End of the Joros, 2023

 They're everywhere in north Georgia now.  They can be spotted early in the season, but they're tiny and inconspicuous.  By August or so, the successful ones have gotten big, and some get very large.

As the season shifts into fall and the nights become cooler, the Joros seem to be a little more resilient than the native barn spiders, which re-build their webs each evening at dusk to catch night-flying insects.  Cold nights = few bugs.  The Joros, although they stay in their webs at night, seem to primarily hunt during the day.

Eventually nights come along that are too cold for them.  I had a very light frost in mid-October, but it was very borderline.  They were fine.  Nights in the low 20s are a different matter, and in early November we've had a couple of those.  They're now mostly hanging dead in their webs.  They've laid eggs by now, so the cycle will begin again next spring.

Tractoring Chickens and the Impact on the Yard

 As discussed previously, I keep my chickens in tractors.  It works well to give them additional food for their diet, thus saving on feed costs, and in theory it helps fertilize the grass.  After some early predator issues, I set up some electrified netting and have had no further problems.

They spend most of the day in the tractors.  They're also out some of the time, but they don't free-range.  I often see hawks on top of the muscadine trellis posts, and I'd have serious predation issues if I let them out for the whole day.  The tractor moves back and forth until it covers most of the area inside the paddock, then they get moved.  As can be seen (both above and below), they do scratch down to bare dirt sometimes.  The area needs time to recover after they have been there (recovery can't happen in a drought or in the dormant season; in those cases, the tractor gets parked and hay is used inside the tractor to provide bedding and what Joel Salatin calls a 'carbon diaper').

The aftermath of the chickens' work in the foreground paddock can be seen here:

These pictures were from spring; they subsequently moved to the right, but now (a couple of months later) they are back in the center area again.  The other chickens move between two areas, as well.  Given enough rainfall, the system works well.

This ground-level shot shows that the grass is a little darker green in the area where the tractor was, and it also shows a few more torn-up spots than were present before the tractor moved through.  That's a pretty fair assessment of how it goes.

Fruit Fly Trap

 Fortunately, this rarely happens.  But I recently had a fruit fly outbreak when I tossed something in the kitchen trash that a fruit fly was able to use to start to establish a population.  One buzzing around the kitchen barely rates notice, but two or three gets one's attention.

This happened once before when I was house-sitting for someone during the summer.  I had some bananas back at home, and when I returned, I found the same thing--a bunch of flies in the kitchen.

There are commercial fly traps, but I decided to try something I'd read about.  It's simple: cut a plastic bottle's neck off, invert it, and put some bait in the bottom.

 

 

I used apple cider vinegar as bait with a drop of dish soap.  I had experience using water with dish soap to drown Japanese beetles.  The vinegar is how it became obvious that I had fruit flies to begin with: I use it in the rabbits' water, and whenever I unscrewed the bottle, I immediately had flies buzzing around me.  As it turns out, it's fortunate that I used the vinegar instead of a piece of banana peel.

Some sites that describe the process for making a bottle trap like this suggest that the flies won't be able to escape, because they'll run up the sides and find their way blocked.  I found that they were able to enter and exit the bottle pretty easily, which was disappointing.  So I made another trap almost immediately out of a two-liter bottle to try to make it a little harder on them.

However, then I held the smaller bottle trap up and looked at it from below.

It was catching a fair  number of fruit flies, but some that flew into the bottle and never touched the vinegar were able to fly back out.  Over the course of a couple of days, the two traps caught more flies than I realized were present.  At that point I tossed them and put out a new trap, which caught zero.  I eradicated the population, or I at least got rid of all of the ones that were attracted to the vinegar.

This was easy, cheap, and effective.  A triple win.

 

Spring Freezes

 It has happened before.  In north Georgia, it's actually pretty common.  Early-blooming fruit trees and bushes, like blueberries and pears, are very susceptible to March freezes.  This cold season has had more than normal.

February was very warm for the second half of the month; it may have even gotten to 80 where I live (in Atlanta, it did reach that temperature).  Most things started to come out of dormancy. Then things cooled in March.  There have been a number of days with highs in the 50s and lows in the 20s.  I had two mornings where the lows were 22 and 21.  Both mornings, it was below 28 for hours, and below 25 for at least four hours.  That pretty much trashed the blueberries for the year and it put a dent in the Kieffer pears that had already bloomed.

All is not lost--in the pictures above, there are a couple of fruits that may have survived, and my other two pears are blooming this year--the buds are not really open to any degree yet.

