Bee more careful!

I went to check the bees to see if they needed fed. Lots of dead ones all around the hive. I unwrap it and press my ear to the hive to listen. Silent, feels dead. So, I decide it’s time to open it up and get the honey out before anything else beats me to it. Surprise, bees are alive and I’m an idiot. Luckily it wasn’t that cold outside and I put the lid back on but….I admit, I ran from some super angry bees. I obviously need to work on my bee detective skills. 😉

Jumping into home brewing by growing it all

After watching a rather inspiring Jamie and Jimmy’s Food Fight we decided we just had to brew our own beer. Jimmy made it look easy peasy and we had a lot of things growing we could flavor our beer with. Fresh honeycomb from the bees. Lemonbalm. etc etc.

Obviously I decided we should grow 100% of what we needed to brew. I started researching barley. I decided on trying Calypso barley for winter planting. Now, we have no idea if it will grow. It’s winter tolerant in Michigan, we have no idea about here. We bought seed from Schmidt Farms. They send us a bushel of untreated Calypso seed with the promise of Odyssey barley to try in the spring.

I never do anything “normal” and growing barley is no different. I planted a nice amount of it in the fenced off garden. I even watered that. I suppose that is my back up barley plan. That barley is likely to grow and succeed. The other plantings, who knows. Fascinated to find out! Some of it is going to be planted in the tree line. I’m interested to see how it does there. Some has already been planted in the un-planted kraters. Then we will plant a few of the bare spots on the land to see if it grows there. May go throw some in the dam area to see how it does there. Based on what grows where we’ll do our spring plantings maybe a tiny bit more structured.

So how am I planting it? Well that varies as well. In the garden I did till. *gasp* I know. Unfortunately the garden keeps getting broken into by chickens and ducks and they’d obliterated the mulch. We had A LOT of weeds growing in the garden and I’d done nothing about them. I could have mulched again but that wouldn’t help us horribly much when I wanted to plant immediately. So we borrowed a tiller and tilled it up. Then I spread the seeds around by hand and raked them in. Then watered. I’ve already chased the stupid ducks out once. I’m trying to keep the annoying creatures locked up. I have no idea how they are escaping the pen. It’s just a few of them that have figured it out, the smaller ones. Probably squeezing under the gate. Anyway, so if the darn birds don’t eat all the seed that one is a sure win for growing.

The kraters were planted by hand. I simply used my new weeding hoe to scratch a trench. Then the kids sprinkled seeds in and I covered it over and stomped it in.

I have no idea if this will work but hey, we’re experimenting here people!

The rest hasn’t been planted yet. We really need to get on it. Unfortunately the tractor battery was dead, dead, dead. We replaced it and now I just need a minute to go get the stuff ready for planting. We are going to plant the rest of the barley like we planted the sainfoin. Use the grader/scraper to rip up the top of the ground, sprinkle the seeds and then grade over it again.

Taking a little planting break with the pup.

Getting her out of the bucket is the hard part.

Coming soon is our hops plant which I believe I will keep inside until spring where it will hopefully be planted on our new pergola by the swim pond.

Wheat isn’t something we don’t have to plant. We get enough seed blowing over from the fields around us that we can just harvest wheat without effort. Now if the wheat grows like that, fingers crossed for this barley!

 

Am I the only one doing this?

Alright people, if you’ve been reading my blog at all you’ll be surprised by what is to come. I’m starting to feel like a weirdo. Yup. All the stuff I’ve been doing and I’ve never felt particularly weird about it. This pig thing though, it’s starting to make me feel weird.

Am I the only one “free ranging” pigs with other animals? Am I the only one not having any problems with it? It’s so easy. I have the laziest system set up in the entire world. This is awesome, because I am essentially lazy at my core.

I have considered that it is the area that has made me so successful at this. We have 40 acres. We have wheat fields in front of our acreage. Our neighbors houses are placed so that there is maximum distance between our properties. Our road is only used by 3 families. Also, it’s Wyoming, old wheat fields that have been over grazed since being developed into residences. In short, there is pretty much nothing to eat off of our property.

So, perhaps I am not having any problems because there is nothing tempting my little piggies to wander. Maybe I’m just lucky. I don’t know. All I know is I open the gate in the morning and all of my animals come pouring out. Chickens, ducks, geese, peacocks and pigs. They all hang out together in the barn until release. Then the smarter chickens follow the pigs around waiting for them to dig up delicious morsels.

The pigs themselves wander here and there. We have no fences around our acreage that would keep a pig in except for those around the barn and yard. A few times they’ve gone to the end of our property to nibble the weeds around the road. We escort them back when they do. The neighbors are used to the sight of fat black pigs wandering about. At night they put themselves up and I shut the gate again. A few times I’ve heard coyotes close and have gone out earlier to lure the pigs back to the barn with a bucket of treats. This is, of course, not because I’m worried about the pigs. It’s because I’m worried about all the birds who would be left with the gate open until the pigs returned. The pigs can handle themselves. Our dogs are terrified of them.

As I watch YouTube videos and read blogs of various people I notice pigs are treated with suspicion. People seem afraid they’ll eat the other animals or escape to never return. I admit to being surprised by this attitude and it makes me feel…well….weird.

I should also note I don’t feed them except when absolutely necessary. We give them our food scraps but otherwise spring, summer and most of fall they are on their own. Get out and find food or starve!

I don’t want to mislead you all though. We had a dog break in and kill our chickens. When I went in and started making a pile with the bodies I woke the pigs up. They went to work destroying all the evidence aka eating the dead chickens. I don’t know that I would leave someone actively bleeding out there with them. However, I’ve seen them wait and watch a chicken die. They didn’t approach it until it was actually dead. Then they ate it no problems. Pig morals.

