Half Acre Homestead, LLC

Our Blog has Moved!

2011-04-06T18:46:00.002-07:00

Please come check us out at http://www.halfacrehomestead.com/blog !

BLOG HAS MOVED!

2011-04-06T18:46:00.001-07:00

Please come check us out at http://www.halfacrehomestead.com/blog !

More Chickens, Coming Up!

2010-03-05T19:04:00.000-08:00

It's so hard in the spring, walking into the feed stores and the local Wilco farm store and seeing the big brooders full of cute, fuzzy, peeping chicks. So cute! So tempting! So far, I've resisted the urge to even touch the little balls of fluff, let alone purchase any, but it's like some low-level addiction. I've wanted to increase my flock again anyway...but I'm not sure I want to explain it to my husband.

Well, as is often the way, nature took care of it for me! My game hen cross, who has the not-very-matronly name of Racer X, decided last week that spring had sprung, and that meant she needed to have babies. She stopped laying, started sitting, and is now a big puffed-up ball of hissing feathers whenever I open the coop door. Poor sad little girl keeps switching nests to find the one with the biggest pile of eggs, and I keep stealing the eggs. Right now she's sitting on three golf balls and looking pretty smug about it.

I emailed the gal who gave me Racer X last year, and she brought me half a dozen fertile eggs. Tomorrow we'll reassemble the brooding pen and nest box, install Racer X, and then slip the eggs under her at night. Hopefully in three weeks we'll have a little flock of puffballs running around! The eggs are from a blue cochin father and a buff orpington mother, so I have no idea what they'll look like as chicks or as adults, but they're two of my favorite breeds, so it really doesn't matter!

Midwinter Bee Maintenance

2010-01-28T20:28:00.000-08:00

I maintain my one top-bar hive "au natural", meaning that I don't spray for mites or fungus, and I don't give them antibiotics or take their honey away and feed them sugar water throughout the winter. This is my first winter with bees, so the learning curve is pretty steep, but we're getting there.

During the super cold snap we had in December (where it got into single digits overnight and rarely jumped above 25 during the day) I wrapped the hive with some tarping to trap a little more heat for the girls, and I used an entrance reducer to keep in more of their heat. Well, since then I've left both of those winterization bits in place, but the weather has warmed up significantly, to the point where it's been over 50 in the daytime and we haven't had a frost since that cold snap. (Seriously, an entire month with no frost. Weird weather patterns. But that'll be the next post.)

Went out to check on the girls last week, and noticed that not only were the bees out foraging, they were bringing back saddlebags full of yellow pollen from somewhere. I haven't seen a single blooming flower around here, not even my pieris or hellebore is blooming, but the bees are better at finding food than I am at spotting flowers. My guess is perhaps they found a nearby house or houses with primroses or pansies, but maybe there's something else blooming. At any rate, they seemed pretty vigorous.

Went back out yesterday to check on them, and noticed that the front of the hive was smeared with streaks of something. As I contemplated it, I realized what it was: bee poo. The girls have a mild case of dysentery (no, not the human kind, just the bee kind.) Oh dear.

Dysentery in bees isn't all that uncommon in the winter, and it isn't usually fatal by itself. In extreme cases, the bees get so weakened they fall prey to other diseases or parasites and the hive dies, or they get so much waste material piled up in the hive that they have a hard time cleaning it. It is often caused by Nosema, a single-celled, gut-invading organism. Hives can survive a Nosema outbreak if they're otherwise healthy and strong, but it can be treated with antibiotics as well.

Dysentery can also be caused by the simple conditions of winter weather for bees. If they are feeding on honey with a high proportion of non-digestible material, their guts become laden with waste matter. Usually they take care of that with a "voiding flight", where they fly out and do their business away from the hive. If the weather is below 50 for an extended period, or extremely rainy and windy as it was the past week or so for us, they can't get out for that voiding flight, and eventually they end up having to void in the hive, or just outside on the front of the hive. Given that my hive's case seems pretty mild so far, I suspect that's the problem, rather than a major Nosema infestation, though things can change quickly so I'll just have to keep an eye on it. Apparently hive conditions can also cause issues, especially lack of ventilation and moisture buildup. I noticed a few weeks ago that they were having condensation issues on the inside of the viewing window, so I know the ventilation is pretty low.

Turns out, one of the reasons commercial beekeepers feed their hives sugar water in the winter is to help prevent dysentery. Sugar water, though almost completely lacking in nutritional value, also has almost no non-digestible matter. Bees eating sugar water don't build up waste matter in their guts, and therefore don't have to void inside or outside the hive. I think that's probably penny-wise and pound-foolish, though. Imagine if you were on a "clear liquid" diet where all you were allowed to injest was lemon-lime soda or energy drinks. Sure, you'd have energy, you'd probably continue to function, but you wouldn't be getting any nutrition. Your muscles would atrophy from lack of protein, you would start to suffer from lack of vitamins and trace minerals, and your immune system would be damped down. Similar situation with the bees; honey is a complex food full of enzymes and nutrients, whereas processed sugar isn't. They still have energy, they are getting calories to sustain themselves, but they're not getting actual food. I can't imagine bees would have evolved over millions of years to not be able to digest their own winter food, so I am going to continue to let them eat it and deal with the bathroom breaks as they can.

Jacqueline Freeman, who lives at Friendly Haven Rise Farm and teaches holistic beekeeping classes, also recommended that I give them a weak tea made of nettles, horsetail, and/or chamomile plus some of their own honey and offer it back to them in a dish with moss on top (to prevent drowning). Between that and removing the rain tarp and opening up the entrance reducer to increase ventilation, hopefully I can stop the problem before it gets worse.

New Year, New Goals!

2010-01-06T22:50:00.000-08:00

This year I've decided I really want to run a small CSA out of my yard. I have more than enough produce to share, plus I have eggs and honey and herbs, and I'm excited about sharing them.

What's a CSA? It stands for Community Supported Agriculture, and it's a model where people buy a "share" at the beginning of the season, and the farmer promises a share of the produce on a preset schedule, whether weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly. Customers may pick up the produce at the farm, or the farmer may deliver, or they may have a predetermined delivery point for all customers. In general, CSA's charge from $16-$30 per weekly share of produce amounting to a box of various items totalling about a weekly produce allotment for a family of four. By getting the money up front, the farmer gains enough money before the season starts to help with the acquisition of seeds, plants, tools, and other items to grow the food without having to wait until harvest time. Customers share in some of the realistic risks of farming; if wet weather wipes out the tomato crop, or if scorching heat kills the lettuce crop early, there's nothing either the farmer or customer can do about it. In return for shouldering some of the risk, the customer gets absolutely fresh, flavorful local produce from a local farmer with whom they can develop a personal relationship. They also usually get more unusual produce than can be easily found at a grocery story, sometimes get a say in what's planted, and often get recipes for using the current produce. Often customers can visit the farm and see for themselves the methods used for growing their food, and be assured of their good farming practices (often organic, though not always.)

In our part of the country, CSA's are gaining popularity along with backyard poultry and eating locally. I first started hearing about them maybe 10 years ago, in the Puget Sound area. I am not much of a vegetable eater and at the time I lived alone, so I never researched it much or thought about it, but I did hear from friends who had shares and loved it. I'm still not much of a vegetable eater, but I love to grow edibles, so I want to grow and share them with others!

Towards the goal of having a CSA this year, I have signed up for a class at the local Extension office, and I'm extremely excited. It's about the economic and legal realities of farming, from small to large scale. 10 weeks, 3 hours per week, and I'm really pleased that it will be done just about in time for me to start in with my Big Plans. In fact, I should be able to have some of my legal questions answered in the first few weeks and really lay the ground work. The good news is, I know that there are not a lot of issues with selling raw, un-processed produce off my land. I know I can legally sell eggs from my home (not off my property) with no license other than a state business license, which I have. It's about the same thing with un-processed produce, but that I can even take and sell off my property! Sweet! My biggest concerns include making sure I'm jumping through all the legal hoops for the USDA or whomever else might care, and making sure that I'm covered in the unlikely event of someone deciding they need to sue me for something. (I'm pragmatic that way.)

I'm in the process of trying to figure out how many "shares" my property will support. I just learned of a woman who does a 3-share CSA off a city lot, and I know I harvest a lot more than I could off a city lot, so I'm thinking probably 5-8 shares to leave enough for me to give some to the food bank, keep some for processing myself, and give some to my family. I'm also trying to decide what's most worthwhile for planting as annual crops this year; I've decided corn is out and eggplants are in, for example. It's all a big learning process!

I'm also contemplating starting up with the local farmers' market, depending on their requirements and the fees involved. Laying in bed the other night, I was thinking idly about the things my husband and I grow or make that I could sell legally at the market (until I get a commercial kitchen, I cannot sell baked or canned goods, darn it.) Glass and metal jewelry. Aprons. Bird, bat, mason bee, bumblebee, and butterfly houses. Hummingbird, woodpecker, and small bird feeders. Bee hives! Honey and beeswax. Eggs. Ornaments made from eggs! Vegetables of all sorts. Herbs of all sorts. Blueberries, honeyberries, raspberries, boysenberries, marionberries, quince, peaches, apples, almonds, hazelnuts, and cherries all grow in our yard too, though we won't have much yield on most of the trees for a few more years yet. I could start a farm store! Which is kind of odd, since I actually live in town... Looking forward to seeing what this year brings!

Eggsactly.

2009-12-29T21:15:00.001-08:00

(Wow, time flies when you're working on Holiday things and indoor crafts instead of tending the garden! Didn't mean for two months to slip by without an update!)

This holiday season, I did as I always do: I baked and cooked myself into a complete frenzy. Every year I throw a big party for friends and family, and as part of it, I cook good food and confections and baked goods and feed everyone until they waddle out the door, and then some. And this year, I had my girls to provide fresh eggs for absolutely everything I did! And oh, do they make a difference. Between those and my discovery this year of King Arthur Flours, I think I did about as well as I've ever done at most of my goodies, especially the divinity...which is just egg whites and sugar to begin with!

But if you don't have ready access to hard-working chickens in your own back yard, how do you ensure you have the freshest, healthiest, best eggs possible? With all the choices on the market today, it's something of a mystery to most shoppers. Some of the labels you might think actually meant something, like "cage-free", don't really amount to much.

Where Eggs Come From
First, you should know how the majority of large-scale egg farmers operate. In general, large-scale farms (like those that produce your basic, uninteresting dozen eggs you'd pick up at a store) use battery cages. This means the birds are stuffed in wire cages, inside a building with no fresh air or sunshine, up to 8 hens in a single cage. They have no room to lay down, stretch their wings, nest, or perch. They have a mere 67 square inches (smaller than a single sheet of letter-size paper) per bird. And that's how they live, day in, day out. In addition, many producers cut off the beaks of their hens to prevent the pecking that would likely result from these cramped conditions. Some also regulate egg production by forcing the birds to molt on the farmer's schedule, by withholding food. This weakens the birds' immune systems, and actually causes some to starve to death.

Sounds great, doesn't it?

And what happens to the male chicks that hatch out of the system? Given that about half a clutch of eggs will result in male chickens, that's a lot of boys. Boys don't lay eggs. Where do they go? You might think they're raised to adulthood for meat, but it isn't so. In general, they are gassed to death, which although sad, seems to me to be at least painless. One of the more gruesome practices is the newer technique of pitching the baby males into a large grinder, which results in (theoretically) instantaneous death. Death by garbage disposal. Neat.

Note: While most males in the egg producing farms are killed, about 2/3 of females in the meat producing farms are also killed, so they don't get off the hook either.

So. If you decide as I did that those conditions are deplorable, and decide to support a more humane way of getting your eggs, what do you do? Of course some of us decide to raise our own birds, but not everyone has the space, time, money, or inclination to do so, and that's fine. Where do you go to buy eggs, then? How do you decipher the Egg Lingo? This guide isn't all-inclusive, but maybe it'll help some:

Age of Eggs
Most eggs will keep 5-7 weeks, even when purchased from the grocery store. Commercially produced eggs are usually washed, which removes their protective bloom and can in some cases drive bacteria into the eggs themselves. However, they're also usually sanitized, which farm eggs are typically not. Mother Earth News did a study in the 70's on unwashed farm eggs, and showed that they last in the refrigerator for literally months. Problem is...how old are the eggs that reach you at the store? Look at the carton. USDA graded eggs are marked with the Julian Date, which is the day of the year on which they were packed. It'll be the last three numbers of a serial code which may include a code for the packing facility. 001 is January 1st, and 365 is December 31st. So if you buy a carton of eggs on February 3rd, and the number on the carton is 003, you know your eggs are about 1 month old before they reached you. If the eggs also have a "Sell By" date, the date will be within 45 days of the pack date, by regulation. After that, you still have 3-5 weeks even by conservative government safety measures to use your eggs.

Me, I rarely have eggs more than a couple of weeks old total in my fridge.

Omega-3 or Enriched Eggs
Changes in the nutritional content of eggs is generally brought about by a change in the feed. Hens with access to their own forage and the ability to eat bugs, weeds, and tidbits of their own choosing have recently been shown to have higher nutritional content in their eggs than hens fed strictly a commercially-produced diet. And claims from egg producers about the nutritional content of their eggs should be viewed rather skeptically. In general, asking the person selling the product for proof is not the best course of action; find third-party testing sources, like consumer advocates, as they don't have a vested interest in the results.

By the way, the color of the egg is determined solely by the breed of the chicken. In the US, most commercial egglaying hens are of a breed that produces white eggs. White eggs are not bleached or altered to achieve that color, and they are no more or less healthy than brown eggs laid by hens raised under the same conditions. I do personally find them to be much less interesting than the rainbow of browns and blues produced by my girls, but that's just aesthetics.

"Other" Living Conditions For Hens
Cage-Free Eggs
So after reading about the cramped battery cages, "cage-free" is better, right? Well, marginally. The hens can probably walk around and stretch their wings, maybe lay down, and interact with more birds. However, they are usually kept in giant warehouses with no access to outside and no fresh air or sunshine, and no population cap. They can be fed pretty much anything including antibiotics, pesticides, drugs, or unhealthy animal byproducts. The cutting of beaks and the forced molting are still allowed. Worst, there's no regulatory agency checking to insure eggs marked "cage-free" actually come from uncaged hens.

Free-Range/Roaming Eggs
These girls are a step up again. They can walk and stretch, lay down, and interact with one another. They usually have some access to outside. But like the cage-free girls, there's no regulatory agency ensuring these standards are met, and there is no actual requirement for access to the outdoors. Still no feed restrictions, and beak cutting and forced molting are still allowed.

Certified Organic Eggs
This label is actually regulated and earned from third-party auditors (not the farmer, and not the government.) They are required to be uncaged with access to the outdoors, and to be fed an organic vegetarian feed free of antibiotics, drugs, pesticides, and animal byproducts. However, the amount and duration of the outdoor access isn't regulated...a small door accessing a tiny yard far too small for even a fraction of the flock is acceptable. There are no regulations capping population density, though because they're not allowed to use antibiotics, the farmers usually keep the density much lower than for situations where they can use antibiotics. Beak cutting and forced molting? Still okey-dokey.

Certified Humane Eggs
Here the girls must be uncaged, but may or may not have outdoor access. They must have enough room to perform their normal, natural functions such as stretching, preening, roosting, and dust bathing. There is actually a population density cap on these, and the farm is also required to have a certain number of nest boxes and perches. As with organic their feed must be vegetarian and free of antibiotics, hormones, and animal byproducts. Forced molting? Not allowed. Beak cutting, however, is still allowed. Wilcox Farms and Stiebrs Farms both comply with this label. Certified by a third party.

Animal Welfare Approved Eggs
Hens must be uncaged and have continuous access to the outdoors. There are standards for population density, perch availability and nest boxes. Diet as in Organic and Certified Humane eggs. Forced molting and beak cutting are finally a no-no with this label. Bad news? There are no participating producers that currently sell to supermarkets, so you're probably looking for farmer's markets or direct from the farmers on these eggs.

United Egg Producers Certified Eggs
Most egg producers in the US comply with this program, where forced molting is actually disallowed. Certified by third party vendors. No forced molting is about the only difference between this and "regular" eggs, though, as they can still be kept stacked in cages with only 67 square inches of personal space, and have their beaks removed.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I'm not a vegetarian, nor an activist, and I don't have any particular agenda. That said, I do think people should be aware of where their food comes from and the effects that result from choices they make at the grocery store. Some people choose to forego eggs altogether, seeing it as a violation of the chickens' animal welfare, and that's fine. I'm not one of them. Some people choose to raise their own chickens. Some will learn to carefully read labels and weigh factors before choosing eggs. Some will support local farmers or neighbors with chickens. And of course many people will continue to purchase the mass-produced eggs that have become a cheap source of nutrition and protein, and that's also fine. Some folks have neither the economic luxury nor the geographic ability to find anything else, either, and they shouldn't be vilified for their limited choices. But that's really the key: knowing your choices, knowing the economic and biological reality, and just thinking about the world around you instead of blindly consuming.

Beans, Beans, the Magical Fruit

2009-10-27T23:54:00.001-07:00

I mentioned a couple of posts back that I had decided to dry my beans. Why? Well, I'd originally planted them to eat them green, but after only a couple of times of that, I just fell behind and ended up with plants full of fat green beans at the end of the season. Once they get those full beans (the seeds) inside, they're no good for eating green anymore. I could have let them dry on the vine if we'd had nicer weather, but about that time it turned wet, and we had frost predicted on several occasions. Frost that never materialized and hasn't to date, but it meant bringing them in.

I went out and pulled all the bean plants and stripped them of their fat pods. I had four teepees of beans, with three stakes per teepee. Each stake had two plants, which means a total of 24 bean plants about 6' high. Took me a couple of hours to strip them all bare and pull out the stakes, pile up the vines and leaves for compost, and put all the beans into a bucket.

After I had all the bean pods inside, I used some heavy cotton sewing thread to stitch them all into 3' long strings, by simply running a needle and thread through the end of each bean. Once I had about 3', I tied the strings to the bottom of a sturdy coathanger, about 5 bundles per coathanger. Then I took them down to the woodstove and hung them from cracks behind the stove, against the brick, to dry out thoroughly.

A few days ago, my husband came to me with a handful of chocolatey brown beans and let me know that the pods were splitting open and dropping their beans everywhere. I interpreted that as, "Your stupid beans are getting everywhere, do something!" So tonight I took them all down, got a bucket, and shelled all the beans out. We ended up burning the dry pods, but I was thinking that they'd probably make good feed supplements for ruminants, if we'd had any.

After all that, I wound up with about 4 pints of beautiful brown beans. 4 pints. I figure it was about 2 hours each picking, stringing, and shelling, so over an hour to get a single pint of beans. *looking at large bag of beans picked up at Costco* Well, at least I know these are organic! Plus, drying them wasn't the original intent, it was just the result of wanting to save the last of the beans from going to waste. Now, we'll see how they actually taste...

Food Preservation Tips

2009-10-18T19:04:00.000-07:00

A few tips and preservation techniques I thought I'd pass along. Seems like the appropriate time of year, when people are hauling in the last of their crops!

* Beans to be dried for later use in soups or bean dishes can usually be left to dry on the plant. When they rattle in the pods, they're dry. If you live in an area, like I do, where frost or rain would threaten the beans before they're dry, you can pick them early. If you have the space, pull the entire plant and hang somewhere warm and dry until the pods turn brown and the beans rattle. If you don't have space, pull the individual pods, then string together 2 or 3 feet-worth on a heavy beading thread, and hang somewhere warm and dry (such as near a woodstove.) When the beans rattle in the pods, you can either continue to store them in the pods, or pop them out of their pods and store them in a glass jar.

* Many vegetables can be sliced and dehydrated. You can follow the instructions on your home dehydrator, or you can use your oven turned to the very lowest setting, around 175 degrees. Celery should be blanched first. Zucchini, apples, pears, eggplant, carrots, and tomatoes can be merely sliced and dried. All of the above can be stored in glass jars. (Note: Potatoes need to be blanched and steamed to absolute transparency before dehydrating. Skipping this step or under-steaming will result in your dried potatoes turning black.)

* Most herbs can be dried by gathering a bunch early in the morning (when the aromatic compounds in the plants are at their peak) and then hanging them upside down somewhere cool and dry.

* Winter Squashes can be stored for months. Pick the squash, leaving at least 2-3" of stem. Allow to toughen on your counter for 2 weeks, then rub the skin lightly with olive oil. Store on your counter if you like, or in cold storage. Do NOT store in a basket or bowl, as the restricted airflow and retained moisture may cause them to rot prematurely. Thinner-skinned summer squashes can also be stored longer by the same method, though they should be refrigerated and may only last a couple of extra weeks.

* Other things can be fermented and made into "sauerkraut"-like concoctions in the same way sauerkraut is made. Shredded carrots and red onions make an amazing combination.

So, if you want to extend the life of your harvest and don't want to dry, can, or ferment your pickings, you can also keep them in a kind of "suspended animation" using vinegar, salt, or a combination. This would be the kind of storage folks used before refrigeration, when copious quantities of salt or storage in cold root cellars were the preferred method for storing foods.

* Basic Brining Formula - 1 Tbl salt per 1 quart of filtered or spring water. Pour over green beans, sliced carrots, peppers, eggplant, or other vegetables to extend their storage life. Keep in the fridge for up to a month. The salt retards the growth of mold and other spoiling organisms, as does the cool temperature.

* Basic Vinegar Formula - Wash your vegetables and dry thoroughly. Pack a jar with your vegetables, poke holes in larger ones like Japanese eggplants and peppers. Fill jar 1/2 full with vinegar, 1/2 full with good filtered water, and top with a few drops of olive oil to create a seal at the top. Store in cold storage for several months.

NOTE: I don't vouch for the safety of storing foods without proper canning or refrigeration, unless fermented safely as in sauerkraut. Botulism, while uncommon, is a dangerous potential side-effect of improper storage under anaerobic (low oxygen) conditions such as produced when submerging vegetables in liquid and sealing the surface with oil. The acidity of the vinegar should provide protection from most toxic growths, but as it's not a measured, tested recipe, variables may change results. Proceed at your own risk, and do your own research online or in books!

Must Be Fall!

2009-10-18T18:28:00.001-07:00

Yesterday I spent most of the day really feeling like it was fall. Got up to a fairly steady, normal fall rain, even!

First I went out to the Apple Festival in Venersborg, WA. Venersborg is a very, very small hamlet about 10 miles east of Battle Ground, WA. (When I say small, I mean VERY small. Friend of mine who grew up near there said, "I didn't know Venersborg had a 'festival'. I didn't even know they had a building.") It was settled in the late 19th and early 20th century primarily by a colony of Swedish folks who grew fruit and dried it for shipping around the country. The festival was held at the little one-room schoolhouse where their children went to school until the colony disbanded in the 1930's.