Blooms on the other two pears are a nice surprise.  About 10 years ago, I planted Seckel and Magness pear trees, but they had never bloomed despite growing well.  The Kieffers both got fireblight really bad a couple of years ago--I had to cut one back to the stump--but the Seckel and Magness were untouched.  However, neither had bloomed.  I even thought about tearing them out.  Fortunately, they're blooming later.  If there are no more low-20s mornings, I may actually get some fruit off of them.

The blueberries are probably about 90% lost.  Alas.

Another Cinderblock?

 As I recently mentioned, I do sometimes have pretty good success with 100% whole wheat loaves.  There have been some epic fails with 100%, however, and then sometimes there are loaves that turn out like this:

At first glance, it doesn't look all that bad.  It looks a little odd on the top, but that's not a series of oven-spring splits.  More on those momentarily.  The issue with the loaf is apparent when it's on the slicer:

It's a wide-angle lens, so there's some distortion, but at the back are a couple of slices cut from last week's loaf, a standard 50/50 blend.  You can see they're a little wider.  The 100% loaf in the foreground is very compact and dense.

 

Cut open, it's pretty obvious. For comparison, here's the 'victory' loaf referred to in the post linked at the top:

The ultra-dense loaf doesn't really constitute a fail; it's salvageable and will make decent sandwiches.  This time I know what the issue was: the sponge was too dry.  As I mixed it, it seemed very (very very) dry, but I wanted to try it to see what would happen.  On oven proof, it actually did eventually rise a bit, but overall it remained pretty dense. The bands visible on top were just legacies from when I formed the loaf before putting it in the basket.

In a cold house, there are only two periods when it rises: before going into the proofing basket and once it's in the oven.  In this case, more time on the initial rise might have been helpful.  When I formed the loaf and put it into the basket it was apparent it was very small. I may experiment a bit more with it to see if I can make it work.

Food Storage Rice

Rice is an iconic food for long-term storage, and studies have shown that it remains good for a long time.  In the BYU study, samples had 88%+ acceptability for emergency use at 30 years, but the acceptability for everyday use was lower:  regular white rice held around 70% over the time frame studied, but parboiled rice was about 10% lower (the poster is viewable here).  Thirty years is certainly very good for stored food.

Storing bulk foods for more than a short time is best done in an oxygen-free environment.  That can be accomplished with buckets, oxygen absorbers and mylar, or half-gallon mason jars (with oxygen absorbers and/or a Food Saver vacuum sealer).  Mason jars are exposed to light (although Ball has offered amber mason jars recently that block almost all of the light).  Mason jars can be re-vacuum-sealed, but this isn't very doable with mylar.

A long time ago--about 2009--I put up some jasmine rice in mason jars. I decided to open one up to see how it was faring.

The results were very decent*.  I didn't perceive any staleness or rancidity (brown rice does this almost immediately, and even white rice can taste a little off after a few months when not well-stored).  I'll finish the jar.  In the picture above, the jar looks a little cloudy; that's just starch.  When the jar is finished, it'll clean up easily.

*I like jasmine rice for everyday use, but this 13+ year-old rice had lost its floral essence and tasted like normal white rice.  So while the rice lived on, the flavor that makes jasmine different was gone.

With food inflation, it makes sense to front-load food purchases even if there's no interest in building an inventory.  Packaging has to be considered, but it can still represent a savings over buying food as it is needed.

The Great Freeze of 2022

 The Christmas weekend Siberian Express dropped morning lows to single digits where I am (6 and 8 on two different mornings, plus daytime highs in the 20s for a couple of days).  My animal housing is not particularly robust against cold.  The chicken tractor design  that I used (based on Justin Rhodes' plans) is open in the front, and my rabbit hutch is very open: again, the emphasis in the design is on keeping them cool, not warm.

If it routinely got this cold--particularly with wind--I'd have the rabbits in an open shed, probably, where tarps could easily be draped across the front to block the wind.  And the chickens would probably have a coop they could be closed up in.

As it was, all of the animals made it through okay.  Everyone's water froze repeatedly.

On the coldest day, even the water I put out mid-morning froze by afternoon.  So I kept swapping out crocks for the rabbits and waterers for the chickens.  After the first couple of days, the highs started going back above freezing again and the daytime water wouldn't freeze.

None of the animals exhibited any distress; all behaved pretty normally.  No frostbite on the rabbits' ears, although the roosters had a touch of frostbite on their combs (note the last two spikes in the picture below).

I was able to keep the house habitable with the wood stove, but it struggled to warm it up the first morning (the storm blew in early morning on a Friday, and Saturday morning was the six-degree low). The house was in the upper 40s Saturday morning, and the stove took most of the day to get it warmed up into the normal range.  Fortunately, I was able to be home to tend it. 

I'm glad it's not routinely like this.