I don't know if it's the colors of the leaves, the way the sunlight hits them and makes them glow, or the hint of crispness in air. Whatever it is, Autumn rocks my world in the most wonderful ways!
Saturday, November 12, 2011
Tuesday, November 8, 2011
Crazy Days
Things have been going very well for Taylor and I, busy, but very well. I have picked up extra hours on a part time job out at an outdoor school in Western Marin. Three days a week I drive through the most beautiful lands, cow farms, rolling green hills, and blue skies. It literally puts a smile on my face every time I drive out there. I am not sure how long this part time job will last, but for right now, I am enjoying the physical job, the hundreds of kids running around, let loose to let their crazy flags fly, and earn some extra money.
--> Here is an update with pictures to come.
Garden: Our fall crops are doing well and popping up with flourishment. We have some wonderful winter squash coming up, Pomme d'Or. These little lovelies will be popping up around the beginning of December. Next to those are the collards, Geogria Southern variety, and they are taking their sweet time maturing. After that are the potatoes, just a basic Russet variety there. Next is the first of two plots of beets; I planted Early Wonders and Chioggias. I am super excited about these root crops coming up, as beets are my new culinary obsession. Plus, Taylor wants to experiment with extracting the sugar out of the beet and using that as a sweet alternative. My rainbow chard is starting to mature up, both red and golden, and again, I am very excited as these are my favorite type of greens. Lastly is our plot of carrots, Chantenay Red Core variety, which is a new one for us. All in all, we should be harvesting some tasty vegetables right around the Winter Solstice. That is one of the nice things about living in Northern California and these micro climates, we can grow through winter and still have a harvest; it doesn't have to be a season of total fallow.
Container Garden: I am experimenting with growing lettuce in a container: Merveille des Quatre Saisons Lettuce (Marvel of Four Seasons). I love this variety, beautiful red bibb-type rosette, crispy, and an excellent flavor. I also planted some fava beans to see how they do in a container: Extra Precoce A Grano Violetto. This is a purple fava, it has six beans to a pod and is very sweet in flavor. I am excited to see how they do.
Chickens: The three chickens that we added to the flock, Teaspoon, Tina Turner and Spooky the Ghost, have acclimated to their new family and living surroundings and seem to be doing well. Teaspoon was laying like a champ in the first couple of weeks, an extra large bright white egg every day or two, but now she's slowed down. I don't think Spooky is laying yet, as we guess she is a bit younger than the other birds. And we're not sure if Tina Turner is laying or not. I think she is, but I haven't caught her trotting out of the coop and calling out in egg-laying pride. All in all their egg production is slowing down with the cooler temperatures and molting stage on its way.
Compost: I can't tell you how awesome our compost is. Trying to describe the sweet, earthy, nutrient-packed, black gold just loses in the telling. This latest batch had a large, and I mean large, quantity of coffee grounds in it. The pile was cooking at 160 degrees for over a week. When we turned it, the temperature spiked right back up in there to 160 degrees again. Taylor built a new system to sift the final product, and instead of grabbing the sifter with both hands and using every ounce of upper body strength to sift back and forth, now I am able to turn the compost in a cage like sifter.....MUCH EASIER!
Bees: The bees are doing well. Every time I walk past their hive boxes, I can smell their honey. There wasn't enough for us to harvest any for ourselves, but I will check in with them tomorrow and see if they maybe started filling the top super with honey (that would honey we could harvest). It seems that many of the bees are dying, as the ground in front of the hive boxes are littered with hundreds of dead bee carcasses. I thought they would hold on a little longer into the cold season, but I am sure it will balance out. I read that I should expect almost two-thirds of the colonies to die off, and then they will repopulate come Spring. Time will tell.
--> Here is an update with pictures to come.
Garden: Our fall crops are doing well and popping up with flourishment. We have some wonderful winter squash coming up, Pomme d'Or. These little lovelies will be popping up around the beginning of December. Next to those are the collards, Geogria Southern variety, and they are taking their sweet time maturing. After that are the potatoes, just a basic Russet variety there. Next is the first of two plots of beets; I planted Early Wonders and Chioggias. I am super excited about these root crops coming up, as beets are my new culinary obsession. Plus, Taylor wants to experiment with extracting the sugar out of the beet and using that as a sweet alternative. My rainbow chard is starting to mature up, both red and golden, and again, I am very excited as these are my favorite type of greens. Lastly is our plot of carrots, Chantenay Red Core variety, which is a new one for us. All in all, we should be harvesting some tasty vegetables right around the Winter Solstice. That is one of the nice things about living in Northern California and these micro climates, we can grow through winter and still have a harvest; it doesn't have to be a season of total fallow.
Container Garden: I am experimenting with growing lettuce in a container: Merveille des Quatre Saisons Lettuce (Marvel of Four Seasons). I love this variety, beautiful red bibb-type rosette, crispy, and an excellent flavor. I also planted some fava beans to see how they do in a container: Extra Precoce A Grano Violetto. This is a purple fava, it has six beans to a pod and is very sweet in flavor. I am excited to see how they do.
Chickens: The three chickens that we added to the flock, Teaspoon, Tina Turner and Spooky the Ghost, have acclimated to their new family and living surroundings and seem to be doing well. Teaspoon was laying like a champ in the first couple of weeks, an extra large bright white egg every day or two, but now she's slowed down. I don't think Spooky is laying yet, as we guess she is a bit younger than the other birds. And we're not sure if Tina Turner is laying or not. I think she is, but I haven't caught her trotting out of the coop and calling out in egg-laying pride. All in all their egg production is slowing down with the cooler temperatures and molting stage on its way.