The Venersborg Community Club had over 300 varieties of apples out for tasting, ranging from your normal boring Red and Yellow Delicious, ubiquitious Granny Smiths, locally popular Gala, Fuji, and Honeycrisps all the way to the pink-fleshed Hidden Rose and a very nearly extinct Gideon Sweet. We tasted a few, and my daughter seemed to enjoy it even when she found apples she didn't like and handed her slices to me or her father for consumption. We looked at crabapples, and pictures of various trees, got information about the Venersborg Community Center, and saw a couple of acquaintances I seem to be seeing more and more often. We also took the apples from our front tree to be identified. Turns out they're a sauce apple called a Keswick Codlin. They're not very nice for eating as they're very soft, but they do make really great apple sauce. Plus our chickens like them! Also had a giant apple identified for a friend. Hers were easily spotted as Hanner's Jumbos, largely by being the size of a grapefruit and bright red; they're a mutation of a Red Delicious, so very similar only hugemongous. They were surprised that someone was growing them in a local backyard, as they were from Hood River and only a few orchardists have them. I happen to know that the former owner of my friend's house was an orchardist, and probably brought the tree with him when he moved to the place.

After we left the Apple Festival, I parted ways with the family and went on to a Food Preservation class and demonstration sponsored by Dee Creek Farms. The woman who owned the house had a lovely Garden hive out back of the solarium where the class was held, and I saw at least two Ameraucana chickens roaming around the lawn. Another funny thing, one of the gals who had been helping at the Apple Festival turned out to be at the class, and after chatting with her I found out that she knows Jacqueline Freeman of Friendly Haven Rise Farms, where I've taken several classes, and she also knows a woman who used to be the leader of the 4-H Goat group my best friend belonged to in high school. Small freakin' world, this slow-food CSA chicken-raising beekeeping bean-hugging-dirt-worshipper world!

The Food Preservation class was interesting, and I picked up a few tidbits. Discovered that I wasn't so terribly clever as I thought when I decided to string my still-green beans on a thread and hang them behind the wood stove; apparently that's an accepted method for dealing with dried beans when they don't have a chance to dry outside before they have to be harvested and brought inside due to frost or rain. I must have read about it in Little House on the Prairie or something...

The class also prompted me to come home and start harvesting and preserving the last of everything else in the yard. I have a batch of celery drying in the dehydrator, plus I'll be putting the last of the peppers in vinegar and brine to preserve for later salsa making. I'll post another short post with some tips I gleaned, for your own food preservation!

New Digs for the Chicks!

2009-10-11T21:25:00.001-07:00

Since we had a hen go broody several months ago, we've been planning the expansion of the chicken coop. We started with five girls last year, and after acquiring three new girls from a neighbor and having 4 babies hatch from our broody hen's clutch, we now have a total of 12 chickens. The coop that was more than adequate for 5 girls was just a little snug for 12, both in the "bedroom" and the outdoor run. Never fear, husband to the rescue!

First, he laid a new, dug-in foundation of cinderblocks to prevent any pests from digging into the coop easily. Given the hardness of our all-clay soil, I'd be surprised if anything could dig under the coop in one night even without the blocks in the way, but doesn't hurt to be safe. Then we moved the entire coop, chickens and all, using a hand truck and a lot of heaving and cussing. Fortunately, we only had to slide it over by the length of the coop.

After the coop was moved, Todd built a new run for the outside. He left the original coop roofed over, and the new run has a roof made of sturdy galvanized chicken wire. It more than doubled the fenced-in run space the girls have. Since we leave them in the run more often than not, we wanted to be sure they had adequate space to get away from one another and roam, and a place for me to throw treats and entertainment (it's amazing what an entire uprooted cauliflower plant does for the activity level of the girls!)

Then he started in on the "bedroom". Our original design was nice, with the nest boxes and roosts enclosed up above an open area on one side of the coop. It left more floor space "outside" that way, but it had a couple of inherent flaws. First, the girls' exit door into the run flipped up instead of to the side. Being short, that presented a problem to me, given that it was over halfway up from the floor and I sometimes had a hard time latching it open at the top. And since it was up high, we had to have a ramp in the coop for the girls to climb up to their "bedroom", which took up space and presented a lovely platform for poo-collecting. However, the biggest problem was cleaning the inside area; in order to clean the floor of the roosting area, we had to flip open the entire back of the coop, remove the nest boxes and roosts, and shovel it out. Big disruption to the girls, and not quick or easy for the humans.

Human Access DoorThe door into the run/coop from the outside. The girls know I'm going to open it soon!

The new setup has less "outdoor" space, since the area under the nest boxes and roosts has been enclosed, but they can walk in and out of it all day as they like, so they're not really out any floor space. Since it's siding over chicken wire, the back and sides of the bottom enclosed area can be opened up during the day in the summer for ventilation and closed up again at night to provide added protection from weather and predators. And since the floor of the space is now at the same level as the rest of the coop's floor, and there's a human-sized door to access the area, I can just rake out the floor. Yay! We're also working on a small storage area inside above one of the nest boxes, to store small containers of grit, oyster shell, and scratch.

The "Bedroom"Two roost bars are natural tree branches from an old lilac of ours, and two are squared wooden rods, so they can choose whichever they like. There are now four nest boxes, the rightmost being the brood box the four little ones standing on it were hatched in. Above that box will be a new storage cupboard. The bottom left, back, and right panels can be removed for ventilation as there is also sturdy chicken wire in place.

The girls have gone from 3 nest boxes, two very short roosts and one longer one to four full-length roosts and 4 nest boxes. When we put them inside it last night, they sat and gabbled loudly, just as if one of them had just laid an egg. Complete confusion! We apparently upset their long-established roosting order, and everyone had to call dibs on a new bit of roost. Two even went back to their old habit of trying to roost in the nest boxes. The four little ones decided they'd be safest up on top of the only flat-topped nest box, and we didn't discourage them last night. Soon that's where the storage area will be, so it'll be a moot point.

The New Wall

The entire roost/nest box area used to only take from the center bar upward. Instead, we've moved the chicken access to the lower left floor, removing the need for a ramp, and we've installed a human-access door to make cleaning easier. Everything can be locked if necessary, but we usually just latch it.

Poor little ones spent all day inside the roosting area, since they're new to the flock and smaller than the other girls. I gave them their old feeder full of adult (high protein, all organic) feed and their old waterer full of clean water. Once they assimilate a little better into the pecking order in a week or two, I'll remove the extra feeder and waterer, but for now I'd rather they not be starving and dehydrated as well as stressed out!

How Not To Grow Tomatoes

2009-10-05T23:26:00.000-07:00

My tomatoes did horribly this year. I know why, so I thought I'd share!

For one thing, I planted them far too late into the season, due to a variety of factors including a late start on the seedlings and a late start getting the raised beds done, coupled with the fear of starting them too early. As it was, they wound up 2-3 weeks too late into the season, or about the end of June. They should really have been in ground by the beginning of June, covered with a light row cover if necessary to prevent frost damage.

Due to what I suspect is way too much nitrogen in the soil (heavy compost load in the soil), the plants got GINORMOUS, and as a result they crowded against one another, broke their tomato cages and in some cases literally snapped the stakes in half, and fell over. I planted them quite far apart, and in fact my husband teased me about how much room I left between them. Or he did, until they started to get big. But the upshot is, they got too big and both undid themselves with their own weight and crowded out all possibility of light and air getting to the inner parts of the plants. No ventilation = bad juju.

And then there was the overhead watering. Due to the speed with which we had to get the plants in the soil this year, we ended up not being able to install the drip irrigation system we normally use. Instead, we installed a "spic spic spic whirrrrr" type sprayer at the center of the garden and let it water everything. Overhead watering is NOT usually a good thing for gardens, and it really proved true this year. I wound up with foliar problems I've not faced in the past, and between that and the lack of ventilation under the tomatoes, they stayed rather damp.

And finally, when the tomatoes were finally setting on and just thinking about ripening, we had a couple of weeks of cool, dampish weather and rain. Boom, late blight. Now from my research I've been doing, it looks like late blight is not common in our area and is usually found in the Northeast, but I'm almost entirely certain that's what's wrong with the tomatoes. They got yellowed and spotty on the leaves, and the tomatoes themselves developed brown leathery areas near the top of the stems. We ended up with only a few pounds of ripe, edible tomatoes from 42+ plants, and a few pounds more of edible green tomatoes. Rather ridiculous.

On the up side, it turns out that late blight doesn't typically overwinter in the soil, so if I pull all the plants out and get rid of the blighted plants in the garbage, it shouldn't recur next year. I will be sure to plant the tomatoes in another part of the vegetable bed as well, just in case. Though the spores are wind-blown and would travel easily to another part of the garden, the largest concentration should be in the soil at the base of the currently affected plants, so by moving to another bed I should hopefully avoid the worst potential for contamination.

To Sum Up...

* Plant tomatoes with LOTS of space between them, to insure adequate air flow and ventilation.
* Plant early enough to leave them time to ripen in the heat of the summer sun, so they're not trying to ripen in the cool, wet fall weather. This may mean using Wall O Water or some row covers to lengthen your growing season in spring.
* Nix the overhead watering. Drip systems win.
* Don't overdo the nitrogen fertilizer, or the nitrogen-rich compost.
* Pull up and destroy blighted plants as soon as blight appears. Do not compost blighted plants. Blight can cross to potatoes, eggplants, solanacious weeds (like nightshade) and petunias, so watch those plants as well.
* Don't plant tomatoes in the same spot where diseased or pest-laden tomatoes, potatoes, or eggplants grew the previous year.

Hot Hot Hot!

2009-10-05T23:21:00.000-07:00

Of all the things I planted in the garden this year, my cucumbers were the most prolific, with the Anaheim peppers close behind. The serrano, jalapeno, and habanero peppers also did well. So, what to do with all those peppers?

I made a couple of kinds of hot sauce! Sadly, I won't eat either one, but they are being distributed to friends. One is a mixture of roasted jalapeno and serrano peppers plus garlic and vinegar and a single habanero, and the other is a mixture of onion, carrot, and several habaneros. The former is green, the latter is electric orange and could be aerosolized and used as a chemical weapon (capsaicin. It's not just for the Military anymore!)

Carrot Habanero Hot Sauce

* 1 large yellow onion, chopped
* 1 clove garlic, diced
* 1 Tbl cooking oil
* 1 1/4 cup shredded carrot
* 2 cups water
* 3-4 habanero peppers
* 2 Tbl lime juice
* 2 Tbl vinegar
* 1 tsp salt

In a large skillet, heat the oil and saute the onion and garlic until translucent. (Do not caramelize!) Add the carrot and water and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer until the carrot is soft. Pour into a blender, add the peppers, lime juice, vinegar and salt, and puree until liquid. Eat, or use to defend yourself against attackers, your choice. Can be served hot or cold, and is probably best used sparingly.

Camping in the Great Outdoors

2009-09-27T23:23:00.001-07:00

Well, maybe not so great, but outdoors anyway. Last week my daughter decided she wanted to sleep outside in our backyard. Since we have a reasonably large backyard, a large tent, and a queen size air bed, I figured what the heck. My husband tucked us in with our popcorn, flashlight, and a Little House on the Prairie book, and said, "See ya in a couple of hours." He figured she'd either get bored or scared and that we'd be back inside soon. Not so...we spent all night out there where I discovered that the Anderson dairy plant a block down the street is very loud and that it's darn cold at night in late September.

Because it is almost the end of September, I asked her if she wanted to sleep outside one more time before we put the tent away. That would be how we wound up sleeping outside last night after we got back from D&D, this time with the Little House book and flashlight but no popcorn. And this time we discovered that the best part about sleeping in a tent in the backyard is having access to a long extension cord and a space heater.

At any rate, while we were out there last night, Evie noticed how many stars there are out here at night. Okay, so every constellation she sees is "the Big Dipper", but every astronomer has to start somewhere, right? And while I was trying to get to sleep, I heard an owl. Actually, I heard a screeching, and then an answering "hoo hooooo" series of calls, repeatedly. Kind of nice to know we have owls living nearby, probably in the large trees overlooking the creek behind the neighbors, at least from the sounds of it. After poking around a bit online, I think what I heard was a Great Horned Owl answering its owlet's screeches for food. Pretty nifty. Some night when it's not so chilly out and my kid is sleeping, maybe I'll go out and sit and see if I can spot any other wildlife out there. Apparently tonight while Todd was sitting outside, he was buzzed by a bat...but we already knew we had bats in the area, so while it was a cool encounter, it wasn't really unexpected. Wonder what else we have hanging about in the yard?

Synchronici-bee

2009-09-15T19:36:00.000-07:00

I've had a hive of bees now for about 3 months. Wow. Seems like it's been longer than that, but it hasn't. I took my first class back in April, got my hive together by May, and got a swarm of bees to take up residence after one failed attempt, and that was in late June. That makes their industriousness even more impressive to me; in that time, they've gone from a completely empty hive to one with bar after bar full of comb, honey, pollen, brood, and nectar, and that's even given that they have to build their own comb completely from scratch in the Top Bar hive, unlike Langstroth hives where they get a foundation frame.

Anyway, I've been interested in bees for much longer than the three months I've had them living in my yard, and I've read many articles and websites and theories about the big threats to the honeybee population, primarily CCD (Colony Collapse Disorder). With CCD, there is often no evidence of what happened; the bees just up and disappear, leaving brood, pollen, honey, everything. No thousands of bodies piled up around the hive, just gone. (My personal theory? They returned to Melissa Majoria. Sorry, Doctor Who geek inside joke.)

In science magazines, the focus has been on varroa and tracheal mites, foulbrood disease, fungi and other diseases, and even the effect of artificial lighting, cell phones, and electrical lines. Each time researchers find something new affecting bees, they wonder if they've found the "real" problem. New treatments are developed, new management techniques employed, new advice generated, and the cycle begins anew. Right now, some apiaries around the US are suffering yearly winter losses of 25 - 50% or more. It's really putting a spin into the commercial honey production business, but of even greater importance, it's putting a strain on agriculture, since a huge amount of our nation's food production relies on bees for pollination.

So what's really going on? Well, I'm not actually a scientist, so I have only a mishmash conglomeration of opinions and facts I've gathered from various sources, including my own theories and observations. Seems to me, since bees have been around for literally tens of millions of years, we're a little arrogant to think we know what's best for the bees in terms of frame size, food supply, location and such. It's common in commercial apiculture to harvest all the honey in the fall, then give the bees *corn syrup* or even sugar water to survive the winter. Does that seem wrong to anyone except me? Bees are often trucked thousands of miles from where they originated, then forced to forage within a vast monocultural landscape, feeding on only one source of food for days or weeks at a time, then moved to another type of monoculture field repeatedly until the end of the season. Now almond or apple blossoms may be a perfectly viable source of pollen and nectar, but they're not complete. Think of it this way: oatmeal is very good for you, but if that's all you got to eat you'd be missing some vital nutrients. And if you relied on the properties of herbs and flowers to help combat disease or fungus, you'd be out of luck if all you could have was one source of food.

With the Langstroth hives that are common in commercial apiculture (because they're easy to increase, move, and harvest), bees are typically given frames for their hives. This means they spend less time drawing out their own comb and therefore can breed faster and store honey quicker. However, is that what the *bees* need? They're geared, through millennia of evolution, to spend their first few weeks of life on household chores like comb building. They vary the size of their comb cells in nature, for reasons clear mostly to the bees. For one thing, the size of the comb cells helps determine the gestation period of the bee larvae, and therefore determines what kind of bee will result. Interestingly, the gestation period of common mites are matched to the bees, and a small variation will cause the bees to hatch before the mites, resulting in mites starving because they lack a host. Another problem with providing frame comb is that the combs are either plastic (with the resultant chemicals and deterioration) or made from recycled wax. One recent study found over 100 kinds of chemicals in a frame; this shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who knows how the frames are made, as every fungus, virus, fungicde, miticide, and pesticide ever brought into or poured into the hive will be recycled along with the contaminated wax. Seems suboptimal to me.

Then there's the problem of fungicides and miticides themselves. Most obviously, trying to find a miticide (a targeted type of insecticide) that will kill the mites without also killing the bees is complicated. Fungicides are less problematic in that respect, but problematic in their own right. First of all, do we really know what the biological mechanisms of a healthy hive are? (Answer: No.) And applying repeated doses of any -cide has the interesting side effect of generally breeding a stronger species of whatever you're trying to wipe out, and making your pathogen or pest resistant to your current batch of -cides, so that you have to continually develop new poisons to stay ahead of the problem, and you create an endless feedback cycle of poison - resistance - new poison. It's the same principle as with the overuse of antibiotics and the failure of most patients to take their full dose of antibiotics: You kill off the weakest of the pathogens and leave a few alive, the very ones which are more resistant to the poison and stronger in general, and they breed the next generation of pathogen. Mites and fungal diseases are no different. With the current treatments, we're selecting for stronger mites and fungi, and weaker bees. Again, suboptimal.

So what's the alternative to the cycle of poisons and treatments and winter feeding and over-management of hives? It's essentially the same question as people are now beginning to apply to factory farming practices with animals like chickens. It may be more convenient for the humans to have the chickens packed in tightly, with beaks cut and eggs dropped directly into a chute, but it's not healthy for the chickens, the eggs, or the humans consuming the products. The costs of free-range, cage-free, or pastured chickens may be higher, but they are consistently better for you in terms of both nutrition and pathogen-transmission. The costs of honey will be higher if we begin to rely on smaller beekeeping methods, but the bees may be given the chance to recover. The one major question we'll have to answer which is very different from those in other factory farming methodologies is the question about using trucked-in bees for pollination of our major food crops. Right now, about 1/3 of our major food sources in the US are dependent upon bees for pollination, and with giant agricultural companies relying on vast monocultural orchards and fields, the only way to get bees into the heart of the operation is to truck them in. Solving the problem may require a major shift in the way farmers and agricultural companies think, with a return to a more blended, varied cultural practice which was the standard up until fairly recently. Instead of 500 acres of just almond trees, farmers may have to go for mixed orchards of almonds, peaches, apples, low growing berries, and chickens running loose to provide pest control and fertilizer. While this works very well for small to mid-scale farms, the vast commercial ventures that provide much of the nation's food will not be able to make the shift without significant increases to their costs, and I'm pretty sure they're not willing to give up their monopoly on food production and turn it over to smaller-scale farmers again. It'll be interesting to see where the system breaks first. Me, I'm ramping up my own farming and animal husbandry so that if and when it truly does break, we'll be set up to mitigate some of the impact on my own family and friends.

So where do small-scale beekeepers come in? I know our local commercial beekeepers are constantly sending out reminders about feeding hives, applying miticides, applying fungicides, checking for this disease or that disease, and really managing the bees. In my hive I've gone for a minimally-invasive, low-maintenance theory of beekeeping; I assume the bees know what they're doing and leave them alone. I've been told by commercial keepers that "you can't do it that way", but I know many other hobby and small-scale keepers who are in fact "doing it that way", quite successfully. We allow our hives to swarm if they wish, and take it as a sign of a very vigorous hive, and just deal with the reduced honey production that results. We also attempt only minimal treatments if something goes wrong with the hive, and sometimes choose to allow a weak or immune-compromised hive to die off instead of trying desperately to save a weak hive. Most of us don't smoke our bees (which is very stressful) and open only a few bars of a hive at a time, which the bees look at as a repair job rather than a full-scale invasion.

I originally titled this post "Synchronici-bee" because I've come across two articles in the past couple of days that are about Bee issues very close to my heart. The first is an article in the October 2009 issue of Discover Magazine titled "Buzz Off", and subtitled "The great bee die-off is not such a mystery after all; industrial agriculture has stressed our pollinators to the breaking point." Hallelujah! Someone gets it. I'm sure they'll get a lot of criticism from scientists and the public for stating it so clearly and making a case for getting bees back to a more natural state, but good for them for putting the pieces together. Seems like most of the researchers have been so focused on finding one cause or one disease or a set of circumstances that they've missed the obvious. I suspect it comes partly because most people look at bees as individuals, when really they're a hive-being; each hive is a critter, and when you start messing around with the critter and assuming you know better than the critter's own instincts, you end up weakening it. (Common practice: squash your Queen bee every year or so, and replace her with a commercially-bred, completely unrelated Queen from a totally different climate. Does that make sense to ANYONE? Seriously??)

"We've looked at bees as robots that would keep on trucking no matter what," says Heather Mattila of Wellesley College, who studies honeybee behavior and genetics. "They can't be pushed and pushed."

Scary fact: A study published in July showed that honeybee Queen breeders use only 500 select mothers annually to produce a million Queen bees. And the bees are chosen on some mostly-random factors the breeders consider important, not on factors the BEES consider important. Same with the drones selected for the artificial insemination process; they aren't selected by the Queens, they're selected based on what a human thinks is important. Yikes.

In the end, the article says, "Bees have been doing this for 80 million years...all we have to do is get out of their way." And that's what many backyard beekeepers seem to be doing, at least here in the We're-So-Green-You-Could-Plant-Us-In-The-Dirt Pacific Northwest. Many of us prefer wild-caught swarms and low-management practices. It remains to be seen how that will pan out in the long run, but the practice of keeping bees in urban and suburban environments is NOT just a fad us Pac NWers came up with!

In the second "Synchronici-bee" moment, I purchased a magazine called "Gleanings in Bee Culture" from February of 1910. Yes, almost exactly 100 years ago. (You can find anything on eBay, I'm convinced.) And in it, there is an article entitled "Bees in the Garret". For those of us living in the 21st century, that means "Bees in the Attic", more or less...the garret being a room on the top floor with a pitched roof, what we would think of as an attic room. The article was written by Charles Stewart of Toledo, OH, who seems to have been very forward-thinking when it comes to the keeping of bees in an urban environment!

"Bee-keeping is classed among rural industries; yet it is not necessary to live in the country or even in the suburbs or in a village to taste the pleasure of the pursuit, for it is a genuine pleasure - it is even more; it is a delightful and seductive charm; and for the city man who retains many of his original illusions and all his love for the simple life of rural industry, keeping bees is the least depressing method of being "stung."

(I do note that beekeeping was a "gentlemanly" pursuit. Wonder what he'd have thought of me wearing jeans and short sleeves and poking around at my hive and generally being not-too-ladylike...)

He goes on to suggest that one can keep a colony of bees in the attic, and that one should make a start during the swarming season! He notes that most urban bees don't swarm, and recommends a style of hive called a Danzenbaker, though I'm not certain what those are.

"You can put a colony in your garret; and if it has sufficient hive room, the chances are a hundred to one the bees will not disturb your neighbors nor dissipate your expectations of a honey-yield by swarming."

I still have a lot to learn about bees; seems to me that keeping bees is a lot like anything else, in that the more you learn the more you need to learn, and the longer you're at it the more you realize how little you know. But it's nice to read articles like these two and gather a little more information, and a little more reassurance that keeping bees in a "natural" manner only a foot from my house isn't as insane as it sounds!

Homemade Goodies

2009-09-14T19:35:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I went up into the Gifford Pinchot National Forest to go to Takhlakh Lake. We made it almost all the way before my daughter declared she was carsick and we had to pull over (never mind that I was also carsick; I can usually tough it out, but a four year old not so much.)

