On Thursday I enjoyed no less than three hours visiting my four hives. The idea was to inspect, do a varroa mite sugar roll and assess if the bees need treatment, check for swarming, and assess which hive(s) I could split. Hive 1 (Italian Queen: Borgia), was doing well: good population, all types of brood, …
Author Archives: kaat
Racking Day
Yesterday we racked DH’s two wines (3 gallons each of Cabernet and Malbec) and my four meads (one of which turned into vinegar).
Korean Natural Farming: IMO 1 (i)
Another oft-used (and used in quantity) cohort of living allies in Korean Natural Farming is IMO: Indigenous Micro Organisms. The IMO “input” is made in several steps, from IMO 1 through 4. IMO 1 is the “catch” of said microorganisms, and in each subsequent step you get to culture these, growing their quantity until you …
Korean Natural Farming: FAA (i)
A month ago I attended a workshop on Korean Natural Farming (KNF), led by Aaron Englander, at the Natick Organic Community Farm, where they implement a lot of KNF techniques. I deeply appreciate many of the ground tenets of KNF: make it cheap (and so available for even the poorest), use as many inputs as possible …
Fungi (i): Edible Mushrooms
Back in winter, my friend Alex and I were planning on starting a mushroom farm on the property. Unfortunately our calls for logs (oak, birch, beech, etc.) didn’t produce any, and so the inoculation season passed us by. But all was not lost. In 2010 I bought and planted mycelium of King Stropharia. Stropharia rugosoannulata, …
A New Approach to Water, Being More of the Same
From the beginning (2008), I have gardened organically – better than “organically,” actually. For instance, I always refused to use the hose, that is, tap water, in my gardens. Even as the garden grew larger and more labor intensive, I insisted on watering with buckets and watering cans. Some relief came when I installed drip …
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A New Approach to Beekeeping
Both my colonies perished over the winter. When I opened them up in early spring I found only a handful of dead bees (no queen, that I could see), and quite a bit of honey left. It was too late, the bee bodies were too decomposed, to send off a sample to the Beltsville Lab, …
Mead Adventures
I got a comment from Ashley about her mead. My apologies, Ashley, for responding so late, but in any case I can’t help much. I’m just a dabbler in mead myself, and do most mead making by the seat of my pants, eyeballing it and experimenting. I’ve not yet had to throw away any mead, …
Wine and the Birth of Song
Music is such a large part of our lives. Amie is playing classical pieces that truly ask the best of her. It is a marvel to see her small fingers dance on the fretless fingerboard, touching each note. Her playing folk with some of the kind folks of the 12 Georgia is a lot of fun. So …
Bees Update
Bearding I just went into my two hives. One of them at least has overcrowded and hot – indicated by the massive bearding that begins in the late afternoon and continues through the night until the foragers go out again in the morning. They don’t abandon this way of keeping the hive cool inside even …