We were fortunate that another swarm of bees moved into a bait hive at my parents’ property. This morning we transferred the bees into a new 20 frame Layens hive at our place. They had some comb built on all 7 frames. We saw the queen, eggs, capped and uncapped brood, pollen, and capped and […]
We have a clipboard by the front door. Everything we bring in from the garden is weighed and recorded with the date. At the end of the year I’ll enter it into a spreadsheet so we can see how many pounds of each crop we harvested and our total for the year.
The summer garden is growing like crazy. Here are some picts of what we’re growing and today’s harvest. There are only 6 huge cloves in this head of elephant garlic. Chinese red noodle beans. Spaghetti squash…not ready yet. Lima beans…still growing. Black beauty eggplant…still needs a while until harvest. Delicata winter squash…not ready yet. Today’s
We usually struggle with trying to preserve all of our summer squash. We can’t eat it fast enough as we harvest it from the garden. This is one of our favorite plant based burger recipes, which we’ve modified from The China Study Quick & Easy Cookbook, by Del Sroufe. We usually double this recipe to
I recently responded to a poll by a presidential candidate’s campaign, which helped me to write down some thoughts about American politics today. If American democracy is to survive more than a generation from now (and that is very much up in the air) these are some things that leaders need to address immediately. 1.
We finished building our Layens hives and installed our first swarm of bees that we caught. The swarm moved into an empty 7 frame bait hive (no pre-drawn comb on the frames) on May 1st or 2nd. So, in just under 3 weeks they have a quarter to a third of 6 frames drawn with
In March my dad and I put out 3 honey bee swarm traps at my parents’ property. My dad has been watching the traps and recently said he’s seen activity at all 3 traps. Sarah and I went over today to check the traps and found that 2 of the three traps have a colony
We heat the house with a wood stove, so I’m frequently stacking or splitting wood. We have a couple years of wood already cut and covered, but I’ve been working in the back of the property and needed another place to store firewood. We have termites really bad here, so it’s important to store any
We had a large storm hit our area late October 2019. I’m still milling lumber from trees that were blown down or severely damaged from that storm. Today I’ll be working on milling 7 pine logs (8 1/2 ft long) into 1 1/2 inch thick boards. The stump is sticking out of the ground on
Sarah wanted to try her hand at incubating chicken eggs, so we purchased a Nurture Right 360 incubator. It was the last one tucked under the customer service counter at our local Tractor Supply Store. They were also sold out of all chicks. It appears that everyone wants to raise chickens and start gardening. Seed