first loaf of french bread myself was to set the pace for the meal and to ensure that we had a loaf ready to eat by 7:30pm).

We were all able to sit, eat, relax and really enjoy each others company after a hard 3 hours of work in the kitchen.

I have organized a couple of 'girls nights' for a few of these women before. The nights were fun, we ate at a restaurant $$ and then met back at my house to visit. It is nice to visit, but I always felt like I had wasted a good kid-free evening at the end of the night. This class was so much better, we were able to visit, we were busy enough to really get to see each persons personality and we were able to accomplish a lot.

I think that much of the joy of cooking has really been lost in my generation. Between take-out food, 'brown and serve' dinners, and 30-minute meals we have had it beaten into our heads that cooking is an unpleasant chore and it should be tackled with as little effort as possible so we can get on to more important things. What can be more important than feeding your family or sharing a meal with friends? Yes, this meal took a solid 4 hours of work, but it was time spent with friends, and the dinner tasted so much better knowing that it was lovingly made. Admittedly, this was not a dinner I would tackle on a work night, but it made for a great Saturday evening with friends.

Even after all of the preparation and the work that went into the class, I went home energized and excited and already planning my next class.

Notes:

1) 10 people was the maximum that the church kitchen (and me) could handle at one time
2) stagger the start times or get more scales / sets of ingredients
3) needed baking stones to help the ovens maintain temperature while all that bread was being put it (the bread took too long to bake and never browned nicely due to the mass of bread being added at once)
4) This would be a great fund raiser for the church. Several people offered to pay (I said no) and the event was more fun that the bread class I paid $80 for in 2010
5) the church kitchen was missing most of the cooking implements (bowls, trays, pots, measuring spoons, stirring spoons) I'll need to plan for this better for next time. We need 1 bowl per recipe and that bowl cannot be re-used for the next recipe (bread has to rise in the bowl).

Hi Honey! Honey Processing 2011 -- extracting

2011-09-01T14:56:00.003-05:00

Bright and early Monday morning (July 4th), we quickly loaded up the supers into our truck and headed up to our church to do the honey extraction.

At the church, we met up with our other beekeeping friend, who was able to borrow the extraction equipment from another bee keeping friend.

We loaded all the equipment into the tiny scary elevator and headed to the basement of the church. We are so lucky this year that we were able to borrow the commerical kitchen of the church for the day so we could extract our honey. Due to food safety laws, if you plan to sell honey, you must extract it in a commercial kitchen to be in compliance with food safety laws. Yes, there are ways around this, and many people cannot afford a commercial kitchen setup. We were very lucky that we were able to use these really nice facilities.

I immediately got to work washing up equipment in the wonderful commercial dish wash station (I want one of those faucets at my house, it was AWESOME!).

Meanwhile, the guys assembled the rest of the equipment and set it up assembly line style so we could move quickly through our tasks.

By 9 am we were up and running. The process was much the same as last year, except we were not packed into my tiny kitchen, nor were we battling bees as we came in and out of the house. Step one: use the hot knife to cut the wax caps off of the frames.

Step 2: use a pokey tool to open any cells that were missed by the knife (yes, Dr. Aaron came back, and his wife brought snacks!)

The frame are then loaded into the centrifuge and the honey is spun out.

The honey is then poured into buckets.

One other fun thing about using the church kitchen is that we were able to invite anyone who was interested to come watch (and help). All told, we had 15 people there for a while.

The kids played with puzzles and made forts under the tables and were captivated watching our tiny portable DVD player.

This step of the honey extraction process ended with empty supers carried back up the stairs and many very heavy buckets. We finished up about 4 pm and were all exhausted and sticky after a hard days work.

The next step (the next day!) meant that hubby carried those same buckets BACK down the stairs and filled all our honey jars.

Hi Honey! Honey Processing 2011-- in the beeyards

2011-09-01T14:30:00.005-05:00

We extracted honey a little early this year, on July 4th, 2011. In summary, 2011 was an amazing year for our bees! We extracted over 5 gallons of honey, that is about 150 pounds of honey. We were also able to do a lot of outreach and education. For every part of the extraction process, we had an eager audience. What fun.

Part I: On Saturday July 2nd, we pulled the supers off of the hives we have in Bells. These bees are pretty much neglected most of the year, add in our not-so-textbook methods of saving comb from the bee removals and the mis-mash of equipment we own and the result was that the inside the hives was a mess.

Hubby did some much needed cleanup (scraping off burr comb, cleaning out dead out hives, and removing the comb from long forgotten inside feeders), I helped wherever I could.

There are two remaining hives in Bells (we lost two over the winter). Inside the hives we were happy to find that there were almost ZERO pest problems, no visible mites, no wax moths, and no small hive beetles. The bees had completely ignored certain frames, and overfilled others. Brood was present in several layers of the box, but we did not use queen excluders in this case so that is our fault. Despite the messy condition of these 2 hives, we were able to pull off 13 strong frames of honey.

Our kids and grandma and grandpa watched happily from the air conditioned cab of their truck. We did learn that working the bees in this bee yard is wonderful in the late afternoon, the tall cedars to the NW of the hives made for some very welcome shade while we worked.

Part II
Sunday afternoon, we worked the hives at our home in Farmers Branch. We had an eager helper from our church who wanted to learn more about bees. Ha ha, ask us to teach you about bees and we'll put you to work... nothing like hands on education!

Dr. Aaron got all suited up and watched in fascination as hubby worked his way through the hives.

Also watching (from the comfort of my air conditioned sewing room) were his wife and daughter.

After just a few minutes of working in the stiff, hot gloves, Dr. Aaron got brave and decided to go gloveless, just like us.

Four more hives worked and no stings, hooray!

Here is our haul the night before we processed. 7 supers nearly full of frames. I think we had 63 frames total. The stack of supers was nearly as tall as I was... and yes, we stored the supers in the house for over 24 hours before processing. We were very careful to get each and every bee out of the supers so it turned out to be a fairly safe way of doing things. If we had left these sweet smelling supers outside, the bees would have swarmed them trying to get at the 'all you can eat' honey buffet hidden inside. Inside the house, the supers were shielded from curious bees.

June Garden Update

2011-06-14T10:01:00.005-05:00

2011 has been a lackluster year in the garden. Things are growing, but only doing okay, not great.

First the good (of course).

The green beans have made a good showing. We have had more than enough for dinner and to share, and I have also put up about a quart into the freezer. As of June 14th, the plants are looking wilted and tired and I think the harvest is tapering off.

My potatoes did well, but I did not buy enough seed potatoes. I planted 2.5 pounds and harvested 12.5 pounds. It is a decent yield for me ~6x and right on par with my best potato harvest ever (planted 7 pounds, harvested 35 pounds in 2009). I had zero bug problems in my main potato patch this year, not so much as a bug nibbled potato in the whole harvest. This is great news, and much better than a friend of mine who reported that his potatoes got blight and he does not expect any harvest at all this year. I think one big factor was that I rotated the location of my plantings this year. One volunteer potato plant came up in the 'old' location and that plant suffered from pests and some sort of wilting disease so I pulled it early.

Sweet Potatoes. Well, I can't count this as a harvest yet, but I am so happy that this year I was able to plant over 35 sweet potato slips grown from sweet potatoes that we had bought to eat. Each time I found an eye on a sweet potato I was about to cook, I would cut off a small section of the potato containing the eye and stick it in a pan with water. After about 6 weeks of this, I had a huge crop of sweet potato slips in my kitchen window. I planted 9 plants prior to June and then planted the remaining 25 slips after I harvested the white potatoes. There are about 10 more slips that are still forming roots in the window. This was a great learning experience and very successful way to get lots of sweet potato plants (even before the harvest).

Also doing well (without photos) are: Swiss Chard, mint, oregano, basil, also pumpkins and winter squash (all very healthy and producing volunteers).

I had okay luck this year with my spinach, garden peas, summer squash. These are producing okay, but just not thriving.

And now the bads... my poor tomatoes look awful, the plants are small and anemic, there is very low fruit set (no fruit at all on most of the plants), and there is some sort of disease or pest causing a yellowing of the leaves. The "Little Porter" tomato is the only one that seems to be thriving. Brandywine has a strong plant, but no fruit. All the others look awful. Considering that Hubby judges the success of my garden by the weight of tomatoes produced... this is a dismal year.

Eggplant, cucumbers: both fell victim to the hail and never recovered.

Corn. I guess since this is the first year I have planted corn, and it got the shady side of the garden, I can't call this a true failure. I have about a dozen corn plants, waist high, and they are starting to flower (tassel?, ear?, fruit?, produce?). I am not sure what they are doing, but they are starting to form something that I hope will turn into corn. Since I have such a small patch, I am counting on having to pollinate these things by hand (with a brush) since corn is wind pollinated and you need a strong stand of corn to get good pollination.

Peppers: the seeds I planted did not germinate, so on June 10th I bought two pepper plants from the store.

Mulberries: these are not in my garden (or even in my yard) but the trees down the street had a very light harvest this year. I kept watching and waiting for the fruit fall to really kick in (last year, it stained the sidewalk and street purple from all the fruit), but this year... not much. We did not even walk down to try to harvest any, I figured with such a light harvest the birds needed them more than I did. Hubby points this out to me as proof that we should take advantage of the good years when they happen (for example, we are still eating last year mulberry jam with about 8 pints left to go). Good lesson.

Peaches: similar story to the mulberries, not my tree, but my friend's and he has reported a very small harvest this year. We do NOT have any peaches left over, so I will have to buy them to can this year.

Other milestones in the garden this year: compost! Hubby has taken over the compost area and expanded it to 4x what I had. He is diligent about turning it and even brings home other people's veggie scraps and coffee grounds from work to add to his compost bins. We have already gotten a 55 gallon drum full of finished compost which we added to the garden when we planted the sweet potatoes. It is some very pretty stuff.
Rain water: the water totes are hooked up and working great... now if we can just get some rain.
Bees: the girls are working hard and as of May we had more supers on the bee boxes than we had at harvest time last year. Hooray bees.

May Garden Update 2011

2011-05-24T15:48:00.002-05:00

Most importantly, we are eating from the garden again!

The spinach is tapering off, but the swiss chard, peas and beans are really starting to produce.

I gave most of my garden a thick layer of old hay mulch (the hay was my curbside treasure from this winter).

The mint is going crazy... what is that hiding behind the mint?

A full sized wheelbarrow. I love how green and pretty it is, but the mint is starting to take over the yard.

My Purple Hyacinth bean is starting its yearly climb of the trellis. These seeds are the fourth or fifth generation of saved seeds I have planted. Too bad I have not been so diligent to save edible seeds to replant each year (usually because I eat the vegetables before they can become viable seeds).

I found a nice surprise on my front porch the other day, a big trash bag full of baby plants from a local family member. Hooray. Inside the sack were about 30 small Purple Cone flower plants and some woody perennials which I am guessing are tarragon.

I am really excited about the Purple Cone flower, which is the common name for Echinecia, the herbal remedy that we buy in capsules from the store. Echinicia is used as an immunity booster and both hubby and I take it when we feel a cold coming on. Our family member has this growing like a weed in her yard and gardens and was more than happy to share. I hope it is as happy in my yard as it is in hers. I will have to do some research to see just which parts of the plant are medicine, but it is neat to be able to grow something so useful.

My tomatoes have finally reached the top of the cages. They all basically regrew from the roots up after the hail storm, so they seem a bit stunted to me this year. I see blooms on most of the plants, but have not noticed any fruit starting yet.

The squash is thick and healthy (and needs to be thinned (which I did on May 23, after this photo). I have harvested a few small yellow squash and a few zucchini, but they don't seem to be putting on as much fruit as I had hoped. Lots of blooms though.

Our trio of mulch loving hens is always trying to get into my garden to make a mess of things.

Luckily, they understand that me yelling, stomping my feet and waving my arms means 'SCRAM'.

As a new experiment this year, I am growing sweet potatoes from slips that I started in my kitchen window. There are about 9 plants in the garden now, and 2-3 more are ready each week. I have photos of how I started the plants, and I'll post more on that another time. I have had great success with my sweet potato slips, only one has died so far, and that was one that I damaged before planting it (I broke about 3/4 of the roots off--oops).

My eggplant looks awful, it is still alive, but looks about the same as it did a month ago after the hail storm.

Side note... notice how there are piles of poop all through my garden? No, we did not get a heard of miniature horses, but I did carry home four big buckets full of 'processed hay fertilizer' from my in-laws horses. My wonderful husband did not even question why there were four stinky buckets ready to be loaded into the van the last time we left their house. As long as I can keep the dog out of it, this little addition of manure seems to give the garden a bit of a boost. If the dog gets into it... yuck.

The regular potatoes are doing well, they are done flowering and now I am just waiting until the tops start to die off and we can harvest our potatoes.

My bush beans are doing great, and so far, are the star producers of the last spring garden. We are able to eat about a meals worth of beans each night with a few extra bunches to share.

This looks like an acorn squash to me, it has two small fruit on it, but I did not plant acorn squash this year... a volunteer!

The red amaranth is still growing slowly. It is supposed to get five feet tall and the new growth and seeds are edible.

Outside of the main veggie garden, I have been sneaking in edibles where ever I can. This little grouping is a strawberry, a squash plant and a bunch of chamomile. I have no idea why they are all clustered so close together.

My day lilies are all blooming and look great. This is the first year they have bloomed (I planted them in 2010). I hope they spread as the years progress, they are such a pretty and tall flower.

Here is the side garden, also called the bee garden. The tall plants in the back are Jerusalem artichokes, they are doing great this year. There is also a fig tree in there somewhere, it is just limping along. Plus some day lilies and WEEDS. Our lawn guy (our biggest luxury EVER) knows he does not have to go into this area because of hte bees, so the grass gets tall back here and makes us so thankful that the whole yard does not look like this.

Two kinds of oregano, about to bloom. The one on the right is Hilltop Oregano and it has a better smell and flavor than the one on the left (that one just said "oregano" on the tag).

One tiny little dill plant.

Parsley from seed! Hooray, parsley is hard to get to germinate, but it does so much better when grown from seed. The plants are biennial, so they will live for two years. My previous parsley plant was about 2 years old and it does not appear to be coming back this year so the timing of this is perfect. This is flat leaf parsley, before I had curled leaf parsley.

More lovely echinecia and more fertilizer.

I don't have a picture of the plant, but the blackberries have been producing as much as we can eat.

The berries are huge and delicous.

Last but not least, the paprika yarrow keeps on blooming and the color is improving as the season progresses.

Ahh May in the garden. We have had good rains about once per week (May 2nd, 12, 20, 22, I think...) but I have also had to water some to keep my plants happy.

April Garden Update 2011

2011-04-27T08:50:00.003-05:00

It is hard to be excited about the garden after it was smashed by hail on April 14th, but ~2 weeks later, it is nice to see how well it has recovered.

The purple heart is blooming, but the leaves are all beaten up. This used to fill the garden near the Cottonwood tree, but the chickens love to scratch in this area so most of the purple heart has been killed off. It still hangs on in the area right around the tree and I know it will refill the garden over the course of the season.

My 'Paprika Yarrow" is growing and blooming nicely. It has spread some, and I hope it will fill the whole area of the flower bed.

My Swiss Chard survived!

It is battered and beaten, but it lives on... phew. Of all of the plants, this one seemed to take the worst beating from the hail.

I planted four varieties of chard this year. The red is "Rhubarb Chard", it is the most scraggly of the bunch and has the poorest performance.

The large yellow is... umm the strongest variety... bu I will need to check my garden journal for the actual name.

The pale white stems were Fordhook Giant. It has the second best performance and seemed to withstand the hail better than the others (could be location too, it is near the mint and may have gotten some protection from that).

The small yellow stems at the front are Fantasia Chard. It is doing fairly well, probably ranks third out of four varieties.

Scattered through the gardens are German Camomile

(the ferny light green plants near the hose). I bought this as a single 4" pot from Northhaven Gardens and there were hundreds of seedlings in the pot. I was able to carefully break the cluster of seedlings apart and planted them all over the place. They seem to be doing great this year. Camomile is a medicinal herb and the flowers are harvested for a calming tea, it can also be used to lighten hair color.

This awful picture is the red amaranth I planted. Amaranth is a grain and ornamental and will grow to five feet tall according to the seed packet. I planted to varieties, but only the red seems to have germinated (no sign of the Golden Amaranth)

The amaranth is over seeded in my asparagus bed. The poor asparagus just limps along.

I saw a few spears, less than 10 and definitely did not harvest any. This is New Jersey Giant (?) planted last year from ugly dried out roots. I need to get a real start of asparagus from my mom. Her patch of asparagus is about 15 years old, and completely untended it has produced more asparagus than she could eat this spring.

The snow peas are starting to produce, it has been too hot for them to really do well. These peas are from my spring planting. The winter peas I planted all froze out in one of our ice storms this winter.

My spinach did not freeze this winter and it has been a great producer. This short little three foot row has kept us in spinach since about February. Unfortunately, due to the heat it has started to bolt. I keep pinching off the tops, but it keeps sending up new ones.

My poor tomatoes. Most of the main plants were damaged by the hail, but most have grown back from the roots.

The squash looks great. Strongest by far is the zucchini (black beauty)

Weird angle on this photo, but the first hill of squash along the fence is zucchini, then yellow crookneck squash (poorest performance), then a hill of the mixed squash (same mix I grew the last two years with excellent results).
The squash mix has already bloomed.

Last is the dead out hill of cucumbers. The four plants I had were completely obliterated by the hail and did not grow back.

Brussel sprouts... I have no idea. Is this what they are supposed to look like? When do they produce sprouts? I suspect that they already made the sprouts and they are now just getting leggy. A few weeks ago, I noticed very loose leaf clusters forming along the main stem of the plant, but they never resembled brussel sprouts to me. It may just be too hot to grow these here. Too bad.

My lovely Red Lasoda potatoes are growing great and I spotted the first few blooms a few days ago.

I only bought 2.5lbs of seed potatoes this year, I wish I had bought more to fill the whole section of garden. I waiver between wanting to try lots of varieties and also wanting to grow huge quantities of what I know will do well.

The beans are blooming. I planted three varities: Jade Bush, Black Valentine, and Blue Lake. It seems that my three bean mix from previous years did better, but it could also just be the weird weather this year that is causing them to grow so slowly.

Jerusalem Artichokes are coming up everywhere. I have replanted from this patch, taken a 5 gallon bucket full of plants to my MIL, and still they keep sprouting. Silly me for moving these spreading weeds to three different areas of my veggie garden over the years. Oh well, if I have to deal with an noxious spreading plant, I'm at least happy this is an edible noxious spreading plant... and it blooms very prettily in the fall, like little sunflowers. I kind of have a love hate relationship with this veggie, mostly I love it, but boy can it be a pain.

Speaking of noxious spreading plants, yikes my mint is going nuts. This little 4" pot purchased in 2009 now covers a huge swath of my garden. I find little mint plants popping up 10 feet away from the parent plant... all connected by a pencil thick root system. I'm happy to weed it, it smells pretty and I have been replanting it in tricky areas of the yard where nothing else seems to grow. The kids like to pick handfuls of leaves to sniff.

New to me this year is corn. I have never planted corn before, claiming I did not have the space, but hubby got me a huge variety pack of heirloom seeds this year and I did want to try something new.

Plus pumpkins, pumpkins, pumpkins... we had about 10 pumpkins to decorate this Halloween and after the holiday, they were carried around the yard by the kids, dog and squirrels. This spring, pumpkin seeds are popping up everywhere. In the garden,

on the path

by the garage door (where we walk all the time)

in the lawn... I'm going to try and let most of them grown (apart from where they will get mowed or stomped) in the wild areas of the garden. It would be fun to have lots of pumpkins, but I'm not counting on them to do great. Last year, I allowed a volunteer pumpkin to take over a huge area of my garden and it only produced one small pumpkin.

