Scaly leg mites, oh my!

Just as a watched pot never boils, it seemed to take forever for the milkweed pods to mature this year because we wanted to collect the seeds. And just like the pot boils over the minute you turn you back, milkweed fluff was flying all over last week after I’d given up watching for it.

Our finally-mature milkweed patch

I caught it early enough to not only collect seed, but also note that the pod does not release the seeds the moment it splits open (we call this dehiscence in the business). The fluff seems to get entangled so that only a few seeds fly away at a time.

Entangled milkweed seeds

The weather warmed again, giving me an opportunity to clean out the high tunnel without having my fingers go numb. So sad to see my lovely tomatoes, peppers, and beans headed for the compost.

Compost bins of beans, a pile of dead tomato and pepper plants in the back

The high tunnel only has herbs, beets, and a few carrots left, and I need to get the beets in pretty soon. It looks forlorn and empty, but I’m okay. I’m ready for a break.

The empty high tunnel. Terry will trim the peach tree when the leaves drop.

Only I didn’t get a break. I had Big Plans to get a lot of stuff done last weekend. Nearly the entire list was delayed when I noticed that Blackbeard wasn’t looking so good. She was missing a lot of neck feathers. I had seen this condition get worse since we moved the hens to their winter run, and I wrote it off to molting or pecking.

Blackbeard, looking motheaten and puny

But Friday, I saw that her feet were ugly. The scales were heaved up on the front instead of flat, and she had big bumps on the back.

Ugly feet. Normal feet are smooth and uniformly covered with scales.

I did my online research and decided it was scaly leg mites.  The mites are invisible, highly contagious, can cause severe anemia and even death, and, as far as I could discern, spend their whole life cycle on chicken feet. That last part was good news because they are a tiny bit easier to get rid of than the body mites that spend part of their time in the bedding and cracks in the coop. To make a long story short, the method that seemed easiest was to soak the hens’ feet in rubbing alcohol for two minutes. I did them all, even though only the older hens seemed affected. The girls weren’t too keen on it, so a good deal of the treatment area (and I) got an alcohol shower.  I also changed the bedding and sprayed the coop and perch with Permethrin, just in case. It took most of Sunday to get that all sorted out. And I get to do it all again this Sunday and the Sunday after that because eggs will continue to hatch over three weeks. Oh joy, oh rapture unforeseen!

I can’t even report if it worked or not for a month or more because I have to wait for new scales to grow in. I think Blackbeard is looking perkier, and for whatever reason, the egg production seems to have increased.

As long as I was taking pictures, I took one of Goldie, a first-year hen. She is one of the most beautiful Ameraucana we have ever had. She has a prodigious beard, both under her beak and on her cheeks.

Goldie, hale and hearty.

So four days late, I can check “blog post” off Sunday’s list!

Carrots, jam, and eagle

 We are seeing the first flakes of snow today. We’re lucky that it hasn’t amounted to much. Heavy, wet snow and/or ice on trees that still have leaves can be disastrous. We were also lucky that it was cloudier overnight than expected, and we did not experience temperatures in the upper 20’s overnight. In fact, it did not even freeze. Based on the dire predictions, however, I harvested the last two cabbages and all of the Brussels sprouts that were close to a good size for eating. About half of the stalks still have sprouts the size of marbles or smaller. They taste good but are putzy to prepare. A whole stalk worth of buds makes about one cup of sprouts. Hardly worth the effort of cleaning all those tiny things.

I have a few carrots in the high tunnel that I planted in early August for late harvest. I brought in all the carrots that I planted early in the summer. I wrongly thought that their growth would slow when the temperature dropped. I had some truly enormous carrots! In this photo, the carrot at the left is what I would call a normal size large carrot. Moving to the right, there is a monster carrot, a carrot that did not get the memo that it is supposed to be smaller at the bottom than the top, and a carrot that split all the way down its length. I suspect the splitting happens more with a specific variety of carrot, but as I do not yet have conclusive proof, I will not name names.

