Kombucha

Our second try at brewing kombucha...
The first batch got infected, but I have a better feeling it will work this time.

We obtained a mother (AKA: SCOBY, mushroom, starter) from someone and started it yesterday.


We picked out some plain tea - it was recommended we not use anything with oils or other flavors added.


Brewed 5 tea bags in half a gallon of water, plus 1/2 a cup of sugar. Let it cool.


Then added the mother and topped it with a coffee filter. Now we wait!


If you want flavored kombucha you add that after it's done fermenting and after you've removed the mother (and the baby).

Pepper Flakes

We are still reaping the benefits of that huge Hood River garden. We hung our cayenne pepper plants to dry in the fall, then bagged them in mesh until we were ready to process them. I love things that wait for our schedule!


These were so easy to work with - we just pinched the stems off and picked out any bad or dirty parts, then threw them in the Cuisinart.


This was a second batch, it worked much better being full. The first run was only partially filled and didn't break down as well.



Easily enough red pepper flakes to last us a year!

Farm Chores

Saturday was beautiful and we took advantage of it by going on a nice bike ride, then heading over to the farm annex to do some chores. Our strong hive was doing really well and I felt confident there were enough bees to make a split and start another hive. Aaron hadn't looked in either hive yet this year, so he was happy to see they were doing well. So well that we actually needed to add another box for honey. Below is a frame full of brood, a sign of a good queen is a tight laying pattern. You can see she is doing an awesome job.



To make a new hive, we took a frame of the youngest (smallest) eggs we could find, the frame above full of sealed brood and a frame with open (you can see larvae in the cells) brood along with two full frames of honey from the previous hive and put them in a nuc box. The idea is that the bees will realize they don't have a queen, and make one from the fresh eggs. We searched each frame very carefully to make sure the queen wasn't on any of them - I hope we didn't miss here, there were a lot of bees on each frame. We leave the bees on the frames, they will tend to the brood and are called nurse bees. They haven't ever left the hive, so they will not return to the original hive. If there are any foragers that get moved, they will simply fly back to the "parent" hive. It's pretty awesome when it works. Now we have to wait 3 weeks and hope they will do their thing.
Aaron scraped off this "burr" comb and found these eggs on it.


The other chore to attend to was to dust the chickens with permethrin for the second time. Some of the girls had been shaking their head a lot, and we thought they might have lice. Luckily I have a great helper (Aaron used to help me, but my mom is much happier to help with chicken chores). Mabel is all ready to be dusted - can you tell it's a bit muddier here than in Hood River?


Then there's Camilla. This chicken has become ridiculously tame. She comes when you call her, and lets you pick her up and carry her around. No complaints.


She's gotten a bit spoiled, and has been getting out of their enclosure and into the barn. The other duty to get done was to raise the pen up so she couldn't fly out anymore.


My dad found this nest she made in the corner of the barn on the top of an alfalfa bale. Sneaky little chicken.

I Did a Bad Thing

A more appropriate title may be: "I feel like a bad person".
We took two hives into the winter - we had 3 last year, but one lost their queen late summer, so we over wintered two. Both survived, but one was clearly much stronger than the other. When I did the first inspection a few weeks ago, the weaker hive had very few bees in it compared to the stronger hive. In fact I didn't see much brood at all.
I began feeding both hives, and the weak hive didn't take any of the syrup I gave them. Another bad sign. I opened them yesterday with Aaron - just a peak in and we were greeting with lots of angry stingers. This usually means there is something wrong, like the queen is dead. We decided the best thing to do would be to break the hive down and save the honey that was left. If we had just left them eventually they wouldn't have been able to defend the hive, and other bees would have come in and "robbed" them of their honey. This means a wild frenzy of bees all over (including the possibility of the strong hive being robbed), and we lose the 35 pounds of honey in the hive we could use to start a new colony.
So I went over today and pulled the hive apart - carefully. There weren't many bees, but my were the ones that were there pissed. They would see me coming and head straight for my face. It took a while, but I just let the cold weather slow them down and eventually kill them.


They hovered in clusters for warmth.


I was surprised to find a queen in there. I teased her out into a plastic bag. We put her in vodka to make queen juice. The idea is that her queen pheromones go into the alcohol and in the spring you can use it with lemongrass oil to bait swarms. I do realize I sound like a total jerk right now, but the thing is when you deal in life, you also must deal in death. We salvaged as much from this hive as we could to have a successful year with a new hive.