Overall, the spring garden is doing well, despite the cold to hot to cold weather and hail. My tendency this year was to plant lots of varieties of plants, but not huge quantities of any one kind (except tomatoes, I have a full section: 9 plants of tomatoes). I will see how it works out for me. Right now, I'm wishing I had planted more potatoes and less winter stuff (beets, broccoli, radishes, carrots--all doing poorly and taking up room). It is hard not to be distracted by all the pretty seed packet descriptions. It is all a learning experience. Like every year, late April and May are the glory days of the garden. Plenty of rain, not too hot, not too cold, everything growing great, it is hard not to be excited.

What the Hail?

2011-04-15T08:19:00.003-05:00

Spring in Texas usually means unpredictable weather, and true to form, we got that last night...

April 14th, 2011

At about 10:30 I woke up to a big storm and the rain sounded heavier than usual.

Sure enough, it was hail that was pounding down on our roof. The black line through the yard is a full sized 1 inch garden hose.

Most of the hail was marble sized

Some was even golf ball sized (this one had melted a bit, but you can see how big it was).

In just a few minutes it had covered our yard in ice

As soon as the hail stopped (and I made sure our family, critters and house were safe) I rushed out to my garden to survey the damage.

Poor squash, poor tomatoes

my swiss chard looked more like swiss cheese

This morning, April 15th, I woke up to see that there was STILL ice on the ground.

As of 7:30 this morning when I left the house, there was still a solid covering of ice in our yard. Our whole neighborhood looked about the same with shredded leaves covering the ground, limbs down and a mess everywhere. Less than 2 miles away at the kids daycare was a completely different picture, just a nice damp 'after spring shower' glow to the gardens and trees. Sigh.

I'm thankful that it was not worse for us than it was. The storm only lasted about 10 minutes before it blew over, but those 10 minutes were spent with me running helplessly from window to window trying to see what was happening (yes, I know, standing by a glass window with giant icy projectiles hurtled toward it was not a good idea).

In the daylight, my garden looked even worse than the night before

tomatoes were snapped off,

the formerly regal looking mullein was in tatters

oddly, the potatoes looked great... I am keeping up hope that after our sunny and 70 degree day today the rest of plants will perk up and recover nicely.

Or maybe a trip to the garden center is in order

Yep, typical spring in Texas.

Making Wine... the process

2011-04-11T10:47:00.006-05:00

Like everything else we do, we took a bunch of photos last year (2010) of our wine making process. I never blogged on it, because we fully expected it to be a flop. Now that we have a successful batch, I am really excited to look back over our process so we can be sure and repeat it for 2011.

So back in May of 2010 (May 9th to be exact) we had extra mulberries

The raw weight was seven pounds ten ounces (I must have skimmed some off the top for eating, because in my notes, I see we only used six pounds of berries for the wine batch).

We dumped the berries into a clean, food grade bucket and mashed them with a potato masher (notice the hand written recipe and calculations in the background?).

mash mash mash until it was mostly liquidy

We then poured in a gallon of boiling water

then lidded the mash and set it aside for a few days in a cool dark place (our master bathroom)

A few days later, we strained out the pulp leaving a cloudy purple liquid. (May 15, 2010)

The pulp was composted.

We then added lots of sugar and left in the bucket for four more days.

On May 19th we decanted it into a 3 gallon carboy and put an airlock on it. We wrapped the bottle in a black trash sack, being careful not to seal it too tight, it needed air, but it also needed darkness. This contraption has sat in the corner of my master bathroom for 11 months. We would peek at it occasionally, for a while it bubbled, then it got cloudy, then it got clear and finally, we tasted it--11 months later.

Success! First tasted April 5, 2011.

A few notes:
1) I have the actual recipe and proportions we used in my notebook
2) We did not use commercial yeast, we intend to, but never got around to it. This was a huge chance to take and we assumed it was probably not good. By not adding commercial yeast, you are gambling that the right kind of yeast exists in the fruit or air and will make good wine. By buying yeast, you make sure you get the right kind of yeast for wine. It was really lucky that we got drinkable wine.
3) We have no idea the alcohol content of this batch, we have the tools, but we should have made a measurement when we started the process and again at the end. The comparison is what tells you the alcohol content. We do know that it has a nice kick to it, I only drank one glass and had a nice gentle buzz. Hubby drank two glasses and said he'd had plenty (man speak for a buzz?). Neither of us woke up with any bad side effects the next day (some cheap wine and I feel awful after just a glass). My understanding is that wine kind of self regulates, over a certain alcohol content the yeast will die, so it is impossible to end up with 100 proof... no plans for us to start any distilled liquors, yet. Is that even legal?
4) Did I mention it was SWEET? My dad would never drink this--he likes a dry wine, but I'm guessing my sister will love it. Hubby likes it, and he tends to like a drier wine than me. How sweet? My favorite wine is port, and this is similar to that level of sweetness. For any 'real' wine drinkers out there, don't laugh at my unsophisticated palate.

Mulberry Wine

2011-04-11T10:11:00.002-05:00

Last year we picked tons of mulberries from a tree in a neighbors yard. We ate all we could, I made jelly, juice, and syrup, but we still had about 6 pounds of extra berries. I wrote about it here. On a whim, hubby decided to make Mulberry Wine using a recipe from a 1970's cookbook. The 6.75 pounds made about 3 gallons of what we hoped would become wine

After fermenting for 11 months in our dark, cool, master bathroom we finally got brave and tried some... it was delicious!

The wine is sweet, has a taste that is very much mulberry, but also kind of has a hint of watermelon.

It is sweet, which is what I like (I'm more of a wine-cooler than a wine kind of girl).

I should note that we are not really drinkers. Curtis has a beer occasionally, mostly when out camping or grilling out, and I sometimes have a glass of wine before dinner. I used to guess that we maybe had a glass of wine per week, but since we started our own batch, we made sure to save every wine bottle we finished over the past year... the grand total?

Eight measly bottles, so my guess of 'a glass per week' was definitely an overestimation, we did not even drink a bottle of wine per month. A few of the bottles were not even wine that we drink, it was left at our house after a dinner party. We are definitely light weight drinkers.

Hubby carefully siphoned the wine from the carboy (what the big jug is called) and decanted it into the cleaned wine bottles. When we made the first batch of wine last year, we lucked into a deal on craigs list and got some carboys, a corker and a bunch of miscellaneous brewing gear for a great price.

Ta-da!

We ended up with eight bottles of wine, plus an extra half a gallon in the fridge, less a few 'test glasses'.

(pardon the fingerprints, they are much easier to see in the photo).

We shared two bottles of wine with some of hubbies friends from work and the rest are for us.

Another big check box for our 'bizarre skills' list. We officially made our own wine, hooray!

I'm thinking of using this photo for the wine bottle label...

Spring Garden 2011

2011-03-23T16:21:00.003-05:00

Garden planning and planting is in full swing.

This is the state of my kitchen table, most Saturday mornings in February.

Seed potatoes went in on March 5th

One of my gardening goals for this year is to have the watering system ready BEFORE the plants are in... easier said than done and something I failed on big time last year.

This year, I'm doing much better. In fact, I actually laid the soaker hoses before planting any seeds this year. Hooray for me.

My garden layout has gone back to the 'four quarters' design, kind of a big X of paths and four easy quadrants to plant in. I have rotated the location of each of my main crops so that now tomatoes are in the north section, beans and squash in the east quadrant, peppers will be in the south quadrant, and potatoes are in the west quadrant.

Tomatoes were planted March 6th, I held to my rule and only bought 9 plants, one for each 'leg' of my drip water system, plus one for the central hub, which tends to drip anyway.

Hubby also worked like a maniac and got all four of my new water totes hooked up to the gutter system in a mad dash before the sun set and the clouds broke on March 12... then nothing. Not a drop of rain has fallen at our house since the last snow we had in mid February. UGH.

Meat Processing 2011

2011-03-23T16:06:00.003-05:00

On the last weekend in February, we headed down to Nada to process and prepare the meat our family will eat for the year.

The starting totals this year (for four families and one guest):
Deer 249 pounds
Deer Jerky 18 pounds
Wild Pork 104 pounds
Purchased Pork 120 pounds
Total.... 491 pounds of meat!

Usually, we are able to use wild hog for 100% of the hog meat, but this year, they had a hard time trapping wild hogs, so we had to buy pork from a local meat market. It was easier than cleaning a hog, but also not free.

All of that meat went into the four variations of processed meat we make each year:

Jerky, dried sausage (like jerky), summer sausage, kielbasa-stlye sausage and ground meat.

Most of the meat is ground in two industiral sized meat grinders (I usually end up running a grinder for most of Saturday).

We brought home 98 pounds of finished meat this year. 35 pounds ground meat, 50 pounds of sausage (yikes, this sounds like a lot!), 8 pounds of summer sausage, 5 pounds of dried sausage and jerky. My family will eat this for the next 12 months... and with 50 pounds of sausage, that means I need to serve 1 sausage per week!

Super Hero Capes

2010-12-30T13:39:00.004-06:00

Last year, I made two superhero masks for my kids for Christmas. Handmade Holidays Part III -Superhero Masks

A full year later, both of the masks I made were still around the house, and often near the top of the toy box (meaning they are used frequently) so I decided to make the kids capes to go along with their masks.

I used the same felt material (60 inch wide EcoFelt from Joanne's, regularly it is $4.99 per yard, but goes on sale for 50% off all the time. Add in the coupon that Joann's puts in my mailbox nearly weekly and it was a very cheap project)

I used black felt and free-handed a cape shape. I cut out the cape and then hand sewed a contrasting felt letter onto the cape.

A tiny piece of self adhesive Velcro at the neckline and it was a wearable cape.

Honestly, I was a bit shocked at just how quickly and easily this project came together so I decided to make another... and another... and another, by December 19th I had made 12 cape - and - mask combos for all of the kids in our lives.

I never got a photo of all of the capes together since they were gifted as quickly as I could finish them.

Here is what the gift looked like, one simple mask and a monogrammed cape--pink for the girls, black for the boys and everyone got a black mask.

This project was a lot of fun, and very easy to churn these puppies out assembly line style. From start to finish a cape took less than 1 hour each to complete. By far, the hand stitching was the slowest part (the letter M was a particular pain), but it was also very easy to do while watching TV.

Most of the capes were for local friends from our church, but one cape was hand carried all the way up to Connecticut for my second cousin (is that what you call the child of a cousin? oh well)

Notes:
1) I free handed the first few letters then decided to just print out a set of 6 inch high letters from the computer-- much easier to use a template to get the letter just right.
2) I used embroidery floss in a contrasting color to applique each of the letters to the capes. At first I was kind of disappointed with my uneven stitching, but then decided it looked folksy (sure, why not)
3) The rough outline for the cape came from here: http://pukingpastilles.com/?p=57 but I did not go through all of the effort of lining the cape, mine were super easy, no sewing machine needed.
4) With careful placement, I could get three toddler-sized capes from one 20 inch cut of the fabric. Fabric is 60" wide and the capes are each ~20 inches wide and 20 inches tall.

Homemade Yogurt

2010-12-30T12:09:00.003-06:00

This year (okay so next year, 2011... in like 2 days) we have decided we want to learn how to make more dairy products. Apart from making homemade butter (which is as simple as putting heavy cream in a lidded jar and shaking), yogurt was the next easiest dairy product to make at home.

I started my online search looking for a 'yogurt machine' for hubby for Christmas, but quickly saw that actually buying a machine was overkill for just how simple the process seemed. Basically it is as simple as this: heat milk, add a cup of starter yogurt, keep warm for a few hours, and... yogurt.

Back when I was a kid, my paternal grandparents used to make yogurt on the back of their stove top at night (I guess the pilot light kept it warm enough). I don't remember eating it, but everything I ate at their house was delicious.

We heated 1/2 gallon of whole milk on the stove (the milk was from Sprouts, not sure all the details, rTBH free?).

We cooked it until it was at 180F. (I think this is to kill any bacteria in the milk)

We then cooled it quickly to 120F by putting the pot into a sinkful of cold water. (this brings the milk back to a hospitable temperature for the good bacteria we are about to add)

We then stirred in 1/2 cup of the starter yogurt into the 120F milk. In this case, I used Stoneyfield plain cream top (this stuff is SOOO good).

Meanwhile, I also sterilized a random collection of canning jars to put the finished yogurt into. (not sure if this step is necessary. I figured we were intentionally creating the perfect environment for bacteria to grow, I wanted to make sure it was the 'right' kind of bacteria and not some random bad bacteria from my jar storage box)

We ladled half of the new yogurt into jars as is (just hot milk and yogurt).

We put the filled, lidded jars into a cooler filled with about 3 inches of hot water (target temp 120F).

This water and cooler will help to keep the new yogurt at a warm constant temperature for several hours to allow the bacteria to grow.

(I don't have a lot of kitchen gadgets, but I really love my digital thermometer.)

As an experiment, we added honey and vanilla to the second half of the batch.

These were lidded too and placed into the cooler to begin the yogurt incubation period. The recipes I found online all called for warm incubation periods of between 3 hours and overnight. Since we finished the cooking and mixing portion of this experiment at 9pm... and we are big babies who go to bed at about 9pm... we opted to allow it to incubate overnight. I read that the longer the incubation period, the tangier the yogurt would taste.

The next morning...

Viola! Yogurt!

Side Note: In all honesty, I only tipped the jar like this because I saw a picture of someone else doing this online to show how lovely and thick their yogurt was. I did it and was so thrilled that ours was that thick too. I snapped a quick picture then in the two seconds it took me to turn back around to put the camera down, the thick creamy top on the yogurt had given way and the sort-of-thick yogurt had poured out and pooled all over my counter. Oops.

Once stirred, the consistency was like a thin smoothie, not terribly thick, but no where near as runny as milk.

We ended up with about a half gallon of homemade yogurt and it was yummy. It was a tiny bit tart, and we all preferred the sweetened version to the straight plain yogurt we made.

By far, the best way we have found to eat this is to mix in a giant glob of my runny homemade peach preserves. Mmmm.

I was a little bit worried that the kids would not care for the tanginess of it, but they really loved it. Since it was so runny, I served it to them in cups with a straw and they slurped it right up. It is basically the consistency of the smoothies we make.

Considering the fact that the Stoneyfield yogurt we all like so much costs between $3.99 (on sale) and $5.00 (ouch) per quart this is a huge cost savings. In Dallas right now, a grocery store price war with the new Aldi store has milk going for around $0.99 per gallon! Even at the usual price of $1.99 per gallon (and with four quarts to a gallon) making our own saves a lot of money.

Basic Recipe:
1 gallon of milk
1/2 cup of live culture yogurt

seasoning:
1 tsp vanilla
1/2 cup sweetener (honey or sugar)

1) heat milk to 180F
2) cool milk to 120F
3) stir in starter yogurt
4) sweeten if desired
5) ladle into sterilized jars
6) place in warm spot for 3-8 hours to incubate
7) refrigerate after incubation period is complete

Harvest Celebration Confusion

2010-12-13T14:12:00.003-06:00

Three bales of straw
Last Saturday night (Dec 4th) hubby took the kids and I driving to look at Christmas lights and we passed a pile of Halloween decorations--pumpkins, squash, 3 big bales of straw-- on a neighbors curb, waiting for trash pickup. Of course, I could not let this treasure go to the dump so poor hubby--all dressed up from the Christmas party we just left, hoisted the goodies into the back of my van.

I will use the straw bales as mulch for my summer garden in 2011. The golden color of the straw will help to reflect heat away from the soil, keeping the plants roots cooler (a definite concern in a Texas summer), the straw will help to keep moisture in the soil from evaporating, and it will also shade the soil and prevent the weed seeds from germinating--saving me time at my weeding. Free and pretty mulch, and all packaged in three tidy bundles. Until it is needed in the garden, the bales will act as a backyard climbing and jumping platform for my kids.

squash with straw mulch

I did not pick up the pumpkins from the curbside pile, but I thought about it. We already have about a dozen pumpkins in our backyard now from our own decorations as well as the free 'after holiday cast offs' from a friend's fundraising event selling pumpkins at her church.

Kids helping me to sort pumpkin seeds for roasting

The smaller pumpkins can be peeled, cubed, and cooked for pies, or the cubes can be roasted in the oven with salt and olive oil, the seeds can be salted and roasted for a crunchy snack. I still have 1 bag of pumpkin puree in the freezer from last years pumpkins. Pumpkin muffins were a real hit with my kids (and high in beta carotene). Even if you don't want to eat pumpkins, they are great food for the chickens. At the very least they are compost pile fodder. Nope, instead they were tossed to the curb to head to the local dump.

pumpkin squash muffins, ready to bake

How funny that the image we have of the bounty of "Harvest Time" and richness of fall with piles of rich golden pumpkins and squash, shocks of dried corn, and bales of golden straw--which used to mean a winters worth of food for the family and livestock-- are now seen as a disposable decorators item. Thanksgiving used to mean the end of the growing and harvest season, a time when families would gather to share in the rewards from a years worth of hard work in the fields.

This is not the first year I have collected hay bales from peoples trash, and it won't be the last (if you want to see a funny sight, picture tiny me, dressed in a skirt and heels for work, attempting to hoist a wet 60 pound bale of straw into the back of my minivan without getting dirty). For some reason this year it made me sad to see the wastefulness and the backward way of looking at things in our society.

So what are we really thankful for today (a bit late, buy HAY)? Thankful for good jobs that allow us to earn plenty of money to maintain a lifestyle? Thankful for stores full of goods, even those that are only used to be visually pleasing for a time? Thankful for a beautiful home to decorate for the various holidays? Thankful that we don't have to hack open a pumpkin each time we want to enjoy a pie?

I don't mean this to condemn anyone, I really am thankful that we live in such a rich and blessed society that allows us the choice to spend our money how we choose... and I'm even more thankful that the life my hubby and I share allow us the ability to see a treasure like this on the curbside. I'm thankful for the knowledge I have on how to use this bounty. I'm thankful that no other 'dumpster divers' got to this gem before me!

Fall Garden--December 2010

2010-12-13T13:44:00.003-06:00

My fall garden is growing nicely this year.

The weather has mostly been mild and damp and the plants are growing slowly and steadily... all except the turnips which sprouted up and have gotten huge.

The beets look bright and pretty

This is my first set of broccoli from seed and it is coming up very nicely.

I grew broccoli for the first time this spring and was very pleased with how well it did. The floret (head?) was not as big as what is sold in the stores, but the flavor was so good. Kind of like the difference between a 'store bought' tomato and a garden tomato... the same is true for broccoli.

My artichoke plant is still going strong, actually, these are the babies of the original plant. This plant is in a far from ideal condition in terms of garden layout and planning, but it has done so well I do not have the heart to move it.

On the wire fence are snow peas, then a row of turnips, which mostly overshadow my poor spinach, then broccoli, beets, then a crazy misplaced artichoke, then cabbage, brussel sprouts, carrots, and more peas... I think.

My volunteer mullein is doing so well in the rich garden soil. This is a native medicinal plant, I just need to remember what it is used for. It is welcome in the garden for now.

I was very excited to see the first three fresh pea pods of the winter garden and promptly ate them before taking any photos--December 12, 2010. Lots of blooms cover the peas so unless we get some very cold temperatures, I should have peas for quite a while longer.

The poor spinach I planted too close to the turnips and it keeps getting shaded. So far, the spinach seeds are the only ones that I have seen a clear breakdown in viability of the seed my MIL purchased in 2007, none of the old seed came up, only the newer seeds. So for future reference, don't expect to be able to 'save' spinach seed for more than a year or two without clear impact on your germination rate--or any germination at all.

Carrots, they really need to be thinned, but I always tend to start at the turnip end of the garden and end up having to chase a toddler before I work my way over to the carrots.

I'm also growing garlic for the first time this fall. To do really well, garlic needs to be planted in the fall in Texas to be able to harvest the following summer. I have never done this successfully before. This garlic is actually the grandchild plants of some grocery store garlic that sprouted in my pantry and I planted out last summer. The heads grew some nice greenery, but never bulbed out. I divided the clumps and replanted them in a sunnier location this fall.

This is my 'dumpster dive' sprinkler. It makes me so happy to watch it spinning crazily and know that I got it for free. Wha-HA-HA.

This is the Hedgehog Aloe Vera plant I bought on a whim last January just before our big debt free party. It had pretty orange-red-hot-poker style blooms when I bought it and I assumed that would be the only time I saw it bloom, but apparently it likes the neglect in my yard and I see buds again.

