We’re racing against the clock here. A week ago I drastically snipped off 3/4 of the leaves on the tomato vines. Many of the fruits on them have been full grown for a month, but very few of them were ripening. The pruning has redirected the plant into ripening, but I think I may have …
Author Archives: kaat
Local Food Experiment
I am blogging on the Transition Wayland website about a week-long locavoracious experiment! LOTS of blog posts there.
More Crazy Double-Nuc Manipulations: Moving out a Colony
Ah, the troublesome double nuc: time to get rid of it. The two splits (Hive 6 with queen Tatjana and Hive 7 with queen Anna) were growing out of it. The plan: to move H6 – whose entrance was facing west (“backward”) – to the common apiary (3 miles away), and to move H7 into …
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Harvests
Today I extracted some massive honey combs. My experiment with foundationless frames went a tad awry, the bees drawing out bulging combs wherever there was space because the next frames was empty. First it made for some puzzling to get those frames out of the two boxes. After using the bee escape for a night, …
Break in the Heat
After over a week of temperatures in the 90s and scorching full sun, it is cooler overcast with some mild rain (still not enough, though). I get to catch my breath. Today I weeded, pruned and trellised tomatoes. Tomorrow I may really get to the wood chip piles: add them to Wood Chip Heaven and …
Drought
It’s been hard in our neck of the woods. We had 0.69 inches of rain this month. Not even one inch. The Department of Environmental Protection has issued a “Severe Drought Warning†for my county. Thunderstorm after thunderstorm has evaporated, glanced off or split around our area. The Wundermap shows their tragic course all too …
On Hope and Opportunity: Carbon Sequestration
I just received Eric Toensmeier’s Carbon Farming Solution, A Global Toolkit of Perennial Crops and Regenerative Agriculture Practices for Climate Change Mitigation and Food Security (Chelsea Green, 2016). Reading this, along with Peter McCoy’s mind-blowing Radical Mycology, as well as the third US Department of Energy Billion Ton Report (just released today), and also listening …
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Compost and Comfrey Tea and Wood Chip Heaven
After a couple of unseasonably cold and gray days that warranted warm socks and a sweater, we’ve returned to hot (+90F) and sunny again. I return to monitoring my one barrel of rain water, which is about 1/5 full (empty). The couple of rain storms we’ve had and the one night of drizzle failed to …
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Queen Replacement
Turns out Dan of Warm Colors Apiaries sent me two Russian queens, so I didn’t have to choose between replacing Laura (Hive 4) and making another split (Hive 7-to-be). I could do both! I went into 4 and found Laura where she usually hangs out, in the top box. DH stood at a safe distance …
Blueberries!
A whole crowd of us went picking at a local horse farm, where the farmers a decade or so ago had the foresight of converting a paddock into blueberries. This year will yield a bumper crop and the picking, in the drizzle, was wonderful. This was the same field where two years ago we picked …