As usual, all of this information is from the class and/or reading I've done ... and now it's time to talk about hiving the bees! This is what it's called when you receive your package of bees and move them into your hive, their new home. First, it's really important to have the hive built well in advance of getting your bees, especially if you plan to paint or stain it. It will take a good month for any chemicals, smells, etc that might be harmful - or even fatal - to your bees to dissipate, so getting it built and ready for the bees early is the best thing.
The day the bees arrive, set them aside in a cool, shady spot until late afternoon. Part of the reason to do this is because it's cooler, so the bees are calmer, but also bees are less likely to decide they hate your hive and leave if it's about to be dark. Bees apparently do very little flying at night. They also need a little more time to get used to their new queen. They will have been hanging out with her for only a few hours to a day or so, so more adjustment time is better. When you put them aside, and several more times during the day, check the sugar can to be sure there is still enough in there to keep feeding the bees. If you want, you can go ahead and mix up some sugar water (two cups of water to one pound of pure white sugar) and put it in a spray bottle. Periodically throughout the day lightly spray the screen on the outside of the package with the sugar water. The bees will lick it off. When they do that they get all fat and happy, which makes them calm.
Before you start, remove the middle-most frames from your hive to make room to put the bees in. When it's time to put them in, pick up the package, and give it a good shake downward to get most of the bees to the bottom of the package. Don't bang it on anything, that'll upset the bees. Remove the sugar can, gently reach in and remove the queen cage, then cover the hole with something. Have a mini marshmallow ready and remove the cork closing the queen cage. Cover the hole with your finger (you don't want her to escape!) until you have time to shove the mini marshmallow in it. Set her aside, being sure she can get plenty of air. Get the package and gently turn it upside down so that the hole is right over the gap in the hive. Then gently shake it around to get the bees out and into the hive. Most of them should come out, but if there are some left just lay the opening of the package next to the hive entrance and they should come out and into the hive on their own. Very slowly and gently (to avoid crushing any bees) replace the frames, leaving one out if necessary so there's still a space in the middle. Hang the queen, still in her cage, in this space. Make sure the screen is facing such that the queen won't suffocate. Then slowly and gently (so as to not crush any bees) close up the hive. As long as it's not freezing outside, provide sugar water in whatever manner your hive allows for so they have plenty to eat and can start making honeycomb. Over the next few days the bees will get more used to their new home, and their new queen. During this time they will eat through the marshmallow to release the queen. You'll want to leave them alone for a few days to allow this to happen, but check in about three to be sure she's out. They can apparently feed and groom her through the cage, but she needs to be out to start laying eggs in the comb the bees have been building.
Our bees are coming at the end of April, but there will be limited flowers at that time, so we'll give them sugar water for the first few weeks. That way they'll have made lots of nice comb and a good number of eggs will have hatched by the time the bees start going out and foraging for pollen. Then they'll start making honey and will be able to feed themselves. Yay for honey!
Sunday, January 19, 2014
Beekeeping 101, Part 2a
The start of today's class was very exciting because I actually ordered our bees! We are getting one package of Carniolans, which are supposed to be very gentle and which originated in a climate (the Ukraine) that is similar to ours in that they have fairly short summers and fairly long - and sometimes very cold - winters. The class is being taught by last year's president of the local beekeepers club, and the club does bulk buys of bee packages for all their members, then actually goes and picks the bees up and brings them back here. The price for the package of bees itself isn't less, but the delivery is done in person, rather than through a shipper. This is great because someone who knows bees is in contact with them from the time they get put in the package at the farm until they get put in the hot little hands of their new keepers. According to her, this results in a lot fewer dead bees on arrival, which makes sense because they come straight here from the farm, rather than wherever the mail/shipper would route them, are handled less, have fewer altitude changes, and are very likely less crowded in. Plus the only packaging they need when they come this way is the wooden crate they come in, so they have more ventilation too. And given that our mail delivery person is a nice lady, it's good to save her from driving around all day with a package that won't stop buzzing. Anyway, the bees will arrive the morning of April 26th, so that's going to be a red-letter day on the calendar for sure!