Compost: I can't tell you how awesome our compost is. Trying to describe the sweet, earthy, nutrient-packed, black gold just loses in the telling. This latest batch had a large, and I mean large, quantity of coffee grounds in it. The pile was cooking at 160 degrees for over a week. When we turned it, the temperature spiked right back up in there to 160 degrees again. Taylor built a new system to sift the final product, and instead of grabbing the sifter with both hands and using every ounce of upper body strength to sift back and forth, now I am able to turn the compost in a cage like sifter.....MUCH EASIER!
Bees: The bees are doing well. Every time I walk past their hive boxes, I can smell their honey. There wasn't enough for us to harvest any for ourselves, but I will check in with them tomorrow and see if they maybe started filling the top super with honey (that would honey we could harvest). It seems that many of the bees are dying, as the ground in front of the hive boxes are littered with hundreds of dead bee carcasses. I thought they would hold on a little longer into the cold season, but I am sure it will balance out. I read that I should expect almost two-thirds of the colonies to die off, and then they will repopulate come Spring. Time will tell.
Saturday, November 5, 2011
Day Light Savings
If day light savings is for farmers, and only 2% of our population are farmers, then shouldn't we perhaps consider doing away with archaic practice that unnecessarily disrupts our lives and circadian rhythms.
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Update Coming, I Promise!
Life has been crazier than ever, but I promise to update tomorrow, after I bake Taylor's birthday cake while he's at his Hunters Safety Course.
Monday, October 10, 2011
New Kids On The Block
We decided that we wanted to add a few chickens to our flock. We have been very happy with our 7 laying girls, but we built the coop and run to hold the legal limit, which is 12 chickens. We found a local farm, Just Struttin' Farms, and went over to check out what she was selling. I was totally overwhelmed by the sheer variety of the birds. I happy to see such clean and well-maintained conditions, and I knew that we were going to get healthy birds. We chose a Leghorn, because we wanted to add a large white egg to the clutch. She looks exactly like our Leghorn/Delaware mix, except Big Spoon, the o.g. of our flock, has one black feather in her mix and she lays a cream colored egg. Next we picked up the most beautiful Golden Laced Wyanodette. Her coloring is absolutely gorgeous as she looks like she has black feathers with brown tips. And the third girl we picked up is a Silver Laced Pencil Rock, and she has the most amazing black and white geometric markings. (Pictures coming soon.)
The Tomatoes Just Keep On Coming
We have done two major harvests off the tomato plants, and the fertile plants just keep going and producing fruit. We have made and canned two batches of tomato sauce, each batch yielding around 10-12 pints. We made and canned some green tomato pickles, yielding around 8 half pints. We are now facing a fourth harvest of both ripe tomatoes and another batch of greenies. We have saved the seeds off of the most impressive tomatoes so we can revisit this sweetness next summer. All in all, our tomatoes, which were planted straight into 100% homemade compost, have surpassed my expectations both on quantity level and sheer life span. As our nights are getting cooler and our days are growing shorter, I can see their lives coming to end soon, but for now, I will continue to bask in the delicious glory of our tomato plants.
Sunday, October 9, 2011
Our Bee Situation
So about a month ago Taylor mentioned to me that he noticed a large cluster of bees massed around the bottom of one of our bee hives. I went and checked it out and indeed there were about 2,000 bees huddled in a small cluster on the bottom of the wiring of one of the hives. At first we thought that they were going to swarm, but as the weeks passed, they didn't. After troubleshooting on our own and talking to a beekeeper, we decided that we needed to add another super. The conclusion we came up with is this: the first two supers were designated for the queen to lay her brood and for the workers to make honey. We placed a queen excluder over the top of the second bee super so the third super would be strictly for honey. What seems to have happened is the queen ran out of space to lay her eggs, so she has been hanging out on the bottom of the hive, and hundreds of her workers have been surrounding her for protection. That is our best educated guess. So, Taylor and I trekked up to BeeKind and bought two more supers to add to the bee hives. In order to add the super which was going to serve as another place for the queen to lay her brood, I had to go in to the hive boxes, remove the top box which was designated for honey, add the empty 'brood' box, place the queen exluder over that, and top it off with the 'honey' box. The first replacement took place seamlessly, no problems. I was suited up, confident, and timely. When I went into the second hive, I wanted to see an example of the honey they had been making. I smoked the little ladies and pulled out one of the frames. What I saw was a dark, concentrated honey. It weighed about 5-7 pounds. I put the frame back into the box with as much delicacy as possible. I noticed a few bees on my arm and instinctively brushed them off. That was my BIGGEST mistake. The brushed off bees released their alarm pheromone and much, much more started to swarm me. I was fine as I was wearing my bee suit that covered my upper body, but my jeans offered no protection against the angry stingers of the guard bees. I ended up getting stung four times around my upper thighs, front and back. I had to place the upper hive box on with much haste, not being able to spare the bees that probably got squished on impact. All in all, huge learning experience to not brush away bees that are not hurting me. So far as I can tell, there are only about 300-500 bees still outside the hive, but I am hoping the rest of them will migrate into the bee supers. For now, it's all about neosporin on my little stung areas. Nothing like the life of a homesteader.
Picture to Come
Picture to Come
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