These Two Hands

I got a bleary call from a post office employee at 6:45 this morning, telling me my new bees had arrived (now that’s the kind of wake up call I don’t mind!).

I went and fetched them while Sofía was in preschool. It’s a strange, almost fey thing to be handed a heavy wooden box, faintly vibrating, loud with bee chatter, warm and unmistakeably alive, over the same post office counter that I visit weekly for mundane things like stamps and pendant mailings. A mixing of two worlds.

I hadn’t expected Sofía to be at all interested, but she was over-the-moon excited as soon as she found out. She talked and talked about them the whole time we did our errands, and could not stop talking about them while we waited for Lilu to finish her lunch and nursey before her nap. I was amazed at how much Sofía remembered about what had happened to our old bees (”those nasty little beetles that ate our bees”) and she was so excited to get new ones (”they make us honey and warm soft wax that we chew up and spit out and eat all the honey”). It warms my heart to see that some of these memories are sinking in.

She was so enthusiastic and interested that I – somewhat nervously – decided to allow her to participate.

First she helped me build the new bee stand. While our old hives were balanced individually on milk crates and makeshift stacks of bricks, this is a sturdier affair made of 2×6 lumber and strong cinderblocks, long enough for three hives if I should ever get up to that number again (if these ones survive).

Then I suited her up – two sets of clothing, a hoodie sweater, rubber gloves, galoshes, and a good bee veil. Plus a stern talking to about listening very carefully and following directions.

She promised and promised and promised. She was as excited as when we’re going to a fair. Who knew she was so interested in bees?

We took out the queen and inspected her. Sofía kept calling her the “king”, but remembered from two years ago that she would be the one with the dot of paint on her back.

That white box on top is not a super, it’s a top feeder. These bees were late to begin with and then delayed another few weeks. They have now entirely missed the yearly nectar flow, so I will be feeding them all summer. They also have a pollen patty inside. No honey from these guys this year! That’s ok. I’ll be delighted as long as they survive.

I don’t think just moving them across the property will protect them from small hive beetle (an adult can fly 5 miles) so I’ve prepared for the onslaught as best I can. I put only 6 frames in for now, so the bees have less territory to defend until their population expands to fill the space. The beetle oil traps (to catch falling larvae and adults) are already in place. I’ve put a rectangular plastic container underneath the front entrance, which I will fill with diatomaceous earth to kill any larvae that do make it through the oil. I can’t protect against the ravages of the overwintered adult beetles, but I hope I can at least stop future generations. I hope.

Eventually I dumped the bees in while Sofía stood and laughed and laughed. Her favorite part was when the bees landed on her, and she held her arms out in the hopes of enticing more – “Look, Mommy, they’re tasting me!”

I had no idea she was such a stud. She’s only four!

She was absolutely fascinated by the bees. She observed every little thing, and when I suggested we go inside she said she just wanted to stay out and watch the bees some more. She pointed out how two were “fighting”, how two were licking each other, how some dragged out a dead bee and dropped it over the side. She even noticed – with no prompting! – how some bees came out and started fanning (”why are they all wiggling their butts in the air?”). I explained that it was to show that the queen was inside, and that pretty soon all the bees that were flying around would know where to land and go inside. She was very impressed when the air gradually cleared and everyone started making their way into their new home.

I actually had to drag her away after about half an hour, when she was getting a little spastic and forgetting to move slowly. I was so proud of her.

Inside, we made our first ever milkshakes to celebrate her first bee installation.

She put in banana, cinnamon, chocolate, and vanilla. It actually wasn’t bad!

I think someone deserves her very own tiny little bee suit!

The garden’s new shape is certainly coming along. Those 6 hours of work I got done on Mother’s Day has really made a difference!

Before:

After:

I only had enough mulch for a few pathways (free mulch is hard to come by), so I elected to only do the pathways along the beds that still needed work. After all, the other beds have already been planted and I shouldn’t need to touch them again until it’s time to weed.

They may not look like much, but those pathways are about 6″ deep, so each barrowload only covered about 3′. Loooots of trips through the muck. They will eventually decompose down to nothing, but in the mean time they do a fairly good job of keeping my knees and the wheelbarrow out of the muck. They also ought to help proliferate microflora and act as a moisture reservoir during the summer months when the water table drops. (That is the one very nice thing about planting down in the bottoms – I may have to wait an extra 2 months to get plants in, but I never have to water even the thirstiest, even during the hottest summers.)

I also had just enough compost left to fill in a row and a half between my new pathways. It is 6-8″ deep at some points, 1″ in others, depending on the terrain under it. I wanted to even out the soil level.

See the plank walkway I had to set up in order to be able to use the wheelbarrow?

I got my last 4 tomatoes planted, along with 12 cucumbers (see the wire trellis?), 12 dill, 6 tomatillos, and about 30 zinnias. I left half a bed empty to plant my first batch of corn.

