Bread-More Thrills of Victory and Agonies of Defeat

 Cold temps require heat-assisted proofing, but also generally provide for the potential for dramatic oven spring.  The oven proofing also has the potential to cause uneven gas pockets in the dough. However, sometimes cold-temp bread turns out great.  A couple of weeks ago, I baked a 100% red whole wheat loaf that turned out like this:

And once cut open, it was nice:

It was still denser than white or 50/50 bread, but whole wheat doesn't turn out much better than this (at least not for me).

As I often do, I followed the 100% whole wheat loaf with a 100% white loaf the next week.  I had visions of airy perfection. What I got was...disappointing.

It's worse than it looks in the picture.  Cut open, it's approaching unleavened status.

That may be a bit harsh, but only a bit.  The (minimal) rise was very uneven.  It looks like Swiss Cheese--big gas pockets and solid otherwise. I'm not sure what happened.  Conditions for the two loaves seemed pretty similar: a cold house, followed by oven proofing for a few hours, then baking.  There are obviously things about bread baking that I still haven't figured out.

Oxygen Absorbers

 As noted previously, sometimes bad things happen with stored food over time.  Food in a sealed container that has oxygen in it, as well, can suffer from infestation and oxidation / deterioration. Freezer burn is another example of this.  So it is best when storing things for more than a short time to vacate the oxygen.

Food Saver-style vacuum sealers do this, and there are also jar attachments for wide mouth and regular mouth canning jars.  I don't know offhand what concentration of oxygen they can reduce the interior of a jar to, but they're a decent approach. They may not drop it enough to prevent insect eggs from hatching.

Another approach is to use oxygen absorbers. They are sold in various sizes to accommodate different containers.  US Emergency Supply has a very useful chart on this. In addition to canning jars, mylar bags and buckets can be used (the bags do not need to be kept in a bucket, but a bucket needs a bag in order to store food--BYU researchers found that oxygen levels could not be reliably maintained at a low enough level using a bucket alone, probably because of seal leakage).

There are plenty of resources online showing the use of mylar bags.  In addition to oxygen absorbers, dry ice can be used to drive out the oxygen.  That's a more old-school approach that fills the container with CO2 rather than sucking the oxygen out of the air and into the iron powder in the absorber.  The Rose Red Homestead has a video that demonstrates both approaches.

When exposed to air, oxygen absorbers begin to react.  It does not necessarily happen very fast, but it does happen: so opening a package of them doesn't render them all useless within two minutes unless sealed back up, but they do need to be put in either their final destination or in another airtight container quickly (a canning jar that is then vacuum-sealed is ideal).

Some oxygen absorber packages have an oxygen indicator:

The Oxyeye is pink when it hasn't been exposed to oxygen, and it soon turns purple after opening the package (or after the package leaks and allows the concentration inside to exceed 0.05%).

One caveat is that in time, the indicator will turn a faded pink, looking almost like it did when unexposed:

The above indicator is a few months old; I just clipped it to the refrigerator to see what would happen.

A usable oxygen indicator will feel like a pillow stuffed with powder, which it is when it's in its unexposed state. If it feels rigid and crumbly, it's probably no longer able to absorb oxygen.  Some vendors repackage absorbers into smaller quantities.  The repackaged absorbers are quite likely to be at least partially depleted in this process, and may be completely ruined. While some oxygen reduction is better than none, levels have to drop below one percent to prevent insect eggs from hatching.  With functioning absorbers and mylar bags, this is achievable.

The above picture shows some pinto beans, packed into gallon-sized mylar bags (five pounds in each). After a day, a noticeable vacuum effect has sucked the package down around the contents as the oxygen has been removed.

After my infestation episode, I'm trying to put my wheat into mylar, even though wheat doesn't necessarily need oxygen-free storage for quality purposes over a relatively short time frame. Hopefully the day of weevils will not be repeated.

Black Walnuts, 2022

 In 2020 I had a bumper crop of black walnuts.  In 2021, I had hardly any.  I was expecting an alternate-bearing bigger harvest this year, and the trees did not disappoint.

I've been doing them one five-gallon bucket at a time; this is a manageable amount that takes me about an hour to process start to finish.  A full bucket yields very little once the hulls are knocked off.