When we got out to walk around, we discovered a patch of huckleberries. It's legal to take up to 3 gallons of berries per person for personal use each year, and those picking for personal use can pick anywhere in the area except for those sections marked and set aside for the Yakama Indian nation...so we picked. After rooting around for a bag, we picked a few cups and took them home with us. Not enough for jam, but enough for something. A pie? Cobbler? Ice cream? Finally decided on a critter called a "buckle."

I'm not usually a great fan of berries or berry creations, but oh my. This was fantastic. Great hot out of the oven, still great cold, would be lovely with vanilla ice cream or whipped cream but stands completely fine on its own!

HUCKLEBERRY BUCKLE

BATTER
* 1/4 cup butter
* 1/2 cup white sugar
* 1 cup all-purpose flour
* 1 teaspoon baking powder
* 1/4 teaspoon salt
* cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice to taste (1/2 - 1 tsp each)
* 1/2 cup milk

FILLING
* 2 1/2 cups huckleberries
* 3/4 cup white sugar
* 1/4 cup flour
* 1/2 cup boiling water
* 1 tablespoon butter

Preheat oven to 375. Grease the bottom of a 9 inch square pan. In a large bowl, cream butter and sugar. In a separate small bowl, combine flour, baking powder, spices and salt. Stir into butter mixture. Stir in milk; mixture will be thick and lumpy. Spread batter into the prepared pan.

In a large bowl, combine berries, sugar, flour and boiling water. Pour over the batter in the pan. Dot the top with remaining butter.

Bake in the preheated oven for 45 to 50 minutes. Eat hot. YUM!

When Nerds Keep Bees

2009-08-27T17:57:00.001-07:00

I've posted pictures of my Top Bar Beehive before. It's a lovely creation which my husband made for me out of pine and alder, and for which he created probably the sturdiest, most weatherproof roof in the history of beehives. But it just needed...something.

Enter me with my woodburner. Yeah. Now hand me an English/Quenya* dictionary and an online Tengwar* translator, and stand back.

The result:

The crossbar is translated into Quenya. It reads "Laure Niernore", which more or less means "Golden Honeybee Dwelling." The left and right sides are not translated into Quenya, but are merely rough phonetic translations of two quotes about honeybees, minus punctuation and reformatted for space...

"Listen! O, listen!
Here come the hum the golden bees
Underneath full blossomed trees,
At once with glowing fruit and flowers crowned. "
- James Russell Lowell, The Sirens (l. 94)

"In the nice bee, what sense so subtly true
From pois'nous herbs extracts the healing dew?"
- Alexander Pope, Essay on Man (ep. I, 219)

* Quenya is a form of Elvish language from JRR Tolkein's books about Middle Earth, including The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, and the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Tengwar is the script in which the language is written. If you're with me so far, you'll know why I was so tickled that my town's name translates as "Dagorlad". If not, you're not missing anything.

The sky is falling!

2009-08-19T22:31:00.001-07:00

Seems appropriate...wasn't that an apple falling on Chicken Little's head which set the whole thing off? Two things I have a lot of around here right now: chickens and apples.

The three new chickens are still skittish, but getting settled. The one missing a large patch of her back feathers will launch herself at me when I come into the coop, but not to be mean. No, she wants to sit on whatever bowl of food I've brought out so she can gobble her fair share without any of the others picking on her. The other buff orpington will come out and let me hand feed her and pet her, but she doesn't yet go down and join "my girls". The little game hen, now dubbed Racer X, is speedy, flighty, nervous, and the low girl on the totem pole. I did manage to catch her tonight with little effort, and held her and cooed at her for a while until she calmed down. They'll get there eventually, I'm sure. Meanwhile, one of my original girls has a big owie on the back of her comb, presumably where the other girls were picking on her. Turns out that one likes to sit on my lap and cluck to herself and have her wings scritched. I'm sure my neighbor thinks I'm insane; he used to raise chickens by the hundreds, in a very "factory" mindset, and here I am petting mine.

As for apples, well, we have a lot. There's a tree in the front yard which is obviously old, and had a few sad apples stuck on it last fall when we were moving. It's dropped a ton so far, filling a big cardboard moving box with soft-fleshed yellow apples with a bit of surface scabbing but no sign of anything major. Once peeled, they are perfectly acceptable apples. I made some into a pie last weekend, and though I objected to them on the basis that they are soft and don't hold up well after baking, they did have a nice flavor. They're destined to be applesauce though.

We have even more apples than that, though, because we went over to our old house and raided the Emerald Spire columnar apple tree in the back yard. (My parents now own the house, so it's not as weird as it sounds.) We planted the tree three or four years ago, and it's a beautifully compact tree less than 4 feet wide but about 12 feet tall. The apples are big and green, and those that hadn't fallen yet were also smooth skinned and relatively free of anything resembling scab or insect damage. I did find a few with a worm parked right at the stem end, but they appeared to be doing nothing beyond sitting there in a little webby bit. After bringing them home, I slated them for apple pies and apple cheesecake, because I know they are wonderfully firm and have a nice tart flavor that holds up well in baking. I still have a few left, but I canned a batch of yummy apple pie filling today!

Apple Pie Filling
* 6 quarts blanched apple slices
* 5 1/2 cups sugar
* 1 1/2 cups Clear Jel (a food starch, available at WilCo Farm Stores and some baking stores)
* 1 Tbls cinnamon
* 1 tsp nutmeg
* 2 1/2 cups cold water
* 5 cups apple juice
* 3/4 cup bottled lemon juice
* Ascorbic acid powder, or commercial anti-darkening powder for fruit
* At least one 6+ quart saucepot, two very large bowls, and a strainer or sieve
* Quart jars and lids

Prepare your jars and lids for canning, leave the sterile jars hot and leave the lids in the hot water from scalding. Fill your water canner and set on to heat.

Wash, peel, and core your apples. (If you do this a lot, let me recommend a hand-crank apple peeler-corer. I've had mine a couple of years now, and I love it. LOVE it.) Cut apples into 1/2 inch wide slices, place in a large bowl with anti-darkening solution of 1 tsp ascorbic acid to 1 gallon of water, or solution made according to the directions on the bottle.

Remove slices from the solution, drain well. Bring a large pot of water to boil on the stove. Blanch fruit by placing 6 cups of slices in the water, then return it to boiling. Boil each batch for 1 minute after it returns to a boil, then remove the fruit from the water, drain well, and place in a large bowl. Cover the bowl to keep warm.

After all fruit is blanched, drain the pot of water. In the large pot, combine sugar, Clear Jel, cinnamon, nutmeg, water, and applesauce. Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly, until the mixture thickens and begins to bubble.

Add the lemon juice, stir in well, and boil one more minute, stirring constantly.

Remove from heat, immediately fold in the hot blanched apple slices. Fill hot jars with the pie filling, leaving 1 inch head space. Remove air bubbles with a non-metal spatula, wipe jar rims, adjust the lids. Process in a water bath canner for 25 minutes (pints and quarts.) Makes 5-7 quarts depending on how much your apples shrink during blanching.

Birdies Birdies Everywhere

2009-08-12T19:17:00.000-07:00

Today was apparently the Day of the Birds around here!

Last week, a gal posted on PDXBackyardChix that she had three "escape artist" hens she needed to rehome. She got an offer in Oregon City, but she lives not too far from me, and that's a long ways from where we are. I happened to see the post then, and offered to take the girls to enhance my flock. They were delivered today; two Buff Orpington girls and a little game hen which apparently lays bluish eggs. They will be added to my three Buff Orpingtons and one Rhode Island Red tonight after dark. (Mama and the four chicks are still sequestered, but they will be integrated eventually as well.)

While I was chatting with the gal and her husband, I happened to glance over and saw a flailing thing in the potted fuschia. I thought at first it was a mouse, but it turned out to be one of the baby House Sparrows which had fallen out of the nest. Its eyes were not yet open, it was not feathered at all, and it was chilled. I picked it up, and with the help of the chicken folks, tried to put it back in the nest. I got it back inside, but after the folks left I watched the Mama Sparrow try to figure out how to get past the baby and into the nest, so I decided to work on it some more.

I got up onto a ladder (NOT my first choice in any event) and took down the nest. I didn't think the lid came off, but the little neighbor girl suggested undoing the main screw on the front, and lo and behold, the lid does come off. The nest box was literally stuffed to the rafters with dry grasses, moss, and feathers. Turns out it was a good thing I opened it up; the actual nest cavity was in the very back of the house, with a little tunnel leading to it. The baby would never have made it back that far, and I'm not entirely certain how it got out. I pulled some of the nesting out, picked up the little escapee, and snuggled it back into the nest with its siblings. I got Todd to rehang it, and I've seen Mama bird coming in and out of the nest, probably trying to figure out how all her babies got upside down and why the house is such a mess. Hopefully all is well inside the nest tonight!

What a crock.

2009-08-05T23:13:00.000-07:00

No seriously, it's a crock! I was at the local Wilco Farm Store yesterday looking for canning jars and generally poking about in the canning section while my daughter was amusing herself riding the pint-sized tractor. I was about finished with my selections when I happened to glance down to the bottom shelf and realized they had 3 gallon stoneware pickling crocks in stock! It takes so little to make me happy...I squee'd out loud, grabbed one, and stuffed all my pickling supplies inside it.

I'd been on a quest for a stoneware pickling crock for a couple of weeks. For my first batch of dill pickles I used a plastic vacu-sealing bucket, but if I'm going to be soaking foods in acids I'd rather have something besides plastic (even though this particular bucket is deemed "okay" chemically, it just seems better to use stoneware or glass.) I'd searched local secondhand stores, and though I'd found a couple that were gallon sized and would have worked, I hadn't found what I really wanted. I looked online, and while I could find listings for them, most of them were out of stock. Even Lehman's page for crocks marked them all as out of stock; it looks like perhaps one of the primary manufacturers has gone out of business. Of the couple I found, the shipping was in the $20-$30 range, so I saved quite a bit by finding one locally. When I told my husband I'd found one at Wilco, he said, "Go buy another one." Not one to need a lot of encouragement when it comes to geeky old-fashioned farmlike equipment, I swung by there tonight on my way home and dashed in 10 minutes before closing to snag one of their last 3 crocks. Turns out Todd's mother also has a 3 gallon one that used to belong to her mother, which has been sitting in her living room and likely functioning as a plant holder, and which she offered to let me use. More pickles!

So today I stopped by BiZi Farm (support your local farm!) and picked up 6 heads of cabbage, 2 cauliflowers, and a bunch of celery, plus a bag of Bob's Red Mill 13 Bean Soup Mix, some lemon cucumbers, a few peaches, and a book on Log Cabin Cooking since I'm a sucker for pioneer recipes. I came home and shredded all the cabbage and started it fermenting for sauerkraut in one of the new crocks, then I chopped up all the cauliflower and celery plus a row of carrots from our garden and made 5 quarts of pickled vegetable mix for Todd's snacking pleasure. After that, I chopped up 6 pounds of pickling cucumbers and made 11 pints of sweet pickle chips, and started another 10 pounds of dill pickles brining in my other stoneware crock.

And I'm still getting around 5 pounds of cucumbers per day from my garden. Oh dear. I think I shall soon be offering cucumbers to unsuspecting passers-by!

Homemade Sauerkraut

* 20 pounds of cabbage (approximately 6 heads)
* 3/4 cup pickling and canning salt (or NON IODIZED, non-rock salt like Kosher salt)
* 3 gallon crock
* plate or wooden disk that fits inside the crock with 1/4-1/2" clearance around the edges
* cheesecloth

Wash the cabbage heads, remove any wilted leaves. Quarter the heads and remove the core. Cut into very fine shreds, about 1/16" inch, using a sharp knife or a food processor or mandoline. In a large, non-aluminum bowl, place 5 pounds of shreds with 3 tablespoons of the pickling salt. Toss to cover, then allow to rest for 5-10 minutes or until wilted. Pack down firmly into the clean crock, using a wooden tamper if you have one. (The head of a wooden tenderizing mallet will work, or use your hands.)

Repeat with the rest of the cabbage and salt, pressing down firmly on the cabbage in the crock after adding each layer and before adding the next. The cabbage should begin to shed its liquid, and by the time you reach the end of the packing, you should have enough liquid to cover the shredded cabbage. (If you do not, add a brine made of 1-1/2 tablespoons of salt per quart of water until there is sufficient liquid to cover the cabbage entirely.)

Place a layer of cheesecloth on top of the cabbage, and top with a plate or a wooden sauerkraut "lid". Add a weight (a ziploc bag full of water, a canning jar full of water, etc.) to the top of the plate to ensure that the cabbage all stays submerged. Allow to ferment between 55 and 75 degrees for 3-6 weeks. Fermentation is done when bubbles cease to form after the sides are tapped to remove bubbles. If a scum forms on the top, skim it off. Switch plates to a clean one if necessary.

Bring sauerkraut to a simmer (185 to 210degrees F). DO NOT BOIL. Sterilize canning jars and equipment per manufacture instructions, leave jars hot. Pack hot cabbage into hot jars, leaving 1/2 inch headspace. Remove air bubbles with a non-metal spatula run around the inside of the jar. Adjust caps. Process pints 15 minutes, quarts 20 minutes, in a boiling water canner.

Pick a Peck of Pickles

2009-08-02T18:47:00.000-07:00

One of the spaces in my garden this year went to pickling cucumbers. I bought a pack of seeds for around $3.00, and started them in the greenhouse. I'm not sure every single seed came up, but it was pretty darn close. And once I moved them to the garden, even though it was late in the season, they took off. They are now producing several pounds of pickles a day. They are thus far the single most productive, useful vegetable I've planted in the garden just in terms of volume picked and used, especially with regard to cost outlay in the beginning.

So far, I've got two gallons of dill pickles brining in the jelly room, using dill from my yard. I also have 8 quart jars and 8 pint jars of bread and butter pickles stored away. In the fridge I have my last three days' worth of pickings, which amounts to enough cucumbers to make about 12 quarts of sweet pickles. And the cucumbers really don't show any signs of slowing down. Pickles anyone?

Brined Dill Pickles

* 15 pounds of pickling cucumbers (whole, small)
* 2-3 bunches of dill heads, fresh or dried
* 3/4 cup pickling spices
* 3 cups white vinegar
* 1 1/2 cups pickling salt (not table salt)
* Garlic cloves (optional)
* water

Wash the cucumbers thoroughly. In a large crock (at least 2 gallons), sprinkle half the pickling spices, and half the dill, and 2-3 cloves of garlic if you wish. Pack with cucumbers to within 4 inches of the top. Add the rest of the salt, pickling spices, and dill. In a large pot, mix the salt with the vinegar and enough water to fill the crock, and add to the crock of cucumbers. Be sure the cucumbers are all submerged in the brine; weight with a wooden block or ceramic plate if necessary.

Let brine in a cool-ish place for 2-3 weeks. Don't stir or disturb, but do make sure the pickles stay submerged. If a scum forms on top, skim off (it's a byproduct of the fermenting process.)

When you're ready to can, strain the brine into a large, non-reactive (stainless steel, enameled, or glass) pot. Bring to a boil. Sterlize your jars and pack with your brined pickles and a small piece of the dill from the crock, then add the hot brine, leaving 1/2 inch headspace. Do not overpack.

If your brine is cloudy, it's due to yeast blooming during fermentation. It won't hurt the pickles, and in fact will taste better if you use it, but if you prefer you can make new brine before canning. Use 1/3 cup salt, 4 cups vinegar, and 1 gallon of water, and bring to a boil, proceed as above.

Final Chick Tally

2009-07-31T18:45:00.000-07:00

Of the original dozen eggs we put under the broody hen, we have four survivors. To my untrained eye, they appear to be three Rhode Island Reds and a Silver Laced Wyandotte. The only reason I can even guess that closely is that I know I only got RIR and SLW eggs, plus one Aracauna which was easily identified because it was a blue egg, and it didn't hatch.

We had four eggs that simply didn't hatch. No idea why. Mama sat on them religiously, turned them, and protected them. They might have gotten too warm in this week's heat spell. We also had three chicks that almost made it, but didn't quite. Two were apparently stepped on by Mama when they were in the middle of hatching, and one just looks like it didn't quite have the energy to pip all the way around the shell. One egg was crushed on the first night by the klutzy Mama.

All four babies and proud Mama hen are in their own mini enclosure out right next to the main chicken coop. They have their own food and water, their own nest, and a little ramp for getting into the nest. The ramp proved necessary after I went out to check on them last night and found the littlest chick sitting forlornly outside the nest box, peeping and unable to climb into the nest to join its foster Mama and foster siblings. I put the chick under Mama for the night, and we took care of the problem today with the ramp.

Now we have to see if Mama does a good job of raising them, and wait to see whether they're hens or roosters! (Crossing my finger that the SLW is a hen, because I'd like to have one!)

Hot.

2009-07-26T15:30:00.000-07:00

While heat is all relative, we're having quite a heat wave for our area. For us, that's temperatures in the upper 90's to triple digits for more than a day or two. It happens pretty much every summer for a week or two, but it seems to always be shocking to the residents of the area, who are used to thinking of themselves as living in a rainy and cloudy area.

Our new house is built with a daylight basement, which means the downstairs is fairly cool even with no air conditioning or fans, even in sweltering heat. Since we do most of our "living" downstairs, it's a pretty convenient state of affairs and much easier on the pocketbook than it might be if we had to cool most of the house. Conversely, it stays relatively warm in the winter, and if we run the wood stove, we don't have to turn on the natural gas furnace very often either. I suspect, though I don't know for sure, that our heating/cooling bills for this house are significantly lower than the previous house.

In any event, the heat has had me looking at weather reports from all over the country, and even outside the country. In particular, I have been examining the water restrictions in San Antonio, Texas, and in parts of Australia. We don't consume ridiculous amounts of water at our house; we don't water the lawn in the summer, we always run full loads of dishes and laundry, we mostly shower instead of taking baths, and we use rainwater we collected during the rainy season for incidental watering. However, we aren't particularly conservative about water, either. The weather reports just made me look at how our water consumption might have to change if we lived in an area so desperate for water, and has prompted me to conserve a little more water just "in honor" of them, to see what it might be like.

(On another note, the severe water shortages in arid, hot areas also point out the ridiculousness of humans. Who honestly thought that moving into a desert and then trying to live as if it were a temperate, farmable area was a good idea? Living there is fine, but living within the capabilities of the climate would have been much better for both humans and the environment. Who seriously tries to grow a lawn in a desert? Ah humans, always trying to bend Nature to their will. Eventually, Nature bites back, and her teeth are much bigger.)

For our area, we've been asked to conserve water, but it's more of a polite, "Hey, we would like it if you didn't tap all our water resources" request rather than a mandate. So today, I took the quart of just-off milk and poured it to my tomatoes instead of washing it down the drain. I washed my day's harvest of pickling cucumbers, peppermint, and onions over a bucket, and poured the gray water to the lilies and the hydrangea instead of watering them with the hose. I know in parts of Australia they shower in buckets; while I understand the need, I'm not quite that interested in the experimental mindset! Washing vegetables over a bucket doesn't make much difference, I know, but I suppose if everyone in my city were to cut back by just two gallons of water a day (about what I poured onto my flowers), it would lead to a daily savings of 34,000 gallons, or 238,000 gallons a week. I've heard the argument that water evaporates and goes back into the water cycle, so it doesn't matter how much we use. That'd be okay if it weren't also true that we use water faster than we the system can replace it in many areas. There's also the fact that humans pour water into a sewer system, where it then has to be cleaned and treated and purified, so any water that doesn't go down the drain means less stress on the infrastructure, and less expense to the homeowner both for water consumed and for sewer volume.

Even with water conservation in mind, in this heat, we're still filling up the wading pool for the little one, though! (When we have to drain it, it all goes on the various plants in the yard and into the bird baths and such.)

House Sparrows

2009-07-23T12:26:00.000-07:00

Apparently my yard is ideal House Sparrow breeding ground. Well, given how prolific they are in general and how adaptable, I'm not sure that's any great distinction, but it's certainly no less true. On the eaves of my front porch there is a battered old bird house, which came with the house when we bought it. The former owners said the bird house was occupied every year, but they didn't know what kind of birds used it. Early this spring, I found out it was a pair of House Sparrows. And now months later, they're still using it.

So far, I've seen them hatch out three clutches of eggs. The last clutch fledged a few days ago, and I happened to step out onto the porch just as one of the babies was contemplating a maiden flight. I tried to be quiet and unobtrusive, but those words are not in the vocabulary of my four year old daughter. The sparrow ended up leaping from the little landing pad on the birdhouse and taking wobblingly to the air, aiming towards the dogwood tree. It made it to the tree, and after crashing through the leaves, it did manage to land. I tried not to laugh, and I was glad it looked like it would be okay.

Not too long after that, I started hearing the peeping sound I've come to realize means either 1) chicks are hungry or 2) mating season is back. The sound that the female bird makes during the courtship rituals is, to my human ears, very much like that of the chicks in the nest, to the point that if I hadn't known for sure the chicks had fledged, I'd have had to go look to see whether it was feeding or mating activity. The sparrows will mate off and on, all over my porch and gutters, for a couple of days, and then start their fourth clutch. I'm assuming it's the same pair, as they seem to be marginally territorial about their nest and the immediate environs, and I've seen them fight off other birds interested in the nest.

Next spring, I will be studying the one house we have for dimensions and construction, and putting up more around the yard, probably on large poles or up in the dogwood and cedar trees. The only difference I want to be sure to make is the ability to clean out the house, as this one doesn't have any way to open it. We have a whole flock of the little critters, so I'm hoping to encourage more than one pair to mate and hang out where I can watch. I hadn't realized how many we really had living on the property or nearby until a couple of days ago when my husband directed my attention to the patch of dirt he'd shoveled out of the front yard and spread over a patch of ground we're preparing to turn into a berry patch. There, on the dried-out dirt, dozens of little House Sparrows were taking very vigorous and chatty dust baths. This morning I peeked out the living room windows and the entire flock was at it again, having a party in the dust.

Ginger

2009-07-20T23:23:00.000-07:00

For as long as I can remember, I have been very prone to motion sickness. As a child, I needed only to say, "I don't feel so well" from the back seat of the car, and my parents would slam on the brakes and/or jam a bucket under my chin for the inevitable deluge. After a while, I learned that sleeping would keep me from being sick to my stomach, so I spent most car trips of over a few minutes in length asleep, stretched out on the back seat, since we didn't have booster seats Way Back Then.

As I've gotten older, it's gotten both worse and better. I don't tend to get carsick when I drive, and I've never noticed any tendency to get sick in planes or on any size of watercraft from a canoe up to a ferry. Most of the time if I am riding in a car and do start to feel queasy, I can fight it off and just feel miserable rather than actually being physically sick. Or I can fight it off long enough to fall asleep, which is quite easy for me to do thanks to the childhood Nap Conditioning of car trips. On the other hand, more types of roads make me sick than ever before. It no longer requires a hairpin road to make me ill; a parking lot or a bumpy road will work just fine. I now also become sick on roller coaster rides, carousels, and swingsets, for crying out loud. There's no way anyone would get me on the Teacup ride at Disneyland, thank you.

