So much to catch up on!

Hmmm, where to start? A lot has happened since my last post. 2010's garden was okay, but we found we had a lot left to learn. 2011's garden did quite a bit better but could have used more attention. Bug-picking and weeding were kept to a minimum due to our health issues. We had a decent harvest, but I'm sure the weed competition didn't do anything to help the vegetables grow. We still put up many, many jars of amazing canned veggies and grape jam for our use throughout the winter.The seeds and tubers for 2012's garden have been ordered. More on that later.

In September of 2011 we planted a small stand of winter wheat. Not only is it acting as a ground cover, it will provide us with wheatberries (for us and the chickens) and wheat straw (chicken bedding and mulch for the garden). It greened up and grew a bit recently when we had a bout of (strange) warm weather, so hopefully it will make it through the rest of the winter with any pending frosts Mother Nature decides to toss our way.

The honeybees survived the bitter winter of 2010/2011 and did really well in 2011. They appeared to be strong going into this winter as well. We won't check them until the weather warms up this spring. Since it's been a mild winter so far (crossing fingers!), they should be just fine.

Our new chicks will be arriving this spring. The current laying hens are still healthy and happy, but we have lost 2 to predators and since they're now almost 2 years old they're not laying as much. Of course their molting during the fall and the short days we're having now aren't helping, but their age is working against them in the laying arena. The new chicks will be a combination of sexed pullets and straight-run chicks, so this time we're pretty much guaranteed a few roosters since the straight-runs usually are about 50:50 ratio of hens to roosters. We'll keep the nicest roo for our flock and the others... Well, let's just say they'll be taking a different road when they're a few months old. It doesn't make sense for us to continue to pay a premium at the farmers market or grocery store for organic, free range chicken when we're able to produce it ourselves for a fraction of the price. More on that in a later post.

In 2011, we welcomed the newest addition to our family, a baby boy! We're looking forward to teaching him about our passions, especially my favorite: playing in the dirt!

Here's to an exciting, productive growing season in 2012!

The other girls (about 12,000 of them!)

In April, our bees arrived from Brushy Mountain Bee Farm. We ordered a 3-lb. package, which is approximately 10,000 to 12,000 bees. Talk about intimidating, but really interesting at the same time! The box of bees had this great smell of beeswax and honey, and the bees just had this soothing "hum" about them. I guess most people would say they buzz, but they hum to me :-)

We set up our beehive near the edge of the woods by our tractor shed. The first order of business was to get all suited up in coveralls, the veil, etc., and spray the bees with a sugar water solution. The sugar water makes it more difficult for the bees to fly, which makes it much easier for us to handle them. Getting the bees into the hive was pretty simple. We took out a few frames and literally dumped them in! After they were all in the super, we put the remaining frames in and closed the cover. We fed them sugar syrup for several weeks to help them gain strength and to tide them over until the nectar began flowing.

Troy all suited up, about to dump the box of bees into the super.

Troy putting the top on the hive.

We checked the sugar solution container every day or so and opened the hive about once a week for a while. The bees did really well and we had to put the next super on the hive about one month after we got them.

Honeybees at work, filling up a frame with brood and honey.

If you look closely, you can see the brood (baby bees) in the cells surrounding the yellow-ish capped cells. They look like little white worms at this stage.

We don't have any recent photos of the beehive, but it now has a total of 4 supers. The bees were doing really well when we checked on them last time. We'll begin feeding them sugar syrup again towards the end of the month, and around that time we'll also see if there's any honey for harvest. The bees will need about 40 lbs of honey to overwinter with, so we can't take it all from them. For a colony just established in April, they look great!

The girls

In mid-April, our day-old chicks arrived. We decided to go with heritage breeds that are true to the way chickens were years ago, before being bred for industrial chicken farming. All of our hens are "dual-purpose," meaning they are good egg layers but also have enough muscle that they could be used for meat as well.

The chicks in the box they arrived in.

1 day old.

5 days old. 

