Bee Prepared

As summer winds down, it is time to start thinking about preparing our honey bees for winter.  The first thing we need to think about is creating the strongest possible colonies.  For us, this means consolidating weaker hives into a strong one and feeding sugar syrup to help the bees build up their winter stores.

Three weeks ago, Hives 2 and 3 showed signs of preparing to swarm.  A honey bee colony will swarm when the bees decide that their hive has reached capacity.  Swarming involves the queen bee and a large proportion of her subjects leaving the hive to find a new place to live.  Swarming is a natural part of a hive's life cycle; however, mid-August is late for a swarm and does not leave the remaining colony much time to recover from the loss of their queen and the significant population reduction.  I was not thrilled about the idea of losing my laying queens nor a huge number of my bees, and so instead of letting the hives swarm naturally, I created artificial swarms by splitting each hive into two.  I moved the queen and one brood box off the existing hive to a new stand and left the second brood box where it was.  I added an empty box on top of each to give the bees more space.  This made the hive think it had swarmed without actually doing so.

While splitting a very strong hive into two weaker ones solved my problem three weeks ago, today as I begin preparing the hives for winter, I am looking to consolidate those two weaker hives back into one strong one.  To do this, I placed the hives back together separated by a sheet of newspaper.  The newspaper divider gives the bees a chance to get used to each other again and they will slowly disintegrate the paper as they reintegrate themselves over the next week or so.  Hopefully the season for swarming is over now so the bees will be happy to be part of a nice strong colony again and the urge to find a new home will not return.

I also began feeding the hives I consolidated.  In the fall, beekeepers often feed hives sugar syrup (2 parts sugar to 1 part water) to help them store up enough honey inside their brood nest to get through the winter. There are still lots of flowers in bloom, particularly goldenrod, clover and bee balm, so there is still ample food for the bees in nature but it cannot hurt to give them easy access to sugar syrup as they get used to their new consolidated colony.

Bee balm in our woodland garden.

And so, on this last day of August, the preparations for winter have begun.

Beans, Beans, the Magical Fruit

We had great success with bush beans this year; however, our pole beans were another story entirely.  It took us three plantings to get any of the pole beans to even sprout and we are only now seeing some (minimal) produce.

My plan was to grow the pole beans in pots and have them climb up the trellis over our pepper plants.  As it turns out, I do not think beans like to be grown in pots, even with consistent watering.  Maybe Jack was on to something - beans really do much better when planted directly in the ground.  My pot method certainly left me a long way from growing a beanstalk that reaches anywhere near the clouds!  I will chalk this up to a lesson learned and will try something different next year.  Maybe trading Charlie for some magic beans?  Not likely.

Another Day, Another Addition to the Pantry

In our continued effort to squirrel away our excess garden produce, Seamus and I made a big pot of chilli.

 We started with our garden's onions, garlic, eggplant, sweet peppers, a jalapeno pepper, cabbage, carrots, zucchini, parsley, and basil.  We added this to some of Ian's ground deer meat from the freezer and lots of spices.

Some time in the pressure canner and there we have it - six gorgeous jars of spicy, but not too spicy, chilli ready for the pantry.  To eat it we just need to reheat, add some kidney beans and top with cheddar cheese, creme fraiche and chives.  Now all that is left to do is wait for a cold winter's day and a loaf of bread fresh out of the oven.

Too Many Tomatoes!

When you harvest this many tomatoes from the garden, you know you have some canning to do.  After filling our CSA baskets and reserving several tomatoes to gift to family and friends, the rest of these beauties were destined for the food mill.

We have quite a bit of boiling ahead of us to reduce the tomato juice down to sauce thickness.  After that, into the pressure canner it will go!  I see a winter full of spaghetti sauce, chilli, stew, and tomato soup.

Day of Liam

With school starting tomorrow and Seamus on a much needed (for me!) Shay-cation at the cottage with Grandma, Liam and I designated today "Day of Liam".  We did exactly what Liam wanted to do.  He was very clear that I was not allowed to "say no" to his activity choices today.  He kept us going all day long, and needless to say, we did not do any of the farm chores that are on my to-do list.