Left to right: normal carrot, mongo carrot, upside-down carrot, split carrot

We still have lots of apples, and I will get back to them. Meanwhile, however, I’m on to making jam. I’ve been freezing pulp for weeks, and I need to get those containers out of the freezer. What could be more beautiful than jars of red raspberry jam? They are little bits of shelf-stable summer, waiting to cheer me up on a snowy, blowy morning.

Red raspberry jam

Terry called me this morning while I was exercising. “There’s a bald eagle out here. She’s flying around like she wants to land on the transformer.”

I got my camera and headed for Terry’s shop. I moved slowly when I got outside, scanning the sky for the eagle. Nothing. Had I missed it?

Terry came out of the shop and pointed to a dead oak across the road. “It’s over there on that branch.”

I saw it. It was eating something. Red entrails hung over the branch.

Guts (or something) hanging over the branch

I took picture after picture as I tried to get closer.

Guts are gone. Eagles always look a little pissed off, don't they?

I ducked down behind the cover of some shrubs to get a clear view across the road.

Unobstructed view

I was trying not to disturb the eagle, but I did anyhow. It hunched its shoulders

Preparing for takeoff

And took off, still carrying its prey.

Up..

Up..

Up...

And away!

When I zoomed in on the pictures, as best I could tell, it had the hind end of a roadkill possum. The matted fur seemed to be gray with a white undercoat, and I thought I saw a naked tail hanging from behind.

I think that might be the closest I’ve ever gotten to an eagle. Kate’s dad says any day you see an eagle is a good day!

Apples, apples, apples

 So many apples! We have hundreds and hundreds of apples this year, and unlike previous years, they are beautiful enough that we are not embarrassed to sell them. We never spray pesticides, so we don’t exactly know to what we should attribute their pristine condition. Terry thinks the chicken dropping around the base of the trees discourages apple maggot flies. I wonder if perhaps the hens are just eating a lot of the bugs that lay eggs on apples. Or maybe that masting thing really works. I learned about masting in graduate school. Perennial plants, trees in particular, tend to have small crops of fruits/nuts/seeds in most years to keep fruit/nut/seed predators low. Every now and then they have a big blow out of reproduction, which is the mast year, and that overwhelms the predators’ ability to attack the fruits/nuts/seeds.

Nearly perfect apples

Regardless of the reason, the apples are a joy to work with. I have a cranked apple peeler/corer/slicer that works like a charm if and only if the apples are firm and symmetrical. I easily cranked through a bunch of yellow delicious apples for the dehydrator.

My next project was apple sauce. I use peeled apples for that too. Hilda used to put in the skins because she loved the pink tint it gave the final project. If you do that, though, the sauce has to be run through a food mill at the end to get out the skins. This is not only adds a messy extra step, but also yields a smooth consistency throughout, and I like a few chunks here and there. Once the coring and peeling is done, all that remains is to cook the apples until they fall apart, adding a little water as necessary to keep them from sticking to the pan. I’ve said it before but it bears repeating—once you’ve had homemade applesauce, you find store-bought watering and insipid.

Apple sauce cooking

The best way to reduce a bunch of apples to a small volume is apple butter. I make it in the crockpot. It takes 16 hours to cook but not much time to prep.  I just cut the flesh from around the core and toss it in the crockpot. After a long cook, I put in sugar, brown sugar, and spices and it’s ready for canning. Six pounds of apples makes six cups of butter.

Apple butter, before

Apple butter, after

Bingo and Banjo take over our recliners whenever possible. They are not yet the lap cats we would like them to be, but we keep working on it. At times, they are so adorable I can hardly stand it.

So adorable I can hardly stand it!

Our dear friend Laura M. gifted me with tickets to a football game at U of I Champagne-Urbana. Jane is an alumnus and was stoked about going. She researched the game and found that it was Wear Orange Day. She got right on Amazon and ordered t-shirts and sweatshirts for us. (It was still warm at the time, and we didn’t know what the weather would be like.) As it turned out, it was a night game and rather chilly. I wore wool socks, long underpants, and my winter coat and was not ever cold. The marching band was awesome. The football team, not so much. We left after the halftime show so we could get back to Jane’s house at midnight instead of 2:00 a.m. We are too old for that stuff!

