Category: Farm & Garden

Elephant Ears

May 24, 2018

Elephant Ears

One of my favorite garden bulbs is what we call “Elephant  Ears.”

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These are from three bulbs that we dug up in some weeds when we first moved in.  They were tiny, neglected, and crowded.  With good fertilizer and plenty of water, (we didn’t have to water them, God did it with the rain!) those three multiplied into fifteen by January when we replanted them in this nice half-shady strip between the carport and the side of the house.

We also leave the wild flowers that don’t crowd out our bulbs.  Tiny white flowers that spread like ground cover are some of Jillian’s favorite because they look like “stars on green sky.”  (Those are under the star lily in the above picture, but their blooms look like dots in the picture.)

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These are the smallest ones.  The elephant ears are now growing alongside a few lilies, six pineapples, tomatoes, and squash.  (The clump of bushy leaves on the right corner are tomatoes.) The plants are called elephant ears because their leaves get to be the size of African Elephant’s ears.  I’ve grown some before, which by their third year, had leaves that were five feet wide!  (Since you have to clip the ears off at the stalk when the ears fall to help encourage new growth, the girls would save the clipped stalks for umbrellas!)

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These are some of the “wild” tomatoes.  This means we didn’t sow them there, they just came from our fertilizer/compost and we tended the plants as they sprouted.  Jillian has the worm-picking job because we don’t use pesticides.

I love Florida bulbs, they are easy to grow and propagate quickly.  I can give the many extras away and cover my yard in little groves of them within just a couple of years.  Now if I can just get fruit trees like fig, citrus, kumquat, pineapple, and bananas to grow as well!

Thanks for reading!

Type at you later…

~Nancy Tart

 

Results of the Rains

May 22, 2018

Results of the Rains

In late Florida Spring, we get rain.  Who am I kidding?  We get flooded.  Our meteorologists have a very easy job.  They can say, “we have a 100% chance of rain at some point today with clouds and a chance of thundershowers.”  We do get a few slivers of sunlight, just enough to remind us that the sun is still battling for dominance.

A result of this rainy season is a slight change to the adage “April showers bring May flowers;” in Florida it’s “A string of showers bring beautiful flowers.”

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Aren’t they gorgeous?

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We had only a few small bulbs in neglected clusters when we moved in last year.  We dug them up, separated them, replanted and fertilized the soil at least monthly with organic non-toxic high-nitrogen fertilizer.  They reward us with amazing  blooms after the showers!

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Our fiery orange and yellow blooms are Kimberly’s favorite.  (We had just three bulbs last year!) These are our front yard background flowers with their huge oval leaves and tall stalks.

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Our bright white and fuchsia lilies make the bulk of the garden blooms.

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These little buggers were in four clusters all dejected.  A total of 34 bulbs – now they cover in a checkerboard pattern the front, center, side, one beautiful cluster, and lines between the cedar trees along the driveway.  There are easily 100 bulbs now and we’ll have more in January when we replant.

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Then there are my awesome tiny purple blooms with straight stalks called “Mexican Petunias.”  Grandma Jeanette had a yard full of those!  These are actually great-grand flowers off of some cuttings Grandma Jeanette gave me about ten years ago.  So they are our “heirloom flowers.”  (Yes, that’s a collard on the right.)

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I love the results of the rain!

Thanks for reading!

Type at you next time…

~Nancy Tart

 

Pineapple

May 2, 2018

Pineapple

One of our favorite fruits is the pineapple.

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The best of the best is fresh cut.  (We will get them straight off our bushes someday!)

Pineapple is great with pork, in oriental dishes, on pizza, in a cake, in muffins, or just plain and juicy sweet.

Up until a few months ago, I’d never cut a fresh pineapple!  It’s really easy if your kids are like mine and want to eat as close to the rind as possible.  My mom cuts the rind off and then dices the meat for a no-mess-later snack.

You cut off the top.  (Be sure to leave a little meat so you can plant the top in a sunny spot and a year later you’ll have more pineapples!)

You cut off the base.  (My kids call it the butt because the pineapple sits on it.)

Now stand the pineapple up and slice through it from top to bottom in two or three cuts.  I always use three because I like narrower bites for small-child mouths to make less of a mess.  Lay these four or six strips flat and slice into wedges.  They will look like pizza slices.  The yellow pineapple meat is pretending to be the cheese and the rind is being the crust.

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And voila!  Easy treat to grab and eat!  Our chickens love pineapple rinds.  Prim always thinks she wants them when we are cutting, but that’s just because we have the cutting board out and she thinks she’s a human.

