I Can't Believe I Forgot About Mason Bees!

When I wrote about our list of endeavors for 2013, I completely forgot about mason bees! We've been thinking about getting bees for a few years now and finally took the plunge. Mason bees are supposed to be a great for pollination, which is critical for production in the garden. We're hoping that they'll also inspire our pear trees to bear fruit this year. We're yet to get pears from the two trees that we transplanted several years back. This is the year, I hope.

We purchased our mason bees from this awesome local business called Wild Bird Nest. The delightful owner of the shop called us in February to let us know that the bees had arrived. Last summer we made sure that our names were on her special bee-buyer list because apparently these buggers are a hot commodity and there's only so many to go around.

The 24 or so bee cocoons came in two tiny, little cardboard boxes that we kept in the fridge (with a little water for humidity) until we were ready to set them out. Michael saved us $50 by building the bee house out of wood scraps that we had lying around the yard.  But we still had to purchase the plastic thingy with holes where the bees will build their nests and a predator guard to keep out the woodpeckers. All in all, we've spent about $75 on this project so far. We're optimistic that the investment will be worth it. If all goes well, we should end up with 80 or so mason bees next season.

Finding a spot for the bee house that Michael and I could agree on was a bit of a challenge. We settled on a spot under the eaves of our chicken coop. This spot gets a nice amount of morning sun and is sheltered from the rain. I have to admit I worry a little that we're doing something wrong and that these baby bees are doomed to die. We're amateurs at this, so it would be easy to mess it up. That's a risk we have to take, I suppose.

For now, we wait and hope for the best.

-Trisa

Updates and Future Endeavors

While we have neglected our blog for a very long time, our adventures in urban farming and sustainable living are alive and well.

A few highlights since our last blog:

Garden

• In and effort to start seeds indoor, we purchased grow lights from the local hydroponic store  Last year's effort was an epic failure. We had maybe 10 little plants out of the hundreds that we had hoped for. So much for our plans to sell plant starts at our driveway market.
• We planted 9 or so dahlia bulbs last year and enjoyed fresh cut flowers all summer long. At the end of the season, we dug up the bulbs and stored them in our garage. It's amazing how much those buggers multiply.
• We're still eating the potatoes we harvest last year.
• It was a great year for our strawberries. We still have some in the freezer.
• Thanks to some calcium amendments to the soil, we had our best broccoli crop ever.
• We didn't have nearly enough driveway markets.

Food

• We got a butter churn for Christmas. Michael made butter without me. When we bought some cream to make some more, the cream went bad. I can't believe I still haven't made butter.
• Those frozen chicken carcasses became the makings of yummy chicken broth and homemade chicken pot pie.
• For the sake of convenience, we shopped at the grocery store a lot more and the markets a bit less.

Chickens

• I can't believe we ate Lucy, Gigantor, and (what was that other girl's name...?). We've come a long way since Rita (Michael's first backyard slaughter).
• A chicken or two died (from sickness/injury), but I can't remember their names.... funny how that happens when they die.
• Spot hurt her leg and now she's all out of alignment. Her tail leans to right (or is it the left?).

Well, there you go. That's your 2012 year in review.


Endeavors, adventures, and goals for the coming year:

• Preserve more, waste less. Use our money more wisely.
• We're trying to start seeds again this year. I thought we had it dialed in this year, but now I'm not sure. Those little plants aren't looking so lively lately. 
• This year we plan to sell our beautiful dahlia blooms at our driveway market (that is if our bulb preserving efforts work in our favor).
• Michael wants to add a few dahlia flower beds in the front yard and maybe a fruit tree or two. 
• Make butter a little more often before the cream goes bad. Maybe we'll milk a cow.... or a goat. I think we should try making yogurt and cottage cheese.
• Market Harris Farm & Garden a little more, sell a little more, and maybe make a little spending money. We picked up some old cupboard doors from an architectural salvage yard. These are going to make some really cool signs to advertise when we have veggies and flowers for sale.

-Trisa

Time to plant!!

So here's the skinny of what we've done over the winter:

We went wine tasting, a lot. We went to several farmers markets to see what they have for winter, which is actually pretty much what you see during the growing season minus some vegetables. We also tried out Spud.com. Spud offers locally produced foods and goods delivered to your home. We've used Full Circle Farms in the past and Spud is WAY better. We'll be ending our Spud membership in a few weeks as our own garden begins producing.

We've lost a couple more chickens, one recently due to age, the other we're not sure the cause. I blame attrition. And one more just after Christmas because she had a crook beak and I euthanized her. So we're down to 11 ladies. We'll be fattening the flock up and harvesting a few in the coming months and getting new chicks to replace the old ladies. Hopefully we'll be getting up to about 10 eggs per day. We've had so much success selling them to coworkers, neighbors, and at our driveway farmer's markets that we need all the eggs we can get to even come close to the demand.

