Warre Hive

 A busy week here on the homestead. Last week end we got Ann's new cow and I had to do a little remodeling in the milking stall. Sissy has settled in fairly well now and Bella is happy to have company. A cow from a herd gets lonesome without  another cow around her so it is nice to have two now. (see previous post) My next job was building these Warre hives for the bees we have coming next week. We had a lot of old standard commercial hive boxes that we had been using but after the bear trashed our hives two years ago we got sort of discouraged. We ended up selling all of those hive boxes so when we decided to get bees again this year it was a problem. I decided to go with the Warre type hive as it matches our management style much better. I put up a link under "Sites I Think Are Worth Your Time" ( top one) but it is not quite right. It will take you to the right site if you follow it through. The free pdf. download will give you the entire plan for building the hives plus a ton of info about managing the hive,etc.  I have to add handles, sand, and paint these yet before the bees get here. I made four hive boxes for each hive. As soon as I get these done I have to get to work and build what hopefully will be a bear proof enclosure for the hives. Picture high voltage!

Jersey Milk Cow

Here is the latest addition to our homestead, a Jersey milk cow. Named Sissy, she brings our herd to three cattle, two cows and a steer. This girl came to us from friends who are organic dairymen. Sissy is a first calf heifer, that means this is her first calf, who freshened with mastitis. This is a serious health problem, especially for organic producers. Without the use of antibiotics it can be difficult to clear up infections. Sissy has been getting good organic care and has improved a lot. Unfortunately, even after a considerable outlay in time and cash,Sissy's somatic cell count was still to high for her milk to go for organic use. When Ann heard that our friends would have to ship Sissy for the meat market since they could not justify more expenses with no return, she went into action. Some women like jewelry, some flowers or chocolates, some want a fancy car, not Ann, she likes cows! Ann feels she can continue a course of organic treatment and clear up Sissy's infection with time. Mean while, the extra milk goes to our steer calf. I don't know that we really need two milk cows but oh well, we have them. Guess we will be eating lots of cheese. Of course, summer is coming and warm summer days call for ice cream. With two Jersey cows milking there should be plenty of cream!

Solar Light Bargain

These small landscaping solar powered lights are a bargain. These were on sale for $2.50 each not long ago. That is a reasonable price and they are nice to light up your walkways. We don't use them outdoors however. We set them where they will be in the sun light most of the day and in the evening we bring them inside. Unless there is a full moon ,it is dark in the woods. These little lights are perfect for lighting the path to the bathroom late at night inside too. We leave a couple in the bathroom, on the porch next to the wood box, and near the water jar. It is much easier than using a hand flash light to find your way around the cabin at night. We have another unit that has a small solar panel that is mounted on the roof and has a cord going to a small light. That one is in our root cellar and provides a little light in there to find things. I won't want to read by either of these units,but they are as bright as a candle and much safer and more convenient. I have one of those landscape type lights that has been working for at least 5 years. I hope this batch lasts as long.

I had to throw in this pic of a porcupine we saw on our walkabout last week end. Big one but sort of camera shy.Had a heck of a time getting him (her?) to look towards me.

Sweet Potato Slips

We have tried starting sweet potatoes before with no luck but this year it worked like a charm. This potato has seven nice slips growing and quite a few eyes that look as if they are going to grow too. We like sweet potatoes but don't really have a long enough or warm enough growing season most years. This year we are going to try planting them in old tires to see if that helps. I was going to try it last year but heard that cadmium leached out of the tires.After doing some research I think that it leaches out while the tire is still on your car and that it no longer is a problem on old used tires. Ann spent part of today in the garden and had several bits of news. Our garlic is starting to come up which is a good sign. The rhubarb is starting too as well as chives. Time to get all the perennial beds cleaned up and re-mulched. We bought a lot of big round bales of old hay for mulch last fall so we are ready to go.We put down a layer of corrugated cardboard first. I really like the way that mulch improves the tilth of the soil.As long as the hay is well rotted before you put in on there are not many problems with it. The one thing I have to watch for is slugs. They like the moist bottom layer of the mulch. They can be trapped in partially empty beer cans with the tops set flush in the soil. Guess I better get busy and make some more slug traps!

