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

My Literal Soapbox

So, I've been thinking a lot about soap lately. Why? Well, it all started with my recent efforts to minimize waste while maximizing our budget for such things.

A while back, I discovered a multitude of quarter-full bottles of shampoo, conditioner, and liquid hand soap hidden in the deepest corners of our cupboards. After combining and re-bottling everything, I ended up with loads of full bottles: 2 bottles of conditioner, 1 large bottle of shampoo, 2.5 small bottles of liquid hand soap to be exact.

I felt like I won the lottery.

What is it about conditioner, anyway? We never use nearly as much conditioner as we do shampoo. So, there's always this surplus of the stuff. So, I got to thinking. I wonder what other uses there are in the world for this modern elixir that we call hair conditioner. Turns out, it makes for an awesome after-shave lotion. We have that tea tree, peppermint stuff too... leaves my legs super smooth and nice and cool after a shave.

Who knew?

Several weeks later, we were nearly out of my re-allocated bottles of liquid hand soap. I decided to do my own little science experiment. After all it's just soap, right? So, I added some lotion to some dish soap, gave it a shake and called it good. I wasn't a big fan of the consistency, but it did the job just as well. A day or so later, I discovered a tiny little phrase on that same bottle of dish soap. Right under "Dish Soap" in tiny little letters, I found the words "and antibacterial hand soap."

Ever since, the wheels in my head have been turning and turning. Shampoo, conditioner, liquid hand soap, dish soap, bar soap, body wash, face wash... so many kinds of soap, but are they really all that different? Or, are we just trained to think we need a special type of soap for every little thing we choose to keep clean?

The saga continues... I like to use facial cleansing wipes to remove my mascara before bed. Up until last week, I always used the Neutrogena brand. To save a few pennies, I decided to try the Costco version of the stuff. Oh, what a disappointment! They smell exactly like baby wipes. I feel like I'm wiping my face with butt wipes.

Now I'm convinced there's a big marketing scandal out there: same product, different packaging. Or, maybe it's just a slight twist on the original: a special scent or color to trick us into believing it's something different.

I'm beginning to wonder if our need for all these products is just one, big illusion.

How's that for a soapbox?


-Trisa

Is our adventure really over?

It's a bit sad that we've neglected our blog for so long. There's no excuse, really.

Well, we did it! We went an entire year without buying food at the grocery store. Although we kept saying we would never go back, somehow we've relapsed into some of our old habits for the sake of convenience and cost savings. Just yesterday I was clipping coupons in preparation for my next trip to the grocery store. I still HATE everything about grocery shopping.

We still have our backyard chickens. We raised two flocks of 4 chicks in our guest bedroom this spring before transferring them to a temporary coop in our background. We had to combine the two flocks at just the right time so that the older chicks wouldn't beat up the younger four. Just when they all started to get along, we traumatized them again by joining them with the 7 elders in the big coop. On that same day we said goodbye to Lucy, Gigantor, and one other bird (sadly I've forgotten her name). We froze the carcasses and will likely use them to make soup sometime this winter...?

The garden beds are mostly empty now. We planted our winter crop several weeks ago- some lettuce, arugula, beets, and carrots. I'm not sure that we'll get much of a crop though, especially after that random snowfall we had. There are plenty of potatoes in the cellar and green beans in the freezer. We're yet to have a fully stocked pantry and freezer, but we're on our way....

Michael took his hunting course and went on his first hunting trip- but I'll let him blog about that.

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

Dropping hints

I've got to be honest here. My wife is pretty much terrible at dropping hints for Christmas gifts that she would like for me to surprise her with. I'm left almost purely to my own devices to plumb the depths and figure out what would make an appropriate and exciting gift for Christmas morning. I love and loathe shopping for her. I've tried to make notes over the months and I can never find where I wrote something down that she mentioned she liked 8 months ago. So, I find myself wandering the mall(s) to find something, anything fitting.

The farm is wintry. It is wet and dirty and nothing survived the FREAKISH Thanksgiving freeze we had. Hence, there's not much to update you all on as far as the farm goes. We lost a potentially righteous crop of Broccoli, lettuce, mustard greens, spinach, radishes and chard. For shame!

