dog days redux
Back in Texas, it’s dog days. Definitely not chicken days. One of our chickens died yesterday, probably just from the heat. I feel terrible about it. I think she got trapped in the shade island out there and didn’t want to go out in the sun even for the short time it would take to get to the water supply.
She’s in the freezer now, poor thing. Not to be eaten, but we can’t bury her in our rocky yard, and interment in the trashcan on a Monday is not going to happen when trash pickup is Friday and it’s hotter than fsck outside.
This is a dishonorable end for our Frieda. I think I need to move somewhere with dirt and a family graveyard.
The only thing thriving around here is the unknown cucurbit taking over one of the garden beds. It won’t set fruit in this heat so we don’t know what it is.
MooJesus
“What if it’s a cult?” said I, as we bumped over the cattle guard and the ranch gate closed behind us. What if that sweetly reasonable website was a lure and a trap for the unsaved such as ourselves?
We visited the MooJesus raw dairy today. Had to, once we saw the name of the place. I was browsing for local foods and ran across the website. The “Everything Jesus” ranch just outside of Seguin hosts the Genesis Christian Academy, and a farm producing organic produce and grass-fed meat, and one of only two licensed raw dairies in the state that does not use milking machines.
Well, they’re not a cult, and they’re perfectly delightful. We sampled the dairy products, took a tractor tour of the ranch/school/gardens and then had lunch. A leisurely lunch…it must have taken two hours; they’re not in a hurry to move their customers out down there. It’s a beautiful location, on what was once part of the Capote ranch, running along the Guadalupe river. I ate more dairy products than I usually consume in a month. It’s going to be at least 18 hours until I’m really hungry again. I’m thinking I need to get antithetical to milkfat for dinner…pickles. Yeah. That would do it.
No brainwashing occurred and they didn’t proselytize (except about sauerkraut) , but the garden, the livestock, the sheer amount of knowledge of raw and cultured foods over there are on my mind. I could live with that. Strangely, I found myself checking out their “help wanted” listing this evening.
More pickles, please.
paying attention
Last year I bought a jar of dried oregano. This despite having a half-barrel of the stuff growing out in the backyard. Oregano is one of those herbs I like best to use in dried form, and when I’m cooking, that means I want to reach out and grab the jar a few feet from the stovetop…not slog outside fighting off mosquitos, chickens and sunburn and for what? A handful of soggy leaves I still have to wash and chop and meanwhile the garlic has burned and…thus the inferior product in the jar.
Needless to say I never thought far enough ahead last year to gather and dry all that herby goodness before I needed it. You have to pay attention to things, to harvest herbs. You want the first flush of growth. You want to wait until just after a good rain, when everything is clean. You want a dry sunny day. You want to snip and tie stems, hang the bundles up securely, protect from dust and worse things. You want to judge moisture content, carefully strip the leaves from the stems, crumble into usable form. It’s tedious, if you’re wanting to be doing something else. It’s altogether satisfying, if you’re wanting to harvest your oregano.
Maybe if I really love you, you’ll get some of my stash this year.
pure luck
I’m feeling incredibly lucky, not to mention wealthy, today. Texas-blessed. First of all, it rained. A lot. For a couple of days. We’ve been seriously moisture-challenged for months, at the cattle-are-dying level. It rained and it rained and then it stopped and clear dry air blew in. Now it’s one of those perfect Hill-Country-spring Sunday afternoons that you’re probably tired of hearing about. But I have to mark each and every one, because, y’know, summer is coming.
Let’s not talk about that.
My backyard is filling up with food! How’s that for wealth? For breakfast I go outside and pick up some arugula and an egg or two, soon to be joined by fresh peas (the bacon crop unfortunately has failed). Now that all the trees have leafed out I realize that the very least sunny spot of our two new garden beds is exactly where I put the tomatoes, which is very sad, but we found a couple of volunteers in another part of the garden, and some basil popping up too, though we had forgotten to plant it, and the farm is saved!
lasagna weekend
While I finished my tax gig, T layered up a lasagna garden bed. He had a couple of helpers, as you can see. We half-filled another frame yesterday and set our new fence posts in concrete. Now we are tired.
dirty mind
Can you believe it’s time to start tomato seeds again? I’ll spare you the blow-by-blow this time. One of my more impolite friends hints that it’s extremely tedious to read about kitty litter buckets and blossom drop. He needs to go forth and plant his own, I say. Meanwhile, I’m going to repeat the upside-down experiment, plus T has built a big wood frame for us to try gardening lasagna-style in the backyard. This is a layered compost method that makes up for lack of dirt underneath.
We sit almost directly on limestone. It gets so hot that turf roots just fry in our two inches of dirt even if I water them more than is reasonable for a responsible gardener, environmentalist, or tightwad. And we’re into a designated “extraordinary drought” now, so it’s going to be ever more difficult to justify. We’ve decided to slice the backyard in half…the part you can see from the back door will remain lawn, but the rest I have quit watering. We’re putting the first 12′ x 4′ garden bed out there, and will add a new one each season we stay here. By the time the wood frames rot out, we’ll have lots of great dirt to rejuvenate the yard.
I’ve got to deal with the mud if it ever rains again. I think we’ll start out with straw on the bare parts, and the whole place will look like a barnyard. So be it. The chickens are very talented with nitrogen excretion, and all those sweepings and rakings will soon have the compost cooking like a Texas dashboard in July.
