Green with Envy

I have a confession to make.

I'm green with envy.

Garden green, that is.

I love, Love, LOVE the vegetable garden at Colonial Williamsburg. Well, I just love Colonial Williamsburg, but that's a whole 'nother post. . .
When I picture the perfect garden in my head, this is exactly what I see.

Perfect, weedless rows tucked into nearly coal-black fertile soil.

I know Colonial Williamsburg tries to keep everything as period-authentic as possible. I'm pretty sure they're organic, but not sure if they're certified as such. They have paid horticulturalists who ply their expertise on these perfectly-crafted gardens all year long, but I still can't help but think that they use some kind of super fertilizer or weed killer. I mean seriously, their produce almost looks too good to eat. How does one achieve this perfect-ness?

Next spring will be my 4th year gardening (well, so long as you don't count the several years that I tried to grow pumpkins and gourds over in a hilly, rooty, shady patch at our old house). I always considered myself as having a brown thumb. A wilted brown thumb at that. Probably should consider it more like a black thumb. . . But moving to the farm 7 years ago and becoming a farmer's wife somehow brought out my dormant gardener.

Now, every year I have good intentions of growing a successful, gorgeous garden like the ones I've seen at Williamsburg, like the ones that The Husband's Grandpa grew before we took over.

Bo and I planting carrots last March. Barefoot, of course, 'cause G-Pa says that's the secret to gardening. ;)

I'm sure he's looking down on us, slapping his knee and getting a rather hearty chuckle at our attempts.

I've come up with pretty good excuses over the years: being pregnant and 1/2 a mile away, and then once we moved over here it was having an infant, the drought, going it alone while The Husband was deployed. . . They all sound like legit reasons why my rows are never straight, the garden doesn't get watered as often as it should, and the weeds and bugs eventually take over and choke the life out of my plants. . .

(July) Here the garden doesn't look as bad as it eventually got, but you get the idea of how quickly it gets away from me.

But no more. No more excuses. This year The Husband will be home, the kids are old enough to help out or at least entertain themselves while I work, and I'll be 4 years wiser.

Sounds good.

Right?

Then again. . . a little winter reading couldn't hurt. . .

(All Colonial Williamsburg garden photos courtesy of Colonial Williamsburg)

Ash

It doesn't look like very much other than Ash right now.

But next spring it'll be the site of my new salad garden.

We had some rose bushes that had grown out of control over the past few years before we moved here. Despite trying to cut them back to a manageable size, the poison ivy and other shrubby weeds had invaded and the tangled mess had broke down the old split-rail fence that lined the edge of the carport patio. So we decided to take it all out and start over. We're going to try to rebuild the two-tier design like what had been put in originally, but first The Husband is going to have to dig out all the old dirt and roots.

It's going to be a lot of work, but having a more convenient raised bed than the current one aaaaaall the way down at the other end of the shop will be worth it.

The Great Honey Harvest

Well, see as how I do call this blog, "The Land of Milk and Honey," it should only be fitting that I include how we harvest said honey to use.

**Disclaimer - we are new to bees. Like, TOTALLY new, this is our first year in the beekeeping business. We've had some extenuating circumstances and because of these, we chose to take a veer off the traditional honey harvesting method road. This is by no means the easiest, cleanest, or most productive way to harvest honey, but it'll do in a pinch.**

In my last post, I mentioned that my bees ditched me. The technical term for it is "absconding", but basically what happened was that the queen bee decided (for whatever reason) that the colony was not going to make it through the winter in their current abode so she took off with the majority of the hive. There's no rhyme or reason to it, but it's heartbreaking all the same. There were still several bees left in the hive, maybe in the numbers of 100's. 100 sounds like a lot, but it's really not. Think of a colony like a city - 100 people doesn't make much of a city, does it? These were bees that were probably out harvesting pollen when the rest of the colony took off and they came home to an abandoned hive, or they were newly hatched bees. Anyway, 100 or so bees isn't much of a colony, they didn't have a queen bee around to tell them what to do and lay eggs. It looked like they had tried to raise a new queen, but with it being so late in the season (October), she would not have gotten bred and therefore wouldn't be of much use anyway. Makes one sick to think about it (I know, because it did me), but the bees weren't going to make it through the winter, they just couldn't possibly generate enough body heat to keep themselves warm and they'll freeze to death.
Before the colony took off, they binged on the honey that they had spent all summer working to make in preparation for winter. And boy did they binge. The entire bottom box (called a deep super - for superhive) was empty of honey. They had also eaten what little they had started to store in the top box (it's smaller in size so it's called a medium super). However, the middle deep still had a fair amount of honey left in it. It still wasn't near enough honey for the remaining bees to survive the winter on, so The Husband and I decided that we might as well harvest what was there and start over again in the spring with a new colony.