Fall Garden 2010

2010-10-04T11:36:00.006-05:00

Saturday, October 2nd the kids and I cleaned out what was left from our spring veggie garden. Honestly, there were not many plants left. There were about a half dozen very scraggly tomato plants, they had started to bloom again, but I've learned from experience, fall tomatoes from spring plants are a disappointment. Oddly, the broccoli from spring was still growing strong (even though it was supposed to have been killed off in the heat) and even had a few small old heads of broccoli on them. I found two pepper plants in the back, and those were spared. One neat surprise was a mullein plant growing in a back corner of my garden. Mullein is a medicinal plant with huge fuzzy leaves. It grows wild here in Texas and my mom always has plants pop up in her yard, but I've never seen it growing in town and especially never in my garden. My artichoke plant, which produced for the first time this summer had died off, but four new baby plants have sprung up from the roots of the original plant.

The tiny 4" mint plant I got in 2009 is now a waist high shrub that covers an area 5 feet by 5 feet. Part of it has started to take over a section of my veggie garden (mint does not respect wire garden fences--HA!). I shoveled it out by the roots and was able to pass on a 5 gallon bucket of rooted mint plants to a gardening friend of mine. I warned her it needed a place to S P R E A D out.

During the clean up, we found 3 snakes (which boy called rattle snakes, but they are just harmless brown garden snakes), bunches of geckos (which boy can now correctly identify), and two spiny fence lizards. It was a cool morning so all the poor reptiles were moving slowly, I had to teach boy over and over how to gently hold the geckos (one ended up dropping his tail from the initial rough grab). He kept pinching them with his thumb and forefinger and the poor geckos eyes would nearly bulge out of their heads. Once boy learned the art of just cupping them in his hand, he was so happy to see that they stayed whit him calmly, the cold lizards enjoyed the warmth. I was less picky about his treatment of the snakes. I learned last year that the primary food of the little brown snakes is earth worms, so they are less welcome in the garden. I let the boy play with them, and we even threw a few to the chickens who ran and fought over who got to eat the little snake. The white chicken is quite the hunter and was the best at grabbing the snakes before they disappeared into the leaves.

We weeded, we raked, then I hand dug 2/3 of the garden with a pitch fork. Partially so boy could find worms and partially because most of this garden is still fairly new soil and there is lots of heavy clay areas. My little tiller can't break up the clay and hand turning just seemed like the best thing to do. Once the clods of soil were turned up, my little tiller made quick work of it.

Sunday after church boy and I got out my bag of cool season seeds and we planted pretty much every seed I had. I tried yet another new layout (this is 3 layouts in 2 years of my new garden) and we'll see how it goes this fall/winter. The rows now run east to west and I did not put in any formal paths, just the typical 18 inch spacing between the planted seed rows.

North to south rows

Along the north garden fence: Oregon Snow Peas
Purple Top Turnips
Broccoli
Beets
spinach (mixed old seeds with this years Laewa and Bordeaux Spinach seeds)
cabbage
brussel sprouts
cauliflower
carrots (Danvers, half long, Taigo? short carrots)
Thomas Laxton pod Peas (along a temporary border fence).

I sprinkled mixed lettuce seeds at the start of each row of other veggies.

The far south section of the garden (the shady section) was left fallow with the Jerusalem Artichokes, which are still blooming) and some purple basil plants which are about to go to seed.

After the seeds were planted, boy helped me to wrestle the soaker hoses to lay along each planted row. He was such a big help holding the ends of the unwieldy hoses, it would have been very difficult without him. We gave the garden a good drink and now we wait and let this beautiful Texas fall weather sprout the little seeds. All week we have sun forcast with highs in the upper 70s and lows in the 60s, perfect!

Curly Sue -- err Sandra

2010-08-31T16:18:00.003-05:00

Hubby's grandma came to stay with us for a few days at the end of July. Grandma H has the prettiest long hair for a woman of advanced age and it is always fixed so nice. The first night she stayed with us, I saw her trick, she puts her hair up in pin curls each night.

She was more than happy to do my hair on Saturday night too. She started working on my long straight hair, tiny section by tiny section.

I sat on the floor while she worked.

A card and a half of bobby pins (about 200) later...

Look, I'm a pin-up girl! Actually, not at all, this was proof that I should never never get one of those pixie cuts. My head looked funny.

Grandma helped me to spray my pinned up head and then sprinkle a little water on my hair (misting would have been better) and I tied a scarf over my head and went to sleep.

Curls,

Curls,

Curls!

After some coaxing, Grandma was able to style my curly hair. When I first took the pins out, my hair was so curled that it did not touch my shoulders. Considering my hair normally goes down to the middle of my back, it was quite a change.

Three curly headed women.

I wore my hair curled to church on Sunday and got lots of compliments. It was even slightly curly the next day for work, but by then it was mostly just waves, not curl.

What a fun learning experience to see how things used to be (and still are) done. I've owned sets of rollers, curling irons and round brushes in my life, but they have never been as effective as the pin curls.

We've visited Grandma a few times since and she's asked me a few times if I had brought 'my pins' with me so she could do my hair again.

August Summary

2010-08-31T16:09:00.002-05:00

Wow, what a cheater post, the last day of August and I'm gonna shove as much stuff into one post as I can. This blog started as my garden record, and my 2010 garden was pretty disappointing. Good thing we have so many other hobbies I can occasionally write about.

Here's a fun one: dead animals. I found yet ANOTHER dead opossum in our yard, this is #3 for the summer.

We suspect that there was at least one more in the tall grass near the bees, because it smelled so bad. I never got close enough to verify. Three (or four) dead opossums in one summer is pretty odd, considering we've never seen a single one in the six years we've lived here (six years, really?). It could be that they are coming in for the dog food, or possibly they are coming for the bees. Who knows.

Here is all that is left of opossum #2

Just a jaw bone.

Opossum #1 was hauled off by the trash man. I was a bad homeowner and just left the other two to nature to deal with.

I saw this weird bee in my garden in August, he was eating something. I got closer and saw he was eating one of our honey bees!

I'll have to do some research to figure out what he is and if he's a threat.

My Jerusalem artichokes bloomed a bit. These poor things have been relocated so many times that they are everywhere in my yard and garden now.

I was surprised to find that my carrots had done great this year, despite being totally neglected.

The largest one was the size of one from the store.

Honey Extraction 2010

2010-08-31T15:38:00.003-05:00

We extracted our honey the last Saturday of July, 2010. We were able to borrow extraction equipment from a friend at church (in exchange for extracting his honey too), and we also got together with another bee keeping buddy to all extract together.

First step, steal the honey. This does not make the bees very happy. Hubby was able to travel up to Bells late on Friday night to get the frames with honey from our four hives up there. On Saturday morning he removed the frames with honey from our five hives at home.

I tried to prepare the kitchen for easy clean up. Tried. I taped a plastic table cloth down on our kitchen table, tucked the curtains up out of the way and moved all the chairs and other stuff out of the kitchen.

Here is the finished set up. We tried to keep a logical flow to the order of things to minimize having to move drippy frames of honey too far. You can see just outside the kitchen window is a stack of medium supers, these came from three different families (and four different bee yards).

Just inside the door we set up a place to stack the supers we were working on.

This is what the surface of one of the frames of capped comb looks like.

Next was the decapping station. Where we used a hot electric knife to cut the wax caps off of the comb to expose the honey.

If done right, the wax comes off in a pretty curl.

The uncapped frames were then loaded into the centrifuge (is this this right name? maybe called and extractor?). This held three frames of honey and had an electric motor to spin the frames and force the honey out of the comb and onto the bottom of the vessel.

This picture is looking down into the cylinder of the extractor as it spins and the honey is flung out.

After several sets of frames were spun, we opened the valve at the bottom of the centrifuge and the beautiful golden honey poured out.

The honey was strained through a series of filters to remove wax and bee parts, then it was held in a 5 gallon bucket with a tap at the bottom.

Repeat. Over and over and over until all of the honey was extracted.

Poor hubby got the job of going outside to retrieve the next super full of frames. The bees very quickly learned where their honey had gone and were frantically trying to steal it back.

Hubby was careful to open and close the door to the kitchen quickly to avoid getting too many bees in the house.

After a few hours, the bees outside the door were overwhelming and hubby had to make a quick dash around the yard holding the frames to try and keep the bees from following him into the house.

This is a cluster of bees drinking the honey that is leaking out of one of the supers on the outside table.

Finished product! We ended up extracting about 12 gallons of honey for the three families.

Here are the bees cleaning off the outside table after we were done extracting.

Within an hour they had lapped up the giant puddle of honey.

The house was fairly easy to clean up, not as easy as just letting the bees do it, but not too bad. I'm still picking bits of wax off of my floors, and my floors were sticky even after two moppings.

In review, this year was just so-so for honey. As first year beekeepers, we are thrilled to get any, but still, we were hoping for more.

Comments and Lessons Learned:

1) We made a mistake and did not use queen excluders on our hives. This meant that the queens in nearly all of our 9 hives moved up into the supers and started laying eggs. Commercial beekeepers typically do not use queen excluders, so we hoped to get away with it to. Nope. Because of the eggs and brood present in the supers, we had to be extra careful to only pull frames that were just honey. Ideally, the whole super would have been filled with honey, no eggs. While this is a mistake in terms of how much honey we got, it is also a happy accident as it will mean our hives should be much stronger next year since they were able to raise so many more babies.

2) The honey was DARK this year. In general, a lighter honey is more desirable, but the comments from the Collin County Hobby Beekeepers association was that all the honey seemed dark this year. It still tastes great to us.

3) We needed more buckets and containers cleaned and ready to go before we started. We ended up having to pour honey bucket to bucket a few times unnecessarily.

Motivational Posters

2010-07-28T10:55:00.002-05:00

After a discussion with hubby regarding a quote he loved, I knew I had to create a motivational poster for him. I found a site several years ago (2007) that was perfect for doing this sort of thing and I was so pleased to find it is still in existance. www.bighugelabs.com it is totally free, but memberships are available for a faster, no ads version.

Garden Friends (gross version)

2010-07-08T14:17:00.004-05:00

I found another dead opossum in my yard. This one showed a bit more 'Buddy love' evidence (wet from the slobber and a bit chewed up). I don't really like that my dog is killing things in the yard, but he's as tired of sharing his dog food as I am of buying dog food to feed the local wildlife.

This little guy crawled into my garden to die on a Friday morning. The kids and I found it right after hubby left for a weekend away. Being the responsible mommy that I am, I gave my son a stick and let him poke at the dead opossum to his little hearts content. When he got tired of that, I gave him the garden hose and let him spray it with water. We then all left for school and work... and for the weekend.

My theory was that trash day was not until Monday so the dead opossum would be better off in the outside air rather than bagged and stinking up my garage in the 102 degree Texas heat.

We got back Sunday night to find this...

Wow, it is barely identifiable as an opossum anymore. The heat and flies and bugs had caused this thing to shrivel up like a mummy--in just two days.

Another two days later and it was even more decomposed. Then just 1 week after his untimely demise, the opossum was nothing but a dry pile of brittle bones and a tiny bit of fur.

This picture was intended to show the pretty blooms on my artichoke plant, but it also shows that there is almost ZERO evidence of a dead opossum left in my garden after just one week.

I'm well aware this topic is gross and disgusting and all, but I find it fascinating just how quickly nature took care of this little mishap.

Okay, thanks for humoring my disgusting facination. Here is another pretty flower

Ginger Honey Cough Syrup

2010-07-08T14:05:00.003-05:00

Why oh why do my kids and I still get sick in the summer time? The rest of the country has to deal with colds during the severe winters when everyone retreats to heated homes and shares germs by the fireside. Here in Texas, we have a mild winter and a fierce summer, forcing us to retreat inside and share germs... by the AC unit.

Late June and both my kids and I got a nasty cold, complete with runny nose, hacking cough, and sore throat. Time to whip up a batch of ginger honey cough syrup. The ginger is good for sore throats and to help clear mucus (yummy!), the honey is an antibacterial and also soothing for sore throats, it also helps to calm the coughing reflex. (except in the case of my hubby who gags when he tastes ginger).

Ginger Honey Cough Syrup

1 tbs fresh ginger, peeled and diced
2 tbs local honey
1/2 cup hot water

Mix all ingredients and stir well. Allow to cool slightly then sip as needed. For a very strong tea, leave the ginger pieces in the jar. For a more mild tea, scoop out the ginger after about 10 minutes.

*It is meant to be thick and sweet, like syrup. Increase the amount of water for a more tea-like drink.
*This cough syrup will keep in the refrigerator for about 2 weeks.

Are bees dangerous?

2010-06-13T23:03:00.005-05:00

Pardon the tacky attire, but it was 95 degrees in the shade and I was weeding in full sun. Right next to three bee hives... in shorts and a tank top... with roughly 120,000 flying stinging insects about 18 inches from me (we assume about 40k bees per strong hive).

No, bees are really not dangerous, this has been a wonderful thing to learn since we started keeping bees. Bees have moods, and sometimes you don't wanna mess with them, but 99% of the time, they are so peaceful and quite happy to just go about their business.

I would not recommend just walking up to any old hive without gear, but I've learned that our three are very docile. I did not intentionally start weeding practially nekked next to these gals, I was just working my way along the flowerbeds and realized I was in the bee yard.

No, I did not get stung, although, I got bumped a few times when I accidentally threw a dirt clod and smacked a hive. Bees 'bump' by flying into your body, kind of like a tiny airplane accident at chest level, it is their way of politely saying "what the heck are you doing you big dumb human?"

Fresh Fruit + 1 day = Fruit Flies...

2010-06-13T22:54:00.004-05:00

With 35 pounds of peaches in the kitchen, we ended up with a cloud of fruit flies that would erupt from the sink every time we walked by. Yuck.

Here is my Aggie-solution-- a recycled fruit fly trap!

I cut the top off of a water bottle and inverted it into the body of the bottle. I put some compost (strawberry caps) at the bottom of the bottle as bait. The trap works like any fish or lobster type trap. The fruit flies can easily go into the opening of the bottle, but are confused when they fly up the sides and cannot get out.

Between this and extreme cleaning for a few days, the fruit fly problem is done. Phew.

One neat item of note is that we have moved so far away from pre-packaged commerical products that it was actually difficult for me to find an empty plastic bottle. I ended up scouting one from the trash-heap that is the back seat of hubby commuter car. The last time I bought a case of water was well over 6 months ago.

Just Peachy

2010-06-13T22:38:00.003-05:00

A friend of mine from work lamented to me that his peach tree was doing too well this year... too well? As in he had TOO MANY peaches? How can that even be possible? I guess if you live alone and don't typically eat a lot of peaches, a tree full of peaches could be a problem. I bummed an invitation to his house (June 3rd) to 'help' with his 'problem' and over the span of 45 minutes we were able to pick two five gallon buckets full of peaches. Hooray for free food! Hooray for free food that is helping someone else with their 'problem' (ei-yi-yi). The crazy part was that after picking all we could (we only brought two buckets) you could barely tell we had even visited the tree. Perhaps it is possible to have too many peaches? Nah...

Two five gallon buckets = 10 gallons of peaches = about 35 pounds of peaches

After two nights of after 10 pm canning and jam making, those 35 pounds turned into 7 quarts of sliced canned peaches, 8 jelly jars of jam, 2 half pints of jam, 3 quarts of peach juice (jam that I was too lazy to measure and cook to set), 1 peach pie, 5 mornings of peach oatmeal, 1 peach crisp, lots of fresh peach snacks. My whole family was starting to turn orange with a slight fuzz erupting from our skin.

Guess how many pictures I took of peach picking... none (I brought the camera, but chickened out about asking my coworker if I could take pictures).

Guess how many pictures I took of the buckets full of peaches.... none.

Guess how many pictures I took of the sticky night of jam making... none.

Guess how many pictures I have of the final product... one, fuzzy one that seems to have focused in on the knife block instead of the peaches.

Notes:
--under ripe is better for canned peach halves
-- We happened to get nearly the perfect number of chilling hours this winter, the bugs were lessened by the late freeze, my friend used miracle grow fertilizer stakes (I did not ask how many), he covered half the tree with a bird net... all of this lead to an amazing peach crop!
--the peaches were small, about golf ball to softball sized. I later read that if he had knocked off half of the blooms the tree would have produced bigger peaches. Even if they were small, they were delicious.
--A five gallon bucket will fit in my fridge!
--fruit flies LOVE peaches... and now my kitchen is invaded with clouds of nasty buggy-ness.

The plan...

2010-06-09T14:04:00.003-05:00

We are working hard at trying to identify what our next step in life is. To this point, it has been so clear when we are on the right track: God puts things in place that I could have never imagined—specifically the way we were able to pay off all of our debts and our house so quickly. Now that that is done, we kind of feel like we are floundering along and not making any progress on anything. We’ve wanted to buy some land in the country and have that as an investment and a weekend place, but it is starting to become clear that it is probably not a good next step. Someday… just not now (and logically it makes sense).

Boy starts real school in 2 years and we are slowly seeing that our current school district (Dallas) probably can’t support the kind of future we want for our kids. Private school is always an option, but I think I want them to attend public schools. So we are now talking about moving into a better district and getting a larger home. The current community we are in is also lacking for suitable local friends for our kids. We’ve met some wonderful people (and our new best friend family) through our church, but it would be great if there were families in the neighborhood—walking distance-- that we could trust our kids to play with. So many choices!

Up until this point in our lives, the path has been fairly clear for us: college, jobs, marriage, house, kids… but what is next? I know that we could carry on with our current setup and have a good life, but we both feel that God has something else in store for us—we just don’t know what… and it is forcing us to work on our worst skill… patience.

As a part of our Sunday school class last year, we read a book called the “Red Sea Rules” about dealing with adversity in your life and trusting to Gods plan. There were something like 10 rules, but one that really stuck out to me was “trust God, but take the next logical step”. Hubby and I both feel very strongly about wanting to live in the country, and I really feel that doing so is part of Gods plan for us, but I don’t think it is part of his plan for us right now. Yes, we could take out a loan tomorrow and buy 40 acres and then what? We both still work full time, our kids will start school in 2 years, we are active in our local church and don’t want to leave… While it is possible to buy land now, it would be very difficult and it seems clear that the time is just not right. I definitely don’t have a peace about making a big step like that right now.

So I’m going to trust that owning land in the countryside is part of Gods plan for us, and I’m going to start taking logical steps to help us get there the right way. Logical steps… hmm, sounds a lot like hubby’s favorite thing… setting goals. So we’ll call buying land our long term (10-15 year) goal. Ideally, we’d be able to buy the land for cash, not be dependent on our in-town jobs to support us, and the kids would be at an age that such a move would make sense for their educational advancement. To be financially prepared to make a big purchase like that (300-500k) we need to start building the base now. One side plan of ours has been to own a few rental properties as a means of investing and generating a side stream of income (5-8 year goal). We are also quickly outgrowing our little house in town, and with boy starting school in 2 years, a better school district would be great. So our short term goal (2 years) would be to buy an upgrade house in a good school district with more room for us to grow our life and hobbies. Rather than simply selling our house and trading up, we hope to keep our current house as a rental property and take out another mortgage to buy our next house. (yes, gasp, debt… I thought we were done with that! I’m still struggling with this item). In the near term (now-2 years) we need to save up about 50k as a big down payment on the next house.

Considering we were able to pay off 72k in 13 months… 50k in two years should be easy… right? Not really. For some reason, money has been tight for us since January, even without a mortgage. Perhaps we are both recovering from such a lean last 2 years and spending more than usual, perhaps we are off of Gods plan and things are naturally bumpier when we are off target. Whatever the reason money-- which we assumed would be easy-- has not been. We’ve had to hit our emergency fund and are slowly rebuilding it, hubby’s overtime has nearly dried up (this was a huge factor in what we were able to do last year), we’re starting a new business and paying cash for everything associated with it. In other words, even without a mortgage payment, we are basically the same way we did before, but with very little savings happening (perhaps I was naieve to expect to be able to put the full mortgage payment toward savings each month). We are still saving, just not on the grand scale I envisioned.

