So, we went to Hannibal last weekend to extract honey for the first time this year. Brooke pulled 28 frames from her hives here in Marshall and ended up with 8-10 gallons of honey. Her Dad had more like 70 frames, so it was a looooooooong day of extracting for them. The kids and I mostly hung out in the pool, so that was nice. 😉
Anyway, with so much honey, including some we and Brooke’s Dad had left from last Fall, the conversation moved toward “how do we offload it?” The kids sounded amenable to putting a table outside our house, so we figured we’d give that a try. Frankly, I didn’t expect more than a few people to stop, if that. We also figured the kids would get bored and want to come inside. The temperature was actually quite pleasant for August 1st, so it wasn’t nearly as hot as it could have been.
They stayed out there for 6 hours. 9:00 am to 3:00 pm. They sold through $212 of various products, including candles, last Fall’s honey, and the more recent batch from this Spring.
They also got $10 in tips. People just dropped by and gave them $2.
I went out for a 20 mile bike ride as they were getting started, and as they were set up relatively far from the house, Brooke wanted to be in earshot of them, so she did some stuff in the garden, and also started picking peaches. We ended up with 10 gallons of those, too!! They actually taste much better than they did last year, and they were good enough to just bite through the skin and eat right off the tree.
They’re getting toward the end of their cycle though, so there were quite a few on the ground already, and as we picked some of them from the tree, peaches typically fell. For some reason, the japanese beetles have been much more mild this year, so we didn’t have to fight off many of those, though we did spot a few as we were doing some picking.
Brooke even put 10 at a time into paper bags to have the kids sell for $2 a bag. We think they sold 8-10 bags of peaches, too!
By the end of the day, we were ready to actually eat some of them, so Brooke put them into a crisp and we enjoyed them that way. Deeeeeelicious. 🙂
All in all, we were very impressed with the kids. They were polite, they took turns coming in if they needed something like water or a snack, they didn’t complain about it… They seemed to have a lot of fun!
So much so, they earned a $55 table-top air hockey set. It should get here tomorrow. 🙂
I’m catching up after a few weeks, so bear with me a bit…. The bean crop kinda got the best of us when it ramped up in earnest after we returned from July 4th in Hannibal. We picked…and picked….and picked….multiple rounds like this, to the point where Brooke was quite done with canning… We ended up with around 30 pints of beans, plus the ones we’ve been eating on here and there. We didn’t end up giving many away because our beans came on late and everyone we’d usually give them away to was also inundated, so they didn’t need more. We should be set in the veggie department for, oh, a few years….
Around the same time we were dealing with the beans, the zucchini plants had grown pretty full, but we hadn’t seen many zucchini on the plants…until we found this gigantic one just chillin’, waiting to be picked. Brooke ended up shredding and dehydrating it, so we haven’t actually used it yet, but we’ve got another one or two on, so she’ll get creative with them momentarily.
We’ve also got other bean plants surrounding the zucchini plants, so as those start to slow down, the beans are going to take their place. The soup beans are vining well, so I’m sure we’ll get our usually ridiculous crop of those by the time we pick them in October/November…
The foreground still isn’t doing a lot, but there are some kale plants, spinach, and a random giant thing that’s either going to make a watermelon or pumpkin. Who can say? Certainly not me.
The tomatoes in the background are starting to produce quite a bit, mostly in the cherry tomato department, but just today, Brooke picked some beefy ones that we look forward to turning into BLTs later this week.
So yeah, not a ton yet, but certainly enough to start enjoying! That one in the upper right is one I’m particularly excited to chomp on…….
The green bean plants are in the middle there, and they’ve slowed down quite a bit. There are still some beans on there, but we’ll probably just keep an eye on them and grab a handful here and there. Brooke also planted sunflowers on the north side for the fun of it, and they’ve been blooming for a week or so.
The pepper plants still don’t look great, and in fact, a storm knocked a few of them over to the point they may not make it, but we’ve gotten some margaret peppers comin’ on that will hopefully be tasty.
In other news, the peach tree is….truckin’ along…to the point that it’s so weighed down with peaches, that branches are breaking…
I mean, on one level, I’m pretty pleased that there are so many fruit on there! But they aren’t ripe enough yet, and the japanese beetles have found them, so even with a billion peaches on there, we still may not get many… I’ve been using neem oil on them once a week, but we’re expecting rain this week, so I may need to wait until the rain subsides a bit.
