Onion Braid

I really peaked and burned out on the whole gardening thing the year I had my bypass. I did a lot that year, but it wasn't that fun and ever since most garden chores just seem a burden to me. I still want the produce and all, I just want it to happen with minimal interaction with me.

Luckily, Corinna seemed to pick up the pace about that same time and has even started selling CSA shares and whatnot. She grew a bunch of onions this spring. They'd have gotten bigger if she planted them in the fall, but for when they went in they got plenty big. But they were starting to die in the heat so she harvested them.

And braided a bunch of them in the basement to hang and keep in a cool dry place. Need an onion for the eggs? Go get one off the braid.

Extreme Makeover: Hive Edition

Okay, sorry for the headline there. It was finally time for us to take the separator out of the top bar hive. It keeps the package of bees we installed in spring occupied with the first part of the box so they don't live like college students or create a chaotic honey bee hoarder palace. But then once they've had a chance to get things going, they need some room or they'll swarm.

Which isn't as dramatic as it sounds, though it is a loss if you're trying to keep that colony of bees going. When bees swarm, they don't attach folks or anything like that, they just go set up housekeeping elsewhere. We needed to remove the tin foil barrier so they wouldn't run away from home.

Which is where the headline came in. Back when I had TV, there were a lot of shows on where they remodeled (usually actually rebuilt) people's houses. This might still be a thing, I don't know, but the tradeoff people made to be on the show was make yourself the object of pity for a national TV audience, we'll give you a house you can't afford the taxes on and leave you the financial equivalent of a stoker on a tandem bike going up hill when the captain jumps off and shouts 'have fun!'

If you didn't know, television is full of these little gems, it's why I can't watch the Royals play Minnesota right now, something I'd really like to do actually. Too much poison comes along with the trace of content I care for. We're up 4-1 as I write this, poised to win three in a row against the team we just reclaimed first place in the division from. If the rest of TV didn't suck so hard, I could be watching instead of looking at updates on my phone.

I digress. Holy cow, I need to get to bed anyway, riding to work tomorrow. Patrick came over and it was really a quickie deal, even he seemed impressed at how easy it went. No need to smoke the girls, just lift the lid, pull the divider, put the blank bars back in place, close up. It took about ten minutes tops. Once again the top bar hive seems to be so, so much less hassle than the Langstroth hives I kept umpteen years back. And now the girls have the equivalent of a huge home addition, we just took their two bedroom and made it a six.

It occurred to me the bees might almost be too much of a good thing. The apricot tree has always put on a lot of fruit, but this year it's branches are literally sagging to the ground with the weight.

Free the Queen!

Last time I kept bees, the queen came with a candy cap on the queen cage, the bees would eat their way to her in a few days and done.

This year's bees came from a supplier who uses cork and no matter how much the bees might want the queen out, they can't eat through cork so you have to spring her.

The girls were pretty docile as we staged our home invasion. They're ignoring the sugar water outside their front door, too, which is a good sign. They're bringing back loads of pollen from the flowering fruit trees and such that are just a few feet past that jar. All good signs.

Buzz!

My friend Patrick is a lot of fun. He's a committed socialist, a union ironworker with a PhD, and experienced urban beekeeper. Among other things. I detest boring people, and Patrick is the opposite of a bore.

He's helping me out with getting back into beekeeping. I've done it, but really, I did it for I think two seasons ending in 2002, so the shit I've forgotten could fill a top-bar hive.

We installed the bees this morning. The supplier I got packages from way back when, the queen came with a candy cap the girls would eat through to free her over the course of the three days or so they need to get used to her. Kind of like Hilary Clinton campaigning for the Democratic nomination, it's going to happen, but the bees need to go through the motions. Okay, that's a flawed analogy, Hilary probably stands less risk of rejection than a new queen bee.

Anyway, the queen in this package will have to be released manually. Patrick thinks this is because some capitalist saved a nickel not using a candy cap. I suspect that the supplier my bees came from circa 2001, his grandpa used candy caps and so he does too. But Patrick might be right, if you save enough nickels, you can have an extra dinner out at Red Lobster and that is heaps of temptation to some people.

Pouring the bees in after setting the queen case in the bottom of the hive, well, it seems like a lot of bees poured in but an awful lot were still int he package. Which Patrick fretted about and so did I. I also fretted about being stung, kind of. I was wearing my bug-baff, gloves, had my pants tucked into my socks, so I wasn't in much danger of actually being stung yet I was still a little freaked out by bees buzzing near my ear. I know it's just a matter of getting used to it, I guess 13 years was enough to reset the automatic response.

Patrick was saying he didn't like working in gloves because of the limitations it imposes, though he admitted to being somewhat allergic to the stings and that he gets stung when he bare hands it. I guess the way I look at it, handling bees without gloves is like patronizing a prostitute without a condom.