I also think a big factor is that we are lacking a shared plan of attack. Our debt was a beast that hubby and I slayed together, every thought, every spare dollar went into killing it and we were working hard as a team. Now that it is dead, we have gotten lazy about things. Hopefully our new shared near term goal will get us moving again in the right direction.

So here is the plan:

1) save 50k downpayment (June 2012)
2) buy a 150-200k upgrade house in a good school district (August 2012)
3) use rental income from house #1 and job income to pay off new home mortgage (lets say 2015)
4) save up 50k
5) buy a rental property (rental house #2) use rental income 1 plus rental income 2 plus job income to pay for rental property #2. (2018)
6) Save up 50k
7) …

After 10-15 years, or whenever God says so, we will sell the whole assembly (ideally 3-4 properties) and pay cash for a place out in the country. Oh, somewhere in here too are a few side businesses in bees and software or consulting that will help us to quickly build up the 50k needed to make our downpayments and lessen our dependence on our in-town jobs.

So God, is this a better plan? Are we back on the right track? I sure hope so, but if not, we’ll review again. Amen.

Land for Sale

2010-06-03T10:48:00.005-05:00

This weekend, for the first time, we went with a realtor to look at a piece of property. We've dabbled online lots, comparing prices and seeing what was out there. In general, our search has been for just land, no house but this property came up in our search and it included a house and a ton of acreage.

A short bio from the relator's website "Price Reduced! The last of the old home places! 188.66 acre farm with early 20th century 5 bdrm, 2 bath, 3111 sq. ft. home; 110 acres is cropland, the balance of the acreage is treed with a small creek running thru the property. Two old barns, small pecan orchard, excellent soils, seclusion. Home has new metal roof but does need some work and updating. 100% mineral rights. Sellers will consider any reasonable offer."

It hits all of the high notes of what we wanted, land, water, barns, trees, good soil, seclusion.

There was a ton of things that we loved about this place...

Talk about curb appeal! The house was set back about 100 yards from a very small all weather gravel road (nearest pavement was less than 0.5 mile away). There were giant old trees shading the home and lovely lush lawn surrounding it.

The house screamed old farm house charm. It has a green metal roof, white wood siding, deep porches on the south and west sides with very neat detailing throughout. The porch curves in a semicircle around the front of the house and the roof line matches. The dormers in the second story had curved wood edges. The house was started in 1911 and finished in 1914. The land has been in one family since 1860 and only came on the market when the owners passed away and none of the 4 heirs were interested in living in it.

We stepped inside the house and found that it was about 10 degrees cooler than the 90 degree heat outside, but no AC... the power had been shut off for years. It was simply the design of the house that allowed it to maintain a lower temperature. The home had very high ceilings (allowing hot air to rise) and every room had multiple doors to allow air to circulate. The second story was much warmer, but still not as hot as outside. Above the second story was an attic that reached between 8-10 feet high at the peaks, again allowing the hot air to rise away from the living areas.

The design of the deep porch was also perfect to battle Texas heat. The porch was about 12 feet deep on the south and west sides of the home, shading the house from the worst of the hot Texas sun. To the north a thick tree row would act as a wind break from the north winds in winter. These are all logical details that are simply not considered in today's home design and placement.

Just behind the house are two very old barns. So old that they are probably not totally functional or safe, but did not seem as ready to fall down as most 100 year old things.

Here is item #1 that scared us... a gas pump in the back yard, about 20 yards from the back door. Below the gas pump is a buried gas tank. Since this is a working farm, and located probably 10+ miles from the nearest gas station, this makes sense that they'd have access to their own fuel. 50 years later, it is still 10 miles from the nearest gas station, but it really worries me what condition the buried tank is in and what the old fuel in it may have done to the soil and groundwater.

More love for this place. The home was surrounded by huge old trees: pecan, bois'd arc, oaks. Beautiful high shade and picturesque.

Secret little outbuildings, half hidden in the woods. To me, this is a plus (not so much on yet another gas tank...). I love the idea that a family has lived on this land for 100+ years. I get all excited just imagining what sorts of old treasures we might find inside these buildings.

This is a shot of the hay loft of one of the barns.

We found this tally on the wall... perhaps they stored 365 hay bales in the barn, or perhaps they were counting days of a year, I won't list here what hubby joked they were counting... (really, is that ALL you think about?)

Outside the circle of perfectly mowed St. Augustine lawn area, the home was surrounded by thick woods and lots of poison ivy. The view from almost every window was trees. Ahhh, lovely.

Then, on the other side of the tree row, to the west... fields

fields

and more fields.

The land itself is bisected by a creek and bits of farm land were carved into every flat portion of the property possible--a total of about 100 acres of farmland. To the west were about 10 acres of soybeans and far back to the north and west of the property (past the creek) were about 70 acres of corn.

The realtor explained to us that neighboring farmers had been farming the land on a contract with the heirs. The heirs put up 1/3 of the cost of planting, and then receive 1/3 of the profit. Pretty neat deal, and exciting that even while vacant, the land is generating income.

This leads me to our deal breaker on the property... walking through, something just seemed wrong... I've gardened my whole life and weeds are a constant battle, but look at this

perfect, not a weed, not a blade of grass out of place

Just baby soybeans popping up in tidy rows. How? Why does my garden not look like this? Easy... RoundUP and other herbicides are used to clear the land of everything prior to planting so as not to foul up the combine harvesters with weeds. My research after the fact was terrifying to me: for every $100 dollars spent on planting a crop $50-70 of it is spent on chemicals (herbicides or fertilizers). Soybeans are bred with RoundUP resistant genetics so that they can be sprayed directly with roundup and not be affected. YIKES, yikes yikes. And no thank you. 100 acres of chemicals surrounded by thousands upon thousands of acres of the very same thing. Where do all those chemicals go?

Yep, right into the watersheds and the three creeks that crossed the property. This was our deal breaker, a single item to take down the whole place. We spend so much time and effort on our tiny home gardens to keep them organic, hubby hunts and slaughters our own meat to keep it as clean as possible, we've even moved away from many of the commerical products due to questionable chemical content, yet we fell in love with a property that had gallons of chemicals sprayed on it each year so it was able to produce. I don't mean this as an attack on industrial farming (or perhaps I do!), I understand that herbicides and fertilizers are necessary to provide the quantity and price of food that our country demands... but I don't' want to live in the middle of it and I definitely don't want to raise my kids there.

I am really torn, because I loved this place so much. Nearly every detail was almost spot on for what we want in a property (assuming a creek could be dammed up to make a pond). But the chemicals are not worth negotiating over, even if we stopped farming the immediate land, the surrounding farms would still be farmed in the same manner.

The staying power of this homestead is proven, people have lived here successfully for over 100 years. The land, water and soil is clearly able to provide what is needed in this remote location. too bad it is all potentially steeped in decades worth of farming chemicals.

What do we want?

2010-06-02T11:45:00.000-05:00

Land.

So that was our answer until about 6 months ago. Now we are starting to drill down to what that means. First and foremost... the #1 (and 2 and 3) most important item regarding real estate: location, location, location. We used to talk about moving up to SW Missouri, hubbys extended family has lived there for decades and my sister lives somewhat nearby as well. The land is beautiful, we like the area, family is nearby, but... the tech industry is basically non-existent in SW Missouri and both hubby and I are in very technical fields (he's electrical and I'm mechanical engineers). We also learned this year that we really don't like winter. Just a span of 4 sub-freezing days here in Texas and one nasty wintry drive back from Missouri convinced us that we are really not cut out for the cold (yes, we are big sissy's being scared by a mere 17 degree day and 8 inches of wintery precip). It has slowly been revealed to us that we like Texas. North East Texas to be exact.

So location... I'm bounding this up by saying east of 75, north of I20 and within the bounds of the great state of Texas. Still a huge area, yes, but we like to keep our options open. We love the land there, close family is nearby, and we have both lived our lives here in Texas and really like it. It also keeps our options a bit more open for a gradual transition (as in start with a weekend place)

How much? (see how clever that is? it means two things: how much land and how much money, sort of different, but totally the same question--yikes, I kill myself sometimes with the cleverness.) Living on a plot of land that is 75x125 feet, even an acre seems like a huge span, but I know we'll need more. Hubby put his bound on it by saying a minimum of 20 acres (now when I go back through emails, he has also said a minimum of 100 acres, 40 acres, 80 acres...) so perhaps we have not defined this so well yet. The upper bounds are limited only by finances--the second meaning of 'how much'. We are currently debt free, but to save up cash for the 200-300k we'll need to buy what we want will take years, and we are impatient. If we are able to sell our current house, we'll be a good part of the way there, but to do that something would need to change on our job front. Not likely.

Now the fun and beautiful details:

Trees
Pastures
Pond or live water stream
Old homestead
Good soil for planting
Lack of chemicals in surrounding land
Good schools
Not on a major road
All-weather road leading to property
Surrounding land not going to be developed

Refreshing a dream

2010-06-02T08:54:00.003-05:00

As much as I love my gardens and my yard in our current house, Hubby and I want to get out of the city. It has been a shared dream of ours to own a big chunk of land in the middle of nowhere. The details around it have changed and been revised over the years, but the general premise is still the same: land, in the middle of nowhere.

Right now, the dream is just that, a dream. With our current job situation, there is not really any way for us to live anywhere but where we do now, in the middle of the 9th biggest city in the US (based on 2007 census data). Further complicating things is the fact that hubby and I both love our jobs so neither one of us is quite ready to make a change on that front... yet.

So what do two space loving, gardening, bee-keeping, chicken-raising, do-ers do when stuck in the city? Well, we practice--small scale. Most of what this Horton Living blog has been is a record of our practice and skill building for 'someday' when we can escape the city and get some land to play on.

The biggest thing we did to move toward our dream was to get out of debt and pay off our mortgage. During our payoff, we learned to live cheaply and now we are doubly rewarded in that we have our former mortgage payment that is now being saved for our near future and we also learned to live on a lot less.

Granted, we are not there yet, but we have crested the hill and finally our 'snowball' is rolling in the right direction and growing for us.

This weekend, we had the opportunity to review and revise our dream a bit. For the first time, we went with a realtor to look at a piece of land... in the country... in the middle of nowhere! Woo Hoo!

The long long story short, we both loved the property and land, but were scared off for reasons that I plan to put into detail. The single best outcome of this weekend was that it has reminded and refreshed both hubby and I regarding our shared dream. We want land. Wishing and dreaming is all well and good, but there is a lot that we need to put into practice NOW to be ready for when we can make this dream come true. It also opened our eyes to the fact that there are two questions that need to be answered: What do we want, and how do we get there?

(picture me yelling this like some deranged cheerleader)

What do we want? LAND!

How do we get there? WITH A PLAN!

Go team Horton!!

Chicken Jinxed, part II

2010-06-02T08:52:00.003-05:00

The same day I posted about being chicken jinxed, I went back to the coop gather eggs. I reached in and the black hen pecked me hard enough that she drew blood!

I think I fixed her though, I dumped her out of the nest box and took it away for a few days. I had to collect eggs off of the ground, but oh well it seems to have confused her enough to not be so broody anymore. I hope...

Chicken Jinxed

2010-05-27T11:29:00.005-05:00

After my bragging about our four-egg-day (four eggs from 3 chickens!) on my blog, via email and maybe even with a phone message or two...my MIL called to ask about our chickens. I told her they were doing great: laying an egg each a day, not fighting, not pecking, not eating eggs, eating all their vegetables, not going broody, not pecking at me... oh my sweet, and perfect model chickens.

The VERY NEXT DAY

Yep, a pecked egg. You can even see the double beak hole where she pecked it. I found this under the perch in the chicken pen.

To top it off, our black hen (one of the infamous mean girls) has been in the nest box a lot, and even pecked at me when I tried to shoo her out yesterday. She has been pulling out the small soft feathers from her belly and under her wings to line her nest with. Gee, going broody? Yep.

Going broody means that she thinks she wants to sit on her eggs to hatch them. In theory, this would not be a bad thing, it is what God intended for the eggs, to be hatched into little chicks, in theory. The reality of the situation is that we don't want chicks, we want eggs. The hen would probably get bored or distracted half way through and abandon the nest, leaving half incubated no-longer-edible eggs for me to deal with. The hen is also preventing the other two hens from using the nest box. Hens also stop laying during the time they are sitting on a nest, so overall production goes down. Some hens make very good mothers, and judging by the history of our two 'mean girls' this one may make a great mother and raise up a flock all by herself. But we don't want that.

By bragging on my small flock, I chicken jinxed myself.

Slice of Prickly Heaven

2010-05-26T14:52:00.005-05:00

My favorite food of all time is artichoke with drawn butter. I love artichokes so much that my mom (and now hubby) puts an artichoke in my Christmas stocking instead of a pesky orange or apple. I toyed with the idea of artichokes in my wedding bouquet. I love artichokes!

So when I grew an artichoke plant for the first time last year, I was disappointed that nothing came of it the first year except a huge, beautiful, architectural plant with spiny leaves.

Here it is last June, small and spiny

Here is the same plant, this year, HUGE and spiny

Here is closeup of the yummy reward

Oops, looks like I never got over that dream of an edible bouquet...

Boil in salted water for about 30 minutes, or until the base of the artichoke is tender when poked with a fork.

Drain and serve with salted drawn butter. Think of it like a giant edible flower. To eat an artichoke, you pull off the petals one by one and drag them through your front teeth to scrape off the yummy soft flesh that lines inside of each petal. Oh, and dip in butter, lots and lots of butter. Hubby sometimes teases me that I am just using the artichoke as a spoon to get more melted butter...

As you get close and closer to the center of the artichoke, the petals get smaller and more tender. Then at the very center is the heart of the artichoke, covering the top of the heart is the 'choke' part, a small section of tiny hairs that is not at all tasty. I usually scrape that off with a spoon, but don't scrape too far, the choke will lift off neatly, leaving the heart to be eaten, yummy.

In general, my home grown artichokes were much smaller than store bought artichokes. The leaves seemed a bit tougher, but I may not have harvested them early enough. I also wonder if the plant I grew is not a differnt variety of artichoke than what is sold in stores.

I definitely plan to grow artichokes again, but not as a part of the tillable garden (since it takes two years to produce). These beautiful plants would look great as an accent plant in any garden. They do get rather large though. At the peak of the season last year, this thing was probably 4 feet across and about 3 feet high. The plant stayed green all winter, even during our 17 degree cold snap (I covered them with a bucket and lots of hay).

Hooray for Artichokes, beautiful and delicious!

Building Bee Boxes

2010-05-20T11:40:00.004-05:00

The guys have been on hold on there bee removal activities because we are out of bee boxes in which to house our new arrivals. We put in another order to the big bee supply place in Paris, Texas and picked it up a few weeks ago. Here is our poor pitiful truck under the load of 15 complete new hives

Wait, those don't look like bee hives... oh, some assembly required... and gluing, and nailing, and treating and staining. No instant gratification here.

We start by gluing the ends of the boxes

This is not strictly necessary, but makes for a stronger box with fewer gaps for pests to hide.

The glued boxes are then squared off and clamped. Then nails are driven at each end to secure the box.

The rest of the nails are then driven in.

Since we had 45 individual boxes to build with this load (15 brood boxes with 2 supers each), we set up an assembly line to make things go quicker.

Glue

Square

Nail

Repeat 45 times... unless you run out of nails part way through, then you stop, get more nails and finish. But you only have to do that part if you don't plan ahead...

So repeat the process until you are very sleepy

and have lots of bee boxes.

Are we done yet? Noooo

Next the boxes have to be treated with boiled linseed oil. This protects the wood and smells really good. I'm not sure if that part matters or not, but it makes it a fun job.

This is a stack of oiled boxes drying in the yard. Ideally, you would oil all of the boxes at once and be done with it, unless of course you run out of oil on box number 21... and have to stop for the night. But that only happens if you don't plan ahead.

Then the boxes must be primed and then painted. Then, then they are ready for bees.

Garden Visitors--May 2010

2010-05-20T10:32:00.005-05:00

First visitor, on May 13th, this crazy looking moth hanging out on the door to the garage.

This is a Giant Leopard Moth, and here is the wiki on it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_Leopard_Moth
One interesting note, it says that the caterpillars of this moth are the woolly bear caterpillars with a red band. Boy and I have found several of these caterpillars in our yard over the last few months, but I've never seen the moth before. Pretty!

There is nothing too special about these birds, just common Starlings. I guess it is sort of special to note that Starlings are a non-native species that was introduced into Central Park in NYC back in the 1800s and has since spread to every single state. (double check me on those facts... it is just what I remember reading somewhere) We have Starlings in our yard every day, but what is neat is that this time, they brought their baby!

This awkward little guy was very funny to watch. He would occasionally trip over a stick or blade of grass and end up falling over. He would then run over to his mommy and stay near her for a while. Several times, if he was following too close to his mommy he would not notice when she stopped and he crash right into her. Quite the birdy circus in the yard.

Here are our other young visitors, a baby white winged dove and the parent. Notice the pretty blue eye bands around the adult?

Doves are one of the most common birds in our yard.

Then a few days later, I saw this!

a mommy bird and two babies, these guys are morning doves. They are the more common type of dove in our area of Texas.

There is also a smaller Inca Dove that has black bands along the bottom of each feather. I have not gotten a picture of those in our yard yet, but I have seen them.

So how I do know all about these birds? I have a helper (notice the bird book under his arm).

Not really, his bird 'I-denty-fa-cA-si-on' book is old and basically useless unless you really don't know what you are looking at or don't need a lot of details. He loves to help though.

This is kind of a cheater picture. More just to remind me to tell the story than to actually show anything. This is taken at the back end of my garden, the gray metal thing in the picture is our gas meter, which was placed directly on the property line, making it a real pain to fence the yard. The previous owners built around the gas meter with a weird boxy addition to the fence. We chose to build over it, just leaving a cut out around the portion of the meter that sticks through. Perched on the lowest pipe of the meter is a baby mocking bird. Nope, you cannot see it from the photos. He has been sitting there for a few days and screaming so loud when his parents come to feed him. He is too small to fly yet, so he must have fallen from the nest. Really, it is a fairly safe spot for him to be. He is hidden by brush and can retreat to either side of hte fence if there is something out to get him. Well, safe except from big dumb me who nearly knocked him over the other day when I went out to investigate all the noise coming from my garden. I decided to be nice to him and not try to take too close of a photo of him.

I also had an insight into my garden visitor from last year at this time-- the baby blue heron In early May, I spotted two full grown blue herons as they flew into a tree in a neighbors yard behind our house (about 2 houses south of us). They are nesting there which explains why the barely-flying baby ended up in my garden last year.

Resources:
http://www.tpwd.state.tx.us/publications/pwdpubs/media/pwd_bk_k0700_0517.pdf

Four Egg Day?!? May 19th

2010-05-20T10:23:00.003-05:00

We have three chickens, chickens on average lay an egg every 26 hours... so basically about one per day. So far, we've had a bunch of 2 egg days, a few 3 egg days, but yesterday was a first. We had a FOUR egg day, even though we only have three chickens.

I picked up one egg before work, it is possible that this egg was laid any time between 8pm on May 17th and 8 am on May 18th. I don't think chickens lay eggs at night, but I suppose if the time is right... who knows. Then after work on May 18th, I found THREE eggs in the nest box.

Ignore the giant brown egg in the upper right corner, that is a wooden egg. It is there to remind the girls where to lay, as well as to discourage egg pecking (which we have not had an issue with yet, thankfully).

Here are the eggs with a smashing toddler hand for size comparison

Here they are in my hand after rescuing them from the toddler so you can see the pretty colors, we get a blueish-green, a true white, and a beige-y off white color.

Hooray chickens for your first four egg day.

May Garden Update

2010-05-20T08:53:00.007-05:00

My garden has felt sadly neglected this year. Last year, I was home during the months of April and May with my new baby girl so I was able to spend hours in the garden each day. This year... not so much. This has also been a screwy year for weather, a very cold, slow winter followed by hot and dry much quicker than usual. Our last snow was on March ~20 and by the end of April it was already up into the 80s and has stayed there nearly continuously since. I've been picking stuff on and off for a few weeks, nothing spectacular in quantity or size, but always of wonderful flavor.

