From Yesterday and This Morning

We didn't expect to see a tree frog clinging to the towel cabinet in the bathroom last night, so it's not surprising that my exclamation of amazement when I spotted it was a little alarming to Brandon.  Especially since I had just bragged about a video I made of a long black snake that Puck and I had an encounter with earlier in the day.  Brandon seemed relieved when he found out it was a tiny frog with suction cup fingers that I was taking pictures of, and not Carlos, our evicted house snake.  Frog relocation is less exciting than snake relocation, but also less likely to prevent us from being able to sleep!

I don't think this black snake is Carlos, since it wasn't as long and fat as I remember Carlos to be.  But, I think this video shows how docile our black snakes are.  As you can see, the snake had plenty of opportunity to be frightened by Puck and myself, but it was never aggressive, even when I petted it.  Nice snake.  I hope he eats lots of mice.  

I hope the snakes do not eat any of the five chicks that the mamma chicken has hatched.  This morning I fed them some hamburger buns, removed six unhatched eggs that she was no longer sitting on, and considered releasing them to the yard.  In the end I opted to leave them in the brooder with their mother for a few more days.  They just look so tiny it's hard for me to imagine that they can be safe, even with a very protective mother.  I'm sporting a blood blister on my right hand from daring to pick one of them up.  She did not approve.  

You can see in this short video clip that the mamma hen does not want me to touch her babies.  

This hen reminds me of the funny looking lady chicken from the Foghorn Leghorn Loony Tunes.  Remember the hen, Miss Prissy, with the funny bonnet, glasses, and her knitting needles that Foghorn was wooing?  Poncho the rooster likes to perch on top of the brooder and make clucking noises at the hen and babies.  I keep waiting for him to say "That's a joke, ah say, that's a joke, son." Ha!

I spent some time trimming back the long grass around the two raised garden beds inside my orange garden fence.  The potato plants are over a foot high now.  Some of the garlic cloves are growing, and the melon seeds that I was sure were so old they were dead, have grown to five inch tall plants and need to be thinned.  

This is my second experience growing potatoes, and once again, they are being attacked by flea beetles!  The leaves aren't supposed to be transparent, I'm sure.  I'm going to try to dose them with some diotomaceous earth, but the last time I couldn't keep up with the treatments because it rained nearly every time I sprinkled it on.  I piled up some old straw around the stems.  

I tell myself that the extra long grass inside my garden fence is a meadow.  It has several different species of grasses and clovers.  I've decided to let the seed heads mature so I can harvest them and seed some areas of bare dirt if I need.  This will be my first meadow seed harvest.  

The onions are doing well, and I have four small kale plants to look forward to.  The most interesting thing, I think, are the buckwheat plants.  I expected more of a grass like plant, but these remind me of sweet potato leaves, and even though the largest plant is only about twelve inches tall, they are already blooming!  Buckwheat is supposed to be good for honeybees.  I don't think I will get enough seed to be worth trying to eat, but maybe I can collect the seeds and grow more plants?  

Brandon used the rough cut trail mower to cut the tall grass in the west field.  We still debate the best way to manage our fields.  I tend to want to let everything grow wild as I love the diversity of an older field and want to promote wildlife.  Brandon wants to cut it before it gets so woolly it bogs down our small scale equipment, and he wants the grass to be nice and thick like you get when it's mowed more frequently which cuts back the small trees and brambles that sprout.  I think our compromises are making some lovely pasture and hay fields.  I can tell that we have more lush vegetation than we did three summers ago when we started mowing it and stopped letting people harvest the hay.  It drives some people a little nutty to see all our hay "wasted" instead of baled, but since we don't have animals yet, I think it's worth the loss of the small income selling the hay would produce to mulch our pastures with the trimmings.  

With our future donkey in mind, we're exploring some low scale hay making techniques that don't require a big investment in equipment.  To make hay, you have to cut the grass, let it dry, rake it up a little so it gets good and dry on the bottom of the pile, and then store it somewhere.  I spent less than five minutes raking hay from the field and was able to accumulate a giant pile which I used to cover the chicken coop floor.  

It smelled so nice, like fresh cut grass, and makes the chicken coop seem like a fluffy bed.  Of course, as soon as I put it in the coop the chickens had to come scratch it around and look for tasty bits.  The chickens like the hay, so I think the donkey would appreciate it during the winter too, if we can come up with some way to store it out of the weather.  Brandon has a home made baler in mind, so expect some pictures of that project soon.  

I wish I'd had the presence of mind to take our guests to see the rose and honeysuckle hedge during the firefly party.  I'm sure the kids got to see it, but I didn't remember to show it to the adults.  The honeysuckle smell permeates the air, and when you look closely you can see the pink rose bushes sprinkled throughout.  

The honeybees are feasting on the honeysuckle.  I'm afraid the roses might not survive the honeysuckle strangulation, but it smells so nice I can't bring myself to trim it back yet.  

