Our journal of what we pray is our sojourn of life along the narrow way, even the old paths, submitting to the Bible as a light unto both.
We are very grateful to the Lord for Him granting our first set of chicks for 2018!
One chick didn’t make it out of the shell completely, and it appeared one egg wasn’t fertilized, but the mama hatched out the other 10, and all are still doing great, thanks to God!
Here they are:
And here is their video:
We are always very thankful to Providence for granting these new chickens. We pray they are productive for His glory and the benefit of His Church!
— David
Chicken Tractor Retrofit
Back in December, 2005, just a few months after we arrived here in Texas, we built a chicken tractor to house our chickens, the original process which you can see here.
Well, fast forward 12 1/2 years, and while it has served us well, it had also begun to fall apart, with uprights rotting, etc.
Given that this was the only real overnight housing for our main flock of chickens, I felt a retrofit really needed to be accomplished in one day. I figured there was no way I would be able to do that myself, and so I requested March 2018’s community work day, and this past Wednesday, we men began the process with haste…
The plan was to pull it all apart, replicate the siding, the front frame, the lower section in the back, and the upper “penthouse” section, and then put the sections back in place, and then the siding pieces. This would allow for not having to re-design things, and allow for using the same roofing and chicken wire pieces without having to re-do those.
But first, we had to pull all of the staples to get the chicken wire pieces off. Everyone got to participate in that, and it actually took a little while:
Here, the roof, siding, and lower back section (which you can see on the ground upside down on the right) are removed, with the front frame and penthouse section still in place:
Here you can see the back section center right, upside down, and a youngin’ sitting on the back door:
Still working on the penthouse section:
Here on the left, you can see the penthouse section removed:
And here, the new front framing and new uprights are in place:
And here’s the new penthouse section, guarded well by a couple of smiling gents…would you trust these fellers? 😉
Skipping forward a little, here we are with the back and penthouse sections in place, and the new siding installed:
And here’s the front view:
And from another angle. I was really hoping to get to this point so we would at least be able to box them in for the night, and thanks to the Lord and the guys, we were able to! But, we did pray the Lord would grant the chickens safety through the night, being they were a little more exposed with the chicken wire not put back:
Here’s looking in the back. I decided to use the same nest-box structure as it was still in fairly good shape:
And here’s how we attached the roofing tin:
And just a metal flashing piece to cover the roof apex:
Here’s the smattering of the old pieces and new left-overs all over…quite the war zone! 🙂
Well, the next day, after God did graciously grant the chickens’ safety through the night, I went ahead and stapled on all of the chicken wire pieces, and they all fit very nicely! Good job to the chicken tractor retrofit crew! Now all we need is some paint:
Hopefully a little more so now! 🙂
Curtains & Pecan Shelling
Over on the ladies side of things, they graciously helped Sue make some new curtains:
And did some of the pecan shelling from the pecans the Lord granted us from our trees last year, which is something of a time-consuming process. The lady who did this got quite a bit of them done!
We are very thankful to God for His graces and mercies in allowing us to be a part of this fellowship. We thank Him for the people here, and we always pray we do these things in love and service for each other out of love and service to Him!
And thanks to the folks for all of the help! May God bless each of you and your households with an abundance of His graces, and temporal, spiritual and eternal blessings!
— David
We thought we would catch you up on how the garden ended up in Fall of last year, including our foray into the adventure of sweet potato growing, and where we are today!
Here are the final days of the 2017 garden before the freezes started to hit…
This is the one plant, a broccoli, that grew from the first Spring planting. I have picked off a few broccoli heads and have eaten them as I’ve walked by 🙂 :
Here is our gogi berry plant:
And these are our blackberry plants:
Here are the okra plants third week in October:
But then the freeze was coming, and so we covered them. They looked a little creepy like this actually… 🙂
And sadly, they still didn’t fare well, and so that was about the end of them for the year:
But before that, we thought we would try to save some okra seeds this year to plant next year as part of our continued effort to get sustaining here. We pray God might grant this to work!
Sweet Potatoes
I mentioned in our last real garden update that we planted sweet potato slips this year. This is our second attempt, with the first one in our raised beds only yielding a few small ones.
This year however, and I think it has a lot to do with that we’re using the forest bed mulching technique we’ve discussed before, God graciously granted some quite nice ones!
We harvested the beginning of October. The first one I pulled out was half rotted, very mushy, and I was worried they all would be like that, but most were thankfully just fine! You’re supposed to be very careful pulling them out so as to not damage the tender skin, which hardens later.