Bad weather, neglect, lack of time, new hobbies, still the garden grows on. Here is what was happening out there in late May.

Here are the veggies I picked on May 17th, beans, squash, broccoli and dill. It weighed just a bit under a pound. I blanched (plunge them in boiling water for 3 minutes, then cool water) the veggies and we had them with dinner that night.

One of our black berry bushes is growing like crazy and is covered in berries. This ripe one was the size of my thumb, huge. I may have picked it a little bit too soon though, it was kind of tough and not at all sweet. Too bad.

I harvested the turnips on May 20th (before work, heck before sunrise!) and it was pretty obvious that my attempted kindness by not thinning them was a mistake.

The turnips that grew uncrowded were perfect orbs the size of my fist... the ones that were crowded into the unthinned areas were as small as my finger. Too bad.

I have to remember this for next year, I HAVE TO THIN THE SEEDLINGS if I want to harvest anything worthwhile. Sigh, still, there are plenty of turnips for a few meals. I'm excited to try them out tonight. Store turnips are okay, and I've never had fresh.

I cleaned out the dying peas, spent broccoli and various weeds and fed the scraps to the chickens. They were pretty excited at this bounty and quickly picked off the bugs. I"m sure these girls will have the greens down to the nubs by the time I get home from work.

The peas were a disappointment this year. I like snow peas (edible pod) but I planted garden peas. Even when they were small, the pods were tough and bitter. I'm not much on shelled peas, so another lesson learned... no garden peas next year, spend my efforts on snow peas.

I included some pretties in the garden this year, this is an Alaskan Nasturtium, it is supposed to vine to 6 feet, but so far they are only about 6 inches tall. Perhaps planting something in Texas with 'Alaska' in the name was not the best choice. Nasturtiums are edible, flower, leafs and stems. The kids and I snacked on a flower petal each the other day. Girl looked at me like I was nuts when I put the flower in my mouth, she generally gets in trouble for putting things in her mouth. Boy did not like the taste, girl ate it just for the novelty of getting to eat a flower. The flowers have a light peppery after taste, sort of tangy and a nice flowery taste at first.

This is a volunteer squash that came up near the compost pile. My volunteer last year ended up being a pumpkin that took over 1/4 of the garden to grow a single 6 inch pumpkin. I'll be more ruthless this year if it turns out this one is not producing well.

My dill is host to caterpillars again

I believe these are swallowtail butterfly caterpillars, so I'm going to share the harvest with them in the interest of having pretty bugs around. Last year, I had two caterpillars, this year, it was more like 6.

Keep munching little buddy, I'm willing to share.

My one prickly baby artichoke has turned into SIX prickly baby artichokes. I'm so impressed. I still have not picked any, I;m not sure when they are ready.

My edamame soy beans are looking good.

They have finally sprouted tiny hairy pods along their hairy stems. I'm looking forward to a good harvest since the plants are nearly covered in pods.

My squash are coming along, we harvested a yellow straight neck on May 17th and this round ball squash will be ready in a day or two.

This is my first year of growing brussel sprouts. I planted a whole row, which after sprouting was then snowed on, thawed, and snowed on again. The seedlings never did well after sprouting. I bought a single plant from a nursery and despite Caterpillar attacks, it appears to be doing well.

I can see the baby brussel sprouts along the stem. So cool!

This is the black prince tomato, it was in the earliest and also in a good sunny spot.

The other tomatoes also have fruit, but not at this size or quantity.

All of my onions are blooming, this year they are blooming without falling over, which is nice, the blooms are very pretty, like fireworks shooting up out of the garden. The onions themselves have mostly bulbed only to about golf ball to racquetball size, so I'm fairly pleased with them. The reds have not done as well as the sweet yellow onions.

The green beans are beany, purple and yellow seem to be maturing faster than the true green ones. This photo was from May 9th, so I've had a few harvests off of these plants already.

My swiss chard from last year has gone to seed, too bad, we ate very well off of those plants this spring. I have a few new chard plants that started from seed this year and one of them is doing great, one is just okay.

Broccoli, pretty good! This is my first year for growing broccoli, I planted seeds (just did okay), bought a 9 pack from Home Depot (they did well), bought 1 large plant from NorthHaven (it had a tiny head and then bloomed quickly). I've probably only harvested a few small broccoli heads, by small, I mean it the whole head was the size of a shot glass. More like a single florete than a head of broccoli. OH well, it was still fun, and definitely something I'll try again next year.

This is what broccoli looks like when it blooms, and the bees visit. See the bee mooning the camera?

Stuff without pictures...
Peppers, ugh, these guys are doing TERRIBLE. On one side half of the 9 pack I planted is dead and gone, on the north side of the garden, they are doing a bit better, but not much. I know I'll love the peppers come the hot weather, but now they are just looking terrible.

Spinach, what a disappointment. It sprouted, was small for months, then immediately bolted. I have not eaten a single garden spinach salad this year. Since spinach tends to like it cold, but not too cold... like snow on my seedlings, I'm guessing the poor performance was due to the weather this year.

Lettuce, very poor germination, very spotty growth, already bolted. Blaming it on the weather. We have not had a single garden lettuce salad this year. boo

Cauliflower, barely sprouted, then died. Weather?

Beets, very poor showing this year. Not sure why.

Carrots, not so great. I have a few that are still growing despite planting rows upon rows of carrots. Maybe next year.

So there is what is growing in my garden this May.

Homemade Deodorant-- do I stink?

2010-05-18T09:17:00.004-05:00

This is one of those things I wavered on actually publishing here. It crosses some sort of invisible line of crazy in my mind but the thing that gets me is that this stuff actually works, at least, I think it does. I don't smell myself and hubby has said I don't smell any different to him either. So it must be working.

Why... why, why homemade deodorant. Well, first off, the cheap stuff I have bought forever (Secret solid in the blue tube) has started being not-so-cheap and it stopped working very well for me. I started to notice a smell at the end of the day, and oh my if I tired to re-wear a shirt, no way. I also started to wonder about all of the crazy chemicals and metals that are in this stuff. Hubby too is very sensitive to deodorant, he has to have a special kind and even that sometimes causes him to break out. I ran across a link for homemade deodorant in a blog I read, then found another and another then just had to try it.

So since November of 2009 I have not used commercial deodorant. There, I said it, come arrest me, better yet come sniff me!

This recipe is based off of one from this website: http://littlehouseinthesuburbs.com/

Deodorant

1/4 cup baking soda
1/4 cup corn starch
~2-3 tbs coconut oil
10 drops tea tree oil

Mix it all together until it forms a very dry thick paste and then pack it into clean commercial deodorant containers.

Comments:
* Coconut oil is a solid at 76F and below, and becomes an oil at temps above that.

When I started using this deodorant in November, it was great. I was able to store the deodorant in the bathroom where I typically keep that sort of thing. Then spring in Texas happened and I noticed a small pool of oil below my deodorant container in the morning. No problem, I store it in the fridge now and just think of it as refreshingly cool...

If 76 seems a little warm to you... here is the reading on our in-house thermostat on May 13th at about 3 pm.

Yes, 83 degrees. We generally keep it at 82, but there is a 1 degree sway before the blower kicks on. Plus you can the the amazingly poor job the previous owners did when painting our house, they did not even take off the thermostat to paint, so when we replaced it with a smaller, programmable version, we ended up with a patch of white wall (which we can't paint b/c we can't match the paint perfectly--oh and we're too lazy).

*Heading into the Texas summer, I am willing to accept the fact that this stuff may not be strong enough to handle a 105 degree day and my 111 degree van after being parked in a 105 degree parking lot. We'll see. I'm totally open to going back to commercial products if they are better than what I can make for myself.

Hive Relocation--May 6th to Bells

2010-05-11T16:12:00.005-05:00

After all of the crazy bee removals, as well as two purchased bee 'nucleus' hives we'd ended up with 6 hives in our small suburban yard... too many.

On May 7th hubby and I took a day off of corporate jobs and relocated four of the hives to his mom's farm in Bells.

Our day started really early, before sunrise, we plugged up the hive entrances with window screen and loaded our four 'removal' hives (Joshua, Mesquite, Aubrey, Garland BBQ hive) into the back of our truck and got ready to head to the farm... an hour and a half drive north. Due to other schedule requirements, we were not able to make the relocation at night which would have been ideal.

After being plugged, jostled and moved, the bees were pissed. Hubby got stung on the eyelid just as we were getting ready to leave. I pulled out the stinger and took a few photos just for fun.
ouch! This definitely proves he not all that allergic to bee stings, his eyelid got puffy, but never swelled shut. (I can't believe that it is me calling an eye sting minor!) I got stung on the hand--oh oh, poor me!

We got the bees up to the farm and realized quickly just how mad these girls had gotten during their drive. The few that had gotten out of the plugged hives were mad and going after anything that moved... much to the dismay of the horse and donkey who love to run along side the truck as we drive in the pasture.

Luckily, hubby had planned ahead and had all four hives set on a pallet in the back of the truck. It was a heavy lift, but we were able to get them all off in one move. We prepped the feed jars and as quick as we could pulled out the screen plugs, stuck in the feeders and ran back to the truck.

Hubby hopped in and drove and I rode in the back to get the gates quickly. I was surprised to hear bees still buzzing me after more than 100 yards, typically, they give up after just a few yards of chase. I can't say I blame these girls, we had been pretty mean to them in our relocation effort.

The other reason for making the drive up to north Texas on a weekday was to pick up our next order of bee boxes... 5 for us, 5 for our friends and 5 for my in-laws who are now officially beekeepers too after our relocation escapades.

Here's hubby at the end of the day, more often than not, he looks like a prize fighter due to some head sting he has received. I'm not sure what it is about his big bald mug that annoys the bees so much but he has been stung on both ears and now his eyelid too.

Prize fighter after his latest round with a lightweight girl.

Notes:
Garland hive had confirmed queen and eggs on the day of relocation
Aubrey hive had un-opened queen cells visible
Joshua hive had confirmed queen and eggs
Mesquite hive had opened queen cells, but no queen was found during our inspection and no eggs. We are most worried about the strength of this hive. Worst case scenario would be that the queen had hatched and was away on her mating flight the day we did the relocation. Best case scenario is that she is there and we just missed her (and eggs) during hive inspection.

How to Bee Legal

2010-05-11T09:14:00.019-05:00

If you've been following our latest adventures you'll know that we're getting into this beekeeping thing. It seems that the government has its hand on just about every facet of our lives and beekeeping is no different.

To be a beekeeper you have to...keep bees. So the first regulation you should check is your municipal code for any regulations limiting or prohibiting bees on your property. Luckily there are none for our city. If there are for your city you might consider keeping your bees at a friends house in a city without these restrictions. Many farmers would be willing to keep them on their property (some even pay for the benifit). Or if you are one of those that are always looking for a fight, you could always rally the troops and fight city hall...

Once you're a beekeeper, you've found a location for your bees, and you have more than one hive (what self respecting beekeeper only has one hive?), you're more than likely going to have more honey than you can use. If you're like me, you probably have more honey than friends to gift it to.

What to do with all this honey and other be by products? Sell or barter with it!

Bartering honey for babysitting, veggies, or farm fresh eggs are all possibilities. NOTE: According to the IRS bartering is a taxable action ( http://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc420.html ). I don't know how to report it on a form and I'm not sure how many people they go after that barter items.

Most want to sell their honey. If you're selling 20 bottles a year to people you know, you probably don't have to worry with the rest of this...but technically you should. There is more to selling honey and bee by products than you would think.

You will need a DBA (Doing Business As) name that is registered with the county courthouse to get your tax permit. Your DBA is your business name so choose it wisely. It also seems to be the first thing you need if you really plan on getting any other permit or license; so figure your name out and get your DBA ASAP.

To get your DBA take a trip in the car to the county clerks office with several business names; in case, the one you want is taken. If you live in a small county it might not take long, if you live in Dallas county take a book with you. Cost $14-$20. ( http://www.dallascounty.org/department/countyclerk/faq-assumed.html )

The Federal tax ID or Employee Identification Number (EIN) is next on the list. Super easy to get and free!(they'll get their money from you later...)( http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/article/0,,id=97860,00.html )

While honey is a food product and (in Texas) it's not taxed; you should still get your Sales and Use Tax permit. If you plan on selling any non-food bee by products it is required and many Farmers Markets and Trade Days require one (even for just honey). ( http://www.window.state.tx.us/taxinfo/sales/ )

Food Manufacturer license is next on the list. Why do you need to have a food manufacturer’s license when it's actually the bees that manufacture the food? Umm, because the state would like to keep everyone as safe as possible... and they want their money. So $104 goes to the state to keep you safe. ( http://www.dshs.state.tx.us/foods/foodmangen.shtm , http://www.dshs.state.tx.us/fdlicense/PDF/PDFfoods/FoodMFGInitial.pdf )

The next is possibly the hardest requirement. You must extract, strain, and bottle in a commercial kitchen. To build a basic commercial kitchen could cost between $4k-5k. Not something feasible for the hobbyist or even a side business. How do you get around this??? Well, for starters there are people that have commercial kitchens that rent them out starting at about $25/hr. While $25/hr sounds a little steep, it's down right cheap compared to trying to find $5,000 and space to put the commercial kitchen. Heck, if you were worth your salt you would barter honey for the rental. ( http://www.commercialkitchenforrent.com/ )

This may seem like a lot to do an a lot of extra expense, but when it comes down to it, a little leg work and less than $200 will keep you legal and out of trouble. Beekeepers are usually a pretty reputable bunch…lets keep it that way.

Mulberry Balsamic Vinaigrette

2010-05-10T15:58:00.002-05:00

Mulberry

2 parts olive oil
1 part balsamic vinegar
1 part mulberry syrup
1/2 tsp garlic salt
1/2 tsp herbs (I used parsley, oregano, marjoram, thyme, rosemary)

Mix all ingredients in a salad dressing cruet (or any lidded jar), shake until combined. Serve over spinach salad with strawberries and pecans.

Artichoke!

2010-05-10T13:27:00.001-05:00

A full year after planting the original 3" pot, my artichoke plant has finally produced something other than prickly leaves... it made a prickly baby!

A delicious prickly baby...

This little guy gets one more day to grow before it will be harvested, boiled and eaten with drawn butter. Mmmmm

Mulberry Syrup

2010-05-10T11:55:00.004-05:00

Mulberry Syrup

This recipe was inteneded to make mulberry jam, but the jam never set up so I'm calling it syrup.

2 pounds mulberries (both ripe purple berries and unripe red or green berries)
2 pounds sugar
2 tbs lemon juice

Wash mulberries in cool water and drain. Prepare sterilized jelly jars, lids and bands if you plan to can the syrup.

Combine the berries, sugar, and lemon juice in a large sauce pot and cook over medium heat stirring constantly. It will look like entirely too much sugar at first. Use a potato masher or spoon to smash the berries.

Cook and smash until the sugar is dissolved and the berries have all been smashed, about 10 minutes.

After the berries have released their juice and the seeds and other chaff is floating on the surface of the juice, it is ready to strain.

Strain through several layers of cheese cloth, or a fresh paint strainer bag squeezing to get as much juice as possible. Return the juice to the pot and continue to cook until the syrup sheets from a spoon. Ladle into prepared jelly jars and process in a boiling water canning bath for 5 minutes. Remove from canner and listen for the pops to know the jars have sealed.

My Notes:
* My jelly never gelled so it is more like a very thick syrup, which is delicious on pancakes, french toast or in oatmeal.
*I made a second batch with Sure Gel fruit pectin, but that did not gel either.
*Internet research indicated that it might gel better if I add more sugar, but I don't want to use that much sugar. I'm happy enough with a syrup.
* I added 2 tbs mulberry syrup to my 7-up and it was delicious.

50 Ways to Eat a Mulberry

2010-05-10T11:23:00.003-05:00

There must be 50 ways to eat a mulberry...
make a jam Sam,
try it in tea Lee,
drink it as wine, B'ryn
how 'bout a vinaigrette...ummm Jet?

Okay, bear with my bad singing and botched oldies song, but I've had the song stuck in my head. I'm also looking for ideas on what to do with my latest find... tons of Mulberries!

About two blocks down from our house on our typical walk path is an empty home that has three huge mulberry trees in the front yard. Each year, we have to alter our walks to avoid the messy side walk for the month or so that the mulberries are ripe.

Even the street is stained with the purple mulberry juice. This year is different though, rather than avoiding it, the old house is the destination of our walks. Gardening is fun for me, cooking is fun for me, and eating is my favorite thing, so what could be better than free food from a tree that I didn't have to plant and I don't have to maintain? Jackpot!

Every night for the last several days, boy and I have been loading our gear into the wagon and walking down to the old house on the corner to pick mulberries. On Mother's day, I was able to con daddy and little girl into joining us to take some pictures of the process.

Mulberries are very delicate fruit with a shape similar to that of a blackberry, only smaller. They are rarely seen commerically because they are so fragile and explode with the slightest touch. Even the act of picking up a mulberry will stain your fingers. So hand picking is tedious and not really worth it, but there is an easy way to get lots of these little yummies.

I spread out an old sheet and use a hoe or other long object to whack the branches and knock down the berries into the sheet. Once most of the ripe berries are cleared from that branch, we relocate the sheet and repeat the process.

Every few branches, I carefully gather up the edges of the sheet and dump the berries into my bucket.

Boy and I are able to gather about 2 pounds of berries in less than 20 minutes each night.

Well, we bring home 2lbs of berries, we harvest a lot more than that but they somehow disappear... somewhere around a happy purple-faced little boy.

With Daddy there to help, we were able to gather six pounds of mulberries! Girl 'helps' by remaining contained in the wagon and shouting at brother to feed her berries.

So there must be 50 ways to eat a mulberry, I just have not found them all yet. Stay tuned for my recipes and uses for mulberries.. other than shoving delicious handfuls of them into your mouth.

Yummy!

Pasture Plant Identification-- Part 1. Bells, Texas

2010-05-04T10:58:00.008-05:00

One of my goals for this year is to learn more about the wild plants around me. I would like to be able to identify at a glance all of the common wild plants I see in this area of Texas. Once I know what they are, I can start to research which ones are useful for foods or herbal medicines. This has been an idea of mine for quite some time now, and I even have a few wild plant identification books I've collected... but it has never worked out. I never remember to actually bring the books with me. So I'm trying this a new way... We visited family this weekend and I took my camera out for a walk into the pasture. While dodging crazy golf cart drivers, sloppy dogs, and miniature equines, I was able to snap pictures of many of the wild plants common to that area of North Texas. Now, I'll use the power of google to try and identify them.

Pink Evening Primrose (Oenothera speciosa)

These are the most profuse flower in the pasture. The blooms on these pretty flowers range from almost white to dark pink and seemed to do best in areas the horses preferred to hang out... They are called evening primrose because the blooms open as the sun sets, in this case, it was a cloudy day so the blooms were out in full force. Plus, the whole plant (flower, leaves, root and seedpod) is edible. I read that young seedpods can be steamed and are a good source of gamma linolenic acid (said to help with PMS symptoms)

These plants are very branched and grow 1-3 feet tall, although often they lie near the ground. Leaves are 2-3 inches long with slightly wavy edges. Flowers have four white to pink petals. The primrose thrives in disturbed areas, such as roadsides. (2)

Prairie Purple Verbena (Glandularia bipinnatifida)

With a black swallowtail butterfly visiting. I can't find any reference to Vebena being anything but an ornamental, but I did find that it is in the same family as teak, which is used for marine wood applications.

The plant is hairy, branched, and somewhat prostrate, reaching 6-18 inches in length. The leaf is divided into several lobes that are 1/2 to 2 inches long. The flowers are in terminal spikes, five-lobed, tubular, and about 1/2 wide. The color is purple or lilac. The plants prefer rocky limestone soil. (2)

Daisy Fleabane (Erigeron strigosus)

Erect plants growing up to 2.5 ft. tall. The flowers resemble miniature daisies. Leaves are less than 1 in. wide, with the stalked basal leaves in a circular cluster at the stem base. Flowers are on individual branches in a spreading cluster. (2)

Has been used in the tea form as a diuretic and a medicine for digestive ailments. Essential oil from Daisy Fleabane can be used to relieve bronchitis and cystitis. When burned the plant may keep insects away. (ref 3)

Prairie Parsley (Polytaenia nuttallii or Lomattium foeniculaceum)

Plants grow to 3 ft. tall and have thick, alternate, compound leaves. Leaves have several segments, each of which is divided or lobed. Pale yellow flowers are in umbrella-like clusters near the top of the plant. (2)

I did not find any references saying this was edible, but did find several potentially poisonous plants that looked similar. So no nibbling here for me.