2 weeks old...still somewhat cute.

1 month old...the awkward teenage years.

We have 12 chickens total, and there are five different breeds. Three of the chicks are Rhode Island Reds (non-industrial), three are Barred Plymouth Rocks, 2 are Silver-laced Wyandottes, 2 are Golden-laced Wyandottes, and 2 are Australorps. They will all lay brown eggs when they're older.

From the time they came to us (picked them up at the Post Office!) until they were about 5 weeks old, they lived in a cardboard box in our basement bathroom. In the meantime, Troy began working on their coop. As you can see, Bear had to help!

Bear the builder.

6 weeks old; enjoying their new home!

The girls really love their coop. Troy made it movable: it has wheels on one end and jacks on the other which helps with leveling the coop on our hilly ground. Since it's movable, it's technically called a "tractor" (don't ask me why). They have several windows (with shutters) and two perches, along with 4 nest boxes. It also has a detachable run that is movable as well.

The coop and run, with a detachable tarp for extra shade on these hot summer days.

The view from inside their run (3 months old).

"Did you bring treats?"

Our little piece of ground

During the summer of 2009, Troy and I began the hunt for our first home. We were very fortunate to be able to find this property: almost 3 acres (~1 acre wooded, 2 acres open) with a nice ranch-style house. We closed on the house on October 16, 2009, and began moving in the same day. There were several large home repairs that had to be made right away that our home inspector didn't find: mold in the basement all over the drywall, a water-damaged bathroom floor, a tree growing into our septic tank, a leaky roof...just to name a few. After fixing the house and reclaiming about 1/4 acre that was taken over by brush and saplings, we have finally had a chance to relax and enjoy the place. Here are some pics from when we first moved in:

Home sweet home...and Bear, of course!

Our front yard. The patch of dirt on the left is where the tree was growing into the septic tank. Thankfully it was cool outside when we worked on that project because those roots were ridiculously strong!

The pond. The smelly, smelly pond. It has been filled in since the neighbor's dog decided it was a good place for a swim. Why not? It's great to go home smelling like dead frogs, isn't it? This is now an herb and flower bed.

Another "feature" of the property that was promptly removed: the pool. It was home to many tadpoles (dead and alive) and would have been a mosquito breeding ground if we left it in place. That combined with the very shoddy, dangerous deck around it was reason enough for us to rip it out. We are now attempting to grow grass here, though the only thing that really wants to grow is bindweed. Que sera, sera...

See that shed in the distance? We had to reclaim all of the ground between the grass and the shed that was allowed to grow up. We're still working on getting rid of the poison ivy that's on that hill...

In the spring of this year, we got a colony of honeybees and a dozen heritage breed hens. Both of us have experience with chickens, but the honeybees were a  new venture for us. We joined the local beekeeping club and read some books, and I think we have a decent handle on things so far. We'll see when harvest time comes!

We also began our first garden together this April. Our tiller came from Walter G. Coale, Inc., the same tractor supply company that Troy's family has been using for several generations. We new that our soil wasn't that great, but after tilling it that became even more obvious. It is in serious need of some organic matter and we picked up hundreds of pounds of rocks, and it seems like more surface every day! We have our work cut out for us here, that's for sure.

We tilled a small patch for buckwheat, and that came up pretty well. There is a bare area where a visiting snapping turtle killed the growing buckwheat (looking for a place to lay her eggs I assume), but it looks like we'll have a pretty decent yield other than that. We also planted several types of corn: dent, shoepeg, and the standard sweet corn. There are quite a few stalks that didn't grow very much, most likely due to the bad soil. Some of the corn is doing well in part of the garden where the soil is a bit better. We're also growing sunflowers, tomatoes, peppers, lettuce, green beans, okra, lima beans, zucchini, yellow squash, patty pan squash, acorn squash, potatoes, watermelon, and pumpkins. We're harvesting whatever the bugs and animals don't eat first!

More posts and pics to follow!

--MB