Beekeeping Certification

We got our beekeeping certificates in the mail yesterday. There are 3 levels in the certification: apprentice, journeyman and master. We are just at the apprenticeship level but it's still pretty cool!

Seed Starting Update

It is amazing how fast they grow. Visible daily growth, I am sure asparagus growers feel the same way.

I forgot to mention that I decided to repot the tomatoes again. I could've stretched the growth in the 4" pots but decided not to. I didn't want them to get too root bound and I figured this might lessen the transplant shock. All the rage online this year seems to be paper pots, what an ingenious idea it is! News paper wrapped up sometimes taped or folded to hold it into a circular shape. These guys can go straight into the ground and the news paper will just deteriorate over the growing season. I learned to be careful to bury the whole newspaper under ground, this way it won't act like a water wick and taking water from the roots. Other than that small issue, it seemed a wonderful idea. I have peppers, tomatoes and squash in paper pots now. Only 2 of the late started tomatoes are still in 4" plastic pots. The rest of my starts are in the eggshell idea that I talked about earlier this spring.

The seed starting room is a major success! I think more so since I can shut the door and control the temperature.  I would love an extra seedling mat, sometimes bottom heat can really make the difference in sprout time and growth.

I am growing 6 different types of tomato this year. Only one of them I can truly tell apart from the others. In the upper right side of the above picture. This tomatoes leaves look very similar to wide carrot foliage, it's called Silvery Fir Tree. I can't wait to get these guys in the ground!

The peppers are actually showing growth now that I have bottom heat and have the ambient temperature in the room around 70*. They should be as big as the tomatoes, but no such luck. Hopefully they will do ok once in the ground.  I am keeping track of what varieties perform best so I can adjust what I grow next year. I don't think I will be growing egg plant like I wanted since I can't seem to get them to sprout. Out of 12 starts I have 3.

All my squash starts are up accept for Delicata and none of them have sprouted. I may need to start a few more since I don't want it too far behind all the others.

Bee Hive Week 1 check

We are allowing our bees to build out their own comb in a top bar fashion. But we decided to do this using langstroth frames. It's complicated, I know! On our monday check up we made sure the queen was free and then added more food consisting of two honey/sugar patty's and a simple syrup bag. Not much is in bloom around here and since this is a new hive with no food stores it must be provided by us, the beekeepers. Long story short, they built in the lid again! After the food patty's were eaten and the syrup bag drained there was plenty of room up there. about 2.5 inches. Since bee's are the master's of small spaces they decided to fill it. Of course we had to remove it..... because other wise they would attach the lid to the top of the frames! What a nightmare that would've been.

Our video doesn't show it because of course the battery died, but we knocked all the bees in the lid back into the hive body and took the wax off the inner cover. We also don't use smoke, but peppermint essential oil and water. This masks the alarm pheromone and the bee's then want to clean themselves rather than fight. Plus I think it disturbs the hive less, but who knows?

Anyway here we are checking them out after week one 1. I promise week two we'll have pictures and more promising growth news. It's so heartbreaking to remove so much of the bee's hard work.

Plastic Reduction Challenge March

I completely forgot to post my March plastic challenge results.  I am sure I missed quite a bit of stuff considering I didn't count any of the plastic waste from our flooring project. We chose bamboo flooring and it came in long cardboard boxes that we recycled but inside the cardboard the bamboo was wrapped in protective plastic and thin foam spacers. Also I forgot to count the glue containers which thankfully were a #1 so I recycled them but I am not sure how much it adds to the overall March plastic weight.

Amount: 257g or 9 1/8 oz.

I went up from last month, but again it would have been much higher if I was able to count all the bamboo wrapping, which would have stuffed a large garbage sack tightly! Much of this months waste is still related to the flooring project.

duct tape
painters tape
random plastic bags from flooring stuff
envelope windows
misc cd and case
hook for rubber chicken coop shoes
bread sticks dipping sauce container ( my kitchen was torn up and I caved to delivery pizza )
foam shoe insoles for jakes shoes
crackers sleeves
head cold medicine wrappers
milk lid rings
and an old hotel card

The last major thing that couldn't have been avoided is ear protection. We went to our local general store (guns, outdoors etc...) to find jake some ear protection. He would be working with the table saw for this entire flooring project we wanted to make sure he was safe. All the good highly rated ones came in a plastic shell.

