Hives Combined

First: the bulk of the day. Phil played butcher. For six hours straight. He cut and cleaved and sliced and cleaned. We had about one and a half five gallon buckets of meat for sausage, many gallon bags of fat for lard. Enormous chops, and a picnic roast that I hope will fit in my canning pot, since it looks about like a 20-pound turkey. (And since it has a large bone right in the middle, it's not terribly practical to cut it, especially with a still-sore hand.)

Speaking of chops: we did try one for breakfast. That's a normal sized frying pan it's in, not a miniature omelet pan. And, yes, it's touching both sides. Enormous.

When Phil was almost done with his butchering, it was time to start grinding meat for sausage and rendering lard. I think it took me about seven hours to cut up the 75 pounds of meat so Jadon and Isaiah could send the bits through the KitchenAid meat grinder, and so I could cut up the fat into bits and render out 12 quarts of golden lard.

That's just about identical to the amount of meat we got from the two girls we processed two months ago. So, yes, we fed the boar for two months for no gain. (Honestly, I was relieved to see that he hadn't lost weight!) But I think we sort of knew that, and with the various freezer issues, and the chicken processing, it took us longer to get to it than it should have.

That was today's triumph. A whole hog taken care of.

Isaiah and I also cleaned the motor home: carpets vacuumed, floor swept, couch cleared off. Sadly, my kitchen is now again a disaster, but I am done. I have been on my feet since 8am, and 14 hours in a row is enough. The dishes will wait until the morning.

In a way, that was a triumph, too. Or at least a pleasure.

But the really beautiful, really amazing thing came with the bees.

It was time for me to put in a mouse guard. Apparently, mice can access hives even with a quarter-inch space, so beekeepers put metal mouse guards in front of the opening to thwart intruders. The guard has holes just a bit larger than a hole punch, through which the bees can fly (and, incredibly, I watched two exit one hole at the same time, so presumably they can also carry the dead out, but that seems like it would be quite a challenge).

Despite knowing that I needed to put it in place, I could find no instructions anywhere. Finally I found a picture that attached the guard to the wood with a thumbtack. And the motor home has thumbtacks (which is good, since I don't think we brought any with us).

I put that one on the Celestial hive first, and that went smoothly. The bees were having a bit of a pileup at the entrance, but they will figure out their new flight patterns very quickly. No varroa mites on their monitor sheet: overall, appear to be doing well, with a good number of bees in the hive.

So I turned my attention to the Celadon hive. This was the day, I had determined, when I would open the hive to see whether they had food enough for the winter, or whether I needed to combine them. If they didn't have food enough, I would have to find the queen and somehow contain her, so I could kill her later. I wasn't really confident about that last part.

I opened their one and only deep and pulled out the first frame. It was totally light: no honey stores. Despite daily feeding for the last month.

Second frame: a few capped brood, a few capped honey cells. Not much.

And so it went. There were maybe two frames that felt even somewhat heavy, with capped honey ready for winter. This hive could not survive on its own.

The experience was unique. I really felt present to the bees, in a way I usually am not. And I said to the queen, "I am sorry, but I am going to have to find you. Even if I have to look again and again, I will find you."

(I forget if I mentioned this before: you have to kill the weaker queen, rather than allow the two queens to coexist, because if the weak queen is still putting off pheromones, her bees will go to the strong queen, ball up around her, and kill her. Presumably, the strong queen's minions will do the same to the weak queen, so the hive ends up queenless and sad. And dead.)

My queen was not marked, and I had not seen her on the first look through the frames. I had only had a glimpse of one queen one time, actually, so I wasn't sure I would recognize her when I saw her.

I shouldn't have worried. Compared with the other, black and white striped bees, she was almost monocolor burnt sienna, with a different look. I spotted her on about the sixth frame, and I bent down to get the queen tube, which I was hoping would hold her well. (I slipped holding the frame, and temporarily lost sight of her, but she hadn't gone far.)

I tried to capture her for a minute or two, when she suddenly flew down, briefly alighted on my pant leg, and then fell to the ground at my foot.

Stunned, it took me a second to realize, "Kill her quickly!" So I stepped on her, as if she were a black widow or a cockroach.

It wasn't until I was reassembling the hive when I thought, "She said goodbye, as she came to me, and then sacrificed herself." It reminded me of what high priest Caiaphas said of Jesus: "One man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not."

Maybe it's a stretch to compare an insect with the Creator and Savior of the world, but I mean no disrespect. The queen's death was, to me, such a noble and precious act: beautiful. (And would not a creature be able to imitate the example of the Creator?)

Then I was free to combine the two hives. So we have the Celestial deep on the bottom, with a layer of paper on top. Then the Celadon deep next, with a mostly empty box containing food on the top.

May the Lord make the two together prosper, and protect them well through the days to come. May they be stronger together than they are apart.

Seven Pigs to Go (plus a cautionary tale)

Now a year old, our boar Charles needed to go into the freezer. We have lacked the time, the storage facilities, and today, Phil gathered himself together and, in a beautiful, sunny day in the 70s, we finally killed Charles. Based on the recommendation in one of my favorite homesteading books, Husbandry by Nathan Griffith, we gutted the boar and skinned him (which took about four hours), and then cut him into pieces (which took about half an hour). The pieces are in a cooler with ice, salt, and water, which we hope will chill the meat quickly and well.

