Bees!

After years of research and putting it off I've finally moved into the world of beekeeping. My bees arrived this past Saturday the 13th. "Hiving" or installing them was a little bumpy. Normally the queen is located in a small cage inside the package. Her small cage's entrance is blocked with a piece of candy and a cork. You pull the cork out of the cage and affix it somewhere inside the hive. Well, I pull the cork out and bees came out of the queen cage. The candy had fallen down out of the hole and she was released at that point. Going forward on future packages I will have a small mini-marshmallow ready to plug the hole should this happen again. After that I had some issues with the feeder. I set it down over on the side of the Top Bar Hive that the bees weren't installed into, but could get over to if they needed to. I set the little quail feeder in there and turned it the wrong way. Its a gravity fed system and since my hive isn't exactly level all of the sugar water poured out. I *think* that has been fixed now and I've added more sugar water.

I've started documenting my beekeeping on my YouTube channel

Installing first package of bees - Top Bar Hive
First beehive inspection
Bees active at 7:30am

Thanks,
Matt

Garden Update: Week of Jan 29th

This was supposed to be done last week but other things got in the way.

• 30 Broccoli seeds planted (this is probably too much, but my son who will hardly eat anything will eat broccoli like its candy.
• 42 Onion seeds (bunching type)

I purchased Burpee mini greenhouse seed starters this year instead of Jiffy brand since they have individual compartments for each seed. They come with these little compressed pellets that expand when you water them. I really can't reccomend these at all. They all expanded at different rates, so some of the pots are overflowing while others are only 1/3 full. But, the good thing is that the next batch of seeds I start in these I don't have to use those little discs. I can just use seed starting soil from bulk bags. With the Jiffy pots you have to use their discs again since the tray is just open and doesn't have individual compartments.

Compost Tumbler and other stuff

The homestead has a new addition! I've very excited about this item. I was gifted (in exchange for some of the (hopeful) bounty of this year's garden) a large ComposTumbler composter. This thing holds A LOT of compost. I look forward to filling this up with kitchen scraps and yard trimmings as well as the old bedding from the chickens when I change it. I still need to look into how to best use your compost in your garden. I hear of organic gardeners using compost but I've never read exactly HOW they use it. Right now I'm thinking I'll dig the furrows for my seeds and fill them in with compost, if I have enough that is.

I have heard these things have a problem with rusting out and becoming useless. This one already has some signs of rust. I may have to find ways to curb this before it gets out of hand. Perhaps sanding down the rusty areas now and applying some spray paint. Although the inside that is in constant contact with the moist compost is going to be nearly impossible to control.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Herrick Kimball, author of The Deliberate Agrarian blog, has another blog (one of several) that I like to read each week called Agrarian Nation. He updates this first thing on Friday and Monday mornings. These blog entries are excerpts from old farmer's almanacs and other agrarian writings from long ago. A recent post contained this picture that I liked:

The text below the picture was this:

-1878-

If you can pay off all debts, so as to start with a clean bill, you can let the world wag. Debt is the load that drags so many people down. No man will be apt to fail if he takes care not to run into debt.

[Thomas’s Farmer's Almanac]

I really liked that picture. You can just see the pride in the man as he holds (presumably) his young daughter up and looks at her. Its possible that I like it because I have a young daughter and I feel the same kind of pride when I look at her. :)

As far as the text goes, getting debt free is something I would like to work hard towards in 2012. I'm not calling it a "New Year's Resolution" just because those have a terrible failure rate with me...

Blogging & More

I haven't done much at all on this blog since starting it. That's because I haven't done much homesteading at all since I started it. We currently live right next to the downtown area in the town where we live. We have about 3/4 of an acre of land most of which is so steep and shaded the only thing that grows there is weeds. I have had a small raised bed on the side of the house that we've had some success with this year. So basically I've not had much of anything to say related to "homesteading". Hopefully that is about to change. We're in the process of buying just under 5 acres of land out in a rural area on which we will build our homestead.

I've spoke with another homesteading blogger today about the apparent drop in the number of people maintaining blogs that relate to this topic over the past year or so. It used to seem that there were several out there, now most of the links are dead and send you to "squatter" pages. This is disturbing and I hope that it just means that these people have moved and I've not gotten their updated links or that these people are just not blogging about the rural life and not that they've stopped living the homesteading lifestyle. On that note, I'm going to try to update this blog more often as we move forward with our little plot of land in the country.

-Matt

Lunch

So, for lunch today I just had two Ranchero Chicken Soft Tacos from Taco Bell which consists of a flour tortilla (made from genetically modified wheat that is ground up and bleached to be perfectly white), chicken (that is pumped full of hormones and antibiotics), tomatoes (that are bred for their tough skin and not their flavors so they can be shipped across country or across oceans), lettuce (which, along with the tomatoes, are probably covered with pesticide residues), ranch dressing (which has all kinds of preservatives in it) and some cheese (which is either not really cheese or is cheese made from milk that contains Recombinant Bovine Growth Hormones). And then to top it off I had cinnamon twists which... I have idea what they are made from. But its all cool, its all been approved by the FDA, USDA and EPA so I'm good. So, what did you have?

Soon to be square foot garden

This is my new square foot garden. It is April 10th and at about 1:30 pm the sun covers half of the bed. I will probably plants and greens maybe some broccoli I'll have to make sure i put them in side it gets the sun. It is still a couple of weeks away from time to plant other plants as tomatoes for peppers.

Homesteading "to-do" list

Here is just a quick list of homesteading things I would like to get started in the next year or two. This is pretty much a list for me personally but if you have an interest or would like to make suggestions please do so. (I've set this post to remain at the top of this blog.)

• Get debt free
• Save up cash to cover 3 to 6 months worth of expenses
  
• Increase my garden (and garden knowledge)
• Increase my cheese making knowledge
  
• Setup a place to keep chickens for eggs (and if I ever get that brave, for meat as well)
  
• Setup an apiary (bee hives) and learn about beekeeping
• Find a way to make some of my money off of the homestead
• Raise Goats for milk/cheese and manure
• Solar energy? or other "off grid" energy (Probably not in the next year.)
• Setup a rain barrel/rain collection system to water the garden with
• Plant an orchard
• Plant a vineyard
• Raise Guinea Fowl for insect control in the yard and garden
• Build a mud oven
• Build a block smokehouse (Like this)
• Build a cheese "cave" (Like this)
  
• ...I'm sure there's more.