Garlic

Garlic seems to work best as a spring crop planted in the fall.  Last fall I got a late start planting the cloves, so this year I put these in early in October.  Hopefully they're not growing too big too fast, because they certainly are growing.  Once the winter gets really bleak in a week or two I'll protect them with some straw for the season.  

Extinction

This week was the end of the backyard colony.  Battered by soaking rains, then raided by yellowjackets, they were down to their last 10 bees.  Seen here is the queen and her remaining crew of workers, before they were run out of the hive in the next wave of yellowjacket attacks.

This crew had a tough year, from the May swarm, the June hive split, the rainy weather during mating season then the yellowjacket raid.  And lets not forget that they had a rookie beekeeper overseeing the operation.  

The one good part of their year was the long dry fall, that allowed accumulation of a lot of late season honey stores.  Those frames have been moved to the basement away from the raiders, and are being fed to the 15th Ave colony, which is itself undersized and underprepared for winter.

Potato Patch

Yo, yo, yo.... POTATO!!  Holler if you can hear me you Spuds!
This week was potato harvest time.  Fortunately I had Maddy digging with me.  She's a pro:

The result was a lot of potatoes, a pretty epic haul in my opinion.  After finishing digging Madeleine had to recruit her friend Audrey to help with collecting and sorting.  Here's Audrey with her cut of the take:

It was pretty satisfying to dig up all those tubers, and Madeleine had so much fun that she was on the verge of tears when she realized that there were no more to find.  (Tomato picking provided some small consolation).  Surprisingly, Madeleine was very clear at dinner time that while she likes finding potatoes, she does not enjoy eating them. 

Here are the production totals, by type:
Russian Banana Fingerling: 8 oz planted, 3 lbs 13 oz harvested, yield=5.63x
California White: 10.5 oz planted, 2 lbs 13 oz harvested, yield=4.29x
Chieftan: 23 oz planted, 5 lbs 10 oz harvested, yield=4.09x

So all in all we pulled about 12 pounds of spud out of the ground, not bad from one row!  I bet that our thick and unimproved soil held back yield, plus I didn't fertilize much and the seed potatoes were planted pretty tight.  Next year we'll do even better!

Tomato

Too bad the battery for the scale died again, this would be a record breaking tomato!  It's the biggest one out of our garden this year, but there are more coming along soon as the tomatoes use our current nice weather to try and ripen up before fall.

Fish

The other day I decided to take up steelhead fishing to feed my family.  I drive home from work along a steelhead stream, so why not?  

I'm told that the smaller ones are more tender.  I guess I'm doing Ok then, right?  I'm glad I was using the size #0 spinner; my #4 might have chopped him to pieces!

Bee Update

A typical summer afternoon at the hive.  The new queen seems to be laying well, so worker numbers are going back up.  This time of year they're working hard trying to store up enough sugar and protein (honey and pollen) to live off of for the winter.  

July 6th

Just a little photo update.  Click on the picture for more detail....

Beans to the left (shell and soy), then proceeding toward the right is a thicket of potatoes, a row of beets planted today, some scattered lettuce and kale, a row of pole beans (under the bamboo trellis, which used to support the peas), then 5 tomato plants and then the asparagus.  Lots of stuff, little space.

Along the driveway we're still harvesting shelling peas, but beans have been interplanted.  And the garlic was pulled today, making way for a bed of carrots.  Summer is here today--finally--and I've already started planting for fall.  How brief are the seasons!

Bee Update

It's been a little over 3 weeks since Swarmageddon.  Before we left town I went into the hive and found lots of honey and pollen stores, and lots of capped brood (ie: growing babies scheduled to hatch in about a week).  All in all, the departing swarm left things in good order.  I also found about 12 queen cells which are intended to grow into new princesses.  These young ladies then have to fight to the death to determine who will be the new queen.

But I was worried that there were too many queen cells (if more than one survives, then the hive will be broken up but yet another swarm(s).  And there is only about an 80% chance of any of the princesses growing up to be functional queens--apparently fighting to the death and then getting eaten by a bluejay happens from time to time.  So I took half of the bees, honey, and brood and two of the queen cells and moved them to my back up box.  I left the other half of the bees, honey, brood, and two queen cells in the main hive.  And the rest of the queen cells were destroyed.