For a while I took Dramamine to combat motion sickness, but that requires a little pre-planning, as it's most effective if you take it more than an hour before you leave. In its favor, one dose tends to last me up to 48 hours and leaves me completely free of motion sickness to the point I can even read in the car. Unfortunately, even the non-drowsy formula tends to put me right to sleep, which is okay if I'm a passenger in a car but not great if I'm trying to ride a roller coaster.

Sometime this summer I finally decided to try a cure I'd heard about long ago but never investigated: ginger. I opted for crystallized (candied) ginger, some ginger chews, and some ginger candy to try various forms against one another. I also picked up some hot ginger lemonade. We gave it a try on a windy road out to the Oregon Coast, with me eating a couple of slices of candied ginger before leaving. Though I'm never going to eat candied ginger as a taste treat, it's not bad, and it has zero negative side effects. And it actually works. Doesn't last the 48 hours Dramamine or similar pills might; it lasts more like 6 hours. But it doesn't put one to sleep, it's inexpensive, and you can share it with anyone else who might be motion sick or even just peckish. The hot ginger lemonade was outstandingly good, but I can no longer find a source for it.

For anyone who wants to try the ginger route, I recommend going to an Import store and examining their selection of candies. I find mine at Cost Plus World Market, where I can get candied ginger, "Ginger Bears", ginger chews, pickled ginger, ginger ale and several other forms of ginger, some of which even tell you how much actual ginger is in the product. Even strong gingersnaps made with real ginger are effective. The trick is to be sure that the product contains substantial amounts of real ginger, not merely ginger flavoring. And if you really can't bear the taste of ginger, you can get ginger capsules in the Supplement aisles of some fancy supermarkets or vitamin shops, or you can make your own with ground ginger from the kitchen and gelatin capsules from the vitamin shop.

And as an added bonus, I have discovered that ginger works significantly better and faster for my heartburn than antacid tablets, and about as well as liquid antacids, without the potentially worrisome ingredients in the antacids. Wish I'd known that when I was pregnant!

Mason Bees!

2009-07-16T23:14:00.000-07:00

I don't remember where I left off on the Saga of the Mason Bees, so I'll just pick up with today's discovery. We'd put our mason bee and leafcutter bee houses up on a freestanding board out by the garden, because we had no really good place to put them on any of our buildings. By mid-June, I had one hole on the mason bee house filled and one started, and then nothing. I assumed the mason bee who was busy filling those two holes probably met with an untimely death. Not long after, the one hole she had managed to fill was torn open by something, so no bees in there at all. Bummer. I'd intended to take down the houses and store them until next spring, but never got around to it.

Turns out, my procrastination was a good thing in this case. I happened to be out watering some nearby plants, and glanced up at the mason bee house, contemplating moving it today. Then I noticed a full hole. And another. And another. Six altogether, which probably means a single mason bee discovered the house. Neat! No holes filled in the aphid eater wasp house, but there are three holes filled on the leafcutter bee house. Neat again!

This means I need to let the houses just sort of hang out until about October, when I'll bring them into the garage for the winter. By then, the little bees should be pupated, and it should be before the brunt of the winter storms. (Unfortunately, the best, sunniest place in the yard is also the one that takes it full-on from winter storm winds, which almost always approach us from the south.)

Go bees!

Broody Hen Update

2009-07-14T00:39:00.000-07:00

I've had chickens for a little over a year now, from chicks through to full grown hens. When I first acquired my five "sexed" chicks, I hoped all five would be female. With an 80-90% accuracy rate, I knew it was a risk one wouldn't be. I didn't have any idea how to tell if one was a rooster, though. "How do you know?" There's a lot of learning that goes on in raising any animals, and the "Well, how do you know?" is a question I keep running across and then answering.

Early on, I had one chicken that was bigger than the rest, who developed a comb and wattles early, and who, sadly, was the friendliest of the bunch. I harbored suspicions that it was a rooster, though I was hoping it wasn't. My friend Tonya, who has dozens of chickens and is quite an expert, took one look at the photo I sent her and said, "That's a MAN, baby." Sigh. You "know" because of those signs, plus the fact that his legs were thicker early on and had little spots where his spurs would eventually grow. That, and he eventually did crow. Luckily, I found a woman north of me who wanted a Buff Orpington rooster to go with her hens, and who had a Rhode Island Red hen to trade. Sweet! Drove to Woodland, made a clandestine poultry swap in the parking lot of the Safeway feeling like a cop was going to bust me at any moment, and went home with "Eeyore", as my then-three-year-old dubbed the hen.

Fast forward to now. I've heard of hens going broody, and I knew what it meant technically, but I didn't know how to tell if my hens were doing it. Going "broody" means that the hen has decided she has a clutch of eggs she must hatch. For many, it's a bad thing as it means she will stop laying eggs and do nothing but sit about on her nest all day, pecking and making noise at any intruders. I knew you could break a hen of being broody by giving her a bath, or forcing her to stay in a wire cage for several days without a nest to sit on. But I still didn't really know what it LOOKED like.

Then I noticed that every time I opened the egg door on our coop, there was a hen on a nest. And when I reached under her to see if she had eggs there, she pecked at me and hissed. That was new. The next two days, I noticed we only had four hens in the run, and the fifth was sitting determinedly on her golf balls, trying to hatch them. Well. That's broody.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I went in search of fertile eggs for her. Without a rooster, my girls only lay dud eggs. I found a gal through the local Chicken List (http://groups.yahoo.com/PDXbackyardchix) who had fertile eggs and came highly recommended. I'd hoped for some Buff Orpington and maybe some likely frizzle eggs, but no dice. I just had her send me a dozen basically random eggs. Didn't know this, but apparently you can gather the eggs and not have a hen on them for days or even a week, and then incubate them and they'll be fine. That means she can mail them to folks, and she mailed them to me. They showed up all individually wrapped in bubble wrap and packed in styrofoam peanuts, and all were safe and sound and took about 24 hours in transit because she is only 30 or so miles south of me. Getting them under the hen was a little interesting, but once she understood that I was putting something BACK, she seemed perfectly content, even happy about it.

That worked for a day, but on the second morning she went out to get some food and water with the rest of the hens, and then apparently didn't beat one of the other hens back to the full nest. Stupid other hen laid a 13th egg in the full nest, AND made the broody hen sit on the wrong nest. Ack! This resulted in my husband having to pull out the table saw and nail gun and build an Emergency BroodyBox. It's merely a 3'x4' wood frame with no bottom and a wood frame lid, all screened in with chicken wire except the back, where there's a sliding wood panel I can use to access the back of the nest to see how things are progressing. The lid is hinged with some old salvaged door hinges and held shut by a very attractive and high-tech C clamp. The reason it has no bottom is that we put it on our concrete patio and lined it with straw. Nothing can dig through concrete, and it's too heavy for a raccoon to lift. Inside that she has her own water and food (though she of course won't eat or drink much) and she has her own nest box located back against the wood back and sufficiently far away from wire on all sides to prevent raccoons from reaching in.

So far so good with the BroodyBox. Only hitch has been that somehow she managed to actually squash one of the eggs; I reached under her today to check it out and discovered a squashed up shell stuck in her feathers, and the other half of the squashed up shell in the nest. I'm hoping it was the one Stupid Hen laid as the 13th egg, as their shells seem to have been running on the thin side lately anyway, and it would have been an infertile egg. I won't know for sure until 2 1/2 more weeks pass!

Operation: Flora Rescue

2009-07-14T00:05:00.000-07:00

Last fall, my husband and daughter and I moved from our decidedly suburban house with it's small but decent yard, out to our 1940's brick farm house with it's 1/2 acre of "oh holy cow, what did we get ourselves into" yard. (And secretly, both my husband and I would have liked to have actual acreage, but this was a great compromise between being near town and out in the toolies, between being in the "suburbs" and in the country, and between having more house and less land or less house and more land.)

Anyway, our former house is now owned by my parents. Through a series of events, it's been occupied for several months by someone who had good intentions with the yard, but little knowledge of how to care for plants. Perennials were pulled up as weeds. Plants were left unwatered. Things were trimmed at the worst times and in ways that caused more harm than good. The vegetable garden looks great, but the ornamentals and herb garden are sad. While the occupant was out of town today, my mother and husband and I went over to dig up some of my more special plants and move them out to my house. (Bear in mind, it is my parents' house, and the current occupant will probably be vacating in a month or so...we fully intend to return in the fall and actually clean up and stage the yard. It wasn't a run-by decimating!)

Out of this, I wound up with several plants I'd gone to rescue, as well as several unexpected bonuses. I went in search of:

* Many tiger lilies
* Asiatic lilies
* A Rose of Sharon (hardy hibiscus variety)
* Several goldenseal plants
* A mayapple (gone. Dead. Suffocated under a barrel.)
* Wolfsbane (all six varieties pulled up as weeds.)
* Belladonna (either suffocated, pulled up as a weed, or gone unwatered and then pulled out. Vanished, in any event.)

I also came home with:

* A beautiful pink hydrangea. One of several that had been in the back yard.
* A hellebore
* A large and apparently not-flowered delphinium protesting a lack of water
* Several horseradishes that had apparently volunteered in the garden
* A rhubarb that volunteered from a chunk of severed root when we moved the big ones
* Several borage (which hate to be transplanted - waiting to see if they survive)
* My little, severely butchered and nearly dead, olive tree
* A stunted and sad calla lily in need of much more water and a little more sun
* A handful of crocosmia (if you've ever had these, you know you only need a handful...)
* Several starts off our luscious boysenberry plant. Thornless and prolific!
* A purple spiderwort
* A strange weird bulby plant with a spiral top. No idea, but I remember Mom giving it to me.
* My almost-dead but valiantly fighting valerian

So, I brought them home and spent the evening transplanting most of them. I also moved around some other plants and starts and formed a little flowering garden area near where I have most of the birdfeeders and birdbath. I cleared the debris away from the base of our pink flowering dogwood and created a little shade garden too. Hadn't really intended to plant along that side of the driveway, but hey, free plants! Something nice about having an entire truck bed full of plants that you didn't have to buy. Well, okay, I did buy them at some point in the past, so they weren't technically free, but it's not often you get to take so many with you when you move!

Note to anyone who is not a gardener who moves into a new house: look before you pull or dig. Learn what bulbs look like. (My beautiful hyacinth bulbs are all tragic victims too. Shoulda taken them with me when I moved out!) Watch as things come up in the spring. Know that perennials including bulb plants may die back completely in the fall and winter and leave no evidence above ground, and then sprout in the spring or early summer, or even late summer. That's normal, doesn't mean it's a weed! When in doubt, grab a gardener friend, or join one of the million gardening groups on the Internet and post pictures of things for people to identify. Learn to prune properly...you're better off letting something go wild than cutting a woody plant up improperly, as you can actually kill a tree or woody shrub with the wrong cuts. And if there are plants in your yard you don't want, contact the local Extension office at your state university, as they might come out and dig them up for you to sell in their fundraisers. Barring that, advertise on Craigslist "free plants, you haul" and you will have no shortage of takers! Stop senseless flora slaughter!

More Ice Cream!

2009-07-10T21:05:00.000-07:00

After my success with the mint ice cream, I wanted to try some other flavor. That other flavor was dictated by the fact that I have a strawberry patch in my yard which yields a reasonable amount of berries for a new patch, but not enough at once to make a pie or a batch of jam. But the ice cream recipe I found only required a pint and a half, which was perfect!

STRAWBERRY ICE CREAM

* 6 Tbls flour
* 3 cups sugar (divided into 2 cups and 1 cup)
* 1 tsp salt
* 4 cups whole milk
* 6 eggs
* 1 1/2 pints (3 cups) fresh strawberries
* 2 Tbls fresh lemon juice
* 4 cups heavy cream
* 2 Tbls vanilla extract
* Crushed Ice
* Rock salt

If you wish, you can substitute whole milk, half and half, or even low-fat condensed milk for the cream. These will lower the calories, but affect the texture. My philosophy: eat less of something really good instead of getting used to crummy food. People getting used to crummy food is what's allowed Fast Food to rise to power.

In a large, heavy saucepan, combine the flour, 2 cups of the sugar, and salt. Use a wire whisk to blend well. Stir in milk and eggs, beat with the whisk until well blended. Cook over medium-low heat, stirring constantly, until the custard becomes thick and coats the back of a metal spoon well. Should take about 8-10 minutes. Using a candy thermometer or an instant-read thermometer, the temperature should read between 165 to 180 degrees. DO NOT ALLOW TO BOIL, as this will cause the custard to curdle and change the texture.

Remove from heat. Place the pot immediately in a large bowl filled with ice and ice water, and stir for several minutes to rapidly cool the custard. This ages the custard and gives the final product better whipping qualities and a smoother finish. After the custard is cooled, cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate for 2-24 hours. The longer, the better.

One hour before you intend to churn your ice cream, put the berries in a bowl and crush with the lemon juice and the remaining 1 cup of sugar. Allow to stand for 1 hour.

Remove custard from refrigerator. Add the cream, vanilla, and the sugared berries. Proceed with the churning and freezing according to the directions on your ice cream maker. Eat. Be very glad this makes about 3 times as much as the mint ice cream recipe. Still whine that there's not enough.

I did actually make this already, and it's very, very good. I'm not even a big fan of strawberry ice cream, but this is smooth and tastes like actual strawberries instead of some food scientist's idea of strawberry. Plus I know there are no preservatives or artificial colors or flavors in it. Too bad my 4 year old has also rejected this one. Next I think I'll try plain old vanilla and smush up some Oreos in it; that ought to do the trick!

Not-A-Bee Traps

2009-07-09T14:51:00.000-07:00

A while back I mentioned that I'm alarmed by the number of people who classify anything that buzzes, is black and yellow and vaguely striped, and is hanging around the yard as a "bee". And that they furthermore seem to hate bees with such a passion that they swat, poison, trap, stomp, squash, maim, fold, spindle and mutilate indiscriminately. Eventually I'll get around to posting a quick primer on What Is A Real Bee and Why Do We Like (and NEED) Bees? But right now, I'd like to address a Not-Bee critter that makes itself annoying around summer picnics and backyard BBQ's.

I'm talking about the Yellow Jacket, or hornets, or wasps. Around here, it's mostly yellow jackets. These guys:

Not A Bee, kids. Yellowjacket. Genus Vespula or Dolichovespula (bees are Apis). These are the most common pests at picnics, because about the time we want to be out frolicking in the late summer heat, their tastes in foods switch over from flowers, fruits, and sap to ripe and fermenting fruits and foods high in sugar like sodas. They also require meat to chew up and feed to their larvae, hence their overt interest in your tasty hotdog. Adding further to their undesirability as a picnic companion, they are much more aggressive than bees, and can sting more than once with no problem. They can also bite. Neato!

So what to do about them pestering you at a picnic? Sprays are a bad idea in general but particularly around food, and I hope I don't have to tell anyone why. Citronella candles can be of some help, but not much in my experience. You can purchase nifty wasp traps, but they're made of plastic, are generally not reusable, and junk up the landfills, plus they're expensive and usually have a chemical lure as part of the trap. You can purchase beautiful reusable glass wasp traps without the chemicals or the plastic, but they get expensive and are better for use on a backyard table than hauled along camping or to a picnic. And realistically, what happens when you're already camping or at a picnic, and the yellowjackets invade? No access to a store, no traps with you, what now? Build your own trap!

I once went camping with some friends, a good half hour from the nearest small town, and we had exactly this sort of thing happen. Lots of yellowjackets trying to ruin our good time. So while some of our companions headed into town to purchase traps, I showed the 9 year old in our group how to make our own.

YOU WILL NEED:

* An empty 1 or 2 liter plastic bottle with a narrow mouth. Pop bottles are ideal, but other kinds will work. (Lemon juice bottles and Bailey's Irish Creme come to mind.)

* Bait. Fish is ideal because it smells strongly. Hot dog bits, canned cat food, slices of beef, raw meat, or even regular soda will work if it's all you have. Meat is better, because beneficial bees have no interest in it, while the pesky yellowjackets love it.

* A knife or a pair of scissors

Remove and discard the cap. Find the part of the bottle where the sloping top turns into straight sides. Cut all the way around the bottle at this point, and remove the tapered top from the straight-sided bottom.

Place your bait in the bottom of the trap. Bonus points if it reeks. Add a little water to the bottom, but don't completely submerge the bait.

Invert the sloped top into the main body of the container. If the sloped top is too large to fit well or hangs too deeply, you can trim some off of it. You will now have a container with what amounts to a funnel jammed in the top.

Place on the outskirts of where you're eating or sitting, preferably in the sun and preferably somewhere humans can see it but won't disturb it. (Don't put it in the grass where someone is going to stomp on it and release the honked-off yellowjackets.)

To reuse or discard, carefully pick up the trap and add water to be sure all the yellowjackets are dead. Remove the funnel top, dig a hole somewhere out of the way and discard the contents in the hole and cover it. You could also chuck the contents in the trash or pour it down the garbage disposal, I suppose. Point is, don't put dead yellowjackets somewhere people will step on them, and don't pour stinky bait somewhere people have to smell it. It's all organic and natural, though, so burying it for the wildlife to find won't hurt anything. Recycle the plastic bottle when you're all done.

Our homemade one beat the storebought one hands down. We caught dozens of them in a couple of little 1 liter traps, using only smoked salmon skin as bait. The yellowjackets smell the bait, fly in, eat a little, and then can't find the hole to get out because it's in the center of the funnel bit, and they can't get to it easily. The heat from the sun eventually kills them, or they fall in the water and drown.

By comparison, the storebought trap actually failed to trap anything until I examined the trap and figured out that the ventilation holes were so large the yellowjackets could crawl back out. With some electrical tape out of my husband's truck, I plugged the holes halfway, which rendered the trap actually operable. However, its chemical bait still only attracted a fraction of the yellowjackets that the homemade one did, and I didn't have to spend a dime or leave the campground!

The Random Report

2009-07-06T22:58:00.000-07:00

There's a local radio station that plays something called the "Random Report". And it is random, as is their musical selection. Probably explains why I like the station. Anyway, I'm often given to making random reports as well...and they look something like this:

Mint Ice Cream
Verdict - Not very much like storebought mint ice cream, not even like the "All Natural" storebought mint ice cream. It is green, even without additional coloring. I liked it, though I found it took a bit of adjustment. It tastes like a mint plant. Not like mint extract, not like mint candy, but like a mint plant. It's good, but chlorophyll-esque, which might put off some folks. It was soundly rejected by my four year old. Husband liked it, except he spit out the chocolate I added. Best friend tasted it, and proceeded to finish off the remainder of the container, so I assume she also approved. She did comment that the texture was good and smooth. Yay for first ice cream efforts! Next up...fresh strawberry ice cream made with my own strawberries! And then perhaps some rosemary lemon sorbet.

Deer Repellent
The repellent seems to have been a success. Whether it was the "100% Dried Blood" stakes or the spray, there's been no new damage this week. I will re-spray the plants weekly and hope to simply encourage the deer to eat elsewhere. Our neighbor says his garden is pretty much decimated, so while I feel badly about that, it does kind of let me know that I am making the deer pick tastier salad bars. Oh, and the whole idea that the concoction gets better upon ripening in the sun? If by "better" they mean "smells like something ate it, threw it up, rolled in it and then died", that'd be accurate.

Broody Hen
I have a hen who has decided she's going to be a Momma. Without my intervention, this is an impossibility for a couple of reasons. First, we have no rooster, so we have only infertile eggs which will never, ever hatch no matter how long the hen sits on them. And second, she's actually sitting on a couple of golf balls.

Okay, for those of you who don't know chickens, that might need some explanation. Yes, hens do lay eggs without having a rooster present. That's all hens are built for: eating, sleeping, pooping, and laying eggs. Good layers lay approximately one egg per day for several years. Poor layers lay a few a week for several years. They are not smart critters, though...the golf balls are there as a prompt to let them know where to lay their eggs.

Having a rooster present does several things for a flock of chickens including providing some protection from predators, but primarily it's how the eggs become fertile and available for hatching. However, most chickens have been bred to NOT sit on their eggs, so they wouldn't hatch out without help from humans anyway. Every once in a while, though, a hen goes "broody" like mine. She thinks she's building up a pile of eggs to sit on, and she pecks me when I open the egg door to gather the eggs, and refuses to get off the nest. What to do with a broody hen? You can give them a bath and remove them from the coop for a few days, and that usually breaks the broody cycle. You can wait it out, though while they are broody they aren't laying, so if you miss the eggs you'll want to choose another option. Or you can do as I'm attempting to do: give her some actual fertile eggs to sit on and see what kind of a momma she really can be. More reports on this later, if I acquire some eggs while she's still broody.

The Bees Knees
The bees continue to fascinate and amuse me. They have now managed to attach the first three combs nearest the observation window all the way down the window itself. They've got six open bars towards the back they haven't yet touched, and the rest have comb built or being built. Watching them create the comb is really something. The comb is created by young worker bees, who secrete the wax between their bodily plates on their abdomens, and then chew it before packing it into place where it needs to be. Really industrious little geometricians! So far the edges of the combs aren't full, so I can't see exactly what's going to be brood and what's nectar and honey at the moment, but shouldn't be long. I do wish I'd gotten another hive up and going this year, but next year for sure!

One thing I love watching the bees do is "sweep". They get busy on the floor of the hive and make little scooping, kicking motions with their front two legs, sweeping junk and dust out of their way. I am not entirely sure what they're actually trying to accomplish, but it looks for all the world like they're simply sweeping the floor.

Mint Ice Cream

2009-07-02T13:57:00.000-07:00

For several years now, I've grown an herb garden. I have had things such as echinacea, horehound, feverfew, lavender, sage, bay, chives, valerian, and of course mint. My husband has made fun of me in the past for how little I've actually used the products of the herb garden, though I counter that they are as useful in just being attractive and good for local wildlife as they are for human consumption. Still, I decided this year I should make better use of the herbs I do plant. So far, the one I've made the best use of is the mint.

If you've never planted mint, take care. I'm convinced that all the Mentha species are actually invaders from the planet Kudzu, whose sole goal in life is to take over all Earthly garden spaces. While their free-ranging and easily-spreading habits are great when you want to naturalize an area, or when you find them growing wild along streams and springs, it's not so great when you're trying to keep a somewhat orderly herb garden. As a result, both my Peppermint and Spearmint plants are growing in containers this year. I see their little shootlets growing around the edge of the pot, seeking a way to escape and conquer the rest of the bed, but I'm faster than a growing plant and can nip them off before they get away.

And nip I did. I just harvested a cup of fresh leaves for my first ever batch of homemade ice cream. (While my husband came into our relationship with an ice cream maker, he never used it before we started dating, and we've never used it in the almost 8 years since. First time for everything!)

FRESH MINT ICE CREAM

* 2/3 cup fresh mint leaves, loosely packed
* 3/4 cup granulated sugar
* 2 1/2 cups whole milk
* 1 1/2 cups heavy cream
* 1 vanilla bean, split lengthwise and scraped
* 5 large egg yolks
* 1/4 cup honey
* 1/4 tsp table salt
* 1 cup chopped dark chocolate or mini chocolate chips (optional)

Put the mint leaves and sugar into a food processor, and process until the mint is finely ground and blended with the sugar. It will look kind of like green wet sugar at that point. If you don't have a food processor, you can use a blender, or a mortar and pestle.

