It might be said that I don't know - about honey bees, and whoever said it would be right. But I am interested in honey bees, so I try to pay attention to my beekeepers. For example, a few weeks ago they came over to check on "my" bees (their bees in my garden). This is a new hive, created this summer in the middle of the day by
stealing half of the hive with a queen egg cell and the bees that were
home while the rest of the workers were out working. I wasn't present for the "theft", but that's how I take the story I was told on "acquisition day". Anyhow, I had called them because I wasn't seeing a lot of bees, I thought, and found a couple crawling across the ground and unable to fly. He checked the bees and was tickled with his findings: lots of capped brood and lots of honey. The hive had a tall super and a smaller, honey super. He added another small super on top of a queen excluder and commented that if they kept making honey at that pace they would need to add another super in a few weeks. He was suited up, using smoke and moving calmly and deliberately. He remarked how docile my bees are.
Fast-forward to this past Friday. Melissa and I went out to check the garden and I noticed that her late planting of sunflowers were starting to blossom. All I could think about was those huge sunflowers must have lots of nectar and that reminded me that our beekeeper had said he would need to add another super in a few weeks, so I called them up to remind them. She told me that he planned to be over by 1 to check on them.
He pulled in, rather in a hurry as he had a flight in just 4 hours and it's two hours to the airport from our house and he lives a little further out. He had his bee suit half on as he hopped over the bottom two strands of electric fence that he didn't unhook, with a small super in one hand and his gloves in the other while trying to pull his suit the rest of the way on. He reached for the wildlife netting and his suit dropped to his ankles, which showed me he was wearing jean shorts and a t-shirt under the suit. He paused then, suited up and then strode across the garden to the bee hive. He loosened up the tie down strap to make room to add the new super and dropped the loop behind the hive. Then he yanked off the metal lid and the wooden one and set them down and peered in the top honey super. He picked it partway off and set it back down rather hard I thought and then gripped the queen excluder with it and picked them both off together.
I was about 20-25 yards away and could see the bees crawling around on the honey super that is under the excluder. When he went to put the exluder and top super back on it seemed that the excluder got ahead of his fingers and landed rather hard on top of the full honey super. The top super was put back on rather quickly and he began swatting at one of his legs while reaching for the lids. I was in full retreat as I watched him jam the wooden and metal lids on top of the hive, grab the empty super (that isn't needed yet) and move quickly from the garden, flailing his arms and swatting his body the whole way out to the road. When he had finished swatting and brushing bees from himself he came over and talked for a minute and got ready to leave, until I reminded him that he hadn't secured the hive. There was a look of dread in his eyes as he said "I'm just going to put a rock on top of it for now", which is what he did, quickly.
OBSERVATION: If you are kind and gentle with your bees, they will be kind and gentle with you. If you are hard and rough on your bees, they will be hard and rough on you!
Sunday, August 19, 2012
Wednesday, August 15, 2012
Preparedness
Last month's tornado showed me that I wasn't as prepared as I should have been.
1. I knew that the last time I tried to start our generator that I couldn't get it running.
2. I knew that when I tried to run the house on the generator the breaker kept tripping on the plug I installed for this secondary purpose, most likely because it is a GFI breaker, as required by code since the outlet is in the basement.
3. I knew that the emergency cord I had made up when we lived in a doublewide trailer to feed the house from the dryer outlet was not long enough to reach the laundry room in the modular we built.
4. I didn't know that none of the gas stations in town kept the generators they had brought in during the last big outage a few years ago.
5. We didn't have any water on hand.
The power went out just after 3pm on Thursday, July 26th. My cousin lives a few miles out of town on the opposite side as us and their power was out too, and based on the number of trees we neighbors cut off the road just after the storm passed, I knew it was going to be awhile before the lights came on again. After clearing all of the trees from the road except for the one tangled in the power lines, I decided it was time to see if I could get the generator running.
When you NEED something, you pay a little more attention to details than when you WANT something done "just to check to see if it works". It didn't take me long to figure out that I had turned the fuel off on the generator. It fired up on the 1st pull after the valve was opened.
