Porpoises

We had a wonderful weekend at the beach. Steve and Mel invited us to Oak Island, near where Mom use to stay, for the weekend (Yaupon Beach). Steve, Doug (Steve's good friend) and I hit the inlet in Steve's brothers 23' boat. We punch in a number and the distance registered 67 miles. We took accepted the risk and pounded our way out for 3 hours in reasonably calm seas. We caught 6 mahi-mahi before the porpoises (porpie?) showed up. I took some great pictures as the water was clear and the sea calm. I made the attempt to touch one, but could not reach that far, but came within a few inches. For about 15-20 min there were 20 or so surrounding the boat, jumping and swerving through our baits, and many more out across the horizon feeding on bait fish. It was one of the best encounters I've had the pleasure to observe.We left at 5 pm and barely made it back before dark; a total distance of 150 or more miles.

Trips to the beach when I was little must have seared the ocean on my brain; I love the marine environment :-)

New Fence

Thanks Dad!

Dad gave me a number of black locust post for a new fence that I'm building around the rest of our back yard. This is the area where I have our garden and chicken coop. I wanted to protect the garden, compost pile, cats and chickens from neighborhood dogs and or other animal threats. Plus there must be some primal thing of marking one's territory that's going on :-) I used Dad's posts, but had to buy cedar cross rails to make the split rail look that I'm after. Here's a couple of pictures of the progress thus far. It's taking a bit longer than I expected, but for the most part all I need to do is put up the welded wire fencing now.



Bees... A friend is into beekeeping and he had extra hives, so gave me one. I picked up a box of bees last Sunday. It was quite exhilarating to say the least dumping a box of swarming bees into a hive. Not one bee stung me though, so they must like the Gilliam's. Evidently Tulip Poplars have a ton of nectar and we have a ton of poplars in our forest, so the bees are coming back to the hive so full of nectar that they can barely fly.

Spring Gardening V1.0.2009

Cilantro is a favorite (bright green stuff middle left). This stuff came up from seed last fall and survived all winter. Diced tomatoes, diced onion, chopped cilantro, little lime juice, salt and pepper is great with chips, eggs, burritos, etc. An easy cheap app.

We're waiting for the white Delewares to start laying any week now.

Atilla the black hen is reliable though! She lays an egg with a deep golden yolk that out sizes the large category grocery eggs.

Wahoo

I went fishing this weekend and caught one of the most sought after game fish in NC. Wahoo make a great run and are one of the top 3-4 best tasting saltwater fish, although lasts night it was at the top of that list in this household. We had blackened wahoo steaks on a bed of spanish rice, black beans, pica de gallo drizzled with chipotle ranch.

Here's what turned out to be a pretty good picture. The fish was 55 inches and 40 lb.




Here's a an old picture of the last wahoo caught about 5 years ago:



For kicks here's a mahi-mahi we caught last year. On the trip this week we caught about 8 mahi-mahi like this out of 15 strikes. Also picked up on blackfin tuna.

Snow and chickens

I'm writing this morning because we have a couple hour work delay because of the March 1, 2009 snowstorm. I'm waiting to here back from the Marion family to see how much accumulated in Marion and Morganton. From the radar it looked like a nice 4-6 inches, maybe?? We ended up with a couple inches last night. If the atmospheric temperatures were a couple of degrees cooler it could have been an epic 12" + snow considering all the cold rain we had, but that's NC snow for you. Here's a few pictures.



In other news... I finished the chicken tractor and bought 4 Rhode Island Red pullets and two other mixed breed hens that were suppose to be laying already. I got the two older hens first and promply made the poor choice of moving the tractor while the hens were in the run and they both got loose. It's been 8 days and have not been able to catch the darn things, and have not even seen them this weekend, so they could be gone for good. Oh well. The other four are still several months from laying. I found a local chicken farm that has a couple hens that are laying and plan to get one this week, so we don't have to wait any longer for our fresh eggs. BTW, 8 week old chickens are so cute. Here's a few pics of the tractor and little chicks.

Update: I meant to post the blog above once I took a few pictures. I just got the pictures, but a few things have occurred since the post above. 1) Our dogs were so excited by the chickens that they found a way to open the gate so they could get a closer look. After a whole day alone they dug out around one side of the chicken coop and the little chicks got out. Our younger dog Cady killed all four, or at least I found the carcasses of three of them. A few days prior I did get another older hen that is laying, so I moved the coop so there is no chance the dogs can get to it again. Since this occurred on Friday our new hen has laid an egg every day, so we're finally have tangible returns on our investment. In the last picture you'll notice I put the coop near our garden. I'm using the hen to till and fertilize the soil, and in a month or so, I'll extend our garden to include this area.

