Hi Honey! Honey Processing 2011 -- extracting

Bright and early Monday morning (July 4th), we quickly loaded up the supers into our truck and headed up to our church to do the honey extraction.




At the church, we met up with our other beekeeping friend, who was able to borrow the extraction equipment from another bee keeping friend.



We loaded all the equipment into the tiny scary elevator and headed to the basement of the church. We are so lucky this year that we were able to borrow the commerical kitchen of the church for the day so we could extract our honey. Due to food safety laws, if you plan to sell honey, you must extract it in a commercial kitchen to be in compliance with food safety laws. Yes, there are ways around this, and many people cannot afford a commercial kitchen setup. We were very lucky that we were able to use these really nice facilities.



I immediately got to work washing up equipment in the wonderful commercial dish wash station (I want one of those faucets at my house, it was AWESOME!).



Meanwhile, the guys assembled the rest of the equipment and set it up assembly line style so we could move quickly through our tasks.



By 9 am we were up and running. The process was much the same as last year, except we were not packed into my tiny kitchen, nor were we battling bees as we came in and out of the house. Step one: use the hot knife to cut the wax caps off of the frames.






Step 2: use a pokey tool to open any cells that were missed by the knife (yes, Dr. Aaron came back, and his wife brought snacks!)








The frame are then loaded into the centrifuge and the honey is spun out.



The honey is then poured into buckets.




One other fun thing about using the church kitchen is that we were able to invite anyone who was interested to come watch (and help). All told, we had 15 people there for a while.




The kids played with puzzles and made forts under the tables and were captivated watching our tiny portable DVD player.





This step of the honey extraction process ended with empty supers carried back up the stairs and many very heavy buckets. We finished up about 4 pm and were all exhausted and sticky after a hard days work.



The next step (the next day!) meant that hubby carried those same buckets BACK down the stairs and filled all our honey jars.

Hi Honey! Honey Processing 2011-- in the beeyards

We extracted honey a little early this year, on July 4th, 2011. In summary, 2011 was an amazing year for our bees! We extracted over 5 gallons of honey, that is about 150 pounds of honey. We were also able to do a lot of outreach and education. For every part of the extraction process, we had an eager audience. What fun.

Part I: On Saturday July 2nd, we pulled the supers off of the hives we have in Bells. These bees are pretty much neglected most of the year, add in our not-so-textbook methods of saving comb from the bee removals and the mis-mash of equipment we own and the result was that the inside the hives was a mess.



Hubby did some much needed cleanup (scraping off burr comb, cleaning out dead out hives, and removing the comb from long forgotten inside feeders), I helped wherever I could.


There are two remaining hives in Bells (we lost two over the winter). Inside the hives we were happy to find that there were almost ZERO pest problems, no visible mites, no wax moths, and no small hive beetles. The bees had completely ignored certain frames, and overfilled others. Brood was present in several layers of the box, but we did not use queen excluders in this case so that is our fault. Despite the messy condition of these 2 hives, we were able to pull off 13 strong frames of honey.



Our kids and grandma and grandpa watched happily from the air conditioned cab of their truck. We did learn that working the bees in this bee yard is wonderful in the late afternoon, the tall cedars to the NW of the hives made for some very welcome shade while we worked.

Part II
Sunday afternoon, we worked the hives at our home in Farmers Branch. We had an eager helper from our church who wanted to learn more about bees. Ha ha, ask us to teach you about bees and we'll put you to work... nothing like hands on education!



Dr. Aaron got all suited up and watched in fascination as hubby worked his way through the hives.



Also watching (from the comfort of my air conditioned sewing room) were his wife and daughter.



After just a few minutes of working in the stiff, hot gloves, Dr. Aaron got brave and decided to go gloveless, just like us.



Four more hives worked and no stings, hooray!



Here is our haul the night before we processed. 7 supers nearly full of frames. I think we had 63 frames total. The stack of supers was nearly as tall as I was... and yes, we stored the supers in the house for over 24 hours before processing. We were very careful to get each and every bee out of the supers so it turned out to be a fairly safe way of doing things. If we had left these sweet smelling supers outside, the bees would have swarmed them trying to get at the 'all you can eat' honey buffet hidden inside. Inside the house, the supers were shielded from curious bees.

June Garden Update

2011 has been a lackluster year in the garden. Things are growing, but only doing okay, not great.

