An Easter Trio

Liam, Seamus, and William: The Three Musketeers

There is nothing like brotherly and cousin-ly love to make special holidays memorable.

Tandem swinging.

Lots and lots of Easter treats help too.

What a busy crazy day.  Now if only we could get our sugar-loaded children to sleep.

My Lunar Loaf

A key motivation to more reliably predict my sourdough starter's time until peak fermentation is to time the starter's final feed so that I am not baking bread in the middle of the night.  So far I have not succeeded.

I fed my starter at 7:00am.  It was ready to go at noon.

The dome on top has started to fall.

 After mixing, letting the ingredients sit for half an hour, 10 minutes of kneading, 10 hours for the first rise, 2 hours for the second rise, and 55 minutes of baking time, I ended up with this...

Beautiful huh?

Check out the time that I pulled the finished loaf out of the oven.

This is NOT 2:09 in the afternoon.  Sad face.

A Message from Beyond the Grave

Eight hours of honey extraction and counting. We have been switching back and forth - Grandma and me while Ian was at work and Ian while we went to the theatre to celebrate Grandma's birthday.  We are 2/3rds done.  Our floor is sticky.  We are tired.  None of us want to see honey ever again.  That feeling usually lasts until we cap the last bottle of delicious golden liquid and then we fall in love with bees and honey all over again.

One of many supers full of honey laden frames.

We removed most of the cappings with a hot knife.  

We delegated scratching anything we missed to Grandma.
What a way to spend your birthday!

The cappings go in a bucket.
The honey is filtered out and we use the wax to make candles and lip balm.

The uncapped frames are put into an extractor that spins the honey out of them.

The honey is collected in a bucket, filtered, and stored in glass jars
that are sold both on the farm and in select local craft breweries.

As always, nothing can ever run entirely smoothly.

Liam tried uncapping with his finger.
He poked a ton of holes in this frame until he figured out that this makes his finger sticky and Mom mad.

And to top is all off - I got stung!  On the tip of my finger.  By a dead bee.  No joke.  If that is not the ultimate honey bee revenge for letting them die on my watch and then stealing all their honey then I don't know what is.

Ups and Downs on the Farm

Today was a bit of a roller coaster of up and downs.

Up - The outdoor faucet in Charlie's paddock that has been frozen for most of the winter finally works again.  Yippee!

Up -  A ton of snow in our yard melted today.

Up - All the raw materials I need for making lip balm, hand cream, and soap arrived by mail.  I am super excited about this!  I am also a little bit scared thanks to the huge skull and crossbones signs all over the bottle of lye but hopefully I will get over this.

Down - Honey extraction has been delayed.  We got everything set up, started uncapping, and realized that the frames are way too cold and wet to continue.

Ian before we realized that we had a big problem.

So, now all our frames are sitting in the middle of our kitchen, covered by a tarp, with a dehumidifier running on full blast underneath.  They need to warm up and dry out before we can get to extracting the honey.  This is not inconvenient at all.  If I had anticipated this (which I should have), I could have begun the dehumidifying process two days ago when I took apart the hives.  Groan.

Down - I am still puzzled by my sourdough starter.

Based on today's monitoring I think that I should begin baking about 3.5 hours after feeding my starter.   We'll see if I get the same result tomorrow.

Good night from us here on Gael Glen Farm.  If nothing else, all our farm and homesteading adventures keep life interesting.

A Mad Scientist

It is snowing here.  Ugh.  I have pretty much given up on outside.  Instead, I am holed up in my nice, warm kitchen experimenting with my sourdough starter.  Since creating my own starter from wild yeast a few months ago, I have discovered that there are about a hundred variables to making good sourdough bread.  One of these is to use your starter for baking at exactly the right time.  That is, when the starter is resting at its peak of fermentation.

I found this excellent blog to help guide me.  For my last loaf, I let my starter rise for 8.5 hours before baking with it.  The bread turned out better than my previous tries, but still not great.  I will achieve a light and fluffy bread fulls of holes if it is the last thing I do!  Dramatic and a bit crazy - I know.

Today, I fed my starter at 11:45am with the intention of baking with it around 7:45pm tonight.  By 2:45pm it had doubled.  I read somewhere in my vast amount of research on this, that you should stir the starter a few times during the day to encourage fermentation.  I stirred at 2:45pm and again at 4:45pm.  Each time I stirred it, the starter went back to the 11:45am level.  However, I tried to research further the benefits of stirring the starter during fermentation and when exactly I should be stirring but I could not really find anything more about it.  Weird - maybe this is not actually a thing.  By 7:00pm my starter was still bubbling but it did not look so great.  It was somewhere between the 11:45 and 2:45 markers.