So this evening I'll go out and see how many girls are still hanging out in the package box. Probably not very many, you could kind of tell they were starting to figure out that the hive was home. The sugar water can from the package still had some left in it, I have a mason jar of 1:1 solution to replace it when it's empty. I'll put the can between the package and the hive this evening when they've had a few hours to settle in.

I'm super excited about this. We have in our little yard 36 or so garden beds plus fruit trees: two cider apples, two dessert apples, three figs, a peach and an apricot. We have thornless blackberries, we have grapes, raspberries, and so on. Bees can travel a mile for food, but I'm guessing these bees won't have to go that far most of the time.

The Garden Tour

I haven't blogged as much about the garden this year, I think that's in part because I found myself really burned out by gardening. Around the time I got the tomatoes transplanted and the peppers in grow bags, I started feeling the endless list of tasks as a burden rather than a joy.

I once heard the difference between children and adults is a child tells you all the things they 'get' to do, an adult frames it in terms of the things they 'have' to do.

Fortunately, Corinna has upped her gardening game (which was already at a pretty high level). Her brain injury after effects (bike crash followed a few months later by a car crash), she has times when her regular work gets overwhelming and the garden is an escape.

But while the chores of the garden haven't been so joyful for me this summer, I haven't burned out on the idea of an edible yard. We eat really well, tons of fresh vegetables, and relatively cheaply. There are expenses related to the garden, and I do know where to get cheap produce in this town, but even factoring in the water bill, ruining a tire on a truck borrowed to haul compost (free load of compost cost over $100 with that tire figured in), the occasional spray of pesticide (I use the pyrethrin stuff—those gray beetles wiping out my cucumbers two years in a row disabused me of the 'organic' fantasy), and so on, I bet we come out ahead long term.

And I think it's beautiful landscaping.

In fact, the other morning I was leaving to take Molly to school and I had to stop and take a picture of the front yard because it's so awesome.

I love, for instance, the way the squash planted along the edge of the driveway spills out into it. It's getting to be a little bit of a hassle, we have to keep training it back into itself because it wants to take over to where we couldn't get in and out of the garage or the rest of the yard, but it looks great.

And even parts of the yard that are out of control are out of control in a cool kind of way.

As an example, the back row of the Tomatosaurus Rex beds, the eight raised beds I built at the end of the driveway, originally intended to be all tomatoes (maxed out that'd be 48 plants), we never have quite gone all tomatoes there. Last year was three fourths tomatoes in that area, 36 plants with two beds given to other crops. This year, I thought I was cutting back on tomatoes. I think I preordered 24 plants, but then between one seed exchange, a couple of impulse add-ons, I put 31 back there. That left five stakes at the back edge by the rose bush.

Against my better judgement, I planted squash in those five spots to climb the tree stakes I drove into the ground last season to support monstrous indeterminate tomato vines. I say against my better judgment because squash are thugs in the garden. We have along that row a spaghetti squash vine which has climbed the fence and taken over a neighboring bed, climbed the rose bush and as with the pumpkin, muskmelon, cantaloupe, and acorn squash I planted along with it, never given up on strangling the tomatoes across the hall.

I say I'm burned out on gardening, but having ripe pie pumpkins in the kitchen waiting to be stuffed is pretty awesome. Between bouts of not wanting to go deal with the plants, I find myself scheming with Corinna for next year's garden. Well, not even 'next year' because there's the fall crops to think about and the stuff that can overwinter. And spinach, which is both a fall crop and an overwinterable one.

And as much as I know the garden is good for me nutritionally, it's also good for me in other ways. The physical activity required, sure, and there's the veggies on the table. But my arachnophobia, previously documented in these pages, well...

The thing about irrational fears, phobias, whatever you want to call it, knowing it's irrational doesn't really help. You just get to feel dumb on top of being afraid. Probably to Matilda's relief (I named the spider Matilda, it makes her less frightening), I'm not about to go handling her to face my fear. I'm not even about to pick the chard she's weaved her web between.

But knowing the spider is there, and being able to check back in on her from day to day, see some of the bugs she's eaten and whatnot, that helps me accept the fact that she's actually an ally in the garden.

Somebody once asked me about this whole edible yard thing, about whether we were 'preppers.' I don't have a TV, so I missed the reference, I learned later, to a TV show abut people who are planning for the End of Days (or something like that).

No, I'm not preparing for the end of days. How am I going to preserve the tomatoes three dozen plants throw off with no electricity? For that matter, what am I going to water in plants with in the absence of municipal water, given that I don't have a well on my property?

But then, I guess, we're better prepared to go a few weeks without gasoline, electricity, and so on, than the average American. Which means we're only a little pathetic on those fronts, as opposed to totally pathetic.