Well it's our anniversary folks, 9 years we've been married. What did we do you ask? Dinner, romantic somethings, breakfast in bed maybe? Nope. We got up at 1:30 AM and again at 3:30 AM and stoked fires in our garden to warm the 36* area up. Then once dawn finally arrived we uncovered our poor tomato jungle and went into town. We joined the throngs of city foragers at the farmers market and then went and ordered some chickens! A lovely couple advertised on craigslist for chicken meat birds. Only not the freak show Cornish Cross meat birds.... these are Delaware and Red Stars! Jacob and I have been looking for a source for heritage meat animals and we've found gold. The couples blog (Mike and Kelsi) is here . It was an awesome few hours spent gabbing about food, gardening, and general environmental geekyness! We reserved 20 birds, when they get harvested late September we'll go and pick up our winter dinners! YAHOO!
In other garden news I got Yard of the Month from the city of Cheney gardeners. For me it's kinda like winning Employee of the Month. I was really honored, when we took the grass out of the front yard this spring and put in the wild spiral garden, I wasn't sure what reception we'd get. So far most of it's been positive.
I took a few videos of the garden to showcase it in it's wild state. The first is the front yard spiral garden. I know they are a little bumpy, but it's hard to walk around and film stuff at the same time.
Here's the big show, the back yard veggie garden and tomato jungle. Isn't it insane how fast it grows?
22 August 2010
I woke up this morning to a cool breeze with high clouds, the sent of rain on the air and Sunday at dawn quiet.
There's a certain amount of honey at the bottom of the straining bucket, mixed with the wax that will never come out. I could let it drip for weeks before getting it all. Frankly I am not that patient and trying to heat our bathroom/honey room hot enough for that honey to flow out.... not really environmentally friendly. We lost maybe a half pint, at most, of honey to the drain.
I've cleaned the buckets and filtered the wax to be weighed. A solar wax melter sounds really cool, but I don't think it would get hot enough in our area. I needed to filter out the wax mainly of sticks and wood shavings from using our hive tool to scrape off all that wax from the side of the frames. I put it in the solar dehydrator, on a 90* day and it only made the wax tacky. I am not sure the best way to filter it but this is what we did.
Beeswax just off the hive looks like tiny wax flakes, think wheat germ only sticky. I didn't think to take a picture of it, but I will with the next batch of supers we take off the hive. In order to get the wax to the image of beeswax we all have in our heads it must be melted and filtered. Really just melted. It melts at 140*. I placed the wax flakes into an unused garage sale pot and placed it in the oven to slowly melt. My oven only goes down to 170* so I have to keep turning it on and off so the wax doesn't scorch and change color. Once that pot is full of melted wax I set up the next step. Using a useless tupperware (with out a lid) I fill at least 2 inches with cold water. Using one of the strainers we bought for filtering the honey, I poured the melted wax through the strainer and into the cold water. The water makes the wax harden, and you get really funky shapes too.
I ended up with 1 lb. and almost 9 oz. Which is is less than I thought we would get. But the honey that is mixed in with the wax in the bottom of the straining bucket weighs more than I expected. I was thinking we might get around 5 lb. of wax. Still... it's beautiful. Candles, lip balms and lotions, oh my.
Forgive the giant post, I am just warning you right now this is going to be a long one. Videos and Pictures of our honey harvest....
First off let me explain something, we aren't using an extractor, because the one we wanted sold out and won't be in until late 2010 if not 2011. So we opted for the crush and strain method of honey harvest. That is exactly how it sounds, crush comb and honey then strain the wax out. We are going to do this again next year, yes the bees must make more wax in order to do it... but it's natural and we won't have any plastic, however small in the hive.
Sunday August 15, 2010
The Equipment:
Strain bucket bottom with 3/16" wholes drilled in.
Honey gate bucket with platform lid and two strainers in place.
A video of Jacob explaining it and putting it all together.
We put the honey supers inside a large tub with a sheet and a lid and stuck it outside to warm up. The hotter the honey the faster it runs, making extraction easier.
11 Frames of sticky goodness.
We did some measurements before we got carried away and this is what we came up with.
10 frames and box empty = 10.4 lb.
10 frames and box with wax and honey = 54.4 lb.
1 frame with wax and honey = 6 lb.
Total of 11 frames with wax and honey= 60.4 lb.
So that's 60.4 lb. of wood frames, wax and honey, subtract that 10.4 for the box and frame empty weight and you come up with 50 lb. of wax and honey!
Now mind you honey weighs more than water but still we should get quite a bit.... here we go!
In the video to follow you'll see I started out with a kitchen spatula that quickly turned into using the hive tool. The spatula was just no match for the strength of the wax.