We began the day at the Canadian Science and Technology Museum.

There is no doubt that Liam is his father's child.  He is fascinated by puzzles and gears.  He is really good at them too!

Like most other boys, Liam is also in love with trains.  He was over the moon about getting to explore the inside of the great big train inside the museum.

We lunched at the nearby Rotisserie St-Hubert where he had, you guessed it, chicken fingers and french fries.  I swear by this point Liam may well have tried this meal in almost every restaurant in the city!

We then spent much longer than I anticipated picking out the perfect first day back-to-school outfit.  After much indecision, Liam finally selected a blue Ninja Turtles t-shirt and camouflage cargo shorts. He is convinced that his friends will think that this outfit is "cool".   He also picked out all of his "ce que je veux" school snacks and decided that he needed a new tube of lip chap (he opted for peppermint mocha flavour) since it is getting to be "that time of year".

He was extremely well behaved all day and can be so hilarious.  For example, after he settled on his outfit he told me, "Thank you Mama.  I am so happy with this."  He also mentioned repeatedly throughout the day that he was very glad it was his day and not "Day of Mama" because doing what he likes is much more fun.

He collapsed in contented exhaustion after our busy day and is very, very excited to get on the school bus tomorrow.  Hopefully this means that I will not have to drag him kicking and screaming onto the bus for the first few weeks of school like I had to do last year.  I am still slightly traumatized by that extremely unpleasant experience.

Spicy Sunday

After spending the morning fixing the hole in our sheep fence, Ian turned his attention to our abundance of hot peppers.  We now have an entire bowl of Habanero and Scotch Bonnet peppers and a counter full of Thai Dragon peppers.

The Habanero has a heat rating of 100,000 to 350,000 Scoville units. Scotch Bonnets are 80,000 to 400,000 Scoville units. Thai Dragon peppers are somewhere between 50,000 to 100,000 Scoville units. For comparison purposes, Jalapeño peppers have a heat rating of 2,500 to 8,000 on the Scoville scale.

So, yes.  These are some super spicy peppers that we need to find something to do with.  Thank goodness Ian likes hot sauce.  However, even he does not like "burn your face off" hot sauce so we are on the look out for hot sauce recipes that use these types of spicy peppers but are reasonable on the heat scale.  If you have any winning recipes, please send them our way.  We are more than happy to reciprocate with a bottle of whatever sauce we end up making.  Feeling HOT HOT HOT!

The Day that Wouldn't End

With over a dozen Seamus temper tantrums before 10 am, it was a long day to say the least.  After an early wake up and near constant meltdowns about everything from watering the garden to helping wrangle the sheep after a fence breach, Seamus was the lucky recipient of an early nap.  He fell asleep in under a minute.  This left Liam and I to finish the farm chores and put together a huge pot of deer borscht which we will can for winter.

Liam washed all the garden veggies.

We cleaned and I chopped everything.

The stew is ready to be pressure canned tomorrow.

It was inevitable that upon getting Liam down to nap around 12:45 pm that Seamus woke up.   As I sadly saw my own nap evaporate, Seamus (in a better though still temperamental mood) and I played 1.5 hours of Little People farm (involving trucking each animal in turn off to "animal jail" for standing on the barn roof - putting "bad people/animals" in jail is Seamus' latest obsession - maybe he will take after his Uncle Matt and become a police officer).  Finally I convinced him to help me make chocolate zucchini muffins.  As he destroyed the kitchen which I had already cleaned twice by this point, Seamus calmly pointed out that "baking is messy Mom".  No kidding when you insist on mixing with your hands.

Dinner was tough.  Bedtime was tougher.  Finally, by 7:30 pm - after getting called at least five times after putting the boys to bed to deal with their various issues - the boys finally went to sleep and I could collapse in exhaustion (at least until 10 pm when I had to feed the animals and put them to bed too).

It was just one of those days.

Beekeepers-in-Training

I firmly believe that it is never too early to involve children in farm life, after all they are a huge part of why we do all this.  I have been gardening with Liam and Seamus since they were in a ring sling and they have helped with planting since before they could hold Grandpa Ed's fancy cultivator.