I vow to get Aprils up here in a timely manner. :o)

Bee update

On Monday the 19th was our first scheduled bee check. At around 3:30 pm I went outside and found this:

Only after talking to the neighbors did I realize they had all once been in flight, very similar to swarm behavior. As to why they landed back on the hive body, I have no idea. So we went outside and did our monday check. The yellow hive had very little comb started, plenty of food, and the queen was free. We took the 2nd hive body off and took out the bee arrival box and the can of syrup (so we could get the lid on without using the second hive body. They were HOT, very upset about having the swarm process interrupted. Anyway we put a ziplock with sugar syrup and a second patty just incase they were hungry, closed up shop and went on to the green hive.

When we opened the lid of the green hive we found this:

But instead of the comb being built in the frames.... it was on the lid! Seriously! Queen, brood, nectar, pollen and the whole lot on the lid. Fuck... can we get a normal hive? Nope.

So we took out the bee arrival box and the sugar syrup can, and gently cut away the comb. I couldn't close the lid with it on there. We got the queen and her attendants into the hive body, replaced the missing frames then added another patty and a sugar syrup ziplock. Then we closed up shop.  The green hive, Italians, were much nicer to work with.

All this happened Monday evening.

Tuesday afternoon I went out to check the girls. The yellow hive was gone. They didn't like us and proceeded to finish the swarm process and take off. It's really depressing to loose a hive that just started 3 days earlier. But the green hive seems to be doing really well, active foragers and very calm. So we will have one hive for the time being. If this one starts the swarm process later in the year we will attempt a split. We might attempt it anyway and just introduce a new Kona queen to help with getting genetic diversity back into our bees. It's all up in the air still, but we have many options.

Installing the bees

Yesterday morning we got up and out to the Millers Homestead to pick up our 2 packages of bees.  Everything was set up and waiting when we got back. The morning was cold and we could tell that these poor girls weren't happy about it. Not much activity was coming from them, just huddling and shivering for warmth. I've never seen the Millers driveway so packed full of cars! Tons of people came to get bees, and many more hadn't arrived yet, as evident by how many were still on the back of the flatbed truck.

Once home we suited up, got our sugar water, ( did have to run back in to get the marshmallow because I forgot that part) and we set to installing our girls.

Jacob took the first set, the Italians we only realized later the pun in that (because he is Italian). His hive we took snapshots of.

Before we suited up we needed a picture of the box of girls!

Here Jacob is removing the queen cage, we get her situated before we let all the other girls out. She comes in her own special chamber. (you can see this in the video further down)

Once the queen cage is out of the box we had to remove the cork stopper that keeps her in there and replace it with a marshmallow. This cage allows the bees to get used to her being the new queen and they slowly eat the marshmallow away and free her. On Monday when we open up the hive again we'll remove the empty cage. Also we added a second hive box (body) and left the bee box inside it so any stragglers can work there way out.

And finally we come to my turn, Jacob took a video of it. Sorry it is kinda bouncy because he is helping me at times. But you get the gist of what went on.  I installed the Carniolans, this hive was much more active and had many flyers after I got done.

Here's the video for the live action.

Ready?

Tomorrow morning we begin our newest adventure....

Deodorant

I have been using the deodorant crystal for about a year now. But recently it hasn't been working as well, and I don't like being stinky! So I searched how to make your own deodorant. The recipes are endless, I found one from here that looked promising. I ended up changing it slightly, this is what I ended up doing.

1/4 c. Baking soda
1/4 c. cornstarch
4 + Tbl. coconut oil ( I ended up with around 5 Tbl. but start with 4)
5-10 drops of essential oil

The essential oil is optional, I used tea tree oil because I had it on hand. Tea Tree oil is also anti bacterial so I figured that couldn't hurt. I have used it for about 4 days now and so far no stink! I can't wait to give this a try on really hot days!