The idea is that in three weeks a new Queen will be hatched, mated, and laying eggs.  Since I have two boxes, I could end of with:
-two queens (sweet!)
-1 queen (and then I could recombine the two boxes into one larger hive
-or no queens (bummer!). 

Fast forward to the present.... yesterday I checked on my backup box.  Hmmm, no eggs, no brood.  This hive is on borrowed time since all of the workers are growing old and there is not a younger generation.  The main hive also has a lot of senior citizens, and no eggs, but I did find a queen.  A queen... but she should have started laying eggs by now.  Maybe she hasn't because the weather has been too bad to take a mating flight?  Or maybe everything is going slow because it's been cool and rainy?  Maybe she's just redecorating the nursery?  Or worst case, maybe she's infertile.  I'll give it another week, at which point we'd need to come up with a new queen ASAP.

Here are the bees resting in the backup box for bedtime:

Peas

After a 3-week East Coast hiatus, we're back to the MCF.  And wow, after 3 weeks the garden starts to get unruly!  Our snow and sugar peas which were supposed to be eaten as small pods are overgrown, so I harvested and shelled them:

According to Bon Appetit, I'm supposed to serve fresh peas with poached sockeye, wild rice, and a light cream sauce.  Let's run this by the critics..... She likes it, she really really likes it!

Swarmageddon 2012

This seems like it'd be a good post for pictures, but I wasn't home when disaster hit.

It was Friday, 5/11, a beautiful day.  Such a beautiful sunny day that my bees decided to take off and move away.  My lovely and productive queen, and tens of thousands of hardworking foragers.  I'm told it was cool to see.  The neighbors thought it was "just like something you'd see on TV."  Apparently there was a vortex of buzzing bees that alighted overnight high up in the neighbors backyard.  The next day they were off to their new home.  No goodbyes, and since they all ate heavily before their journey, not even much honey left.

What is left?  Well there is a little stored honey and pollen and they left a few workers behind to tend the incubating larval brood.  The workers are trying to raise a few of these larvae to be a new queen, which supposedly has an ~80% chance of success.

Now I'm on vacation and when I return in 3 weeks I may have a dead and empty hive, or I'll have a new young queen, with some spacious honeycomb to fill.  Before leaving I took out some of the combs with an incubating queen and put them in a different box with some of the workers.  This was a risky move, because that leaves minimal resources for both boxes.  On the other hand, now they each have a chance of raising a queen, so hopefully one, if not both, will have a laying queen in a few weeks.  Worst case scenario would be that I return to no bees, and cross my fingers that I can catch someone else's escaping swarm.  Best case scenario, both boxes raise a queen but have to fight back from a population too small to make much honey.

Either way this will be a "rebuilding year" for the bees, and a year without a big honey flow for us.

Spring Update

I think it's safe to say that spring is officially here.  The bleeding hearts are up, and came up fast enough that the slugs couldn't get them.

And the wisteria is covered in fragrant blossoms.  Last year this vine flowered once in the spring and again in the summer, so I'll keep my fingers for that.

Even the girls are feeling Springy.  Here Juliet is sporting her new spring hairdo, and eating baby's first pancakes.  What a milestone!

Oh, and I ate the spring's first homegrown peapod today.  No picture of that, it's in my stomach now.

M, Sammy and Daddy plant lettuce.

Spring.

It must be spring, officially.  The sun is out, and things are growing in the garden...some good, some bad.

First the good.  The bees are hard at work.  Go bees!

Second, the first pea plant has decided to flower.  This is one of the plants that was started indoors, then spent a few weeks under a row cover, and has now been out in the open for the last few weeks.  Go peas!

And then the bad news: the pests are on to all the delicious happenings at the MCF.  What I used to call the cabbage moth is actually a Little White (Pieris rapae), an invasive from Europe that thrives all across North America, including the Miller City Farm.  This one (below, on the kale just L of center) showed up today, flitting from kale leaf to kale leaf, leaving single yellow-green eggs that will soon be unstoppable green caterpillars.  I guess the kale are headed for the brazing pot now while we still have them.

