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.