We found some heavy duty extension cords and plugged in the downstairs refrigerators (mid-size fridge used during canning season and a college dorm fridge) and freezers. We consolidated everything from our upstairs kitchen fridge/freezer to those downstairs for two reasons. First, the fuller a cooler is, the easier it is to keep it cold and, secondly, we only had to run 2 extension cords, which is all we HAD.
Around 8pm I called the power company, just to make sure they knew the power was out on our road; they did and they gave me an estimated time to restore of midnight, Friday. My cousin called Thursday evening to gloat about having taken a shower because they got their generator hooked up and told us about no one having gas in town.
On Friday morning, after running the generator long enough to get the freezers back down to 0º from 20-24ºF and running to my cousin's for a quick shower and 50 gallons of water, we set out to the next town over that had gas with the 1 good gas can that I could find. I also had designs on getting another circuit breaker (non-GFI) and plug and cable from the hardware store there. We stopped to get gas first, which was a good move because while we had to wait on the 2 people that arrived at the pumps just before we got there, the line behind us was 6 deep and growing by the time we left. The station had 3 5-gallon cans left so I bought one of those; with the full tank of the generator that gave me about 14 gallons of gas, or enough to run about 67 hours continuously. At the hardware store I realized that I didn't know what make of breaker I needed and they were out of receptacles anyhow. I ended up paying 50-some bucks for a generator-rated 50-foot extension cord.
Back at the house we figured out that we could run the emergency cord out the dryer vent to reach the generator. It makes me nervous as heck to run it that way because if someone should throw the main back on to the grid, the consequences could be unlivable. First on my list of upgrades is a proper flop-over switch. Scratch that - I'm going whole house coverage!
1. I knew that the last time I tried to start our generator that I couldn't get it running.
2. I knew that when I tried to run the house on the generator the breaker kept tripping on the plug I installed for this secondary purpose, most likely because it is a GFI breaker, as required by code since the outlet is in the basement.
3. I knew that the emergency cord I had made up when we lived in a doublewide trailer to feed the house from the dryer outlet was not long enough to reach the laundry room in the modular we built.
4. I didn't know that none of the gas stations in town kept the generators they had brought in during the last big outage a few years ago.
5. We didn't have any water on hand.
The power went out just after 3pm on Thursday, July 26th. My cousin lives a few miles out of town on the opposite side as us and their power was out too, and based on the number of trees we neighbors cut off the road just after the storm passed, I knew it was going to be awhile before the lights came on again. After clearing all of the trees from the road except for the one tangled in the power lines, I decided it was time to see if I could get the generator running.
When you NEED something, you pay a little more attention to details than when you WANT something done "just to check to see if it works". It didn't take me long to figure out that I had turned the fuel off on the generator. It fired up on the 1st pull after the valve was opened.
We found some heavy duty extension cords and plugged in the downstairs refrigerators (mid-size fridge used during canning season and a college dorm fridge) and freezers. We consolidated everything from our upstairs kitchen fridge/freezer to those downstairs for two reasons. First, the fuller a cooler is, the easier it is to keep it cold and, secondly, we only had to run 2 extension cords, which is all we HAD.
Around 8pm I called the power company, just to make sure they knew the power was out on our road; they did and they gave me an estimated time to restore of midnight, Friday. My cousin called Thursday evening to gloat about having taken a shower because they got their generator hooked up and told us about no one having gas in town.
On Friday morning, after running the generator long enough to get the freezers back down to 0º from 20-24ºF and running to my cousin's for a quick shower and 50 gallons of water, we set out to the next town over that had gas with the 1 good gas can that I could find. I also had designs on getting another circuit breaker (non-GFI) and plug and cable from the hardware store there. We stopped to get gas first, which was a good move because while we had to wait on the 2 people that arrived at the pumps just before we got there, the line behind us was 6 deep and growing by the time we left. The station had 3 5-gallon cans left so I bought one of those; with the full tank of the generator that gave me about 14 gallons of gas, or enough to run about 67 hours continuously. At the hardware store I realized that I didn't know what make of breaker I needed and they were out of receptacles anyhow. I ended up paying 50-some bucks for a generator-rated 50-foot extension cord.