In a medium saucepan, heat the milk, cream, and vanilla bean (pod included) on medium heat. Stir to keep from sticking.

In a medium bowl, whisk the egg yolks until they are smooth. Add the minted sugar mixture and combine until smooth.

When the milk mixture steams (do not let it simmer), take 1/4 cup of the hot milk and whisk it briskly into the egg yolk/sugar/mint mixture. Repeat with another 1/4 cup. This is an important step, as it warms and tempers the egg yolks so that they do not scramble on contact with the hot milk. Remove the saucepan from the heat, and slowly pour the mint mixture back into the hot milk mixture, stirring briskly until completely combined.

Return the saucepan to the stove and cook over medium heat. Add honey and salt. Cook and stir until the custard becomes thick and coats the back of a spoon well, 5-10 minutes. (Do not allow to boil.) The custard should hold a line when you draw your finger through it on the back of a spoon.

Set the saucepan into a large bowl filled with ice water, and stir well for several minutes to quickly cool the custard. Cover, and refrigerate until completely cool, at least 1 hour and up to 24 hours.

Pour the custard mixture through a fine mesh strainer to remove the mint leaves and vanilla bean bits. Add chocolate chips if desired. Churn in your ice cream maker according to the directions on the machine. Eat. Whine because there's not enough. Make another batch.

Laure Niernore*

2009-07-01T11:58:00.000-07:00

The bees are working busily! They are working on attaching the combs to the side of the hive, which can be seen along the viewing window, and they've built comb more than halfway back. By my calculations, they should be hatching out new workers soon, if they aren't already. Excellent!

They have one of the sturdiest roofs I've seen on a hive, built out of random scraps and leftovers we had hanging around our garage:

The entrance to the hive is at the bottom front, that thin "crack" where you can just make out a couple of bees hanging about. The viewing window is on the right side, with the wooden cover in place over it. The whole hive and stand are bolted to a concrete pad on the south side of our house, buffered on the east side by a large rhododendron to screen it from the street and keep the flight path away from the majority of the front lawn. Although most of our weather comes in from the south, which is the direction the opening faces, there are a couple of large trees between the hive and the incoming weather, which should help mitigate any winds.

In order to try to coax the bees to make the straightest comb possible, we are using top bars with a fully triangular cross-section, instead of ones with a thin strip inlaid as a guide. We've also made sure it's level front-back and side-side; bees don't care about aesthetics or straight comb, but they do react to gravity, so if your top bar or frameless bars are not level, the bees will probably build wonky comb, rendering it difficult to harvest cleanly. This is all purely for ease of harvest for the humans, as the bees don't care what cross-section the bars have, or if their combs cross or wobble.

* Allowing my geekiness to shine for a moment, this is the phrase I'll be woodburning on the cross bar under the roof, only I'll be writing in Tengwar script. It's Elvish, roughly translating to "Golden Honeybee Dwelling". Laure Nierlonde ("Golden Honeybee Haven") was another possibility, but that seems to apply more to the yard than the hive itself, so I chose the former. This is what happens when nerds decide to move to the country...

Oh Deer.

2009-06-28T15:10:00.001-07:00

The garden is proceeding wonderfully. All three sections of raised bed are finished and filled with compost, a three-way soil mix (dirt, compost, and sand) and vegetables. A lot of work, to be sure! Apparently I'm incapable of doing anything halfway, given the quantities of everything I've planted. For example, we have a three person family consisting of myself (a known hater of vegetables), my four year old daughter (likewise), and my husband. And we have, among many other things:

42 tomato plants of various strains including Stupice, Beefsteak, Yellow Brandywine, Brandywine, and Roma.
18 Cabbages
24 pole beans
48 pickling cucumbers
Rows of carrots, lettuce, chard, radishes, peas
10 dozen Walla Walla Sweet onions
5 dozen each white and red onions
3 dozen asparagus plants
3 rhubarb plants (huge)
Several dozen strawberry plants
Peppers including a habanero, half a dozen jalapenos and about that many serranos and anaheims
At least 7 squash plants plus 3 (really weak and sad and potentially dead) zucchini plants
A whole herb bed including 2 kinds of lavender, 2 kinds of rosemary, purple sage, pineapple sage, feverfew, chard, bee balm, lemon balm, lemon verbena, lemon catnip, 2 kinds of thyme, cilantro (EW!), horseradish, 16 basil plants, and 4 kinds of oregano
Other things including an eggplant, 4 cauliflowers, 3 soy beans, 18 potato plants, some trees and berry bushes yet to be planted.

Why so much if I don't eat many vegetables? I get a kick out of giving food away, out of processing it down into jams and jellies and sauces and eating it that way, and out of drying it for future use in soups and whatnot. It's healthier and better tasting than the limp stuff that comes from the grocery store, and I actually tend to eat more of it when it's freshly grown than I do when I lug it home from WinCo.

So today, I was out watering the part of the garden that gets missed by the early morning wave sprinkler. I know, I know, drip systems are better, and wave sprinklers are wasteful, and top watering is bad, and so on and so forth. Well, we're putting in a drip system eventually, but right now the garden needs watering and we have other projects more pressing, so a wave sprinkler it is.

Anyway, Todd pointed out to me that the tops of some of my newly planted tomatoes were snipped off. AUGH. We further determined that there was damage to our two small cherry trees as well, and deer prints in my garden beds. While I do like deer, and I don't actually care much if they're wandering around in my yard, and I don't even mind if they eat my ornamentals or poop in my lawn, they best be leavin' my veggies alone. Now I'm on a mission to find deer deterrents that actually work.

Todd's bringing home "repellent stakes" for the edges of the garden. I asked him to call me from the store to read me the ingredients, as I dislike using chemicals in the yard. These contain, and I kid you not, "100% Dried Blood". I tried not to think about what kind of animal might have once been using the blood, and told him to bring some home. While the ew factor for me is a bit high, the plus side is that I don't have to spray it on anything and it's chemical-free.

I'll also be making Deer Repellent Spray at home. I'll post the results after I find out whether it works or not. The spray I'm trying first:

3 large eggs, shells included
1 large clove of garlic
2 cups of fresh green onion tops
2 cups of water
Bar of deodorant soap (like Dial)
2 Tbls chili powder or cayenne pepper

Put the first four ingredients in a blender or food processor and liquify completely. Pour into a bucket, add 2 quarts of warm water. In a microwave-safe bowl, melt the soap and add to the bucket. Stir well. Add chili powder or cayenne pepper. Stir well again. Pour into a sprayer and squirt your plants well. If there are still chunky bits of shell, use a watering can with big holes to pour some of the mixture around the plants. Use every 2 weeks, works year-round. Rumored to be effective against Voles and Rabbits as well. Also rumored to be more effective if left to "ripen" in the sun for a few days before use.

Long Live the Queen!

2009-06-25T22:47:00.001-07:00

Yesterday I peeped at my hive again, just to get a better look at that beautiful white comb. I also took some pictures of my girls coming in and out of the hive, being extra busy. I didn't see any drones hanging about, but I did see several of the girls with their pollen baskets heavily laden with pollen. What was really cool was seeing the huge range of colors the pollen was! Some had dark reddish orange pollen, some had almost white pollen, some had lemon yellow or peachy. Just beautiful stuff. And a good sign that all is well in the hive and little bees are being hatched, as they won't usually carry in pollen unless they have brood to feed.

As I was watching through the window, I peered between a couple of sheets of comb, and noticed a little cleared patch with bees around it. And then I got a good look...the queen! She had a HUGELY long abdomen, and she was busily laying eggs in empty cells, while being attended by workers. So. Cool!

And daily I notice the bees are building more and more comb. Considering they haven't been in the hive very long, I'm sure if all goes well they'll have the whole thing full by the end of summer. I'm still wishing I could have gotten the other hive up and running this year, but I'll wait until next spring and see if I can attract a swarm on my own.

I've noticed as I talk about bees both online and in person that many people seem to classify everything that flies and maybe stings and is stripey-blackish-and-yellowish as a "bee", and to further place all "bees" in the category of "swat or spray on sight." And much to my shock, people seem to be unaware that bees are hugely important pollinators, responsible for the production of much of our fruits and vegetables. This distresses me to no end. Pretty soon I'll write up a bit on what is and is not an actual bee, and why bees need to be respected and protected, cuz apparently not everyone gets it!

Bees!

2009-06-23T17:25:00.001-07:00

The second swarm of bees installed in my Top Bar Hive has indeed settled in nicely, and is busy busy busy. You know, like bees. I've been peeking probably more than necessary, through the little portal window on the side, but I'm curious and was a little nervous about their health and inclination to stay.

I was, until today.

Opened up the peeper window, and FINALLY got to see what was inside that mass of bees. Usually when I open the window, the bees are all clustered up towards the front quarter of the hive, hanging on to each other and generally being mellow. That's because I usually check in the evening, when I have time...and when the bees are all in for the night. Crowded digs make it hard to see what's going on. But today, I opened it up midafternoon, and saw several sheet-straight, beautifully white combs being made. Rock on. Go little buggers go! The wax is so amazingly white, not at all like the yellow beeswax you see being sold after it's been used in a hive. And did you know that wax is secreted by the bees themselves? It's like bee sweat!

I observed them for a little while, and darned if I didn't see several GINORMOUS bees coming in and out. Big, shiny eyes and huge abdomens, almost black. Drones. They're the males of the colony, whose only purpose in life is to go hang out in some Drone Bar In The Sky, waiting for virgin queens to fly by so they can all make a nab for her. The rest of the time they just hang out and bum food off the worker bees. I know some men like that...fortunately for them, humans don't also follow the bees' practice of kicking all the drones out to freeze to death at the start of winter.

One of the things that made me decide to peer in the hive at midafternoon when the bees were all very active was the fact that yesterday I got my new Sheriff-style beekeeping jacket and leather long-sleeved gloves. It is totally the bomb. Easy to put on, zippered at the neck so the hood can be thrown back, secured with velcro as well to keep the truly intrepid bees from finding their way through the opening where the zippers all meet. Double plus bonus, it actually fits me, which was of some concern as I'm not a tiny woman. Found it on eBay, though they also sell them in various beekeeping shops online, and at Ruhl's Bee Supply in Portland, OR.

Speaking of Ruhl's, I picked up another little tidbit of "country wisdom" from them today. When the blackberry petals fall, the supply of food for the bees has about run its course. Soon after, hives are prone to robbing and predation by yellow jackets. Given how much clover we have in our grass, and how long its growing season is, I'll be waiting to see if that's the case. I hope my girls can get their combs built and filled before the growing season is over!

Birds, Birds, Everywhere

2009-06-19T19:59:00.000-07:00

The baby robins have fledged. They sure grew quickly!

This was taken June 4th. Little more birdlike and less fuzzy than the first pink things that came out of the eggs...

And June 7th. What a difference a few days makes!

And finally June 13th, the evening before they all fledged and spread out. Way to go, Momma Robin!

Making Butter

2009-06-17T00:04:00.000-07:00

A couple of weekends ago, I made a fresh loaf of bread while my D&D group was here. The one guy who is a big bread-aholic asked if he could have some, and I said of course. He proclaimed it good (yay!) and asked me when I was going to start making my own butter, because the fresh bread with fresh butter would be Nerdvana. I assured him that I would keep that in mind.

Weirdly, I'd been considering making my own butter for a little while. I probably had an article about it laying around, which might be what prompted the question. Or perhaps they're just getting used to me making things that "normal" people buy in the store. Either way, it got me to finally make the leap into my own butter.

I did a brief search online for butter churns, and after pricing them between $150 and $300, I decided that I could probably do without. Technically, I have a tall dasher churn, but it's a family heirloom that hasn't seen cream in at least 50 years, and there's no way I'd use it for making butter, both for the sake of anyone eating the butter and for the integrity of the antique.

Turns out, if you're not trying to go "off the grid" or avoid electricity, you can make butter in a KitchenAid stand mixer with the whisk attachment, or even in a food processor. And if you are trying to go without electricity, or find yourself in a situation where you have cream, no butter, and no electricity, you can use a mason jar with a tight-sealing lid and shake it, it just takes a while. Good way to pass the time while you're watching TV, unless you have no electricity, and then it's a good way to pass the time while you're, uh...singing campfire songs?

For sweet cream butter, you can use pasturized heavy whipping cream (yes, like you get in the Dairy case) or sweet raw cream. Make sure all your utensils are crazy clean and sterile, then pour the cream into your mixing bowl, food processor, or jar. Then beat/shake. Cream goes through three stages as it progresses into butter; first, you end up with a fluffy white concoction you will probably recognize as whipped cream. Next, it becomes slightly yellow and granular; if you've ever overbeaten your whipped cream, you will be familiar with the sight. If not, it looks like slightly lumpy frosting. Finally, it will "break" and become butter sloshing around in buttermilk. It's really quite amazing, seeing the solid fluffy mass suddenly contain a liquid component!

Butter "breaks" fastest between about 50 and 60 degrees, and the cultured breaks faster than the sweet, but it will eventually get there even if the temperature is not optimal or if you're using pasturized cream.

Beat thoroughly until the butter clumps up. In a mixer or food processor, it will stick together rather like dough. When it's all clumped, strain off the buttermilk and save it for your favorite recipe requiring buttermilk; it's much better than the "cultured" faux buttermilk you can buy in the dairy section. After it's strained, use a wooden spoon or even your clean fingers to press the butter together and against the side of the bowl, squishing out as much buttermilk as possible. When you can squeeze out no more buttermilk, rinse the butter with cold, clear water. Fold the butter over on itself and "work" it with wooden spoons or your fingers. Drain, repeat with more cold water washings until the water runs clear.

When the butter is clean and rinsed, be sure to press out as much water as possible with the spoon or your fingers. If you wish, add a very, very tiny amount of salt at this point. If you want a flavored butter, use a Tablespoon of rosewater in the final rinsewater for sweet butter for baked goods, or use salted water in which a sprig of rosemary has been boiled for a savory butter to go with meats and breads.

If you want to get all fancy-pants, you can buy butter molds and press your new butter into them. You could also use small candy molds or even cookie cutters to shape your butter. Or you can squadge it into a bowl like I do. Whatever works. Refrigerate.

Now, for a more flavorful, cultured butter, you either have to start with raw cream (unpasteurized), or add back in a culture starter. If you have access to raw cream, allow it to age in the fridge for a couple of days to a week. It should smell sweet and slightly nutty, never foul or sour. If it curdles or smells bad, throw it out. Otherwise, beat into butter as above.

If you start with pasturized heavy cream, add a starter. You can buy a commercial starter for creme fraiche or butter making; check Google for sources. If you go this route, follow the directions. Or, you can use a Tablespoon full of commercial sour cream, creme fraiche, or yogurt...just be sure to check for "live cultures". To strengthen commercial cultures, leave out, covered or preferably still sealed as purchased, at room temperature for 8-12 hours before beginning your buttermaking. Add a Tablespoonful per cup of cream, mix well, then cover and allow the cream to age in the refrigerator for a couple of days to a week or more. Same caveat as above; if the cream smells bad or curdles, throw it out and start again. After your cream is aged, beat into butter as above.

Now. Imagine how great shortbread recipes would be with fresh butter. Or how good hot, freshly baked bread would be with homemade butter. Melted on freshly grown corn. Mmm.

Things keep rolling even when I'm not...

2009-06-14T21:19:00.000-07:00

I've been sick for over two solid weeks now. I came down with my husband's cold the Saturday I was in Boise for my second cousin's graduation. And then it just hung on. Coughing, lost voice, fatigue, lots of fun. Apparently I had some severe allergy attacks on top of the cold, which triggered my mostly-latent asthma. I ended up having to go to the doctor to get a Proventil inhaler, then hit the MucinexD hard. (Side note: in my state, you practically have to sign over your first born child to acquire MucinexD, due to the pseudoephedrine content. I don't care. It works.) Then the cottonwood bloomed like a summer blizzard, and took me out again. Finally got smart and slept the entire day on Saturday, and almost felt human today. Almost. I'm getting there.

But while I was sick, things kept moving along, as they tend to do. Last Friday I got a call from Will Dart letting me know he had another huge swarm of bees for me, to try again. This time I was home to see the installation, though I had to watch from inside because I was feeling so awful. Fortunately, we put the hive directly below one of the screened living room windows, so I could chat with Will and Todd while Evie and I watched from inside. After the bees were offloaded into their home, I went out with a plate of honey water as an offering, and went back inside to watch them drink it all up. The good news is, this time the bees seem to have approved of their new home. They are still there a couple of days later, doing their bee-thing.

I went out tonight and moved the false back of the hive to the second to last top bar slot, vastly increasing their home space. While I was doing this, the neighbor kids came over to watch, and I let them all look inside the viewing window briefly since it was cool and late in the evening, so almost all the bees were inside and completely disinterested in any goings-on outside the hive. I've been deemed "cool" and asked if I had any more interesting things in my yard. So, I showed them the empty robins' nest and where the bumblebees live.

Yes, the robin nest is empty. The three baby robins have grown over the last couple of weeks, and finally fledged this morning. The mother robin was chasing one of the "teenagers" around the yard and into the arborvitae hedge, still trying to stuff it full of worms. Silly momma. I'm leaving the nest for now in case she decides to reuse it, but in the fall I'll bring it in the house.

The second batch of Old World Sparrows has fledged out of the front birdhouse as well. The mother and father bird are making overtures towards one another and the nest that make me think we might have a third clutch coming up very soon as well. Prolific little critters; explains why we have so many of them in the yard!

Of Bumblebees and Lilies

2009-06-01T15:21:00.001-07:00

I've had hardy water lilies in a pot for several years now. They moved with me from the old house. Each year they send up lots of pretty green lily pads, and nothing else. This year, they signaled their approval of the new house by giving me a bright, beautiful water lily blossom!

That weird sticky thing next to it is a limb off our old corkscrew willow tree. We'd cut it back in preparation for selling the house, and we'd thrown the limbs in a pile to use in backyard projects. Lo and behold, some of them sprouted leaves, so we stuck two of them into our pot of water lilies, and they've rooted. As soon as we figure out where to put them, we'll plant them and have beautiful new corkscrew willows!

And completely unrelated to the lily, I took some photos of our bumblebees at the entrance to their home. I'm still not telling where they're located, but they seem to be busy and happy and fat and beautiful, so we're just leaving them alone. I checked my bumblebee field guide, and I believe they are Bombus rufocinctus. They are listed as liking to nest in walls and buildings, and as being testy around their nest (hence my husband being stung when he bothered them.) I can't be certain about that without consulting an entomologist specializing in bees, but it's close enough for my tastes. Beautiful little guys, they are!

We have babies!

2009-06-01T15:08:00.000-07:00

The robin eggs have hatched. Weirdly, I only found one little tiny piece of shell under the bush, even though I'm sure I peeked in the nest very very shortly after the hatching. My guess is that momma robin either ate the shells or disposed of them elsewhere to disguise the location of the nest. (On eating shells...my chickens get eggshells and oyster shells as a calcium supplement, as the act of making eggs draws a lot of calcium out of their systems.)

So these are the eggs, last Thursday. Note that Momma Robin is apparently in to recycling, as she's used part of a plastic bag in the nest design:

And these are the weird little balls of pink-and-fluff that resulted. Taken today:

I always wait until Momma Robin is off getting food or doing whatever, but she's never far away and she always scolds me and comes to see what I'm doing. I don't even move the branch, I just hold my camera up above it and shoot until I get the right angle to see in the nest. Should be fun to see them progress over the next few days and weeks!

And here's Momma Robin, sitting on the nest. She's hard to see, and that's how she likes it!

We also have a second family of Old World Sparrows nesting in the front birdhouse, but they've built their nest so well I can't see the babies through the front door! I'll try to snap a picture when they get big enough to gape out the door at mom and dad returning with food!

Disappointed

2009-05-28T22:49:00.000-07:00

Got a call last night from Will Dart, saying he had a nice swarm to bring me today. Got it arranged, and he dropped the swarm off in my hive around 9:30am. Had them all settled, and he left.

By the time I got home at 1pm, things looked a little wonky...very few bees hanging around, some doing a little orienting flying but none fanning, and really, not the volume I would have expected. And no buzzing sound, and he'd said this was a very strong, large swarm.

By 3:30 no bees were in evidence at all. I opened the observation port, and they were all gone. Well, I had two or three confused stragglers and one dead one. Little bit of bee poop, a few spots where it looked like they might have been attempting to start some wax attachments on the bars, and that was it. No signs of trauma, wasn't super hot in the box, nothing. No idea why they left. I'm really, really disappointed.

I've never heard of a swarm leaving a hive, but the guy who brought me mine said it's the second one in a week he's had vacate the new hive. He couldn't find anything wrong with mine...good construction, appropriate woods, unstained, untreated, no glue, nothing. My thought was perhaps a really large swarm deemed the space too small (it's a relatively small hive). I don't know. And now I don't know if I can try to house another swarm in it or not.

I have a call in to two other beekeeper contacts, but have yet to hear anything. I did a little poking around on the web, and as far as I can tell, it's highly unusual for a homeless swarm to reject a decent new home. And I was really looking forward to having them here. Monday I will be assembling my Warre hive and beginning the search for a colony to install in it, but my hopeful level has dropped significantly.

And in other bee related news, it turns out I have a colony of bumblebees already happily living on my property. Not quite what I'd hoped for, but they're more than welcome here. I'm reading a book about them called Humblebee Bumblebee. It's really quite good, by the same person who wrote the Orchard Mason Bee book I like. I will definitely be attempting to provide good overwintering and hibernation spots for the fall queens, and then to provide good nesting sites in the spring.

Apitherapy

2009-05-27T20:12:00.000-07:00

The more I learn about bees, the more amazing the little critters are to me. Of course it's cool that they make honey and wax, and that they pollinate our crops...but they can do so much more!

Apitherapy is the practice of using bee products for health care and medicinal purposes. It includes taking honey for sore throats and taking bee pollen, propolis, and royal jelly for health related purposes. One major breakthrough in the battle against Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus (MRSA) appears to be the application of Manuka Honey! It's a very thick, dark, strong-tasting honey made from the nectar of the Tea Tree bush in Australia, and like all honey it possesses antibiotic properties. Unlike most honeys and even most antibiotics, Manuka honey applied directly to a wound containing MRSA seems to be capable of clearing the infection, without side effects and without drugs. Keep watching the news on this product...at least one drug company is patenting manuka-honey-infused bandages!

In practice, however, the term "apitherapy" is generally used specifically to refer to the practice of injecting bee venom to help with arthritis, bursitis, tendinitis, and other medical problems While the scientific community says there are no studies that prove it to be beneficial or effective, many people do believe in the therapy. I find it rather similar to acupuncture in that respect, though with far fewer practitioners OR studies.

