Hello everyone! I know it has been a while, but things have been busy here at Priddy Acres. Aside from the holidays and festivities surrounding them, Michelle and I have been running around like chickens with our heads cut off trying to finish some of the projects we have going.  Let’s get the updates rolling.

On the bee front, we have been monitoring the bees to see what happens to them this winter and it looks like a couple of the hives have died off.  I opened them up from the quilt boxes, to ensure the majority of their heat stayed inside and to see where they were in fondant consumption.  In two of the hives, the bees were working their way through their honey and eating up the fondant.  In the other three, however, I saw nothing but dead bees.  I have held onto hope that the clusters are just down lower in the hive, but I am fairly certain they are all dead.  I will clean up the hives, freeze the frames, and buy new packages to replace them probably next month.  The new packages of bees will likely arrive sometime in April, so I need to have the old hives cleaned up and ready to go by then.  I think I am going to leave the leftover honey for the new bees. This will give them a good jump start on building up a new hive, rather than having to start from scratch.  Of course, I will make sure I scorch the inside of the hive bodies and freeze the frames before I put anything new in there. Don’t forget that you should be treating your bees for mites next month!  That’s pretty much it from the bees since they are just holed up and trying to stay warm.

In the chicken area, there have been quite a few changes.  The chickens went into winter production mode and are down from the 11-12 eggs a day to 2-3 eggs a day.  Not a big deal for our own use, but not enough to be selling any for sure.  Once the light comes back, the bugs come out so the chickens can eat more, and the chicks will have matured enough to start laying; we will be up to around 20-24 eggs a day. We also had an unfortunate incident in late November or early December.  Our beautiful (but dumb) rooster, Gaston, died.  I’m not entirely sure what it was he died from as no other chickens have died or appear to be getting sick.  He may have just had a biological issue we couldn’t have known about.  Though we only had him for a short while, he was entertaining to watch and unsuccessful in his attempts to pass on his genes. I know he didn’t succeed at impregnating any hens because out of the two hens that tried to hatch chicks, not a single egg hatched.  I hired a roofer, who is a friend of my dad’s, to re-roof my woodshed and I mentioned to him that my rooster had died, so he brought me two new ones from his flock.  One of them, Brutus, is a massive red rooster with a deep throaty voice.  The other, Speedy, is a smaller white and black rooster with a less deep voice.  They are pretty funny.  Brutus is obviously the more dominant of the two. He will casually walk over to a hen, step on top of her, do his thing, then casually walk away.  Speedy, on the other hand, has to run really fast and chase the hen down, grab her by the tail and hoist himself over her (quickly) in order to make some babies.  It’s rather funny to watch him go for it.  Brutus chases him off sometimes, but he is never more than a few feet away from the bulk of the hens.  I figure having both of them watching over the hens, plus the dogs will be good when that hawk comes back.  I still marvel at the entertainment I get when I pull into my driveway.  My chickens now know the sound of my Harley pulling in because they are running toward the driveway as I pull in.  I know it is because they want their afternoon snack and not because they love me, but it is entertaining nonetheless.  The reason for my absence from this blog is due mostly to the last things I will tell you all about.