Plantian (Plantago major -broad leafed and Plantago lanceolata -narrow leafed)

The photo is of the narrow leafed plantian, broad leafed plantain also grows here but I don't think I got a photo.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plantago

I'm probably most excited to find this plant in the pasture. As an herb this thing is considered a cure all and the Indian name for Plantain translates to 'life medicine" Crushed leaves (chew one up) are placed on bee stings or other bug bites for relief. Whole plant is good for its medicinal properties. Other notes: All of the plantains contain a high level of tannin and the seeds have a high mucilage content. The astringent property of the leaves due to the tannin makes the leaves useful for all types of sores on the skin, cuts, bites and various inflammations. A tea brewed with the seeds is a treatment for diarrhea and dysentery and for bleeding in the mouth or other mucous membranes.

(4), (5), (6), (7)

Green Milkweed Asclepias viridis

This one has all kinds of conflicting information on the web, edible, not edible, good for herbal cures or poisonous... I'll play on the safe side and NOT EAT IT. All sources say the sap can treat warts and poison ivy. The fluff from the milkweed pods was used during WWII to stuff life vests and has better insulating properties than goosedown. It is also a good fire starter. Milkweed is favored by the monarch butterfly caterpillar. (2) (8)

Common Horsenettle (Solanum carolinense)

I grew up calling this nasty thing stinging nettle because one brush of the spiny stem and it feels like you've been stung by a bee.

The plant has large concentrations of solanine which is a toxic alkaloid. Has fruit which may not be poinsionous when ripe...again, not gonna try it. The juice of the fruit has been used topically to treat mange in dogs. The fruit could be a sedative or anti spasmodic.
(9)

Blue Eyed Grass (Sisyrinchium)

possible laxative use.

Common Yarrow/Wooly Yarrow

Can be used as a remedy for colds, can be used to stop the flow of blood from a wound or nosebleed. Astringent tea made from yarrow is good for skin care and as a hair conditioner.

(10)

Yellow Sweet Clover Melilotus officinalis

excellent for honey bees, good green manure cover crop, can be dangerous to cattle if allowed to go moldy in hay.

Poison Ivy Toxicodendron radicans

Leaves of three, leave it be! Causes itcy rash, very common across US. Grows along fence rows and at the edges of shady cover

False Dandelion Pyrrhopappus grandiflorus

Totally edible and less bitter than true dandelion. It has fuzzy leaves (also called cat's ear) and a solid stem (true dandelion has hollow stem)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catsear

American Pokeweed Phytolacca

Whole plant is potentially poisonous, but young leaves can be boiled with frequent water changes and eaten. Poke Salad was common dish in the south. Grated pokeweed root was used by Indians to treat inflamationand rashes. Berries yield a red ink dye used by indians to decorate their horses. Pokeberry ink was used during the civil war and the ink is still visible in letters. Pokewee is a food source for the giant lepord moth larvae.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pokeweed

I have more photos, but this is about it for my excitement level on this project right now.

Resources:
1) Ladybird Johnson Wildflower Center http://www.wildflower.org

2) http://www.okprairie.com/Flowers.htm

3) http://www.nativetech.org/plantgath/daisy.htm

4)http://www.altnature.com/gallery/plantain.htm

5) http://www.prairielandherbs.com/plantain.htm

6) http://www.2bnthewild.com/plants/H150.htm

7) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plantago

8) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asclepias

9) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solanum_carolinense
10) http://www.altnature.com/gallery/yarrow.htm

Pasture Plant Identification, part II

2010-05-04T10:29:00.011-05:00

Wild Blackberry or Southern Dewberry R. trivialis, many varieties

Spiny stems will eventually have yummy blackberries if we can beat the birds to the harvest. Infusion of roots and leaves can be taken internally to treat diarrhea and rheumatism, used externally to treat hemorrhoids. Infusion can be combined with honey to sooth sore throats. Leaves can be used as a tea to regulate urination (what the heck does that mean?) Inner bark can be used as an eye wash to treat eye infections

Ragweed A. artemisiifolia

Don't let the pretty leaves fool you, this little plant is the main cause of allergy attacks for many people. Each plant is reported to produce a billion grains of pollen over a season. Blooms July - August or until cold weather appears (hmm, that means December in Texas!) Pollen will clump in humidity over 70% and have less impact on hayfever sufferers. This plant is native to the US and is now found in every area and pollen has even been found 400 miles out to sea. Bees visit this plant for pollen and ragweed pollen has been identified as a component of most honey. This could help to build up a resistance to ragweed as an allergen.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ragweed

Indian Paintbrush Castilleja

These are a very common Texas spring plant, often popping up with bluebonnets. Flowers are edible and sweet, but the roots and leaves may be toxic due to a high Selenium content. The Chippewa Indians made a hairwash from this plant that made their hair glossy and full bodied. Since there are only a few of these growing, I figure we'll get more pleasure from looking at them than from eating them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castilleja

Great Blue Lobelia Lobelia siphilitica L.

Potential cure for respiratory complaints. When chewed, tastes similar to tobacco and has similar effects to those of nicotine, used in some anti smoking products. Also causes nausea and vomiting and was used by Indians to cure bad whiskey habits. Wow, no thanks!
http://www.altnature.com/gallery/Blue_Lobelia.htm

Wild Mustard Sinapis arvensis

Seeds can be used as a spice just like cultivated mustard. From the same family as cabbage and brussel sprouts. Can be irritating to the skin and used to increase circulation.

Dock (Rumex)

possible laxative. Leaves can be used to treat sings from nettles. Related to rhubarb. Washed dock root can be mashed and mixed with honey to treat wounds.

Oxalis Clover, wood sorrel

Edible with a sour lemony taste. Can potentially use in place of lemon to curdle milk for cheeses. Don't eat too much because the oxalic acid can be dangerous.

http://wildpicnic.blogspot.com/2009/07/wood-sorrel-oxalis-acetosella.html

White Clover Trifolium repens

A good cover crop/green manure--like yellow clover, used in folk medicine agasint gout. Indians made a white clover leaf tea for coughs and colds. Survival food, high in protein, can be used fresh in a salad or boiled. Dried flowerheads and seeds can be made into a flour.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trifolium_repens

Horsemint, Lemon Bee Balm Monarda citriodora

I'm pretty sure this is the horsemint plant prior to blooming. Antiseptic properties released in alcohol for skin infections and minor wounds.

Hedge Parsley/Sticker burrs Torilis arvensis

The fruit have little hairs like velcro that stick to clothing and pets. Evasive spreading plant with no edible uses listed.

I still need to identify these:

Hard Candy--Mexican Mint Marigold

2010-05-04T08:29:00.001-05:00

My MIL has a huge row of Mexican Mint Marigold growing along her privacy fence. The row stretches about 40 feet with plant clumps every 1 foot. She has told me many times to bring some plants home, try it, try it, I hear they make candy from it in Mexico... can be used instead of Tarragon in cooking... so finally this weekend. I did.

Mexican Mint Marigold Hard Candy

Step 1: Herbal Tea infusion
1 large handful/bunch of Mexican Mint Marigold (or any herb), stems and all (about 3/4 cup)
1 cup water

Boil water. Meanwhile, use cool water to rinse surface dirt from the herbs. Unless the herbs are really dirty, be very quick with the rise, you don't want to wash off the tasty plant oils. Put herbs into a heat proof bowl and pour hot water over the herbs. Cover the bowl and allow to steep for 15 minutes to 1 hour. Scoop out the herbs, strain if necessary, reserving the liquid. Remeasure the tea and add water to equal 1 cup total liquid.

Step 2: Hard Candy
1 cup herbal tea infusion (see step 1)
2 tbs corn syrup
1/2 cup granulated sugar
candy thermometer
1 tsp powered sugar for dusting the finished candy--optional, but prevents sticking

Prepare cooling dish by spreading silpat pan liner or wax paper onto a cookie sheet.
In a small saucepan over low heat, boil the herbal tea, corn syrup and granulated sugar, stirring constantly until temperature reaches 280°F, or soft crack stage. About 35 minutes.

Immediately pour onto prepared cooling dish and allow to cool. When cool, break into bite sized pieces and dust with powered sugar.

**Common sense warning** only use herbs that you know have not been sprayed with pesticides, because illness and death is not a nice side effect when you want to enjoy a piece of candy.

Options and hints:

* For evenly sized pieces, use a large flat bladed knife to press score lines into the candy as it cools. This works best after the candy has cooled for about 10 minutes and has formed a skin across the surface.

* Neatly placed drops of hot candy across the cooling dish also make great smooth edged lozenges.

* It is possible to make lozenges by rolling the partially cooled candy into balls. This is very tricky, it requires the exact perfect temperature of the candy. It looks great if you can get it just right.
*This recipe can be used with any herb to make candy. Horehound candy was the basis for this recipe, but I have modified it to make rosemary candy, homemade mint candy, etc.
*If using a herb for its medicinal and not flavor properties, 1-2 drops of food grade wintergreen oil can be added at the end of the cooking time to improve flavor.

The original recipe came from a Martha Stewart Living Magazine in March 1999 and has been well used and modified by me ever since.

Pollination without a Pollinator

2010-05-03T11:20:00.004-05:00

With bees now such a wonderful part of our lives, I hope that in my garden and all of my future gardens, this will never be an issue, but occasionally there is a real need for pollination without a pollinator.

My dad called me the other day with a plant question (I do love being the family expert in this sort of thing). His four tomato plants were blooming like crazy, but the blooms were dropping off without making any fruit. After a nice chat on the phone I was able to get the details and leave him with a plan of action.

Three potential problems
1) Nutrients-- tomatoes need a well balanced soil diet to be able to fruit well. Dad's were planted in Miracle Grow Veggie mix, so this was probably not his issue. Proper nutrients can be achieved organically, but it is a lot trickier than just using the bagged mix.
2) Pests-- his plants did not appear bug damaged and Dad's ravenous local deer have not been bold enough to climb onto the deck to eat... yet.
3) Pollination-- This is the most likely cause. To form a fruit, the male pollen must be moved into the female parts of the flower. Normally, pollination is carried out by insects like our beloved honey bee and many others; however, sometimes this does not happen effectively and fruit will not form.

This is not a tomato, but you can see the small fruit forming at the base of the female squash flower--different plant, same concept.

Solution: my dad had to "Be the Bee". I suggested he use a small paint brush (or q-tip) and poke around gently into each flower with the same brush. This has to be repeated for each flower on each plant--easy enough if you have just a few plants. I also suggested his do this a few times each day for several days to ensure that he gets the pollen to the right parts of the flower when it is ready. Eventually, with luck, a few of the flowers will be properly pollinated and fruit will form. Unfortunately, unless some local bees discover his tomato plants, he'll have to hand pollinate for each tomato he hopes to harvest this year.

Results:(this is a direct email from my dad, and yes, this is EXACTLY where I get my awful sense of humor--please understand that as you read this potentially disgusting email string from father to daughter...)

Subject: We're Pregnant
Hi Sandra my Sandra:
We've conceived!
I have two tiny green tomatoes on my smallest plant.
The other three are growing beautifully but only flowers no tomatoes.
I followed your advice; put on yellow and black stripped shirt and pants, flapped my arms, put a little brush in my mouth and made a continuous buzzzzing sound as I danced around each plant.
Love
Dadeeezzzzz

So this is a case in point of why bees are so crucial to our food supply. Without bees, my dads four small tomato plants were not setting fruit. He was able to remedy this with a very hands-on-approach and was successful in getting some tomatoes to set fruit. In my home garden I have 23 tomato plants, no way do I want to be out there with a tiny paint brush hand pollinating for each fruit I hope to harvest--it is possible, but not practical. Then imagine the massive scale of acres upon acres of tomatoes in a commercial field, it would be impossible for humans to hand pollinate on such a huge scale.

This is exactly why the survival of the honeybee is so important to all of us.

Go get 'em girls!

Solar-Oven Chicken and Rice

2010-04-30T11:00:00.004-05:00

Pretty, huh? The chicken was delicious, moist and fall off the bone tender. The rice however was a mushy mess. I probably need to use a sturdier rice grain next time. I used plain old short grain white rice this time (not quick cook, we don't even own any quick cook rice). I also sliced up two zucchini and they were just okay. The chicken was definitely the star of this dish.

Solar Oven Chicken and Rice

3 chicken thighs, 3 chicken legs
salt, pepper, paprika, garlic salt, Lawry's seasoning
1 cup rice
1 cup water
2 sliced zucchini

Put rice and water at the bottom of a covered baking dish. Arrange sliced zucchini over the top of rice. Arrange chicken pieces over the zucchini and season. Cover and place in solar oven.

Cooking time will vary. I put this out in the solar oven at about 11 am and pointed the oven at where the sun would be at 2-3pm. When I got home at 5, I reoriented the oven (it was still at ~225F) and let it heat back up to 300. I used a clear glass baking dish and covered it with a dark dishtowel to help minimize heat reflection out of the oven.

This was my first time at purchasing 'humanely raised, organic, hand cut' chicken from a local store. Most of the time we buy the big bags of pre-frozen chicken breasts from Sams (with sodium broth-and who knows what else-added), or we use fresh chicken which we have butchered ourselves--kind of a leap from one to the other right? I have found that with our home butchered and organic chicken from sprouts, I have to add a lot more salt to get the meat to taste right. I'm guessing it will take some time to re-calibrate my taste buds from being used to broth infused chicken breast to all natural chicken.

The most amazing part is that this meal cooked with zero electricity, gas, or other fuel which requires a monthly bill. This whole meal was cooked in my solar oven, using only the heat of the spring time sunshine. How great is that?

Bee Removal--Aubrey 4-29-2010

2010-04-30T10:16:00.004-05:00

Our kids are spending the weekend with their grandparents, so hubby and I had the rare chance at a date night... so what did we do after dropping off the kids? Romantic candle light dinner? Theater? Dancing? Drinks? Go to bed early and enjoy a quite house? No, no, no, nope.
Here's a clue... check out my elegant attire for the evening...

How about driving 60 miles to eat some fast food and do another bee removal? Yep.

This hive was near Aubrey and had been there for about four years. The bees had made their home inside the siding of a wooden shop building.

As the sun set, we fired up the bee vac and started to catch as many of the bees as we could. This was our first time to do an extraction just my hubby and I.
Lucky for us, the siding pried off very easily to reveal the bees home.

This comb was built across the lenght of the wall joists as well, very pretty and new looking comb with gobs of bees.

At the bottom of the wall cavity was some older comb which had clearly broken off and fallen from above

Wait, who's that working the vacuum?

Yep, me! It was amazing to see the inside of the hive like that. The bees were hanging in sheets on the comb. I could have scooped them off by the bucketfull. I had no idea that there were so many bees involved when the guys did one of these removals. It was truly an amazing thing to see. There was a lot of brood and a lot of drone cells

The comb was stacked about three layers deep in the wall cavity

I kept feeling Curtis brush my back and legs and asked what he was doing. Turns out I was just covered in bees and I totally did not care.

This is not a great picture of me, but there is a bee on my bonnet right in front of my nose. I ended up getting stung once when I crushed a bee under my arm, it hurt pretty bad for just a few minutes and then I could not even point to where the sting was. Completely unlike a wasp sting (which make me cry for days)

The hive was located in one 16 inch section between the building joists; however we had to remove the adjoining two sections to catch all the bees.

All clean.

this is the back of my minivan on it's first bee removal. Packed full of sticky coolers and a giant box of buzzing bees.

Once we got home, we placed the new brood box and super then removed the bee vac components-- lots of bees!

Hubby did not seem as impressed as me, but this sees like the most bees we have seen yet.

We had to smoke them very heavily to try and get them to move down into the hive body.

These girls ended up with a brood box and super filled with bees. Due to all of the bees, we were not able to add back as much of the brood comb as we have for the other hives. I hope they will be okay.

Here is the cooler full of comb from our adventure in Aubrey

One other note... the homeowner mentioned seeing a swarm of bees in one of her trees a few years back. She said it was there for a day or two and then dissappeared... gee I wonder where it went?

Bee Removal--Farmers Branch April 28, 2010

2010-04-30T09:52:00.004-05:00

The guys got to enjoy a short drive to get bees on Wednesday night. A man in Farmers Branch, just about a mile from our house, called to say he had a hive of bees in his garage.

Here's hubby, rockin' the shorts and mud boots look.

Like many of the other removals, the bees had found their way into a wall. Unlike the other removals, the bees had built their comb across the width of the wall joist (about 16 inches across) instead of perpendicular to it (about 6 inches wide. This meant some enormous comb sheets.

There was a decent amount of brood in this very dark comb, and the guys were able to secure about 2 frames worth for the bees.

In addition to the cooler full of brood comb, there was also a cooler full of honey.

Since this hive was originally located so close to our house, the guys made the call to keep the hive at our friends house (which would be about 4 miles away from the original hive. Bees can forage from 2 to 2.5 miles away from their hive so it is very possible that had we kept these bees at our home, they would have just wandered back to their old garage... probably not what the homeowner had in mind.

Wax Melting Part II

2010-04-29T14:05:00.004-05:00

Well, more lessons learned... as I was writing my Wax Melting Part I post, I updated what I did along with my comments on what I should have done and boy am I still learning. One big mistake was to use my favorite green mixing bowl to melt wax into...

Here is the wax after day 2 in the solar oven. This time I left the glass door closed, but not latched.

The wax had all melted through and left a pile of sludge on the paper towel.

Here is a side view of the paper towel and bowl.

The paper towel was completely saturated with wax and the wax had also dripped onto the floor of the solar oven, quite a messy process and potentially very dangerous if you you were trying to melt wax in a real oven.

I tore off the paper towel and began to see the mistake of using my favorite bowl... bits of waxy towel stuck everywhere

As the wax began to cool and solidify, it followed a very interesting pattern, almost like a honeycomb shape during the cooling.

I am sure there is some scientific explanation for this, but how amazing to watch.

I allowed the wax to fully cool and then poked it out of the bowl. It formed a pretty disk about 6 inches in diameter and about 8mm thick (yes, I'm an engineer and I mix units. Big things I measure in English units, tiny things I measure in Metric, it works for me. Even more confusing is that for my job I work with temperature daily, but always in Centigrade. For all of my at-home purposes, I think in Fahrenheit)

So, back to my favorite bowl... wax is basically waterproof, so I could not wash it out, it did not pick out completely, would not scrape out... my poor bowl sat on the counter for two days with bits of wax and waxy paper towel stuck to it until I was able to put it back in the solar oven to heat back up. I then used a clean paper towel to wipe off the melted wax. It took a few repeats before the bowl was clean again. Phew, I sure missed my favorite mixing bowl, and I was not the only one. I overheard hubby teaching the boy how to make brownies: "Step one, you get the green mixing bowl..."

For a family who uses maybe 1 roll of paper towels every quarter, this has been a very wasteful experiment, towels to filter through, towels to clean up with, not to mention all of that wasted wax. I've found plans for a large scale solar melter, considering we now have a cooler and two 5 gallon buckets filled with comb, plus the guys went on a removal last night, we are going on a bee removal tonight and have one booked for tomorrow as well. Busy season, but lots of bees and lots of wax.

Bee Removal--Mesquite April 21, 2010

2010-04-22T10:22:00.009-05:00

I got to attend my first bee removal with the guys last night. At sunset we drove to Mesquite. Before arriving, we had been told the bees were in a shed and had been there for about 7 years. The man later told me that he's been through 4 different pool service companies because they refuse to come back after their workers get stung the first few times, yikes! The homeowner has plans to tear down the shed in the next few weeks so he had no problem with us ripping out the floor to get at the hive.