We have been diligent in purchasing all our groceries from a farmers' market. We haven't cheated since the last time we cheated and I am still mightily craving Traders Joe's Mediterranean Seasoned Feta. And a salad in a bag. Those were the days...

Survivor is almost over. Thanks to the faithful friends who have kept coming out week after week to our Survivor Nights. We LOVE them. And we love your babies.

A few weeks ago Trisa and I joined a business and social club downtown. It's been great. Already, I've taken so many orders for wine that I had to skip a mixer just to make sure I didn't get so many orders I couldn't fill them. It'll only be a matter of time before the wine business and farm are sustainable full-time employment...

Anyway, that's all for now.

Mike

OMG it's been a long time

It's so hard to blog after so much time has passed. I'm not quite sure where to start. First, thanks faithful reader who called me to remind me to blog and making me get off my rear and just do it already. For the last two weeks I've been telling myself I was too busy.

The farm is firmly ensconced in Autumn. The leaves are falling and our GINORMOUS Japanese Maple is a beautiful fiery red that glows in the evening sun. GORGEOUS!! I've always said that if/when we move, we're taking that tree no matter the cost. The chickens are seeing less and less grazing, but they're loving the little time they get to roam the backyard garden each week. The worms are in dire peril. Our ladies are expert worm hunters.

They also eat spiders, slugs, maggots, grubs, and whatever else they can find. After processing apples into apple butter two weeks ago, we gave them the pulp that was left behind from the food mill. They went positively batty for that.

A few weeks ago, we picked up about 60 pounds of apples and pears. With the apples, we made apple chips and apple butter. With the pears we made some pear chips and canned pear slices in a light syrup. We've some left of both that will go to apple and pear sauce this week. The apple butter I made is fricken awesome. I used the recipe from "Ball's Complete Guide Preserving Everything" that I ordered from Amazon a few months ago. I modified the recipe a little to use a tiny bit less sugar. Ball's guide is fantastic. I thought there'd be more on Allrecipes.com, but most people's recipes I've found seem too sugary, or more like for parents preserving things kids will eat. One more gripe, if I may, is that there's not even ONE good bread recipe I've found on allrecipes.com; there's only ONE good recipe in the two cookbooks I use the most: Betty Crocker's wedding edition and Bon Apetite. I NEED some more good bread recipes!!! On the bright side, I'm getting very good at the simple peasant's white bread recipe form the BC cook book. I've increased the sugar (since I use raw sugar) by 1 tsp and reduced the flour by 1/4 cup and WHAMMO it's moister and less crumbly but still has a nice stiff crust. I've yet to master moving the loaf from the greased stone I let it rise on to the preheated stone I leave in the oven without punching down the dough a little more than I'd like. That's something to think about.

Here's the apples, pears, cider and some of the implements we used to process them.

Here's the apple butter and the pear slices cooling after canning:

If you'll notice, canning and a good glass of pink wine go together splendidly. Generally I dislike pink wine, but Brian Carter Cellars Abracadabra Rose is actually quite decent. It's one of 3 pink wines I can stand and I've tried literally hundreds.

Here's Trisa cleaning the coop on Sunday. You can just see her hiding behind the sunflower stalk. Gigantor is at the bottom of the pic wondering what Trisa is up to.

I broke our regular camera a while back so I'm using my phone right now. Please forgive the low quality pics. We'll get a new camera sooner or later. This next pic is interesting.

There's two blurs that are Lucy (black blur on the right) and Kate (red blur on the right). Lucy is broody - that's when a chicken stops laying eggs and starts sitting on them. There's a reason we call people who are grumpy or who look like they just hate what's going on, broody. It's because they act the exact same way a broody chicken does. I mean EXACTLY. Lucy was just walking down the gravel path, Kate was digging for worms. Usually, nothing would happen if Lucy were to walk by Kate, but Lucy in an instant was UBER FIGHTING MAD and she lunged for Kate. Her ferocity was such (and she's a dumb chicken) that she misjudged her velocity. She went right over Kate and landed inside the coop about 6 feet away. It was very funny and I was just lucky to catch that instant on camera.

This was two weeks ago during the 70 degree weather

OK, enough fricken words already.

That's all for now. I'll blog again soon(ish),

Mike