At this point I decided to label "stirring the starter during fermentation" a failed experiment and aborted my plan to bake with this iteration of the starter tonight.  I chucked out a bunch of the starter, fed it, and decided to try the fermentation process again - this time without the stirring.

I plan to check the starter's progress at the 8 hour mark but am considering leaving it until the 10 hour mark too.  I am confident that I will figure out the timing of its peak fermentation point, it might just take me a few (or many) more tries to do it.

Honey Bee Death March

None of our honey bees survived the winter.  None.

Using my "honey bee path of death"

I moved all our empty (sob) hives out of the bee yard and up to the house for the remaining honey to be extracted and all the equipment scraped and stored.

We had six strong hives last summer.  In the very late fall, the bee colonies in two of our hives inexplicably disappeared.  So, we were down to four.  One of these remaining hives had very few bees in it when I took it apart today.  I think this colony must have left too.  

The remaining three hives each had an entire second super of capped honey left.  This means that these bees did not starve.  However, they each had almost no bees in the body of the hive and a thick layer of dead bees on the bottom board.

One had lots of dead bees on top of the inner cover too.

It is a sad thing to have to empty out your apiary.  

Four

Three

Two

One

Zero

Bee carnage.

I found a bee who died with her tongue sticking out.  I took her inside to show the boys.

She also had two varroa mites on her torso.  Not a good sign.  We did not medicate our bees in the fall and maybe we should have.  Looks like varroa might be the cause of our empty apiary.

Despite this disappointing turn of events, I have thought of four good things to focus on:

1) I did not get stung today.  Always a bonus.
2) I did not have to wear my hot, constricting bee suit.  Ditto.
3) Our livelihood does not depend on our bees.  Thank goodness.
4) The bees are only half the equation.  We still have all of our equipment, we do not need to burn our hives because of American Foul Brood disease, and our frames are all drawn out.  This will make it fairly easy to bounce back.

After some deliberation, we have decided not to purchase nucs (replacement bee colonies this spring).  They are very expensive.  We plan to wait until swarm season to see if anyone is selling splits or swarms.

Ian is also going to set up a swarm lure to see if he can entice any swarms from our beekeeping neighbours to come live in our bee yard.  That would be an interesting way to acquire some new bees.

Stay tuned.  We may be down but we are not out!

Multi-tasking

During dinner tonight, Liam could not stay still.  Midway through a lap around the kitchen table, when he stopped at his plate to take a bite, Ian and I managed to get his attention and ask him what he was doing.  He looked directly at us and answered very seriously, "Multi-tasking."

While this was hilarious coming from a four year old, with all the things we do each day it is no wonder he has picked up the word.  For example, today we:

Did some transplanting and seed starting in the living room.

Made yogurt and decrystallized some old honey.

Started feeding our sourdough starter again
in anticipation of bread making later this week.

Made healthy peanut/almond butter balls.

Thank you for the recipe Auntie Skyla.
They were super easy to make with the boys (fun measuring and no baking)
and used up honey (which we have a ton of).
These will be great as after school snacks.

We played outside.

We also took naps, cleaned up the house, took care of the animals, read about a hundred books, played inside, watered the plants, did laundry, did crafts, ran errands, etc.....

I suppose we are rather good multi-taskers.  No wonder Liam knows the word.

Ride a Donkey Day

With cousin William visiting from Toronto, Liam and Seamus were excited to share with him the things they love most about living on Gael Glen Farm.  First they showed him how to ride Charlie.

Seamus

Liam

William tried it out but wasn't loving it.

True to her petting zoo roots, Charlie was the most lovely beast today.  So gentle and patient with the boys.

Next, Liam and Seamus showed William Martha's tricks.

Seamus is encouraging Matha has she attempts to climb up the curly whirly.
The boys think this is hilarious!

Finally, Liam and Seamus tried to give William the rare opportunity to pet Kate, our half-blind duck.

William was not very impressed by Kate.

Despite the best behaviour of our farm family, they were unsuccessful at winning William over this time around.  Instead, he was much more interested in trying to escape his mother in order to splash in the mud/poop sludge in the chicken run.  William also thoroughly enjoyed sticking his mittens elbow deep in the chickens' water bucket when mom wasn't looking.  He wouldn't be a normal almost two year old if he wasn't captivated by the possibility of playing in super stinky poop mud.