The time has come. The end of the long hot days of summer are nearing their inevitable conclusion and, with it, the end of the outdoor gardening and honey producing season of the Northwest. As we are all getting ready to prepare our various farming areas for winter, I figured I would run down the updates to all the activities here at Priddy Acres complete with pictures (the kind that isn’t staged and beautified before release)!
Our hives bustled along at a decent pace for the summer. Two of our hives nearly doubled the output of the other three hives, but for first-year hives, they did pretty well. I’ll have more information as we progress through our honey harvest, but we have already cut out about 60 packages of honey in the comb. I will be putting it up for sale here on our website as soon as we get a label put together for it. We will also be putting our normal honey, conveniently packed in the cheapest mason jars we can find, on sale here on the website. I expect we will see around 120 pounds of honey total. It’s hard to estimate at this point because all of it is in the frames. Fear not, though. We will have it extracted by the end of the week and get it up on the website shortly thereafter. To prepare for winter, I will be treating the hives with thymol (an essential oil of Thyme) to make sure they don’t head into winter with an excess of varroa mites. I have considered the oxalic acid fog, but I much prefer to hit the mites with something a little more naturally occurring. I’ll remove the honey supers sometime this week, pry the two brood boxes apart, and slide the tray of thymol on top of the frames of the bottom most deep super (aka brood box). This should provide close enough proximity of the gel to the bees that the mites will eventually just die and fall of off them. I also plan to build some quilt boxes to go on top of the hives, which I need to do before the real cold hits. As I said in my post about condensation, bees can survive cold and wet but not at the same time. As the bees breathe, they emit warm moist air that rises to the top of the hive. If the top is vented, the moist air is carried out of the hive and we don’t encounter many issues with the moisture. If not, however, the moisture can collect on the cold cover of the hive, condense into water droplets, and drop down onto the cluster of bees. That is almost always going to mean certain death for the hive (at least, it did last year). The plan is to build them with some wire mesh that I can put some kind of absorbent material on (wood shavings, shredded paper, etc.) to prevent any moisture which does collect on the lid from dropping back down onto the bees. It will also have holes on the sides, covered with wire mesh to prevent anything from getting in there, to allow air to flow through above the absorbent material to blow most of the moist air out of the hive. While this will make it a little more difficult for the hive to stay warm, it will prevent the bigger problem of moisture in the hive. I am also going to try to put up some kind of metal cover to prevent the bulk of the rain from getting onto the hives. They are already situated under the branches of a large maple tree, which should shield them from most of the wind and rain, but I would like to be extra safe when it comes to moisture…it rains quite a bit in the Pacific Northwest winter.
The garden, as I said before, got put on the backburner because we just had too much to do this year. As a result, it is completely overgrown with three-foot-tall weeds. The tomatoes are still producing, much to my amazement, but they aren’t as plentiful as they would be if we had kept up with the maintenance. My plan right now is to till the field under, weeds and all, then cover the field with plastic (or something similar) to help the organic material to mulch over the winter. My hope is that, come spring, I can just pull the plastic back, till the field, put the plastic back over it, cut a slit where I want to plant vegetables, and the weeds will be relatively kept under control. It becomes a full-time job weeding when you don’t use any herbicide and have nothing controlling those weeds other than your hands, so anything I can do to prevent Michelle from spending all day weeding will be a plus (suggestions accepted). The deer don’t seem to have come back since I put that organic deterrent on the garden. I am glad to have found something organic that helped control that issue. It was cheap and worked for us. I plan to start out using it next summer. Maybe my peppers will actually make it if I do.
The chickens have started producing eggs. We are currently getting about three a day from our oldest three chickens, but we are hoping that the others will finally start producing soon. One of the hens ended up being a rooster, which I think I mentioned in the last post. He is a really good-looking chicken, but I don’t want the racket he will make once he finally figures out how to crow like a real rooster. Currently, I feel kind of bad for him because his crowing is terrible. He needs a good vocal coach. Anyone looking for a vocally handicapped rooster? We also found the missing chicken. I was convinced that she ran off the property and someone picked her up, but it ended up being something worse. I was walking through the shop one day and found her. She had evidently thought that her destiny was becoming a fried chicken, wandered into my blacksmithing shop, and jumped into a quench tank full of oil. It was a pretty grisly discovery, but I felt better knowing what happened to her. There is now a milk crate over any exposed fluids that a chicken could jump into on accident. I contemplated not telling Michelle because I knew there was a high likelihood that she would cry. Being a man of integrity is hard sometimes and I went ahead and told her. To her credit, she held it together and didn’t cry (though I thought she might right after I told her). Anyway, the chickens are super friendly and love to get their nightly petting (except the rooster who voices his displeasure with my harassment) when I close them in at night. When I put them in, I stroke the chest of each chicken to get them used to human handling. It has worked out pretty well. They come when I call them and are pretty easy to catch when I want to pick one up. Their response to the eclipse was rather amusing. When it started to get dark, all of the chickens headed toward the hen house, but it got all the way dark before they got there. They weren’t sure what to do, so they just stood there like statues until it got light again. It was pretty funny watching the confused looks on their faces.
Lastly, the wood shop remodel is going pretty well. The walls are up and it has sat there for almost a month, but finally, the stuff I need to fix the roof is ready. Within the next month or two, I should have almost everything I need to get done on the outside of the building and will start working on the inside. I’m planning to put a two-part epoxy on the floor to make cleaning up easy. I’ve never done it before, but it can’t be that hard…he said right before spending $3000 fixing something that would have cost half that if he hired a professional the first time. Anyway, I’m hoping to have the whole remodel done before next spring so I can start using it for real. Fingers crossed.
I hope everyone is enjoying their summer. Keep checking back on the products page if you are interested in buying local raw honey (with or without comb). We will price it along with normal local prices so you can know roughly what to expect when it finally arrives on the website. Thanks for being awesome and have a great day.
Priddy Acres 