They’re just wandering in this picture.I took it from our living room. I love watching them meander.

New Additions

We had a problem this year. Mainly that neighbors dogs broke in and killed most of our chickens and peachicks. Suddenly we were down to 2 chickens, when it was decided 6 were needed to supply the family with enough eggs. What to do.

In comes the wonderful community we have around us. We were given 3 chickens. Happiness.

Then 4 egg laying ducks were given to us. Then a little call duck drake was given to my daughter. Suddenly we had geese. Then yet another egg laying duck was given to us.

There we were, completely without poultry and BAM, plenty of birds meandering the farm.

Now this has had an impact. The pond has been completely free of birds for the year. I had grasses and reeds growing. The pond was actually clear most days. The pigs were enjoying it and digging it out like crazy but otherwise, a healthy ecosystem.

The ducks didn’t make that big of an impact. The initial 4 were young and did not create that much of a mess. The geese, now they were a problem. I did not even consider how quickly and completely they could destroy all green matter around the pond. The grass, pretty much non-existent. All of the plants growing up around the pond, destroyed.

I was a little discouraged by all this. I was thinking about how tasty those geese would be. However, I think they can stay. They’ve started venturing out of the fenced pond area and onto the property as a whole. Our acreage can certainly withstand the appetites of two Sevastopol geese. In fact it was a beautiful morning, looking out the windows and watching our chickens, ducks, geese and peafowl wandering the property finding food.

Look at that fat pig!

Indeed I still haven’t fed anyone. I won’t until all the green on our property is gone. I will feed through the winter only. Even without feeding I have fat animals. Happy animals. Healthy animals. It has been a beautiful season with the animals.

Permaculture bringing in snakes

We’ve lived on our little property in Wyoming for 10 years now. We didn’t do much beyond putting up some fences when we initially moved out. It wasn’t until we started having kids that I started looking at our land with interest. Permaculture practices weren’t really put into place until child #2 came along.

Where I grew up, in the suburbs of Cheyenne, there was an open field behind the house. It was there for flood events and was fenced off. Not that that ever stopped any of the kids in the area from going over or under the fence to play in the mystical world of grass and creek. In this world snakes were plentiful. In fact, we made a bit of a name for ourselves as snake wranglers. You see every year someone would smoke or light fireworks and catch the field on fire. Then all the animals would rush to the side that was in tact and the neighborhood around it. People in the burbs aren’t fond of masses of snakes under their porches and my siblings and I would go round them up and put them back in the field so they weren’t killed. Snakes are kind of my thing.

One thing I noted about our property is the complete lack of snakes. Year and years of wandering, digging, etc and never seeing a single snake. It was disappointing.

That is no longer a thing. Last year we had our first snake experience. Babies. So many babies. All over the grass in our yard. The kids were entranced. Catching and holding them every chance they got.

Now those babies have grown up and we have a lot of big snakes about. So many that we’ve actually caught some in the garage mouse traps.

We spent some time this year saving tadpoles from the evaporating water puddles they are hatched in. Turns out tadpoles are a favorite food and snakes can hold their breath a really long time. So long my husband accused me of making the whole thing up.

Sorry babe, there really was a snake in the pool eating the tadpoles. HA!

We came home from one of our tadpole hunts to find the peahen screaming her brains out. I went over to see what was up and caught this bull snake attempting to eat her eggs. This is actually a small bull snake and he could not get that huge peacock egg in his mouth but you gotta give it to him for trying. I wasn’t sure if he’d go for me so I did put some bite proof clothes on before catching it. It was pretty docile. No problems. We took it away from the peacock and released it in the ground squirrel holes. Go get fat on vermin snake!

Then there was the day we were dumping tadpoles in the pond (as we decided they’d have a better chance in a larger body of water since all the pool tadpoles had been eaten by snakes) only to discover not one but three garter snakes swimming about slurping tadpoles. We removed them from the area but we’ve seen them back there several times since.

I’m pleased to have snakes around. They are a joy for us. The kids love catching and touching them just as I did as a kid. I’m happy we were able to create an environment they can thrive in!

Bees- costing way more, way more quickly than expected

Our bees are doing great. Really great. So great we’ve already had to purchase 3 additional boxes to expand the hive. I am thankful for all of the bee food we’ve been laboriously planting all these years as it’s made bee keeping a breeze. Well, except for how bee like my bees are being.

It turns out my bees really could care less about where they build their comb. My hive has foundation in the first two boxes and I have a lot of cross comb and burr comb happening. I was opening the hive every 2 weeks to cut this out but it matters not, they are still doing it. I know what you bee people are thinking. Is your hive level? Yup. Is it facing the wrong direction? Maybe. I did move it around though in the hopes it would help. It didn’t. My bees are just busy and they don’t care if I can access the hive or not.

So when I put the honey super on I took the foundation out. I really hoped that doing so would encourage the bees to build on the frame better. What did they do? Well they built their comb across every frame. Now I can’t even lift any of those frames out. What a pain!

I wanted to be a “good” bee keeper. I’m finding though, my bees think keeping away from them is as good as it gets. We aren’t planning on harvesting any honey off them anytime soon. In fact if this hive can simply be split to produce other hives, we’d be happy with that. Plus, pollinating the orchard and other plants is a huge plus!

So we are going to go into winter with a strong colony. I hope to either catch them swarming or split them next spring. Stay tuned!