After washing, they get arrayed in the sun to dry:

Now it's just a matter of cracking them...

The Arrival of Fall

 Fall is here.  There's a pretty serious drought going on (stage 2, heading toward stage 3), so leaves are dropping early, and some color started earlier than normal.  However, plants need less water as they're going dormant, so hopefully the long-term damage will be limited.  I've been watering trees and plants for over a month (during which time I've only gotten 1/8" of rain).

My paw paws have never produced. They've been in the ground for a while now and I keep hoping I'll see blooms in the spring.  Maybe next year.  This year they turned a nicer shade of yellow than I think I have previously seen (the above picture was taken about a week ago; the tree is leafless now after a couple of hard freezes).

The muscadine vines are now fully turned; the picture below was taken a couple of weeks ago as they were midway.  The vertical orange leaves in the background are poison ivy.

 

Now begins a brief four-month window of complete dormancy to get things done.  Spring is just around the corner.

Fall Bread

 With my sourdough starter, I get optimal rise in the dough (aka sponge) at about 75 degrees.  Above 80 the rise is explosive, and letting it sit on the counter for 7 or 8 hours leads to big prebake rise, sub-optimal rise while baking.  In the colder months, I have the opposite problem.  My dough doesn't rise much at all, so needs an oven proof session of about two hours.

This fall has yielded a rapid transition from warm (> 80 indoors) to cool (barely 70).  I baked one loaf that turned out great before I had to go back to oven-proofing.

Obviously, in the summer I could switch to a daytime rise, when I could control the time a little better than when it rises overnight.  But that would be disruptive to other things in the routine. So overnight rise it is.  That will work well for the next few months.

Another Gifted Tree

 A year and a half ago, someone took down a red oak and gave it to me.  Someone just a couple of weeks ago had a dead oak of some kind near his house, cut it down, and invited me to haul it off.  He cut it into max 6.5-foot lengths.

That enabled them to fit in the bed of the truck with the tailgate closed.  The tree was fairly small, so it fit easily into my log rack for bucking--and the individual segments were easy to handle even before cutting.

Bucking them only took 30 minutes or so.

It was described as being "dead but not rotten," and that looked pretty correct as I was bucking it.  But it's definitely not ready to throw in the stove next month. As I started to split it, some sections had the feel and smell of fresh oak, and the moisture meter gave readings of around 24% (though some were higher).  That's similar to the freshly cut (as of July) maple that I also have. Maybe by early 2023 some will be ready (if needed).

First New Zealand Litter

I got the breeding stock off someone on Craigslist, with no further information.   The first breeding didn't take, but the second one did:

They grow quickly.  The picture below was less than a week later:

And a few weeks later they were weaned and on their own...

They're older now, about 12 weeks, and at harvest weight.  The picture below shows a lot of them alerting to a noise off to the right.

They grow up so fast...

Canning Rabbit Meat

The first litter of rabbits have now been processed.  Some of the meat has been frozen; some has been eaten fresh, and I have canned some of it.

I have never canned bone-in meat before.  All of my prior experiences have been with boneless beef or chicken.

My first attempt worked out okay, more or less.  The instructions for all meats are pretty similar.  Boneless are processed for 75 minutes for pints, 90 minutes for quarts.  Bone-in meat is processed 65 minutes for pints and 75 minutes for quarts.

I had two rabbits to can. They were in the refrigerator, so I decided to go ahead and use the boneless time.  Two rabbits, roughly four pounds, went into three jars.

For raw pack, no liquid is added, so what you see in the picture cooked out of the meat.  A couple of days after processing, I opened one up to see how it turned out.  The meat was fine.  As with all canned meat, it was somewhat over-cooked and a little on the dry side, although it wasn't objectionable at all (rabbit meat is thoroughly cooked when it reaches a temperature of 165 degrees Farenheit, so heating it up to 240 degrees is definitely overdoing it from a taste standpoint--but it's the only realistic way to get it done).  The main problem was the bones: they more or less crumbled.  That made deboning a little tricky.  I'm pretty sure that's due to the extra processing time that I built in.  Next time I'll do the 75.  Overall, though, this is definitely a viable way to preserve the meat.