Back at the house we figured out that we could run the emergency cord out the dryer vent to reach the generator. It makes me nervous as heck to run it that way because if someone should throw the main back on to the grid, the consequences could be unlivable. First on my list of upgrades is a proper flop-over switch. Scratch that - I'm going whole house coverage!
Monday, August 13, 2012
TORNADO!
We're not supposed to have tornadoes in north central Pennsylvania, but on Thursday, July 26, 2012 we had one touch down here in Coudersport, PA. I heard it coming. And it passed over/very near to our house before continuing over the town to where it touched down just to the east. The National Weather Service confirmed it was a tornado, along with one in nearby Elmira, NY.
I subscribe to weather.com's text notification service for severe weather and received a notification at about 2:55pm that we were under a tornado warning. Always the skeptic, I opened the sliding glass door opening onto our back deck, which faces westerly. Everyone always talks about tornadoes sounding like a train, but I don't think so. I would describe the sound as a dull, continuous roar, like you might hear when blowing over the end of a small pipe, only louder. WORRRRRRRRRRRRRL. I retreated to the basement, where Melissa and the dogs were cleaning the basement bedroom, and went into my den and watched the weather unfolding. The tree tops began circling in wide arches like I have never seen before. When the rain blanked out the treeline some 150 feet away some time between 3:05 and 3:10 pm, I decided it was time to move to our "safe room". The safe room is a closet I built in the middle of the basement that is along the front wall, which is underground and the concrete wall that keeps it from pushing in because of the back being a walk-out at the south-western corner. I built the closet big enough for our family of 4 to hunker down in and Melissa, 3 dogs and I fit inside without too much crowding.
We were lucky in our subdivision overlooking the town. Only one building was hit by falling trees, the neighbor's garage on the downwind side of us. We had the top come out of the top of a large beech tree at the southern end of the house. It fell eastward, between the deck stairs and the shed about 20 feet away. It missed the fence's 4x4 post by mere inches, taking out just 4 boards.
In the garden on the northern end of the house, the plants did okay for the most part. All of the peppers were laid down, pointing at the house; most of them have erected themselves. The tomatoes fared the worst. They rubbed hard on their ties and some of them were broken off at the ground. Many of them have since caught the blight, I believe because of the stress of their wounds. The top snapped in one of the maple trees at the top edge of the garden, and is still hanging there. Another 50 feet or so and another had it's topmost branches stripped of all it's leaves and the ends of it's branches too. The oak tree, our best oak tree, on the downwind side of it was pushed over onto some smaller trees. It leaned there for over a week before coming the rest of the way down on the 9th of August. It is out of the frame, to the right and I missed getting a photo of it before it fell completely.
No one was hurt on our road, nor by the tornado but the storm did cause one wind-related death when a tree fell on a camper nearby.
Power was out throughout much of the county due to numerous fallen trees and it was out on our road until Sunday around noon.
I subscribe to weather.com's text notification service for severe weather and received a notification at about 2:55pm that we were under a tornado warning. Always the skeptic, I opened the sliding glass door opening onto our back deck, which faces westerly. Everyone always talks about tornadoes sounding like a train, but I don't think so. I would describe the sound as a dull, continuous roar, like you might hear when blowing over the end of a small pipe, only louder. WORRRRRRRRRRRRRL. I retreated to the basement, where Melissa and the dogs were cleaning the basement bedroom, and went into my den and watched the weather unfolding. The tree tops began circling in wide arches like I have never seen before. When the rain blanked out the treeline some 150 feet away some time between 3:05 and 3:10 pm, I decided it was time to move to our "safe room". The safe room is a closet I built in the middle of the basement that is along the front wall, which is underground and the concrete wall that keeps it from pushing in because of the back being a walk-out at the south-western corner. I built the closet big enough for our family of 4 to hunker down in and Melissa, 3 dogs and I fit inside without too much crowding.