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Pineapple is loaded with vitamins and minerals needed for healthy bodies.  It has an enzyme called bromelain that is anti-inflammatory and helps sooth coughing too.  For the calories (82 per cup), pineapple is considered nutrient dense and low sugar.  One cup of fresh pineapple has about 180mg potassium, 2g dietary fiber, 0.6g protein, 0.7% Vitamin A, 40% Vitamin C, 6.7% Vitamin B6, as well as copper, iron, folate, magnesium, thiamin, niacin, and 130% daily value of manganese!  (Among others, check it out!)

So, for a healthy, easy snack that tastes great, try some fresh pineapple!  (Just watch out for the “burn” you can get on your lips after a few slices.)

Fun facts:

Did you know that adding a little salt to pineapple makes it taste sweeter?  Just not too much!

The pineapple is technically a berry!  It is formed by several flowers fruiting together at the core (the hard central “Stem” through the middle of the pineapple) and fusing together into the soft, yellow meat of a single fruit per stalk.

The core and rind are edible!  The core can be too tough to eat in an unripe pineapple.  The rind is traditionally used to make a fermented drink!

Thanks for reading!

Type at you next time…

~Nancy Tart

 

Understanding and Choosing Forgiveness

April 23, 2018

Understanding and Choosing Forgiveness

Sometimes things make us irritated.  Loss, waste, and destruction of life are hot spots for me.

We have livestock.

Honestly, I can shrug off an owl or hawk picking off a young chicken.  I can understand the predators are getting food and my unguarded (or less than perfectly guarded) animals become easy prey.  We learn how to build a better pen or protect our animals better for the environment we have.  But I hate waste.

I had never faced a human killing animals indiscriminately.   Until yesterday, neither had the girls.  They love to show off their animals and share their experiences: from soft, fluffy biddies to newly laying vibrantly colored pullets to nuzzling Guinea Pigs.  The girls love animals and wouldn’t think of hurting them just because.  Even the “mean” cockerels (young chickens we will eat or sell, sometimes a rooster just has a mean disposition and they stay locked in the pen for protection!) are treated with respect.  They will be grilled chicken dinner or traded for feed money, anyway, so they serve a purpose.

Once, we had a child swipe a biddie because it was  “so cute  and I wanted  it,”  but her brother returned it the next day because it “looked sick.” (Unfeathered baby chicks have to stay under a heat lamp at about 100o and yes, without that heat, they get sick.)  We could understand that but the girls kept explaining to this little child that if she wanted to hold them and play with them, she could come to our yard and ask, but the biddie needed to stay with her “sisters.” (The other chicks.)

Recently, a child came to the house, systematically killed several hens, stole most of the young chickens to bait a dog, and took eggs.  We didn’t want to believe it was true.  His family returned the two live ones that managed to make it and graciously paid money to replace the lost animals.   One of the accomplices was one of the girls’ friends.  The girls went through many emotions: devastation, betrayal, anger, sadness, joy (when discovering the one rescued young chicken was the last female Buff!), compassion (when they decided they needed to pray for him), and forgiveness.

It took a while to process.  We discussed trust, honesty, betrayal, sin in the world, fallen man, how we shouldn’t be bitter, how Jesus calls us to love regardless of how people hurt us, and eventually the anger and sadness turned to compassion and forgiveness.

For me, I went through the same emotions.  It was hard to swallow and move on because of how hurt the girls were.  I wanted to protect my children from these emotions.  I didn’t want them to feel betrayal – they had allowed “friends” over and shared their animals with them and at least one of these children were part of the attack and theft.

Instead, I chose to help coach them through the emotions.  It was right to feel betrayal, anger, and sadness.  Those emotions are normal.  They had to understand how sometimes good people choose to follow evil and are sad about what they did.  (Case with their friends.)  The girls had to forgive.

And by the end of the next day, they were laughing and playing in the yard with their reconciled friends.  True forgiveness means forgetting and moving on.  That, despite the loss and hurt of the morning, made my heart happy.  Of course, I hope they never feel betrayal, but – reality check! – in this fallen world, it is likely that someone else later in life will hurt their hearts – and they will have to forgive to keep their heart from bitterness.

Yes, I found that if I allow God to move on my children’s hearts, He can turn their hurts into joy.

Thanks for reading!

Type at you later…

~Nancy Tart

 

Spring Seeds

March 3, 2018

Spring Seeds

Florida likes to tease our tropical plants a bit with a fake spring.  It’s really the start of spring weather but we will have at least one more cold snap to remind us that we do participate briefly in the season the rest of the country calls winter.

My favorite plant (outside of anything edible and my personal favorite trio of roses, gardenia, and Camilla) type is bulb.  In Florida, many bulbs thrive with minimum care.  Our yard had a few worn beds of overgrown bulbs when we arrived.  Year one was break them up and replant.