A Small Patch

 I patch jeans using an old scrap of denim from I don't even remember where.  It must've been jeans that were irredeemably ripped (I don't do cutoffs).  As I have cut pieces from the scrap over the years it has accumulated a long narrow appendage. It was too small to likely ever be useful, but I didn't a) need to cut a bigger patch than needed for a given job, because that just means more thread and sewing, and b) want to throw it out because someday it might be useful.

Someday arrived.  One pair of pants had a gradually worsening stress tear at the top corner of a rear pocket.

The picture shows it already patched up, but these kinds of tears are not uncommon--although I usually haven't gotten them on my pants.  Also shown is the source for patch material with the appendage mostly cut off.  This is because on the backside, the patch looks like this:

The patch is small--only about 1 1/4" x 3/4"--but it's big enough to overlay the emerging rip visible in the top picture.  Hopefully the adage of a stitch in time saving nine will apply here.  There was almost no chance that little fragment was ever going to be useful, so it's nice that it found a use.

The repair itself was not that easy: as the top picture shows, I had to drive the needle through the top corner of the pocket itself, which meant punching through three layers of denim.  I needed the thimble.

One thing that helped with all this (now that my eyes have reached that age...) was the big-eyed needles I got off Amazon:

They're not small-diameter needles, obviously, but they work okay for things like this.  And maybe the broader end is a little easier to push on, in addition to the big eye being easier to thread.

Hopefully this patch holds up as long as some others I've done (still going strong after five years now).

Death under the Black Walnut

 It was another bad day for a cicada.  As I have mentioned before, I have European hornets in the area.  I see them frequently during the summer months.  Every once in a while, I head a cicada alarm call.  When it's coming from the ground, it's invariably a scene like this:

It's usually around the black walnut tree by the house. European hornets are meat eaters, so go after a variety of insects.  As my other post showed, they are very aggressive in hunting, even to the point of cutting trapped insects out of spiderwebs (I have only seen that the one time).  Fortunately, they don't seem to go after people much, except around their nest (which is true of most stinging insects).

Sun Tea

 This is one of those things I grew up with and have assumed everyone knows about, but the knowledge doesn't appear to be universal. It is how we pretty much always made tea for iced tea in the desert Southwest.

The process is pretty simple: put some tea bags in a clear jar of water, set out in the sun for a while, and then you have tea.  It's sun- and temperature-dependent, but either working separately, or both together, will lead to some degree of success.  In other words, a cold sunny day or a warm cloudy day will work, but a cold cloudy one won't be so good.  Sun seems to matter.  Regardless of temperature, tea seems to turn out better when it's in the sun.

I was surprised to read that some feel sun tea is potentially unsafe. If the bags are contaminated, they could be correct, but that's probably very unlikely (see also below).  If the water is contaminated when it goes out into the sun, then having it sit out there warming up for a few hours certainly won't help, but if the water is okay at the outset, the tea bags would be the only thing that could cause problems.  In my new house, I was originally on a bored well that had some contamination issues.  I didn't make sun tea much back then because of my work schedule.  The water I was drinking out of the bored well was a mess generally, with or without making it into tea.

Although I've been doing it for decades, the process I follow is still ad hoc and it's widely tolerant of divergence to the upside: leaving it out for too long does not ruin it.  I have a jug that's about 1.5 gallons, and I put three Luzianne family-sized tea bags into it.  Four can be used and will make satisfactory tea faster. Lipton or any other kind also work.

 

Then I just go by sight. On a sunny day in the summer, it can be ready in as soon as a couple of hours.  If it's spring or fall and cooler, it might take four.  If it is cloudy, it takes longer. As noted above, cloudy days often lead to cloudy tea, but I haven't studied it systematically.

 

Lipton, Luzianne, and possibly others also have cold brew varieties.  I have only seen Luzianne on the shelf.  It does work okay, though I let it go for longer than five minutes.  It can be put out in the sun and works fine that way, though I haven't tried it when it was warm out, just when it has been below about 50 degrees.  It doesn't have to go outside: it can also be made on the counter indoors.  The taste is different, but it'll work if nothing else does. And obviously, if sun tea poses a risk, cold-counter tea does, too.

