Busy Summer

We're busier than usual right now. That seems to be a hazard of summer. Three days a week, Tor is working on riding:



Both his instructor and Coda are very patient, and he's happiest out there. We have big hopes - see those heels? Now if we could only chase down footwear and breeches I'd rest easy.


In the garden, we're starting to see the effects of a recent heat wave. Things are springing along, and I cooked my first planting of fall seeds. Should have just put them under lights downstairs.


These were all taken with a telephoto lens, so I had trouble getting a good overview. The back kale/lettuce/carrot bed features some bolting chard. We're eating kale all the time (I had a large handful in my smoothie for lunch today - mmmmmm) although I anticipate this planting of Lacinato following the chard into BoltLand soon, I'm really enjoying it.

Before the heat hit, the lettuce was just beautiful. I had already started giving heads away, and last night had an entire salad of bronze romaine.


Unfortunately, there seems to be some kind of blight on the tomatoes. I'm still thinking that there's something wrong with the Target-bought Romas, but currently I'm tearing off the diseased branches to see what happens. We also sprayed soap to see if getting the aphids off helps the tomatoes cheer up. The other varieties seem happier. Plus, there are volunteers everywhere. I let two Cherokee Purples go in the Seascape strawberry bed, just to see what's what, so there should at least be some this summer.


The Anna apple is gracious under its load. Today I disturbed a branch and ate the one that fell. It wasn't ripe, exactly, but it was edible. I'm greatly looking forward to these beauties.

Overview of the right hand side. I'm tickled about the Italian beans on the right side. We'll have soup! In front of the beans in the long vertical bed are the possibly-too-many-plants of squash. Why do nurserymen insist on planting multiple seeds and not thinning? Why don't I notice before transplanting? Peas in the pea bed are almost ready to gather for seed, and then I have to figure out what to put there. Behind the peas are the Tristar strawberries. They taste better, to me, than the Seascape, but they're still unhappier. Smaller plants, smaller berries. We'll see what amendment will do later, although it might be a climate thing. Seascape is supposed to do well here, with the implication that others might not, I suppose.

The front bed is sparsely planted, mostly flowers. We caught the rain perfectly for some seeds and missed the window for others. Again, maybe I'll troll the garden centers for sales once this week's heat breaks.


Left side. From back to front, empty bed, lettuce/kale, Ellie's corn and maybe more corn (must buy seeds. . .) bed, then the Seascape berries, the leeks and garlic and kohlrabi that I just pulled today along with half a dozen garlic heads, and the peppers. Each week as warmer weather has come along, I'm seeing more sprouts on overwintered Padron. Hopefully there will be much good eating. This winter, I think I'm going to try to root some cuttings and overwinter them under lights instead of outside. Much easier!


The lavender out front is doing pretty well, too. I wish I had more gals to enjoy it, but the other day I was out early enough to catch one bee working in lambent light:


Just realized I left a pump running. Ack.

Bee happy

I finally got my ducks in a row and spent some time over the past few days inspecting hives. On Thursday, I went to the hive at a friend's house in order to see if they were ready for a super. This is a hive which, two or three years ago, was in a top-bar hive. Then I cut out the comb and rubber-banded it into frames for a Langstroth hive.

But. . . then nothing. Last year (?) I found only drones in the hive, so shook everyone out and either requeened or put a swarm in or something. I know, I should really go back to see what I did. But anyhow, we've never gotten more than the odd bit of honey from the hive.

For Thursday's visit, I even brought a full super's worth of drawn frames, reasoning that if they were ready, they could get right on to filling those frames rather than working to make wax. This friend has been so gracious about hosting the hive that I figured she really deserved a good year.

When I cracked the lid, I saw something to cheer the heart of a beekeeper: it was almost fully covered with busy bees. Unfortunately, I had also closed up the hive last fall with only nine frames in it, so right against the wall of the hive there was a perfect frame-sized comb of capped honey. It took my hive tool and a cookie sheet to get that out.

A quick inspection revealed open and capped brood, so I put on a queen excluder and the super. I'll go back and check in a couple of weeks.

And today, at home, Ellie and I suited up to check that swarm I'd hived about three weeks ago. It was still just the two deep boxes, so I cracked the top one off and we started going through the bottom.

Odd, I thought, it's mostly honey. Well, honey and pollen and unevaporated nectar. A tiny bit of brood, but every single one of those were drones. For a bit, I entertained the thought that I had somehow managed to get a queenless bunch, but they seemed awfully calm and pleasant for that to be the case.

It was nice to have Ellie with me, because I told her what we were seeing and sort of talked her through it. We set up the lid of the hive as a stand of sorts for the top box, and began to go through that. First frame, honey. Next frame, some drone and some honey. Frames 3-8? Solid, solid, perfect, textbook worker brood. Boy, oh boy was it pretty.

I practically jumped up and down, and Ellie was pleased and oh so helpful. She ran to get another deep box because I figured I'd give them another place to put brood going up rather than rotating the boxes. I still don't know if that was the right decision. At any rate, I figured I'd concentrate on big hive rather than big honey for now.

But wait. . . who was that I spied between the frames of that brood-heavy box, wandering around on the upturned lid? It was the queen! (Sorry, no pictures. We were busy and the only lens I have functioning is a super telephoto -- good for sports, bad for gardening.)

Back Ellie had to scurry to get the queen marking pen and the tube. She was so resourceful and quick that I didn't even worry about the queen, just carefully lifted the box up and set it on the bottom box, then coaxed the queen into the tube.

It was, alas, a new paint pen, so while Ellie kept the bee down in the tube, I shook and jabbed the pen against the fence until the paint flowed, but not so badly it would overwhelm her. Just a few quick dabs and she had a nice white dot on her back. Without planning, it turns out to be the "right" color for the year.

