Cows Put on Heavy Fur Coats

Here's Thor in his winter coat.

I was looking back through some of the pictures I took last summer of my cattle. They all looked so sleak and healthy.   I took a bunch of pictures of them this afternoon so I could update the website. Gone are the sleak short haired coats, replaced by thick, fluffy ones.  It seems to me that they are wearing particularly heavy winter coats this year.

BTAP Juliette, very pregnant and fluffy.

Considering all the crazy weather we've had around the country lately I think it is safe to predict a cold and snow filled winter.  We used to try to predict the weather by watching the woolly worms' fall color, but you know, I've not seen a woolly worm in years!  Woolly worms and big Black Racer snakes used to be all around our house when I was a kid  We'd pick up the worms and  run a finger gently down their furry backs. They'd curl up in our hands.  And black snakes were everywhere. We'd find them hanging in the pear tree on the east side of the house, hanging from the rafters in the barn on hot summer days, and once we found one draped around the backdoor of the house. When I spotted a big Black Racer under the oak leaf hydrangea bush this summer it was quite an event! I hadn't seen one that big in a good twenty years!

The lack of woolly worms and black snakes makes no sense to me. A good 500 acres of the land around us is organic, so pesticides aren't the problem.  Maybe the increase in crows and hawks and coyotes have something to do with it.  If any body knows, leave a comment.

Here's little and very pregnant Bramble.  She is wearing one of the fluffiest coats of all.

Wild Black Walnuts

Photo by Amy Cowell of Edible Austin, TX

Black walnuts seem to be plentiful in this part of the country.  I have two trees in my yard and there are at least other 25 throughout the farm.  I think black walnuts are an acquired taste. Their flavor is strong and bittersweet - a nice counter point to something sugary sweet. I certainly wouldn't recommend eating them out of hand.

When we were kids my grandfather collected the walnuts on our farm and took them back to his city home to parcel out to his neighborhood squirrels  through the winter. He and my grandmother lived in a little California Bungalow style house in Dayton. The house had a wrap around porch with a porch railing made of brick posts and wide cement railings.  When we went to visit we laid the walnuts out on the railings, then scurried into the house to watch the squirrels through the window. We never seemed to have squirrels in our yard at home on the farm and to this day I associate squirrels with cities.

My grandfather cured a few walnuts for us each year and my mother cracked them for making walnut brittle or a walnut cake.  The bitter flavor is a good counterpoint to the sweet brittle and cake.To make the brittle  Mom took one of her cask iron skillets, melted granulated sugar in it over medium heat, add the walnut meats, stirred and poured the mixture out onto a buttered rimmed baking sheet to cool. Then we could crack it into pieces and eat it like peanut brittle.  The cake was simply a rich white cake with walnut meats added into the batter.  The frosting was either a white butter cream or a carmel butter cream.  This makes a very sweet cake and again, the bitter walnuts were just the right touch.  We also like this cake made with hickory nuts - when we can wrestle them away from the squirrels. 

Apparently, black walnuts have become a foodie thing. Like their English walnut cousins, they are very nutritious. If you Google the words wild black walnuts you will find a plethora of people selling black walnut meats at about $12 a pound, which to my way of thinking is cheap considering how much work it is to harvest them. You can also find plenty of instructions for harvesting your own black walnuts - most of the instructions include a car, wire brushes and rubber gloves.

Pumpkins and Asparagus, Raspberries and Blueberries Fall Update

Will they ever turn orange?

The early frost this month killed the leaves on the pumpkin vine.  I checked several university agricultural sites and they all agreed that I should cut the pumpkins off the vine and allow them to ripen on their own.  The yellow you see on them is where they lay on the grass as they grew.  Halloween is now less than a week a way and I'd love to have them turn orange by then, but somehow I don't think that will happen. Considering that this was a volunteer plant that didn't set fruit until August I guess I shouldn't complain. Will keep you posted.

Asparagus starting to turn color
 

The asparagus is starting to turn color from green to golden.  When its totally turned brownish its safe to cut it down and throw the fronds on the compost pile.  Most years I let it stand until spring - but last year I had the big Bush Hog style mower on the tractor most of the winter, so I mowed it down in December.  That was probably a mistake because I had a lot more weeds and grass in the bed this spring.  I weeded a couple of times very early, but the grass took over and at one point in May I picked all the asparagus spears I could find and then mowed the patch very close with my lawn mower.  The ferns are very dense and I'm hoping if I leave them in place all winter they will smother out some of the weeds and grass. 

Red Raspberries still producing as are the weeds!

This is my first year for raspberries.  My brother gave me six plants last fall. I planted them carefully in a slightly raised bed with good drainage, but alas, only three survived.  However, those three have been super producers. I'm still getting a hand full of delicious ripe fruit every other day. In September I was getting about a cup of fruit a day from the three plants.  I have a lot of work to do on the raspberry beds this fall, but I'm encouraged to buy some more plants and expand the patch. Red raspberries are one of the most nutritious fruits you can eat, and are considered the highest in fiber of all the fruits.

The little bit of red color at the base of the trees is a blueberry bush. With the near record September rains and mild weather the weeds have taken over yet again. It's really a good thing we have a killing frost on the way. I'll hopefully have to weed just one more time this fall. These plants were all heavily mulched in June!

Several years ago my garden club visited Marvins Organic Gardens in Lebanon for a gardening talk. Marvin is a great garden information resource and we all enjoyed his presentation very much. At the end of his talk he gave us each a plant. He's also a very generous guy donating whole yards worth of landscape plants to Habitat for Humanity and other worthy causes. 

I received a low bush blueberry plant from Marvin and for the first couple of years it sat in its big gallon plus plastic pot among the ivy and the dogwood tree on the east side of the house. I wasn't too inspired to plant it  because I've always understood that blueberries need a lot of acid in the soil to produce fruit and our soil in very alkaline (high PH). Asparagus does well here because it really likes a high PH.  I kept the blueberry  watered and it had a nice sheltered location, but of course it needed to be planted in the garden.

Finally one spring I got it together and dug a blueberry bed, planted the plant from Marvin's and purchased three more blueberry seedlings, mail order to join it. Since the potted blueberry had continued to grow in its pot, I didn't amend the soil for the PH.   After two years the seedlings gave up and died, but the older plant hung in there.

Last year I converted the blueberry bed to a tree nursery, but kept the one blueberry plant in place. I had purchased a couple of yards of mulch from Tony at Cardinal Landscaping and that gave me plenty of mulch for the garden plants as well as the flower beds around the house. Weeds were out of control this year so  I mulched the raspberries, the tree seedlings and the blueberry plant with the purchased mulch. All of the plants did very well. I haven't tested the soil around them for PH but I suspect that the mulch raised the PH enough to make the blueberry happy because this year, for the first time, the blueberry bore fruit.  The fruit was large and sweet and I am inspired to get back to Marvin's this spring and purchase more of this type of blueberry plant. If all goes well I'll have a good blueberry crop in a year or so.  The leaf color on the plants is also very attractive and will be a stricking backdrop for fall flowers.