Garden Resolutions: 2013

Our new house is getting closer to being done.  The drywallers have finished, the gypcrete has been poured on the main floor (gypcrete is a soupy concrete-like material that we're using under the tile on the main floor to add "thermal mass", thermal mass acts as a heat sink, moderating the temperature of the house.), and the next thing to do is paint and tile.

With feeling like we may actually be able to move in at some point, I've been getting excited and overwhelemed  at the idea of creating a garden from scratch.

My plan is to fill the south side of the house with raised beds.  The raised beds may have to be unframed and we'll box them up a couple each year until they're done.

The east side of the house is going to be my "forest" and maybe at some point there will be a pond in the corner near where we buried Taja.  The west side will be the grassy rectangle for the boys to play and run around, and we'll surround it with raised beds like we did at our last house- those raised beds will hold the grapes, strawberries, raspberries, and whatever else I can think of.

One side of the very long driveway will be our "orchard.  I'll probably plant a peach tree, an apricot tree, a plum tree, and a nectarine tree.  I'm debating doing some espaliered apple trees...

It's going to be a lot of work and I'm sure it will take several years to get things the way I want them, but eventually it will be great.

If I can manage to get anything done besides just getting things going, my plans for reclaiming my inner pioneer this year include:

Growing my own mushroom logs.

Trying round 2 with bees.  Try #1 didn't survive the winter (we may have squashed the queen...).

Try #2 with the potato tower (this time I'll make sure to get the right kind of potato).

Try artichokes again.  Last time, I was able to get one plant through the winter, and it produced several artichokes, but I'm thinking they would fit really well up against the house on the south side of the yard.  In between the window wells...

Early Morning Watering and Garden Puttering

This isn't garden or puttering, but you can never have too many cute baby pictures... Baby E playing on his "computer".  We train them young around here.

I *think* this is a cucumber.  There are so many weeds that look similar that it's hard to know for sure- so I'm not pulling anything until they get a little bigger and I can better distinguish weed from plant.

The transplanted raspberries seem to be doing pretty well- we only lost a couple.

Beans are up, and I'm happy to report that the saved seeds appear to be coming up at the same rate as the purchased seed.

Finally, potatoes!  There are only three plants up, so hopefully the others pop up soon, so I can bury them all again...

Some of these are weeds, but most of them are sunflowers.  It's going to be fun to have the long row of them edging the garden.

Blackcaps.  Even without the bees, they seem to be thriving and there are lots of buds where fruit will form.

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I didn't take a picture, but the tomatoes and peppers are being hardened off, so we'll get them planted on saturday.  Also, there are three cracked eggs on the garage floor that I've been putting off cleaning up... I put them in the pocket of the stroller canopy to bring to the house, and when we got to the garage, baby E pulled the canopy down, dumping the eggs.  I about cried because we have two or three broody hens and eggs aren't as abundant as they have been.

Fall Clean Up (Part Two)

Saturday we had a lot of non-yard stuff to do, so we didn't get started on any of the yard work until close to 4pm.

My Mister started weed whacking around all the fruit trees while I pulled weeds from the strawberry bed, and cleared a place for garlic in another bed.  I added compost, and got nearly a pound of garlic cloves planted.  We planted Music that we ordered from my favorite seed company, Seed Savers Exchange, and covered the garlic with a thick layer of straw mulch.

Next was to weed whack all the strawberries down to nubbins and cover them with a thin layer of straw.  Next spring the plants will grow up through the mulch.  By weed whacking the plants now, the plants will be healthier and have better air circulation next spring.

We also gathered up the watering lines from the raised beds and pulled the tomato plants that don't have tomatoes on them still.

My Mister checked on the bees, and there aren't a lot of them.  He's a little concerned that last month when he cleaned out the crooked comb, he might have killed the queen.  We'll continue to watch the bees to see if their numbers continue to decrease, or if they build up again.  There were some brood cells, but not many.  Worst case, we may be buying bees again in the spring.  Hopefully we learned enough this year, that we can avoid the crooked comb in the future and don't have to do such invasive work on the hive.