Our apple trees and pear tree are also producing. The granny smith apple tree, especially, has a solid number on there, but Brooke says it isn’t time yet, so she isn’t letting me test any out… Hopefully I get to before the squirrels get them……ug…..
And last, but not least, so much honey! Brooke collected around 28 frames last Thursday, and we took them to Hannibal this weekend. We ended up with around 8-10 gallons of honey, which is a mostly ridiculous amount to get from two hives, one of which was just established a few months ago. Mark pulled 70 frames himself, so altogether, we ended up with around 30 gallons (and hundreds of pounds….) of honey this weekend between Hannibal and Marshall. I think the kids are going to try and set up a table and sell honey along the street, so we’ll see how that goes. Brooke’s going to try and contact “the powers that be” at our Farmer’s Market to see if she can set up there, in which case, we should be able to offload it relatively quickly. Plenty to get rid of!
It’s been a minute since I updated about the garden. We’ve got some tomatoes on the vines now, including some pretty beefy big ones that’ll help make some great BLTs in a few weeks. The cherry tomatoes are moving along, but we haven’t seen any red ones yet. Also, some of Brooke’s paste tomatoes are looking to be a good size, but again, I think we’re a few weeks away.
The green beans and peppers can be seen in the lower left of the above image. No beans yet, but plenty of flowers on the plants, so in a week or so, we’ll probably be picking. It’s been pretty hot this week and last, so once that happened, the plants really started perking up.
I happened upon these margaret peppers yesterday when I was seeing why one of the plants was mostly on its side. It was apparently weighed down by huge peppers! We’ll wait until these are red, so it’ll be a bit before we can pick them, but what a pleasant surprise! We don’t usually have peppers on at this point in July, let alone peppers this size. Excellent!
Here’s a better view of the pepper plants and green beans. You can see all the flowers on there, so yeah…tons of beans coming on… At the back of this plot, Brooke planted some sunflowers, so those are slowly rising above the green bean plants.
In the background, we’ve got raspberries on the plant, so Calvin’s been going out and stealing them. The strawberries have been done for a few weeks, but we were soooooo pleased with how many we got. We were getting bowl-fulls daily for awhile there, so plenty to fill ourselves with and plenty to share! Brooke ordered some new plants, so we’ll add some more to the plot and expand it for next year. We didn’t get enough strawberries for a pie (well, total, we probably did, but not enough to split and use for other things, too…..), so gotta put more plants in.
Lastly, Brooke never planted any “pole beans” (just didn’t get around to it), but we do have a volunteer growing from last year, so we’ll probably end up with a few, regardless!
Brooke replanted the spinach and kale plot with zucchini, black beans, and soup beans. Those plants are all doing really well, but are a bit behind the green beans in total size (aside from the zucchini, of course). I need to do some weeding around that plot, and with the kids being gone next week, maybe I’ll find the motivation….(hah!).
The lettuce is looking good still, too! Probably getting done with it in the next two weeks, but we’ve had a good run of lettuce this year! Brooke dehydrated the kale and put it through the food processor, so we’ve got a few pint jars of powdered kale sitting in the freezer. What will we do with it? Who knows! Expect Christmas presents of powdered kale. 🙂
Last, but not least, so many peaches! Like, I said this last year too, but this year is so many more. Unfortunately, the japanese beetles have reared their ugly little heads, so Brooke’s already doing battle with them while I spray neem oil every week. Not sure it’s actually doing any good, but it makes me feel like I’m trying, at least…..
That’ll do for now! Another post coming once we start getting ‘maters!!
I mostly just wanted to post this for posterity, but Calvin is riding a bike! Yay!
I suggested it to him a few weeks ago, that we could go up to Meg’s old elementary school asphalt and he could ride around in circles, getting some practice in. We tried doing something similar last year at his old school, and while he was able to do some light biking, he didn’t have much control, confidence, and couldn’t really start the bike by himself.
What a difference a year makes! This time, I think I held the bike once to get him started. After that, he listened to my instructions (“Start with your right foot down, and put your left foot on the pedal so you can push down with it and get yourself started”…stuff like that…) and just kinda did it! To be fair, he also had his knee pads, elbow pads, and wrist pads on this time, so maybe he just felt invincible?
After a few times around the black top, he took off the pads to get a bit more flexibility and, again, he just kinda did it! He really didn’t struggle at all, except for the occasional pause when he’s trying to get his feet in the right position to get started.