In the class, we started out talking about getting into the hive. General rules: wear light colors, move slowly, send the bees a little love throughout the process, make sure you are clean and fresh, but not wearing heavy scents like deodorants, lotions or perfumes (do you want them to think you're a flower?!), and don't eat anything with garlic or bananas in the hours before you go in. This last one surprised me a little, and also made me a little sad because I love garlic and bananas, though not generally together. There's good reason, though: both could make the bees attack you. For whatever reason, they don't like the smell of garlic, it makes them angry and aggressive, which is something you'd probably like to avoid. But in addition, bees communicate in two ways: through dance and through pheromones. One of the pheromones they excrete is one that alerts other bees to the fact that the hive is under attack, say there's a bear breaking in. It causes all the bees to go on high alert that it's time to defend the hive. That pheromone smells just like bananas. So even if your bees know you (more on that in a minute), they're going to want to drive you off if you pop your head in just as they are smelling that banana-y high alert scent. Other than that, as long as you're gentle with your bees, they are supposed to be pretty easy-going, docile little bugs.
About your bees knowing you, they have facial recognition! Kind of like a baby, they get to know and recognize the people who peek their heads into their cribs all the time. And they associate the way you treat them with your face! So if you are nice to them, gentle with them, and generally treat them well, they begin to expect that kind of treatment from you. This is nice, in part, because if you do accidentally squish one a little it probably won't sting a person who is usually nice and gentle because it kind of knows it was an accident. Now the drawback here is that bees (other than the queen) only live about 40 days, so you pretty much have to be on the nice list all the time. But that's still pretty awesome.
So back to getting into the hive: clean, light colors, move slowly, send them love, and have all your supplies ready. When getting into the hive, here's what you probably want to have close by: your feather or bee brush, your hive tool, a long knife (in case you need or want to cut comb or propolis), a tupperware container with a lid (in case you collect any honeycomb), a zip-top baggie (to dispose of any propolis you remove. Note: propolis does have some good uses too, such as in burn salve, so you may want to keep it), masking tape and a sharpie (to mark the bars/frames in your hive to help you keep up with what's going on in there), a toothpick or similar object (for opening cells if necessary), a queen cage (just in case anything crazy is going on and you need to remove her), and your smoker (there are debates about this in the beekeeping community, though, more on that in another post because we'll need to figure out our position on it). The woman teaching the class says she just keeps all that stuff in a tote bag because it is easier to keep up with as she's moving from hive to hive (she has lots, we'll only have one for now).
She recommends dating the bars/frames with the date you first put them in there. This is so you'll know approximately when the comb on it was started. Because the beeswax takes a lot more time and energy for the bees to make, you don't necessarily want to be removing it all time. Bees will reuse old comb, and the more time they spend making comb, the less time they have to make honey. This means you get less honey and/or could end up having to provide them with some if they don't have enough to get through the winter. So you may want to leave comb, but not for more than three years. By then it will be pretty black (from all the traffic of bees walking
all over it and from the fact that the bees will put a thin layer of
propolis over it before reusing) and old comb could harbor disease. One
interesting thing about the comb is the different size cells the bees
make. Larger, deeper cells are for growing drones; smaller, more shallow
cells are for growing workers; cells in the middle are for storing
honey. This is one benefit of going without foundation in your hive -
the bees know what they need and will make it themselves if you don't
try to force them into a one-size-fits-all box.
She also highly recommends keeping notes every time you get into the hive. She said this is important for beginners because it helps you figure out what works for you/your bees and what doesn't, but it's also important for experienced beekeepers because if something happens, you'll have more and better clues to help you figure out what it was. She lost a hive last year to Colony Collapse Disorder and wishes she'd been keeping notes because she feels like she might have a better idea of what led to it. Though not knowing seems to be a mark of CCD, so maybe she wouldn't, but she'd probably feel a little less unsure if it would've made a difference.
Finally we went through step-by-step, and in great detail, how to go about hiving your bees. I'll go over that in the next post.
In the class, we started out talking about getting into the hive. General rules: wear light colors, move slowly, send the bees a little love throughout the process, make sure you are clean and fresh, but not wearing heavy scents like deodorants, lotions or perfumes (do you want them to think you're a flower?!), and don't eat anything with garlic or bananas in the hours before you go in. This last one surprised me a little, and also made me a little sad because I love garlic and bananas, though not generally together. There's good reason, though: both could make the bees attack you. For whatever reason, they don't like the smell of garlic, it makes them angry and aggressive, which is something you'd probably like to avoid. But in addition, bees communicate in two ways: through dance and through pheromones. One of the pheromones they excrete is one that alerts other bees to the fact that the hive is under attack, say there's a bear breaking in. It causes all the bees to go on high alert that it's time to defend the hive. That pheromone smells just like bananas. So even if your bees know you (more on that in a minute), they're going to want to drive you off if you pop your head in just as they are smelling that banana-y high alert scent. Other than that, as long as you're gentle with your bees, they are supposed to be pretty easy-going, docile little bugs.