Tomorrow morning, we plan to cook up a pork chop for breakfast. We want to see just how musky the boar meat will be. If it's particularly bad, we'll make it all into sausage, the most versatile of pork products.

In celebration of our first successful solo pig butchering, I would like to offer a story, told by a friend with the understanding that she be kept anonymous. I thought this a story unlike any I've read in any book, so either this friend has particularly bad luck, or the books aren't telling the whole story.

Be advised: it is not a nice story. My narrative resumes at "Speaking of dragging pigs," so you might want to skip to that part. (But if you want to farm, you should read these next paragraphs at all cost: they might spare you some trauma!)

For this friend, she went out with her husband to kill a pig. They hadn't had much experience with killing animals, and they were reverent enough of the act of killing, they prayed and thanked God for the gift the pig had been to their farm, and asked him to please bless the killing process. Keep them safe, help the pig die easily and well.

While the pig was merrily munching some feed, the husband got within a foot with his rifle and shot the pig point blank between the eyes. Now all the husband had ever witnessed, and all the books had ever said, was that the pig should have dropped. If not dead, at least stunned enough to cut the throat and kill the pig by bleeding out. This makes sense. Bullets kill.

But in this horrible example, so horrible this is probably why these stories are never told, the pig didn't drop, but backed up, squealing like a stuck pig, blood dripping from the mouth. The needed knife was right at hand, but the pig was in no mood to stand still for its throat to be cut. Nor was it interested in looking down the barrel of the rifle again, so it went off into the woods.

The brave husband, absolutely stymied and feeling ill, went off to fetch his pistol. For good measure, he grabbed his more powerful rifle as well, equipped with scope and special very deadly bullets.

After cautiously beating through the woods (after all, we have all read stories of wounded boars making deadly charges on man and beast), the husband finally located the injured boar, far from any area with easy processing. Since a 400 pound animal, dead across a small ravine, would be an absolute impossibility, the husband regretfully roused the pig, and, speaking coaxingly to it, managed to return the pig back to, almost, the starting place.

Clearly, the pig didn't feel good. It lay down and stared at the husband. So the husband, grieved at heart, shot the pig straight on, from a foot away, with the pistol.

Unbelievably, horribly, tragically, the pig did not die. It squealed again, and ran to the end of its pen, and then turned and blindly headed back to the woods.

The husband then shot the pig with the powerful rifle, through the chest. And though the pig spun from the force of impact, it managed to rush into the woods and die in, perhaps, the most inconvenient spot it could, a little ravine where the roots of a tree once tipped over. In order to extricate the pig from the ravine, the husband had to rig a hoist that could attach to the back of a tractor. The heavy pig ended up dragging the tractor, but by rolling the pig over, it no longer had to head up the steepest part of the ravine, and so made it safely out of the woods.

Then, when the husband tried to cut the pig's throat, despite having a knife so sharp it would cut human skin with a mere touch, let alone a slice, the pig's throat was so tough it took several minutes of serious pressure to get through membrane. In every way, a horrible experience.

If you are considering farming, heed the sad story of my friend. The promise of a better way of life for yourself and your animals may come true (and I hope it will): but there might be some horrible stories like these that are, generally, best kept to yourself.

And, perhaps, shoot the pig with a powerful gun from behind the head, where the bullet will go forward into the brain. Or, simply don't ever raise boars, so you can bring all pigs to the butcher. Easier by far!

Speaking of dragging pigs, I was amazed at how something as simple as getting a pig off the ground and into the air could be so difficult! The first time Phil raised the pig with the bucket, the chain was a little too loose, and the snout dragged in the ground.

So Phil got off the tractor, readjusted the pig so it was a bit higher up, and started to drive again. He asked me if I thought the rope on the pig might slip off the end of the chain. It looked like the hook was pressed firmly against the bucket, so I answered with a negative ... and then the pig hit the ground. Apparently it was about to fall off.

So Phil got off the tractor, rigged the pig up again, and started to drive again.

Instantly he was off. "The pig started to tip the tractor." So he readjusted the pig chains again.

And was stung by a wasp.

Could this story get any worse? (Well, had I been my friend, I suppose that could have been worse.)

But at last the pig was safely stowed in the shade. We should have rinsed him off with water, as he had apparently gone wallowing shortly before his final meal, and it made for a messy skinning. And despite our best efforts, the skinning was not smooth. I believe this is known as a hack job.

We did our best to save the precious fat as we peeled the pig, but it was quite difficult.

When we knew we would have to butcher several pigs, Phil bought special butcher knives and an especially long hack saw. Even I used it for a time, and it cut through the backbone quite easily.

I call this photo "Three Hams."

As we finished, I noticed that the pig had cooled enough that the marrow had started to leak out the spine, and turned gelatinous. Such a healthy food for joints: such an unusual, interesting sight.

We Keep Talking

I woke shortly after 4am to a terrific rainstorm. I am liking the earlier rising: I got in a good three hours of work before any boys were up to distract me (or need feeding).

With the short deluge, it was a bit too wet to kill a pig (Phil said it would be awful to be slipping around while trying to aim). He went out to work on the broken auger that has been the bane of our existence for several months now.