Bees!

Bees. It's been many weeks of anticipation and education as I attended bee class and read countless beekeeping references.  But all the preparation still didn't prepare me for the moment I popped the lid off of my box of 10,000 bees!

But first, getting them home.  I'd put a downpayment on a "nuc" of bees back in March.  (a nuc of bees cost $99, if you were wondering).  A nucleus is an active hive, scaled down to a small box with 5 frames.  The bees have been living in this hive for a few weeks, so the queen has been laying and the workers have the frames full of honey and pollen to feed the growing brood.  On the scheduled date of April 7th, Maddy and I went to the nursery to pick up our hive.  Being good Portlanders, we of course rode our bike.  Here's our new minivan-sized bike, Maddy, and the nuc:

We put the box in the backyard and pulled the plug blocking the entrance hole and....nothing happened.    But as soon as the sun had warmed up the box, the bees swarmed out and flew in a vortex, accomplishing their orientation flight to get there new bearings.  After an hour of buzzing vortex, the workers were off to investigate the neighborhood, leaving relatively fewer bees in the hive, and it was now the safest time to open the box.  I put on a white shirt (bees stay calm around white) and put on my veil:

I pulled the lid off, and to my pleasant surprise the bees remained happy and busy.  Unfortunately there aren't any pictures of this, since Gretel was holding Juliet and they wanted to stay a bit back from the action.  Trying to cause minimal bee casualties, I carefully transferred the 5 full frames to my first deep box, and added 5 empty frames to fill it out.  On went the cover, and the bees were settled into their new digs:

The unpainted wood is an entrance reduce that closes down the size of the entrance while the hive is still young and small.  This makes the entrance easier to defend in case of raiding by a stronger hive.  Here is a video of the girls in action 5 days later. Be sure to turn on the sound:

Springtime!

Greens

You may recall that a while back I put some lettuce and brassica starts in the ground under cover.  This week the weather has been pretty good, so I decided to take the cover off the row:

In there is a mix of lettuces with chard and kale as well.  Some of the chard took pretty heavy bug damage, but it looks like everything is still growing.  Strangely, the plants get larger the further along the row you get.  I wonder if there is a fertility gradient in the soil, or if its the moisture?  I'm not sure, but here is the last lettuce in line, with my hand for perspective.  It's almost salad time:

First Asparagus

I can't seem to remember what variety of asparagus I planted last season.  Apparently something purple because here it is, the first asparagus stalk of the season!  Yesterday it was 60 and sunny, and the long range forecasts are for warm and sun.  Maybe this stalk will grow and harden off before the slugs get it?

Seed Timing

Technically it's spring now, but I'll admit that its more "early spring" than "spring spring."  But on the rare sunny day that gets mixed in, a farmer gets tempted to plant.  I was recently reading the instructions on my pea packages and apparently starting the seedlings indoors is discouraged, and they should be planted outside "as soon as the soil can be worked."  With that advice under consideration and then ignored, I usual go ahead and start plants indoors, aiming for ~Presidents Day as ideal seeding time for peas.

Here's a comparison that backs up my thinking.  Check out these pictures taken today, the first one is of snow peas, planted outdoors on 2/24.  They're planted up against a nice warm piece of southern facing foundation.  Look how big they are (or aren't):

Ok, maybe you had to squint but they're there, right in the middle.  Now for comparison, here are some peas that I started on 3/15, indoors, then transplanted out the other day.  Time will tell which grow faster or produce more, but for plants that are about 4 weeks younger, these guys look pretty good:

In my experience-based opinion, it makes more sense to start peas indoors then transplant them out after they have 3+ leaf pairs.  This is because spring growing conditions are challenged by the reemergence of the local slug population.  Slugs like to eat my peas right at the surface as they first break ground, but they're less inclined to climb up to the higher leaves.  Hopefully these larger plants will have at least a fighting chance.

St. Patrick's Day

I'm not sure when potatoes are supposed to be planted.  But I do know when St. Patrick's Day is every year, so that's when I plant them.

A few days prior I dug out a ditch of a bed for them, and then backfilled with compost, fertilizer, and straw.