About your bees knowing you, they have facial recognition! Kind of like a baby, they get to know and recognize the people who peek their heads into their cribs all the time. And they associate the way you treat them with your face! So if you are nice to them, gentle with them, and generally treat them well, they begin to expect that kind of treatment from you. This is nice, in part, because if you do accidentally squish one a little it probably won't sting a person who is usually nice and gentle because it kind of knows it was an accident. Now the drawback here is that bees (other than the queen) only live about 40 days, so you pretty much have to be on the nice list all the time. But that's still pretty awesome.
So back to getting into the hive: clean, light colors, move slowly, send them love, and have all your supplies ready. When getting into the hive, here's what you probably want to have close by: your feather or bee brush, your hive tool, a long knife (in case you need or want to cut comb or propolis), a tupperware container with a lid (in case you collect any honeycomb), a zip-top baggie (to dispose of any propolis you remove. Note: propolis does have some good uses too, such as in burn salve, so you may want to keep it), masking tape and a sharpie (to mark the bars/frames in your hive to help you keep up with what's going on in there), a toothpick or similar object (for opening cells if necessary), a queen cage (just in case anything crazy is going on and you need to remove her), and your smoker (there are debates about this in the beekeeping community, though, more on that in another post because we'll need to figure out our position on it). The woman teaching the class says she just keeps all that stuff in a tote bag because it is easier to keep up with as she's moving from hive to hive (she has lots, we'll only have one for now).
She recommends dating the bars/frames with the date you first put them in there. This is so you'll know approximately when the comb on it was started. Because the beeswax takes a lot more time and energy for the bees to make, you don't necessarily want to be removing it all time. Bees will reuse old comb, and the more time they spend making comb, the less time they have to make honey. This means you get less honey and/or could end up having to provide them with some if they don't have enough to get through the winter. So you may want to leave comb, but not for more than three years. By then it will be pretty black (from all the traffic of bees walking
all over it and from the fact that the bees will put a thin layer of
propolis over it before reusing) and old comb could harbor disease. One
interesting thing about the comb is the different size cells the bees
make. Larger, deeper cells are for growing drones; smaller, more shallow
cells are for growing workers; cells in the middle are for storing
honey. This is one benefit of going without foundation in your hive -
the bees know what they need and will make it themselves if you don't
try to force them into a one-size-fits-all box.She also highly recommends keeping notes every time you get into the hive. She said this is important for beginners because it helps you figure out what works for you/your bees and what doesn't, but it's also important for experienced beekeepers because if something happens, you'll have more and better clues to help you figure out what it was. She lost a hive last year to Colony Collapse Disorder and wishes she'd been keeping notes because she feels like she might have a better idea of what led to it. Though not knowing seems to be a mark of CCD, so maybe she wouldn't, but she'd probably feel a little less unsure if it would've made a difference.
Finally we went through step-by-step, and in great detail, how to go about hiving your bees. I'll go over that in the next post.
Wednesday, January 15, 2014
Beekeeping 101, Part 1
This past weekend I attended the first of a series of three of these
classes. It was fairly basic, and the first part of the class focused on a lot of stuff I'd already read, but
there was a lot of good information. For example, some of the wildlife you need
to protect bees from? Bears (seemingly obvious, but they're actually after the
brood chambers, not the honey), skunks, and raccoons. What?! Skunks and
raccoons eat bees?! Yep. And what do the bees eat? Not pollen. Honey.
As most people know, the bees build pretty little beeswax and comb chambers, in which they store their honey. They also put little baby bees-to-be in them. Those are the brood chambers. For the first three days, the babies are just "eggs." They then develop into "larvae," and continue to develop for several more days. They are white and slimy and gross-looking at that point. I think the bees must get the gross-looking thing too, because at that point they put a little brown cap over the chamber the larvae is in, and it becomes known as a "capped larvae." This is the most important stage because this is when the wings and all of its other tiny little body parts develop. When it's all finished cooking, it breaks its way out of the chamber and is officially a bee! At that point, it gets to work on its first, but not last, job: being a nurse bee. The nurse bee cleans up its own little chamber, readying it for the queen to lay another egg there, then helps the other nurse bees to take care of the new eggs and larvae. When a new round of bees hatch, the previous round moves on to what will be their permanent jobs.