The garden’s starting to look good!

After a lovely morning involving GF pancakes and lots of sleep, Josh surprised me with a promising new book. Sofía gave me a beautiful painting she’d worked on, and a little book she wrote that said “my mommy is as smart as rain.” (No idea). Lilu gleefully ate the tissue wrapping paper.

Then I skeptically geared up to go see what the rainstorm had done to the garden.

This is 12 hours after the rain:

Even so, I managed to get my Mother’s Day wish of a day of uninterrupted garden work. I laid down a sort of gangplank of scavenged boards all the way from the mulch & compost piles to the places I wanted to lay new mulch paths – wherever I didn’t have a board, the wheelbarrow sank axle-deep in muck.

But I got a whole bunch done – I ran out of compost and mulch at about the same time I ran out of stamina. I was barrowing full loads back and forth for about 6 hours. And man am I ever sore today.

Sofía had wanted to have a cookout for dinner on Saturday, but because of the rain we had postponed for Sunday. What a great idea that was: cheap, easy, fun, and no dishes!

Josh engineered us a fancy hot-dog-skewer. He was so proud of himself that he appointed himself Head Chef and did all our marshmallows with great precision and aplomb.

Strong enough for five dogs at once, long enough that he could sit down to do it. Brilliant.

Lilu refused to touch the marshmallows – so Josh gave her a chocolate cookie.

Then we got to wash all our clothes and the mei tai and the baby too.

And I figured out a gluten-free smore.

(Really it was way too sweet for me, but still a decadent idea!)

And after we put the kids to bed I got to relax with my new book in a piping hot bath.

It was truly the best Mother’s Day yet – I hope we make a tradition out of it! My heart is full, my garden is beautiful, my muscles are well-used. Thank you to my family for making it possible.

I was supposed to get a beautiful day of gardening, all by myself, as my Mother’s Day gift.

But the skies exploded, dumping hail and flood upon us. The garden is under an inch of water. The broilers are standing in a miserable peeping huddle in the middle of an ankle-deep puddle that is their new home. The fruit trees’ new branches are slumped dejectedly with sad tattered leaves. I had to put on galoshes to go get the eggs.

It is mid-May, and the tomatoes that should have been planted a month ago are now drowning in water up to their necks. I spent all that money on garden amendments and compost and tiller rental for what, exactly?

I hate Maryland.

Today while the girls napped, I got the temporary chicken fence put up around the swampiest, least useable part of the whole garden. (Can I get a “huzzah!” for working with long metal rods during a thunderstorm? Oh, the excitement!)

That pile of trash is most of the landscape fabric I pulled up. I’m waiting for it to dry so I can move it. But with another few days of rain predicted… that might be a while.

We happened to have a roll of chicken wire left over from the chicken coop expansion that was exactly the right length – serendipitous! And just enough T posts on hand.

The broilers and 3 new layers are going to go in here while they grow out; for maybe the next 6 weeks or so. My plan is that they can make use of otherwise completely unuseable land while pasturing themselves so I don’t have to drag the chicken tractor every day. In fact, to make use of what we already have instead of building new shelter, the chicken tractor is going in here, maybe permanently. It’ll take two of us and we’ll have to tip it to get it through the (8″ too narrow) gate. Wish us luck – that thing is pretty heavy.

That’s the plan, anyway… Unless the neighbors complain or something. They’ve told us they hate chickens, and while I wish it were in a different spot, this is the part of land that I can’t use for gardening so this is where they have to go. It’s only 5 or 6 more weeks til harvest, anyway.

It’s a pretty big space. They ought to be plenty happy.

In another month and a half, the water table ought to have gone down. I might be able to do something with the half of the land that isn’t a swamp; I was thinking I’d till it and plant wheat or some other cover crop, but my experience with the other tiller was so unpleasant that I’m rethinking that plan.

Maybe if the harvest goes well, I’ll just start another batch of chickens! Though actually, my husband might have something to say about that. He is not a fan of the chickens. Hm… With all the mud in the swampy part… he says I should grow rice. Think he’d go for ducks instead?

They say you’re supposed to get a soil test every three years. I’d gotten one the spring of 2010, right after the land was cleared, but it was an over-the-counter sort of thing and told me nothing beyond soil ph (backfill hill, 5.1; bottomland 5.5). I was of the opinion that if I just kept adding more organic matter to the soil, plus a bit of lime here and there, it would all work itself out eventually. And it seemed to do pretty fine. Things haven’t grown as big as they could, but then the groundhogs and deer mostly cut them down over and over, so that might have been the reason why.

Then I heard this fascinating two-part podcast interview with Steve Solomon over at The Ruminant (which is a great garden hacks blog, by the way).