I happen to be a more science-oriented person than many, especially within the "organic" and "green" movement, seem to be, at least in my experience. If someone makes an extraordinary claim, I want to see the proof. I want to look at the experimental data. I want to know about the confounding factors. But, I'm also firmly of the belief that "if it's stupid but it works, it's not stupid". I don't necessarily need to disprove everything, and if it works for someone, I'm good with it. I look askance at many of the more unproven health claims of alternative medicine; at the same time, I benefit from some that I've tried. In that vein, I was rather skeptical of the idea that bee venom could be helpful for arthritis or inflammatory problems, especially given how little venom a bee actually delivers.

Well, color me a believer.

I noted in my last post that I got stung at my class, right on the top of my head. What I didn't note was that for 2 months prior, I'd been suffering from what I'm assuming is a bursitis attack in my left shoulder, and probable early arthritis in my right hand, at the first knuckle of my index finger. This had been bothering me quite a bit, considering I've taken up fiddle playing as a hobby, and I use that hand for playing. And the morning after I was stung, I woke up pain free. The absence of pain was strange in itself. But it's been several days, and the two activities which used to trigger the most pain, typing and fiddling, no longer hurt.

I can't prove that the sting had anything to do with it, but it sure seems like a weird coincidence. The over the counter pain relievers and anti-inflammatories hadn't been doing anything at all, and I hadn't done anything else differently. Anyway, just one more anecdotal story to add to the large pile of non-scientific evidence!

BeeMused

2009-05-24T20:20:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I attended yet another workshop on "Organic" beekeeping. When I say "Organic", I mean methods which avoid drugs and chemicals, and interfere as little as possible with the bees' activities. It's my third workshop, and I still have no actual bees! Well, there's always something new to be learned, and probably better done before the bees' depend on it!

A few years ago, I started getting interested in having honeybees. I didn't really pursue it much, being on a city lot and not even remotely sure where to start. I did discover that my great grandfather and my best friend's grandfather had both been backyard beekeepers, which I thought was both interesting and cool. But the setup of the Langstroth hives and all the suits and smoke and chemicals involved kind of put me off the entire idea of beekeeping...until I discovered that's not the only way to do it.

The first classes I took, which I've mentioned elsewhere in this blog, were on Top Bar Hives. The instructor, Will Dart, advocates a very non-chemical, low-invasion approach to beekeeping. He disdains all antibiotics and miticides/fungicides, and doesn't even advocate smoking the bees. He does, however, advocate harvesting the honey, which some organic beekeepers (or "bee guardians") view as something only to be done in the event of accidents or damage to the hive requiring removal of some comb. His approach used only Top Bar Hives, one of which I now own, though it's still empty of bees.

Yesterday's workshop was even more bee-oriented. It was taught at Friendly Haven Rise Farm, out in Venersborg, Washington. The owners of the farm, Jacqueline and Joseph Freeman, advocate a very bee-oriented approach to keeping bees, where the foremost question is always, "What is best for the bees?" They didn't advocate any particular style of hive, and we got to examine Langstroth, Top Bar, and Warre Hives (pronounced Wah-REH, and also known as Garden Hives.) I would definitely recommend this class to anyone who can manage to make it to the location; we had one attendee from Duvall, Washington, which is about a 4 hour drive. The farm owners do allow for overnight stays, so one possibility would be to arrive a day early, stay at the farm overnight, and then take the class the next day.

As part of the class, we went out to examine a Top Bar Hive that had tipped over in a windstorm a couple of weeks ago. As you might imagine, this was rather catastrophic for the bees. Jacqueline and Joseph tipped the hive upright, and replaced as much comb as possible, then just waited. In opening it yesterday, they were intending to move the brood, queen, and as much of the comb as possible to a new hive. The hive, however, had other ideas. Turns out they'd been busily repairing as much of the damage as possible, and were thriving. The queen was uninjured, and the bees were active and aggressive.

I was near the hive without a bee suit, and doing just fine until one of them pinged off my head and got caught in my hair. Fantastic. Poor little thing got all agitated, probably thinking it was trapped in a spiderweb, and as I tried to comb it out, it eventually just gave up and stung me right on the top of my head. Ow. Drat. Worst part was immediately after, when all the other bees smelled Eau du Dead Bee and kept bombing my head, checking me out to see who was killing bees. I had three or four MORE get stuck in my hair. Those I did manage to shake out without getting stung, at which point I gave up and retreated to the house to wait for the rest of the folks to come back down.

Ultimately, they decided to leave the hive as it was, and let it be a "seed" hive for swarms instead of attempting to harvest honey from it any more, so after they put it back together, we sat for the last part of the class. I came away with a kit for a Warre hive from Nick Hampshire of The Bee Space, which I will be assembling myself sometime this week. (One project my husband doesn't have to do!) Now if I can just get some swarm to cooperate and come live with me!

Eggs!

2009-05-22T15:02:00.001-07:00

I found eggs today! Okay, that's not amazing, considering I have five chickens who lay me eggs on a regular basis. However, the eggs I found today were not nice brown chicken eggs, nor were they in my coop.

There is an American Robin nesting in a rhododendron right outside my bedroom window. It's a fairly protected little spot, tucked under both the rhodie and under a large, overhanging cedar tree. Only disadvantage is that it's low enough that predators and curious homeowners can access the nest.

I saw that the mother Robin was out of the nest a bit ago, and took the opportunity to stand on tiptoe and gently tug down the branch to peer inside the nest. (I'm about 5'3", so the nest isn't very far off the ground.) Three beautiful sky blue eggs! Fantastic. Now I hope all the yardwork and the periodic invasions by passing people doesn't bother the mother enough to make her abandon the nest. I am hopeful, though; yesterday my husband was not 10 feet from the nest, chopping wood and making all kinds of racket, and yet the mother bird was sitting calmly on her eggs.

I'm going to try to get a picture of the eggs, and then of the chicks when they hatch. Hoping I can find the eggshells after they hatch too, so I can bring them inside!

Plants on a Budget

2009-05-18T23:16:00.000-07:00

I love plants. There are certain places where it's dangerous for me to go unescorted, at least when I have my wallet with me: bookstores, craft stores, hardware stores, "organic" type food stores, and nurseries. I seem to be incapable of walking out of a nursery without at least one or two new plants. Problem is, they're expensive, and anyone who buys plants know this. Well, if you don't have a lot of cash, as a lot of us don't right now, there are some ways to keep your plant costs down.

* Where possible, start your veggies and flowers from seed. An entire packet of seeds generally costs the same as or less than a single full-size plant of the same species. If you use newspaper pots or egg cartons or even cut-off toilet paper tubes to start them, you'll save the cost of buying pots and reuse some waste materials at the same time! Of course, it means you have to start thinking about your garden earlier than if you bought large plants, but it's worth it to save some $$. And if you don't want to use an entire packet of seeds, go in with some friends and split them!

* Don't be afraid to buy the end of season rejects! The local Walgreens had out-of-season daffodils, hyacinths, and tulips in 4" pots for sale for $.50 each at the end of the season. All the blooms were spent, and they'd cut off the greenery about 4" up. Take them home, plant them, and they'll be just fine next year.

* Tsugawa has a Clearance section in their parking lot for sad orphan plants that are out of bloom, or otherwise bedraggled. Fred Meyer and other "mercantile" type stores with a nursery section often have a reject/sad plant area as well. You do want to be sure that the plants you pick up aren't actually diseased or laden with vermin, but usually the plants in those areas are just out of bloom, out of season, a little wilted from a heat wave, or somehow imperfect and in need of some extra TLC. Don't forget to look for indoor plants in these places too! At Home Depot, I once picked up a Christmas cactus in January for $1.00 because it had no blooms left. So what? I took it home, it bloomed the next year, and it's still hanging out with me years later.

* Trade with friends and neighbors! If you know folks who garden, schedule Plant Swaps in late spring and fall, when people have divided their plants and planted their seedlings. You can include seeds, pots, and other garden goodies in the exchange too!

* Check out Craigslist under the "Free" or "Garden" sections for free plants. Many gardeners like myself wind up with gaggles of orphan plants that self-seed in the yard, or an overabundance of seedlings from starting veggies, or even large plants from dividing in the spring and fall. I've given away masses of iris and hostas, starts from gooseberries and raspberries, and many herbs this way. Another good place to check is your local Freecycle. (Freecycle.org for the chapter near you!)

* Dumpster dive! Okay, this isn't one with which I'm personally comfortable, but I know people who do it quite successfully, and for much more than just plants! (Google "freegan" if you want to know more.) Nurseries and places like Home Depot often throw out their bedraggled plants en masse to get ready for the next "seasonal" shipment. I would suggest checking the local laws in your area for the legality of climbing into a dumpster before you do so. And if the store objects, politely leave. But you can certainly come away with some great plants for no money if you're willing to walk a little on the wild side.

* Scout out home sites that are going to be leveled or turned into subdivisions. Again, I'm not overly comfortable with this personally, but my parents and I used to do it when I was a kid. You know those abandoned, boarded-up homes slated to be turned into McHouses? Sometimes they have some fantastic plants out front, and if you don't rescue them, they will be run over by a bulldozer, quite literally. It's technically illegal to remove anything from private property without permission, so if you're interested in doing this, you might attempt to contact the property owners. I would imagine most wouldn't care, as the plants will just be destroyed anyway. Or if you're more daring than I, you might just take your chances. Be absolutely sure the property is going to be scraped bare or leveled before you start taking plants out, though.

DO NOT take plants from national forests or wildlife refuges. I know it's tempting to take home that beautiful tiger lily or snowdrop or trillium, but don't. Not only is it illegal, but it's also damaging to the ecosystem. Some plants are endangered in certain areas, and the plants should be allowed to reproduce so all the insects, animals, and humans can enjoy them in their natural habitat.

Life Around the New Place

2009-05-14T18:58:00.000-07:00

It's interesting, the changes from living in a thoroughly suburban area near major roads and a freeway to moving to what amounts to a suburban-style strip surrounded by farms and woodland, even though it's blocks from town. We still have neighbors, we actually live on a busier road than we did before, but with the surroundings, we have a lot different ecosystem going on out there!

This morning when I went out to dump the accumulated water off the top of my soft-shelled greenhouse, I was startled by a rabbit sitting between it and the chicken coop. Apparently Thumper lives in the hedgerow of arborvitae between us and the west neighbors. Cool! Well, cool unless he develops a taste for my veggies and whatnot. Even then, as long as he only eats his share, we're good...I always plant too much!

And yesterday while I was standing in the living room, I happened to see a robin outside picking up bits of twigs and straw and random things. I've seen that robin (or another one) hanging out in the woodpile out back, so I watched to see where this one went. It flew and went out of sight around the corner of the house, so I switched windows, and it looked like he was in the giant rhododendron on the corner of the house. Today I got a chance to peek, and sure enough, there's a nest about 4' off the ground in the rhodie. Cool! If I get a chance and can do it without bugging the parents too much, I'll try to take pictures as things progress.

In other birdie news, the little finches that were nesting in our front porch birdnest have fledged, and the parents seem to be busily building a new nest for a second brood. Sweet! The birds out here are surprisingly unafraid of people, and usually let me get within a few feet while I'm filling the feeders. Been up close and personal with a downy woodpecker and many little finches, sparrows and chickadees in the last couple of days.

I've also seen bats circling around in the evenings, and have put "build bat house" on the mile-long list of projects for the near future. Haven't yet seen raccoons or possums out there, but I know they're around...just a matter of time before I have a close encounter!

Newspaper Plant Starter Pots

2009-05-14T14:07:00.000-07:00

So I just wrote about dealing with the overflow of plastic pots you might have if you buy plants very often. Of course one easy thing to do with them is use them to start new seeds. But if you actually have a situation where you don't have enough little plastic pots, or yours are all too large, then what?

You can of course buy peat pellets, or the brown biodegradable pots you can plant right along with your seedlings. Or...you can make your own "plantable" pots out of recycled newspaper. Cheaper, available in endless quantities so you never run out in the middle of planting, makes good use of waste materials, and kinda fun to do, especially if you have kids!

There are several methods. All of them require:

* Black and white newsprint (no colored newspaper)
OR plain brown paper, as from shopping bags
OR other plain, uncolored paper, at least 10" in length and 3.5" wide
* Scissors or a paper cutter
* Potting soil
* Seeds or seedlings

* Brown paper tape (optional - use paper tape as it's biodegradable)

Method 1: Storebought Pot Making Tool

I have one of these little doodads, called a Pot Maker. They're available at various garden stores, and range in price from $9.99 to $19.99, so shop around.

Take your paper, and cut strips 3 1/2" wide by 10" (at least) long. Wrap a strip around the pot form, leaving the first corner sticking up a little bit and wrapping the rest around the cylinder part of the form. You should have it fairly even at the top of the cylinder, and have quite a bit sticking over the bottom.

Fold in the bottom on one side, then the other, creating two pointed bits. Fold in one point, then the other. (You rolled coins sometime in your life, right? Same idea.) Press the folded bottom down onto the mold form, and twist a few times to crease. Remove from the form, and fold the little pointy corner you left at the top forward over the side of the pot, to secure it.

Fill with dirt and seeds or seedlings, pack tightly into a seed-starting tray, pan, or box, and you're good to go!

Method 2: Homemade Pot Making Tool
Two words: Pop Can. Seriously. It's a little larger than the pot making tool described above, but it's got the divot on the bottom and it's cylindrical. Plus it's basically free. A full pop can will work better than an empty one, just because you won't have to worry about crushing it, but either way will suffice. And if you crush an empty one, hey, you can always get another.

Measure the paper lengthwise to wrap at least twice around the can, and widthwise to go halfway up the pop can plus 3/4 of the way across the bottom. Proceed as above. When it comes time to smash it onto the bottom form, use a lid from a milk or preferably a juice jug, and press the bottom of the can firmly onto that, twisting to be sure it creases. If you have difficulty getting it to crease, you can add a small piece of brown paper tape to your pot to hold it together.

If you want to make this a more permanent setup, take an empty pop can, fill it with sand, and seal the top tightly with duct tape. For the base, take a block of wood slightly larger than the diameter of the pop can, place a juice jug lid in the center of it, and glue it in place with heavy-duty glue like gorilla glue or barge cement. Not so pretty, but it'll work well enough!

You can actually use any size cylinder you like, from a fish food container to a can of vegetables. If you don't have the divot on the bottom for crimping, just secure the bottom fold with a piece of paper tape.

Method 3: Origami
I haven't the patience for this method, but some people do! It makes containers more sturdy than the above, and some can be done with recycled printer paper (check to be sure your inks don't contain anything toxic. Soy ink is ideal.)

Some of you probably made origami boxes as a kid. Same idea for newspaper pots! Since I'm not an Origami gal, I'm going to leave some pointers to tutorials.

Origami Seedling Pot Instructional Video - bit long, but thorough, and good design.

Origami Seedling Pot - same basic pot as above, pictures and instructions

Origami Box - Sure looks the same as the others, but it's from Rachael Ray's site, and it's designed for use with thicker paper to make party snack holders.

Origami Seedling Pot Video 2 - About half as long as the first one, same basic pot.

Notes About Newspaper Pots
* I don't find these pots to be terribly sturdy, so you're probably going to want to pack them close together in a tray. A reusable seed-starting tray would be ideal, but an old roasting pan (check Goodwill or your local thrift stores) or even a very sturdy cardboard box would do...just remember the cardboard will get wet and eventually disintegrate.

* Again because they're not terribly sturdy, you're probably going to want to use a fairly loose, dry potting soil mix to fill the pots. Of course it will compact down when you water it, it just makes loading the little pot easier.

* They do dry out fairly quickly, though if you keep them packed shoulder to shoulder and in a humid greenhouse, it won't be much of an issue.

* And finally, when it comes to planting these guys, you won't be able to carry them too far unless your seedlings have become rootbound, in which case the roots will hold the soil together. Just carry the entire tray over to where you're going to plant, and lift each pot out carefully or they will fall apart. (This is also true of most peat pots after a few weeks of being in the greenhouse, so it's not really much different.)

Nursery Pot Recycling

2009-05-13T20:56:00.000-07:00

It's late spring, and gardens are underway everywhere during this prime planting time. For folks who buy plants at nurseries or garden stores, this tends to leave one with a flood of plastic pots of all shapes and sizes. (If your storage shed is anything like mine, you'd swear they reproduce as soon as the doors are shut...) So what do you do with your leftover pots?

I discovered that Tsugawa's Nursery in Woodland, WA, has a nifty solution to the problem of Pot Overpopulation. Right next to their parking lot, they have a large wooden bin for nursery pots of 1 gallon size or smaller. The little sign on the bin encourages folks to toss in their used, empty pots, or to take the pots they might need. Kinda like those little penny trays in convenience stores, only frankly more useful!

If you don't live near Tsugawa, you might check to see if your local nursery equivalent has a similar exchange program, or encourage them to set one up!

Other things you might do with your used pots:

* Save them and load them up with orphan plant babies all year long. Then organize an Orphan Plant Exchange in your local area through a listing such as Craigslist or Freecycle.

* Call up your local County Extension office and find the Master Gardener program. Some of these programs do plant sales as fund raisers, and often want the gallon or larger pots.

* Visit your local farmer's market and find out if any of the vendors there might want them. Some of the farmers run on a very thin profit margin, and might be glad for clean, useable nursery pots.

* Save them up, then post them on your local Freecycle group or on the Free section of your local Craigslist. Almost guaranteed someone will snap them up quickly. (Same goes for orphan plants...I never have trouble getting rid of mine!)

Asparagus - The Pointiest Vegetable

2009-05-11T20:41:00.001-07:00

I saw that sign on a local Burgerville..."Asparagus - The Pointiest Vegetable". At the time it made me giggle, but lately I've been a little overly excited about asparagus, so I thought I'd share.

A few years ago, someone in my family asked me to pickle some asparagus spears. Okay, I said, bring me some asparagus and lo, I shall render unto it a pickle form. What happened next was not pretty; my father stopped at a farmer's market in Yakima on his way through, and brought me 45 pounds of asparagus to pickle. That's a LOT of asparagus. A whole lot. 7 hours worth of work, actually. And the kicker? I don't even like pickled asparagus.

Anyway, I decided when we moved to a larger property that we needed a permanent asparagus patch. Asparagus is a perennial plant which can produce spears for 25 years, so it's a good investment. Drawback is that it's at least 3 years before you can harvest it if you start it from seed, and 2 years before you can harvest from most transplanted crowns. I've heard that a 10 foot row of asparagus should yield 5 pounds of asparagus after the third year, though of course I haven't had it long enough to verify that.

I ended up getting 25 asparagus crowns of a couple of varieties, one of which is the ubiquitous Martha Washington. I planted them out in the vegetable garden and hoped for the best. Well, at least several of them have sent up shoots, whoo! They look just like asparagus from the store. I'm hoping all of them come up, but I won't know for a while yet if they'll all survive. I may hit them with some nitrogen rich fertilizer in the meantime to promote vegetative growth.

I also started some asparagus from seed in my greenhouse. After a week of soaking on a paper towel in the house, they did absolutely nothing, so I gave up and planted them in peat pots and just assumed they wouldn't do anything. Well, I was wrong! They're sending up slender little tiny shootlets, which I will nurture along in the greenhouse until they're big enough to transplant. Here I am presented with another issue that I hadn't really considered; asparagus plants are dioecious, meaning they have male and female plants. Both genders produce flowers, but in the fall the female plants produce red berries which will drop and re-seed the asparagus bed, rendering it potentially crowded and weedy. Buying dormant crowns, you can usually get all male populations and never have to face that issue. Both genders of asparagus are edible, with the female producing more but thinner spears, and the male producing fewer but more robust spears.

In the fall, the asparagus left uncut will go sort of ferny, with flowers and more structure than we're used to seeing in the spears. This is normal, in case anyone thinks they have mutant asparagus!

** A note on how to avoid the hard, woody ends of asparagus **
The easiest way to ensure that you only use the tender part of the asparagus is to grasp it near the base, and bend it. It will naturally snap at the point between the woody part and the tender, tasty part. Toss the woody ends into the compost heap, and work only with the tender bits!

Roasted Asparagus

* 1 lb asparagus spears
* Olive oil
* Fresh grated parmesano-reggiano cheese (or regular parmesan)

Heat oven to 400. Roll asparagus spears in olive oil to coat thoroughly, and arrange on a cookie sheet. Sprinkle with the grated cheese, and roast 10 minutes or until tender. Salt and pepper to taste if desired, and eat with your fingers!

Pickled Asparagus
Recipe from my friend Meg Safranek

* Asparagus, fresh
* Mustard seed
* Dill seed
* 2 cloves peeled garlic per pint, or 4 per quart
* Crushed red pepper flakes
* Lots of ice water and extra ice
* White vinegar (or use half Apple cider vinegar and half white)
* Water
* Rock Salt
* Cane Sugar
* Pickling Spice (remove the cloves)
* Alum

One batch of Brine will cover: 6 quarts of spears plus 1 quart of chunks, or pints to total that much. Depending on how much asparagus you chop, you may need more than one batch of brine.

Prepare a large ice water bath in a tub or large bowl. Next to this, lay several clean towels for drying your asparagus.

Wash the asparagus thoroughly. Snap off the woody ends and discard as described above. Working with the tender portion of the spears, measure the depth of your jars and chop the asparagus spears to fit in the jar with at least 1/2" left between the top of the asparagus and the jar lid. Keep the bits you chop off; they will pickle just as well as the spears, they just don't look as cool.

Blanch the asparagus: Bring a pot of water to boil, preferably one with a collander insert like for cooking pasta. Plunge the asparagus into the boiling water and leave for exactly one minute, then remove from the boiling water and plunge immediately into ice water. Use lots of ice, and get it very cold immediately. This helps retain the crispiness. Remove the asparagus when completely cold, and allow to drain on clean towels until thoroughly dry.

Wash and sterilize canning jars by boiling 5 minutes or by running through the hottest setting on your dishwasher. To each clean jar add:

* 1/2 teaspoon mustard seed
* 1/2 teaspoon dill seed
* 2 cloves peeled garlic per pint, or 4 cloves per quart
* 1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes

For one batch of brine, bring 5 cups water, 1/2 cup rock salt, 1/2 cup cane sugar, 1 Tablespoon pickling spice (remove cloves), and 1 teaspoon Alum to a boil in a large saucepan. Boil for 5 minutes. Remove from heat, add 5 cups vinegar, and cool.

Pack the jars with asparagus. I usually pack spears point up. Be sure you have about 1/2" headspace between the top of the spears and the lids. You can just fill jars with asparagus chunks any old way, but still leave 1/2" headspace at the top.

Pour the cooled brine over the asparagus in the jars, covering the asparagus but leaving 1/2" of headspace. Process 5 minutes in a boiling water bath.

NOTES:
Um, my garlic is blue.
Yeah, that happens. It'll turn either blue or green sometimes in the pickling brine. It's harmless.

Boiling Water What?
It's a canning method. If this is your first time canning something, congratulations! In a nutshell, it means to bring a large pot of water to a boil, then place the hot, filled jars in the water bath. Bring back to a boil, and boil for 5 minutes. Remove the jars from the water, allow to cool overnight. The lids should vacuum seal down (test with your finger; if the lid "pops", it didn't seal). Once the seal is set, remove the outer bands and store without them.