Here is the shed, it was a small wooden shed with a wooden floor joists, the bees had made their home under the floor in a corner of the shed.

There was a lot more gear involved in the bee removal than I ever thought possible. Two bee vacs, two boxes of equipment, a circular saw, lights, extension cords, pry bars, hoses... but they seemed to use most of the gear they brought

The guys got suited up and began to pull up the floor.

There were no where near as many bees as I expected in and around the hive, the guys too said that there were not as many bees as they usually saw.

Unfortunately, since the hive was built under the floor of the shed, the comb was stuck down into the dirt and rocks and was very dirty to pull out. You can see how the comb has been attached to the dirt--which pulled up when we pulled up the floor.

As they removed sections of flooring, the guys used the bee vac to suck up any bees they saw.

This picture is sad, you can see the honey pooling on the floor and dirt stuck all over the comb. Due to the old flooring and weird hive location, it was nearly impossible to remove any of the comb without damaging it.

The hive and comb covered an area of about 5 feet by 2 feet under the floor. Most of the comb was clearly very old and dark in color.

As they removed each piece of comb, they were careful to vacuum off any bees.

Under the next section of floor, farthest from the bee entrance there was some newer comb, but it had not been filled yet.

The guys are very methodical and efficient in their work. It was fun to watch them deconstruct the hive

We loaded the comb into coolers for the ride home.

There was one nasty surprise... a dead cat that had been there a long long time. Hubby was down on his stomach reaching under a shelf to suck up more bees when he looked over he saw this

Well, hubby said it worse than that, that is just fur--apparently the dead cat was making quite a face too-- but I was not willing to get down close enough for a good shot.

We left Mesquite at about 11 that night and headed home to handle the other part of a bee extraction.

Proof I was there!

We ended up with two coolers full of comb and the bee vac had a lot more bees than the guys expected. Like the last few extractions, hubby tried to wire the brood comb to the bee hive frames, but this comb was too narrow to do it very neatly. Still, the hive got about 4 frames of brood returned to them and I also set out the honey comb for them to clean today. I've read that it is bad beekeeper practice to give bees honey when there is more than one hive nearby, but we did not have many other options.

My first night of bee removal was a success. Mostly I just took pictures, but I was there in the middle of the extraction with bees crawling all over me and it was very neat to see. Only one sting for any of us... hubby got stung on his finger when he was taking his hat off.

Later today, I'll try to figure out what to do with all of the excess comb. I expect the bees will have completely cleaned the combs I left out for them. The honey had a sharp twang to it that I do not like, so we won't be extracting any honey from this hive. I learned that some of the spring flowers have strong unplesant tastes in honey, primarily wisteria.

Orange Cashew Chicken Recipe

2010-04-21T13:47:00.002-05:00

Orange Cashew Chicken (loosely based on recipe from Taste of Home Magazine)

• 1 pound boneless skinless chicken breasts, cut into 1-inch cubes (I generally use less chicken and more veggies)
• 2 medium carrots, sliced
• 2 zucchini sliced
• 1 chopped onion
• 1 head broccoli florets
• Any other veggies that are in the fridge (green beans, peas, frozen corn, mushrooms, celery, pineapple etc)
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 2 tablespoons cornstarch
• 1/4 teaspoon ground ginger
• ½ teaspoon garlic powder
• 1 cup chicken broth
• 1/4 cup orange marmalade (could also use honey for non-orange flavor)
• 3 tablespoons soy sauce
• 1/4 to 1/2 cup salted cashews
• 2 tablespoons sesame seeds
• Hot cooked rice

Directions
• In a large skillet or wok, stir-fry the chicken in oil for 8-10 minutes or until chicken is no longer pink. Remove chicken and cook the veggies, carrot and onion first, then add softer veggies. Add chicken back to pan and reduce heat.
• In a small bowl, combine the cornstarch, ginger, garlic powder, chicken broth, marmalade and soy sauce until blended. Stir into chicken mixture. Bring to a boil; cook and stir for 2 minutes or until thickened. Stir in cashews, sprinkle with sesame seeds. Serve with rice.

-If you like really sweet stuff (like honey and orange marmalade are not enough) you can add a few tablespoons of maraschino cherry juice to the sauce. It turns it into a pretty pink color and tastes a lot like Sweet and Sour chicken, especially if you add pineapples to the stir fry. I’m generally not big on sweet meats, but my family loves it.
-I cook up a huge batch of this each time I make it, we eat the leftovers for lunch the next day.

Wax Melting Part I

2010-04-21T11:25:00.003-05:00

One day of research and one day to start. I'm turning into my hubby with how quickly I'm moving on these projects. Generally, I'm much more the wait-and-think-about-it type and he is the jump-in-and-do-it type.

Tuesday morning was mostly clear so I decided to try my hand at wax melting in my solar oven. I can't say sunny, because when I get started in the mornings, the sun is not even up yet...

I had a jar of beeswax and a small bit of honey left over from my honey extraction this weekend.

On Monday, I had dumped the jar of wax on a tray and let the bees clean it of all residual honey. I stirred the tray a few times to give them access to all portions of the wax. After a day in the bee yard, the wax was mostly clean of honey.

I put the wax in my cheese cloth lined colander and put that in a big bowl and ran cool water over it to further clean the wax.

After reading warning after warning online about keeping beeswax away from your sink, I was extra careful to catch all of the drained water from the wax.

If this waxy water had gone down the drain, I'm sure it would have caused all sorts of clogging problems in the future.

I filled the bowl with water and swished the colander around to rinse the wax. I used the bowl of rinse water to water my garden outside. It took three rinses before the water in the rinse bowl was clear. I was shocked with how cloudy the first few rinses were, the water was a murky yellow white color.

I then prepared my wax melting jig. I filled my favorite mixing bowl with a few inches of water and got a roll of strong shop towels and a rubber band.

I spread one towel over the top of the bowl and held it in place with a rubber band.

The rubber band was from the last batch of asparagus I bought, those bands are so useful around the kitchen.

I put the bowl on a tray to catch any wax drippings. (hindsight note 1: I used an aluminum cookie sheet, which it turns out was not the best idea because I think it ended up reflecting too much light out of the sun oven.)

The cleaned wax was piled on to the paper towel. Up close you can see the flaked structure of the wax. When the bees create wax, they link together in long chains of bees and it is under this tension on their bodies that they are able to create the tiny plates of wax. These plates are joined together by the bees to form the hexagonal honey comb that we typically see.

I rigged up the solar oven in the garden. Beeswax melts at 145°F and my sun oven has gotten over 300F, so I had to control the heat to prevent overheating the wax. I am not sure the flash point of wax, probably not 300F... but I wanted to be safe.

To keep the temperature low, I used a stick to prop open the door a bit. (hindsight note 2: The door was propped open WAAAY too much. hindsight note 3: the bees smelled the wax and honey and with the open door were all over the wax when I got home, luckily, the temps were so low that I did not cook any bees)

I locked the garden and headed off to work for the day.

Ten hours later... nothing!

The oven door was propped open far too much. I quickly relocated the oven to the last sunny spot in the yard and closed the door. This was at about 6 pm.

With the door closed, the oven quickly got up to 150F, just above the melting point of wax.

I started to see some melting, and the paper towel was now soaked with wax, but it was just not melting as quickly and I knew it should. This is when I realized that the aluminum cookie sheet was reflecting the sun away from the wax.

I replaced the cookie sheet with a dark brown plate and the oven temp quickly rose up to 200F and the top layers of wax started to melt.

Unfortunately, this all happened as the last rays of sun were dropping below the rooftops of our neighborhood so my first wax melt was left incomplete.

In the last hour of good sun and higher oven temps, I got a few drops of beautiful golden wax in the collection bowl below.

as soon as the wax came out of the oven, the bees were buzzing around. Much to the amusement of the locals...

That is wax melting part I, not quite complete. Today is another sunny day and the wax is melting away... I hope.

Portirat of Crazy

2010-04-21T10:53:00.005-05:00

Hubby snapped a picture last night that pretty well summarizes most of the crazy stuff we do, so here is my portirat of craziness (not just me, but the guy taking the photo too).

Wax Melting Research

2010-04-19T13:22:00.007-05:00

As a side product of all of these bee extractions, we have quite a bit of excess comb in our posession. Below is my research for what to do with all of this excess comb. These are my notes taken from a variety of sites on the web, my favorites are noted in the resources at the bottom of the page.

General:
-segregate wax for color. Pure white comb with no propolis is most desirable.

-dark wax will not hurt the bees but it is not as desirable for purchase due to personal preferences.
Dark comb

Medium comb

Light comb
Really light comb (on top of really dark comb)

I also have some that was pure white, never used. I don't have a photo, apparently, this is very desireable for wax. When the bees first make the wax, it is a pure white almost opaque color. As they walk across the surface of the comb, their feet dirty it with propolis causing it to darken in color. I also read that brood comb is lined with a substance that causes darkening of the wax, as it is used over and over it continues to darken. This is definitely true for the comb we have seen, brood combe is much darker in color.

--old black comb melts poorly with very little resulting wax (still gonna try it!)
--store wax in the freezer to prevent wax moths (space issue?)

Melting:
--wash wax to remove honey--do not dump rinse water in sink!
-Beeswax melts at 145°F
--Beeswax is pliable at 100°F
-Beeswax is highly flammable.
-Comb can be put in a burlap bag and boiled, melted wax escapes and floats to the top of the water, then solidifies after cooling. This method produces wax with inclusions and not usually of a pretty color. Probably good for huge quantities.
-First melting. Put a paper towel over a bowl of water and rubber band it into place. Put balls of wax on top of the paper towels and allow to melt. The wax will filter through the paper towels and drip into the bowl below. A black slum will remain on the paper towel.

Filtering
- Silk is best for final filtering of clean melted wax

Wax block for competition
-8x8 inch brownie pan, 2-3 lbs of wax, no more than 2 inches thick
-place the container of melted wax in a bowl of warm water to allow for slow cooling and prevent cracking
-vibration or air current could cause waves in surface of drying wax

Resources:
http://beekeeperlinda.blogspot.com

Sweet Rewards

2010-04-19T11:24:00.004-05:00

As a side product of hubby's bee extraction on Saturday, we brought a small section of capped honey comb on a plate to snack on in the house. We love to take a spoonful of wax and honey and chew it like gum. My mom was in town--she watched the kids for us during our bee class and I wanted to share some with my mom. As I dumped the comb into a jar for her I had the idea to see what was left in the cooler outside. Jackpot!

We ended up with a cooler partially full of honey comb and wax.

I cut the comb into small section to fit inside half quart wide mouth canning jars

I was careful to only grab the prettiest of the newly capped honey.

I ended up with seven jars of comb, but they looked kind of lonely there...

So I lined my sieve with cheese cloth and took the not so pretty honey comb and squeezed out the rest of the honey into the sieve.

Depending on the age of the comb, the wax formed a neat ball (for older comb)

or crumbled (new comb)

Ooey gooey fun!

I smashed up all of the capped, but not so pretty comb and allowed the honey to seep out and strain through the cheese cloth.

As the honey collected at the bottom of the bowl, I'd pour it out into the jars over the comb honey.

At the end of the process I had seven half quart jars of honey and comb as well as a jelly and half jelly jar.

Left in the sieve was the wax crumbles

Which I put into a jar of their own and I plan to melt down to make beeswax blocks for some later craft project.

Everything that was left was given to the bees for them to reclaim for their own stores. The neat thing about bees is how efficiently they will lick every drop of honey from something. It was nearly impossible to scrape all of the extra honey from our colander, but after just an hour out by the bees, it was completely clear of honey and ready to be washed.

Bee Class--April 17th, 2010

2010-04-19T10:43:00.003-05:00

Hubby and I have been taking a bee keeping class from a local beekeeper and president of the Collin County Beekeepers association. We attend a four hour class one Saturday per month since January. As a part of the class, we were each able to buy our own bee nuc and get to visit it in the bee yard prior to bringing it home.

This class was the first time we were able to actually get suited up and out into the bee yard.

This is me all suited up in full bee gear. This was also the first time I have been actively involved in getting inside a hive.

We got the smokers all fired up.

Unfortunately, we did not bring the camera with us into the bee yard. It would have been easy to do, but we were not sure how busy we'd be and if we'd both need our hands free.

During the time in the bee yard, I was able to open and inspect a hive for the first time. I was amazed at how calm and gentle the bees were, even with 6 humans poking around in their home. Mostly, the bees just clung to the frames and completely ignored our intrusion.

My biggest milestone of the day was that I removed by elbow length bee gloves and was able to grab and hold a drone bee with my bare hands, hubby did too. Drone bees do not have stingers, so this was a fairly safe adventure. Still, we were the first of the class group to remove our gloves and go glove less inside the hive. We noticed that all of the instructors and helpers were not wearing gloves, so this was not all that impressive except that we are newbies to the game.

We inspected the hives that were set up for us. The first hive (which hubby claimed...) we were able to find the queen and lots of new eggs quickly. Our second hive (which hubby said was mine) did not have a visible queen, had queen cells built into the comb and did not have any visible eggs... not a good sign. We alerted the instructors and they will tend to the hive later this week to ensure that I get a good strong bee nucleus to bring home next week.

We were also able to have the queen in the first hive marked with a bright blue dot on her abdomen to make her easier to find in the future.

Hubby out until 4am and came home with lots of girls?!?

2010-04-19T09:04:00.005-05:00

Bee Removal--Joshua, Texas April 16, 2010

Good thing the 'girls' were lots of hard working bees! Hubby and his buddy went late on Friday night to do a bee extraction in Joshua, Texas. They left our area at 10pm and did not get home again until 4:30 am. It was a cool and rainy night, not a time for happy bees. This hive was located under a trailer home and only a day or so before, the hive had split and part of the bees had left as a swarm. The guys were very happy to find the swarm was still on the property, in a small bush about 2 feet off the ground. The guys used both of their bee vacuums to capture the swarm and the hive separately.

I woke up to help them when they got back home (and by help, I mean feed the tired hungry guys and take lots of pictures). This is the cooler full of comb and honey. The brood comb is the darker stuff to the left and the honey comb is the lighter stuff to the right.

The brood comb was filled with actively hatching new bees. We were able to watch one after another chew and climb out of their cells.

This series shows a new worker bee hatching from her cell. First just the head is visible, then her body, then she pops out and quickly starts crawling around. The first job of a new worker bee is to clean up her own cell to prepare it for the next round of new bees.

Here is drone cells and brood. The drone cells are the higher cells to the right side of the comb. The brood is the shiny white baby bees inside the open cells. These brood are cared for by nursery worker bees.

This is a queen cell with either royal jelly or a dead queen inside. When the queen leaves or dies, the worker bees make a new queen by building a big queen cell (several of them actually) and feeding that brood a special mix of food called royal jelly.

This is another image of a queen cell (rising upward in the middle of the upper comb) and colorful pollen stored inside the open cells.

The pollen is all different colors depending on where it was collected. The next image shows some pollen cells cut in half. The layers of different colored pollen visible, even if the comb is a little bit squashed.

Here is more drone cells along the edges of this comb

My favorite, the capped honey comb. The honey is stored in newer wax comb and a wax lid is built over the honey once it is finished.

Here is a comb of uncapped honey. The bees were still working to remove excess water from this honey before capping. This comb also has a suspicious looking bit mark out of the top of it...

almost like someone took a bite directly from the comb...

Ah, the joys of working with edible products.

In order to give the evicted bees the best possible chance of survival, we cut their existing comb so that it will fit snugly inside a commercial bee hive.

The bees own honey, pollen, eggs and brood are placed into frames and moved to a hive body.

For this hive, we were able to rescue about 6 frames of comb for the bees.

Hard working beekeepers in matching outfits (okay, so it is really rain suits)

The extraction at Joshua Texas was one of the most brutal yet, hubby got stung about 12 times. His friend was only stung once or twice. Several things made this not so good...

the weather was cool and rainy and the bees were pissed about being evicted from their home. Since they had just swarmed, it also probably put them in a bad mood. The guys new rule is to only do extractions on dry and not rainy nights.

Here is the bee vac designed by our friend. It is two industrial trash cans bolted together.

The bees are all inside the cans. To get them out, the can is tapped hard to knock the bees to the bottom, then it they are tipped into the waiting hive body.

Inside is a 5 gallon bucket with holes drilled in it that acts as a diffuser.

The bee vac is hooked up to a canister style shop vacuum so the suction force must be reduced to avoid harming the bees. Hubby has a bee vac too, I'll do a in-detail post on his vac sometime.

Other notes on this bee extraction:
1) the honey was amazing, sweet and golden with lots of freshly capped honey
2) the bees were more defensive than normal
3) tons of brood of all ages present in the hive
4) about 14 pounds of honey were harvested from this extraction (more info on that later)
5) swarm bees went to friend's house

Say, do you know...

2010-04-15T13:27:00.003-05:00

On April 12th, I went to our local library for some free tax help from the AARP. After gently chiding me for waiting so long file, Mary quickly filled out all the forms and our taxes were done. A funny thing happened about half way through the process, she looked over at me and said "If I said the name 'Dave Ramsey' would you know who I was talking about?" I told her I knew him better than I deserved. She laughed and kept on working. I asked her what made her ask me that question and she said that something in our paper work just screamed Dave Ramsey at her. She commented the paperwork was in good order (wow, if ours was in good order, I bet she's had a rough few weeks!). I told her that all of the stock sale info she just slogged through was part of what helped us to pay off or last debt this year: our mortgage. She was very happy for us. She was a graduate of Financial Peace University and was also at the Dave Ramsey Live event in Dallas back in March. She said that after FPU she realized for the first time that she could afford to buy a house, so she did.

This was my first experience being called out as a Dave Ramsey fan by a stranger and it was a great feeling. It is very encourgaing to meet others who have been motivated and had their lives change for the better through Dave's ministry.

Chicken update

2010-04-15T12:44:00.004-05:00

We are in the middle of week 2 with our city hens... still no letter from the city, but the eggs are rolling in.

Here are the first two eggs we got, we have averaged 1 egg per day for the first week. Our three hens lay eggs in 3 subtlety different colors. The Auracana lays pale green eggs, one lays true white eggs, and the other one lays buff or beige colored eggs. In the bright sun, all the eggs just look white, but upon closer inspection, there are definitely three different colors.

The hens have all settled in nicely. At first we were having serious issues with the black and white hens picking on the orange hen, but that seems to have stopped. The first two days (before the run was built) the white hen especially would get her feathers all ruffled up and charge after the orange hen and peck at her. There was never any blood, but I got very tired of breaking up the fights. The poor orange hen would just huddle into a corner and wait for the abuse to stop.

Almost as soon as the hens got access to the open run, the fighting stopped. I"m guessing they were bored in the small coop and also vying for space. The larger run has lots of grass and dirt for scratching as well as piles of mulch for the girls to dig through.

The chickens seem to be afternoon layers, at least almost every egg we have found has been late in the day--even if I check all day long. I was home all day yesterday, sitting in our home office with the window open so I heard every little squawk and peep these girls made during the day. Mostly, they are very quiet birds. Around 4 pm, it sounded like someone was tap dancing on a wood floor and I went outside to see the orange hen in the nest box, scratching hard on the wood. I checked, no egg. At about 5 I left to pick up the kids from school with one last check of the coop for eggs, nothing. I got home 20 minutes later and hubby had collected 2 eggs, I guess they decided to lay eggs the second the van left the driveway.

Our friends chickens have also started to lay eggs, they went 1 week without a single egg. They suspected that the hens were in revolt because they were being terrorized by their lab and their 2 year old son--both would run around the coop to get a better view of the birds. Now the hens have realized that neither is a threat to them and started laying.

Bee Removal--Midlothian April 14, 2010

2010-04-15T12:01:00.005-05:00

On April 14th hubby and his pal drove to Midlothian for another honeybee removal. This was a much smaller hive and since they were in the soffit of a garage, the comb was almost perfectly sized for the standard size hive box. Hubby n'pal were able to trim the comb slightly and wire it into place on 4 frames from a super. (I'll have to do a post on bee hive components). This was a very small and even tempered hive from his comments. No one got stung.