They have helped us make maple syrup since they were infants.

And have been our constant helpers in caring for our livestock.

And of course, the boys have been involved in honey extraction since before they could walk.

But today was Liam and Seamus' first introduction to a new apiary chore.  Much to their delight, they used hive tools to scrape mouldy pollen off of old frames from our hives that did not overwinter.

With deer season just around the corner, this frees up some highly coveted room in the deep freeze.  We are so very lucky to have such healthy, capable boys who are (almost) always willing to lend a hand on the farm.

An August Sowing

For us, the end of August is usually a time for harvesting and canning.  The weeding and watering are mostly done and we are busy reaping and storing the rewards of our spring and summer's work.  This year is different.  Having constructed cold frames to get an early start to the growing season, I am well positioned to extend the tail end of our growing season as well.  As such, I find myself sowing seeds and seedlings now in hopes of harvesting fall hardy vegetables until November or even early December.  

Our fall plantings of chard and kale are already coming along nicely.  Last week we planted radishes, arugula, daikon, spinach, lettuce, green beans, carrots, and even a new zucchini plant.  Today, I added a row of peas and a few more rows of spinach and lettuce.  There is nothing better than being able to harvest fresh greens from your garden after everything else is done for the season.  I also transplanted some seedlings I started inside mid-summer into the garden: broccoli, cauliflower, lettuce, endive, parsley, and basil.  I gave everything a good watering and now we must wait to see what takes.  Here's hoping for a good fall harvest!

Chicken Jail

This is the second time this summer that a few of our hens have gone broody.  Chicken broodiness is when a hen plucks out all of her breast feathers, stops laying eggs, pretty much stops eating and drinking, and sits in a nest all day on whatever eggs happen to be there - fertilized or not.  Last summer I took pity on our broody hens and let them try to incubate some eggs into chicks. I ended up with lots of broken eggs and four roosters.  No thanks.

Our two poultry prisoners.

This summer, I have no patience for broody hens - they go straight to chicken jail.  Chicken jail means that the hens get banished to the other side of the coop (the backyard side) where there are no nests to sit in.  Instead they spend their days foraging for fallen apples, eating the fresh grass that the rest of the hens can only dream of eating, and generally being allowed to free range through the garden and yard.  I think of it as a white collar prison.

At night I move the hens from their makeshift nests into the barn on the goats' side.
The goats are great hosts and are happy to take in the prisoners for the night.

After four days in chicken jail, their broodiness is cured and the hens are reintegrated back in with the rest of chicken society.  In this case a little tough love does the trick.

1 Epic Harvest, 2 Testicle Disinfections & 3 Lambs with Separation Anxiety

Another busy day on the farm began with one epic CSA harvest.

It has only been three days since our last harvest but wow!  Lots of vegetables!  This week's CSA baskets included: green beans, heirloom tomatoes of many different varieties and sizes, cooking onions, walla walla sweet onions, kale, carrots, eggplant, cucumbers, beets, zucchini, orange sweet peppers, hot peppers (jalapenos, chillies and others), parsley, mint, basil, swiss chard and turnips!  What a feast.

Unbeknownst to me, the harvesting was the easy part of my day, in large part because Grandma was kind enough to come down to help me with the boys while Ian is away on business.  This means that Liam and Seamus did not have to "help" me with harvesting.  *Sigh of relief*.  I love my boys but toddler "help" in harvesting makes the job take twice (or three times) as long and is at least one hundred times more frustrating.  If I have to ever say the phase, "Seamus you are standing on the _______ [insert name of any vegetable you can think of here]" again, it will be too soon.

I have also been monitoring the ram lambs' castration and noticed that their scrotum is starting to detach.  It looked a little sticky and icky along the edges during this morning's check requiring me to catch each lamb (Cobalt was easy, Lego not so much) at bed time and coat the edges of their ball sack in iodine.  Ram lamb horns are sharp.  I do not enjoy being poked with them.