We were lucky in our subdivision overlooking the town. Only one building was hit by falling trees, the neighbor's garage on the downwind side of us. We had the top come out of the top of a large beech tree at the southern end of the house. It fell eastward, between the deck stairs and the shed about 20 feet away. It missed the fence's 4x4 post by mere inches, taking out just 4 boards.
In the garden on the northern end of the house, the plants did okay for the most part. All of the peppers were laid down, pointing at the house; most of them have erected themselves. The tomatoes fared the worst. They rubbed hard on their ties and some of them were broken off at the ground. Many of them have since caught the blight, I believe because of the stress of their wounds. The top snapped in one of the maple trees at the top edge of the garden, and is still hanging there. Another 50 feet or so and another had it's topmost branches stripped of all it's leaves and the ends of it's branches too. The oak tree, our best oak tree, on the downwind side of it was pushed over onto some smaller trees. It leaned there for over a week before coming the rest of the way down on the 9th of August. It is out of the frame, to the right and I missed getting a photo of it before it fell completely.
Power was out throughout much of the county due to numerous fallen trees and it was out on our road until Sunday around noon.
Tuesday, June 19, 2012
Garden Progress Update
The Cauliflower are under attack, along with the beans you can see in the beds in the back half of the garden. I believe the culprits are army worms, based solely on the leaves being eaten from the edges in. There were flea beetles in the eggplants, which are above the green beans, a chipmunk is eating half of each strawberry left to ripen and the beets are disappearing, I think crows might be getting into them.
Other than that, the plants are all healthy and growing well. Melissa visited relatives down state this weekend and she said their plants look sick compared to ours :-). That makes my competitive side happy!
I'll try to get some pictures posted of the back half of the garden soon.
Chickens, Chores and Staining Tip
On Thursday morning I had scheduled a contractor to install gutters on our house so bright and early Luke and I were out putting silicon in the nail holes of the aluminum fascia where they had pulled through and tacking it down before they arrived at 9:45. In the meantime, Melissa started building a small chicken fence inside our large dog fence. She went out to our friend's around noon and got the chickens.
When the contractors were finishing up around 2:30 with the gutters we were talking about the things I had to do that afternoon, which included staining the deck floor and the steps on the stairways. He passed on a tip that we found very useful: instead of using a brush for staining, use one of those rectangular paint edging pads that you can put a broom handle in. We happened to have one and gave it a try. Melissa stained the entire deck floor in an hour and a half, the same amount of time it took me to brush-stain one of the 2 sets of steps.. The last time she did it with a brush and it took her all day. She did the other set of steps in about 30 minutes.
At 5pm we started working on a chicken coop for our new "flock". We found some left-over pressure-treated 2x2 square railing spindles to use for the frame. Then we found some tongue and groove cedar plank cut-offs left over from my brother's camp we had planned to use for a dog house that we used on the two sides. We had a sheet and three quarters of 3/16" interior plywood that we used for the floor, front, back and roof. I keep a supply of deck screws and roofing nails on hand and we had shingles that were left-over from building our house. By 9pm we put the chicken coop in the fence and then put the last piece of fence up and locked the chickens in their new coop for the night.
On Friday morning we got the roll of wildlife netting that we had left over from fencing the garden and and covered the entire enclosure to keep Miss Houdini in. SHE'S NOT GETTING IN MY GARDEN! We've been getting 2 eggs a day ever since. - Thank you, Sharon!
Tuesday, June 5, 2012
Vermin Venison
Last year we planted a flat of Strawberries (4 dozen) in front of the boulders in front of our house. Some of them disappeared before fall and I strongly suspected the local Whitetail Deer population. This past week I've been watching my nice lush plants with berries with just a hint of color starting to appear in them.
This morning, while going out for our walk, I discovered that I no longer have berries with any color, and most of the leaves on most of the plants were gone as well. Out of the 4 dozen plants we planted last spring, we transplanted just 17 survivors to the bottom of the fenced-in, back garden and only 3 of them escaped undamaged. The rest are just gone, even though I had let the sporadic volunteer wheat from the straw mulch I put down grow up around them, standing.