 

Once tea is made, it lasts through the day and usually is good into the next day--but beyond that is very iffy.  Sometimes it's cloudy and getting off flavors the next day, too.  Various sites suggest letting it cool at room temperature before refrigerating it to ward off cloudiness. When the weather is cool outside, this won't be as much of an issue, but when it's warm, the water will obviously heat up even if there's cloud cover.

One of the better aspects of tea made this way is that it is cheap: If  $3.48 (as of May, 2022) buys 48 family-sized tea bags, and each batch yields 10 glasses, that's only about $0.02 per glass for the tea cost, plus any sweeteners or other flavorings added at the time of drinking.  That compares very favorably with any pre- made or mixed tea product.  So drink up!

First Litter

I have two pairs of rabbits: two TAMUKs and two New Zealand Reds.  The TAMUKs are more heat-tolerant, developed at Texas A&M Kingsville, and have several breeds in their lineage, including New Zealands.  The TAMUK doe's first litter has arrived:

The litter had eight, but one fell through the sidewall of the cage to the ground and died.  Four weeks later, they have grown.

TAMUKs can have any color, and mixed-color litters are not uncommon.  The buck is sort of off-white.

Pretty soon they'll be moving to a grow-out cage of their own.  Things are going very well.

 

Patches on Top of Patches

 Patching clothes does work.  The jeans mentioned in the previous post are still in rotation four years post-patch, although some additional dings have been accumulated.  I have some other pants that are on a steep and increasing downhill slide, however.

I had some pants that needed to be patched in the knee a while back.  I don't remember exactly how long ago, but it was a couple of years.  Then another wear spot made it necessary to add a second patch immediately adjacent.  Then a third.  This is how the knee area looks now:

From behind, it's gruesome.

The patch at the left is the newest one; the pants haven't been washed with it yet.  It's the same left-right orientation as the front view above.  However, as you can see at the right of the top picture, there's another tear forming.  These pants may not be long for this world.  Patching is a thrifty way to extend the lifespan of clothing, but there are limits.

 In response to the obvious question, why not do a huge patch to cover the whole area rather than smaller ones: It's not obvious that a bigger patch will be needed.  Sometimes it's not.  A large patch is harder to put on (keeping both layers smooth and properly aligned) and uses more patch material and thread.  Plus, it takes a lot of time.  Speaking of patch material, however, I may be getting more from these woeful worn-out pants soon...

 

Spring Pruning, 2022

 I am virtually always late when it comes to pruning.  Every November I think that I'll plan ahead and get it done early, and every March I wonder where the dormant season went.  Some things are still dormant as of early April, but they won't be for long.  Better late than never, in any case...

This year I also need to pull out some of the fence circles I put around trees when they were first planted.  The trees had outgrown them, were growing through the fencing in some instances, and old enough to stand on their own. That's not to say that there won't be problems from the deer, but it should be relatively minor damage at this point rather than lethal.

This was not necessarily an easy task, but had to be completed before the trees leafed out.  I found that in some cases, the wire had to be clipped to free the branches, and some roots had grown over the bottom fence wire (no tree roots, fortunately--mostly grass, and in one case, privet). This points to one of the problems with the fencing: it discourages maintenance activities inside the wire.  Speaking of privet, this was growing inside the fence circle next to my Enterprise apple:

Once the fencing was out, the t-posts had to be removed.  Several years ago I got a t-post puller, and had seldom used it.

If you don't have one of these and you have to pull t-posts, get one.  I've pulled them up by hand and this is vastly easier, quicker, and doesn't tear up the ground as much.  The price from Tractor Supply is up from when I got mine, but it still isn't bad at under $55.  It's awkward to use in close quarters but does work well, even if it has to be short-stroked.

I was even later with pruning most of the muscadines.  Some of them leaked sap profusely after pruning, but hopefully they'll be fine as in years past.

A Treat for the Bunnies

It's only about two months past when I should've pruned my fruit trees and the muscadines, so it's time to get going on that task.  Ahem.  At any rate, this year I have a potential use for the small branches taken out in pruning: rabbits like them.

 Although my New Zealand doe doesn't look terribly impressed with the offering, she did eventually gnaw it pretty thoroughly.  Shown below are a couple of freshly-cut sticks with one that has been debarked.