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Year two is sprouting.  (See how I love bulbs!  Fast growing, hardy and results in a year!)

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Elephant ears are one of my favorites, but this yard has two types of elephant ears, bananas, gorgeous lilies, fire-flowers, a yellow-red lily with a huge 6” bloom (just a green few in the picture here as tall, cup-like leaves with “spokes”), and the normal replanted ones like celery, onion, and garlic.  Celery bottoms replant and grow until they are tired of being stepped on.  We have one two-year pineapple and two newbies.  Two garlic cloves are growing. Dozens of onions dot the design.

And we have what we call “bonus plants” these come from our fertilizer.20180302_173445.jpg

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We fertilize with an organic mix of hay, biodegraded plant material, and chicken droppings.  Since our philosophy is to waste nothing, our chickens end up eating a lot of kitchen scraps that include seeds.  This often leads us to wonderful “bonus plants.”

These gems are usually milo, wheat, millet, collard, eggplant, citrus, pepper, or tomato!  We’ve noted cucumber, sunflower, and pumpkin as well.  When we find a tomato, we baby it.  Usually, though, the next day the lizard hunter has trampled it even though the gardens are strictly off limits.  Any lizard who makes it to the house or the garden is safe!

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But this spring we were babying one tiny tomato in the front porch garden when today, voila! ~ ~ We discovered this literal bed of tomatoes hiding under an elephant ear!  We’re so excited we haven’t figured out if we want to attempt to dig them up and separate them while they are small or just leave them in this area they appear to like.  (I’m beginning to believe a single chicken must have eaten an entire bag of tomatoes last season!)

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All of our young pullets are finally hens, laying and regularly producing so we have an average excess of 10 dozen eggs a week!  Now our chickens pay for themselves and the dogs!  (The money we get from the market for our eggs pays for chicken feed and dog feed.)  I love the seeds of spring!

20180302_173503.jpg(So does Lucas, who had to have his picture taken without his dirty shirt.)

Thanks for reading!

Type at you next time…

~Nancy Tart

 

 

 

Garden Lesson

February 16, 2018

Garden Lesson

Cold, actually cool (we’re in Florida, “cold” means less than 50 degrees), breezes attacked us.  Winter means pruning roses, repotting figs, starting seeds in pots, and refreshing the soil in beds for spring sowing, all to prepare the garden for a new crop.

Newness.

Even though spring is several weeks away, we are preparing for it.  We break ground in the old soil, turn it, remove the weeds, add new fertilizer, repair containers, and get everything ready for new life.  Taking a deep breath, I wonder at how our lives revolve in seasons.  Being broken, removing old things, repairing ourselves, adding fresh knowledge to keep us alive; to be healthy we are continually renewing our minds and hearts.

Gardens teach us so much about patience, care, and investing in the future with uncertainty as our only guarantee.  I can perfectly prepare the soil, make a perfect bed, and give my seeds the best chance at life – sometimes they grow and flower beautifully, but sometimes life happens; a storm, flooding, foraging animals, tramping children, drought, pests.  Sometimes the crop fails, but I patiently restart for the next season.  This reminds me how I love my children; I do my best, pray, and trust in God to guide their hearts to Him.  It’s also the same way God loves us – patiently repairing us time and again and starting us anew each time.

Gardens teach us so much of life.

Thanks for reading!

Type at you next time…

~Nancy Tart

 

A Storm and Chicken Story

A sneak peek at Long Tail and the Big Storm

August 26, 2017

A Storm and Chicken Story

One day we were playing outside and a storm came up.  Not a cute little Pooh bear thundercloud with a few raindrops, but a giant, hurricane-wind, flash-lightning-fireworks-in-the-sky, shake-the-whole-house-thunder, all-people-hide-inside kind of thunderstorm.  (Okay, it was a simple, everyday, Florida thunderstorm.)  The winds were swirling chicken feathers and fluffing them out like towel-dried cats.  Smaller chickens were hop-flying to stabilize themselves as they fought for the safety of the henhouse.

After drying off from the first wave of rain, the girls peeked outside and giggled at the chickens until the raindrops were so large we couldn’t see the henhouse anymore.  The late summer winds blew the tree limbs around like strong autumn breezes scatter just-raked leaf piles.

“Mom, can you tell us a story with a storm?” Asked Rebeccah.

“A Long Tail story!” yipped Kimberly.  She was five, and she loved Long Tail.

So we snuggled on the couch with lightning flashes illuminating the room through the big windows and started what would become “Long Tail and the Big Storm.”

The chickens of the yard were ruled by Long Tail, the great yellow chief, and guarded by Long Tail and Alfredo, the white rooster imported some time ago.  Under this rooster team, the hens and pullets scratched and gossiped and laid eggs all day with no worries.