The incriminating hoof prints in the road in front of the garden, pointed directly at the strawberries are all the proof I need. Yes, deer are vermin, tasty vermin, but still vermin; and I'll be fighting the ever-losing battle to eliminate them again this fall!
This morning, while going out for our walk, I discovered that I no longer have berries with any color, and most of the leaves on most of the plants were gone as well. Out of the 4 dozen plants we planted last spring, we transplanted just 17 survivors to the bottom of the fenced-in, back garden and only 3 of them escaped undamaged. The rest are just gone, even though I had let the sporadic volunteer wheat from the straw mulch I put down grow up around them, standing.
The incriminating hoof prints in the road in front of the garden, pointed directly at the strawberries are all the proof I need. Yes, deer are vermin, tasty vermin, but still vermin; and I'll be fighting the ever-losing battle to eliminate them again this fall!
Wednesday, May 23, 2012
Mounds of Dirt
On 12 May we hurriedly planted our broccoli in the traditional garden rows we grew up with, not exactly understanding what we've been reading in "THE VEGETABLE GARDENER'S BIBLE" by Edward C. Smith and on several gardening blogs. We were in a hurry because our fathers were arriving for our daughter's college graduation on the 13th. A week later, Thursday evening actually, as we were sitting at the picnic table looking at the garden and discussing our growing plans, we realized just how much space our 8 doz broccoli consumed (our garden is now a multifamily garden). If we continued to plant in traditional rows, with traditional walkways between the rows, we would run out of space before we planted half of what we wanted.
I started thinking about last year's garden that did really well even though I had spaced the rows really, really tight. It worked because we applied a PILE of mushroom soil to transform our woods soil/clay into decent top soil. Since we took out some trees to double the size of our garden to about 1/4 an acre, we applied 30 yards of mushroom soil again this year. I deduced that we could probably plant the garden as tightly this year as we did last, with all of that extra nitrogen laying around. With our new plan formulated, we went in for the evening and I picked up "THE VEGETABLE GARDENER'S BIBLE" to refresh myself about the different requirements for some of the plants I would be buying the next day. I read again "deep, wide beds", but it still didn't click.
On Friday morning I tilled some of the garden again, while waiting on the garden center to open. After picking up all of the plants on my list, and waiting for the heat of the sun to dissipate some, we planted the the Hungarian Wax Hot Peppers. Melissa had scheduled dinner out with a few of her friends. After she left I puttered around the garden some more and I put a string up below the hot peppers and stepped back to look at it. I thought to myself, what a waste of good mushroom soil. All of that work going into a path! Then I got an idea. What if I shoveled the good, nutrient-rich, soil out of the path and put it in the next row to be planted?
Bright and early Saturday morning I left Melissa weeding her flower beds while I went for a load of mushroom soil (1 yard) for our very front garden and for the top, back edge of the back garden where we missed spreading some earlier, and more importantly, a flat shovel. As soon as I got back I backed the truck up to the back garden and set to work with my new shovel.
I found scooping the loosely tilled soil out of the defined path to be relatively easy, except for areas where we stepped on it repeatedly while planting the hot peppers. I remedied that problem by re-tilling the tramped in areas. Tilling the pathway helped immensely in reducing the the amount of force required to move the dirt and it wasn't very long before I had a 55 foot long path below the the hot peppers.
Melissa finished with her flower beds as I was reaching the end of the row and she decided she liked the idea except for one thing, the path wasn't quite wide enough for our pull along wagon so she widened it out by another 1/2 a shovel width. The BOOK said he (Edward) likes wide rows of 30, 36 and even 48 inches. Needing a number of rows for different plant types, I opted for 30 inch rows so I measured down 30 inches and began digging the next path. We went the whole width of the new garden and ended up with some really deep beds. We leveled off the dirt we had piled on each row as we dug the path above it and ended up with our planting surface, and I was quite pleased.
Late Saturday afternoon we were finally ready to plant. We planted all of the raised beds we had created and then stood back to look them over. What we have looks very good and we're quite pleased but something didn't seem quite right. I studied the book Saturday evening and it hit me like a 2x4 up a'side the head - I made the BASE 30" not the top! Dirt doesn't stack straight up like blocks very well, it tends to settle outward at the base until there is sufficient width to support the height.