So, on to the messy part - harvesting the honey.
Now, typically (read that - ideally), a beekeeper would have a honey extractor.
(Click the link to see a homemade extractor.)
http://www.myhomeamongthehills.com/honeybees/equipment/

This is a pretty basic one, but they can get a whole lot fancier and more expensive. The process goes like this:
You "uncap" the frames by cutting off the thin layer of beeswax that covers the holes in the honeycomb where the bees have stored the honey. You load 2 frames (or 4, 6, 10. . . depending on the size of your extractor) into the basket and spin it via a hand crank or some of them are electric. By use of centrifugal force, the honey is blown out of the frames, where it hits the walls of the extractor, and then slides down to the bottom of the barrel. There is usually a "honey gate" at the bottom which is a little door that you open up, the honey pours out and voila - honey in a jar/bucket/whathaveyou.

Sounds like sticky madness, but this really is the cleanest way to harvest honey.

You would then put the frames back into the hive, the bees would clean it up and start filling it with more honey.

But we don't have an extractor (yet). Plus, we weren't sure what caused the bees to leave. Even if we caught the colony resting on a branch somewhere, we couldn't put them back in the hive because they would just leave again. So we figured our best bet was to start with fresh wax foundation in the spring (you can buy sheets of wax foundation at beekeeping supply stores).

So here's what WE did:

Our deep super with 10 frames in it.

 First, we tried to just uncap the frames and let the honey drain out into a pan:

 But that was taking FOR-EV-ER. . . after 3 hours, there wasn't much honey in the pan (you can see most of it if you peek under the frame in the photo above).

So then we decided to cut the wax foundation out, crush it, and let it seep through some butter muslin (beekeepers all debate on whether to use cheesecloth to strain the honey or not since you can get fibers in the honey - but it was what we had so that's what we used)

A slice of honeycomb waiting to be smooshed.

The empty frame.

We mashed the entire comb, wrapped it in the butter muslin, and put it in a strainer to drain. I rigged up a homemade cheese-press using a gallon of water as a weigh to help compress the wax and make the honey squeeze out faster.

 

But then, God Bless Her, G-G (Husband's grandma) dug out this old strainer that they had used to strain honey out waaaay back when Husband's Great-Great-Grandpa had bees. I have no idea how old this thing is, but I want one. I can come up with infinite uses in my head already. . .

Old-cone-strainer-thingy.

The honey practically poured out. And, I didn't have to keep switching out my butter muslin (it kept getting gummed up.

HONEY!

 It was a sticky, messy project. It took nearly 4 days of switching out mashed honeycomb and straining the honey and I had to wipe down the entire kitchen when we were done.

But it was TOTALLY worth it! There's not like the taste of your own honey, especially after all that work!
It looks pretty cloudy in the picture above - that was when I had just filled the jar. The honey clears up a good bit after a week or so. Our honey is still a pretty dark honey, which some people don't like, but it's just an aesthetic thing. Dark honey or light, it all taste great!

Our harvest.

After it was all said and done - we got about 24 lbs of honey. Sounds like a lot, but really it's not (especially for all the work it takes!). You can typically expect anywhere from 40-100 lbs of honey from a single hive depending on whether it was a good year/bad year. You can extract more honey using an extractor too, but that's alright. It'll get us and even some of the family through the year.

While I was pretty bummed that our "free" bees didn't do very well, we're not giving up yet. There is a honeybee shortage and we need those little critters on the farm to help pollinate our pastures (they're a clover/grass mix), our wild berries, and our garden.

We'll try again next spring.