First the good (of course).



The green beans have made a good showing. We have had more than enough for dinner and to share, and I have also put up about a quart into the freezer. As of June 14th, the plants are looking wilted and tired and I think the harvest is tapering off.



My potatoes did well, but I did not buy enough seed potatoes. I planted 2.5 pounds and harvested 12.5 pounds. It is a decent yield for me ~6x and right on par with my best potato harvest ever (planted 7 pounds, harvested 35 pounds in 2009). I had zero bug problems in my main potato patch this year, not so much as a bug nibbled potato in the whole harvest. This is great news, and much better than a friend of mine who reported that his potatoes got blight and he does not expect any harvest at all this year. I think one big factor was that I rotated the location of my plantings this year. One volunteer potato plant came up in the 'old' location and that plant suffered from pests and some sort of wilting disease so I pulled it early.



Sweet Potatoes. Well, I can't count this as a harvest yet, but I am so happy that this year I was able to plant over 35 sweet potato slips grown from sweet potatoes that we had bought to eat. Each time I found an eye on a sweet potato I was about to cook, I would cut off a small section of the potato containing the eye and stick it in a pan with water. After about 6 weeks of this, I had a huge crop of sweet potato slips in my kitchen window. I planted 9 plants prior to June and then planted the remaining 25 slips after I harvested the white potatoes. There are about 10 more slips that are still forming roots in the window. This was a great learning experience and very successful way to get lots of sweet potato plants (even before the harvest).

Also doing well (without photos) are: Swiss Chard, mint, oregano, basil, also pumpkins and winter squash (all very healthy and producing volunteers).

I had okay luck this year with my spinach, garden peas, summer squash. These are producing okay, but just not thriving.

And now the bads... my poor tomatoes look awful, the plants are small and anemic, there is very low fruit set (no fruit at all on most of the plants), and there is some sort of disease or pest causing a yellowing of the leaves. The "Little Porter" tomato is the only one that seems to be thriving. Brandywine has a strong plant, but no fruit. All the others look awful. Considering that Hubby judges the success of my garden by the weight of tomatoes produced... this is a dismal year.

Eggplant, cucumbers: both fell victim to the hail and never recovered.

Corn. I guess since this is the first year I have planted corn, and it got the shady side of the garden, I can't call this a true failure. I have about a dozen corn plants, waist high, and they are starting to flower (tassel?, ear?, fruit?, produce?). I am not sure what they are doing, but they are starting to form something that I hope will turn into corn. Since I have such a small patch, I am counting on having to pollinate these things by hand (with a brush) since corn is wind pollinated and you need a strong stand of corn to get good pollination.

Peppers: the seeds I planted did not germinate, so on June 10th I bought two pepper plants from the store.

Mulberries: these are not in my garden (or even in my yard) but the trees down the street had a very light harvest this year. I kept watching and waiting for the fruit fall to really kick in (last year, it stained the sidewalk and street purple from all the fruit), but this year... not much. We did not even walk down to try to harvest any, I figured with such a light harvest the birds needed them more than I did. Hubby points this out to me as proof that we should take advantage of the good years when they happen (for example, we are still eating last year mulberry jam with about 8 pints left to go). Good lesson.

Peaches: similar story to the mulberries, not my tree, but my friend's and he has reported a very small harvest this year. We do NOT have any peaches left over, so I will have to buy them to can this year.


Other milestones in the garden this year: compost! Hubby has taken over the compost area and expanded it to 4x what I had. He is diligent about turning it and even brings home other people's veggie scraps and coffee grounds from work to add to his compost bins. We have already gotten a 55 gallon drum full of finished compost which we added to the garden when we planted the sweet potatoes. It is some very pretty stuff.
Rain water: the water totes are hooked up and working great... now if we can just get some rain.
Bees: the girls are working hard and as of May we had more supers on the bee boxes than we had at harvest time last year. Hooray bees.

May Garden Update 2011

Most importantly, we are eating from the garden again!



The spinach is tapering off, but the swiss chard, peas and beans are really starting to produce.



I gave most of my garden a thick layer of old hay mulch (the hay was my curbside treasure from this winter).



The mint is going crazy... what is that hiding behind the mint?



A full sized wheelbarrow. I love how green and pretty it is, but the mint is starting to take over the yard.