Last week we spent a few days at the Monteillet (pronounced Moan Tee A) Fromagerie. The

Monteillets are a couple that have a working farm and cheese business about 25 miles outside Walla Walla in a town called Dayton, WA. We had a great time getting to help with some farm chores and taking a Cheese Making class with Pierre-Louis. Normally classes are $200/person per day. We signed up for the hard cheese class - a one-day class (or rather, half of a two-day class). They ended up teaching us both halves in one day. it made for a long day, but was WELL WORTH IT. In the end we ended up getting the full two day course for the price of one day.

They have a little cottage they rent out. Visitors pay $200/night for the whole cottage w/ one bedroom. If you need to spread out, there are two more rooms in the cottage that can be had for an extra $100/night each. So, if you took up all three rooms the lodging would cost $400/night. They fill the fridge with farm fresh milk, eggs, butter, cheese and some meat for breakfasts.

Trisa usually takes the pictures, hence you won't see her in very many. But here's me making cheese, wearing a lovely hair net. We made Chevre, Feta, some French hard cheeses, and more. I don't know all the names, but in the picture you can see some large molds to my left - those are for Feta, some tall mold in front of me called logs in French,

the medium mold I'm working, and there's 48 medium/small molds past the large Feta molds. Out of the picture are about 6 large muslin bags for the fresh cheese to my right. The Fresh cheeses are the Chevres and one other I can't remember t

he name of.

The countryside in Eastern WA is so beautiful. The farm is in a great setting right next to the Touchet River (think tushie, as in your bum). I prefer to call it the touch it river, but I never did

because it is running so high and fast right now. Plus is was super cold outside all of the days we were there. Trisa calls this next picture my family photo. Who knows? Maybe it'll go on our Christmas cards this year...

On our way home, we stopped at the Palouse Falls. It's an amazing waterfall in the middle of the plains. FREAKING AMAZING. There's an old legend that a beaver tricked a coyote and threw him into the hole that the falls now enter. The coyote was stuck for eons and dug the pit and tried to claw his way out. The result was the canyon the river runs through, the pit the falls enter, and the appearance of scratch marks on the pit and canyon walls. If you look closely, you can still see where the coyote tried to claw his way out.

This year we are again offering some boxes in our front side yard for rent. We've already rented out two of them and we haven't even posted on craigslist yet. We've also created some more flower beds in our front yard and we have some plans to make a couple of long skinny beds at the bottom of out lawn and practice what we read about last year - SPIN farming.

Over the winter we tried to extend the growing season by installing hoops and covers on three of the boxes, but the 14 days of subfreezing temperatures we had over Thanksgiving and into December wasted our efforts. We ended up planting a few areas of Dutch Field Peas - they are Nitrogen fixers that have been adding N2 to our soil for a couple of months and some Rye Grass that we turned over this weekend that will break down and add some Carbon to the soil. This season we're adding some Blood and Bone Meals, but just a little, and some Chicken manure. In another season or two we'll be at a level where we're adding almost nothing to our soil that doesn't come from the "farm."

I'll take some pics of the farm this week and post them so you can track our progress and the plants and the weather with us.

That's all for now.

Mike

Blarg. The blog.

Today I got up at literally the ass-crack of dawn to try to catch some Chinooks in inner Elliott Bay. A buddy from work and I fish quite a bit and last week EB opened for 5 weeks of Fri-Sun only. We're allowed 1 hatchery or native Chinook per day.
Unfortunately our first trip out was a series of unfortunate events:

• The Seattle Parks dept didn't open the parking lot until well after 4am (their posted time)so one of our group had to park a distance away.
• On our way out the crab pot lines got tangled. In cold rainy weather it took what seemed like hours to untangle them
• A down rigger ball (10 lb lead weight coated in rubber) got thrown overboard (they cost $45)
• The kicker motor BROKE
• We got a bite, but the line snapped so there's a Chinook with a lure in his mouth trailing a flasher (lure, flasher, ball bearing swivels and whammadyne hook = $25). So we were down to one down rigger trolling on the main motor
• We got another bite, but lost the fish in the fight
• On the way back, we stopped to pull the pots and found that mine had been dragged to sea (crab pot, bait box, buoy and line = $45) - we caught 4 keeper crabs, but J threw one overboard because we said "it's a rocky, not a dungeness." He took that to mean it's not a keeper. We were merely stating the species. 5" or better male OR female rock crabs are keepers, so we tossed a keeper back into the drink.