Solomon maintains that food cannot be nutrient-dense if it comes from soil that is nutrient-poor; that even if it produces fruit, those fruits will be lacking in vital minerals and elements that we humans need. He talks about his newest book, The Intelligent Gardener, which sounded so interesting that I immediately requested it through inter-library loan (I’ve learned the hard way not to buy books I haven’t read before). It’s a good book. Solomon starts by assuming you have next to no gardening experience, but also directs you to different chapters based on your experience level. He goes in-depth into soil science, about the roles that each mineral has to play and the optimal ratios and complex interplay between them in the garden.

To be honest there was so much science that by 3/4 through the book my eyes kind of glazed over at times; his jovial (and somewhat curmudgeonly) tone kept it light though.

While I was waiting for the book to arrive, I finally got on the ball and ordered a pair of real soil tests from A&L Eastern. (I’ve been really happy with these guys; they’re cheap, fast, and when a few days after I got the results I realized that I’d ordered the wrong test, they still had my samples on hand and went ahead and emailed me the results for the new test right away and said I could call them whenever to settle up the difference. It’s nice to find trust in a commercial company like that, and I’ll be using them from now on.)

I was surprised, first, that in both samples my ph had improved a lot (backfill hill 6.5, bottomland 5.9); and secondly by how much – and by what – the soils were lacking. Iron is off the charts, but we have next to no sulfur. I never would have thought sulfur was very important.

Solomon quotes the old economic principle that growth is limited by the scarcest element. His entire book is aimed at getting my soil minerals in balance – his term for that is remineralization - so that the plants can have plenty of everything they need in order to grow their best and provide the most nutrient-dense (and tastiest) food. In order to arrive at a balanced soil, first one must translate all those ppm numbers listed on my soil test results into actual pounds per acre of elements that I need to apply. That involves math. Math and I do not get along.

Luckily, Solomon also provides simple worksheets in the book. He has generously also made them available for download at the New Society website.

I had some pretty huge deficits, according to Solomon’s math. The numbers on the far right are the pounds per acre of actual element; you can see below how I translated that into pounds of actual fertilizer (divide by the percentage listed on the bag).

As you can see by my results, I would have needed 261 pounds of kelp meal, 30 pounds copper sulfate, 108 pounds bone meal, along with some other stuff too. And these totals are just for our bottomland; half (I omitted the pathways) of 3/4 (Backfill Hill takes up the rest) of 1/4 acre.

Well, I hate to disappoint Solomon’s contention that anyone not on a commercial farming scale can afford to remineralize, but dude, that just ain’t so. Copper sulfate is $33 per 4lb around here; kelp meal is sold in 5lb bags for $20. I didn’t even bother to calculate out the cost for the ideal remineralization program – I just laughed and bought what I could afford. A little is better than nothing.

Plus, I’m leery of overfertilization. Solomon’s recommendations were up to 800% greater than those given by the soil lab. Not that these particular fertilizers are anything to really be scared of runoff-wise; minerals and bone meal and greensand will stick around for quite a while. Which is, I guess, the whole point. Even so – easy does it, eh?

I had already put down 90lbs of lime; I added 50 lbs bone meal (half what was called for), 133 lbs greensand (very cheap but very, very slow to release), the borax & epsom salts (Mn sulfate) but no copper sulfate (my farmer friend at the local feed store said it’d kill my crops) and no zinc sulfate (couldn’t find it and didn’t need enough to bother). Up on Backfill Hill I added 3 lbs sulfur, more epsom salts & borax, among other things. I mixed each prescription up in my wheelbarrow, poured them into my spreader (using it for the first time in three years) and applied liberally on the beds, then tilled.

I hope I did it right. I hope Solomon knows what he’s talking about. I hope I haven’t just poisoned my whole garden.

Time will tell, I suppose. If things grow great this summer, I’ll give Solomon a little more credit than I already do. And I can’t wait to see the difference in next year’s soil test.

Both of the girls graced me with two hour naps this afternoon, and I got so much done in the garden!

I spread 12 wheelbarrows – 72 cubic feet – of compost on top of the first three newly-tilled beds. I’m using it as mulch, to plant through, because it’s still fairly rough. That’s just fine; my soil test told me there’s plenty of organic matter in my soil already, and I’m thinking this stuff ought to do a pretty fair job at weed suppression. Later when the plants get bigger I’ll chop up some leaves and use those too, if I have time.

I even got most of the cool-weather seedlings planted just before it started to sprinkle – it’s supposed to rain heavily all day tomorrow and I’d really wanted to get these things in the ground. I planted 12 celery, cauliflower, cabbage, a whole flat of leeks, and another half packet of spinach (about 24 square feet). Though we’re already 2 weeks past our last frost date – a month at least beyond when I should have planted them! – the weather has been so cool (in the 50’s and 40’s) that I think they might still have time to grow before the real heat arrives.

