Welcome Spring!

Spring has sprung! There is evidence and excitement all over our yard . . .

Rhubarb (now in it's 3rd spring) is showing itself . . . 

Swiss Chard, overwintered in cold frames are looking fabulous . . . 

Strawberries are coming to life and have been thinned and strawed . . . 

Hens (now almost one) are in the full swing of laying motion. Here is Pearl, our best layer.

The hens have been in trouble recently though for raking the nice straw in their nesting boxes, out with they big ole feet!! Silly hens.

This is probably Elizabeth, our medium sized Barred Rock. 

The Rocks were very keen on investigating this camera business . . . 

Garlic (4 varieties) planted in the fall is looking healthy! Can't wait!

Asparagus (3rd spring) is ready to start picking daily. A wonderful thing.

My honey bees are a-flyin' -- pictured here on a peach tree.

Both hives have made it through the winter.

One has symptoms of Nosema, so I've treated both hives with medicine. Both queens are laying, and there is fresh brood in both hives. We actually saw baby bees being born when we went in for the first time last week! 

One of my dwarf peach trees in bloom.

A plum-cot tree in bloom. (plum & apricot combined)

The Birds and The Bees

Awww .... aren't they cute? One of each of my three breeds of hens: Barred Rock, New Hampshire Red, Rhode Island Red. It's snowy around here, and my hens weren't venturing out of their hen house much, so I threw some straw out around their house and they love it. Since then, they get out most of the day and tromp around. Here, my three hens are sunning themselves in the 30 degree weather under the hen house.

In spite of the cold weather and shorter days, my girls are young and laying up a storm. The day before we didn't have any eggs, then yesterday we had seven! So, to catch up, I made a double batch of zucchini bread and quiche for dinner.

Here is a picture of the hen house with the small bit of snow that is still hanging on. (Here, being relatively close to the ocean and the gulf stream, our snow doesn't tend to stick around very long, sadly. For me, if it's going to be cold, I'd just assume have snow for sledding and ice for skating!)

My honey bees are all wrapped up for the winter. In November I finally got to putting up the mouse guard (narrow fencing stapled to the entryway). The thought of stapling a bee hive just didn't sit well with me. Even though it was below freezing (an old timer told me they can't fly below freezing, but I don't know if that's true?) on the day I stapled the fencing to the entrances, I still put on my veil. I couldn't help myself.

The mouse guard, well, prevents mice. Apparently it's very common for mice to find their way into the hive to keep warm. Ugh. Mainly they make a big mess, and sometimes the bees win out and propolis (bee glue) the poor mouse from head to toe, so it looks sort-of mummified.

Finally in December before the big cold snap, I wrapped my hives in roof felting to help them to keep warm. It's not necessary to do this, but a lot of people feel it helps them through the cold winter months. Perhaps then they use up less energy trying to stay warm, which by the way they do in a similar way to the Emperor Penguin where the Queen Bee is in the middle, then they cluster around her in a big ball. The bees take turns being on the warm inside, versus the chilly outside of the cluster. Cool eh?

Some bees do slowly die through the winter. So when they do, as is customary, worker bees push the dead bees out of the hive on a warm (relatively speaking) day. So far I've seen two batches of 10 from each hive over two months. The idea is that before winter you want to have a large strong hive that has plenty of honey stores to make it through to warmer months. I hope mine make it. It will be sad if they don't after all my work, but I have certainly learned a lot and will start over and purchase more bees if they don't.

Hostile Takeover

I was only able to catch one hen on this swing set on my camera, but there had been five! This shot is from a few weeks ago. Since then I've tried to cut their wings three times, as they'd even gotten into my fenced in garden! Still, every afternoon, I find a few of them roaming around outside of their fencing. So, today I have a neighbor who also has hens and has just successfully trimmed his hens wings, coming over to help me. My hens are out of control. The little whipper-snappers.

However, they have started to give me some good gifts . . .

I don't think my Barred Rocks are laying yet, but my New Hampshire and Rhode Island Reds are just starting. My champion layer so far is my New Hampshire Red, Pearl. Named for her pearlized colored legs -- they are supposed to be yellow at this young age.

Hen Bliss

I can't imagine there is a better day in keeping hens than the day you find the first egg. After 21 long weeks, our moment finally arrived! A wee little egg, found yesterday morning. The first eggs that young hens lay are small. We have plastic Easter eggs in their nesting boxes to encourage the hens to lay there.

For breakfast today we will cook up our lonely egg for the boys and split it. It's gotta be good. I'm hoping.

We had friends visit the other day . . .

and they fell in love with our hens.

Give us an afternoon with your kids . . .

and we'll have them begging for hens of their own!

Incidentally, we received another wee-little-egg today.

Wonderful.

Disobedient Hens

Do you remember this?

I do. Victor and I worked our rear-ends off to make a protected area for our little hens.

Don't you know that now as many as five of them at one time hop out (flapping, half climbing up the fence) at will and peck around the yard.