That first day, he wasn’t great at using his brakes, but he asked to go again later that week (“Well, of course we can go biking again!!!” said the very proud father), so that time, he focused on gradually pushing backwards on the pedals to slow down a bit, rather than coming to a complete stop.
That day, he also went down the hill on the road a bit, so that’s probably the fastest he’s gone. We went again yesterday and he did the hill one more time. We also brought Brooke along so she could see him in action.
We’re talking about getting another bike now, as this one is a little on the small side for Calvin, and it most definitely won’t fit him next Summer. We’re still working on convincing Meg to actually put forth an effort on riding a bike (she’s pretty stubborn about it….wonder where she gets that from?), but I think seeing Calvin doing it so easily and having fun makes her think that she could probably do it without falling and hurting herself.
Regardless, I’m not officially not a failure as a parent. I’ve got at least one kid riding a bike, and enjoying it. 🙂
Since our vacation plans were derailed this year (we were supposed to have been in Yellowstone last week……ug…..), we’ve tried coming up with some fun alternatives that will still be memorable for the kids. A few weeks ago, Brooke and I took our inflatable kayak that we got last summer down a stretch of the nearby Lamine River. It’s a little less than 6 miles and took us about 3 hours to do it, but three weeks ago, the river had more water in it and was moving a bit faster.
Brooke looked into getting a youth-size kayak for Meg to use, so Calvin and I could just use our inflatable, and Meg and Brooke could use traditional fiberglass versions. They checked around, thought there were some at Walmart in Sedalia, drove down….didn’t find any at the store….and essentially, it sounds like most places are out of kayaks. It sounds like everyone else is thinking the same thing we are: fewer vacation options, so find stuff to do closer to home, and kayaks are a relatively cheap option for that.
Well, once we figured that out, Brooke tried ordering another one of our inflatable kayaks from Amazon, but those were back-ordered (again, the aforementioned “everyone is buying them all the sudden,” but also “harder to get things shipped in from China). Thankfully, they over-estimated the back-order and a second kayak arrived on Friday. Yesterday’s weather was less pleasant, so we ended up going today.
Overall, the kids did pretty well! We tried to warn them that this was a pretty “lazy river,” so it wasn’t a particularly fast float. The novelty of kayaking wore off pretty quick, so Brooke and I ended up doing most of the paddling, though Meg and Calvin would have their moments where they wanted to actually help out a bit. We brought along some snacks and drinks, so we could slowly release those here and there to keep them occupied.
By the time we were done, it took about 3.5 hrs of paddling, and all things considered, the kids did alright in that period of time sans screens and other entertainment. Brooke and I were both pretty tired by the time we got to the end, so it’ll probably be an early bedtime tonight.
In the end, it was very tiring, but we’re still glad we did it! We may want to hold off on doing a “camp and float” trip, but now that the kids have a better understanding for just how long this can take, maybe they’ll have realistic expectations when we propose: ‘hey, wanna go on a float trip?’
As I’ve made pretty clear with the last few points, we’ve been friggin’ busy these last few weeks, but while we’ve been busy inside the house, the garden has been doing its thing with some minimal intervention from us (aside from a little weeding here and there).
Brooke planted green beans a few weeks ago, and only in the past few days, they’ve finally started looking pretty good. We had a bout of cooler, rainy weather that wasn’t all that conducive to our hot-weather plants, so now that we’ve had weather in the upper-80s and lower-90s for the past 5 days, the beans are finally making headway.
The green pepper plants south of the beans are also finally looking better. It just took some sun showing up for them to finally take off. I wouldn’t say we’re out of the woods yet on them, though, as they’re pretty small. Brooke also added some sunflower seeds to the north part of the plot, so they’re up and moving around. We’ll see how they turn out…
The tomatoes are also finally taking off. I pulled the milk jugs off of them a few weeks ago because the plants were getting too big, but even then, they slowed down their growth due to the aforementioned cooler weather. The four varieties we’re running are all moving at around 3 plants apiece. We’ll have to see. Got another month or so to go on them…but we’re optimistic…
Today, I tilled up the last bit of the garden that wasn’t planted yet. Brooke put in more kale and spinach, as that part of the garden is relatively shady and will hopefully give us some leafy greens later on in the summer. I think this is the first time we’ve tried planting those things in mid-June, so we’ll see how that goes.
Speaking of spinach and kale, the former is mostly done (though they’re still in the garden), and the latter is ready for harvest. The kale is still looking pretty good though, so Brooke will probably pull it sometime later this week.