There are a handful of jobs in the hive, but most bees will either be workers (the girls) or drones (the boys). Workers, as you might guess, work. They make beeswax and honeycomb, collect the pollen, store it away, and make the honey. The drones fly to a certain place (probably the bee version of a bar) every morning, wait around for any girl bees to fly by needing to get fertilized, do the deed if the need arises, then fly back home that night. Hmmm ... sounds like a rough life, doesn't it? There are also a limited number of guards (they stand sentry and keep an eye on things to ensure the hive remains safe) and attendants (they meet every whim of the queen - feed her, clean her, groom her, ensure that she sleeps, and addresses any and every of her needs).
We also discussed the "must have" tools every beekeeper needs.
These are: a hive and bees (duh), a veil (those wide brimmed hats with mesh
hanging down to protect your face), a smoker (makes smoke from bark to calm the
bees while you're getting into the hives), a hive tool (or several - these are
like tiny, though much stronger, crowbars), and a bee brush or feather (to move
the bees from where you don't want them without injuring them). That’s it
apparently. That kind of surprised me. I figured you’d need all kinds of crap.
One of the most helpful parts of the discussion was about the different types of hives, which solidified the direction I'd been leaning. There is the Langstroth Hive and the Top Bar Hive. They each have benefits and drawbacks. The Langstroth Hive is the traditional, and most well known, hive. It looks like boxes stacked on top of each other. Frames hang inside these boxes, and the bees make their beeswax, honeycomb, and honey inside these frames. The boxes are super heavy and have to be moved about every time you want to access the hive, are very difficult to build yourself and a little expensive to purchase, and require quite a bit of equipment. But you get a lot more honey out of them.
The Top Bar Hives look like long houses with sides that slope in at the
bottom. They have bars across the top, which hang along the top of the
"house," and the bees build their honeycomb, and store their honey
and brood chambers, hanging vertically from those top bars. They can be built
by the average person at home for about $50.00, don't require any equipment
other than the "must haves" discussed above, are lightweight, and
don't have to be moved around to access the hive. You get less honey out of them,
though.
After lots of thinking and discussion, I think we're going to go with a Top
Bar Hive. We like the fact that we can build it (inexpensively!) ourselves,
that the whole hive doesn't have to be moved around to access the hive (which
means I can fiddle around with it even if C isn't home), and while we are super excited about getting
honey, it isn't a top reason we are doing this. We are still debating about
where to locate them, but we're thinking about somewhere near the back of the
property as this places them away from people, will provide them with shade,
and puts them right between two sources of water (the ditch behind the property
and the irrigation pond in the middle of the yard).
So excited! Looking forward to the next class!
As most people know, the bees build pretty little beeswax and comb chambers, in which they store their honey. They also put little baby bees-to-be in them. Those are the brood chambers. For the first three days, the babies are just "eggs." They then develop into "larvae," and continue to develop for several more days. They are white and slimy and gross-looking at that point. I think the bees must get the gross-looking thing too, because at that point they put a little brown cap over the chamber the larvae is in, and it becomes known as a "capped larvae." This is the most important stage because this is when the wings and all of its other tiny little body parts develop. When it's all finished cooking, it breaks its way out of the chamber and is officially a bee! At that point, it gets to work on its first, but not last, job: being a nurse bee. The nurse bee cleans up its own little chamber, readying it for the queen to lay another egg there, then helps the other nurse bees to take care of the new eggs and larvae. When a new round of bees hatch, the previous round moves on to what will be their permanent jobs.
There are a handful of jobs in the hive, but most bees will either be workers (the girls) or drones (the boys). Workers, as you might guess, work. They make beeswax and honeycomb, collect the pollen, store it away, and make the honey. The drones fly to a certain place (probably the bee version of a bar) every morning, wait around for any girl bees to fly by needing to get fertilized, do the deed if the need arises, then fly back home that night. Hmmm ... sounds like a rough life, doesn't it? There are also a limited number of guards (they stand sentry and keep an eye on things to ensure the hive remains safe) and attendants (they meet every whim of the queen - feed her, clean her, groom her, ensure that she sleeps, and addresses any and every of her needs).
We also discussed the "must have" tools every beekeeper needs.