Last week when we sold our piglet, Phil jammed his thumb very hard while making a grab. It has continued to bother him, and the little pounding he had to do not only warped the metal he was trying to fix, but set his thumb to throbbing. Nothing is ever easy!

After a time to cool down, he went back and did something magical, so that the auger is now working (we think).

I spent a few hours hunting down the raspberries I planted along one swale this spring. I dug them up and transplanted them into the greenhouse, weeding a bit as I went. A good many raspberries had either died or been trampled, but maybe that's just as well: after several hours of weeding and mucking about in the very wet greenhouse soil, I was tired.

Our soil expert said that it's actually a good thing we haven't covered the greenhouse yet. The sodium in our soil is high, due to all the compost added, but after a winter of leaching, it should be much better.

This evening, Phil and I had a continuation of our conversation about the animals: what do we keep? What do we sell? What do we need to put in the freezer? We are closing in on what we most want and need. And we talked through what to do about the stone fruit orchard, coming to a better understanding of what needs to be transplanted, what needs to move.

That's good!

Get Rid of Johnson Grass

I went out to dig up some raspberries from the swales, in order to transplant them into the greenhouse. With more rain last night, our soil is moist, and the roots come out quite easily.

I pulled some Johnson grass, amazed at the thick, white rootlets, so twisted and invasive. I realized that in the section I've cleaned fairly well, the new blades of grass have their own thick green look, so for each patch, I dug them up and removed all the roots I could see.

While weeding, I was irked to see that the piglets, recently realizing they are small enough to roam, had found my sweet potato slips and systematically dug them up and ate them. We are hoping to have several suckling pig roasts soon. I'm ready. Past ready.

And to round out the animal carnage to plants I want: I went to dig up my aloe plant for the winter and found no sign of it, but a circular patch of dirt where it should have been. Apparently the chickens, housed around that plant, needed something in it. Too bad for them to eat my mother's day present from several years back, though.

I went to weed the greenhouse blackberries, too. I think they had a rough transplant, because the energy in the greenhouse was so high it was burning the plants a bit, but they have adjusted well and have mostly doubled in size since transplanting. And the weeding around the blackberries was very fun. Phil had already run the hoe between the rows, but I pulled little weeds between the plants. There were many volunteer tomato plants, some even with blossoms. The soil in the greenhouse is quite nice.

Phil contacted our soil lab to ask a few questions. Most notably: did we go backwards this year in soil fertility? The answer: no. Our calcium continues to slowly come up, and our ratios are slowly getting more in line. That was encouraging.

I've been thinking lately about how often I grow frustrated by how much wasted time there seems to be. Whether its uncertainty with how best to weed, or frustration with how long simple tasks like moving chickens can be (with the weed load, it took Phil several hours of hard hacking to clear enough of a path to set up the chicken netting in its new place this morning): I grow annoyed so quickly.

But one of the lines our elder used to say was, "Nothing we do for Christ is ever lost or wasted." I think it feels like so many of the tasks I do here are repetitive and will likely prove pointless. But maybe that's not the point. Maybe the point is that I should carry out my tasks with thanksgiving and joy, and do them as to the Lord.

In any case, I'd be happy simply not to have loss or waste!

Season of Mists

With grey skies the last week and more, it was a relief on Friday to have rain much of the day on Friday. Phil had good time indoors, planning and filing.

The boys made me laugh when they pig-piled on each other: all four boys, stacked up voluntarily.

Joe was proud of himself. After watching his older brothers do string games for the last year, he came up to me with a mosquito of his own design and pretended to bite me. "Bite, bite."

And when I was away all day on Saturday, teaching a short class on healthy eating and the principles of a Weston A. Price diet, Isaiah made his younger brothers a little paper house, with a man, a pitchfork, and a belt with a sword. All the vital necessities for farm survival, apparently.

The mist these last few days has been outstanding in the morning. I went to make breakfast and could hardly spot Phil, coming back from feeding the pigs.

The apple orchard is beautiful.

And the new cover crop Phil seeded just a few weeks ago is coming in well down one row. He's kicking himself now that he didn't plant the whole orchard, but maybe we'll get to it soon.

Phil moved the cows today, from the farthest point on the neighbor's land back to our lower pasture. It took three set-ups of electric wire, but he managed to do the whole thing, with a little help, in only about five hours. Considering that the last time he tried it, a move from the lower pasture to the neighbor's closest point took two days, almost killed a cow, involved two young ones escaping, and almost took out a peach tree, that seemed very swift, smooth, and successful. Perhaps not all our animals grow easier to handle (ahem: pigs), but the cows are smart and pleasant, and I think they learned, more or less, what we want them to do.

Finally, we have good hope that the three foot black snake is out of our trailer. If not, we're being overrun with them, since I found one on the ground behind our house trailer, and then found it again near the spigot by our barn. Phil last saw it heading west. Go west, young snake.

Remember the Beauty

Phil headed back to Costco today. Without any companions, he was able to shoehorn two freezers into the back of the van. Quite impressive! Our plan is to process the boars as soon as we can. With freezer storage, we might be able to get to both in the next week.

Along with errands for ice, electrical conduit, a meeting in town, and shipping some business packages, he didn't get home until after dark.