In the plot that previously hosted the radishes, Brooke planted zucchini. We’ve planted it before, but I don’t recall much coming of it. Instead of a mound, Brooke put them in a row. Again, this is a “we’ll see” kinda deal.
The garlic is still doing its thing, too. Waiting for them to be done!
Speaking of radishes, we got a lot! Only a few of them, thus far, are what I’d qualify as “good.” A few of the ones I’ve tried are pretty tough and fibrous, but I’m not ready to toss them all out yet.
The real story of the summer thus far is the strawberries, though. We’re getting at least a bowl like this every day, but we’ve been fighting against the slugs for them… These tiny little things keep getting the strawberries right at the “ripe” point, so we’re picking them just a day early to make sure we get some. We’ve given some to the neighbors and to my parents so far, and even with that, we’ve ended up with enough to put on ice cream and put in a breakfast cake, so we’re very satisfied with the crop!
In other news, Brooke planted some sage and bee balm in the raised bed to go with the other herbs. They’re not doing much yet, but the lettuce is finally looking good. We’ll probably have more salads next week, or at least some sandwiches. Too bad we don’t have tomatoes to go with a BLT just yet…
Today, Brooke started picking cherries! Infamously, we got a single, solitary, sad little cherry last year. This year, we’ve got quite a few more than that! Brooke said this was maybe 10% of what’s on the tree right now, so we’ve got a bit to go. We’ll probably pick every other day or so, but we’ve heard that rain can make them split, and as it’s supposed to rain the next few days, we may have to pick a few early again. Still, better than last year!
Speaking of “better than last year,” peaches. So many peaches. All the peaches.
And last but not least, the bees are doing their thing! Again, it’s been hot these last few days, so they’ve been bearding frequently. The existing hive is the one with the ridiculous numbers, but the new hive is still doing fine. I’ve noticed some bearding, but there simply just aren’t as many bees in that southern hive as in the northern one. Brooke needs to hop into the hive and see how much honey they’re putting away, but I would bet we’ve got enough to harvest by July 4th.
As I mentioned in the previous post about this, Brooke caulked the corners and the gaps that were created along the top and bottom of the walls. We went with a second coat of primer, and a third in the spots that seemed like it really needed it. And after all that……..
…finally….PAINT!
AND MOAR PAINT!!!
Once the paint went on, we made significant headway, with me painting large swaths during the day and Brooke “cutting in” along the edges at the points where I’m just not all that patient.
Then, when Brooke was at work, I took care of the carpet. And it took me the whole day. And I had a bed frame to work around… Honestly, the carpet removal didn’t take all that long: I had it all off the wood by the time Brooke was home for lunch. It’s the tedious removal of all the staples that takes forever, but I still had that taken care of by the time Brooke got home after work.
At that point, we were so close that we just finished it all off. I’d vacuumed the floor a few times, but Brooke came back through and wiped it all down, vacuumed again, and put the finishing touches on the floor. We brought the new rug in from downstairs, Brooke put in the new Roman shades, she put in the new light fixtures, and….voila!
After we’ve got everything done, I’ll post additional pictures of it. Meg’s room and our room still need some things on the walls, and we’ve got new furniture picked out….just waiting on Ikea to open up to the point where I can actually go get it in KC… So yeah, we’ll have one last post with how everything gets reset.
Hopefully sooner rather than later, but for now, we’re all back where we belong and things are looking good!
Apparently a lot has been going on these past few weeks…. A lot of work stuff got in the way of posting more on this subject…. Onward!
As we left off in the last post, Brooke ended up spending a lot of time on the southern wall. There were countless evenings of plastering, then sanding, plastering, then sanding, etc. She did her best to make the wall as smooth as possible, but it was hard to secure the new plaster to the lath on the wall. I don’t think she was completely satisfied with it, but it ultimately looked waaaaay better than it did before.
The other walls around the room still needed some TLC as well, but nowhere near what the south wall did. Brooke spent awhile up on the ladder and down along the floorboards to try and clean up the leftovers from the wallpaper, but ultimately, it needed a bit more. After we started priming, Brooke decided that caulking the corners and the edges would be the best solution, so after I put the first coat of primer on, she came back through with caulk, and then I covered up the caulk with the second coat of primer.
I feel like the first round of primer went better in our room than it did in Meg’s room. Yes, it definitely needed another round of primer (as you can see on the south wall in the background, but I still think it took fewer coats to actually be done.