I do spray my fruit trees with a variety of things, but this season all they've gotten is one dose of copper (they're due for another), and I've gotten about three inches of rain since I sprayed the first time.  So I figured it probably wouldn't hurt them to give them a treat. I have also given them some dandelion leaves, which they like (I don't spray the grass at all).

Other than that, they're still on hay and pellets.  It seems to be working well.

The End of Psycho

 As I mentioned a few months ago, my Barred Rock rooster was not behaving well.  Things continued to deteriorate with him to the point that holding him down brought no improvement at all; he'd come at me in another day or two again.  Two things made me finally pull the plug:  The first was the realization that I didn't want to propagate his bloodline (Joel Salatin, in his new book, makes it clear that animals with behavioral problems have to be culled to get improvement in whatever you're breeding).  The second (and probably decisive) element was the attack at my face that left me bleeding in several places.  Yes, I should've been more wary around him, and yes, the injuries overall were relatively minor.  But still.  I was kneeling on the ground refilling their feeder, and he came around and hit me from above and the side.  So he truly had to go.

Ultimately, the destiny of all of them is the freezer.  He just got there a little sooner than he would have otherwise.

Shown below are the breast meat fillets:

The one on the bottom is from Tyson--it's a Cornish Cross breast, so is larger, but the color difference is striking. 

The rooster was about 18 months old, so the meat was a little firm, but not objectionably so.  The Tyson breast, coming from a chicken that was about eight weeks old.  It was definitely more tender.

I processed him on a Sunday, breaking the meat down right away.  It sat in the refrigerator for a couple of days before being frozen for another few days before baking.  That should have been enough time for any post-death rigor mortis to subside. So I'm assuming the not-entirely-tender quality of the breast meat was due to age alone. However, as I do more, I'll have to keep an eye on it.

Tractor Modification Update

 As discussed in an earlier post, I made some changes to the tractor design for the second build, which is still occupied by the second group of Barred Rock birds. The main thing I was trying to accomplish was lowering the nesting boxes so that they would be lower than the roosting bars.  I hoped this would avoid the problem that developed with the first tractor, in which the chickens roosted in the nesting boxes and laid on the ground underneath the boxes.  Lowering the boxes greatly complicated the build, but last year it seemed to work reasonably well at getting the birds to lay in the boxes rather than sleep--after an initial period of them laying on the ground.

Well... this year while they have been parked, they have fallen into the same habits the first group of chickens acquired.  They're laying on the ground (again) and roosting in the boxes.  This is what I'm finding daily:

The egg in the picture is a fake one, providing a hint that is not being taken (at least for now).  I'm hopeful that this is more a product of the tractors being parked, with the resulting hay inside, that is making a little nest area at the back on the ground more attractive than the boxes.  Once I started rolling last year, the birds soon moved to the nesting boxes for their egg-laying and all was well.  I hope that happens this year, because there's no room for a nesting box under the existing nesting boxes in the new tractor--unless I cut one down.  At this point, I'd say my design modification was not worth the effort and I wouldn't do it again.  Ah well.

Meanwhile, the Delawares in Tractor 1 are mostly laying on the ground, but I've found a couple of eggs in the boxes--and not much poop.  So there is some hope.

 Update:  both tractors are rolling again, as the grass is greening and the winter weeds are abundant.  Both groups are laying in the boxes more often now, but the Delawares are still laying one or two on the ground every day.

The Delawares Are Laying

The Delawares hatched in late September (as did the Barred Rocks, a year before).  In early January, the rooster started crowing (same time frame as the Barred Rock rooster, Psycho, in 2021).  The Barred Rocks started laying in mid-February last year (which surprised me; I wasn't looking for eggs so soon).

The same thing has now happened with the Delawares--also in mid-February.  As with the Barred Rocks last year, the first eggs have been small.

 

In the picture, an egg from the Barred Rocks is on the left, and the rest are from the Delawares.  As happened last year, I expect the egg sizes to gradually increase.  Even though they're small, they're fertile:

The white spots on the yolks show that.  So the rooster is doing his job.  I'm not hatching any out now, but that may come at some point.  For now, it's nice to be getting eggs in quantity again.

Cardinals in Heat

 The seasons progress.  Although it is still winter--trees are still dormant and it was 18 two weeks ago, the daffodils are up (though not blooming yet) and we're entering a sort of peri-spring period. The roads are covered with dead skunks--they mate mid-January to mid-February--and squirrels have been getting active.