If you want more information about canning, I recommend purchasing the Ball Blue Book of Preserving, as it's a great guidebook. And there is lots of information at the Ball jar home site, Freshpreserving.com.

Bananananana Bread

2009-05-08T23:28:00.001-07:00

I've been trying to cut down on our garbage output, especially in the form of wasted food. We compost, and we feed scraps to our chickens, and I've been getting better about using leftovers and freezing half of the large batches of food I make so they don't go bad before they're consumed. So I always feel a little twinge of "Yay!" when I use up some food that might have been a garbage can candidate.

Lately I've been freezing bananas when they go a little overripe. I like my bananas in that 24 hour window where they are perfectly yellow and ripe; no astringent taste from the greenness, and yet not at all mushy. (As you might expect, I don't eat many bananas.) My husband and daughter like them a little green. This means that any bananas that pass my threshold of edibility are way past theirs, and therefore go uneaten. The overripe bananas generally occur one a a time, which is too few for use in my recipes, so we used to feed them to the roses, or simply compost them. Then I learned that you can throw an entire unpeeled banana in the freezer and save it for later! When you get adequate amounts, make something!

It's really as easy as throwing the banana in the freezer, no need for a container or wrap. It will turn black and unappealing, and the banana is definitely beyond regular edibility after freezing, but it's still perfectly fine for recipes. To use the bananas in banana bread or smoothies, take out of the freezer and allow to thaw for about 20 minutes. Snip the end off the banana peel, and squeeze from the bottom. The entire banana will slide out of the skin. It's kind of gross, but very convenient and sort of cool too. It's almost pre-mushed!

Banana Bread

* 1 3/4 cup flour
* 2/3 cup sugar
* 2 tsp baking powder
* 1/2 tsp baking soda
* 1/4 tsp salt
* 1 cup mashed bananas
* 1/3 cup softened butter (you can also use margarine or shortening)
* 2 Tbls milk
* 2 eggs (farm fresh if ya got 'em!)
* 1 Tbls cinnamon
* 1 tsp allspice
* 1/2 tsp ginger
* 1/2 tsp nutmeg
* Chopped nuts (optional)

Preheat oven to 350. Grease bottom only of loaf pan, set aside.

In a large mixing bowl, combine 1 cup of flour, plus the sugar, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and mashed bananas. Stir well, then add the butter and milk and beat well with a mixer for 2 minutes. Add eggs and spices, blend well. If desired, add nuts, blend well. Pour into the prepared loaf pan and bake 60 minutes, or until a pick inserted into the center comes out clean. Remove from oven, allow to cool 5 minutes, invert onto rack, and cool thoroughly before slicing.

Twitterpated!

2009-05-06T20:41:00.000-07:00

When we moved out here, I set up our bird feeders next to a giant Rose of Sharon bush, across the driveway from the kitchen window. I can see all the activity at the feeders while I'm puttering in the kitchen, and when I whip out the binoculars to look more closely, I have the added bonus of appearing to be spying on the neighbors.

Up until recently, I've thought of the birds at the feeders in these basic groups: Robins, Jays, Woodpeckers, Little Brown Generic Birds, Starlings, and Random Other Things I Don't See Often. However, in the last couple of years, my father has become a more and more avid birder, so he has also become my go-to-guy for all things avian. For example, a conversation a few days ago went like this:

"Hi Dad? Yeah, what looks like a robin, but isn't? Yeah, I know that sounds like the setup to a joke. No, I'm serious. It's got red eyes and a speckly back, but it's the size and shape of a robin, with the same movements."

"It's a Towhee. Used to be called a Rufous Sided Towhee, but is now called a Speckled Towhee."

"Okay, thanks. Just saw one under the feeder."

"Remind me to get you a bird book."

So, true to his suggestion, he bought me a copy of The Sibley Field Guide to Birds of Western North America. And this morning, I sat out by my dining room window with my binoculars and my book, and watched birds for half an hour.

In that time, I spotted:

A mated pair of American Goldfinches

A metric ton of Pine Siskins of both genders

The nesting pair of White Crowned Sparrows we have living in our birdhouse

A couple of solo Black Capped Chickadees

An American Robin

Several House Sparrows

A Scrub Jay

A pair of European Starlings

My bud the Spotted Towhee

A pair of House Finches (an Old World finch, and the little buggers that get all poofed up and shiver over the warm driveway periodically.)

A Brown Headed Cowbird

A Mourning Dove

A Steller's Jay (whose hairdo was all flopped over and droopy in the rain)

A Downy Woodpecker

I suspect part of this whole countrification thing is going to include learning about the houses that various birds prefer, in an effort to entice more of them to nest on the property. Next year I'm hoping to attract the Tree Swallows by hanging a house up much higher; my boss has one hanging way up ridiculously high above the shop, and it's occupied every year.

Yay for Avian Diversity!

The Great Sunflower Project

2009-05-01T19:58:00.000-07:00

I found this in a magazine called Hobby Farm Home, which is incidentally one of my new favorite magazines.

The Great Sunflower Project is asking folks all over to plant sunflowers in their yards, or in containers on their porches or decks, and then count the bees that visit the flowers. The counts are only twice a month, and take less than half an hour. You write down your starting time, then each time you see a bee, you write down how many minutes it's been since you started. If you start at noon, and the first bee visits at 12:05, you write down "5". If the next one visits at 12:12, you write down "12". You're done after 5 bees or half an hour, whichever comes first.

Not any kind of sunflower will do, as most have been bred for purposes other than prolific production of pollen. Apparently Lemon Queen sunflowers are the flower of choice, as they're packed with pollen and produce multiple blooms all summer long.

If you see a lot of bees on your flowers, that's great! If you see none, that's actually even more important information. And if you keep bees of your own, they're still interested, so it doesn't mean you're "cheating"!

The project is being led by Gretchen LeBuhn, an associate professor of biology at San Francisco State University. You can donate to the project, or ask for free seeds to participate in the project, at http://www.greatsunflower.org. You can also get the appropriate type of sunflower seeds at Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds or Gurney's Seed & Nursery, among others.

Progress in the Planting World

2009-04-30T17:45:00.000-07:00

For the last few weeks, I've been absorbed largely with preparing for the Oregon Glass Guild's 9th annual Glass Gallery show at the Oregon Convention Center. The show was this last weekend, and my next scheduled show isn't until November, so I have a nice wide chunk of time where there are no pressing crafting deadlines. Convenient, now that spring is sproinging and I'm ready to start planting at least some of my year's crops!

My husband has been hard at work putting together our raised beds and filling them with a combination of a compost underlayment and a three-way mix fill (three-way being 1/3 compost, 1/3 topsoil, and 1/3 sand.) As he's filling the second of the three tiered beds I have designed, I'm busy following behind planting what he's filled.

One problem that faces some folks in areas such as mine, where the weather can be unseasonably cool right into June, is overeagerness. Someone told a gal on one of my gardening mailing lists that she could plant tomatoes starting April 1; another told the same gal she could plant them starting April 30th. She split the difference and was going to plant around April 15th, until a bunch of folks told her that was far too early for our area. The issue isn't so much whether or not we'll get a hard freeze, or even snow, as it is the ground hasn't warmed up yet. Tomatoes (and many of our other summer crops) are tropical in nature, and really need the ground to be 55 degrees bare minimum, with 75-85 being ideal. That doesn't happen around here until June or so.

One reason I use raised beds, even where the soil is fairly decent, is to allow me to extend the growing season a bit. They warm up earlier in the spring, and they are easier to attach row covers and cloches to than the flat ground. I also like raised beds because I can sit on the edge and work towards the middle, and they are never so wide (by design) that I can't reach into at least the middle if not farther, so I never have to get into the beds. And with paths between instead of bare dirt, I battle far fewer weeds, and have an easy place to put my tools and wheel barrow and such. I've been asked if it's necessary to use raised beds, and of course it isn't. It isn't even necessary to rototill or amend your soil; you can use a lasagna layering method, or just strip off the sod and hope. Your results of course will vary on a number of things, including what you plant, the character of your native soil, how you fertilize and water, and even the lay of your land. Raised beds just bring more of the variables within your control.

Today I planted two lavenders, a rosemary, and a feverfew in the center Herb bed. I also acquired a pineapple sage for that bed, though she won't be planted outside until June, and I have some chives and oregano as well. In the middle tier I planted Walla Walla sweet onions, white onions, red onions, 20 asparagus crowns, and three rhubarb plants with room for a fourth. I have room in that bed reserved for strawberries, beans, peas, carrots, radishes, and lettuce. The outside bed will be corn, squash, cucumbers, cauliflower, tomatoes, celery, and perhaps a few other things.

While I was at it, I also planted two new columbine plants and a winter Daphne as well as three ferns and a hardy fuschia for the hummingbirds. I've started my Orphan Plant section too, with three healthy Ivy plants and three small cedar trees.

Mason Bee Update

2009-04-21T23:52:00.000-07:00

Our weather here has warmed up significantly; most of the trees are blooming (darn pollen anyway), and even our Rose of Sharon is budding out. I don't know how the neighbor's walnut tree is doing, but next time I see him I'll ask. Why? The walnut is their marker for "no more frosty nights", as apparently it's pretty reliable about only budding after danger of frost is past.

With the warming weather, two of the Mason Bee tubes have seen activity. The bees have chewed their way out and taken off in search of food and mortar. I happened to peer up at the nesting block tonight, and one of the holes is full! While I was watching, the little bee came back carrying a big ball of mud in her jaws, and she disappeared down another hole. I stood and watched her for a few more minutes, as she left and reappeared with more mud. I hope she has company, but even if she doesn't, at least I'll have some bees next year.

As for the mud, I'd almost forgotten the recommendation about digging a mud hole for the bees. Fortunately, we have a hole in the middle of our lawn where we had a tree topped, and as the top fell from some 90 feet up, it drilled itself into the ground. My husband had filled it partway up with some fill dirt from planting trees, and I stopped him from filling it all the way and added some water. Score! I saw at least two little mason bees busily flying to and from the mud pit, though I only saw the one reappear at the nesting block. Maybe the other was getting a drink, or just checking it out for suitability, or maybe she was nesting somewhere else.

Plants that Give Back

2009-04-17T19:04:00.000-07:00

Since moving to my new house, I've been intent upon getting a new pair of columnar apple trees. I had two in my old, smaller suburban backyard, and they were wonderful. The Emerald Spire grew to about 10 feet tall and less than 3 feet wide, and had apples bunched on it so tightly they looked more like giant grapes. The Northstar was shorter at about 7 feet tall, and it didn't have as many apples on it, but it was so unobtrusive and small you might never even realize it was a full fledged apple tree unless you looked closely!

We have enough room in our new yard for full size apple trees, but I'm a big fan of "less is more", since it means I can plant more variety if I keep the individual plants small. And they were so easy to care for and productive I wanted to repeat the process.

Went looking for some of them at the local nursery, didn't find any. One of the workers there pointed us northward to another nursery, so today we trekked off in the rain and the wind to visit both Bird's English Garden nursery and Tsugawa's. The former was a complete bust; most of their stock was in very sad shape, and they had little stock to begin with. The only staff in sight was a non-communicative young man doing something with a backhoe. The latter nursery, however, was a total win! If you happen to be in Northwest Oregon or Southwest Washington, I highly recommend Tsugawa's, right off the freeway in Woodland, WA. Helpful, friendly staff, healthy and interesting plants, great little store inside, lots of water plants and a wide selection of bonsais to boot!

We ended up with three varieties* of columnar apples, two dwarf cherries, a self-pollinating peach, a four-way almond, a quince, two hazelnuts, five blueberry bushes, two honeyberry bushes, and a bright pink "Valley Valentine" Pieris japonicus. We needed a forklift to get it all back to the truck, drove all the back roads home to avoid doing 70 on the freeway, and now we just have to get it all in the ground!

* For anyone new to growing apples, cherries, blueberries, or many other varieties of fruit, there's a reason I purchased in multiples: many fruit trees and berry bushes need a different variety to provide pollination. If you purchase only one apple tree, for instance, your apple yield will be poor or non-existant. Blueberries are well-known for this requirement. There are varieties that are self-pollinating, and there are trees with multiple varieties grafted to a single rootstock that will self-pollinate. If you don't know if your tree or shrub needs a pollinator, look it up on the Internet, or ask your nursery staff.

Successful Hummingbird Flirtation

2009-04-10T11:49:00.000-07:00

I brought my new hummingbird feeders home on Tuesday, and filled them with homemade sugar nectar that afternoon. I hung the fancier set off the front porch, where they can be seen from the kitchen window, and hung the more utilitarian set off the bathroom window, where they can be seen from the backyard, and more importantly, can't be seen from the other set of feeders.

By Wednesday, I had hummingbirds.

By Thursday, I had to refill the smaller utilitarian feeder.

This morning, just standing around getting ready for work, I saw two hummingbirds visit the smaller feeder, and at least three different hummingbirds visit the larger front porch feeder. At one point, one of the hummingbirds was spooked by the chickadees building a nest 5 feet away, and the hummer flew over to the giant rose of sharon bush where I keep most of my birdfeeders and the birdbath. It actually perched on the top of the bush, and let me check it out with my binoculars. What a beautiful iridescent red bib it had! From flipping through my bird books, I'd have to say it was an Anna's hummingbird, but it also looks like we had some rufous hummingbirds this morning.

In my area (the great Pacific Northwet, just north east of Portland, Oregon), we have Anna's hummingbirds all year round, and we have rufous hummingbirds in the warmer parts of the year. There may be others, but those are the ones I've been told to keep an eye out for.

Didn't think the little guys would find the food so quickly! Makes me doubly determined to plant some actual plant-type food sources for them soon.

Hummingbirds

2009-04-07T16:32:00.000-07:00

A few days ago I was standing at the kitchen window and was surprised to see a hummingbird investigating the porch. The former house owners left a ton of cup hooks up on the roof part, so I'm thinking they might have had hummingbird feeders there at one point. Who am I to argue with a hummingbird? They are so much cooler than I ever thought about being!

Did you know that hummingbirds...
* have heartbeats up to 1,260 per minute, and take up to 250 breaths a minute
* consume half their weight in sugar daily
* eat small flying insects as well as nectar
* flap their wings 80 times per second
* can fly forwards, backwards, up, dow, sideways, and even upside down, at up to 60mph...but can't walk

So today I went to the Backyard Bird Shop in town, to find a decent hummingbird feeder and potentially a dripper for my birdbath (another story.) I had no idea there were so many types of hummingbird feeders! I still think of them as the bulb-shaped containers filled with red liquid and with a little glass spout at the bottom, which attracted more bees and wasps than birds and was generally kind of a bust.

Apparently hummingbird feeders have come a long way since my childhood. They now are generally drip-free, as they are designed to allow the birds to perch and feed from above, instead of hover and feed from below. They may come with ant traps to deter ants from stealing the sugar water, and probably attract fewer bees because they don't drip or leave sugar on the outside of the container as much as previous designs. It's now also recommended that you clean your feeders weekly with vinegar and rinse in hot water.

After wishing I could afford to buy them all, I purchased a decorative, three "flowered" feeder with glass bulbs set into driftwood and topped with bright red tin "flowers" possessing yellow centers for feeding. I also purchased a window-attached feeder with two glass tubes with red caps wrapped up in copper wire and attached to a suction cup for sticking to a window.

The lady at the shop told me that hummingbirds are territorial, so it's best to set stations up a fair distance apart. It wasn't until after I was on my way home that I wondered, what then is the purpose of having two or three "flowers" on each feeder? Just for the bird's entertainment? In case he brings a date?

One way to attract more of the little hummers into your yard, and thus have more visitors to your feeder, is to fill your garden with plants that hummingbirds happen to like. Since I'm looking at planting a new yard this spring, I have sheets on attracting various critters. For hummingbirds, attractive plants generally possess tubular flowers, in colors of red, orange, scarlet and gold.

Plants that attract hummingbirds include:
* (Perennials) Columbine, Foxglove, Fireweed, Bee Balm, Clarkia, Salvia, Trumpet Vine, Honeysuckle, Fuschia
* (Annuals)Petunia, Nasturtium, Red Salvia, Snapdragons, Scarlet Runner Beans
* (Shrubs/Trees)Butterfly Bush, Hardy Fuschia, Salal, Flowering Currant, Salmonberry

At checkout time, I noted that the shop was charging $4.00 for a small box of "nectar" powder. When I investigated, it was merely sucrose. Sugar. Fortunately, the gal at the counter also gave me a recipe for Homemade Hummingbird Nectar:

* Boil 2 cups of water for 1-2 minutes
* Remove from heat, add 1/2 cup white sugar
* Stir to dissolve, and allow to cool
* DO NOT add food coloring, or use Honey or Sugar Substitutes

Fill feeder with only as much nectar as will be consumed in 4 or 5 days (or fill to the top if you are willing to throw it out if unconsumed.) Store remaining solution in refrigerator for up to 2 weeks.

Take the feeder down, rinse with hot tap water and vinegar, and refill with nectar every 5 days at minimum (more in hot weather). Spoiled or moldy nectar can kill hummingbirds.

Honey Harvest

2009-04-05T21:14:00.000-07:00

Today I went to a honey harvesting class. The weather cooperated; it was a beautiful 75 degrees and sunny. The class was hosted at the home of a lady who has had her hive just under a year, so it was her first harvest. Our Bee Guy came out to show us the ins and outs of harvesting, and it was really nifty.

First, the lady's yard was really, really awesome. It was a fairly small city lot on a great corner, but she had it so completely tidy and filled with everything fun I could have spent all day exploring it. She had a great little sitting area next to her detached garage...

And a really fantastic chicken coop, with a large walk-in door in the "run" area as well as a regular people-sized door for the roosting/nest box area.

She also had some lovely espaliered apple trees out front, and some sweet plums, and several birdfeeders, a fountain, and a sweet cat that kept wandering around looking for attention until I think it had too close an encounter with a bee. Oops.

Our Bee Dude started off by talking to us about harvesting honey in general. He recommends harvesting when the weather turns warm in the spring, about the same time as all the plants begin to blossom, so the bees will be able to gather enough food to sustain themselves after you rob them of their stores.

At that point, he showed us his harvesting "equipment" and we had a general discussion of harvesting honey. He uses a long, flexible, serrated bread knife to separate the combs from the sides of the hives (and from one another if necessary). He has a pair of tongs for picking up any dropped comb bits out of the hive, and a potato masher for squashing up the comb for filtering. He also has a 5 in 1 drywall tool which he uses as a prybar to open up the tops of the hives and to pry apart the bars, which the bees glue down with propolis. His last tool is a large, soft paintbrush, used for brushing the bees off the extracted combs and off the sides of the hive when replacing the bars.

As for getting the honey out of the comb, he cuts apart and crushes the comb, then uses a combination of buckets with wire hardware cloth and then wire window screening as strainers, to allow the honey to drip through. I don't think there is a lot of equipment out there right now meant for harvesting top-bar style honeycomb; comb frames from Langstroth hives are fitted into a spinner, which centrifuges out the honey quite handily. The frames are then cleaned and replaced in the hive. With top bar hives, the entire comb is cut free. The bonus is that you get to keep and use the wax after you've strained out the honey. The problem is that you have to separate the honey from the wax!

Some of the folks in the crowd suggested using a cheese-press to squish the honey out of the comb, and I suspect that would be a good solution. A couple of other folks suggested hanging up a conical food-grade strainer, as one might use for jams or jellies or preserves, and letting that drip. One person said that wire window mesh didn't work for her, but I don't think she knew to spray the screening with water prior to beginning, as this helps break the surface tension and allows the honey to drip through more effectively. Even our main Bee Dude says his honey extraction is a work in progress, and we should all experiment to come up with efficient ways to extract it. One of the women said she got 100 ounces of honey out of one hive this spring, and about 30 of that was due to pressing the wax after she'd let the honey drip out as much as possible.

When Bee Dude opened the hive, first he removed the top. The bees hadn't sealed it down with propolis, so it was a fairly straightforward operation. Then he used his prybar to loosen a couple of the rearmost bars and remove them. They had been sealed down, but several had no comb at all, and one had only a little tiny portion of comb on it. He set four or five of them down on the grass, and then moved the one with the little starter comb to the back so he could work on the next ones up.

In theory, he should have been able to loosen the bar, then slide the knife down along the side to remove the anchor points where they attach 3 or 4 inches down the sides, and then pull the entire comb out. Well, not so much on this hive. It wasn't leveled when it was erected, and the bars were the old style with a thin "strip" down the middle instead of a completely triangular cross-section, so the comb wasn't straight. It had crossed over and welded to the neighboring combs on each side, and it was messy and ugly to cut it apart. He had to slide the knife between each pair of combs, and in doing so he ended up opening up much of the capped honey, spilling honey into the hive and coating (and thus killing) many bees.

In the end, he only removed two full bars of honey before deciding the hive had had enough poking for the day, and he told the owner he'd come back out to finish the job and help her put in the new type of bars and level out the hive.

He worked completely without protective equipment, and most of us were only a few feet from the hive. It was interesting to see the mood of the hive. At one point, when he removed the first full comb, they became a little agitated and the tone of the buzzing grew a little louder and the cloud of flying bees got a little bigger. It calmed down again after a few minutes. Our Bee Dude only got stung once, when sure enough one flew up his pantleg. Ouchie. But he had his hands in the hive, sometimes covered in honey, and he brushed the bees off the comb without upsetting them too much. Once the combs were cleared, he cut them from the bar (okay, one broke away and fell into the hive; he declared this about the biggest harvest disaster situation we could experience, and that we were probably lucky to be seeing it even though he didn't feel so lucky to be dealing with it!) Once the combs were in the bucket, he used the knife to cut open all the cells, and squashed it good with a potato masher, then let it filter through the mesh on the straining buckets.

One of the combs had cells filled with dark pollen, which he cut away separately. He suggested that if we encounter that, we could remove the pollen from the cells and use it as a nutritional supplement rather like flax seed is used. It sells for a lot of money at Farmers' markets, and is supposed to be good for allergies, especially when it's local pollen. I don't know much beyond that about, though I'm sure I'll learn soon!

He let all of us taste some of the honey as we were harvesting it. It was almost molasses-like, much richer and darker tasting than I'm used to from commercial honey, and even a lot richer than the raw honey I've been eating lately. I broke off a little piece of comb and chewed on that, and the wax was almost pure white once I'd chewed out all the honey; because it's not reused, it has less of the propolis and layers of older wax that make commerical beeswax yellowy. Neat!

So, now it's time to wait for the swarms. I asked Bee Dude (whose name is Will Dart, incidentally) how many people he had on his swarm list, and he said about 20. Some of the folks had reserved "farmed" bees at the local bee store, but they're all out for the season, so I'm just hoping to be able to get one of the swarms when they come available sometime in the next 4-6 weeks, as the weather warms. Then I hope for the best after I pour the little buggers into my nice, sturdy hive and wait!