While we waited for the walls to dry after putting more (and more and more…) plaster on, Brooke kept working on the bed frames. As mentioned in the previous post, Brooke refined her process and cut down on the time spent on each part of the frame. In general, she’d work on one at a time, then prime it, and then start stripping the paint off the next frame while the previous one dried.
The primer actually looked alright in its own right. She used spray paint for this, and it took quite a few cans per head/footboard. During the course of the stripping, Brooke noticed that the frames had been a few colors in the past, whether some shade of white or some shade of black. We also considered just painting them some loose approximation of the metal underneath it all, but ultimately, we went with a kind of hammered metal black color.
It turned out really good! It also took multiple cans, but it was really just for full coverage, not because it needed multiple coats. The drying of each board also didn’t take all that long, thankfully, though they did have to be stood up in the garage to let them dry more effectively.
I was letting a set dry outside and a bird pooped on it. This happened on the last of the four, of course…so how the previous three didn’t have that problem is beyond me…
Last, but not least, the welding! It ended up taking a week and a half to get the rails back, and it only cost $40, but it was well worth it. In the picture above, you can see the L-shape of the rail, and then a second, smaller L-shaped portion added as a stabilizer for when the rail is placed upside down. These rails didn’t need as much stripping as the other parts of the frame needed, but Brooke still primed them for paint.
So yeah, that’s how the next few weeks went. Plastering, sanding, stripping, priming, painting…..and so on and so forth……
Ooooooooooh, boy…. We “finished up” Meg’s room on April 11th. We’ve been working on our bedroom basically since then without many breaks except for that first weekend and Mother’s Day. To be fair, a lot of this length of time was working around furniture refinishing and plastering (more on that later), so there have been a lot of moving parts….
…but first, back to the beginning….
So, we originally thought our room may go somewhat quickly because of the vinyl wallpaper that was already peeling in some spots (especially certain corners). As we would eventually discover, nay, it definitely did not “go quickly”… The vinyl layer came off easily, yes, along with a thin, white layer underneath. Yet, underneath that, we found a floral pattern…and underneath that, we found yet another floral pattern.
Those bottom two layers did not go quietly into that good night.
As we were doing this during Coronapocalypse 2020, I was doing scraping on the walls for 3-4 hours a day before or after my “virtual office hours,” while Brooke was at work. So I’d have to take breaks here and there to make sure the kids weren’t burning down the house, but as the weather was finally getting a little warmer, the kids were able to go outside sometimes, so that alleviated some of the constant bickering…
For the most part, I got into a groove and made solid progress. We ran into some issues with the ridiculous amount of wallpaper on the walls though, mostly on the top and bottom of the walls where the moulding was….because they put the moulding on top of the wallpaper!!!
…..sigh…..
I did my best with it, but we ultimately use caulked over it to try and obscure it as much as possible. It definitely isn’t a perfect solution, but the prospect of removing and replacing the moulding again wasn’t exactly at the top of our priority list…
I should also note that there’s a bed frame in this image. I should also I know that yours truly is the one who assembled this bed frame, and it is also yours truly that couldn’t figure out how to take it apart again… I’m assuming there was some special tool that came with it that is buried somewhere on the work bench out in the garage, but for the life of me, I couldn’t find any tool small enough to fit into the hole that held the nut that attached the head- or footboard to the side rails. Sooooo, we just decided to leave it in there and cover the surfaces of the bed with the old curtains that we were going to replace anyway. It got annoying here and there, but for the most part, we were able to work around it and still use the ladder.
The wall between the south window and my closet door was, by far, the worst one. Spoiler alert: Brooke ended up spending quite a bit of time plastering, sanding, plastering, sanding, plastering, and sanding this thing….
But while she was doing all of that, she was also messing with the bed frames, mostly on the weekends.
We got these frames from my parents, who got them from my Uncle, who has had them for a few decades, but he got them from my grandfather. These frames were his and his brother’s growing up, which is really cool! The less cool part is that they needed some TLC.
This involved quite a lot of paint stripper (the stuff in the blue bottle, not the white bottle, because Brooke found that only the stuff in the blue bottle worked well at all….), and plenty of spray painting. And some welding (more on that in a bit).