Even more exciting than a blue chicken egg, newly hatched baby chicks, or a tree frog in the bathroom - cherries on the little cherry tree!  Only three, but still - they are cherries!  My heart actually sped up when I saw these little fruits.  I've planted five cherry trees over the years, and only one is thriving.  I'm determined to eat a home grown cherry some day, and I may tie all my hopes to this little tree.  

Visiting Other Peoples Places

A real cabbage patch!  As someone who was a six year old girl during the cabbage patch doll craze of 1983, there's no way I could visit my parents garden without taking a peak inside the cabbage plants, just to make sure there weren't any baby dolls growing in there.  

No babies yet, but this patch is still young.  The plants were so green and healthy, and growing in nice dark soil.  This garden is already an inspiration.  

And look - strawberries!  These are still green, but already perfectly shaped.   

My parents garden already has tomato plants, grape vines, a blue berry shrub, and various other tiny sprouts from seeds that have been planted.  I predict this to be a good year for their garden.  

Outside the garden fence, the ground near the bee hive is covered in these pretty purple flowers.  I believe this is lyreleaf sage (Salvia lyrata), which is a native perennial wild flower.  

It makes for a beautiful blue meadow for the bee hive to live in, although we never saw a honeybee drinking nectar from one of the blooms.  Maybe the entrance to the flower is too small for honey bees?  

While my parents place was inspiration for the garden, a recent visit to Joe's farm was an inspiration of animals!  Even on the drive there, this family of geese blocked our path as they moseyed down the middle of the road.  

Look at all those fuzzy animals!  Animals with babies even.  I told Joe that I wanted to run through his pasture petting all the animals and he said that if I could get any of them to hold still, I was welcome to it.  So tempting to try.   

I settled for calling to them from the fence, and managed to capture the attention of the donkeys.  

The donkeys seemed to like us back, unlike the cows and sheep which kept their distance.  

Even the baby donkey let us pet her long ears.  Donkey noses are the softest noses, I'm sure.  

Not that the sheep would bring their lambs close enough for me to compare noses.  

Once the donkeys had our attention, they weren't going to share it anyway.  They didn't even want to share with each other!

Joe has hundreds of ducks.  The day we visited he had just taken a whole batch of adult ducks (mamma ducks, as his little boy calls them), which had been out on pasture, to the processor.  He has four hundred more baby ducks in the barn, ready to go out on grass as soon as they are old enough.  Wow.  That's a lot of ducks!  

How many ducks does Rain have?  Zero.  Not fair!  

Party Day! Cup Cakes, Bee Hives, and Balloons

Cupcakes!  Happy Birthday cupcakes, even.  On Saturday we celebrated my nieces' birthdays.  They are 8 and 6 this year.  Time flies, doesn't it?  Has it been an entire year since I wrote about my nieces' fifth birthday party?  

I spent the early morning hours on the day of the party having fun baking cupcakes, wrapping presents, and squeezing icing.  I love an excuse to bake, but ever since we started planning our hike to Machu Picchu, over a year ago, I've limited myself to baking only healthy protein bars and cookies made with almond flour, unless it was a celebration, of course.  It was liberating to get to pile as much sugary icing on these cup cakes as I wanted!    

I even had time to create a cup cake carrying case, by wrapping a cardboard box with paper, and lining it with foil.  I used a coconut icing for German chocolate cake for some of the cupcakes, since it's a favorite flavor with some of the adults.  I had to laugh when one little girl was gazing into the cup cake box, pointed at the coconut frosting, and asked me in a very serious voice "what is that stuff?".  Ha! 

Hopefully no one noticed that I was out of birthday themed paper for my box, and that I used christmas wrap instead.  

Before the party started, Brandon and I parked the cupcakes in the shade at my parents house, and helped mom with some bee hive work.   She ordered several new hive boxes and a bunch of frames to fill them.  Everything comes un-assembled, so while mom and I painted the outsides of the boxes, Brandon used a hammer to nail the frames together.  

The four sides of the frames are nailed together with small nails.  Each frame uses eight nails, and Brandon put together about fifty frames in just a few hours.  

Here you can see the pieces of wood that will become the outside of the supers, and the new hive base.  We have enough supers now to make a whole new hive, plus put some small supers on our other hives, should they need it.  If our bees survive the winter and swarm again in the spring, we will be ready to capture another swarm.  

 Mom convinced me to peak inside our three working hives to see how they were doing.  I needed convincing, because this was supposed to be a party day, and we had already been doing so much work!  But once I got geared up and had the smoker smoking after my first try (a first!), I realized it wasn't so hot that I was going to become a sweaty mess, and it really only took a few minutes to look inside each hive.  Under the lid of the first hive was this blue tailed skink.  I know from trying to catch them when I was a kid that if you grab them by the tail, their tail pops right off!  It's very disturbing to have a wiggly skink tail in your hands, believe me.  I was happy to get a picture and let this one keep his tail.   

The small super on top of the hive that was a captured swarm, from this spring, didn't have any wax or honey built in it.  I'm not sure, but this may mean this hive isn't very strong, which means it may have a hard time making it through the winter.  In the photo above, you can see all the bees working on the thin piece of foundation wax we placed in the frame.  