Here’s a stack of them:
And Sue with an American football-sized one:
And this is just to give a size perspective:
Here they are in the wheelbarrow being taken to the house for curing. Using the information from a website about curing sweet potatoes, we let them open-air cure just on the ground in a couple places in the house for probably about three weeks:
And then wrapped them up individually in newspaper to go into the root cellar for another six weeks. Apparently the longer you can wait to harvest, even just after the first light frost, and giving them that long to cure allows the sugars to form in them, which gives them a good taste, and without which they apparently taste very bland:
And finally, last week, we started pulling them out of the root cellar, and they appear to be still ok….yea, and thank the Lord!
Here, Sue is putting them into a meal:
And into the pan (although there is one store-bought mixed in). But, they do indeed taste great, and again we are very thankful to God for these provisions off of the land!
Garlic
Since we have larger garden areas with which to be able to plant both for Winter and Spring, we are attempting garlic again this year, planting cloves the Stongers graciously gave us. This is just this week after the big freeze we went through here:
And the wild lettuce, which I believe is the prickly lettuce I mentioned before, is coming back too!
As always and again, we are very thankful to the Lord for His providence in granting sustenance from the gardens! We pray He might continue to, as He will, and that He guide us into more and better ways to live off of the land in direct dependence on Him!
— David
Trying to learn from my mistake of how we handled turkey moms wanting to sit out in the woods by just trying to put them in the barn at night but them going right back to their nests the next day, and us loosing one of our sitting hen turkeys earlier in the year because of that, this time when Trina our original turkey started sitting, we grabbed her and put her and her eggs in the summer kitchen.
Well, thanks to the Lord, that worked out much better! With those eggs and some new ones she laid, and hoping at least some of the eggs were fertilized, she indeed hatched out two new chicks!
Here are a couple of pictures of the turklets a couple of weeks old:
They don’t always get very far, not even to two weeks sometimes, as we’ve had them die young in the past, but I also think some of that was due to me getting too close to the mama and causing her to panic and them maybe getting stepped on. And so, I tried not to do that as much, or much more slowly, and by God’s graces, the chicks are still going! Here they are just the other day:
And here is the video of their life adventure so far. The introduction of them to the flock didn’t go so well, and Trina was picked on a lot, but eventually she apparently got tired of it and went on the offensive, and that helped back off everyone:
Also, the young turkey in the last turkey chick blog post mentioned above, which we called Halia, ended up being a tom. Ha! And so, we’re going to call him Halio now. 🙂 It seemed to really take him a long time before showing male characteristics — only recently have we discovered this.
He is on the left in this picture:
And here is one of all of the flock minus Trina and her little ones:
Once again, we are very grateful to the Lord for these provisions, and the continued health and safety! We pray they go to uses that glorifies Him and benefits His Church!
— David
The Lord has graciously allowed our orchard to continue on, and we are very thankful!
The year started with my pruning the fruit trees. This year we had foreman Mimi supervising! 🙂
And here is the orchard mid June:
I think the mild winter last year affected our peaches and nectarines, as we didn’t really get any of those. And not many plums either. But God granted we had one pear tree do very well. Quite a few fell off in a storm we had, and we collected them but they never ripened. And apparently, pears don’t ripen on the tree, and you have to pull them at just the right time, when they easily twist off the tree, and then they ripen as they sit, but can only sit for so long before they over ripen.
However, we were able to enjoy quite a few of them from the ones still on the tree which did ripen fairly well! Here are the last several:
And this year was our most productive pecan harvest! We had basically three trees produce this year, up from one last year.
Here is the first round from the two newly-producing trees. This sheller apparently works extremely well:
And then our big producer yielded a two-gallon bucket worth!
We are very grateful to the Lord for granting these provisions of food off of the land, directly from His hand. And we thank Him for the increase in pears and pecans He graciously granted!
— David
Having lived in Texas over ten years now I can see why okra is so popular in the South. In our personal experience with hot Texas summers, we have found that okra is one of those crops that thumbs its nose at the hot, sweltering Texas sun and says “Come on, is that the best you got?” It is an extremely prolific, heat/drought tolerant crop that has done well for us every time we have planted it so far, thank the Lord.
This has presented a problem, albeit a good problem, for me in terms of the best way to capture and preserve it. You can certainly pressure can it but that is not our preference because we like to preserve it with all of its nutrients and freshness. Okra is a nutrient powerhouse, so we are excited and very motivated to incorporate it into our diets.
The last couple of years I cut it up and lacto-fermented it in a salt brine but found I didn’t prefer it for a couple of reasons. For those of you who don’t know, okra has this “snotty”, “mucusy” stuff inside each pod that is really healthy and beneficial but kind of gross. And, for some reason, I still haven’t nailed the salt brine recipe and have had a lot of hits and misses.
