Water

It’s 10:30 am and I just came in from an hour of watering the garden. And from the heat. It’s 87 F (30.5 C) and the sun’s a scorcher. Most plants are holding up well, except for the brassicas. The kale especially is doing some spectacular wilting.  The beans are coming up nicely, in more-or-less straight lines, and all of them together. In a day or two I’ll spot the empty spots (where the squirrels or chipmunks dug ’em up) and will tuck in replacement seeds.

And I used up all the water in my three 60 gallon rain barrels. I concentrated on the veggies and the new transplants, and was very stingy with the bushes, trees and canes. Still, it was all gone in a matter of days.

So yesterday I hooked up another 60 gallon barrel, and today I’ll try to rig up the large drum that was given to us last year. It’s made of metal, is rusting  a fair bit, and it was painted, so in contrast to my plastic  food-grade barrels, I’m hesitant to use it on the veggies. But it will do where I plan to put it, in the “utilitarian” part of the property, where it will serve for rinsing pots and whatnot. Then I have a fifth, 40 gallon barrel (food-grade) that I still need to find a good downspout for.

I water with a galvanized 4 gallon watering can, which I refill from my barrels (which are slow when they’re low), so it takes me a while to work my 650 930 square feet of beds. We’ve been thinking about putting in soaker hoses, but the cost is prohibitive, and anyway I like my daily hour visiting each plant personally with a drop to drink. That way I know what’s going on with them on a day to day basis. And I stop to weed a bit, and to train the peas to the trellises…

Yesterday NOAA promised a 40 to 60% chance of rain tomorrow and the day after, but today I see all that welcome rain has evaporated to a 20% chance of thunderstorms. I know those: a sprinkle and that’s it. Water is going to be an issue this year!

Water for the Bees

The tubs you see in the picture is the bees’ water supply.

Bees need water to cool the hive (by evaporation), to feed brood (brood food is 70% water), and to dilute their own food (honey, sugar syrup or nectar). It is the main task of some bees to find and bring in water (they make about 50 trips a day for 0.000881 oz of water per trip). If the hive is short on water, other foragers will stop collecting nectar and pollen to help with the hydration effort. When it’s very hot, a colony needs about half a gallon of water a day.

The conscientious beekeeper had better supply some water, the closer to the hive the better, not just for the bees’ health and the honey production, but also for keeping the peace in the neighborhood. If bees bother the neighbors, it’s probably because they’re looking for water, on laundry on the line, in swimming pools, in the trays of potted plants or gutters.

Hence, the tubs. The first experiment was the galvanized tub on the right. It is filled about 1/4 with stones, arranged in a slope so bees can gradually approach the water without drowning, even as the water level goes up and down with rain and drought. Within days of installing it, it got grubby with leaves and insects. I am dumping it out at my next hive inspection.

So I added another tub (on the left). Its “beach” is simply a small plank held down by a stone. It holds two oxygenators: a floating water hyacinth that will also provide a landing platform, and a submerged Hornwort. I also added some capfuls of natural enzymes that are meant to keep bird baths clean. The product is called Birdbath Protector, by Carefree Enzymes and it’s safe for all wildlife. Let’s see how this one does.

Running electricity to the tub for a pump would be problematic, but at some point we might want to run a line into the veg garden anyway – for ventilating the hoop house with fans, for instance.

Hive Inspection and Preschool Bee Talk

I did a quick hive inspection today. It was hot – at 10 am – and I had forgotten to tie my long hair back, thinking the hat might keep it back, but no… So I made it quick, and just pulled out the frames to check on the pattern of brood, honey, pollen, and drone cells, and to find the queen. The powdered sugar test for mites will have to wait till next time.

capped brood

these frames were really heavy

queen

(Thanks to DH for the pics!)

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I did the bee talk at my daughter’s preschool last week. The kids loved it. I came in all dressed up in veil and suit and gloves. I had brought one deep brood box with the undrawn frames in them, as well as the burr comb I pulled out earlier. My smoker was still smelly from going into the hive right before and stealing a drone, which I put into the old queen cage for them to see. They were so careful with him when they passed him around.

They had so many questions and, of course, stories about being stung, or not being stung. We talked about how to be safe around bees, and about how generous and hardworking they are. Fascinating, how the minds of 3, 4, and 5-year-olds work. Especially the boys were concerned about the fact that a colony is basically a sisterhood. “But then there’s no room for brothers!” said a little guy (a brother). I assured him that in the human world there is lots of room for brothers, but not so much in the bee world. They’re just different.

They, and I, had a great time playing a game that illustrates how bees use pheromones and scent to recognize each other. I had put one of 4 strong-smelling things (banana, garlic, oregano and tiger balm), 5 of each in old yogurt container (20 kids), then strapped a paper napkin over them so they couldn’t see what was inside (note to self: cloth next time!). They had to sniff their own scent and then buzz around to find the other members of their colony.

