There’s a calico cat that’s been hanging around our property, so we started putting food out for her. Turns out there are two calico kitties. Hopefully at least one gets friendly enough to hang around and be a barn cat!
Category: Homesteading
Buckwheat
Our buckwheat is starting to form seeds!
Bee Inspection
We checked on the bees around noon today. We’ve seen a lot of activity at the hive, and they seem to love the field of clover in our yard — so we were curious to see how much the colony had built up. It wasn’t as full as we were hoping (we would have loved to add a super!). There were more bees in the upper deep than last time, but the hive box wasn’t super full. Maybe five frames with brood, several frames with honey, and a few frames that they’d started drawing out. We moved the frames around — the brood frames were all clustered together, so we moved (2?) frames up to the top deep and interspersed empty and half-empty frames with the full ones. Hopefully having empty frames in the middle will encourage them to build out the frames.
Fall Seed Starting
I got the seeds started for our fall harvested vegetables. We bought these little seed starting trays on Amazon — a tray, a 12-cell insert, and a humidity dome with an adjustable vent. The kit came with plant markers … but it seemed silly to write something permanent on the marker. So I turned them into reusable markers by adding some of the blue tape you use for painting a room (because that’s what we’ve got & pen works OK on it). First I put three of the markers in a line on the tape.
A couple of quick slices with an Exacto knife, and I can change the label as needed.
I started the normal fall veggies — broccoli, broccolini, chard, and lots of cabbages. But I also started a sweet tomato that’s meant to produce in 60 days and a watermelon that’s supposed to produce in just 75 days. That’ll be the end of September so maybe we’ll get some watermelon this year!
Raised Bed Herb Planters
When we decided to use some old cinder blocks to build raised beds, the idea was to fill all of the blocks with dirt and use the spaces as bonus planting spaces for small plants like flowers and herbs. Functional and aesthetically pleasing. I never got far in that project — filled some blocks with dirt and lots of weeds. But no ring of herbs around the bed.
This year, I’m doing it! It’s a time consuming process to clear out the existing plant growth. I’m adding about two inches of rocks (we’ve got a lot of rock-covered beds that we want to de-rock), and filling up with soil. Anya started a bunch of herb plants, so she has been transplanting her seedlings into the blocks and adding some wood mulch (I expect these small blocks will warm up and dry out rather quickly otherwise).
Garden Progress
I knew the garden was growing well — there are tons of bean flowers, cucumber flowers, and tomato flowers. The buckwheat has sprouted, some of the corn is about a foot high. But it’s really cool to see a few veggies forming!
Bee Inspection
A little after 1PM today, we inspected our beehive. Scott set appointments to remind us to inspect the bees on Sunday afternoon every week for the first few weeks. I filled the second frame feeder with a gallon of 1:1 sugar water. Figured it would be quicker and easier to swap feeders rather than try refilling the feeder outside.
We opened the hive — there aren’t as many bees on the top entrance board now that the hive has a larger entrance, but they did build some burr comb between the frames and the top board. Scott scraped off the burr comb, and Anya held onto it. There were a lot of bees across six of the frames. The bees have started working on the north-most two frames, so they were ready for the second deep hive body.
We removed one of the frames from the lower hive body — looking at the frame, we saw both capped brood and larvae. That’s great — we know the queen is laying! I found a cool picture of the bee lifecycle that made me think we wouldn’t see any capped larva yet (we released the queen 8 days ago … and “capped” shows up on day 9.
They are collecting pollen (we saw some pollen on the bottom board) and nectar (there’s already capped honey as well as cells with not-yet-finished honey). The frame was placed into the new deep to encourage the bees to move up into the new box. We removed the empty feeder, replaced it with the filled feeder, and placed one new frame into the lower hive body so it has eight frames plus the feeder.
We then put the new deep on top of the hive — it has the one frame we pulled from the hive plus nine clean, new frames. There’s a little gap between the two hive bodies that shrinks up when weight is put on the top. We put the top entrance board on the deep, set the lid in place, and placed a large cinder block on top of it all.
Bee Check-in
We checked on our bees this afternoon — it was a nice, hot day (low 80’s!). We turned the entrance reducer to give them more space to come and go. I frequently saw bee traffic jams! We removed the queen cage and some burr comb the bees had built up between the two frames where the queen cage was placed. I’d given them a gallon of sugar water when we installed the package, and there’s a bit left. But they’ve consumed a lot of the syrup. We’ll have to refill their food when it warms up again next week.
Bees, again!
I’d ordered a package of bees this year (we’ve got frames from last year that will give them a good head start), but the post office seemed to have lost them. They left Kentucky over the weekend and went into “umm … the package is on its way to the destination. Check back later” status. But, at about 6:30 this morning, the post office rang me up to let me know they had bees for me. I picked up the package and set them in the butler pantry (a nice, dark, quiet place!) and we put the bees in their hive at about 3PM.
Ducks are starting to hatch!
One duck egg started pipping yesterday (really early!), but didn’t make it out of the egg. A second egg pipped this morning and we had a little duckling in the incubator by the afternoon.