On Sunday we worked the back half of the garden, putting in wider beds. My goal was for a 36" wide planting surface on top and I found that a 40" base allowed me to achieve that with the amount of dirt I was digging out of the pathway (4-6") without getting the sides too steep to hold up. I was VERY please with the results and next year I will redo the front half of the garden to have the wider, 36" RAISED beds.
That was my final epiphany: RAISED BEDS. Every time I read about raised garden beds I always pictured a wooden box structure with dirt poured in it. It never occurred to me that a raised bed could be made without any construction materials! Mounds of Dirt aka RAISED BEDS!
I started thinking about last year's garden that did really well even though I had spaced the rows really, really tight. It worked because we applied a PILE of mushroom soil to transform our woods soil/clay into decent top soil. Since we took out some trees to double the size of our garden to about 1/4 an acre, we applied 30 yards of mushroom soil again this year. I deduced that we could probably plant the garden as tightly this year as we did last, with all of that extra nitrogen laying around. With our new plan formulated, we went in for the evening and I picked up "THE VEGETABLE GARDENER'S BIBLE" to refresh myself about the different requirements for some of the plants I would be buying the next day. I read again "deep, wide beds", but it still didn't click.
On Friday morning I tilled some of the garden again, while waiting on the garden center to open. After picking up all of the plants on my list, and waiting for the heat of the sun to dissipate some, we planted the the Hungarian Wax Hot Peppers. Melissa had scheduled dinner out with a few of her friends. After she left I puttered around the garden some more and I put a string up below the hot peppers and stepped back to look at it. I thought to myself, what a waste of good mushroom soil. All of that work going into a path! Then I got an idea. What if I shoveled the good, nutrient-rich, soil out of the path and put it in the next row to be planted?
Bright and early Saturday morning I left Melissa weeding her flower beds while I went for a load of mushroom soil (1 yard) for our very front garden and for the top, back edge of the back garden where we missed spreading some earlier, and more importantly, a flat shovel. As soon as I got back I backed the truck up to the back garden and set to work with my new shovel.
I found scooping the loosely tilled soil out of the defined path to be relatively easy, except for areas where we stepped on it repeatedly while planting the hot peppers. I remedied that problem by re-tilling the tramped in areas. Tilling the pathway helped immensely in reducing the the amount of force required to move the dirt and it wasn't very long before I had a 55 foot long path below the the hot peppers.
Melissa finished with her flower beds as I was reaching the end of the row and she decided she liked the idea except for one thing, the path wasn't quite wide enough for our pull along wagon so she widened it out by another 1/2 a shovel width. The BOOK said he (Edward) likes wide rows of 30, 36 and even 48 inches. Needing a number of rows for different plant types, I opted for 30 inch rows so I measured down 30 inches and began digging the next path. We went the whole width of the new garden and ended up with some really deep beds. We leveled off the dirt we had piled on each row as we dug the path above it and ended up with our planting surface, and I was quite pleased.
Late Saturday afternoon we were finally ready to plant. We planted all of the raised beds we had created and then stood back to look them over. What we have looks very good and we're quite pleased but something didn't seem quite right. I studied the book Saturday evening and it hit me like a 2x4 up a'side the head - I made the BASE 30" not the top! Dirt doesn't stack straight up like blocks very well, it tends to settle outward at the base until there is sufficient width to support the height.
On Sunday we worked the back half of the garden, putting in wider beds. My goal was for a 36" wide planting surface on top and I found that a 40" base allowed me to achieve that with the amount of dirt I was digging out of the pathway (4-6") without getting the sides too steep to hold up. I was VERY please with the results and next year I will redo the front half of the garden to have the wider, 36" RAISED beds.
That was my final epiphany: RAISED BEDS. Every time I read about raised garden beds I always pictured a wooden box structure with dirt poured in it. It never occurred to me that a raised bed could be made without any construction materials! Mounds of Dirt aka RAISED BEDS!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)