So here we are again.  It’s been a while since my last post, but things have been busy.  I’m sure all of you understand how it is trying to balance work, family, fun, work at the house, and all of the things that come up with life. So, here I go, trying to give you an update of how things are going out at The Farm.

The bees are doing great.  They have filled the two deep brood boxes that Michelle and I put on there in late spring.  It seems, though, that we got them a little late in the season to be putting bare foundation honey supers on and expecting to get much in the way of honey this year.  The hive is packed with bees and I plan to check the top super (we have two medium honey supers on) and see if they have built up enough comb and honey to fill it up.  I tried to go in there without smoking them down a week ago and they practically spilled out of the top like flowing water.  It was rather impressive.  I have to imagine that they have really started working hard at building up the comb in that top super and filling it with honey.  I am excited to see the progress that they have made when I get home.

The garden has been generating a lot of lettuce and kale for us, but the rest of it has been severely unfruitful.  The weeds grow like, well…weeds, and has to be jumped on pretty much daily in order to keep it from looking like a jungle.  It is a ton of work and Michelle has taken the brunt of that activity.  We don’t use any unnatural chemical compounds for taking care of it, so it gets increasingly difficult to keep those damn weeds down.  Furthermore, the deer have taken to nipping the tops off of all of the plants, so it is getting rather frustrating dealing with all sorts of anti-gardening villain’s.  We are still enjoying the veggi’s that do grow and the corn, broccoli, cabbage, peppers, and tomatoes are about to get ripe in the next couple weeks even with the constant assault from nature.

Lastly, I have finally finished my forge/foundry and have started playing around with it.  I melted down some aluminum into purified ingots for use in a future project with casting.  In the last few days, however, I have been trying my hand at forging steel into useful tools and implements.  When it comes to hammering out metal into something useful, there are a few things I didn’t count on.  First, swinging that 2.5 pound hammer a hundred times really makes your muscles hurt.  Second, you really do need a good anvil in order to make things properly.  You can make do with a hard surface of any kind, but there are parts of a real anvil that make the process much easier.  For example, the horn of the anvil is very handy when it comes to making certain shapes.  I currently use an old scrap piece of railroad track as my anvil and trying to make a spoon, yesterday, for scooping flux onto hot metal was a real pain in the ass.  I couldn’t quite get the shape right, but I eventually found a way to get close enough.  It’s just things like that which make an anvil a necessity. Third, you need a lot of different tools. You need tools to pull hot metal out of the forge, tools to clean the metal (both hot and cold), tools to pound the metal, tools to cool the metal, tools to shape the metal.  It’s staggering the number of tools you will need to do all of the things you want to do.  To start, though, you need tongs for moving the hot metal around and holding it while you’re working with it ( I use a pair of large vise grips), the forge (of course), a blacksmith hammer (roughly 2.5 pounds), and something hard to act as a hammering surface (I currently use the railroad track). Fourth, forge welding metal is really hard to get the hang of!  I spent the bulk of yesterday, out in the shop with my bro Waterboard (yes, that’s what I call him and he calls me Trainwreck), trying to figure out how to get two disjointed pieces of metal to stick together and become as one solid piece.  We started out with an old lawnmower blade.  The process is supposed to be: clean the metal, heat the metal, clean the metal again, put flux (we use borax) on the metal, heat the metal, bang the metal on the floor, tap the metal together, metal is welded.  Our process went exactly by those steps, but in the end the metal did not fuse together.  It was frustrating to say the least.  At multiple points in the day, we went into the house to read more literature on the subject and watch more videos.  Every time, we came back out to the shop to try what we thought was our critical error only to find out that we still suck at making a forge weld.  At the end of the day, we had the spoon I had created and several pieces of bent and burnt metal that were not welded together.  We may end up having to consult someone with more experience than we have.  Fear not, though, I did manage to get some actual work done.  I helped my son change out the sprocket on the motorcycle I gave him…then I went downtown with Michelle to replenish our supply of Poke balls.  Yup, I work hard, but I’m still a geek at heart.