Back at the farm, I got an email with our soil sample results. Overall, it appears that we haven't made progress this year, but have regressed some. I struggle against despair, feeling that this last year has been a waste. Then I remembered that last October and November I was desperate to move away, desperate to leave the cramped quarters, ready to get away from a place that seems to demand everything I've got without return or encouragement.

Perhaps malaise affects me seasonally. How predictable and how ordinary.

To fight the blues, I headed out with the camera. I expected to see nothing of beauty or color: the faded greens of late summer, the grey sky for yet another day. Foolish me. Even the old flowers offered beauty; even the unwanted rooster amazed me with his crimson comb.

The worker bees, entering the hive with saddlebags full of yellow and white pollen. The wildflowers, the goldenrod, the leaves just changing for fall, Little Mallardy the smallest duck.

Enjoy the colors with me on this last day of summer.

One Pig Down: Eight to Go

After several days away from the farm routine, I spent most of Tuesday wrapping up loose ends from the previous three days, and preparing for the next few days. I'm guessing that Phil had some sort of allergic reaction to the massive amount of feather dust on the birds we processed on Monday, because he had a sinus headache until I gave him some Belladonna and Nux Vomica homeopathy, at which point he became functional again.

He fixed the auger so he can get started on fencing again. That has been a repair long in coming.

Today we penned the six piglets and Buttercup in preparation for selling one of the gilts (young girl pig). When the buyer came, he drove his truck right down to the temporary pen, and Buttercup and babes spooked. Buttercup somehow managed to escape out from underneath, along with one of her babies.

This ended up being a fortuitous error, though, because while I stood on the broken fencing, Phil hopped into the pen and soon grabbed one of the slippery babies. She squealed, as always, and Buttercup, outside the pen, went absolutely berserk. She was backed against the electric line and, I'm sure, was getting a good jolt, but she appeared not to take the least notice. Happily for me, she ended up on the wrong side of the electric line. The two boars were nosing about me, the remaining four piglets were scurrying around in the pen, and Buttercup was winding her way around, trying to get back to her babies.

It was an intense few minutes. I will be glad when the pigs and piglets are all gone. I'm not sure what the right method of separating and hauling and such would be, but I'm glad we won't have much more of that to do.

In other news, the varroa mite treatment on the Celadon hive continues. Each day since starting, I've found between 30 and 70 dead mites on the bottom monitor board, up from about seven (or so) before the treatment. Let those mites keep dying! Help that hive survive!

A day or so after treating, I found clusters of what looked like tiny white seashells, about the size of a fingernail: the dead bee brood. The package of mite strips had warned that that could happen, that the brood at a certain stage would die for a few days. That only lasted two or three days, though, and I am glad for that.

When the bees finished their forty pounds of honey, I have made them a different food: two parts sugar to one part water, with a pinch or two of sea salt, a bit of honey, all steeped with about a Tablespoon each of yarrow, peppermint, and yarrow. (There are other herbs that would serve the bees well, but I forget them now. I don't have them on hand.) The bees do not eat that food nearly as quickly, but I still check them daily to make sure they have enough.

And finally, we started an intense study of the book of Mark. On Sunday we were talking about Jesus' 40 days in the wilderness, and someone made the encouraging point that, in the Bible, people are not sent into the wilderness to die. It's not a pleasant time, but a time of stretching, where God meets with a person one-on-one, where they come away changed.

The encouragement of that thought has stuck with me. This time of stretching is not to crush, forsake, or destroy, but to grow and change. I like that.

Die Hard Chicken

Phil fed the broilers the last of their food yesterday morning, so we got up to process birds this morning. Phil got up to do the chores, and I staggered out at 7am to rearrange the barn in order to fit the new freezer inside. By the time that was done, and feeding the bees, feeding the boys, washing the dishes, and catching the chickens, it was about 10am.

Phil opened the storage trailer to get a needed tool and yelled in astonishment. A three-foot black snake was stretched along the entrance, and before Phil could react, the snake slithered off among our boxes of books, crates of clothing, and unused furniture. The advantage: no mice in our clothes. The disadvantage: there's a snake in our stuff. Nothing like a little adrenaline in the morning.

Chicken processing went smoothly, for the most part. One chicken had a fully formed egg inside, shell and all, and another was probably only a week from her first shelled egg. They must have missed the last two processings, the rascals. I did all the eviscerating, and although I didn't quite keep up with Phil's killing, plucking, and scalding, I didn't fall too far behind. We would do 25 at a time, which took three hours from catch to freezer (until the third batch, which we whipped through in two hours flat!). Then we would take a break, feed the boys and ourselves.

The weather was perfect: overcast, cool enough for comfort, warm enough for short sleeves.

Jadon even helped scald a chicken, until he dipped a bit too vigorously and scalded his finger. He finished that one, then went off to play. (Phil always asks if a boy would like to volunteer to kill a chicken, but so far, no takers. We figure that, since he was in his thirties before he killed his first, and he almost threw up the first time, the lack of volunteering is really okay.)