These are: a hive and bees (duh), a veil (those wide brimmed hats with mesh
hanging down to protect your face), a smoker (makes smoke from bark to calm the
bees while you're getting into the hives), a hive tool (or several - these are
like tiny, though much stronger, crowbars), and a bee brush or feather (to move
the bees from where you don't want them without injuring them). That’s it
apparently. That kind of surprised me. I figured you’d need all kinds of crap.One of the most helpful parts of the discussion was about the different types of hives, which solidified the direction I'd been leaning. There is the Langstroth Hive and the Top Bar Hive. They each have benefits and drawbacks. The Langstroth Hive is the traditional, and most well known, hive. It looks like boxes stacked on top of each other. Frames hang inside these boxes, and the bees make their beeswax, honeycomb, and honey inside these frames. The boxes are super heavy and have to be moved about every time you want to access the hive, are very difficult to build yourself and a little expensive to purchase, and require quite a bit of equipment. But you get a lot more honey out of them.
After lots of thinking and discussion, I think we're going to go with a Top
Bar Hive. We like the fact that we can build it (inexpensively!) ourselves,
that the whole hive doesn't have to be moved around to access the hive (which
means I can fiddle around with it even if C isn't home), and while we are super excited about getting
honey, it isn't a top reason we are doing this. We are still debating about
where to locate them, but we're thinking about somewhere near the back of the
property as this places them away from people, will provide them with shade,
and puts them right between two sources of water (the ditch behind the property
and the irrigation pond in the middle of the yard).So excited! Looking forward to the next class!
The Importance of Bees
I'm a person who likes to read about the things I'm doing ... how to, wins
and losses, general information, etc. The reading on pollination was very
interesting. Apparently plants are a lot like humans. Some of them are lone
wolves (asexual), and can basically pollinate themselves to produce fruit all
on their own. Others are either male or female, and both are required to bring
the fruit to maturity. At first I was really worried about whether we'd know
which plants were male and which were female. The yellow squash were the first
to begin to bloom. They all looked the same! We watched, debated, worried,
waited. Well, WE watched, debated, and waited. It was mostly me 
After a lot of reading, and after a lot of watching for bees, we began to be concerned at how few of them we saw. So we kind of took matters into our own hands by doing some pollination by hand. I used tiny little paintbrushes, got out there at the break of dawn to get the new blossoms just as they opened, and did my best to be a bee. I had a different paintbrush for each type of plant. I then used the paintbrush to collect pollen from the male plants and painted it around on the female plants. I did this with as many of the female blossoms I could catch, but I know that not every blossom was caught.
While the garden worked out well for us, we still worried about how few bees we seemed to have. We'd both heard about Colony Collapse Disorder, and we both understood that we need bees, even if we didn't understand as fully as we do now. Late in the summer we started talking about helping by getting bees. Which meant, if we were serious, we had a LOT to learn. We joined the mailing list and Facebook page for the local beekeepers club, and a couple months ago they sent out an email about a Beginner Beekeeping class. More about that in the next post!
Monday, January 13, 2014
Last Year ... Successes and Lessons
Last year - 2013 - C and I planted the first garden either of us has ever had. I worked in the garden, both at my grandfather's farm and at my father and stepmother's place, some as a kid, but this was the first one that was really mine. C had never had a garden either, so this was a new experience in a lot of ways for both of us. Especially considering we'd only been dating a couple months when we decided to get ourselves into this.
We started with a 12' x 24' bare spot (literally) and dug down a few inches, removing the grass, weeds, and top dirt. We enclosed the space with welded wire fence to keep out critters from deer to the occasional bear to small dogs chasing thrown tennis balls. We then lined the fence, inside and out, with river rocks. We also dug out spots on three sides of the garden plot for the fruit: raspberries, blueberries, blackberries, and strawberries.
When I say "we" you should understand that I mostly mean C. I carried a lot of rocks, and wheeled a lot of wheelbarrows full of dirt from the new garden space to the place where C wanted to build a new berm to contain overflow from the pond, I even carried and dumped a lot of top soil and compost. But C did almost all the digging. He was aided ably one day by his teenage son and one of his friends, but it was mostly him. The clay here is super hard, and I was incapable of removing more than an inch or two at a time. Luckily he's super strong and awesome.
Finally we brought in a huge load of top soil and compost. Initially we used these to make hills, in which we planted our beautifully started seedlings. This was completely unsuccessful (lesson #1) and we almost lost all our plants. In desperation we carefully pulled out any plants that looked like they still had any life in them, and mixed the soil and compost into the newly dug out garden plot. We then planted the plants back into the ground, still in rows, though they were a little less organized this time. This yielded much better results. Apparently the clay, while hard, has lots of nutrients that plants love.