End of Syrup Season

  This is our finishing pan being drained. A woefully short and unproductive  maple syrup season is almost over for us. It looks like we will have about 7-8 quarts for the year. Guess my sweet tooth will be on a diet.
   A lot of our perennial flowers such as daffodils are starting to come up.We planted a few new things last year so it is always interesting to see which make it through our winters. Of course this was a very mild winter so everything should have made it . My big worry right now is that the apple trees will bloom to early because of this warm weather. It would seem like warm weather early would be a good thing but it is not. I am sure it will swing back to seasonal temperatures soon and then stuff that came up to early will freeze. While most plants will survive the freeze and regrow , blossoms will not appear a second time on most trees. If the blossoms freeze there is no fruit this year. Our trees are young and would only produce a limited amount this year anyway.

We had a few small rain showers this week so it is not dangerously dry in the woods right now. This means that Ann is back to doing some campfire cooking.There are somethings that just seem much more tasty when cooked over a open fire. Even though Ann cooks on the campfire fairly often during the summer,those meals always seem a little special and more relaxed somehow. The smell of coffee perking along with the wood smoke smell is sure to whet my appetite and eating out of doors makes it seem like a picnic.

Weekend Wandering

 We spent part of our week end checking out some of our favorite foraging areas. It is still to early for much to be up so the only thing we actually found was a handful of last years winter green berries. They were tasty, just scarce. Later on we stopped by at a High Stump Sugar Bush which is owned by family members and is located in Westboro,Wisconsin. I was hoping they were having a better year than us amateurs but that was not the case.  The large wood fired evaporator in the picture makes short work of a lot of maple sap. With literally thousands of trees tapped it runs around the clock a lot of years but not this year. Local maple syrup will be in short supply this year as none of the areas commercial producers are doing any better. There is still some talk of a cool down coming but I think it will be to late for this year. On the home front, I got my apple trees pruned Saturday and saved most of the trimmings to use as grafts. As soon as my root stock arrives and I can plant them I will do a post on grafting.

Homemade 12 Volt Generator

 I suppose if I was being absolutely honest with my title I would have called this post,"Homemade 12 Volt Generator-Fail! That's not completely true either as the device does charge a twelve volt battery. It is just to noisy and to expensive to run. It takes it almost a hour to recharge a battery that has been run down to 10.5 or so volts. It will burn almost a gallon of gas in that time which makes for real expensive electricity. I used what I had as usual and it this case it was a 8.5 horse engine. It was on a snow blower I had which had a broken gear case. At any rate, I no longer needed a snow blower, especially one that didn't work, and it was a easy conversion. I removed the blower part and bolted a steel plate on in it's place. On to the steel plate I mounted a automotive alternator with a adjustable bracket . I found a wiring diagram on the internet for the alternator I have and hooked it up. I did have to buy a vee belt.I use a set of jumper cables to hook it to my battery. Since I left the tires on the snow blower it is easy to move it around. There is a lot of vibration for some reason which has caused several problems. The electric starter, which hung out from the side vibrated enough to break the weld that held it on. No problem, it can be started with the pull start. Then the muffler weld let go too. That was harder to fix and I have not found a muffler that will make it quite enough to run close to the cabin without having to wear ear plugs. With gas at $3.82 it will not be running much! We added some more solar panels this year and plan to add a small wind turbine soon. I may try rebuilding this outfit if I come across a smaller engine.

Sap Bag Holder in Use

 Here is one of the sap bag holders I made last week. This one has a second tap going in the top  so that worked fairly well. The clear bags in the picture are not the greatest, we have had several spring leaks from rubbing on the bark. We have some blue bags that are much heavier and haven't had any trouble with them. The bags and holders are nice because when it rains they don't fill up with rain water. We use a lot of buckets too and always have to go empty them if it rains. This year we tapped extra trees, about 300 taps total, but so far it is a very disappointing year. It is very warm, highs in the 60-70F. range and not freezing at night. If this pattern holds for even another week it will be all over for this year. We have collected enough sap to make about a gallon and a half of syrup, about  15% of what we would normally make. We try to use syrup for a lot of our sweetening so this will be a problem.

Here is our main sap pan. It was made from a full 4ft. by 8ft. sheet of steel. The sides are bent up at 6 inches and have a small angle iron stiffener at the top to make a finished pan that is 3ft. by 7ft. by 6inches deep.I have the fire door open in the pic to show what kind of fire it takes to boil the sap. It has to be a big ole blaze to get it boiling. I had just added twenty gallons of sap before I took this pic so it isn't boiling yet. It tends to foam up when it starts to boil. I use the old times method of settling the sap which is to swish a fresh balsam bough in the pan. It makes the sap quit foaming, probably from the resin in the balsam needles. We have another small pan that we finish the syrup in. Our sugar shack is a sort of temporary affair being made of poles and tarps. After sugaring season is over we will fill the pan with water and heat it up to wash all the buckets and taps. Not the most fun part but important . If the weather stays this warm we will be doing that soon.

