Fall is here - at last!

Fall is one of my favorite seasons. I love when the long, hot days turn into cool evenings and mornings. Fall always reminds me of Europe, for some reason. I remember the cool days and the Volksmarches in Germany, the walks through immaculately maintained woodlands, the breezes that carried brightly colored leaves to the ground, the smell of the Earth, the warmth of the Sun. We have a great fall season here in Virginia. Halloween is normally a blast because the temperature is just right. Fall is apple harvest season and I cannot wait for our apple trees to begin bearing fruit. It is also pumpkin season. We only got a few small pumpkins this year. Next year I'll plant them later and pay more attention to them than I did this year. One thing that fall always reminds me of is hunting season. I've never been a big hunter but, having worked in the firearms industry for years, I always look forward to fall because the American hunter takes his sport seriously. This year I've decided that, since we have the land and the deer, I'll try to fill my limit. I'm not a trophy hunter. I want meat. So, I took my Remington 870, which was originally intended for home defense, and bought myself a great, used, 24" rifled slug barrel with a cantilever scope mount. Thank God for the Second Amendment and Gunbroker.com. After researching a bit I decided to try the Winchester Supreme .12 gauge, 3", 385 grain, partition Gold sabot slug. I stole the little red dot scope off of my tricked out Kalashnikov and put it on my slug barrel. To make a long story short, I sighted that puppy in at 25 yards, based on my planned kill zone, in only two rounds. I can't wait. The plan is to put a couple of big, healthy does in the freezer as roasts, steaks and ground meat. I LOVE me some deer chili!

Time to start the Autumn Garden

Summer has been busy and productive around the farm. The garden has produced a LOT of tomatoes, to our delight, the corn did really well and is now done for the year. We canned homemade tomato sauce and homemade stewed tomatoes. Beet pickling next. Since we have run the course of the summer garden I have started some more broccoli and lettuce for the fall garden. We will also put in some more spinach, cauliflower, cabbage and green beans. The green beans I planted in the summer garden never really got into production but the super-long asparagus beans I planted were not very tasty and produced small amounts per bean stalk. I won't plant them again.

The bees are doing well, I have added another brood box and a honey super. They girls are really busy during the day and are a joy to watch as they buzz around the hive.

Fresh Corn!

Well, we are definitely doing much better this year than in years past. We have eaten all the spinach, picked all of the broccoli, finished all of the lettuce, harvested the onions and garlic, the beets are ready to be harvested, we are pulling monster cukes from the garden, the first red tomatoes are being picked and joy of joys, we are eating fresh corn from the garden with out super tonight! Man, this is why we planted a garden!

The Pollinators

I installed my bees on the 16th of April and checked on them for the first time this weekend. They are doing awesome! I started with a 5 frame nucleus hive (nuc) from the Sustainable Honeybee Program, Inc, in Loudon County, VA. (www.sustainablebees.org) Since they had to draw comb from foundation I guessed it would be a month or more before they were ready for the second hive body to be added. I was wrong. At three weeks they had drawn and filled the remaining four frames and had drawn burr comb under the hive-top feeder so that I nearly could not remove the feeder. I had to rush back and assemble another hive body to stack on top of the first hive. If they continue at this rate we will have lots of bees to work the garden and fields. When I removed the feeder I had to also remove the burr comb from atop the frames and below the feeder. It has a good combo of larva, pollen and capped honey. I showed the comb to my wife and kids and we all got to taste the honey our bees had produced. It is great. I hated to waste the larva that had already begun to develop, but now they will have much more space to use. I'm glad I checked on them!
This is my second year as a beekeeper. My first was very educational, but it ended badly with the loss of my hive to the cold winter. Much like my gardening adventures, I re-read the reference books I have and tried again, this time with a couple of ideas from other, more successful beekeepers. I had also wanted to have more than one hive, but as it turned out I was only able to secure one nuc this spring. Having two hives is a good idea in case one or both become weak because you can always combine the hives. I am hoping that if these bees continue to grow the colony at their current rate that I can make a split this summer.
Sometimes people look at me funny when I tell them that I keep bees. Most folks think it is neat and some know or have known folks who have kept bees. I think keeping bees is an important part of sustainable agriculture. I like it because it caused me to learn something that I did not know anything about and because I enjoy that place I find myself in when I am standing over my open hive with the bees buzzing, looking at the frames full of bees. It forces me to focus on the business at hand and on treating the bees gently. The smell of the honeycomb and the smoke, the sound of the buzzing, the sight of the bees working so diligently at their various tasks, the sunlight shining into the open cells, the tiny eggs, the various colors of the pollen, the white, capped honey, and most of all I think, the total disconnection from everything else. The stresses of work, traffic and finances are far away and its just me and the bees.