My Purple Hyacinth bean is starting its yearly climb of the trellis. These seeds are the fourth or fifth generation of saved seeds I have planted. Too bad I have not been so diligent to save edible seeds to replant each year (usually because I eat the vegetables before they can become viable seeds).



I found a nice surprise on my front porch the other day, a big trash bag full of baby plants from a local family member. Hooray. Inside the sack were about 30 small Purple Cone flower plants and some woody perennials which I am guessing are tarragon.

I am really excited about the Purple Cone flower, which is the common name for Echinecia, the herbal remedy that we buy in capsules from the store. Echinicia is used as an immunity booster and both hubby and I take it when we feel a cold coming on. Our family member has this growing like a weed in her yard and gardens and was more than happy to share. I hope it is as happy in my yard as it is in hers. I will have to do some research to see just which parts of the plant are medicine, but it is neat to be able to grow something so useful.



My tomatoes have finally reached the top of the cages. They all basically regrew from the roots up after the hail storm, so they seem a bit stunted to me this year. I see blooms on most of the plants, but have not noticed any fruit starting yet.




The squash is thick and healthy (and needs to be thinned (which I did on May 23, after this photo). I have harvested a few small yellow squash and a few zucchini, but they don't seem to be putting on as much fruit as I had hoped. Lots of blooms though.



Our trio of mulch loving hens is always trying to get into my garden to make a mess of things.



Luckily, they understand that me yelling, stomping my feet and waving my arms means 'SCRAM'.




As a new experiment this year, I am growing sweet potatoes from slips that I started in my kitchen window. There are about 9 plants in the garden now, and 2-3 more are ready each week. I have photos of how I started the plants, and I'll post more on that another time. I have had great success with my sweet potato slips, only one has died so far, and that was one that I damaged before planting it (I broke about 3/4 of the roots off--oops).



My eggplant looks awful, it is still alive, but looks about the same as it did a month ago after the hail storm.

Side note... notice how there are piles of poop all through my garden? No, we did not get a heard of miniature horses, but I did carry home four big buckets full of 'processed hay fertilizer' from my in-laws horses. My wonderful husband did not even question why there were four stinky buckets ready to be loaded into the van the last time we left their house. As long as I can keep the dog out of it, this little addition of manure seems to give the garden a bit of a boost. If the dog gets into it... yuck.



The regular potatoes are doing well, they are done flowering and now I am just waiting until the tops start to die off and we can harvest our potatoes.



My bush beans are doing great, and so far, are the star producers of the last spring garden. We are able to eat about a meals worth of beans each night with a few extra bunches to share.



This looks like an acorn squash to me, it has two small fruit on it, but I did not plant acorn squash this year... a volunteer!



The red amaranth is still growing slowly. It is supposed to get five feet tall and the new growth and seeds are edible.



Outside of the main veggie garden, I have been sneaking in edibles where ever I can. This little grouping is a strawberry, a squash plant and a bunch of chamomile. I have no idea why they are all clustered so close together.



My day lilies are all blooming and look great. This is the first year they have bloomed (I planted them in 2010). I hope they spread as the years progress, they are such a pretty and tall flower.



Here is the side garden, also called the bee garden. The tall plants in the back are Jerusalem artichokes, they are doing great this year. There is also a fig tree in there somewhere, it is just limping along. Plus some day lilies and WEEDS. Our lawn guy (our biggest luxury EVER) knows he does not have to go into this area because of hte bees, so the grass gets tall back here and makes us so thankful that the whole yard does not look like this.



Two kinds of oregano, about to bloom. The one on the right is Hilltop Oregano and it has a better smell and flavor than the one on the left (that one just said "oregano" on the tag).



One tiny little dill plant.



Parsley from seed! Hooray, parsley is hard to get to germinate, but it does so much better when grown from seed. The plants are biennial, so they will live for two years. My previous parsley plant was about 2 years old and it does not appear to be coming back this year so the timing of this is perfect. This is flat leaf parsley, before I had curled leaf parsley.



More lovely echinecia and more fertilizer.



I don't have a picture of the plant, but the blackberries have been producing as much as we can eat.


The berries are huge and delicous.



Last but not least, the paprika yarrow keeps on blooming and the color is improving as the season progresses.


Ahh May in the garden. We have had good rains about once per week (May 2nd, 12, 20, 22, I think...) but I have also had to water some to keep my plants happy.