Wisdom from the Neighbors

2009-04-05T17:13:00.001-07:00

We have an older couple living next door to us. They've been here 40 years, which is long enough to have seen this town go from a wide spot in the road to...well, a wider spot in the road. But it's on its way to becoming a fairly large town in its own right, and if the City Council has its way, it'll be down right urban. (I suspect if the locals have their way, it won't. People don't move here for the Night Life and the urban amenities, they move here for the elbow room and the scenery.)

At any rate, I got to talking to the lady, Pat, over the fence this morning. She was watching my husband and I put out ground cloth for the base of our soon-to-be giant garden plot, and commenting that it reminded her of what she and her husband did 40 years ago. We talked about the wildlife she sees in their yard at night (mainly opossums and racoons, with other occasional visitors), and about my chickens, and about the Mason Bees I'm hoping to raise to pollinate the garden.

She then asked me, "Well, you know what the old timers will tell you, right?" Well, no...what will they tell me? "Don't plant your garden while there's still snow on Silver Star." First off, I didn't even know that mountain over to our East had a name. Well, the one directly to our east is more of a large hill, and it's Tukes Mountain, which I knew. But the one a little farther south and then east, which is often covered with snow, is apparently Silver Star Mountain. I looked it up on Google maps. Learn something new every day!

Pat told me that when she first moved out here, she got that advice, and didn't heed it. She'd never had problems with a garden before, so she just did her thing. And she didn't have much of a yield that summer, though nothing actually died. She thinks it's because it got so cold in the spring that the plants just got sapped of energy and never really recovered. I've had similar experiences with tomatoes, only in reverse; I was extremely busy and didn't get mine planted until mid June one year, and my mother in law had planted hers about 2 months before, yet by mid August my plants were outproducing hers. Every year I have to remind myself not to get too gung-ho about planting early or as soon as the weather seems nice, because we almost invariably have some late frosts and cold evenings through mid-April at least, and often through the end of April. Our last "frost danger" day isn't until almost the end of May!

The other thing Pat told me was that until the Oak and Walnut trees bud out, we're still in winter and in danger of frost. She said she has neighbors who don't have walnut trees who come over and take a look at hers to see if it's budded yet. I might have to do the same thing!

Breadness

2009-04-01T18:24:00.000-07:00

I've declared this the year that I will learn to make decent homemade bread, so I've been working at it for several weeks. I've determined that it's part science (as is all baking), part art (as is cooking), and a lot of practice, practice, practice.

I've started with a recipe I found in Mother Earth News. At one point, I found a pointer to it in a blog on how to live in poverty and still have things you want and need. A week or so later, I got my first issue of Mother Earth News, and in it were several letters to the editor declaring the recipe in the last issue to be fantastic and trouble-free. Interestingly, it was the same recipe.

I've noted that my bread comes out differently on different days; this latest batch came out with a bit of a beer-like aroma and taste, which I attribute to some fermentation as the dough sat in the loaded fridge for a week or so before I used it. Previous batches have risen more or less depending on conditions at the time of baking. Thought I'd share some other things I've learned about this particular recipe...

-- If you double the batch, you need a very large bowl for the rising process. My first attempt at doubling had the dough crawling all over the counter like something out of a 50's horror movie.

-- If you don't have a pizza peel, a small cutting board works almost as well.

-- Their recommended size loaf really makes a small "dinner" loaf, suitable for baking for one meal for a family with no leftovers. If making a larger loaf, adjust the baking time accordingly.

-- This dough makes AWESOME cinnamon rolls. I pulled out a hunk and rolled it out, and without a recipe, proceeded to make a batch of cinnamon rolls that won the hearts and stomachs of my weekly D&D group. And their kids. A large part of that was merely providing fresh, hot cinnamon rolls of any variety, but they were quite tasty!

For a 13"x9" pan of cinnamon rolls, you'll need:

* 1/3 batch of the artisan dough, post-rising
* 1 cold stick of butter (1/2 cup)
* cinnamon
* white sugar
* powdered sugar
* 1 tsp vanilla

In the 13"x9" pan, finely chop or slice half the butter and dot it randomly around the pan. Sprinkle evenly with cinnamon to cover the entire pan, then sprinkle evenly with sugar to cover the cinnamon. (Guesstimate: 2-3 Tbls of cinnamon, 1/4cup sugar). Set aside.

Take the dough out of the refrigerator and treat it as if you were going to make a loaf of bread. Pull it around and make the "ball" as directed in the original recipe, but lay it on a floured cutting board. Roll out to a rectangle about 1/4" thick.

Take the remaining butter, and chop finely or slice thinly, and dot evenly over the rectangle of dough. Sprinkle evenly with cinnamon, then sprinkle evenly with sugar; about the same amount you used in the pan. It's not an exact science here.

Starting with a long edge, roll the dough tightly into a log. Dust the top of the rolled-up dough with flour. Using a very sharp serrated knife, slice the log into 1-2" slices. Lay sliced rolls in the pan on top of the butter and cinnamon and sugar. (15 slices works well...five rows of 3 rolls.) Try to arrange them so that when they rise, they'll fill the pan. If you don't have enough rolls to fill the entire pan, don't worry. They'll be fine even if they're not all bunched together.

Heat the oven to 350, and allow the rolls to rise on the counter for 30 minutes. Bake for 30 minutes or until golden.

A few minutes before they are done, prepare the frosting. In a small bowl, combine a scoop of powdered sugar (guesstimate, 2-3 cups), a tsp of vanilla, and enough milk to make a thick frosting consistency. You may also add a spoonful of softened butter or margarine if you wish a little richer frosting. Blend well.

Remove the rolls from the oven, and spread immediately with the frosting. Serve hot. Store any leftovers (yeah right) in the refrigerator for up to 5 days. Reheat 30 seconds in the microwave for just-baked yumminess!

New Hive!

2009-03-23T21:20:00.000-07:00

A couple of weekends ago, I took a class on Urban Beekeeping. Granted, I'm not exactly urban out here, but I'm not exactly in the middle of the country either, so I need to use methods for farming and animal husbandry that will be compatible with neighbors. I've wanted to have bees for some time now, though with the small backyard I had at my old house, it just seemed like it would be more trouble than it was worth. Now I have a beehive, and I'm also convinced that it would have been fine at my old house as well.

If you're anything like me and probably the majority of folks out there, when you think "beehive" you probably either picture the funky stepped-pyramid thing for which the hairdo is named, or the large white boxes that you can find in orchards and fields, and which are what commercial beekepers use. That's what I pictured, those white boxes with their layers of sheeting inside, and the full bee suits and the smokers and whatnot. Well, that's the Langstroth method for raising bees. And turns out, it's somewhat like factory farming for bees.

The traditional, historical method for raising bees is pretty basic. Find a swarm, dump them into a box or some stump or hollow area, raid them for honey in the spring. Easy peasy, but messy and not good for large scale operations or speed. The Langstroth method standardized hives, and made large scale workings and transportation of hives to fields much easier. Langstroth hives are built on a vertical principle, with a box of "brood" combs topped by one or several honey "supers". The hives are generally pre-laden with beeswax frames for the bees to use. Harvesting honey is fairly rapid, because the entire box is broken apart between the brood and the supers, and the supers are taken away and drained of honey, reloaded, and replaced.

The problem with Langstroth hives is that they don't really work with the bees' natural inclinations, and introduce some management methods that may ultimately be counterproductive for the bees. I'm coming to believe that the methodology of raising bees in this country is partly or even largely responsible for the current problem with Colony Collapse Disorder and several of the sub-problems including Varroa mites and funguses. When a Langstroth hive is harvested, the hive is cracked in half and opened to the sky, which stresses the bees enormously; they really don't like their brood comb exposed! In order to calm the bees enough to work with them, they are smoked. This causes a response in the bees which signals them to gorge on honey in preparation for a long flight out of a forest fire. Again, the gorging stresses them. Langstroth hives are typically painted, and though I have no reason to believe the paint is toxic or bad, it's not necessary. The frames in the hives are pre-set with beeswax combs. While beekeepers may claim that this reduces the work for the bees because they don't have to create their own wax and frame, it's really for the beekeeper's convenience; if the bees aren't spending time and energy making wax, they're spending time and energy making honey. And because the frames are of a set size, bees are unable to change the size of their combs according to need and instinct. Bees have several natural responses to invaders like Varroa mites, and one of their primary defenses is to vary their gestation time so that the mites are immature when the bees hatch, thus leaving the immature mites behind to starve, or so that the mites are ready too early, again dooming them. In a Langstroth hive, they only have one choice for cell size. And the pre-made wax frames may have been created of wax contaminated with funguses, viruses, or insecticides, as the wax is all recycled.

In comes the hive I have fallen for: the Top Bar Hive. Apparently traditional beekeepers may scoff at it and claim it can't be done, but people are doing it, quite successfully. It's a method designed for small scale and backyard operations, which is more natural for the bees and less work for the humans. Some of the more hard core folks refer to themselves as "Bee Guardians". It's a method which should appeal to organic farmers and "back to basics folks", as well as locavores and people who just like nifty keen garden toys.

I am hopeful that people will adopt this method of raising bees and increase the availability of pollinators both in variety and distribution. Those who are allergic to bees should not be overly concerned about having one near, though I certainly wouldn't recommend being the one to manage the hive. Bees are generally fairly gentle and primarily sting when stepped on, trapped in clothing, or caught in hair. Or when they're swatted at indiscriminately. They're not like hornets and yellow jackets, which seem to sting just because they are in a bad mood!

In essence, the hive is a giant box. It's got tapered sides, a little slit for the bees to enter and exit, a little window in the side so you can monitor the activity without opening the hive, and bars across the top. The bars have points on them to signal the bees to attach their combs, and the bees get to make the decisions about where the brood comb goes and how much honey to store (with a little subtle direction from the humans.) That's it. Open hive, dump in swarm, close hive, leave them alone. No smoking, no poking, no nothing. Harvest can be done one comb at a time throughout the year, or all at once in the spring. (Honey needs to be left over winter for the bees, as that's what they feed on. In spring, when they have new nectar and pollen, they can be robbed and they will happily store new honey instead of relying on older honey.) Brood combs don't have to be disturbed. It's not necessary to open more than a couple of inches of the hive at once, and the bees look at that more as a repair job than an invasion. "Hey Myrtle, get the propolis! We gotta big leak here!"

When I decided I wanted a hive, I was going to simply buy one. They have the top bar hives available at http://www.backyardhive.com. They have both an original design, and a Golden Mean hive which is based on the Golden Ratio and which fits well with how bees design their hives. They also have plans available on their site for free, for those who are DIY inclined and handy with woodworking. I am both DIY inclined and handy, but I am also busy with other things and hoping a swarm will arrive any time now, so I was intending to buy one. That is, until my husband caught wind of the price and declared that he would make me one. A week later, I now have a fully functional, ready to go hive!

The hive from the side, with the window closed and lid on.

End of the hive. The little gap is where the bees come in and out.

Window exposed, and lid off. The window has plexiglas in it. The divider you can see inside the hive is a "false back" that allows you to trick the bees into making less brood comb and farther forward, to give you more honey at the back when you remove it and they discover their house has grown.

Closeup of a bar. The bees attach the comb on the point, and it hangs down into the hive in a sheet.

(In the event that you're in the Greater Portland Area or Seattle area and want one, contact me; we might be able to work out a deal. I can even detail the top or sides with woodburning.)

Now all that is missing is the swarm! When one comes available, I'll post and let you know how it goes.

The Bee Corner

2009-03-21T11:23:00.000-07:00

Bee things proceed apace! This week, I went out and purchased two large wooden planters for my "Bee Garden". Ordinarily I would put the plants directly into the ground, but I'm not entirely sure where I want these plants to wind up in the eventual garden scheme. So rather than transplant them one or more times, I decided to just put them in a container which I can move around the yard for a season or three before settling them into their final location.

The above planter contains three of my "bee attractive" plants. The large one with the white bell flowers is a Pieris japonica, which will eventually get quite large and definitely need a permanent spot in the yard. (The largest one I've seen reached up to the roof of the nearby house.) The smallish broadleaf in the front is a Helleborous niger, also called Lenten rose or just plain hellebore. It blooms in the late winter and often continues to do so through spring. The pinkish one on the right is English heath, which most of us just call heather.

The above planter here shows a dwarf Pieris japonica, together with a pink flowering Viburnum, which will also definitely need a permanent spot in the ground eventually. The Viburnum has the added bonus of bird-attracting berries later in the year.

In finding a spot for my Mason bees, I examined the entire yard. It's best to give Mason bees a spot where they catch early morning sun so that they can warm quickly and get on with their work of pollinating; Mason bees cannot fly until they warm their bodies up to approximately 55 degrees Farenheight. I do have some walls that catch morning sun, but because of the orientation of my house and garage, and the placement of some large trees, I don't have a place on a building that both gets early sun and retains it for more than a couple of hours. So, I'm trying what is admittedly a bit of an experiment. I built a tall "faux wall" out near the greenhouse, and mounted the bee houses on it. It has an overhang to protect from the worst rain, and a little shelf under it for the bees to hang out and warm up after emerging from the block.

It's not advised to hang bee houses on fences or trees, so I have no idea how well this will work. I know the bees won't get the added bonus of a large, warmed structure behind them for additional heat, but they do have the height and the open flight path that would be afforded by a wall.

This picture is of the Wall O' Bees. You'll note my three bee blocks look kind of lonely and helter-skelter...the hope is that in future years I'll need to install more blocks for a growing horde of bees. Left side is the Mason bee house, empty and waiting. Middle is a smaller block for Aphid eating wasps. I haven't got many plants in the yard that attract aphids right now, so I don't know if I have a wild population of wasps or not. The right side is a Leafcutter bee house. In front of the entire operation I've stapled black bird netting; I realized that by placing these on a board with a nice landing pad in front, I'd basically created a diner for my downy woodpeckers, flickers, and jays. Right now the tube of hibernating bees is still in my refrigerator, though I will be putting it out in the next day or two as the Bee Plants open up.

With all of this preparation, the goal is to have a colony of Mason bees established for next spring. I'm in the middle of selecting fruit tree and berry varieties for planting in the next few weeks, with an eye towards the first real harvest being next year. One thing that's true for gardening; it can be an exercise in long-term planning!

More Spring Fever

2009-03-18T18:48:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I got Todd to put up the small greenhouse I purchased at Bi-Mart. It's made of metal tubing and connectors, with wire shelving, covered with a plasticky translucent green tarp thingy, so it's portable, lightweight, and inexpensive (I think I paid $70 for it.) It's got enough shelving space for 14 trays of plants, and I can walk in and easily stand up in the center. It's a "one-butt greenhouse", kind of like a "one-butt kitchen", but Evie and I have enough room to work if we're focused on the same thing. I pulled a small bench/storage thingy over near it, and I'm going to be doing potting there until we get the barn style garden shed built.

So since that was finished and up, today I went to Wilco with the intention of getting potting soil and a few more trays for my greenhouse. That store is dangerous...it's a farm supply store. There are a few kinds of stores that are always deadly to my pocket book: craft/bead stores, hardware/home stores, bookstores, and Wilco. Today was no exception.

I purchased a thermometer for the greenhouse and mounted it inside. I need to be sure it's going to be warm enough in there for seedlings before I get started; really, I'm several weeks ahead of the curve for planting where I live, but the stores are all so enticing with the seed displays and the new plants! But if I can keep the greenhouse warm enough, it won't matter if I'm early, and the plants will be all the bigger by the time I transplant. Some seeds I will be direct-sowing either singly or using seed tape (carrots, radishes, lettuce) so they'll get planted later anyway.

They had baby chickies at Wilco! I am so tempted to buy some more. They had a whole pile of Buff Orpington babies, which are a soft puffy yellow and decidedly "standard chick, generic, one each" looking. They also had a big vat of Aracauna chicks, and they were tempting too. They grow into rather ugly chickens, IMHO, but they lay colored eggs, which would be fun. I decided to wait until next spring, as about that time my girls should be deciding it's time to molt, and new chicks will reach laying age about the time my girls are starting to slow down. If I wind up with 10 all full-bore laying, I'm going to get buried in eggs. I could just hang up a sign on the fence advertising eggs, I suppose. Found out that if I am an egg producer selling eggs directly from the same premises where they are produced,

I also bought some more trays and some inserts. I couldn't decide between the paper pots which you can plant with the seedlings, or the little plastic inserts. I chose some of both, along with some pop-up peat pots for Evie's entertainment. I'll figure out what works best for next year.

Make Your Own Seed Tape

2009-03-18T18:42:00.000-07:00

I'm not exactly a newbie at gardening, but neither am I a seasoned pro. I've been actively gardening in some form for about 8 years now, and if there's one thing I've learned, it's that there's always more to learn. Every time I peruse a garden catalog or hit the farm store, I find something new and interesting. Last trip to the farm store, I found this nifty invention and immediately understood the usefulness. I also immediately understood the additional expense!

In a nutshell, seed tape is a long strip of paper which is pre-embedded with seeds at the proper intervals for germination. It helps gardeners arrange straight rows, it helps eliminate the "oops" moments where too many seeds get planted in one spot, and it helps cut down on the need for thinning after sprouting, as the seeds are already the proper distance apart. And the best thing of all is that you can make your own seed tape out of recycled newspaper!

MAKE YOUR OWN SEED TAPE
You will need:
* Seeds
* Unprinted newsprint, or black and white newspaper (no colored inks)
* Flour
* Water
* Paintbrush
* A paper napkin and a wire tie
* A quart jar
* Powdered milk
(The last three bullets can be skipped if you're going to plant soon)

Cut your newsprint lengthwise into 1" wide strips.
In a small bowl, mix flour with enough water to make a thick paste. Dot it on the newsprint in the appropriate spacing for whatever seeds you're using. Look at the seed packet to tell you how far apart they should be. Place a seed in the center of each flour paste dot. Allow to dry.

If you wish to store your seed tape, place a few teaspoons of dried milk in the middle of your napkin, and tie it up into a bag using the wire tie. Place the milk bag and the seed tapes in your jar, seal, keep in a cool dry spot until you're ready to use them. The powdered milk absorbs moisture and keeps seeds from rotting or sprouting.

To plant your seed tape, dig a small furrow where you want your row of plants. Lay in the seed tape, and cover to the appropriate depth for your particular seeds, as indicated on the seed packet. Water as normal. The paper and flour will decompose in rapid order, leaving you with just evenly spaced seeds in straight rows!

Bee Garden

2009-03-18T18:37:00.000-07:00

My previous post was regarding my Orchard Mason Bees. Being in a new house with a new yard which was previously tended by folks who didn't much like gardening, there isn't a lot around here to feed bees early in the spring, and I want to keep the bees here instead of having them fly off to play at the neighbors. I decided I really wanted to go dig up the giant Pieris japonicus from our old house, but I didn't know how it'd transplant, and as it's one of the few nice healthy shrubs in the backyard there, it seemed a little less than kind, too.

Instead, I went to Home Depot and found two smaller Pieris plants of two varieties, both loaded with not-yet-open blooms. I also picked up a not-yet-blooming-but-will-have-loads-of-flowers Viburnum, a Hellebore, and a pink Heather. After I selected them all, I realized...I was planting a bee garden. Seriously. A garden just to entice and retain early pollinators. Well why not? During the summer I plant borage just to entice the bees and other pollinators to come visit my vegetables, and it works like a charm. In fact, this year I plan to have the borage in pots that I can relocate around the vegetables as necessary. (The downside of that is how freely borage reseeds itself.) The key to being enticing to Mason Bees would be early and durable blooming; since I don't have fruit trees yet this year, the Pieris and heather should keep my little workers hanging around. Next year, hopefully I'll have both a large quantity of bees and many new fruit trees!

When we got home we moved the new pots of plants out near where the bird feeders are, and not 20 minutes later there was a honeybee on the heather. No kidding. March 3rd. Sweet! Bee garden looks like it will be a success.

I bought some more seeds, and found this wonderful invention...seed tape. It's biodegradable paper tape with the seeds already in it and spaced appropriately. How cool is that? Those little fiddly seeds always end up being a mess for me, and having an easy planting system like that would be a really back saver. I also bought 16 asparagus plants, which I plan to put with the rhubarbs in a perennial vegetable bed (never even considered the need for one of those until now). When I got home I also put up a new birdfeeder, got Todd to put up the greenhouse, did some pruning, and investigated a few plants I wasn't sure would overwinter. All of the plants seem to have survived even our extra-deep-freeze this year!

Orchard Mason Bees

2009-03-18T18:33:00.001-07:00

I have bees in my refrigerator. I posted that elsewhere online, and one of my more astute friends said, "Knowing you, that's probably on purpose." Yes, yes it is. I have three little cardboard tubes of hibernating bees tucked into my salad crisper. And I'm ridiculously excited about it. In fact, last night I dreamed about bees.

In my dream, I was out walking my property, and I noticed that there were bees coming out of my bee houses. I observed that they had short antennae, and decided they were females. I patted them on the head. And I was very happy to have bees.

What I have in my fridge are cocooned, hibernating adults of Osmia lignaria, the Orchard Mason Bee or Blue Orchard Bee. They're little, they're bluish black, and they do a heck of a good job of pollinating yards and fruit trees. Unlike Apis mellifera, the European honeybee, Osmia are very localized in their habits. They are a "gregarious solitary" bee that likes to nest very close together, making them easy to propagate. The fact that they're solitary means each female bee has to gather pollen and nectar and lay eggs, and they're not invested in the survival of the colony, so they're very non-aggressive and stay close to home. Their entire range is only about 300 yards, if they can get their requirements (food, clay-laden mud, and a place to nest) within that space.

For years I've been hearing about Orchard bees, and native pollinators, and I've wanted some. The source of mine is http://www.knoxcellars.com, which is located in the Puget Sound area just north of me. I got both the hibernating bees and the bee houses...one designed to appeal to Orchard Mason bees and one designed to appeal to leafcutter bees. Although it's likely there are orchard mason bees or leafcutter bees already in my yard, I wanted to be sure I'd have a starting population. I also purchased an Aphid eater wasp house. Contemplating a bumblebee house too.

Since the native solitary bees aren't subject to varroa mites or tracheal mites like Honeybees, and aren't hive-dwelling and so not subject to colony collapse disorder, they're a great alternative for pollinating. 250 adult females can pollinate an acre. If you provide ample housing and food for them, 600% year over year growth in population is expected. By the time I have fruit trees blossoming next spring, I should have a decent colony established one way or the other. They're only active in the early spring, so they work best for fruit trees and early blooming plants.

Some of the leafcutter bees are active later in the year, hence my desire to encourage them as well. A few circles cut out of my leaves is a small price to pay for pollination and entertainment! (The first time I saw or even heard of a leafcutter bee was 10 or 15 years ago at my parents' house, when I dumped out a window box and found a succession of little leafy "cells" leading back from the drainage holes, which were apparently just the right size for a leafcutter bee to call home.)

I just finished reading "The Orchard Mason Bee" by Brian L. Griffin, and available on the Knox Cellars site above. Great, easy reading with lots of information about solitary bees and how to keep them. We'll see how the spring goes with my new little workers!