There was one frame with brood, the other side looked about the same. No eggs, but some larvae and mostly capped brood. This time of year there should be 8-10 full frames of brood. This queen was not laying well anymore, hence the population decline.


All I had with me today was a camera phone, so sorry for the picture quality.

For those of you wondering what will happen with the farm this year - we took the chickens and bees to my parent's house in the country. The chickens are having a great time (and so are my parents!) and laying lots of eggs. My garden size has decreased dramatically - from 2200 square feet to 42 square feet. But I'm looking forward to a little break and I have my mom's big garden and Salem Harvest. I'm willing to sacrifice this year in order to get into a house that we own.

Salem

Well it's official - we have moved to Salem. Aaron was offered a job at the hospital and we were happy to get out of the gorge. Thankfully our kitchen doesn't look like this anymore. Moving is such a bitch. Hopefully just one more - into something we own!

Wedding Details: Woodworking

Aaron's father is a woodworker and made some of the crowning touches for our wedding. I had a vision for these little wooden holders and I love how they turned out. He used many types of wood from their backyard to give different effects. He probably made 100 of them and we used them all over our wedding.

For the food and beverage labels.




On the photo booth table.


Also for our table "numbers". I found some alphabet cards that I loved, and he made some with wider slots to accommodate these thick cards.




The clincher that these were the cards for us? Q is for Queen Bee. For the head table of course.


He also made some very large ones which we used to hold our beer and wine lists.


But the best thing that he made for our wedding were these hand carved tap handles. They are absolutely beautiful and made our little Beehive Bar.




Steve with his tap handles.

All photos taken by Honeysuckle Photography.

Ice Storm

We had a crazy weekend beginning with our power going out Thursday night. We had over a foot of snow and then the freezing rain came. Lots of freezing rain, for days. By Saturday morning there was over an inch of ice on everything. Early Saturday (about 3:30 am) it began to warm up a bit and rained hard. That's when the branches really started breaking, and all of the snow and ice started coming off the trees. The snow began to melt and slide off the roof in big heavy sheets that shook the ground when they hit. It was noisy, scary noisy. Aaron slept through the whole thing with ear plugs in. We talked to two of our neighbors, they both had moved their entire families to other (safer) areas of the house during this time.
Four big branches broke off on the tree in the chicken run.







The biggest branch that came down in our yard. Hood River is a mess right now, some areas have 30% of their trees down. Which is why it took so long for our power to be restored, lots of areas without power.


As the ice melted off the trees and power lines, it would hit the ground, shatter and dance across the icy snow.


From a power line


Shedding


Here's why our power was out. A tree fell across our neighbor's driveway and took the power line clean out with it. Another neighbor cleared the tree, got most of the branches off the line, and plowed the road so the power company could access it.


The other end of the line on our side of the street.


Best purchase ever - Aaron found these at the Rack for $45! We lived in our Sorels this week.






Beautiful glazed snow...


That was hard to walk on! You could get away with walking gently on top of it most steps, but occasionally you would break through and startle yourself.


There is so much snow right now, especially where it has come off the roof. There is even more since this was taken, I can easily look down into the gutters on the coop.


Regarding the power outage - which lasted from Thursday around 4:30 to Sunday at 4:00, not very fun. The biggest concern being with the food in our freezers that I had grown from seed, planted in the garden, watered all summer, then prepared into food. 6 months worth of labor that I didn't want to lose. I learned a few lessons with this experience. Keep the bulk of anything you really care about in your largest freezer. We had all our tomato sauce in the kitchen freezer, I had meant to move it into the big freezer but never got around to it. It was stacked all together, so it kept itself frozen, thankfully. If you have extra space in your freezer, fill it with frozen jugs of water to help keep it cold longer. We filled our refrigerator and refrigerator freezer with bags of snow after day 2. It did help. We didn't open the large freezer, which is in a cold room, and things stayed frozen solid.
I realized having a wood stove and a good supply of fire wood is something we should always have. We would have been so miserable if we hadn't been able to stay warm. Other than a few annoyances, like hauling in the chicken water every night (I'm spoiled with my thermostat controlled water heater), not showering, and the difficulties in cooking, we survived just fine. When the storm wasn't keeping us awake, the extra sleep was nice. I had to force myself to stay up until 8:30 last night and slept til 7! Tonight we are clean, happy and well fed, a good way to start out the work week.