Indian-Pipe

 Indian-Pipe, Monotropa uniflora L., which is also sometimes called Ice Plant, is one of the stranger plants you might find while hunting mushrooms. With it's complete lack of chlorophyll the flower stalks look sort of like frozen jelly. Each fragile stalk bears a single nodding bell and the leaves are not much more than scales on the stalk. It is 6-8 inches tall and found between June and October in rich woodlands. It has been used for a variety of medicinal purposes including eye inflammations and as a sedative,but the safety of these uses is uncertain. It is potentially toxic as it does contain several glycosides. Many field guides say it is rare but I have found it fairly often. It is one of those plants which makes me stand in awe of the natural world . This  plant is a parasite, but not on other plants.It is a parasite on the fungus that are growing on tree roots! What a amazing adaptation. If you go to www.TomVolkFungi.net you will find tons of info about this plant.

Now Arriving..Seeds!

Our first, and biggest, seed order got delivered today. As you can see from the pic, this year our big order went to Johnny's Select Seeds. We order from several seed companies and try to spread our order around somewhat but usually order the bulk from one place. This year it was Johnny's. They have a very informative catalog and we have always liked the service we have gotten. In our area we don't put many crops in until the end of May. It is not unusual to have hard freezes in mid May so any tender plants would be killed. We try to get in our cold hardy crops about two weeks earlier.Many things will be started in the green house and transplanted later. I think that transplants do better if they are just starting to get their second set of true leaves so I only want them about 5-6 weeks old when set out. That means I will have to get the green house set up and heated by the end of March. Busy,busy time of the year starting now. We tapped about 150  Maples for syrup today and will do about another 100-125 tomorrow. The weather forecast for next week doesn't look very good for sap production. For that we need nights below freezing and sunny calm days above freezing. Of course, there is the small chance that the weather forecast is wrong!

Old Saw

 While I like old tools and enjoy restoring them to usefulness, I'm not about to give up my chainsaw for cutting firewood. This is a old crosscut saw I cleaned up and sharpened last week during our snow storm. I want to give it a try soon but not on standing timber. I thought a  log   would be a safer place to practice. Now I just have to convince Ann that this will be fun since it is a two man saw, or should I say two person?  I have several other old crosscut saws but all the others had pitting from rust that was to deep. Out of a half dozen handles these two were the only ones that are still in usable condition. They are not actually a pair but it is all I have.Using these old hand tools give you a peek into your ancestors lives. I remember the first time I used a scythe to cut off a small patch of weeds. Talk about a work out! I have two scythes now and have learned to adjust them to my height and to sharpen them but they still bring on a sweat in about 45 seconds. Those old timers were some tough birds. I will probably hang this saw on the wall but first I want to at least learn how to use it.I will probably never need to cut my firewood with it but I want to know I can if I want to.

Hen of the Woods / Maitake

 Digging around in my pic files again and came across this pic of some nice Hen of the Woods,Grifola frondosa, we picked a couple years ago. This is typical size of Maitake,as it is known in Japan, when mature. This batch was all growing around the base of one tree. They are actually over mature for prime eating and we only used the outer edges of each frond. They are one of the better eating mushrooms in our area but long slow cooking is best. They will fruit in the same location for years so we check back every year . This year some other picker had beat us to this one but we found others near by. Hunt for these in mature hardwoods, especially oaks, at the base of the tree. We find these in early to mid September in our area, about the time that nannyberries are ready to pick. Looking at this picture and then out the door where we have two feet of snow and more falling, makes me think mushrooming season will never get here!

Here is a pic of one called Northern Tooth. I couldn't find the Latin this morning but anyway, it is not edible. Just threw it in cause it looks neat. Usually found on maples around here.

Stove Fan

Here is a device we have been wanting for several years and finally went ahead and got it despite the price. It is a fan that is powered by the heat from your stove. Well, actually it is powered by the temperature difference between the top part and the bottom part of the fan housing. At the junction there is a device called a peltier connection that makes electricity from that temperature difference. The electricity is enough to drive the fan. This  same device is used in those small 12 volt can coolers. Apparently if you run electricity through it it creates a temperature difference!? Don't ask me how because I have no idea. It does work but don't expect a hurricane.When the stove is good and hot it definitely makes a light breeze which is enough to move some heat around and keep the cabin temperature a little more uniform. At $120.00 I'm still sort of iffy about it. It works but not near as well as I'd imagined it would. Maybe I just had unrealistic expectations.