I’ve got an arborist coming by this afternoon, looking to dump some free mulch; I plan to fill in those pathways with that. As it decomposes it’ll provide nice moisture retention and become a habitat for tons of beneficial microflora & fungi. Plus raising the soil level a couple inches at a time… over the years it’s sure to add up, right?

Getting tasks crossed off the list is so liberating. I can’t wait for tonight’s rain to really arrive, watering in all those plants and the amendments I spread this weekend.

We got the deer fence finished yesterday. Or actually, Josh did. He volunteered! On his birthday, when he could have spent all day with Doritos, video games, and beer (the trifecta of Josh perfection).

But instead, we pulled and cussed – okay, mostly I cussed and mostly he pulled- out that very last stretch of fencing. And now there’s a barrier 8′ high around the garden, which – cross your fingers – will keep out the deer as long as they don’t get too hungry. Thanks to Josh, we got ‘er done.

Take that, you nasty garden rats!

Then I went in and char-grilled him some free-range lamb chops rubbed with rosemary-garlic paste, and I roasted him some mushrooms in lemon and butter. Because birthday. Woo!

I engaged in a fair bit of destruction this past weekend.

Remember how I originally laid out the garden?

A few straight beds, but at least half the useable area taken up with looping, curved beds in (what was supposed to be) a Nautilus kind of shape.

It could have been really nice, especially if I had managed to fill the beds with swathes of different colored flowers or something.

But in the end, practicality has won out. The curving beds were all different shapes and sizes. They were impossible to mow or till, and I couldn’t easily & accurately figure out their square footage when trying to estimate soil amendments & fertilizers. They were hard to plant in.

In the end, they were just too difficult for a working kitchen garden, and I sadly and reluctantly had to rip them out, pulling up all the landscape fabric pathways that had been long-buried in six inches of mulch and generations upon generations of crabgrass and other noxious weeds.

I was a little sad to see all that work we’d done – me, my inlaws, my parents – being torn out. But it was not all for nothing.

When I was done, with farm girl helper to show scale.

Because all that decomposed mulch got dumped right back onto the soil of course – and the worms! You should have seen the worms. They were everywhere. And huge.

So of course my little hillbilly child took off her shoes and socks and got right in the squishy mud and caught as many worms as she could… (not in that particular order, of course, sigh). Some she fed to the chickens and some she threw into the strawberry bed. She is very excited for strawberries this year and wants them to taste as good as possible.

And then I spread a couple hundred pounds of organic amendments – mostly slow-release minerals like bonemeal and greensand. This is the first time I’m using the scientific method for soil amendment, not just the “throw a little of this random stuff down before growing and it’ll probably be fine” mentality. More on that in a different post – but I did a lot of math this weekend.

Then I rented a tiller.

Tillers suck, and I hate them, it was loud and smelly and too hard, and the $1400 machine just kept getting gummed up with clay and weeds and then the durn thing broke anyway, so after a day of nearly nonstop cussing and sore muscles we also now get to go harangue someone until we get our money back.

Still, it worked those amendments into the top 3″ at least, more or less. I should be able to go more or less no-till now, at least on the soggiest beds. Maybe I can see if this area is any easier to till in the Fall? This was after a long week of warm sunny days, when it should have been perfect; maybe our land is just not meant for Spring tilling.

I’ve been remiss! I just realized I never posted about our winemaking endeavor; and it was begun in January. One would think I didn’t like wine that much! (One would be wrong.)

It’s not wine from our own grapes, alas. Those, I can barely get to stay alive, much less produce fruit. This was a kit Josh bought me for last Mother’s Day … yeah, I’m all about timely projects.

It’s a zinfandel-merlot blend, my favorite, and it all went swimmingly. (Except the part where I attempted to move the heavy 6 gallon pail via wagon and the whole thing tipped, spraying the walls and floor with sticky purple syrup. That part sucked.) The part that sucked less? Getting over 30 bottles for about $2.60 each. Oh yeah.

We bottled in March, and we were supposed to wait three months before tasting. We’ve already gone through two bottles though; it’s not bad just the way it is!

It could be better – there was one part where the directions weren’t clear and I ended up adding 2-3 quarts of water to it (I mean seriously, if you’re going to write “top up carboy with water to within 2 inches of top” on your directions, shouldn’t you specify which size carboy I’m supposed to use??) So that water, disappointingly, made the wine a lot lighter-bodied than I like. But it is perfectly quaffable, has a good, respectable flavor profile, and its lighter feel will be great for summer.

Names! I held a names contest on Facebook, first prize being a free bottle. I’m stuck, though… I just can’t decide between “Little Red Hen” and “Mother’s Little Helper.” Preferences? Thoughts, anybody?

Hopefully I’ll be posting my label design and name choice in not too long now… despite spring planting and fencing and wedding dress making and a new chair refurbishment project! Oh how I love being busy.