The hive next door had lots of wax, but no honey in their top super, but the hive by the garden had about half of the frames filled with capped honey.  They may have enough honey to share with us!

Finally, it was party time!  By the time we got the water balloons filled using the garden hose, the kids were so anxious to get started they could barely keep their hands off the stack of balloon ammunition.  I've heard rumors of fancy water balloon gadgets that fill forty balloons at a time, but all I had were the old fashioned kind you have to do one at a time.  Filling enough balloons with water to load a tub took quite a while, even with lots of little helpers.  

Only two rules.  Don't aim for anyone's head, and before you can arm yourself with another balloon you must run and touch the tree.  This rule was to keep anyone from standing at the tub and dominating the game.  

Water balloons are just like I remembered from when I was a kid.  They don't burst when you want them too!  I saw lots of great throws which resulted in a child getting whoomped by a fully loaded water balloon which didn't pop until it hit the ground.  Ouch!  Or you drop them and they get your own feet wet.  No one seemed to mind though.  

After a day of water balloons, cake, ice cream, chili spaghetti, presents, and silly string fights, I remembered that I brought some balloons advertised as light-up balloons.  I thought this meant they would have a faint glow in the dark.  Oh no, no dim glow here, these balloons actually had lights in them!  They were so cool! 

Boo!

It was really neat to watch the kids bounce the balloons in the dark.  A fitting end to party day!

Stacks of Honey!

Look at those bricks of beautiful gold!  We harvested an entire small super of honey from the hive by the garden last Friday.  I'm so impressed with these bees.  They managed to fill an entire super of honey for us, and send out a new swarm in the same spring season.  

Before I got to the well established hive with the honey, I checked our captured swarm to see how they were doing.  The photo above shows all the yellowish brood cells that are capped with baby bees inside.  The white cells are capped over honey.  These bees are a growing family.  Almost all the frames in this one super has some honey and some brood.  They were so full, that dad had to go to the farm and garden store to buy a new super so we could add a second story to their home.  

Here's a close up of the brood cells that aren't capped yet.  See the white wormy looking things - I hesitate to call them maggots, since maggots are gross - in the bottom of the cells?  Little bee babies all curled up.  Okay, they look like maggots, but I was still excited to see them.    

I'm pretty sure that big bee on the top left is a drone.  The drones are the males, who don't do any work, but are just there to mate with new queens.  I think the drones don't have stingers, so they are okay to pick up and handle bare handed.  I could tell he was much larger than the other bees, but I wasn't quite confident enough to pick him up without my gloves.  Maybe next time.  

This is the hive that I took the honey from.  For some reason, we didn't fill the super with enough frames, so the two spaces on the right are just the wax and honey that the bees made, without the guidance of the frame.  It really goes to show how the supers and frames are set up to create the perfect width of honeycomb and gap between.  It's exactly how the bees do it if left to their own design.  

Because this super was completely full of capped over honey, I wanted to harvest it all, so when it came time to pull the combs that weren't hanging on frames, I just had to pull it out by the clump.  The problem with this is that there was honey oozing from the edges, and when I brushed the bees from the clumps, lots of bees got coated in honey and dozens of them drowned in it.  I can see how the frames are much better for the bee keeper and the bees.  I'm not sure if it's normal to kill that many bees when harvesting.  

I've read that a small super of honey can weigh up to forty pounds.  I believe it!  I held each frame over the hive as I pulled it from the super, and used a small brush to brush away the bees before I added the frame to my stack.  By the time I did seven frames, my arms were shaking.  My left arm and shoulder were sore for days after this job.  I had no idea I was such a wimp!

If I can remember correctly, this is our third year with honey bees.  I felt like this was the first time I opened the hive and didn't feel anxious.  I was actually calm enough while working with the frames and brushing away the bees, that I got into the groove and really enjoyed them.  I had bees buzzing on my veil, and thousands of bees coating the outside of the hive I was working in, which was inches from my legs and feet, and I didn't have that hurry-up feeling that I usually get when opening the hive.  The bees were cool, so I kept my cool.  It was cool.  

Mom used a knife to cut the comb from the frames. If we had an extractor, we could just cut off the caps, extract the honey from the comb, and give the empty comb back to the bees so they don't have to recreate it.  

Just like last time, we squished the honeycomb with our hands in a metal strainer basket, and collected the honey in a crock.  

This is the part that took so long. We had enough honey that we had to empty our crock and then squish some more.  

Everything was a sticky mess - the kitchen, the door knobs, the floor, our clothes.  We decided that the next time we would put the frames in a big plastic tub, so the frames didn't drip on everything while they were waiting their turn to be squished.  

We dipped the honey through another strainer before we poured it into jars.  It's so perfect!  It amazes me that there are boxes of honey out in the garden that we can just go out and collect.  

We put some of the honey comb in some of our wide mouthed jars, just because it looked so neat.  

I'm not sure how many jars of honey we ended up with since my nieces did the counting and their system seemed a little unreliable to me, but one of the numbers I heard was twenty-nine.  Wow.  That is something to grin about, for sure.