Although Phil caught all the chickens last night and penned them carefully, three escaped from his pen this morning. Somehow they found the strength to fly straight up from a dead stop, push aside the chicken wire top to their pen, and fly away. Then they would mock us, poking around the feathers of their friends, checking out the bucket of entrails right at my feet. Oh! How they taunted us. Phil offered the boys a quarter for each bird they could catch, and Isaiah, incredibly, caught one (how anyone could catch a wary bird with the whole farm available for flight is beyond me, but kudos to him), right as Phil finished killing the second round of chickens.

Phil needed to move and water the cows, so he went off to do so, leaving the solitary prisoner in the pen. I had about six more birds to process, and the entire batch to bag and weigh, and I watched at the bird struggled against the wire pen. Phil had put half a concrete block on top of the chicken mesh to ensure the bird remained.

And then the bird flew violently upwards, somehow pushed the concrete block aside, and escaped, crowing triumphantly as it flew into the woods.

That chicken refused to die today.

We ended up with five rogue birds. But because we have at least three roosters to kill among the layers, and probably ten (?) ducks to kill before winter as well, with four freezers full, we are done for today.

May the Lord protect the power supply to our freezers!

I Talk Up Healthy Food

Up before 6, I headed up to Monticello for the Heritage Harvest Festival. Last year, just a grateful attendee, this year I had a booth on behalf of the Weston A. Price Foundation. With only a few 30 second breaks from 8:45 to 5:15, I handed out brochures and talked nutrition with anyone who was willing to reach out and take one.

My favorite brochures ran out at 2pm (the simple line, "Would you like a brochure?" proved quite effective among such a receptive audience), and I was grateful for a second volunteer for the last several hours. The weather was chilly enough that I had been shivering since 7:30 when I arrived to set up (despite a sweater: I envied all with wraps and jackets), and my voice was growing lower. My lower legs, too, developed pins and needles. Though my enthusiasm remained high, physically I was glad to share the burden, and two people in the booth meant more people stayed to talk longer.

As long as it was just me, I think people felt like they shouldn't talk long, lest they monopolize the conversation.

I was, frankly, surprised at the number of people who wanted bumper stickers. Perhaps it was only ten, but the fact that ten people were willing to put a "Keep the government out of my kitchen" or "The Raw Milk Revolution with not be pasteurized" sticker on the back of a vehicle—well, I was surprised. Maybe I value my vehicular anonymity too much to share my agricultural opinions with the world.

So I returned home, ready to eat and sit under blankets until delightfully warm.

In the Sacrifice Stage Still

We put the piglets up for sale yesterday. I would be thrilled to sell them, even at a loss. They are so scrumptious looking, but I don't want to feed pigs anymore. I want to kill and eat the two boars, get rid of the purebred Berkshire mother in a way that is respectful of her and her breeding, and sell off the piglets to happy homes.

I have reached a point of hopelessness about the animals, though. I suspect that no one will come to buy our beautiful animals, which will require hard decisions. Always hard decisions! Always the wrong choices! Argh!

I have spent some time clearing our future blueberry patch. I have moved rocks out of the swales, and have tried to pull up the largest, most lignified weeds that the chickens didn't eat. In some areas, the chickens have done a remarkable job scratching the soil surface, clearing almost entirely. In other spots, the grass grows thickly yet. Phil is not convinced that it is worth it to clear the ground as much as possible; just till the ground, weed rootlets, grass seeds, and all, and then stay on it as the plants grow.

While I appreciate the time-saving elements of this approach, I worry that the grass rootlets will come back to haunt our plants for years to come. Most people I know spray herbicides to clear the land before planting. Since "herbicide" is incompatible with my idea of how the life in the soil should work (not necessarily how it does work, but how it should), I'm not willing to spray. Whether weeding is worth it, though, I don't know. And indecision irks me: I feel unsettled in how to proceed, grumpy in outlook.

To compound this grumpiness, the weather turned quite cool, down to about 45 degrees this morning. The realization that again we are approaching winter in the construction trailer, without much headway towards a warmer home, really struck me this morning. I hadn't felt much claustrophobia about our living quarters before, but I am fighting it now.

We will get through. We always do.

It is easy for me to think the pigs, and their voracious appetites, the focus of all my woes. Evict the pigs, and all will be well! Money for true necessities and money for frivolities (like running water!). But it isn't really just the pigs. It has been a second year of experiments, and I am done with experiments. I am done with failures and money running through our fingers. I crave success and fruitfulness.

Phil moved the sawmill this morning. We had briefly considered leaving it where it was, and trusting that his skill in felling trees would be enough to prevent the sawmill being crushed. But that was ridiculous: far better to spend a little more time moving and leveling the sawmill than risk destroying it.

The first tree he downed was a massive, 20+ inch diameter tulip poplar. I hadn't realized he was going to fell it, and when I realized which tree he had cut down, I was temporarily stunned. I loved that tree. It was a straight, beautiful, tall tree, right in my line of walking to the creek. I thought of it as my friend.

And now it was down, irreparable. (When Phil realized how upset I was, he felt absolutely sick. He had analyzed the future grazing site or potential market garden, and left a more valuable tree nearby, so he was doing his best to both thin the site, get usable lumber, and leave valuable trees for the future. He wasn't just mindlessly cutting trees down without thinking; he just didn't realize my affection for that particular tree.)

I walked downslope then, to see the other trees marked for use. I had never paid much attention to them: they were not in my regular path. But I was surprised at how large they were, how straight and desirable.