As the season went on, the plants really took root, grew and flourished. We ended up with more yellow squash than we could eat, so we froze a lot. We also ended up with lots more cucumbers than we would use (C is the only one who eats them) so I made lots of refrigerator pickles. I'm planning to get canning
equipment before summer gets too well started this year so we can put some of our bounty away more long term, and so we can more easily share it with those we love! We ended up with a decent amount of broccoli, eggplants, cabbage, cauliflower, cherry tomatoes, basil, and rosemary too. And the asparagus plants looked great, even though they take several years to actually produce. We also had lots of Beefmaster tomatoes, but they (frustratingly) never ripened, lots of hearty looking brussels sprouts plants, though they never fully developed, and peppers - thai chile and jalapeno - that were kind of bitter. Finally, we lost all the kale to too much sun, and the whole pumpkin patch to a freak hail storm - "freak" being more a term to describe the size of the hail (fist-sized!) than the fact that it happened in the first place. That was more sad for me than the other losses, partly because I was so excited about the pumpkins. We were to have three varieties: Casper (white ones), Big Max (they get really big), and Jack-o-Lantern (self-explanatory, yes?), and I love Halloween, so I was really looking forward to carving a whole bunch of
them. But I think it was hard too because the whole lot were destroyed.
Some, like the picture here, were just busted open by the
hail. It looks
like a sad face, which is one reason I chose to take a picture of that
one, but being pounded by the hail really made all those scars. Those
rotted and died pretty quickly. The rest died because the leaves of the
plants were so torn up that they couldn't provide the still developing
and growing little babies with enough nutrients to make it.
In the end, though, it was more lessons, just things we'll do differently this year. That's one great thing about gardening, I think. As long as you aren't going to starve without that plant being successful, you know you can always try again next year. So this year we'll start them all down in the soil, water more early on, provide a little shade for the delicate greens, and cross our fingers against more hail. I can't promise I won't be out there trying to cover all the tender little veggie bodies if it does happen. This year we'll have all heirloom varieties and a more diverse crop. The asparagus will come back, and we'll have basil, rosemary, kale, yellow squash (though fewer plants), cucumbers, tomatoes, eggplants, broccoli, cauliflower, and pumpkins again. But we'll also have cilantro, sweet yellow and blue corns, lima and soy beans, and zucchini, butternut and acorn squashes.
With all these plants, we're going to need a lot of pollinating. Which means we're going to need a lot of bees. Which brings me to the next -and possibly biggest - project we'll be undertaking this summer: beekeeping! More on that in the next post.
Until then, Em
When I say "we" you should understand that I mostly mean C. I carried a lot of rocks, and wheeled a lot of wheelbarrows full of dirt from the new garden space to the place where C wanted to build a new berm to contain overflow from the pond, I even carried and dumped a lot of top soil and compost. But C did almost all the digging. He was aided ably one day by his teenage son and one of his friends, but it was mostly him. The clay here is super hard, and I was incapable of removing more than an inch or two at a time. Luckily he's super strong and awesome.
Finally we brought in a huge load of top soil and compost. Initially we used these to make hills, in which we planted our beautifully started seedlings. This was completely unsuccessful (lesson #1) and we almost lost all our plants. In desperation we carefully pulled out any plants that looked like they still had any life in them, and mixed the soil and compost into the newly dug out garden plot. We then planted the plants back into the ground, still in rows, though they were a little less organized this time. This yielded much better results. Apparently the clay, while hard, has lots of nutrients that plants love.
As the season went on, the plants really took root, grew and flourished. We ended up with more yellow squash than we could eat, so we froze a lot. We also ended up with lots more cucumbers than we would use (C is the only one who eats them) so I made lots of refrigerator pickles. I'm planning to get canning
In the end, though, it was more lessons, just things we'll do differently this year. That's one great thing about gardening, I think. As long as you aren't going to starve without that plant being successful, you know you can always try again next year. So this year we'll start them all down in the soil, water more early on, provide a little shade for the delicate greens, and cross our fingers against more hail. I can't promise I won't be out there trying to cover all the tender little veggie bodies if it does happen. This year we'll have all heirloom varieties and a more diverse crop. The asparagus will come back, and we'll have basil, rosemary, kale, yellow squash (though fewer plants), cucumbers, tomatoes, eggplants, broccoli, cauliflower, and pumpkins again. But we'll also have cilantro, sweet yellow and blue corns, lima and soy beans, and zucchini, butternut and acorn squashes.
With all these plants, we're going to need a lot of pollinating. Which means we're going to need a lot of bees. Which brings me to the next -and possibly biggest - project we'll be undertaking this summer: beekeeping! More on that in the next post.
Until then, Em
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