The guys mentioned that the hive size had been greatly reduced, that they saw tons of disintegrating comb in the eaves of the garage and they brought home several combs that were completely empty except for a tiny bit of colorful pollen in a few cells.

Despite being small, these girls are working hard to expand their numbers, most of the comb was filled with brood of varying ages.

tiny brood

big brood

cutting down the comb to fit the frames

excess burr comb

wiring in the comb

Bee Removal--Arlington April 4, 2010

2010-04-15T11:56:00.005-05:00

On Sunday April 4th hubby and his pal went to Arlington for a honeybee removal. While hubby likes the idea of keeping better records, he's just not that motivated to write here... but he did email me the following summary of this removal, which I will blatantly copy here.

hubby said:
"The bee removal was one of our hardest yet. They were between two floors (1st and 2nd). We pulled off the wooden siding to get to the bees from the outside. They were in the floor joists. We removed enough to see we couldn't’t get it all from the inside. We went upstairs and cut a hole in the sub floor. They were everywhere. It was probably back from the wall 4-5’ and the floor joists were about a foot across and about that deep FULL of comb. Easy two brood boxes full. Luckily we brought my vacuum and his because we needed it with all the bees we got. I’m probably going to go back later this week to suck up the few we missed. There were tons of drones so we might need to requeen anyway. There are tons of bees to make it successful even with a new queen. I haven’t talked that over with Lee yet. Not sure if he’s getting the hive or if we are. For as many bees as there were they were pretty tame. Lee got stung on the knee (think he squished one), I got stung on the chin because I needed to take my hat off and I let one in, and then I think I squished one under my arm (that one hurts). The family wanted to make sure we were able to save all the brood and every last bee. She got stung under the nose (she nearly cried) and she asked if there was a way that they could sting and not die. Almost laughed that even after being stung on the nose she was worried about one bee dying when we had up wards of 80 THOUSAND bees. I guess I understand, but still kind of funny. They had a kid about 11 or 12 that was really excited about suiting up and looking at the bees with us, until we actually opened everything up and he saw all the bees. He didn’t come anywhere close to the hive after his mom got stung. The dad was an Aussie and his accent was pretty strong."
end quote...

They guys went back to the home in Arlington on April 7th to catch the remaining bees. Hubby said that there were tons of dead bees in the house. He suspects that when they opened up the wall to get at the hive, the bees were able to get into the room, but not able to find their way out again. It is funny (and sweet) that with 80 thousand bees, these guys are worried about the death of a few hundred of them.

Since the comb and removal was such a mess from this site, they were not able to reuse much of the comb in the newly relocated hive. Our friends were able to extract 14lbs of honey from this hive. The honey was mostly uncapped, so it has a strong, raw flavor that is not like anything I have tasted before. Not unpleasant, but just very different. Hubby does not like it, but I'm still undecided. Undecided enough to use nearly half a small jar in my various cups of tea over the last 2 weeks...

Solar Oven Cooking, Trial I

2010-04-09T13:09:00.004-05:00

Hubby bought us a Solar Oven last week. It arrived just before Easter, but it has been cloudy, or chance of rain-y since. Yesterday morning, as I was preparing a batch of beans for the crock pot, I discovered that my leftover ham bone was much bigger than I thought and I ended up with an extra cup of soaked pinto beans.

With only a 10% chance of rain forecast for today and the sky totally clear before sunrise, I decided to give the solar oven a go.

I sliced off a small portion of ham for each of 2 half quart jars and added 1/2 cup of soaked beans to each. I put used canning jar lids on and barely tightened the screw bands.

I put the solar oven in the garden and pointed it approximately south/southwest so it would catch the rays the hottest part of the day. Ideally, the oven can be roatated throughout the day to follow the main rays of the sun; not-so- ideally, I work away from home all day long, so I had to work with what I had. Start time... 7 am.

Fast forward many hours of work.. and at 5 pm I returned home to find the sun oven sitting in full shade and the temp gauge reading ~80F...ambient air temp. But it appeared that something good had happened during the day. The liquid at the bottom of the jars was a milky beany color and the jars were quite warm to the touch. I quickly moved the oven to a sunny spot in the yard and realigned it to catch the last 2 hours of sunlight of the day. Within 10 minutes, the oven was reading back up at 200F and within 15 minutes the temp was at 250F.

By dinner time at 6, I had to use potholders to lift the jars--a great sign!

I also saw that at least one of the jars had reached a full rolling boil and had even boiled over onto the tray.

Now the review, and very handy comparison with crock pot beans.

Both jars needed more liquid, and in fact, so did the crock pot... My extra large ham bone had partially propped open the lid of the crock pot and the top inch of water had boiled out, leaving hard crunchy beans in the top inch of the crock pot. I had to carefully scoop the crunchy beans off the top of the crock pot. I figured the same fate faced the beans that were left out of the water in the solar oven cooking jars, but no. Actually, the solar oven beans above the water level were tender and soft, not at all crunchy.

Here is a side by side comparison:

crock pot beans are on the left and Solar beans are on the right. Both are perfectly cooked through and tender, the crock beans have a bit more fat and flavor (they also cooked with about 2lbs of ham bone, skin and fat) whereas the solar oven beans only got about 3 oz of ham meat per jar. The darker beans on the left were kind of hard due to being cooked above the water line (apparently, I was not successful in picking them all out). There were NO crunchy beans in the solar oven jars.

In conclusion:
1) beans in the solar oven were cooked to perfect consistency
2) beans in the solar oven above the waterline fared better than beans above the waterline in the crock pot
3) flavor of crock pot beans was better, but only due to the huge ham hock
4) solar beans took NO ELECTRICITY to cook, nada.
5) crock pot beans cooked all day on high in the crock pot (wish I had a way to measure how much electricity it took...)

Next time for solar cooking:
1) bigger jars
2) more water in the jars
3) Solar oven located in a place to get full afternoon sun (not the garden, apparently)
4) not too much to add, I am SO very pleased with our first solar cooking experience. I usually don't hit it right on the first try, but I could not imagine a better first attempt at something so novel.

Now, my next effort will be... Solar baking

Even Further down Crazy Lane

2010-04-07T14:19:00.004-05:00

We have some new arrivals in our family that take us just a few steps further down the crazy path... But first lets recap all the ways we are endearing ourselves to the neighborhood:
1) slowly getting rid of lawn and planting edible plants instead
2) keeping 50,000 flying,stinging insects in small wooden boxes
3) storing stinky rainwater in giant plastic barrels
4) hanging my families socks and undies out in the sunshine for the world to see
5) composting every scrap of organic matter in a big smelly pile

So why not add squawking, pooping and mulch decimation to the list too...

Welcome Horton Hens!

The as-yet-unnamed trio are expats from my in-laws farm in Bells. 'Blackie' and "Whitie" (not their real names) are part of the mean girl group of hens my MIL was given. The original 6 hens were deemed too mean and uncivilized to live with her existing flock of 50 pet chickens. One of the six mean girls we butchered and ate last year, the other five came home with us on April 2nd to live a city life. We were also able to scam her out of one of her pet Aurachana chickens. Wait, you say, the math just does not add up... five plus one totals six chickens, but I only see three in the picture. It gets even better, we convinced some friends of ours they too needed to keep chickens in the city... so they got three, we got three and this area of North Dallas just got a bit crazier.

Hubby has been very busy building a great chicken-hutch-house for our new girls. It is framed out with split cedar 2x2s, has 1/4" wire sides and bottom, and a hinged front door leading to a 5x8x5 foot run built with 2x4 welded wire. The main part of the house is sturdy enough that if this whole chicken thing does not work out due to city regulations we can use it to house rabbits.

So why, if they are smelly, messy, and possibly illegal in our city, would we want to do this?

EGGS! Within the first 24 hours of city life, one of our three hens had laid the first egg. We also want this to be an experience for the kids on where food comes from. Since he helps collect eggs at Grandma's house, boy sort of knows that eggs come from chickens, but now it will be a daily thing (we hope).

We also want to use this as 'practice' for when we can get out into the country and have some room to raise a bunch of chickens for eggs and meat. Like so many of our endeavors here in town, we hope to work out the kinks in these small scale systems so we can go with confidence into full blown production when we have the opportunity.

Potatoes Mulch layer 1

2010-04-07T14:14:00.002-05:00

On April 4th, the potato plants were up enough for me to add the first layer of hay mulch.

Here is one of the little potato sprouts.

I noticed that the blue potatoes I planted later than the rest (March 5) were up first. They were also a lot leggier when I planted them.

Who the Heck is THAT?

2010-03-24T14:48:00.004-05:00

There is a new face on this blog...my voice has been here since the beginning, but now my pics will be too. Hubby is in love with our new camera, so for the first time in a long time, I'm in front of the camera instead of behind it. Doing what I do best, tackling toddlers and elusive weeds.

So hi from the other side of the lens!

Going Granola

2010-03-24T12:06:00.010-05:00

With all of the wacky stuff we do, we realize that it may sound a bit like we've gone granola (my understanding of that term means kinda crazy, back to the earth, tree hugging, liberal, birkenstock wearing, long haired, hippie type) but no, really we have not. We're still just as conservative as can be... and only one of us has long hair.

So no, we are going granola, we're just eating it, a lot.

I have been making this granola recipe as a packable snack for my family for the past few months and it is really good. My exact recipe changes each time based on what I feel like, but the basic recipe is below and can be modified infinitely. Thank you to my Aunt Marilyn for the original 'flexible recipe' idea.

This makes a chewy sticky type of granola that holds together fairly well in bars. The closest commerical comparison is to the "Nature Valley Chewy Trail Mix Fruit and Nut" bar--the one in the purple wrapper.

Horton Ga-nora Bars (cause my son can't remember the word granola)

Dry Ingredients:
2 cup puffed rice cereal (crispies)
4 cups oatmeal (non-quick cooking kind)
1 cup chopped nutty add-ins (almonds, pecans, walnuts, hulled sunflower seeds)
1 cup dried fruit (raisins, craisins, blueberries)

Sticky Ingredients:
1 cup honey or corn syrup
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup peanut butter
1 tbs vanilla
2-4 tbs butter (I have also used coconut oil, olive oil may work too)

Optional Pre-Cooking (adds great depth of flavor, but not necessary)
[In a giant frying pan, melt ~1 tbs butter over medium heat and cook the chopped nuts until lightly browned and fragrant, stirring constantly. These get too toasty really fast, so keep an eye on them. Dump them into a giant bowl, then add more butter 2-3 tbs to the same skillet and toast the oatmeal the same way. The oatmeal will take a lot longer to cook, but will burn quick too. ]

Put the oatmeal, cereal, nuts, and dried fruit into a very large bowl.

Meanwhile, in a small saucepan cook the honey and brown sugar over low heat, stirring constantly. Allow the mixture to come to a boil, then boil for 2 minutes, stirring constantly to keep the bubbles from overflowing. After 2 minutes, remove from heat and stir in the peanut butter and vanilla. Stir well until melted.

Pour this over the oatmeal mixture and stir well. Once combined dump the mixture onto a rimmed cookie sheet and flatten to about 1/2 inch. To make cleanup easier, I like to use two Silpat pan liners when I flatten the granola—one on bottom and one on top. This keeps the sticky fingers to a minimum and gives a more even final product. Once the granola is pressed flat, set it aside to cool for a few hours.

When cool, the granola can be cut into serving sized squares and wrapped individually for easy packing. I try not to cut anything on my slipat liners, so I use one of my son's place mats as a cutting mat.

I set any of the funny shaped or broken pieces aside in a Tupperware dish for immediate munching.

This keeps my family from grabbing a wrapped bar to eat in the kitchen, and saves me from some additional tedious wrapping… besides, the hippie-legislate-to-save-the-earth-wacko deep inside me would hate to see that tiny sheet of plastic wrap go to waste!

Total Money Makeover—in action!

2010-03-24T09:51:00.002-05:00

One of the neat things we’ve found about the Dave Ramsey Total Money Makeover plan is that it keeps working, even after the ‘plan’ is complete. Here’s our recent events that made me so thankful that we have been careful with our money.

We had to dip into our emergency fund last weekend…On Friday, we took the van in to the shop…We’ve known we’d need new tires for my van soon--they were looking really bad and it probably would not have passed inspection. Since they are run flat tires they are expensive, to the tune of $400 per tire… we had saved up in our car fund about $1200 for this purpose. Which was good, worked just how it was supposed to, we’d saved $125 per month for the last year or so. But then at Honda they mentioned the van was running really rough, so we had them do the 105k mile service (we are at 102k) and that ended up costing another $1300 (replaced timing belt, water pump etc). So that money had to come out of our family emergency fund. I suppose we should have known a service was coming due and could have saved for it, but the tires and the service at once was a real budget killer.

So it was an expensive few days, I am SO thankful that we had this in the emergency fund (and car fund) to cover it all. These are the sorts of things that could totally ruin a budget or force a person to use credit. It hurt that we had to use the emergency fund, but I am so happy it was there. It is a VERY good feeling to be financially prepared.

Home Brew

2010-03-23T13:10:00.002-05:00

Hubby bought a 'coffee' press at Ikea... guess who got it first?

I made a yummy backyard tea from fresh peppermint, lemon balm, dried pineapple sage, and dried stevia.

Topped off with local honey from our friends it made for a delicious hot drink.

Since it wall all safe ingredients, and no caffine, boy got to enjoy his first small cup of tea as well.

He mostly just enjoyed being with mommy and doing such a grown up thing as sipping tea.

Our NEW Budget

2010-03-15T10:59:00.006-05:00

What excitement and fanfare and well, fizzle... after all of our work in 2009 to kill our last debt--our mortgage--we kind of feel, um, bored. Not that we don't totally enjoy not having any payments anymore, that is great, it is more that we spent the last year frantically slaying this huge beast and now that it is dead we are kind of lost on what to do next. Hubby is a very goal oriented person, and I am to some extent. Having a shared plan of attack on the mortgage was great for us. Now we are both kind of coasting along without a clear target, and when we don't have a clear target... we tend to get distracted.

We sort of know what to do next: we want to buy land, start a business, invest, give more, travel, have fun... but there is no direct path or plan to get there. Our new budget has been on my mind, I hope that defining that will give us some excitement again to our finances.

Perhaps I like catchy silly slogans, it helps me keep focus, but here is what popped into my head for our new budget (drum roll please): Live, Give, Save... (now sad slide whistle noise...) is that it? Yep, that simple, and probably copied directly from Dave Ramsey.

LIVE--taxes, pay utilities, allowances, insurance, all the normal stuff.
GIVE-- 10% goes to our church for tithes, I'd also like to have a give budget for fun, additional stuff
SAVE--for land, business, etc...

So these simple little buckets are my way of trying to understand our new financial life. I have not looked at any numbers yet, but I wonder if it is possible to have an even split, 30/30/30... or even if we want to. Unless I"m totally not thinking of something important, that seems to be the main things you can do with money. Perhaps our 'live' bucket will be much heavier than I'm aware of, even without debts thrown in.

I'm not sure where our 401k/Roth IRA investing and college savings falls in these categories. I know it is technically 'save' since we are saving the money, but it is also just part of the normal bills we pay and not really something we have to think about or work toward, it just happens each month. I also have a really hard time as seeing this money as real. Yes, I get a statement each quarter showing growth, but since I've never seen nor touched that money, it all seems make believe to me--hopefully my 55 year old me won't have this same thought!

So here is my target, my goal, my new financial score card. Over the next years of our life, this may swing one direction or another, or maybe it will stay constant, but I hope it will help me keep focus on finances in a good way.

What is WONDERFULLY absent is the debt bucket.

First Fresh Food 2010

2010-03-10T08:29:00.003-06:00

We enjoyed the first fresh side dish from our 2010 garden today... sauteed Swiss Chard and it was delicous.

The Swiss Chard plants are from last years garden, they have survived 105°F heat last summer and 13°F cold this winter and still they produced lots of tasty little leaves for us to enjoy this spring. Last year I only put in four plants, but this year I have planted a whole section of plants since they were so great.

Conversations in our Marriage...

2010-03-09T14:29:00.002-06:00

Me to hubby: Sorry to nit pick, but it is C-O-O-P, chicken coop. That is, unless you plan on our hens over-throwing the government.

Race the Rain Gardening

2010-03-08T11:21:00.006-06:00

We've had a stretch of decent weather to kick start spring here in Texas, but more rain was forecast for Sunday/Monday. I've tried hard to make full use of it...

Wed March 3rd--planted potatoes

Thursday March 4th -- boy and I made a run to the dirt store before work to get a load of compost (who knew $34 could bring so much joy to our lives).

side Note: Boy loves to watch the tractors and I love to get dirt. The tractor drives know us now and go out of their way to do a tractor rodeo for boy. These are HUGE tractors, the scoop is bigger than our little Tacoma so about 1/4 of a scoop fills our truck bed. The tractor driver has taken to using the scoop to level off the dirt in the truck, and even patted it down with the scoop. He was so precise that the shocks on our truck did not move as this huge bucket tapped the dirt in the truck bed. so neat! Boy flips out about it, I think it is pretty cool too. Yes, a load of compost is worth being an hour late for school and work!

Friday March 5th -- Kids were at grandma's so I was able to wake up early and start tilling. I'm sure the neighbors love me, because I actually watched the sunrise as I was tilling the back 1/4 of the garden! The back two rows tilled up great, but I got bogged down in mud and muck on the 3rd row and had to quit. Rather than doing one job fully, I"m doing the garden piece wise, I just don't have the time all at once to do it all. So my method was to till a row, bring in a barrow of compost, level it, then bring in a barrow of mulch for the path... repeat. In this way, i was able to get 3 perfect, ready to plant rows done before I had to leave for work on Friday.

Friday March 5th (evening) -- Since the kids were at Grandma's we had our date night, which meant two garden centers and dinner out... thank you my sweet romantic hubby. We bought two grape plants and two muscadine plants (which we think are like grapes, but look a bit different, we need to research it), herbs (upright oregano, salad burnette, German chamomile), 3 tomatoes (great white, black prince, something stripe/streak?), two globe artichokes, and one calendula, 9-pack of sweet bell peppers, 9-pack banana peppers. I also got a pile of seeds: Quinoa, calendula, red amarath, beetberry?, sorrel, bush bean mix (same as last year), squash mix (same as last year), nasturtiums. I also bought four more bare root strawberry packs, which I've since returned, the quality from Lowes was awful. No real gardening happened that night, just lots of buying...

Saturday March 6th-- In the two hours between social obligations, I was able to till the last few sections of the garden (S-E quarter) and get bunch of stuff planted. I ended up having to plant more seeds than I expected because I very foolishly watered the plants I bought and did not realize the seed packets were underneath...oops. Boy and I quickly planted the pre-soaked seeds about 8 hours after my initial mistake. Beans (rows 6 and 7, qinona and nasturtiums row 13 along the fence)...

Sunday March 7th -- I was able to unload the last 3 wheelbarrow loads of dirt to the front fruit gardens before church, it started raining as i was cleaning out the back of the truck. After church, I planted the rest of the tomatoes (row 11) and peppers (sweet bell row 5, banana row 8). The German chamomile came with about 20 tiny seedlings in the pot, I spread those all over the yard in random drifts of 4-5 plants. Lets hope they do well in small groupings.

Phew! I"m sure there more, and there are pics later. It rained all day Sunday and we should have some thunderstorms on Monday. Now that the garden is tilled, I'm praying for a drenching rain 1-2 time per week for the next 3 months...

Meat Quantities 2010

2010-03-04T09:25:00.005-06:00

Every year we take a trip down to Nada to process our deer and wild hog meat. This was by far our biggest haul ever. We had well over 500lbs of meat for four families. We typically pile all the meat together, weigh it and divide up the meat into four portions (or how ever many families that decide to process with us that year). This helps for the years when someone may not have been as lucky in the field (we have no slackers so this works well). We then decide what percentage of the meat will be made into Jerky, Link Sausage, Summer Sausage, and Ground meat. Below is our divisions this year:
Type -- Link, Ground ( weight in pounds)

Nick -- 27, 73

Jared -- 27 , 73

Curtis -- 55 , 48

Preston -- 64 , 40

And I think we all had 10 pounds of summer sausage and 5 pounds of jerky.

Before...

After...