The Story of Stuff: Bottled water

I really love the story of stuff and they've done it again, the story of bottled water.

Roaring wind

Today we had wind, maybe I should type it WIND. Sustained 25-30 with gusts 45+ mph. All day. I really mean all day! It got so bad mom's fence collapsed, I am sure she's not the only one. I am surprised we didn't loose power. I am sure many people tonight are out of power due to power lines getting knocked down from trees. The roar has been so constant all day, now that it's gone it seems eerily quiet. The joys of April weather!

Spring Plantings

I am pretty proud of myself this year. I've gotten my potatoes in the ground a full month earlier than I did last year. Much of the delay last year was due to the seed potatoes unwillingness to sprout! This year I ordered them much earlier in order to give them time to sprout before I got them in the ground. We're trying out some new varieties this year. Carola, All Blue and Russian Banana. I've also decided to try planting them in tires and similarly to last year add another tire each time the potato out grows it. Potato Tire Tower! I was disappointed with the amount I got last year. However that bed was huge and difficult to keep watered, which added to the smaller amount we got. I got the tires for free at the local tire shop, which is nice! I like free materials.

Jacob built me some super awesome trellises to support our peas! All the other beds need them too, since I plan to be drowning in tomatoes by the end of the summer... but those can wait to be built. Today I planted our two types of peas, two lettuces, spinage and some green bunching onions. I need to do succession planting for the spinage that way they don't all ripen at once. I plan to do that with the lettuces too.

Our weather has been typical April, snow, rain, hail, sun, wind, warm, frost. It's like a light switch rave, on and off with the only constant being inconsistency. I hope it's nice when we get our bee's I don't want them to suffer in the rain when we dump them into there new home. 11 days until they arrive. I have some extra stuff to get at the Millers so I am heading out there thursday morning. Getting excited for the new addition to the farm!

Bee Hive's painted and prettied

I burned some pretty designs in the bee hives, just for fun. But I noticed that the native bee hives that I did this for last year, the wood burning design as faded and is almost invisible. Sad. But at least I'll get to enjoy it for a while.

Bee's when you have more than one hive can 'drift' into another hive and sometimes one hive will end up stronger than another, simply because it has more bee's in it. But drifting isn't as big an issue if you give the girls an address. That's what I originally meant the burned designs to be. But Jim our master beekeeper said they look for colors rather than designs. But since I had painted the bee hives in linseed oil and beeswax mix no paint was getting into them. We improvised and nailed an untreated piece of wood to the front of the hive to paint, that way the paint would have something to stick to.

Yellow and green. We had green left over from painting our house, the yellow we had to purchase though.
Here's the hive's pretty burned design side for us and the colored painted wood side for the bees.

Seed Starting Room

I've taken over the downstairs bedroom as the seed starting room. But come June it will be our bedroom, we move downstairs in the summer so we don't suffer as much when it gets in the 90* range. So far I have onions and leeks, celery, tomatoes, peppers, broccoli, and some herbs that aren't up yet. This week I have to start a bunch more stuff. WOOT! Mini grocery store starting in the basement!  I am hoping to have more than I could possibly need incase anything dies when it get's transplanted outside. I don't think I have enough onions though, I might get some sets at the hardware store.

Onions, Leeks and celery!

Tomatoes!!

Yes that's a pallet, with random wood legs.... we're cheep and the seeds don't care! LOL!

This was once a lovely shelf that we used in our food storage area (laundry room). We didn't want to buy a new shelf yet so we just used this one and put everything on the floor. The laundry room looks rather chaotic now!

Flooring Pictures

Please excuse the 'flooring porn' that is to follow. I found a good 'before' picture at Yule that shows the living room to dining room transition. Oh and it showcase's Jake being my Jake... that's balsamic vinegar he's "chugging."

Ok here we go!

Entry stairs.

Living room, kitchen, dining room.

Master.

Computer.

We still have the little bathroom to do and some finishing work like trim and stuff. Once the whole project is done I'll post a video of the sexyness.