Oh Yeah . . . Now I Remember

Tags

backyard chickens, Beekeeping, bees, French Breakfast radishes, gardening

I’m not feeling so bored or depressed about not having a toddler/baby in the house anymore.  In fact, I’m starting to remember how much I enjoyed my life pre-children.  It was pretty good.  Sleep as much as I want.  Read a book all day if I want (hell, just read a book without constant interruptions every couple of sentences).  Long walks with the dogs (not so long anymore; senior dogs can’t go very far these days).  Pole dancing.  Gardening.  Theatre.  Writing.  Biking.  Taking forty-five minutes to drink my coffee and read on a Saturday morning.  Wandering through the Farmers’ Market with no time constraints or threats of public tantrums.  

Children are great, but life without children is also great.  

Garden update:

Radishes and asparugus are going strong. I’ve been eating a huge amount of French Breakfast radishes.  I’ve waited all winter for these radishes, and they are just as wonderful as I remember them.  I eat the radishes, and the chooks eat the greens – they love radish greens so much that they start jumping up trying to snag them as soon as I open the coop door.  

  

Rhubarb is ready to be harvested.  I still have a bag of frozen rhubarb in the deep freeze from last summer, so I think I’ll make a batch of rhubarb slushies this weekend, and harvest some fresh stuff for preserving (once strawberries are ready to go in July).  

  

Planted tomatoes, cucumbers, and herbs in pots (since we ran out of room in the gardens). We actually got a bit of frost last Thursday evening, and it killed a couple of our tomatoes, and made the cucumbers really droopy.  The cucumbers perked up, but the tomatoes didn’t recover.  Have to grab some more seedlings this week.  

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Hardneck garlic, softneck garlic, onions, and peas are looking really good.   

 

And the hives are all hopping.  There are starting to store honey already!

  

Garden Diary, Bees, and Chickens

Tags

backyard chickens, bees, Chicken coop, gardening, planting, splitting hives

May long weekend!  Time to plant the rest of the garden (plus garden number two).

In our yard, we planted:

• Radishes
• Pumpkins (Sugar Pie)
• Butternut Squash
• Spaghetti Squash
• Golden Summer Squash
• More pumpkins (Jack B Little)
• Tomatoes (bought seedlings; planted some in pots)
• Cucumbers (in pots)
• Peppers (bought seedlings; not in garden yet)
• Melons (bought seedlings; not in garden yet)

In Garden Number Two, we planted:

• Carrots (Danvers, Nantes, Paris Market)
• Beets (Chiggio, Golden, Cylindra)
• Sunflowers
• Onions

Will split the hives.  It was a bit scary, but they were so full, the bees would’ve swarmed anyway.

I finally – FINALLY – cleaned the coop.  Even though Ginger had already laid her egg today, she insisted on breaking in the fresh straw in her nesting box.

On another note, I’ve now napped three days in a row.  I feel as though I’m catching up on six months of sleep deprivation.

This Weekend on the Homestead

Tags

bees, Beet, beet greens, canning, honey, swiss chard, urban farm

It was so good to be home this weekend.  As much as I didn’t want vanlife to end, it was great to be home a few days early and have some garden fun.

We came back to a lush, beautiful garden (thank you, Melanie!) Check out the pumpkins.  The bigger green ones are Sugar Pie, which I’ll use for jack o’lanterns and then baking.  The smaller ones are Jack be Little, which are just cute and for decoration.  And the purple/green beans were still good, so we harvested them all, and then pulled the plants to make room for the rapidly growing squash vines.  Note to self:  Don’t plant squash in the middle of the garden next year.

As I mentioned on Friday, we cracked the hive to find lots and lots of beautiful honey.  Melanie (our house sitter/summer house guest) helped Will take the frames out of the honey supers.

Then we scraped and crushed and strained and poured the clear honey into mason jars.  It was a pretty fantastic time.  In the end, we got 28 pounds of honey.  And that’s only the first harvest.  Yippee!

We picked the last of the sour cherries from the school yard across the street.  I broke down and bought a cherry pitter.  It was bloody expensive so I expect it to last at least 100 years.  Once we got that puppy going though, it took longer to pull the stems off the cherries than to pit them.  Love that stupid thing.  I canned four pints of sour cherry preserves, and I’ve still got 28 litres in the freezer downstairs (thank you, Mom!)

Finally, on Sunday, we did a quick little harvest for supper.  The beets are lovely, and Will steamed up a huge bunch of Swiss Chard and beet greens for me.  I love them when they’re just wilted, tossed with olive oil and salt, and then drizzled with balsamic vinegar.  So good.

We maybe sorta decided on the trip to start our our own urban farm (eek!)  We’re in the research phase at the moment (anyone familiar with SPIN farming?)  We’re thinking of the name Urbana Farms – opinions? thoughts? ideas? awesome name or weird name?  Help us out with the market research.  Leave a comment below!

 

A New Addition

Tags

backyard bees, beehive, bees

Oh, hello bees.  Welcome to the Chateau Tabitha Urban Homestead!

More pics to follow . . .