My Mister shucked all the corn, and put it in a bucket in the chicken coop storage area, the birds have already eaten/scratched all of the grass in their new run area, so they'll appreciate the corn cobs to play with.

The big pumpkin is finally starting to turn orange, but I don't think it will be orange by halloween.  We'll see.

We moved the leftover hay into the chicken coop storage area, and will try to keep the kids out of it so we can use it in other areas.  I want to use it to mulch over the artichoke plant once I cut it down.  I'm still waiting for it to flower so I can collect some seeds.  If I could get five or six plants to survive a winter, we'd be pretty set for artichokes.

Update

I haven't posted in nearly a month.  We've been busy with soccer and stuff around the yard, and, whenever something interesting happens, I post about it on facebook, so my mom is right, facebook reduces blog posting.

To finish off my last post, we got the honey strained, and here's what we ended up with:

We've already eaten most of one pint.  The boys LOVE J's recipe for biscuits (that he got out of the Magic Thief book) with "fresh, homemade" honey.  

It's a bit of a sad fruit year, the trees don't have much on them (with a couple of exceptions), the apples all fell before they were ripe.  There weren't very many nectarines, so we ate a couple and dried the rest.

The peach tree finally has ripe peaches on it.  Just a few, but the bonus of not-very-many peaches is that you get ones like this:

And here's a picture for my mom.  Baby E has discovered the washing machine. He likes to watch the water and clothes swirl around.  It's pretty funny to watch him bounce up and down in excitement.

I'm just a little black rain cloud, hovering over the honey tree...

The other day I noticed the clump of bees hanging on the outside of the hive.  Today my Mister finally had some time to go investigate.  He opened the thing up and decided that the crooked combs had been rebuilt crookedly again really needed to be cleared out.  

He cut quite a bit out and spaced the now-empty bars in between straight comb so that they hopefully rebuild straight this time.  This is the picture where I got a little too close and got chased away by a couple of angry bees.  They don't like people stealing their honey.  After getting the combs cleared up, the bees were too riled up for him to do anything with the bees on the outside of the hive, so we're hoping it's not a major problem.  We'll let them calm down for a few days and take a closer look then.  I'm hoping they were just running out of space inside, and had started building comb on the outside- and not that they are getting ready to swarm...  With how much honey we had to cut out, we're a little worried about winter anyway.  We'll see how much they have left and how much more they can produce between now and winter.  

Just a couple of fatalities.

We tried some of the honey comb.  The kids were not a fan of the wax.  The honey was so sweet that I had a hard time eating my spoonful.  It needed a good biscuit or fresh bread or something.

With top bar hives, you don't use an extractor, you mash all the comb up in a big pot.

Scoop it into jars.

Cover the jar with a mesh-material.  We used cheesecloth, but I think tulle would work a lot better.  (UPDATE: the morning after setting the jars up, very little honey had dripped into the bottom jars, so I stopped by the fabric store and bought 1/2 yard of tulle- it should last for quite awhile- the difference was amazing, at this rate they might be done in a few hours!)

Place an empty jar (with ring) on top of the jar with mashed honeycomb.

Tape them together really well.

Invert.

It's supposed to be done by tomorrow morning, but I think the cheesecloth is slowing things down.  If it doesn't look like there's been much progress by morning, I'll go by the fabric store to get some tulle to try again.

Saturday Morning Chores

I went for a run while my Mister picked one apricot tree clean.  The trees are a bit sparse this year, so even though these aren't the prettiest (they're pock marked), we're canning them anyway.  

He also worked on getting the dead bees out of the wax from the crooked combs he had cut off before our vacation.  He was using a fork to scoop the bees out, when I got home and saw what he was doing, I suggest we get a solar wax melter.  Ours was pretty pricey.  Here's a close up:

Our solar wax melter seems to be working pretty well. 

Still just one hen laying, although others have been in the nesting box off and on, so I'm guessing the others should start soon.  

We let the chickens out to free range a bit, they like eating the weeds.

We have several more projects going on today, so I'll post about them later.  I also picked the black caps again.  My Mister finished up the last little bit of drywalling in the garage, and fixed the garage doors.  