Thankfully, some time last year my friend and neighbor, Shannon, and I were talking about okra and she mentioned lacto-fermenting it leaving the okra pod in tact and not cutting it up. I was very excited when she mentioned that and was eager to try it. First of all, it meant a lot less prep time and also, maybe a reduction of the “snot” factor.
Fast forward to mid-summer and our okra plants were starting to produce each day. If you’ve ever grown okra, you know that it grows measurably every day. You could probably sit and literally watch it grow if you had the time. At first, I cut them up and put them fresh in our salads each night, which is crunchy and delicious, by the way, and the “snotty” factor is virtually non-existent in fresh, cold okra. But then the floodgates opened and a big okra surplus started to mount up. I remembered I had preserved garlic cloves in apple cider vinegar and really liked the flavor so I decided to do the same with okra. I went out and bought a really cheap jug of apple cider vinegar at the store and off I went!
Here is our beeeeeautiful okra, probably just one days worth:
So I quickly rinse them and, it’s not necessary but I like to cut off the stems so they fit in the jars better:
Then I just shove them in the jars however they will fit:
You can usually get a gallon jug of cheap apple cider vinegar for under three dollars. Even though it is not organic with “the mother” in it (a colony of beneficial bacteria promoting good gut health), cheap apple cider vinegar is still a great preservation vehicle and a pre-biotic, which means it feeds probiotics. So it’s still a great way to preserve. It also provides a really nice pickling-like taste:
I just pour in the apple cider vinegar and leave about 1″ space at the top:
A very important step that I had forgotten but a friend reminded me, is placing in the jars something that contains tannin. This keeps the okra nice and crunchy, where it would otherwise become soft and mushy over time. Thankfully, we have oak and mesquite trees right outside our house, so I just place a few leaves of one or the other in each jar.
Another step worth noting is that you may find you need to burp your jars for the first few days to release the buildup of any CO2 (carbon dioxide) gases. But since you are not waiting for an official fermenting process, you can eat the pods as soon as you like!
All in all, we preserved over 50 quarts of okra this garden season, all thanks to God for bringing the increase! I went ahead and numbered each jar so we can be sure to eat the oldest ones first. Since the pickle taste can be pretty tangy, I quickly rinse the pods before I put them in salads, etc., and it leaves a really nice pickled okra taste. You may wish to add in any other spices/flavors to customize your preserved okra to your liking. If you want to tone down the tang, just soak the okra in filtered water over several hours before you want to use it.
This way of preserving should keep for many months, although your experience may vary.
We are extremely thankful to God for His bountiful okra harvest and a very quick and simple way to preserve it!
Susan
The Lord graciously granted another three chicken hatchings of 2017, the 6th, 7th and 8th!
Here’s group 6. I believe the hen hatched out 8:
In this group, there was one that had trouble with one of its legs, and would stick it out straight back — you can get a good look at it how it was in the video below. Well, in our experience, a good way to try to help with that is to put binders on its legs, where you use a thin piece of duct tape and wrap each end around each leg, which helps keep the legs together, with the idea that the good leg will help guide the bad one into what it’s supposed to do correctly (like us being yoked to Christ! Matt. 11:29 – “Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls.“).
At first, it was too small for the good leg to overpower the bad one, but as the good leg strengthened, I was able to attach the binder, and it did seem to help. You can see the binders on it in the video as well.
Today, she (which is what it appears it turned out to be) is still going, and able to get around fairly well, which we also show in the video.
And then, here is group 7. The mama was a hatchling from I believe a couple of years ago, and she originally hatched out 11. But…
I can’t remember exactly how this went, one day I did a count, and only saw 10, but thought perhaps I had just miscounted originally. Some time later, I walked in, and there was one dead, and only 7 alive, which means another 2 were missing. What was going on? I looked around in the summer kitchen pantry there, and sure enough, I found a snake in the corner, picked it up, and there was a chick-sized lump in its belly. Arg! And bummer. I don’t know how it got in there, as I had been purposefully keeping the main doors of the summer kitchen closed just because of this snake issue (we’ve had trouble like that before) — maybe it got in through a small hole in external OSB, but it seems it would have had to do that when it was smaller.
Anyway, after getting the snake out of there, the other 7 are still going strong!
And this is group 8. 6 or 7 hatched out, 1 or 2 died, but the other 5 are still also doing well!
And here is a video of all 3 groups:
Once again, we are very grateful to the Lord for granting these provisions, and for His mercy on the ones He allowed us to keep. They are all His chickens to do with as He pleases, and we are just thankful He has allowed us any. May they be used for His glory!
— David
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