The Bees are in Town

I'm late in posting about the most exciting thing to come to the farm since chickens: BEES! It's been over a week now with the bees. And it was an exciting weekend. Morgan, Jason, James, Neil, and Emily came up for a weekend of fun! I drove down to Vacaville and picked-up the critters to live on the farm. Three queens, each surrounded by 4lbs. of bees.

Part of the reason for such a late post was that I wanted the bees to get started before blabbering about how cool they are. The first two times I checked on the hives, 4 days after they arrived, and yesterday, I didn't notice any brood (new baby bees in larvae form), which the new hives desperately need to survive. However, I checked on them today and found brood in each of the three hives! I'm over the moon!!! This is great news.

While the great news doesn't mean the bees are completely out of the woods and on easy street, it does mean the chances of survival are much, much higher. This is because female worker bees (who do ALL the work) only live about 4-5 weeks, maybe 6; and it takes 21 days for a baby bee to go from larvae to worker. This is a pretty small window of success, dictating the survival of the entire hive. But now, with fresh brood on the way, the old bees now working their buts off will have a fresh batch of replacements. Reminds me a little of the bugs in Starship Troopers, but much cooler, of course.

The Garden

Like soldiers in the night the garden rotates its next plot

Part soil, part mulch, and clay loam

The goal is a jungle bound

But let's just hope for some earth

to give our bellies a joyous girth

Johntown Creek Waterfalls

In our backyard, behind Coloma over the American River and around Mt. Murphy lay a misty waterfall oasis. The moderate hike through newly ripened poison oak groves takes you over fields of splendid wild flowers, a couple of which I believe to be the Foothill Pretty Face and White Globe Lily (all below). There were two main falls, the more spectacular set of falls are further up the trail.

I can imagine Johntown Creek falls to be a welcome retreat during the awful summer heat -- though my guess is you'll need to visit them early in the season before the waning water flow and the crowds turn the place into spring break Lake Havasu.

Attempting to identify the wild flowers I see this season, I saw a lone flower just barely visible at the edge of the falls. I carefully slid down to get a better look and take a picture. I identified the flower as the Chickweed Monkey Flower, a flower that grows on wet mossy cliffs at low elevations from the western Cascades to northwest California. Another unsung treasure of living in the foothills of the Sierra!

Foothill Pretty Face.

White Globe Lily.

First set of falls.

The second set of falls, with Chickweed Monkey Flower popping out over the edge.

Chickweed Monkey Flower.

For Nerds: The Garden Cheat Sheet

For those that are interested, I thought I'd post the cheat sheet (below) that I use to log and account for all the things growing in the garden. It's still a work in progress -- the intent is that it'll be the template for each successive year. It tells me what family of crops to rotate where, the correct spacing of each type of plant, what seeds to save and how, and based on last year's successes and failures, what to do differently next year.

So far, the big take-away is that I attempted to germinate the cold-weary fruits and vine crops too soon -- for instance the tomatoes, tomatillos, and watermelons -- and will have to germinate them a little later in the season next year and/or hope that we don't have a similarly late cold season as this year's. --Though I'll thankfully still have more than enough to transplant in the garden come mid May.

Here is the Google Docs link. (Note: Google Docs doesn't have a text overflow feature, so the Excel upload comes out a bit funky. You'll see you have to open up each cell to see the text).

The Routine

With farm life (and by that I mean tending to a garden, an orchard, chickens, bunnies, quails, dogs, horses, and a cat) you'd be quickly overwhelmed without finding new ways to simplify -- well, if not overwhelmed, at least without much of a life outside of it.

I have only begun the rudiments of a farm. The dogs, horses, bunnies, and the cat need to be fed twice a day. The greenhouse and the garden need tending to everyday. The chickens' eggs need to be collected, and their food and water checked. When the bees arrive, they'll need attention to about once every two weeks or so. And this isn't considering the time required to plan and implement seasonal events like planting, harvesting, seed saving, honey extraction, and new chicks. I don't mean to sound like I'm complaining; all these living things provide much joy; like all things worth having, they just need caring to.

For me there is much satisfaction in beginning to understand the huge wealth of knowledge required to care for flora and fauna in an organic, natural, and simplified way, and turning that knowledge into action on the farm. I know I have only revealed the tip of the iceberg -- yet, the complexity of the biological processes taking place are astounding, compounded further by our desire to use those processes for our benefit.

At this stage, almost six months into this (ad)venture, I am happy. The curiosity in the routine provides me as much enjoyment as the playfulness of the animals and abundance of life around me. I don't know: it could just be because it's spring time!

Friends and family, it's a great time to get your butts up here! There is always room for more beds, the nights are warm, and things are alive and growing everywhere!

P.s., I just planted all the frost tolerant annuals in the garden these past couple days. Let's hope they survive. It would be a sad day if it all gets wiped out tomorrow by gophers or birds or some other critter... If not, in a couple months there should be mountains of fruit and veggies to enjoy until winter!

It's Coming Alive!

The first veggies of the season are now officially planted in the garden. Those pictured are peas -- Amish Snap and Green Arrow -- that will hopefully, delightfully run up the twine forming nice arches. This whole gardening thing is definitely an experiment. I have no idea if these plants will like the soil they're planted in; whether they'll actually run up the twine; or if they do, whether they'll block the sun to the others.

However, I very much like the trellis design. The a-frame design prevails again! You may remember that the chicken coop was an a-frame. The trellis was made using one 2''x6'' by 14', of old wood fencing of which we have a gaggle. Twine is then run from the top beam to metal piping (preferred) or secured to the ground using old wire clothes hangers.

Planting these veggies in the garden for the first time reminded me of how a mother might feel when she first lets her child play outside without supervision. Outside the greenhouse it's a dangerous world, where deer, rabbits, gophers, birds, and other living things could easily wipe out months of growing! Yet, I think with life, and with these veggies, you just have to leave it up to chance. Let the world do as it may. C'est la vie.

Rototiller Partay!

With the last frost estimated to be less than a month away (my elevation is 2000ft., and at zone 8a - or so they say) and with a brief break in the rainy weather, it was about time we got off our behinds and till! Aliyah and I got up at 6 in the morning to pick up our worker friends, Kacey and Robert, the rototiller, and oodles of coffee and doughnuts.

The space we chose to till amounted to a 50' by 30' foot area, estimating that we were tilling not only for the current year's crops but for next. Using the rototiller is extremely evasive to the natural micro-organisms living in the soil, and thus not something to do every year. Ideally, this garden will turn into a no-till garden that relies purely on green manure planted between the growing season, compost, and mulch from the nearby oak trees. But with our virgin clay loam sod being very compacted, the rototiller was a necessary evil to prepare the soil for gardening.

You'll also notice that there is white webbing fencing surrounding the plot. This is meant to act as the primary dear deterrent. It's actually electrified and made with an unit that had been laying around the old house for years. We'll see if it actually does the trick and keeps the dear away!

Oh, and we also added 5 cubic yards of mulch, courtesy of the county of El Dorado Fairgrounds, which was amended to the soil by hand to add nitrogen and balance the ph. This complicated the tilling process and made work a lot harder.

I wish we could've put the dogs to work! All they did was nap and occasionally beg us to throw sticks.