When the paint was dry and the new box rested on the getting-very-tall-now hive, I tipped her out onto it. She looked confused -- I wonder if she was thinking something along the lines of "where'd everybody go?" and then as if on cue, up popped a worker and like a tiny Border Collie, chivvied the queen back down into the hive.

Although I was thoroughly wet through from sweat afterwards (talk about beekeeper's glow), it was a great feeling to have a happy hive. I just wish I'd had more of them.

Just a quick walk

I went out this morning just to grab some oregano for some spaghetti sauce I was making from the very tail end of last year's tomatoes. That freezer had to be cleaned out to make room for this spring's grassfed beef, and we are enriched by it.

A funny thing happened on the way to the herb bed --



So a quick run down: morning fog, check. Afternoon sun, check. Summer squash, check. Strawberries, both varieties, check. It must be summer!

Two Heads are Better than One

Gardening out here can sometimes seem like a solitary activity, but it's really not. How could it be in a family of six? There's all the help with hardscape from Eric, and the evenings I force him to walk in the yard with me while I talk about plants, to the kids' various levels of interest and help. So it's always a multi-person effort.

For instance, I only get to see the strawberries so far. Eating seems to be a kid assignment (edited to add that tonight we discovered that the DOG is also eating them -- aaagh):


The flowers that Ellie and I planted together are coming up under the onslaught of more rain than our area has seen in over a hundred years. Sigh. I miss summers. Anyhow, these are blue bread poppies. I'm looking forward to harvesting seeds and then baking:



I thought it was only one, but another of the Padron peppers has decided to return for another year:



Two of the Anna apples are very close to each other. I've never seen this before;


And of course, our prime garden helper also takes seriously the "no empty bed" approach -- to gardening and, er, other things:


He's not alone in his philosophy:

Mystery solved

I stuck my head up the stairwell and called, "Sarafina, the peas are looking horrible. Can you pick some and see if we can salvage any?" I had wondered, this morning, if there was some sort of disease I should know about that was attacking them.

She went out and then called me -- "You need to come and see this!"

Now we know what was wrong with the peas.

I don't think there is a spray for this.

Back in the Saddle

I remember pretty clearly the day that I first perceived the beauty of sheer hard work. It's not as though I was raised by slackers, far from it. But lessons presented are not the same as lessons absorbed.

Anyhow, I was newish to my marriage and therefore to my inlaws, and we had gone up to their place for some visit or other. Maybe it was when my sister in law graduated with her PA degree, and we went up to help get ready, or it may just have been an ordinary visit.

What matters to the story, despite my nattering along, is that I watched (and helped, some) my inlaws work. They did yard work, housework, whatever needed doing, and then they took a break and had lunch, cleaned up, and got back to work. Nothing really out of the ordinary. We were all significantly younger then, too.

At any rate, the message finally found a resting place in me -- work, hard work, is in many ways its own reward. Sometimes it's the only reward. On that day, I did one of those "I want to be like them" things and it's never gone away fully.

I don't mean to suggest that I work as hard as they did or do, I'm still myself. But I'm able to dig deeper and find more effort inside me than I used to. So even though I had terrific (though fortunately shared) insomnia last night, today was really productive so far. Eventually I get to go to my nephew's 11th birthday party, so that's a few hours of a different kind of productivity.

But I got up and mixed the sourdough english muffins that were started last night from the sourdough starter, then moved some of the really rich dirt out from the old chicken coop area to a garden bed, although there's much more dirt to move. We decided not to raise meat birds, as I'd planned.

Taking a year off of beekeeping because I had no bees and hadn't gotten any swarms was something I'd seriously considered. I was a discouraged beekeeper. Yesterday, though, Eric reminded me that our vacations are built on honey sales, and then I got a call while I was at the zoo looking at baby otters. A friend's neighbor had a swarm in a tree. Although it took longer than I'd hoped and I wasn't certain I'd gotten all of them, I hived that really big swarm in two nuc boxes. Then Eric and I went back at night and picked them up -- all of the swarm had moved down into the boxes, so we had to borrow an exterior box to transport them all. Good night's work.

This morning then, we really decided to dismantle the would-be meat coop and make that area a bigger apiary. I'm hoping to have at least four hives, and to be a more conscious beekeeper this year. With a late start, I'm going to have to get my act together.

In the midst of muffining, I moved the colony into its hive boxes -- really big swarm, as I noted.


Tomorrow the cement on the metal stand should be firm enough to lift the box up and I'll get set to start admiring the real champions of hard work.

Castaway

Sleeve Island, what a lonely place to be.

So little left to do on this Cotton Sweater of Many Ends


And yet, picking it up to knit some more rounds of a sleeve feels a bit like running away from the Thing behind the door in a dream. My hands move slowly, and surely a sweater this size shouldn't weigh 25 pounds! The weight of resistance burdens every stitch.

And yet, I do want it done, and the deadline for county fair entries looms. What to do?

Well, I did finish some spinning.



And how I miss the good camera, which is hurt and out of commission right now. Turned out I got about 500 yards of singles from the Grafton Fibers batt. Once they were skeined up, I washed and shocked them with agitation and repeated plungings from hot to cold water so that they'd be slightly-fulled. I don't trust my singles spinning that much yet.

Even with the rotten pictures, perhaps you can tell why I can't wait to get this knit up into something. This yarn wants, I believe, to be a warm, squishy hat. Exactly which warm, squishy hat is still in debate.


I must not be the only spinner who waffles about finding the Right Pattern to complement finished yarn. Commercial yarn doesn't carry the weight that handspun does for me. I've loved every one of my few handspun knitting adventures, so I probably should get going.


Once I finish 4.6 sleeves, that is.