Jane and I in our Illini orange at Memorial Stadium in Champagne, IL

I stayed at Jane’s instead of trying to drive home at that hour. We met Kate for brunch the next morning. I brought her a quart of frozen applesauce, a jar of pickles, and two small pumpkins to replace the two large ones that had been eaten by squirrels. The new pumpkins will be indoor decorations. As we were transferring the goods from my car to hers, she held the pickle jar for a moment, wondering how she was going to get it home without it rolling around. Lo and behold, the door had a spot where it fit perfectly! Life’s little victories.

A perfect pickle pocket in the door of Kate's car

Now that things are quieting down in the garden, I am starting to take walks around the property. The wild cucumbers are just about done for the year. I was able to find one that had not opened yet and a few that were still green. Most of them, however, were already dried with their seeds gone. By spring, there will be nothing left but the skeleton, which bears a resemblance to its fellow cucurbit, the luffa. I pulled the skin off the fruit on the end for educational purposes.

Stages of development of the wild cucumber from the top

And from the front. Each fruit has four seeds.

The seeds have an interestingly mottled coat.

Wild cucumber seeds with mottled seed coat

We have been waiting, waiting, waiting for the pullets to begin laying. Yesterday, I finally found the first small pullet egg. It is from a Wyandotte, who lays brown eggs. We had another brown pullet eggs this morning. No green eggs from Goldie, and Ameraucana, yet. The Wyandottes are laying eggs on the floor. I hope they catch onto the nest boxes soon.

Our first pullet egg of the year, right, with an Ameraucana egg on the left for size comparison

 

Back to our roots

October. It’s quiet in the mornings now, just a few calls from chickadees, crows, and blue jays. I haven’t seen the hummingbirds in awhile, although Jane insists that I need to leave the feeder up until her birthday next weekend. She still has swarms of them at her house. I think that’s where all of mine have gone. 

 It’s time for the roots to be harvested. In addition to the usual odd carrots that grew together, sometimes in obscene ways, I pulled out this carrot that had odd bumps growing on it, as if the side roots failed to elongate. 

Mr. Carrotface

We had a good potato harvest. Terry did a good job of digging without severing very many tubers. I set the cut ones aside in a paper bag marked “wounded.” We use those first. I also separated out the “weenies” which, due to their high surface area, also don’t keep well and need to be used promptly. All the rest were put into boxes by variety, Burbank Russet, Red Norland, and Kennebec. 

Potato harvest, upper left to lower right, Burbank Russet, Red Norland, Kennebec

Oh, the beauty of a new potato! So firm and crisp. So easy to peel. So delicious! I always plan to use them up before they get all shriveled and sprouty, but one day follows another, and before you know it, we will be in March, the Month of the Wrinkled Potato. They are hard to wash and peel, but we eat them anyway. 

A champion-sized Kennebec

I’ve started rolling up the weed barrier between the rows. I hate putting it down, and I hate picking it up, but it sure does save a ton of time in between. Over the summer, numerous ant colonies have decided that the weed barrier makes the perfect cover for their home; it is only a matter of time before I have ants in my pants. I suffered bites to my left knee and thigh, but the itching doesn’t last long. 

Rolling up the weed barrier

The kittens are settling in. I am often delayed in my morning chores by a Banjo on my knee, so to speak. (Oh, Suzanna, don’t you cry for me.…) Here he is napping between my legs. 

Banjo stretched from my feet to my hips--and not even full grown!

Cats can make you feel like you are the most fascinating creature on Earth. They follow us around just to see what we’ll do next. (Are you putting on your socks? WOW!) I spent LOTS of time in the kitchen these days, and my little kitchen helpers are right there with me. 

My kitchen "helpers"

 They aren’t much help, though. I spilled a bunch of chicken stock on the floor, and neither of them showed the slightest interest in helping clean up. Useless!