Lastly there was snack (very important!). Amie had designed a bee for the cookies and had helped cut some out. She was chosen to distribute the snack to the class. She was so proud. Of course she knew the answers to all the question I had for them, but she let the other kids answer first.

Strawberries All Taking, and Other News

strawberry bed

I was skeptical about my strawberries but (again) nature proved me wrong, or rather, made up (again) for any bungling on my part. I bought 25 crowns from Nourse Farms and planted them the day they arrived in a well-prepared bed (it was crawling with worms). The instructions were to plant the crown so half of it is in and half of it is out of the soil.

Honestly, I had no idea where that mark was, the crowns being so short, and I was in a hurry to get them in as it was getting dark and threatening rain and Amie didn’t have much patience with my gardening that particular day (when so many other plants had gone in as well). Later I forgot to water them a couple of times, since their bed is (as yet) outside the high traffic part of the garden. I checked yesterday and all the crowns have acquired new, healthy-looking leaves.

Also the currants and gooseberries are doing well, as are most of the free raspberry transplants, the kiwi vines (the male in particular) and the hazelnuts. Only my Gamma pollinator hazelnut seems dead, as well as one of the two paw paw seedlings. I still have no clue how to prune and harvest my Sochi tea plants: any ideas?

I poked around in the mushroom bed, but see no mycelium as yet.

In the veg garden the peas and favas are flowering, the overwintered pepper plants have beautiful white blooms and even a couple of tiny peppers. Also one of my tomato plants already has a little tomato.

The new hoop house plastic is arriving next week.

The carrot bed is a pain to weed and some animals (chipmunks?) have been digging for the newly seeded beans. Jacob’s Cattle seems to be their favorite, and who can blame them? I imagine the beans displayed in all their glory on their credenzas, dazzling the guests.

asparagus (Purple Passion) pushing up spears

The mints L gave me survived the transplant. I put them in the small bed next to the house that used to have the daffodil bulbs (which are all drying out so they can be stored and replanted in Fall). The bed has a couple of ornamentals (a hosta, a columbine, a couple of coneflowers) but it is Mainly Mint – ideal, since it is bordered on all sides by concrete.

I went back to L and S’s on Saturday morning to help them put in my leftover asparagus and to clear a patch for a veg bed. L is going to grow tomatoes again! She showed my her defense against cut worms. But that’s for another entry.

Comfrey Heaven

Thank you again, Freecycle!

A while ago I put up a wanted notice in my local Freeycle group for comfrey plants. My first contact fell through, and then I forgot about it, until yesterday, when a local man contacted me. I went by this morning and  discovered… heaven!

L and S live in a cul-de-sac that is all lawns. Azaleas and arbor vitae abound,  but it’s mostly grass: sloping, cut very short, and sprinkled. Then you get to L and S’s place which… stands out. Their tiny bungalow is hardly noticeable in the dark jungle that is the front yard, darkened by towering pine trees and scraggly, half-bald spruces, all overgrown with vinca. There’s a rusted old car in the driveway, and paint cans. It smells sweet: something is flowering, but you can’t quite see what…

Now follow a side “path” of rotten boards sunk into the mud to enter the backyard and have your mind blown.

It used to be all raised vegetable beds, L tells me, but she could no longer work them, so they decided to let it grow into a raspberry field. And boy, did the raspberries oblige! There is also mint of all kinds gone rampant, and lovage, and wildflowers. Oh, and comfrey. Patches, like islands in a sea of raspberry canes, of two varieties, near to a hundred of them, some as tall as me!

I dug and lifted while chatting with L, hoping she wouldn’t find me greedy, but thinking they might need help clearing the comfrey a bit.  Now I know what they mean by invasive, uncontrollable, and “compost crop”. L says by June these plants will be even bigger, leafier, fatter…

After a good half hour I had hardly made a dent, but it was all I could fit into my station wagon. L also gave me some of each of the four kinds of mint she could find, and some lovage.

Such dear and interesting people. They were the first to know what I was talking about  when I explained the intended permaculture setup at our place. L and S went all the NOFA meetings since they started and saw J.I. Rodale speak. For decades they grew their own vegetables, organically of course, but now they are happy with their 400 pounds of raspberries each year. Only they and their friends are getting on in age and can no longer do all that picking.

I offered my leftover asparagus plants in return for the comfrey and will go and help L clear a patch for them. And they invited me to come and help pick raspberries, and we’ll split the pickings!

I’ll get a picture of the transplants when it stops raining. I am so glad for the rain: my barrels empty out too fast now that all the beds are in operation, and the transplants do well in the rain.