Ahem . . . why did we bother?!

They were hopping out so frequently, and so many of them, that one late afternoon Benjamin and I let them all out figuring they'd stay close to home and come home easily at dusk. Nope. Those hens started trekking deep into the woods like a group of mountaineers beginning a expedition to climb Mount Washington. We had to pull out the stale hot dog buns and have Benjamin and Ripley coral them back towards the yard like sheep dogs -- luring them with crumbs. Bad hens.

To top it all off . . . we have no eggs yet. This is the week they start to lay. We are waiting.

Not too patiently.

Victor is already starting to talk about soup . . . and I don't mean egg drop.

We do have pole beans, harriot verts, dried beans, parsley and tons of arugula though!

Hens, Bees, Peaches and Apples

How are my little hens doing?

They are almost full grown. In two weeks or so, they should start laying tiny little eggs. How exciting! We have one Barred Rock who likes to exercise her wings. At first we were concerned that she was a he, but other than being slightly larger and able to fly a little bit, she doesn't display any other "he" characteristics. But we're still watching, just in case. She occasionally hops out of their chicken run and waddles around outside, but she wants to be with her friends, so shortly after doing a little exploring she pops back in.

Don't you just love the barred rock feathers?

So pretty.

Here is one of our New Hampshire Reds, Pearl.

Uncharacteristically, her legs are pearl color. Usually, when a chicken is older their legs slowly bleach out. Pearl's legs are literally pearl colored. Recently highlights of brown have shown up.

Here are six of them (out of eight) giving me the one-eye.

My bees. Oh, my bees. As you know if you've kept up with my bee saga since April, my left hive swarmed in spite of all of my efforts to make sure they had "room". I'm starting to think that eight frame hives tend to make bees swarm -- I have got to research it. Has anyone read anything about this? My left hive made their own natural queen who was able to return safely from her mating flight, and starting laying. The hive is calm, thriving, and I happened to see the darling lady two weeks ago, and she's HUGE. Wonderful!

My right hive has been thriving. There have been a TON of bees in there. I have carefully added on supers to give them room, but ultimately I think I had a case of "my queen only wants to travel UP" syndrome. I hadn't gotten down to the bottom box to check in 2 weeks because I was inspecting on my own, which would have been fine, except that I was getting a bit overwhelmed by HOW MANY BEES there were. It was set up just as you see it here and every frame was PACKED with bees. This is when the foragers are out, so at night and early morning there were even more in there. An extremely healthy hive. Anyway, I dutifully went to do a hive check and go down to the bottom box when I'd noticed eggs in the first honey super the week before. I should have done it THAT week, but the bees were crabby with me.

I let a week and a half pass and they had made swarm cells. There were about ten of them. I'd just talked to a life long beekeeper and he'd suggested that at this time of year it is possible to stop a swarm. As a new bee keeper, I was very proud of myself for removing all of these cells. For me, when crazy things happen in the hive, my brain short-circuits and goes to mush. All I can focus on is the crazy thing (whatever that might be). This is where my error was. I didn't look to see if there were fresh eggs in the hive, to know that the queen was still in there. There were still so many bees in there, frankly I couldn't tell that any of them had left. I know, it sounds crazy. What can I tell you, I'm new at this. So, without a queen in the hive, I removed all of the queen cells. What does that give you? A hive without a queen! Not a good thing.

The woman I was working the hive with that day thought that she'd seen some queen cells that were torn open, which would mean that at least one queen hatched. So there was the slight possibility that a virgin queen was in the hive. I checked two days ago for eggs and still saw nothing, so I made the call to get a new queen. Just in case. It's getting a little too close to fall and cold weather to play the waiting game for two long.

So, just yesterday, I put my new queen, in her cage, into the hive. The bees noticed her right away and cruised over. The big question now is, if the hive DOES have a virgin queen in the hive (that should start laying within days), they will kill the new queen. But, I was willing to take the $25 gamble to make sure I got a queen in that large hive pronto.

I'll let you know how it goes.

I wasn't able to use my organic sprays this year because of the lack of time spent at my house, so my fruit trees have had some issues -- but all in all, they are okay. The peaches were finally ready on our two dwarf peach trees.

These apples weren't quite done yet, so they are still doing time.

One apple tree, and Empire, had apples that were ready. It was a very small harvest and each apple had issues. But hey, it's only my second year. Right?

We gardeners live for the hope of the next growing season.

The Good, Bad and the Sad

(Just a portion of my potato harvest.)

Well, it was another day in the garden, yard and hives.

The Good News:

My right bee hive is thriving. I put on another honey super (now I’m up to a total of three). The bees filled up the second honey super I’d put on two weeks ago, after having to build comb on wax foundation. When I put the second honey super on, I moved the filled honey super to the top and put the empty honey super just above the two brood chambers. This way the bees feel they have plenty of room and don’t become “honey bound”. I should have a good amount of honey from this hive. Before I harvest the honey I have to wait until the bees have capped (put a thin layer of wax over the top of) the honeycomb. Once the honey is capped, you can be assured that the honey is fully prepared and won’t ferment.

