A Little Bit Of Everything

It's been a busy time here on Honey B Farm.  We got the gardens planted in between rain storms, and things are growing nicely (including weeds!)  Our new bees are very busy and working hard, and the hives are doing superbly well!   Yard work keeps us busy, too.   Harold has been fixing various things on his tractor/loader, and fixing the mower.   I've been busy trying to keep up with the constant grass cutting.   Yesterday a drive belt on the riding mower wore out and started burning.  So we went to town and got a new belt and Harold fixed that this morning so I could continue mowing.
     In between all of this, I have been recovering from cataract surgery on my right eye.   This coming Wednesday I get the other eye done.   Oh what a difference!!  When I look at everything with my newly fixed eye, everything is so bright and colorful and sharp!   The vision in the other eye is cloudy and yellow.  It will be SO good to have both eyes clear and sharp again!  I need to put special eye drops in 4 times a day, and I am not supposed to bend over a lot or put strain on the eye or lift anything heavy for a week after surgery.    That means I can't bend over and pull weeds.   So the weeds will just have to grow for another week or so.   Harold did what he could with weed pulling and tilling, but it takes two people to keep up with all of our gardens and yard work. 
     I walked around the place today taking new pictures of how things look now.   So far we have had a good June with gentle rains and warm temperatures.   The only thing to complain about is the tent caterpillars.   Those green/black worms are eating everything.   They especially like fruit trees and berry bushes.   We can't really use insecticides here because of our bees.   Harold rigged up a contraption to ward off the tent caterpillars from our apple trees.   They come up from the ground and work their way up the tree trunk to the tree, so we put a bucket or a milk jug around the tree trunk and seal it off.   The worms try to get up the trunk and fall back to the ground with this system.   It has worked well for us for the past few years.  Here are a couple of pictures of what I am talking about:

On a small apple tree we can use a milk jug to deter the worms.

Our large apple tree needed a bucket to keep the worms off.

The apple tree is going to produce apples this year!

One of many young apples on our tree.   These apples are Prairie Magic variety.

The bees are doing so well.   Today we witnessed a massive hatching of young bees and the orientation flights they do around the front of the hive.  Here is what we saw:

Many newly hatched bees learning where home is, and doing their "orientation flights" to practice going into and out of the hive.

Harold also put an electric fence around the garden.   This will keep the deer out.   I have tried many things over the years, but an electric fence works the best!

Harold is stringing the wire all around the garden.   We use a solar powered fencer for this garden.  It produces enough of a zap to keep the deer out, but we have a very powerful electric plug in type fencer around the beehives to keep the bears out.  We haven't seen any more bears since my blog post about them a while back.

Every year I start my flowers from seed.   This year I think some of my petunias are especially pretty in shades of deep purple, blue and various shades of rose.

Isn't this a gorgeous deep blue petunia? I am very proud of my efforts at seed starting on these flowers.

Check out these purple and pink beauties!

This will be a good year for our gooseberries, too!  That is, IF the caterpillars will leave them alone!  Gooseberries are good to eat just as is, but they also make exceptional jelly.

Gooseberries end up being a deep pink when ripe, and about an inch in diameter.

I have tried several new varieties of lettuces this year in the greenhouse.   I hit upon an heirloom variety called Tom Thumb Lettuce which I really love!   This will definitely be a yearly favorite!   It grows into small compact heads of delicious mild and tasty lettuce, about 8 inches in diameter and about 4 or 5 inches high.  If you have a garden and you like to grow your own lettuce, I highly recommend Tom Thumb variety!

Here are 4 heads of great tasting Tom Thumb lettuce, an heirloom variety.

Things are doing well in the greenhouse.   I am on my second crop on some things in there!

Tomatoes and lettuce on the left, peppers and garlic and leeks and carnations in the middle, and lettuces and spinach on the right. 

We mowed a path to the lake through the un-mowed section of our yard.  We call this small lake Two Squaw Lake, and we share the ownership of it with our neighbors.   It makes for a nice trip down to the water on this path!

The path to Two Squaw Lake through our prairie. The front of the lake is a bog, but the back part is a nice sized lake.

The front part of the lake is more or less a bog, but it supports a lot of wildlife.  Canadian geese and loons and wood ducks use the water for nesting, song birds live all around it, too, and there are plenty of muskrats. 

Another view of the path, looking towards the house.  We like to sit on our raised porch and look out over the lake and the woods, and listen to the loons in the evening.   The path looks flat, but it's really a bit of an incline.   I get my exercise walking up this hill!

And that's the status of everything around here as of today!  Life is good and peaceful here and we are so blessed.   The weatherman is predicting some very bad storms tomorrow, but we hope it doesn't include hail!  We could use the rain, but not the hail!