After her nap, I recruited my helpful assistant and the potatoes went right in.  We planted about 2# of spuds, so I'll be curious to see what our end-of-season yield is on this operation.

Springtime!

Gret and Liz enjoy a pow day

Sushi Chef

Big M making sushi.  With tortillas, egg, honey, raisins, banana.  Yum!

Snow Peas

Well if snow is falling, I might as well plant snow peas.  After all, I've had a bunch started in the grow room and it is March already.  (Usually I like to Plant Peas on Presidents day)  Hopefully they can get established now, while the slugs are frozen?

Snow

Cold on the heels of my post about using row covers to keep the plants warm and dry come this weather event, the Blizzard of 2012.  Were people afraid to travel? Yes.  Were schools closed? Unnecessary, but yes.  Did my plants survive?  I guess I'll know in a few days....

Row

Lettuce and kale, living in the rowhouse.  Looks like there's some slug or worm damage on the kale, but lettuce is going strong.  Speaking of lettuce, we had our second harvest of the year from stuff planted last fall.  Admittedly when I say "harvest" I'm talking about a few heads of Romaine, enough for two bowls of salad.  And when I say "second" I also mean last, since that meant harvesting all of the remaining lettuce.  So until these plants in the row house get bigger....

Speaking of row houses, supposedly ones like this are to keep the plants warm.  I'm not sure how well the thin layer of fleece does that, and I also wonder how much sun it filters out (the kale look spindly).  People tell me that in Oregon, the bigger benefit is that the covers keep rain off the soil, since soil saturation leads to moldy rotten seeds and plants, so things are nice and cozy and dry inside.  I'm also hoping that covering the row reduces the number of slugs and other trouble makers.  

Valentine's Day, under the lights

2/17

I thought that it seemed overpriced to have to buy a miniature row house like the one on the left, especially when I already have a roll of fleece cloth.  But having spent an hour today bending bamboo arcs and trying to affix the fleece such that it doesn't blow away I'm ready to declare the manufactured one a deal.  After all, the pre-made one has metal support arcs that anchor well and are enclosed in pockets.  It's so easy to set up, and isn't lopsided like the one I built.  

Under the left house is a mix of chard, kale, lettuce, etc.  It's sustained some minor slug damage but otherwise seems well.  The one on the right was filled today and includes 2 types of pea starts, some chard starts, and my first direct sown crop of the season: radishes.  The package says they'll be ready in 20-25 days.  Sure.  

The prepared soil on the left will be potatoes.  There is room on the right for lettuce; some of the rye grass cover crop remains here.  Far right is the asparagus bed, cozied in with a layer of straw and now some steer manure on top of that.  I added two crowns of UC157 towards the front, since the lawn has been cut back by about 2 feet there I figured I'd fill it with more asparagus.  

Lettuce and Chard under the lights

Sun? Growing stuff? Is it Spring?

Garlic

The garlics are doing their thing, getting an early start to the spring.  I've tried to protect them and their soft soil with a layer of hay.  (add $9.95 for the bale to the cost total...)

Starts

It's pretty clear that the quality of the lens on my phone is worsening.  

Regardless, here are my flats of starts which are spending time outside "hardening off" prior to being put in their fleece row house.  Lettuces, kale, chard, spinach.  Maybe they can get a good start while the slugs are still frozen?

Farm Update

Happy 2012, MCF fans and followers!

This year, we've got a slightly bigger garden plot, and we'll be striving for more produce from this bigger acreage, coupled with wiser crop rotation and succession plans based on what we learned last year.  Also, I'll try to keep track of expenses, and yield totals.  I don't think we'll keep track of "$$ saved as compared to the market shopping", since crop prices and quality fluctuate too much to allow any meaningful numbers to be derived.  But hopefully by keeping track of input costs and vegetable yields, we'll have a sense for "value" of our vegetables.

Purchase #1: $22.99 for a 3 meter row house.  Theoretically this will allow earlier, or even winter, planting.  For scale, it is pulled out to an 8 foot length in this photo.

I put a lot of effort into building good soil last year.  Nutritious, soft, wormtastic soil.  Pardon me as I pat myself on the back, but it does look pretty good indeed!

Sunny Winter Day