Finally, it is pouring here.  Not that I am complaining - rain is much needed after the drought we had for most of the summer.  The problem with heavy rain is that my heart breaks to leave poor Charlie outside under the shelter while the other animals are snuggled up warm and dry inside the barn.  It is supposed to rain all night and so I decided that I would put the three lambs safely inside the lambing pen so that Charlie could join the rest of the sheep in the main barn.  It was a close call which was more heart wrenching - pathetic Charlie soaked from standing out in the rain or the pitiful baas of the lambs as they were separated from their mothers for the first time (granted they can see and smell them through the pen wall but this does not seem to be much consolation).  However, as it continues to downpour I feel less and less bad about the lambs' separation anxiety and better knowing that Charlie is safe and dry inside the barn.  Thank goodness I have understanding neighbours because I have a feeling that it is going to be a noisy night on the farm.  The lambs seem pretty determined to express exactly how much they dislike my weather-related decision making.  If only everyone would get along, barnyard living arrangements here on Gael Glen Farm could be much simpler.  

Musical Livestock

The night we arrived home from vacation, I went to put the animals to bed and noticed that Abbott was chillin' with the ladies.  He is supposed to be in the neighbouring paddock keeping Charlie company during her segregation from the lambs.  He was clearly not.  It was late and I was tired so I shrugged it off and allowed him the luxury of sleeping in the barn with the ewes and lambs.

The next morning, I separated Abbott from the other sheep.  He seemed more than happy to be reunited with Charlie and munch on the oats they typically share for breakfast in the far paddock.

Yet, that evening, when I put the animals to bed - there was Abbott in with the ewes again!  I decided that he must be pushing the gate open and squeezing through the bottom so I moved the bungie cord that holds the gate shut lower in an effort to block his escape route.  Smart farmer, right?  Well, clearly my sheep is smarter than me.

Tonight at bed time I was greeted not only by Abbott in the sheep pen but also by Martha and Mellie, the goats!  It was a barn party in the sheep paddock and poor Charlie's invitation must have got lost in the mail.  She was woefully stuck in the neighbouring paddock while the rest of the livestock was having a grand old time.  I guess that is what happens when you are caught stomping on lambs.  Nobody likes a lamb stomper.  It looks like I have some fence inspecting to do tomorrow and some breaches to fix if I am going to put an end to this expanding game of musical livestock.  Party pooper - yes, I know.

Tub 'O Turnips

What would you do with a huge tub of turnips?  Nobody can possibly like turnips that much!  After saving some for this week's CSA baskets, Ian pickled the rest.  We really like shawarma and luckily pickled turnips are a key ingredient in those.  They are also a nice addition to salads and as a substitute for cucumber pickles - a favourite in our household.

Fooled you!  These are not french fries but sliced turnip.

While Ian was on turnip duty, the boys and I peeled garlic.  We peeled and peeled until our fingernails ached.  However, this is short term pain for long term gain in the form of ready-to-use garlic for all sorts of dishes from garlic bread to spaghetti sauce to stir fries, soups and stews.

Preserving our own food is lots of work up front but then we have easily accessible, home grown food at our fingertips all winter long.  I do not have the energy to work hard to make every meal.  Knowing that I have prepared food available in our pantry or freezer motivates me to keep processed food out of our shopping cart.  Knowing that I do not have to peel garlic to make homemade garlic bread is often enough to stop me from buying store bought garlic bread, for example, or knowing that I can toss together a jar of canned tomatoes with some frozen garlic and dried basil to make a quick pasta sauce keeps the store bought stuff off my grocery list.  We know that advance preparation is key for a winter of easier, healthier eating and so here we find ourselves at the end of every summer canning, dehydrating, and freezing much of our garden produce.  It is a very cool thing to be able make meals in the middle of winter largely out of things that came out of our summer gardens.

Back from the Big City

We took our country boys to the big city for a week...

... and our garden exploded in our absence.  It is a jungle out here!  We spent our first day back harvesting, weeding and generally tidying up outside.

An actual hamper of turnip.

Next on the list is cleaning and preserving.  There is still so much to do but at least our work resulted in delicious "choose your own tomato" sandwiches for lunch!

Seamus' choice (left) and Liam's (right).
Both heirloom and both delectable!

This tomato would have excited Grandpa.
He loved a good one slice beefsteak tomato sandwich!