Tenth Day Hive Inspection

The bees have been busy. I can see a lot of activity at the entrance, lots of flying in and out. Perhaps it was the weather – coldish, gray – that kept them inside, or the fact that they first needed to draw out more comb before going out to get stuff to put in it. But now they’re definitely foraging, because I saw large pollen baskets on the bees when I did my hive inspection yesterday.

Beautiful orange pollen on a bee crawling out of syrup frame feeder

This was the tenth day inspection (a day late since the actual tenth day was too windy and cold) and an important one. Let’s say that the queen is released from the queen cage on the 3rd day (D3). Assume she lays a worker egg on that day. For 3 days this worker bee will be an egg. She becomes a larva on the 4th day of her life (D7), when the workers start feeding her. On the 5-6th day of her life (D10) her cell is capped with wax. On her 10th day (D15-16), she becomes a pupa and she will stay in the cell for 12 days, to emerge on the 21st day since her life began as a new bee (D24).

All seems to be going according to plan, for I saw capped brood, as well as fat larvae, not so fat larvae, and eggs too. I can expect the first new bees to hatch on the 27th of May, and many new bees in succession after that.

Workers busy feeding lots of fat larvae and, if you look closely, you can also spot cells with eggs

Capped cells

There was also more comb than when I did my last inspection, and some of it filled with glistening nectar, pollen, and honey (?).

There was a nice half-moon pattern to it on one of the frames:

Lastly I had no trouble spotting the queen:

I recommend this neat YouTube video of a Queen laying eggs. The beekeeper in the video, George Muhlebach, also offers the trick of nudging bees out of the way with your finger: they get nudged constantly by their peers, so they don’t mind.

I also didn’t find what I didn’t want: supersedure cells (cells for new queens) or drone cells (which are bigger, and the caps of which stand out, like bullets – see video), which could indicate an infertile queen or a laying worker (each of which have unfertilized eggs, which can result only in drones). All these would indicate a faulty queen. This video is also interesting in this respect.

I also pored over the frames looking for mites. I couldn’t spot any. Not that I presume to be able to spot them, anyway, yet, so  in a few days I will nevertheless put the (natural) mite treatment into the hive.

From that last video I learned the trick of putting a roll of chicken wire or some such underneath the hive entrance. Skunks come at night and scratch on the landing board, so when the guards come out to investigate they eat them. They can do this for hours and disseminate the colony. They don’t like to put their paws on the roll because they’ll fall through, and even if they manage, they need to stand up and the bees can then attack them on the belly and that will keep them off. Luckily I have lots of that stuff lying around!

So far, so good!

Mushrooms and Asparagus

Amie is sick (a cold, again) and home from preschool. She’s really bummed about it because these are the last weeks of school, and after Summer she’ll be going to a new one. Luckily it is sunny and warm again, today, so we spent a lot of time outside. She is great about letting me work in the garden, though she doesn’t have much energy to help. She did supervise the seeding of the 2,5 lbs of the Winecap – Stropheria rugoso annulata – sawdust spawn that arrived in the mail last week.

Oh, it smelled divine: nutty, mushroomy.

2,5 lbs of sawdust spawn inoculates a 25 square foot bed of wood chips. That made for an 8.3 by 3 foot bed on the outside of our fence, in the most shady part of the garden. It’s on the edge of our property, in an area that can do with some clearing, as you can see. It’s also along the path we created by which our the neighbors cut through to the conservation land behind us. I’ll be curious to see their reaction to the mushrooms when they pop up!

On the rich forest floor duff I spread 4-5″ of wood chips (3 large wheelbarrows) that my neighbor, the tree guy, dumped for free in our depot area.  I forget now which tree it is from. I mixed this with half a barrow of  sawdust (from the same tree) and half a barrow of compost. I spread all the spawn on top of that and gently raked it in. I added 1 more inch of the wood chips/sawdust/compost mix and watered it. Then I topped it off with a mulch of pine needles, to trap the humidity. I’ll have to make sure it stays moist, not wet.

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I also planted 18 asparagus crowns that I had ordered from Nourse and that were sitting in the crisper in the fridge for weeks. (I’ve 6 left: where to tuck them?) The picture shows the second furrow – the first has already been topped off. Usually asparagus need a 12-18″ spacing, with 3′ in between rows, but these, Purple Passion, only need 6-8″ in between. That’s how I fit 18 into an 8′ long bed.

This gives you a good idea of where the asparagus bed is:  about 6 feet away from the side of the beehive. The bees were as active  as I’ve seen them in the eleven days they’ve been with us. There were lots of them flying in and out of the entrance. Some buzzed around my ears as I dug and planted, but none bothered me.

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I did the 10th day hive inspection today and found what I was looking for: capped brood! Also lots of eggs, uncapped larvae, nectar and pollen, and the queen. Very exciting!