She’s pretty sure there were 3 layers of paint on one of the beds (two white, one black), and 2 layers of paint on the other bed (both white). There wasn’t a good way to know if it was lead paint or not, but we didn’t want to take the chance, so she used a carpet square from Meg’s room to catch the paper towels she was using to strip the paint. It took awhile to figure out her order of operations, and that first footboard (pictured above) took about 8 hours for her to finish (!!!!!!). By the time she got through to the fourth of these things, she cut that down to only a couple hours, so now she’s a pro!
But there was another issue with the beds. We took various measurements and discovered that one of the beds measured 53″ wide by 57″ long, which is the standard size of a modern full size bed. The other bed, however, measured 53″ wide by 69.5″ long, which is the standard size for literally nothing in 2020. Soooooo, I asked around and talked to a local welding business to see if there was something they could do to modify the off-size bed. I put these things in my Forester on Good Friday, ready to take it all over to the business, but apparently they took off that afternoon and I didn’t think about it, so the frames just sat in my car until after Easter.
Brooke met me there so we could talk to the guy and see what he thought, so everyone would be on the same page. We showed him the stuff while it was still in the car, so I didn’t have to unload it (which is not trivial, by the way….it takes a few people to finagle these into the back of a small SUV). He asked us a few questions about it, we chatted about potential options. And then he asked, “Did you try just flipping them over?”
Brooke and I just looked at each other, then said, “Uh…no?”
But low and behold, it was a great idea! You see, the beds are very similar to each other, but they aren’t quite identical. One bed (the actual full size one) has rails that slide in on their sides, but the one that’s too short has rails that connect on each end to the head- and footboards, which results in extra bits of metal (you can see all this in the image above) that would be in front of and behind the box springs.
If you flip the rail upside down, then instead of resting in the “L” shape of the bracket, that “L” is now upside down, so the box springs just sit on top of it! The problem with that is that the box springs can then slide side-to-side, and potentially off the rails.
So, after we took the pictures above, I took the rails to the welding company and told them we wanted them to just put on some bits of metal on the sides to prevent slipping of the box springs. I suggested 3 or 4 bits of metal would probably do it. Brooke also wrote “top,” “side,” and “head” on them so they would know how to orient the rails to put them in the right place.
And that took 2 weeks to get done……but on the plus side, the head- and footboards were still here, so she could keep stripping those while the rails were getting worked on.
The early(ish?) Spring has been pretty good to the garden so far. The radishes are doing really well (middle), and the kale (to the left) and the spinach (to the right) are coming along, though Brooke planted some extra seeds in there to try and fill out the row a bit better. To the far right, the garlic is…still doing its thing…
The tomatoes are doing well, too, but the temperatures these past few nights (dropping to the mid-30s) weren’t kind to at least a few of the plants. I pulled the jugs off a few that were growing out of the holes at the top (visible in the image above), but replaced them today after a few of the stems broke. They were damaged relatively high off the ground and they still have leaves, so I’m hopeful they’ll make it…
I should also note the straw, at this point. We kept it from Oktoberfest last Fall to protect the bees for the Winter, and figured this time, rather than grass clippings between the rows to limit weed growth, we could just spread the straw instead. We’ve still got some bales left, as we don’t have everything planted yet, so for now, they’re just taking up space: just not on my grass…
The peppers are also doing their thing, but growing a bit slower. We haven’t had many days in the 80s yet, so they’re probably wanting a little bit more heat…
The green beans are going in the soil next to them, but we haven’t planted them yet. I think we’re putting black beans in this year, too, as sell as soup beans (duh!).
The strawberries are taking off! Quite a few flowers have shown up, and the middle of the patch has some new plants popping up. Our next outdoor project will involve expanding the berry patch out and planting some new stuff, but first….gotta finish up the bedroom upstairs……more on that eventually…
The new bees arrived last week! She got into the older hive and put a new super with queen excluder on. For the new hive, put in new frames on the bottom, then transferred frames from the nuc into the top box, and then dumped the bees into the middle. A few days later, she added empty frames again. Both times she got into the new hive, she found the queen, but hasn’t seen much new brood in there yet.
In other news, we’ve got almonds! Like, five of them? Not very many, for sure… We’ve still got frost warnings happening still, so hopefully those few almonds make it….we’ve been waiting 5 years……..
And last, but not least, the peaches are back! Millions of them. There are so many peaches on that tree. We’ve also got apples and a ton of cherries (we only got one last year).
So yeah, I think that’s it…since we don’t have much growing yet, there’s not a ton to say yet, except that things are moving along…
And we had to cover the strawberries tonight because we have yet another frost warning….ug.