On further reflection, the reality is this: the usable trees are going to be the larger ones. Phil can take down the smaller, junky trees, but they won't have much use in larger construction. I don't think I had ever really thought about that: the trees needed will be larger, more beautiful.

Argh! Life! If it doesn't kill you, it makes you sacrifice something lovely.

I suppose it could also be argued that you can try to create something lovely, but I don't think we're there yet. We're still in the sacrifice stage.

Combat Varroa Destructor

Today was a bee day for me. The Mite Away strips I ordered ten days ago finally arrived, and when I went down to care for my bees, it was as if a small swarm had left the hive and gone into the mite monitor area below the hive for sustenance. I opened the hive to see if there were queen cells that would indicate swarming. But though I found capped honey (hooray!) and some brood cells (not nearly so many as I would have hoped, but certainly some), I found no queen cells anywhere. Presumably, the few hundred bees outside the hive were not a swarm then.

Varroa destructor mites are external parasites that attach to the bees and suck their lymph-like blood (called hemolymph). They leave open wounds, which, obviously, weakens the bees. And apparently it can affect the DNA of the bees, causing bad wings and other problems. They lay their eggs on the bee brood, and reproduce exponentially.

Incredibly, the same formic acid that makes bee stings hurt and swell can be used to kill the varroa mites even in capped brood. Mentor Gunther said that formic acid has been researched for many years and it does not persist in either the honey or the wax. And because it is a naturally occurring substance in the bees themselves (at a lower concentration), it is not damaging to the bees at all.

It can be damaging to people, though, so when I went to put the varroa mite pad on the hive, I wore eye protection under my bee veil, and chemical gloves over my normal neoprene gloves, as well as head to toe rain gear for general skin protection. Under the September sun, I was sweating profusely.

So the more heavily hit Celadon hive was cared for. On to the Celestial hive, not hit nearly as hard with the varroa.

Ever so much more brood! A large amount of capped honey! This is what a strong hive should be looking like!

I went back to the trailer to research, convinced that I needed to combine the hives. Celadon seemed too weak by comparison with Celestial, despite the three weeks of heavy honey feeding, in which the bees have eaten probably over 40 pounds of honey.

Combining sounded fairly easy. Remove the cover and put a layer of newspaper on the top of the strong hive. Then take the weak hive, find the queen and remove her (probably by killing, or by putting her in a nuc, or 5-frame small, temporary hive), and put the bees above the strong hive. Cover. In the few days it takes the hives to eat the paper between then, they get used to each other's smell, and make a strong hive together. Better to lose a queen than an entire hive.

Okay. I found my queen catcher and put back on my heavy clothes. I got the Celestial hive all ready to receive their weaker Celadon counterparts, and began putting the Celadon frames in place, one by one, searching diligently for the queen. No queen. No queen. No queen.

At six frames, I suddenly realized that there was more capped brood than I remembered. As the bees were returning from their foraging, the hive seemed a good bit more crowded with bees than I had remembered. Was I really prepared to kill a queen (or force her into slow death with an ill-planned nuc)? No. I'll give the Celadon hive a bit more time.

Back went frame after frame. So sorry, bees, that I don't know what I'm doing! Thank you for your patience, for your peacefulness despite my fumbling and indecision.

***

Phil calculated how much lumber he needs to build the forms for the base of the metal building. He figured he needs to cut and mill at least 9 trees with an 18" diameter. He found seven in the bottomland that will be easily accessible.

I pulled weeds from a section of our future blueberry patch. The chickens came along behind and scratched up bugs.

I quit when I was stung by a yellow jacket. I felt the sting and crushed the insect. Then another one targeted my other arm, and I killed that one, too, after getting a second sting. When a third instantly came up near my face, I dropped my weeds and dashed to wash the smell away.

Big Rock Shifted, Big Pile Shoveled

Phil found a chicken curiosity this morning. After months of chickens in the orchard, yesterday the broilers suddenly girdled a peach tree, entirely stripped about 18 inches up the trunk.

To say that I am eager for the broilers to be gone would be an understatement. I appreciate their fine flavor and their rich stock, but they have been so costly it makes my chest constrict to think of it.

With the compost pile moved near the woods, Phil brought down wood chips from the farm entrance to the pile. He used the tractor to scoop the chips into the truck, and then the older boys worked steadily and faithfully to empty the bed. (When finished, Isaiah happily went inside and vacuumed. He's been asking to do so for a week now, but we have had so much debris around from clearing out the office trailer, I haven't been able to dig the vacuum out of the closet. But with vacuum dug out, Isaiah even went so far as to vacuum my mattress, front and back. What a guy!)

Joe didn't really help with his scoop, but he had a good time, in any case.

With the chip pile removed from the farm entrance, Phil began a little farm beautification. He moved pallets that littered the entrance (leftover from various deliveries). He consolidated several piles of downed trees, left over from our first attempt at land clearing two winters ago. With the logs moved, he could mow along the driveway. And he removed an extremely large rock from the orchard. It would make a good building foundation, perhaps. (It positively dwarfs Joe!)