Another early-season mating period is apparently that of the cardinal.  For the last couple of weeks, I've noticed a bird fluttering around the mirrors on my truck, and then I noticed this:

Somebody has been spending an awful lot of time on my front bumper.  I then started to pay attention and saw the cardinal (or maybe there's more than one) flying away from the front of the truck every time I walked nearby.

The picture isn't the greatest--massively digitally zoomed and through a not-so-clean window--but you get the idea.  He's seeing himself in the chrome and in the mirrors and fighting his own reflection, trying to drive the presumed rival male out of his territory.  Not surprisingly, this hapless soul doesn't have a female with him--which is doubtless part of the frustration.

All birds apparently are prone to this, and the impact of a mirror on a male betta fish is well-known.  Cardinals may be more susceptible than most other birds.  There are plenty of pictures online of the phenomenon.  Hopefully this soon passes--then we'll be progressing to male woodpeckers and carpenter bees.

Hay, Bunny!

 As is generally recommended, my rabbits are getting pellets and hay.  Although websites usually mention Timothy hay as the most preferred, that's pretty pricey (Tractor Supply sells a 50-pound bale for $23.99 as of this writing).  Bermuda and alfalfa hay are more available.  The link above suggests that rabbits don't like Bermuda grass as much, but the nutrition profile of Bermuda and Timothy are essentially identical (see Table 1 of the linked PDF). One note is that alfalfa hay has more calcium and is usually contraindicated for rabbits in most articles I've read (e.g., this one). This is not a problem; alfalfa costs more.  On Craigslist, alfalfa bales are usually about twice the price of Bermuda, which are the only two readily-available options other than the prepackaged and expen$ive route from a Tractor Supply or similar store.

When I got rabbits, the only hay I had on hand was some Bermuda bales from the previous winter--I park the chicken tractors in late November and don't move them again until March.  I tossed some in the cages and the rabbits immediately began nibbling at it.  They may prefer Timothy to Bermuda, but they seem to go for Bermuda with enthusiasm nonetheless.

I'm not sure exactly how much they actually eat vs. lose through the wire bottoms of their cages.  Some people have built little hay racks in their cages, but I just dump a bunch on the floor of the cage.  Sometimes there's still some left the next day; sometimes not.  Some of the rabbits seem to get into playing with it:

In the foreground is the red New Zeland buck; the TAMUK buck is in the background.  The one in front often burrows into the hay as soon as I put it in his cage--but he eats it, too.  Tossing his hay around though is bound to make more fall through. Alas.  He has gained weight very well, and rapidly, so he's getting enough to eat one way or another.

Snow, 2022

 It happens sometimes.  The mountain counties probably get snow every winter, but elsewhere, it's not an every-winter thing.  I got snow in mid-January this year for the first time since February, 2020. 

The total amount of snow was probably around three inches, but there was rain in between two bouts of snow, so the amount at the end of it all was less.

Southern lore holds that if the snow stays on the ground three days, another snowfall will occur soon--and it did, sort of.  I got a few flurries about a week later, but there was minimal accumulation.  The cold is not done for the year, although the snow may be / probably is.  Although snow is possible into early March, that is very rare.  March is early spring around here.

More on the Rabbit Hutch

 The re-engineered rabbit hutch is working decently well.  More overhang on the sides would be potentially helpful, but overall it's working worlds better than Hutch 1.0 did.  However, once I put rabbits in, I realized they pick a corner of the cage as their latrine spot, and one of the rabbits ends up routinely urinating on the horizontal cage supports.

I should've realized this would be a problem.  It would've been much easier to address before installing the rabbits.  Alas.  However, it was addressable ex post, too.  I pulled all four cages off:

...and painted the 2x4s the cages rest on with high-gloss white paint:

I only did one coat... I should do another.  You can also see that I painted the insides of the cross braces and the vertical supports, too--I had heard, but had to experience first hand, that bucks spray urine everywhere.  So far, the two boys seem to be coexisting reasonably well, but there was a chance they'd end up spraying more than just the wood under their cages--so it all got painted.  It's not a perfect solution, but it's better than raw wood.