Just to give you a perspective on the frame/insert and how much the bee's draw out the comb. The insert is all you start with, then the girls do the rest.
Jacob giving scraping a go!
Now it's time for the fun part. SMASHING!!
Monday August 16, 2010
A quick video about the strainer with some action shots. Overall I am really happy with the crush and strain method. It does take some patience because you can't bottle and enjoy the same day. With that said, really it's only about a 24 hour period to wait.
I couldn't get a video of the jarring process because of the honey gate leak. Plus it's usually good to have someones hands that are not sticky with honey holding the camera. But I did get a few pictures of the honey in there lovely jars. Ohhh....Ahhhh.... it's a lovely light golden color, and of course it tastes the best!
I am not sure of our total weight, once I get all the wax cleaned I'll weigh it so that we'll have a rough estimate of the total just honey weight. As far as volume I could probably figure that out but for now I am going to just rough estimate it at 2.5 gallons. Jake and I will go though about 5 gallons in a year. With baking, and using honey as our main sweetener for everything it's easy to do. But still it's a start.
Thank you lovely hive for teaching us patience and gratitude. Oh... and thanks for only stinging Jake when we robbed you!
So we finally saved enough money to get me a bike for the 3rd time in 4 years mind you. First it was a road bike, then it was a cruiser and now it's the recumbent. Seriously, all I want to do is bike! I have two issues (only two?) that prevent me from using an upright bike. One: I have one half of my hips (yes they flex... how do you think women make babies appear?) that is tilted, which means when I sit, I sit on one "sit" bone more than the other. Two: shoulder injury, any push up position or normal bike position makes for a burning shoulder. I know this is hard to imagine without much descriptions and hand gestures so we'll just say hips = off kilter, shoulders = on fire. What that means for biking is only one butt bone is on the seat, that blogger world is bad for any sort of long riding, even short ridding gets miserable. So with this new found hip knowledge I thought, Eureka!! I'll sell this road bike and get a cruiser with a giant foam butt pad! That's exactly what I did, I bought a grannie, vintage, cruiser, upright, sunday driving kinda bike. I made sure the one requirement of 4" thick foam was in place, the only problem you ask? No shocks. What I mean by no shocks is simply, every teeny tiny bump in the road came straight though the bike frame and into my sit bones. I began to pull my hair out with frustration at this point. Mean while Jacob is out riding, because he didn't have hip issues... jerk. :o) After I sold the second bike, serious research was needed. Maybe, I thought.... I can't ride in a standard position (this girl needed to ride side saddle if you feel me?)
Viola, recumbent! Too bad the price tag isn't Viola, it's Cha-Ching! Ok so we had to save up for one. After much research I wanted not only a recumbent but a trike. YES they make trikes for big kids too! Intro the TerraTrike. We decided to get Jacob's first, since he bikes to work daily. As funny as all of this trial and error was for me. I think Jacob started feeling left out, so his shoulders started to give him pain when riding his triathlon bike. Well why don't we both get butt bikes (my affectionate term for recumbents)!!
I finally got mine in August, Jacob's had his since October of 2009. We opted to get a doggie trailer, so we can go on long bike rides and when our mutt gets tired of running we can tow her. We'd like to do the Trail of the Coeur d'Alenes bike path, since it rides along water and mountain but the dog can't run that far so we got the trailer. On a side note, that trailer has even proved useful in hauling stuff, I caned about 15 pints of beans for my mom and used it to bring them over to her.
Here's Kai (mutts) first ride in the DoggieRide. Sorry about the wind noise, it can't be helped when biking. She keeps yawning because she's nervous, dog's yawn a lot when they are nervous. Kai got used to it fairly quickly, we're going slow because of the motion factor we don't want her to get sick.
I've also got cherries out in the solar dehydrator and I have peaches to cut up and dehydrate or freeze for oatmeal.
Our little tri-star strawberry patch is producing like mad house right now. They are a late ever bearing strawberry that is small and sweet. We're rooting some of the daughter plants right now to place into our old June bearing strawberry bed. I can't remember the name of the June bearer but it did nothing 2 years in a row, so it can no longer take up garden space. Jake and I ripped it out and are going to plant the tri-star daughters in it's place. If the second bed produces as much as the first one, we should be rich in strawberries next year.
The raspberry patch is doing really good this year. Well half of it is, the bed runs slightly up hill and the up hill quarter of the bed does produce raspberries but they are not as sweet. We're not sure what to do about supplemental water for that part of the patch. This is the first year of actual raspberry production, we let it get a little out of control until july then we had to cut some of the shoots that were leaning way out into the walk way. Next year, now we know better, we'll keep better control of the patch and help the shoots to grow straighter by tying them up.