Chicken Tractor

What the heck is a chicken tractor? Well, thanks to Mother Earth News and a few web resources I decided to go with a portable chicken coop often referred to as a chicken tractor. The main advantage of course is the ability to be transient. Moving this every few days gives the chickens fresh ground to forage through and a natural fertilizer treatment. We plan to make several trails through our forest; I think pulling this through the forest slowly will help create trails.

Taking a cue from Dad, the entire tractor was made from reclaimed or scrap wood, minus the roof, chicken wire and hinges that I had to buy from Lowes. I found an scrap pile of wood on a lot down the road and looked online to see who owned the property. It was some investment group out of Louisiana, so decided to just take it. 5 pallets were bought for $5 and used as the base and side paneling of the hen house. I was even able to reuse the nails. I'm off today and will install the chicken wire to form the run.


BASE, 2x10 green treat split in half and a pallet at one end to make the base structure.


Hen house built. You'll notice the wheels at the rear. It looks heavy, but actually rolls nicely on the lawn. The roof has hinges on the front, so it lifts up from the rear. I plan to put the nesting boxes along the back wall, so I can lift up and easily retrieve eggs, or clean.

Projects Complete, Projects Started

We've been rather busy over the last few weeks. Cecilia has been feeling much better over the last month since she's started taking a suite of vitamins. This is the busy season at Progress Energy, so the stress level is a little high at work, but she's handled it well. She's looking two months out when the work level drops, and she'll be able to take a week off for her own personal enjoyment.

Speaking of time off, our group at work accomplished two goals last year. 1) We successfully implemented some physics modules in a new weather model and tested, so we're ready to transition from an older model to this "next generation" weather model for use with our air quality model. 2) We developed what is termed a coupled meteorological-air quality model. Basically, the weather model above was connected "in-line" with our air quality model, so they are both running in synchronicity. The weather model passes atmospheric conditions to the air quality model, then the AQ model uses that to move pollutants around as it steps forward in time, then the AQ model passes pollutant information to the weather model, which impacts the amount of radiation, it steps forward in time and passes the new info to the AQ model. At any rate, this was a big project and although our computer science expert did most of the programming, I helped with various parts around the edges. Back to time off, my boss came to me this week with a piece of paper and told me I got a bonus for last years work. I thought it would be a little money or a day or two of payed vacation. When I read the bonus it said 40 hours of time off. Needless to say, I was estatic to get a whole extra week off this year. I looked at what I have saved up now and have 60 hours already in the bank this year.

On to the projects underway... I should have my fence complete today. After work this week, the prep work on the last section of fence was done. All that needs to be done today is laying out the woven wire, stretching and driving the metal posts. Here is the section of fence I completed last weekend.



A couple other projects done over the last few weeks are my worm bin and seed starter table. Thanks to Mother Earth News and my neighbor who's sister is really into worms, I decided to turn our scrap food into prime fertilizer. We have been composting our scraps for the last few years, but it just seemed you have to wait too long to get the good soil. So, I got a couple of rubbermaid containers. Holes were drilled in the bottom of one container, food scraps, minus any meats is placed in the bottom and covered with a mixture of loose soil and shredded newspapers (I have a lot of newspapers that need to be recycled). 4 dozen red wiggler worms were bought at the local bait shop and placed in the bin. The worms dig down and process the scraps then turn to worm castings. After one week all the food was gone, so I dumped the next load of scraps and covered. Evidently, after a few months the bin will have thousands of worms and a harvest of worm castings I can use for starting my plants. So, with very little effort you can basically nourish new plants that you'll eventually eat with the scraps of the plants you just ate. It's a neat sustainable and efficient system.

The other small project was to make use of a table we bought a while back only for the top. Part of the top (butcher block) was used for the back splash in the bathroom I did a year ago. Last year I tried to use the table to start seed with one small grow light, but it did not work that well. My neighbor told me his Dad always used flourescent lights to start seed. We had a 2 ft flourecent light fixture in our bedroom closet that was replaced. This was the perfect size for the small table. My problem was two fold. 1) A reflecting hood to focus the light downward was needed and 2) The light needed some type of bracket that would allow for easy adjustment as the plants grow. The fun part was trying to figure out how to do this at minimal cost. My answer to the hood was a cheap aluminum vent pipe, and for the bracket, PVC pipe and parts. All of the parts were less than $10, but the bulbs with correct light for plants did add $12. Here is the final product. The light is hooked to a chain that can be adjusted.