Garden Update 7/12

We've gotten three tiny eggs in the last three days, so just one hen is laying still.  The top two eggs in this photo are ours, the larger egg is from the store.  We need to make sure our hens are getting more greens, the yolks should be much darker than the store bought egg.

The nesting boxes that my Mister built.  We worried they'd be too high, and that we should put in a ladder, but before we got that far, we found an egg in the center box.  It's amazing to me that the chickens knew where to lay the egg even though the nesting box had only appeared in the coop the day before we got our first egg.  

It had been awhile since my Mister checked on the bees, so he thought it would be a good thing to do before we went on our camping trip....

This one looks good.  The bees are capping the honey.

This one doesn't look so good.  We had the follower board blocking the last third of the hive or so.  The bees filled up all their available space and got into the back area, where they started to make some comb that crossed several top bars.  My Mister had to cut those combs off, then he moved the follower board, opening up the entire hive, so hopefully the bees rebuild straight.  They weren't too happy with what he was doing, and he got stung once on the leg.  He came in and got some long pants on (maybe a duh thing right there...) and was fine.  He left the comb he cut off in a bucket outside the hive so the bees could gather the honey in it and move it back inside.  

We set up the automatic watering system in the big garden.  No more watering by hand!

One of the zucchini plants in the raised bed garden is blossoming.  I bet we come home from our camping trip to some zucchini.

I found this weird mushroom.  The big parts were in a ring around a smaller center part, like a flower.  We didn't eat it.

Cherry tomato.

Paste tomatoes.

Bees were on the onion flowers.  I think I'm supposed to knock the stocks over so that the bulb gets bigger, but it's hard to when the bees are enjoying the flowers so much.  I wonder what onion honey tastes like...

It's hard to see from this picture, but there was a lady bug on the artichoke plant.  I noticed aphid-looking bugs the other day, and sprayed them off with the hose, so I was glad to see the lady bug.  Hopefully her friends are around and they're taking care of the aphids.  The good things that come when you don't use pesticides...  Which reminds me.  When I was a kid, my parents hired a neighbor boy to come do some yard work for them.  As a joke, he used round up to kill a big Y in the field (his family were all BYU fans, my family were UofU fans).  For the parade, we had most of that family sitting next to us, and they joked about using round up to put another Y in the field.  My comment was that if they could find an organic way to put the Y in the field, they could go for it.  I just didn't want to cause problems for the bees and ladybugs and all the other beneficial insects that help us maintain our garden.  

Garden Update

The apricots are starting to turn.  There aren't very many of them this year, so we're watching them closely to make sure we get them all.

The artichoke plant is getting big.  No signs of artichokes yet, but we're ready.

The tomato plants (most of them anyway) have finally started growing.  They sat and did nothing for quite awhile.  There are even little green tomatoes on most of them.

The peppers are just now starting to get bigger.  They're still pretty small.  We haven't had a really good pepper crop in a few years, so hopefully these do better.

The peas are starting to die back, and I need to pull them out so that these sad little cucumber plants can have the trellis (and get a little more sun).

My edamame experiment is going well.  No blossoms yet, but the plants look good.

I picked and ate ONE blackcap.  It was the only one ripe.  The rest are getting close (please let them ripen BEFORE we leave to go camping next week!).  We're going to eat them and put the rest in the freezer for smoothies and ice cream and stuff.  The blackcaps are the healthiest they've been in as long as I can remember.  I think it's partly due to the wet spring, me remembering to water them regularly, and the bees.  

This is the weeded half of the corn.  The half to the left of the photo isn't weeded and looks, well, less nice.  You can also see the squash/pumpkin plants.  I put these around the perimeter in hopes that the prickly vines would deter critters and varmints (apparently critters and varmints are not the same thing- the things you learn from netflix).  

The beans.  They just started to flower yesterday.  Bean canning will be in the near future.  We did so many last year (I picked and picked in hopes of going into labor on my own- so glad it's this year and not last year...) that we still have a couple of pints left.

The ladies are enjoying the peace and quiet now that the meat birds are gone.  We kept six hens.  They haven't started laying yet, but they should, any day.