My hens are 14 weeks old now. So far we don’t have a crower (aka: Rooster). I read online that roosters can begin to crow as late as 20 weeks, particularly if they don’t have an older chicken to learn from, but generally they begin to crow around 8 weeks. Time will tell. At approximately 20 weeks (the end of September) they will start laying eggs. How exciting!

I have a LARGE amount of potatoes! I harvested them yesterday. My sister-in-law roasted some up with garlic, olive oil and salt for dinner last night and WOW were they good!!

The Bad News:

The reason I harvested my potatoes is that I had THE BLIGHT! Ugh. I’ve been watching my tomatoes and potatoes and didn’t see the tell tale spots on the leaves, but when I went back to work the garden yesterday, it was obvious. The leaves were all dying off, there were large brown spots on some of the tomatoes and stems. Sad. Even if I were to have tried to spray organically to fight the blight, I have a hard time believing that with all of the rain we have received, that the spray would have been able to stay on long enough day to day to be effective. I don’t know. It’s been a bad year for rain, bugs, plant disease, heat-loving vegetables and fruits, and trips to the beach.

So yesterday I pulled up all of my potatoes out of my strange potato towers (it is fine / safe to eat tubers (potatoes) from a plant with blight), and Victor helped me by pulling up all of our tomatoes -- all of those doomed green tomatoes -- all of the effort of nurturing the plants from seed. Bummer. Well, at least now I have plenty of room in my garden for lettuce, beans, carrots, beets, etc., etc.!!

The Sad News:

I mentioned recently that I’ve been concerned about my left hive. Something just wasn’t right. They were slow to build out the wax foundation (make comb) on the brood chambers (there are still about four frames that aren’t finished within the two eight frame brood chambers). Maybe my novice eyes just missed a poor brood pattern? (I guess I did mention my concern about it in my last post.) There were bees being born and capped brood, but perhaps I was missing the severity of its weakness. They’d fallen behind the right hive and then really took a major turn for the worse over the last two weeks. So, I had my wise bee friend Diane come over to look at my hives yesterday. The bottom line is: I no longer have a queen in that hive. It’s been about 2 1/2 weeks since I did a full inspection where I looked at every single frame in the hive. What we found were 4 small swarm cells, and 1 small supersedure cell. Diane felt they almost looked unfinished because they weren’t as long as she’s seen. But what we didn’t find, is a new queen of any kind. So perhaps she is right, the bees tried to make a new queen, but by that point the hive was already too weak. Sad. The good new is, I am getting a new Italian Queen from a local guy in Rhode Island on Saturday morning. I wish he had some Purvis Goldline “organic” bees available, but he doesn’t and Purvis only ships out on Wednesdays and my little hive can’t wait that long. So, I’ll have to live with an Italian. Hopefully she’s nice.

American Gothic

Have you ever wondered why the man and woman in Grant Wood's American Gothic painting look so solemn?

I've done some research and I can say with a high degree of confidence that they . . .

had been working to put up a chicken run fence.

It has been brutal.

We live in an area of town called "Rocky Hill". Need I say more?

We are digging the good old fashioned way with pick and shovel. No fancy, expensive, rented Bobcat or backhoe, no . . . just the sweat off our brow, and skin off our hands. We are just about done. We started nailing the fencing to the posts late last night and are hoping to finish today.

The kicker is . . . this is Victor's vacation week. Not exactly what every family dreams of . . .

At one point when I was exhausted and demoralized I tried to motivate myself by thinking of people in North Korea who are punished by being sent to hard labor camps. Get a little perspective Sandy and stop feeling sorry for yourself!

In the end, it will be well worth it.

For the love of Hens

Come out, come out, wherever you are . . .

Careful now, down you go . . .

My boys are loving their pet hens. We've put up a temporary run for them while we construct a sturdier permanent one. It's been fun to see the hens pecking and scratching, zipping around, and generally acting like chickens.

Benjamin is the chief chicken caregiver. He feeds them, waters them, brings them scraps from the kitchen, picks them up, and lets them out. They are creating quite the bond. It's adorable.

Benjamin holding a New Hampshire Red

Even Ripley has gotten up the nerve to pick them up. When they were little balls of downy feathers, Ripley wanted to pick them up, but after a few neck holding events we had to put a stop to it. Now the hens are large enough to take a little boy handling.

Ripley with a Plymouth Barred Rock

Happy Boys . . .

Happy Hens.

Taking a rest and a dust bath.

They all snuggled up together and fluffed in the leaves, dirt and dust.

Apparently this helps them to prevent or combat any pests and bugs.

All lined up . . . a New Hampshire Red, Plymouth Barred Rock and Rhode Island Red.