Little flowers

I saw the first flowers on a couple of our plants this evening as I was walking in the garden. Our golden raspberries are blooming. I hope that means we'll get some fruit this year. I also saw the first little yellow blooms on one of the tomato plants. You know what that means - in a few weeks we'll be seeing fresh tomatoes. The bees are doing well. As I was standing near the hive watching the activity one of my cats, Rooney, our first feline leukemia rescue cat, came over to the hive. He was not very aware of the bees. He is now. His tail brushed against the front entrance to the hive and he got a nasty surprise. He had a small number of bees burrowing into the thick fur on his tail to sting him. Poor kitty. Of course, Steph and I tried to remove the bees without getting stung ourselves, which we accomplished but not without a fight. Encountering one bee that is determined to sting you is a serious challenge (and a GREAT adrenalin rush!). Encountering a lot trying to sting you is a hopeless cause. We got away without being stung. Rooney wasn't so lucky.

As an aside, all of our cats are rescue cats that have feline leukemia virus. Feline leukemia is often fatal but some cats survive if diagnosed and treated soon enough. Feline leukemia is responsible for more feline deaths than any other infectious disease. We have two male, orange tabbys and a calico female. We also had the gray and white kitten of our female calico, but she succumbed to the disease and passed away very young. Most feline leukemia positive cats are kept indoors and isolated because the disease can be spread through their bodily fluids to other cats. Once we moved out here we began letting the cats out a little at a time to increase their quality of life. At this point, they are very much like any other cats and you would never know they are positive for feline leukemia. They roam outside and catch mice, voles and birds like any other barn cats.

Coming along well.

We have a garden! So far we have even harvested leaves from the spinach and lettuce for our salads and made a Sunday brunch of spinach and Swiss cheese omelets. Our own eggs and our own spinach. I have to say, it tasted great! The potato plants are going wild. I will soon cover them with a new tire and some more compost, leaving only a few inches exposed above the soil, to encourage them to grow more tubers in the compost. I have read that a 4 tire stack of potatoes grown in this fashion will yield far more potatoes than we can consume in a season, so plenty for storage. The beets are coming up slowly. The onions are doing very well. The broccoli plants are soon to produce and my intent is to cut the early heads off to encourage the heads to split and grow even more heads. I planted some carrots in among the tomatoes and they have real carrot leaves now. Our Silver Queen sweet, white corn is doing quit well also. Silver Queen is a hybrid that is supposed to be the best tasting sweet corn variety. We shall see.

Corn. Now that leads me to another topic. I don't claim to be an expert or even have a complete understanding of the issue of genetically modified vegetables, but it seems to me that Monsanto and the big corn producers are taking it on the chin for producing varieties of corn that require less water, fertilizer and pesticide. With the population of planet Earth growing ever steadily and the demand for food along with it, doesn't it make sense to modify food product to feed more people? Being a beekeeper I understand the concerns about genetically modified plants producing genetically modified pollen, etc. I do not want my bees effected by pollen that could hurt them. So here is my question: What are you doing about it? Me? I'm growing my own food, at least some of it, to reduce demand on global food resources. I hope to make a small dent in that demand by doing so. It may seem inconsequential on the global scale, but it also seems like the responsible thing to do. This appears to be a topic surrounded by a lot of hype and emotion. Where is the science?

Off to a good start.

Well, the garden is off to a good start. We have both white and yellow sweet corn in, cukes, green beans, spinach, five types of tomatoes (beefsteak, cherry, romas, lemon boy and golden hybrids), sweet basil, onions, garlic, carrots, bib lettuce, broccoli, green peppers, banana peppers, Anaheim chilis, and large sweet peppers, beets and of course, Pontiac Red potatoes. We also have watermelon, cantaloupe and pumpkins. We still have to put in the sunflowers, although we have some seeds in peat pots along with the zucchini, yellow squash, more corn for the three sisters gardens and more bib lettuce because I'm sure we'll go through it pretty fast. I started some Blue Lake pole beans for the three sisters gardens as well. I also installed a beehive just outside the wire fence of the garden in hopes that the bees will be happy to help us pollinate the garden. That is a story all to itself. Beekeeping is an awesome past time and super beneficial to both agricultural and natural plants. Not to mention, you get honey out of it.

We are using our companion planting charts to keep our tire beds full. The lettuce shares with carlic, the tomatoes share with basil, peppers, carrots and garlic and the three sisters gardens share corn, beans and squash types including watermelon, cukes, cantaloupe, pumpkins as well as zucchini and yellow squash. Eventually, I'll put some pictures on here, but for now everything still looks pretty small, although we did have our first garden salad of bib lettuce, spinach, green onion and boiled egg. Hard to beat that, at least until the tomatoes are ready.