I had pulled a nasty vine on Saturday. It had quickly covered a large area, and was starting to put out seedpods. I pulled one on Saturday for about an hour. The other came up out of our future pond, I think, so I pulled its tendrils yesterday, and today Phil pushed the whole thing into the pond, along with some other bad weeds. Somehow we have to figure out how to compress this vegetative matter, and cover it with clay, in hopes that we will have a sealed pond without paying for a liner.

But while he did that, he also chopped up the residue from our failed three sisters plot (the corn, beans, and squash, with sunflowers around the edge, not one of which produced anything). The residue was a thick mat on the ground, and I am happy to again see a few of our land's contours.

Phil also fixed the boom arm on the sprayer, which ended up not being an expensive or difficult fix, which is a mercy.

I went out and walked the swales to the north of the road. How long are they? How many blueberry plants could I, potentially, plant? That settled (more or less), I started to weed. When it comes time to actually purchase plants and have them ship, I want the land to be ready.

In the past, I think my enthusiasm for ordering new plants has overtaken my preparations for those new plants, so we have been left scrambling to find temporary storage for these living organisms. I like the idea of preparing a place for them, and welcoming them when the time comes.

Planning Begins Again

Saturday morning I woke, refreshed, after a short four hours of sleep, ready to plan how to implement our new farm plan. I mapped out all the tasks I could anticipate for our three-pronged approach, summarized as follows.

• Fruit with focus on apples, increased peaches, and blueberries that we will plant as soon as possible, hopefully in the next six months. Happily, this includes my beloved bees, which are needed for pollination.


• Limited Market Garden with focus on asparagus, garlic, and vegetables for sauerkraut (and maybe other lacto-fermented foods: kimchi, pickles, etc.) Also a little section for bee sanctuary plants.


• Small Dairy with milk shares eventually, and the beef from cull animals and perhaps breed stock. Maybe we'll do layers or broilers following the cows, but maybe only on a personal scale.

Isn't that a great plan! Every one of those is something we love, every one is something we're excited about. And they have a good mixture of tasks through the year, so we hopefully won't be entirely buried at any one time.

First step: how much could we expand the peaches if we moved the cherries? Incredibly, by pulling the 25 (out of 40 originally planted) trees, we could add just about 100 peach trees in the same area. Wonderful.

I went through the peach orchard and tried to analyze which trees were doing well, and which were doing less well. Some varieties were noticeably less happy than their immediate neighbors: so interesting how some trees thrive and some do less well.

I also went through the top two rows of apple trees, the 80 most dwarfing, earliest producing trees. I had taken specific notes as we planted, but I hadn't yet gone through to see what was doing best since then. The G.16 rootstocks are absolutely the best in our soil. It was fun to make a spreadsheet, too (one of my secret pleasures): place in row, type of tree, type of rootstock, planting notes, current notes. Even date in the ground, almost like each tree has its own farm birthdate.

I went to the next two rows of apple trees on Monday morning. On average, the precocious top trees have trunks the size of half dollars; the trunks of the next two are nickels. A good bit smaller. And, on average, the precocious trees are 8', while the next are 6'. And, since we didn't really spray or do much tending, I was impressed to see how glowingly healthy the Liberty tree looked, known for its resistance to various apple troubles (scab, fireblight, and such). I'm guessing some of my trees are struggling with some of those, since they aren't all glowing.

In any case, energy around a new project is always at a peak, but we had a fun time being with church friends multiple times over the weekend, too. What a joy, to get to know our brothers and sisters better.

Monday tasks for Phil were a bit irritating. He had opted to fix the tractor's auger himself, expecting it to be a fairly easy project. And immediately broke one of the three pieces. After watching various movies online, he has a good idea of how to fix it. So many new tasks he's had to learn to do!

So then he began to move our compost pile. No longer in the center of our living quarters, he's tucked it away back near the woods. Perhaps a little farther to walk, but aesthetically worth it.

As he moved the still curing compost to its new site, the chickens went crazy, eating up the bugs. So he stopped for the evening to let the chickens eat well.

Face to Face with a New Enemy

She loved everything that grew in God’s earth, even the weeds. With one exception. If she found a blade of nut grass in her yard it was like the Second Battle of the Marne: she swooped down upon it with a tin tub and subjected it to blasts from beneath with a poisonous substance she said was so powerful it’d kill us all if we didn’t stand out of the way.
“Why can’t you just pull it up?” I asked, after witnessing a prolonged campaign against a blade not three inches high.
“Pull it up, child, pull it up?” She picked up the limp sprout and squeezed her tumb up its tiny stalk. Microscopic grains oozed out. “Why, one sprig of nut grass can ruin a whole yard. Look here. When it comes fall this dries up and the wind blows it all over Maycomb County!” Miss Maudie’s face likened such an occurrence unto an Old Testament pestilence.

From To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

I have read of Miss Maudie's battle against nut grass, or nutsedge, for almost two decades now. Last year, I read a blurb in a gardening magazine that had a photo of this terrible foe, and I paid attention, but happily had never seen such a plant.

Weeding yesterday, I noticed a cute little green plant for the first time. Pulled it up and put it with the rest of the weeds.

But when I headed out to weed the second asparagus bed today, I paid more attention when I found a second plant. And by the third, the little voice in my head said, "This is nutsedge! Pay attention!"