Only one of our grapes survived the winter. Our freakshow apple has one branch with apples so big it needs support. All the other branches have maybe 4-5 apples on it though. So we'll most definitely need to get apples from elsewhere.
The herbs I have drying on the front rack are: purple and green sage, some basil, marjoram, winter savory, rosemary, thyme, and 2 types of mint. I am waiting for more basil to come in so I can make my own Italian seasoning (this is what you get when your husband was raised solely on pasta.) I didn't plant any parsley or cilantro this year because I still have some from last year. I still need to harvest some marigold flowers and lavender as well.
Our intention this weekend is to rob the bees of some honey.... pictures/videos will document the wild rumpus!
"There comes a time in life when you walk away from all the pointless drama
and people who create it, and surround yourself with people who make
you laugh so hard that you forget the bad and focus on the good. Life is
too short to be anything but happy."
I am not sure who spoke it first, but it sure fits with my world view right now. I am trying to live presently everyday, which is so much easier to do in the summer. I find joy in the visible daily growth of the squash, the slow ripening of my tomatoes from green to yellow to red, a strange stoplight to be sure.
I love picking strawberries in the rain, they never see the collection bowl.
The workshop was great, oh man were we tired when we got back! The two flights and pre-dawn wake up coupled with all the information crammed into our heads made us zombies for a while. Most of the information is explained in the tiny house book, but the questions from the participants got down to the nitty gritty of it all.
I didn't take any pictures of the group, but picture a hotel "conference" room with a bunch of people facing the front, there you got it.
I did get this one of us though, enjoying a HUGE ice cream cone for just a 'single' scoop, at the Portland Saturday/Sunday market. Ok, maybe huge is over rating it... but it was really rich, and way to much for the both of us. We decided we should have split one. Oh well.....
We're in discussion still about how to go about building a tiny house. I've contacted our code department but have yet to get a response. I think we might rent out the entire house if we move into the tiny house in the back yard. Then we could really save for land or whatever we decide to do at that point. We may just stay here and buy land to farm on. Or the other thing I thought of is leasing land. Can we get an acre or two to raise turkeys, chickens bees and a garden on but not live there? Maybe rent the land and exchange food instead of money? Ideas.....
I suppose I should get better about updating the life happenings around here. First off Jacob's eye is better, every now and then it still feels like he has something in it, but at least the pink eye is gone! Kai's foot injury is getting better (not sure if I mentioned that). But now one of our chickens is lame. One of "the twins" (for the life of me I can't tell two apart) won't walk much on her left leg, she's still getting around ok but I must keep an eye on her.
The huckleberries were a total bust this year. No snow pack will do that to them, all I can say is, sucks! But the vacation was great.
The garden is starting to produce FOOD! I am drowning in beans and zucchini. I have blanched and frozen some zucch's and canned some green beans. Today I am working on canning more that I got in bulk from the farmers market. Our tomatoes are coming on strong. I have a feeling they will all ripen at once and make me entirely busy for day's. Oh sigh over garden complaints, truly we will be rich in a sea of red this year!
I braided the soft neck garlic yesterday and bunched the hard-necks. A beautiful sight! Much of the hard-neck varieties are being given away as gifts.
Tomorrow we are off to our Tumbleweed Tiny House workshop in Portland. Which should be awesome and entirely weird since we are leaving here in the morning flying to P-town and flying back all in one day.
It amazes me how many very bright people are really in the dark about vegetable, insect and animal life. Now I don't claim to be an expert by any means but I can recognize a bumblebee. Large, rather fuzzy, smaller wings, sounds like a giant bomber airplane. My neighbor Justin who is a bachelor, a librarian, and has lived in this town his whole life motions to a bumblebee and says... "Wow, your bees are really getting huge, I mean look at the size of this one." Maybe he was referring to the bees in my yard I thought? But no, I said "that's not one of my bees, that's a bumblebee." A puzzled look appears on his face and he say's "really?"
I did show him what one of the honeybee's look like and I explained that bumblebees are wild native bees. Really honeybees are wild too, a bee keeper just has them on the property. I could no longer tell a bee what to do than tell a dandelion not be yellow. I understand that we can't know what we haven't been taught, but at the same time it really does sadden me that a 30 something man who's lived in this town his whole life doesn't recognize a bumblebee.
All humans used to have an agrarian origin, it's time we bring that back. I was in no way picking on Justin, or think he is stupid because he couldn't recognize a bumbler. It just kinda felt like a lead weight was dropped into my stomach when he said that. We have a long way to return to our roots some more than others.
Just incase you needed a refresher: the bumblebee is the big B-52 bomber in front.