On one autumn day the bright sky darkened with angry clouds.  The sun hid.  The birds in the woods started crying warnings and flying away.  Two small humans who were playing in the henhouse with the baby biddies, heard a booming crack of thunder and jumped!  They put the baby biddies back in the safe brooder and left the henhouse.

“Look at those little humans!” cawed Alfredo, laughing, “running like rabbits!”

A giant bolt of lightning lit up the sky just behind the woods and a cannon-loud BOOM of thunder shattered the air.  Alfredo scrambled into the henhouse and hid under the brooder.

All the hens laughed at the silly rooster.

Even Red Feathers and Golden Eye, two of the youngest pullets, laughed at him.

Long Tail strutted by, “when the water falls from the sky, we come in.” Long Tail was not afraid.

A big wind shrieked through the henhouse.  It blew the people door open!

Can Long Tail save his flock?  Be sure to check out Long Tail and the Big Storm to see just how this courageous rooster accomplishes this brave feat!

Thanks for reading!

Type at you next time…

~Nancy Tart

Conquering Ticks

Our natural solution to ticks.

August 10, 2017

Conquering Ticks

We live on what we call a tiny farm.  It’s just over an acre.  It was abandoned before our landlord bought it, spruced it up, and cut down all the brush.  When we arrived in April, we discovered that a twenty-foot walk from our carport to the front step attracted lots of ticks!  Not the big, easy-to-see dog ticks, but tiny ticks the size of a period!  (Yes, some are so small they can fit on the head of a sewing pin, the girls have tried it – they also are fascinating to look at under a microscope because the light goes through them!)  Some were slightly bigger.  (No, we’ve never taken pictures of them!  We are usually inside when we find them and we smash, burn, or flush them, instantly!)

Research taught us these were a variety of deer tick.  The small ones are called “seed ticks.”  In part of the tick’s life cycle, they are newly emerged in their tick form (small adult form) and need just a little blood to finish growing.  So they bite and release.  The duration of this bite is between ten minutes and an hour, so sometimes we caught them and got them off.  We got very adept at distinguishing tick bites from the bites of other minuscule horrors of Florida, like sand gnats, mosquitoes, fire ants, and yellow flies.  We all know that ticks attach themselves once they are full adults.  (For this variety, full adult size is about 1/8th of an inch in diameter – the size of a small print “o”.)

I hate ticks.  (Who doesn’t?)  I don’t like pesticides.  (We want to eat food from this yard!)

Luckily, I have chickens!

Chickens are opportunistic omnivores (aka, scavengers).  This means while most people envision them eating dry seeds and corn, they actually have a palate that inclines them toward consumption of living organic material such as insects, microscopic organisms, fresh new plant shoots, and anything moving that is small enough to fit in their beak.  My chicken flock has always been known to hunt actively for mosquitoes and flies.  (Yes, they run along under the flying insect and jump to attack once they perceive catch is possible.  Several times they have smashed into a fence or wall while hunting in this manner.  Side-effect: human entertainment.)

Roosters (grown-up males) seem to find ant larvae a delicacy and get all excited digging up ant beds and telling the others, “here, some awesome food!”  (A few hens join in this feast, but others look at the ant-larvae-loving chickens with “eww, gross” expressions.)

Our laying hens (females) and breeding roosters stay in the covered henyard.  Our “biddie-babies” (the girls have made-up terms for every stage; this is newly hatched to 6 weeks) and “baby-toddlers” (6 to 10 weeks) share the brooding pens so they can be protected from rain, draft, and heat in the pre-feathered chick stage (biddie-babies) and to protect them from our area’s population of kites (beautiful, small hawk-like birds who hunt young chickens).  The “big toddlers” (10 to 15 weeks) and “teenagers” (15 to 24 weeks) roam near the henyard because they are too big for the kites to carry away.

They will forage all day for insects and leave the free-choice feed completely alone.  They stay within about 25 feet of their water source at all times (during or just after a light rain, they may wander a bit farther, but not normally).  They LOVE seed ticks!

Within two weeks of our natural pest control plan, we could walk to the carport with zero ticks!  Within a month, the strip of back yard where we hang clothes and the kids play was nearly tick-free!  It’s been five months and they have cleared an expanded circle that includes parts of the front yard.

(My bulb beds helped grow the circle as they love to eat insects that eat the bulbs and the plants hold dew.)

Slowly, our chickens are conquering the tick population in the rest of the yard!

In closing, if you have a tick problem and don’t mind chickens scratching through your plant beds, maybe consider a pest control plan that rewards you with organic fertilizer… and eggs too!

Thanks for reading!

Type at you next time…

~Nancy Tart

 

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