How did my brain know it? Maybe it was the Holy Spirit. I pulled perhaps thirty little plants that have popped up in the last month, and put them in a black garbage bag that will, hopefully, cook them and eventually bring them to a landfill. I don't usually like my weeds to leave the property (this land grew them: this land should get the minerals and whatever else), but in the case of nutsedge (and poison ivy, actually), I make exception.

Phil, the older boys and I then took down the remainder of the tomato T-posts, and cleared a bit more weeds away. The soil remains so moist that, rather than using the T-post puller, we could simply rock the posts back and forth and pull them out by hand. Even the boys could! It made us all feel very strong and tough.

And all afternoon, Phil and I talked through farm strategy. After two years here, in which we've tried pretty much every possible homestead animal and endeavor we can think of, what do we want our enterprises to be?

There were some definite surprises. One of the biggest: nothing we mentioned involved the greenhouse. Hmm. Hopefully at some point we'll figure out a good use for that expensive structure. Another: we couldn't figure out how to make pigs fit. So maybe we keep buying weaned piglets for our personal consumption, but in our list of preferred enterprises, pigs are out. So are chickens, except maybe some layers to follow the cows. Maybe. Maybe we keep some for ourselves.

In talking through the orchard, Phil mentioned that he wouldn't mind pulling the cherry trees and putting in more peaches. I would not have thought of that off the top of my head, but in walking the orchard afterwards, it makes sense. The peaches are thriving. The average tree (see photo) has a good number of leaves, a reasonable trunk, shiny green leaves. And a few trees are magnificent!

The average cherry: not so much. Not only have probably 25% of the trees died in their two year tenure here, but the ones that are yet living are not thriving. They have lost most of their leaves already, struggling along with thin trunks.

So we'll transplant the cherries and hope some make it for our personal consumption, cut a few new swales in the stone fruits, and plan to plant new peaches. I'm good with that.

Strong Boys

The light at this time of year has turned to fall. Even the weeds have their special gleam.

The boys helped Phil all afternoon. They spent several hours clearing a few sections of "market garden" (weeds). The boys used clippers and pruners to cut down weeds around the raspberries planted in the swales, and Phil scythed the rest of the weeds. There is a clear line of sight now, and Phil was encouraged to see how many of the missing raspberries were still living.

Then the boys helped Phil put up new pig fencing. The pigs were ecstatic to have a new area to root and plow, and I'm thrilled to have a new area for them to plow and manure. Those boys were good helpers, too: Jadon carried three T-posts at once, and then Isaiah did, too! Strong boys.

I was pleased to weed one of the two beds of asparagus. The raspberries that lived, interplanted with asparagus, are growing enormous now, some stalks about 5' tall. This variety was supposed to require no staking, but I can see how stakes could be useful with those slightly prickery brambles.

With the massive rainfall, weeds came up easily, and it was a joy to go barefoot in the softened earth, pulling up some enormous staghorn sumac sprouts, some grasses, and plenty of other random weeds. Even a dandelion came out with six inches of exposed root. So satisfying!

(Though I can say that, overall, we encourage dandelions on our farm and appreciate the beauty of their cheery yellow flowers, their ability to bring nutrients up from the subsoil, their healthy vegetable status—more nutritious than kale!—and the amusement of blow-the-puffball. I just didn't want any dandelions in my asparagus directly.)

Two Insect Homes

Phil and I went to pull soil samples today. In past years, I've dug down six inches with a spade in about five spots per sample. It is hot, hard work, trying to get an accurate cross section of soil. Add to that a bowl to mix the samples, the bags and sharpie for holding and marking samples, and the spade itself: it has been a juggling act.

This year: so much better. We have a soil probe now, with lines marked at 6". Better still, the massive rains made the soils quite damp. Rather than chopping through pottery (as it felt when I attempted soil sampling a few weeks back), the probe sank easily into the soil, except where blocked by a pebble. Best of all: Phil did the probing, and I held the bowl, bag, and sharpie. That made soil collecting easy!

We still have spots of extreme clay. But there is crumbly soil, too, and the color is no longer shocking orange, but is mellowing, darkening a bit.

In the apple orchard, we went to the bald-faced hornet nest, grown larger than a basketball, and, apparently, deserted. Phil prodded it (after being fairly sure it was empty), and, finding no one home, he began to smash it. The hives from the hornet stings must have been on his mind.

I rescued some bits of the paper hive, made from chewed wood. The hornets built several thin, smooth layers for insulation and protection around the edges. The variegated grays: subtle and beautiful.

Their brood nest, I was interested to see, had the same six-sided hexagonal pattern as the honeybees.

But while the honeybee hexagonals are horizontal in the hive, the hornets built their hexagonals vertically, and stacked them in the hive.

The last casualty of the honeybee comb enchanted the boys and I. Completely emptied of babies and honey, it lay at the bottom of the hive's second level, so incredibly constructed. The center bottom has a triangular section of slightly larger comb, where the male drones were placed. The worker comb surrounding it is the same shape, but smaller.

The pattern repeated on the far side: small worker comb on the edges, and larger drone comb in the center.

The bees do not chew wood to make paper; they excrete wax cells out of their abdomens, up to eight per day if conditions are perfect.

And it takes almost a million wax cells to make one deep frame.

A full size hive will have twenty deep frames, and twenty super frames. The industry of the little honey bees boggles the mind.