The Arrival of the North Wind

The North wind has a particular sound and smell.  When it arrives, there is a subtle change in the air and Fall begins!  This morning when I opened my window, the North Wind blew in and I was immediately filled with images of sweaters, falling leaves, and baking pies all rolled into one immense feeling of excitement.

Yesterday I finished the fall planting in the rain - beets, carrots, spinach, mustard greens, chard, broccoli.  There are eggplant, potatoes, okra, and earlier beets getting a head start for fall.

Did you know there are 2 kinds of poop! - hot and cold.  Cold poop (rabbit) can be directly applied to the garden.  Hot poop (chicken) is put on a compost pile to heat it up.  I learned this last Saturday from a family friend.   So because I have been using 'cold' rabbit poop, this compost pile won't be ready for at least 2 years!  So moving to chicken poop!!   It really 'takes a village' because I look at the pictures if I have to read directions.  Getting information from people is a lot easier.

Along those same lines - another friend came to visit that same Saturday -  he was a bee expert.  He looked at my hives and in 10 minutes had completely reconfigured the 2 hives into 1 heathy hive.  Turns out that one of the hives was missing the queen.  He reduced that stagnant hive to one box and plopped it right on top of the healthy hive!  I then learned that I was starving all my bees!  I just assumed that if I fed my bees they would become dependent on me.  Yes! I put them in a box and they are dependent on me!  So, as it turns out, one has to feed bees.   So much for letting nature take care of itself!   Since my hive was reconfigured and I feed it regularly , several people have been stung in the face (including me) at quite a distance from the hive!  I can't go in my garden without a bee chasing me.  Nature!!! so unpredictable!!

My bean vines are beautiful.  But no matter how I cooked them, they didn't taste that good.  Even if I cook them in butter with onions, the skin was tough.  Well, it turns out they are not beans, they are cow peas!  I was using a recipe from my John Besh cookbook to make gumbo and there was a picture of my beans!  The description under the picture said purple hull peas!  You have to shell them to get the peas out!  Wow, that was a revelation!  So I go and pick a big bunch of these wonderful peas and sit down on the porch to enjoy the cooler weather and shell these peas.  Half hour later, I have a small bowl of peas - enough for one person.  I am not growing these next year!!

Yesterday, my son brought home young turkeys and baby quail!  

Baby Quail in hot house

Turkeys hiding from other animals

      

Part of the other animals about 200 young roosters

More Baby chickens

roaming duck mass

Looking in the hoop house, I was surprised by these characters...And I don't even know what these are! 

And of course...there are the hogs.  I talked about Buttercup (a very big teenage girl) last blog.  Usually she pushes past the electric fence and is willing to take the current for what lies OUTSIDE THE FENCE)  Yesterday morning, very early, as I was feeding the chickens, she comes up and I watch her lift up on her hind legs and try to push over the garbage barrel that holds the chicken feed!  She usually has an entourage of the newest baby hogs (which are not so small anymore).  The other day, the chicken coop was left open and I found her and several of her entourage in the hoop house.  Scared the chickens to death.  Like I said earlier - shoulda never named her!! 

We are now eating the meat we are raising along with the vegetables we are growing.  This is an amazing thing when you come from the suburbs!  

The kids are digging some kind of hole in the bog.  There are all sorts of tools out there and they come back covered in mud.  I was going past them in the car and it suddenly dawned on me that they might be trying to did a tunnel under the road!!  Freaked me out - I checked on it - they were not! They have a garden also - beans & pumpkins.  For some reason they dug out the pumpkins and put them in small pots in the tree house.  I told them that the pumpkins were going to grow big and the treehouse porch may not be the best solution!  Those darn kids!!  

There are just some things about this life that are not pleasant - for instance - the stink bugs have returned for the fall.  They are all over the screens and will find their way into the house into our furniture...  This will be followed by the ladybugs.  The flies are everywhere and follow you into the house every time you open the door.  The mice are working to get into the big house.  So Fall is coming and along with it - the good, the bad, and the ugly....