Michelle and I have been embarking on two MAJOR projects, the first of which I started last spring.  Last spring, I decided that the woodshed was a huge liability given we were going to have a bunch of people on the property for two weddings, I needed that building looking much nicer if we were going to use the property for an event venue, and the building was damn near falling over.  It was so bad that the property appraisal company didn’t even assign it a value when we bought our farm.  At any rate, we started remodeling it back in May and I was able to get the walls stabilized before the wedding with some new studs.  We ended up using it to serve drinks and hang out after the bulk of the people had left.  I wanted to have the roof redone by the time of the wedding, but it was just too much work for such a short time and the honeymoon afterward meant I had to wait to finish it.  I finally got the trusses replaced and the roof put back on, so now it sits waiting for me to finish the other major project we started in late November.  It is really the combination of two projects. When we moved into our house, we knew there were things that needed fixing.  It was a house built in 1947, after all, and the guy who owned it did all of his own work (or at least, that’s what it looks like). I appreciate a guy with a “can do” attitude, but times have changed and there are a lot of things we know about construction now that we didn’t know back then so there are a lot of things to update.  At any rate, the basement would flood every winter due to a floor drain (and greywater drain) that would clog up all the time and due to the hydrostatic pressure from the high side of the hill we live on.  That pressure would cause the water to squirt up the seam between the concrete floor and the concrete wall.  I broke some of the floor out last winter and put a temporary sump (a sump pump in a 5 gallon Home Depot bucket I drilled holes in) in to keep it from flooding again, but it was a band-aid.  This winter, I hired a plumbing company (Mr. Rooter if anyone cares) to come out and fix everything.  Just as a side note, the first company I wanted to hire quoted me $19000 to do the work…with far less being done than was actually done.  I ended up hiring the company I hired because: the quote was a pleasant experience.  The guy they sent out, Josh, was super reasonable and listened to my plans for the basement before deciding how to best suit my needs including future improvements.  When he heard I wanted to put a third bathroom in the basement, he told me I should upgrade my sewage ejector so I won’t have to replace it when I put the bathroom in.  They also piped everything in for the bathroom, so literally, all I have to do is re-pour the concrete floor and put in the fixtures.  I told him I wanted to save money, so he told me how to save the most, which was to do the concrete work myself (break the old concrete out and re-pour when they were done).  They also replaced the sewer lines from my two bathrooms, one of which has been clogged for a year, to the septic tank.  The two guys they sent out to do the work, John and Jonathon (father and son I think), were absolutely a pleasure to have around. They got everything done in two days and took pictures of the funny stuff they found. For example, when they went to install the sewer lines, they found out why I couldn’t unclog my second bathroom.  The pipe from the second bathroom butted right up to the pipe from the first bathroom, but the connection point (joint…whatever it is called) the former owner installed wasn’t quite the right size. Rather than cut it out and put a new one in, he pushed the pipes together, wrapped the joint in duct tape, and poured a concrete block around it.  Over time, a tree root infiltrated the joint and made the pipe to the second bathroom nearly impossible to unclog.  Anyway, the plumbers installed a sewage ejector and a sump pump, both a little smaller than a 55-gallon drum, below floor grade.  It was quite the task.  At the same time, we paid Michelle’s brother to come up (he is a contractor in California) and do some remodeling in the basement.  That is the second part of the project.  The basement was “finished” when we bought the house, but it had had some modifications to it and the flooding had rotted out some of the wall studs.  We wanted Michelle to have a place to do all of the production/shipping for the business, so we decided to remodel the basement.  It already had two bedrooms, a kitchen, a dining room, and a living room.  They just needed to be fixed a bit.  The windows in the basement had been filled with concrete, so we recut the holes and installed new windows.  When we replaced the wall between the bedrooms, we made room for some closets in each room.  We plan to move the entire bee fondant operation into the kitchen and one of the bedrooms as her warehouse.  That is where the third bathroom comes in as it would be kind of inconvenient to have a bunch of stuff cooking and have to go into basically another building to use the facilities.  We have all the framing done, ventilation installed in the kitchen (to carry the steam out of the basement), new switches and wall plugs, internet cable, and insulation in the ceiling done.  We now need to insulate the walls and install sheetrock.  It is very exciting to be getting so close to finishing, both because we can then move Michelle’s cooking operation downstairs and out of the main area of the house, and because we can get back to work on finishing the woodshed.

2019 is starting off with a huge hustle, but hopefully it will get less stressful and less busy as I finish up the major projects and get ready for the more minor (a weekend or less of time) projects which will never be done completely.  I already have to replace the water line from the pump house to the house and build more laying boxes for the hens, plus farming season is quickly approaching. That’s pretty much it from Priddy Acres! I hope everyone has a great rest of the month.