This week went WAY better. No bites, not even a nibble, but starting your day with a fishing trip is AWESOME. Pure joy!
I must've looked pretty shady driving the back streets of north Seattle at 3:20am on my way to Shilshole because I was stopped by one of Seattle's finest. The officer approached the car with his hand on his gun and asked if I was indeed Michael Harris. I told him I in fact was . He asked for my ID, went back to his patrol car and came back a few minutes later. He said, "You are free to go, you are not the Michael Harris we are looking for." Fishy...
Meanwhile: Back to Urban Farming...
This weekend should be our first veggie stand weekend in our driveway. We're planning on doing it on Saturday, midmorningish. Everyone is welcome to come on buy (pun intended). We're very excited about the growth in the yard. I think if we get 5-10 interested veggie purchasers we'll have sold out of our harvest for the week. Yesterday I gave two garden tours to passers by and scheduled another one. It seems the spectacle of 8 foot tall sugar snap peas and literally GOBS of veggies being grown int he front yard equals an invitation to stop by and ask to see everything while I'm watering the lawn and drinking a beer. I'm more than happy to oblige. I love to show off the garden. I sent a family off last night with some free samples and their promise to stop by tomorrow and buy us out of all the lettuce.
Trisa and I are loving growing our own food and buying local. We've been on this adventure for 5 weeks and with the exception of purchasing food for road trip snacks and our contribution to a pot luck, we've managed to not buy any food except from farmers markets. To date our rank of markets is as follows:

1. Mercer Island - tops for actual food variety and amount
2. Ballard Sunday Market - they have a meat pie maker
3. Snohomish - overall a great market well worth the trip out, plus there's a bakery in Snohomish that sells the awesomest pies in all the land

Today or tomorrow I'm going to try my hand at baking with Duck eggs. Most likely I'll start with a loaf of bread.
Mike's Meat Pie Review (hopefully I can get my hands on all sorts of meat pies and review them - maybe once per month) - Mike's meat pie review really rolls off the tongue quite nicely so I'd like to make it a regular tidbit in the blog...
My first meat pie (and only so far) was from Deborah's Pies in the Ballard Sunday Market. We bought the Peasant's pie, which would normally not have been something I'd have chosen due to there being sun dried tomatoes in it. But the allure of feta compelled me to bite the bullet and try it out.
The pie was excellent. It looked good, smelled good and the taste was a sensation in my mouth. I paired it with a uber chilled Pinot Gris from Columbia Valley AVA. The pair was perfect. the sun dried tomatoes were not over powering and only added to the balance and complexity of the affair. My only complaint is that the directions on the box did not cook the pie to it's tip top potential. Several more minutes were needed to bring the center to a wonderful warmth and the bottom crust was slightly mushy, most likely caused by the frozen water melting and not heating fast enough. I'd recommend flipping the pie at least once when it is half cooked, bake it at about 15 more degrees and for about 10 minutes longer than the directions state. OR... use convection if your oven has it. Otherwise I give that meat pie 4.5 Pi out of 5 Pi.
That's all for now.
Word,
Mike

Plastic bags should never be used as barf bags

This week, we went on our first fishing adventure in hopes to return home with a cooler full of fresh fish! On the way to Westport, we realized that we would have to stop at a grocery store to pick up lunches for the next day. In the checkout line, the cashier (upon seeing the Dramamine), shared how his father was sick on the entire trip of their first fishing experience. I should have known this was a warning….

Later we arrived in the sweet town of Westport, which should really be called Motelport. Of all of the motels we could have chosen, we stayed at the Holiday Motel. Aside from the smell of cigarette smoke and the 80s motif, the Holiday Motel was the perfect fisherman’s motel. We unpacked our things, said “hello” to my parents, and went looking for a place to eat. We ended up at the Knotty Pine pub next to our motel – another non-smoking facility that reeked of cigarette smoke…. The bartender’s smoke break won over my drink order.

The next day, we awoke at 4:30 am, crawled into our fishing wear, and popped some Dramamine before heading to the charter. Once we arrived, Michael realized that he forgot his checkbook and ran all the way back to get it-- thankful that he wore his running shoes and not his rubber boots. When he made it back, he paid for my fishing license with our very last check.

After chatting for a while with our friendly Skipper, it was time to head out to sea. I knew that the ride would be bumpy at first, but I figured it wouldn’t last too long. About 10 minutes into the ride, I started to feel queasy. About 5 minutes later, what I had left of the” Knotty” pub food, was now in a plastic bag.

Throughout the hour long ride to the first fishing spot, I wasn’t alone. Just about everyone on the charter, with the exception of my mom and Michael, lost their breakfast. Finally, after about an hour of rough waters, we “stopped.” The motor was all that really stopped. The boat continued to rock and rock and rock and rock….

I attempted to join my family outside and to begin fishing (the whole reason I went on the boat). But every time I stood up, I lost a little more of that “Knotty” food…. until, of course, there was no more. So, needless to say, I didn’t do any fishing on this trip. I will, however, always be thankful for the beautiful salmon and sea bass, caught by my dear husband, Michael. From now on, I will stick to lake and river fishing!

Lessons Learned:

1.) Plan ahead- pack lunches with fixings from home so as not to have to stop at a grocery store!

2.) Just because you took Dramamine, doesn’t mean you can’t experience motion sickness.

3.) There is no end to sea sickness once it starts.

4.) A charter may be the one place where public vomiting is considered acceptable.

5.) Plastic bags should never be used as barf bags.

-Trisa