Gathering A Bounty Of Blessings!

The end of summer is almost here for us in northern Minnesota.   Our summers are so short.  The leaves are already starting to turn red and yellow and orange here and there in the woods.  Crops grow quickly here, and today we gathered a bounty of fruits and vegetables!  The Lord has been so good to us and He has blessed us with such an abundance!  Every week for our Farmer's Market booth we gather almost a pick up bed full of vegetables to sell.  Today we picked the rest of our apples, and we are starting to harvest grapes, too!  We've had a problem with a fungus on our grapes for several years now.  We tried various methods of fungus control - sprays, fertilizers, adding nutrients to the soil, weed control, different watering methods - and nothing seemed to work.  We decided that if we didn't get any grapes this year, the vines were going to be torn out and we would just forget about trying to raise grapes.   With this in mind, we more or less forgot about watering and just let the vines have rain, but nothing more.   Well, that seemed to be the answer!  Perhaps we were over watering!  This year the fungus problem was minimal and we actually will have an abundance of grapes!  These are called Northern Valiant grapes and they are good for juice or jelly.   I have plenty of other jelly that I've made this summer, so this year's crop of grapes will be canned up as juice for a special treat for us for holidays.  After I extract the juice, I will can it in pints for Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's, Valentine's Day, our birthdays and Easter.
     In my last post I talked about our hazelnuts.  We got them all husked, and ended up with 3 1/2 lbs of nuts.  Hazelnuts are also called filberts.
     Today I also trimmed and cleaned a whole box full of garlic to use for cooking and to give away and to sell at our booth.
     This week I will need to put cabbage in the crock for sauerkraut, dig up our potatoes, and start canning tomato products.  Such a busy time!   We also will need to bottle up more honey, as we sold almost 3 cases of it at last week's market as well as 6 quarts.   We have more orders to fill.  We did end up with 350 lbs of excellent honey - another big blessing for us.   It is so rewarding to grow our own food.  And when things turn out good, we are more than thrilled.  This year I also had great success growing carnations, and Harold tried his hand at growing gladiolus flowers.   The house looks so pretty with flowers all around - another reminder of all the Lord's blessings!  Thanks be to God for another great season here at Honey B Farm.

Remember those hazelnuts from the last post?  Here is a tray of 3 1/2 pounds of them drying a little more. 

One of several baskets of grapes this year.  This is a Concord type grape called Northern Valiant.   It is good as a table grape, but is especially good for juice.   It has taken us almost 9 years to get a good bunch of grape vines going.

A box full of fresh garlic for cooking.  I grow two types - a small commercial type, and a larger type sometimes called elephant garlic.

We picked a 5 gallon bucket, plus 3 big baskets of apples today.   We already picked a couple other baskets full and processed them into dried apple slices in the dehydrator (3 day's worth of drying apple slices!).   These are Prairie Magic apples and they are huge.   This is a pie apple variety, tart for cooking and baking and making sauce.

Some of Harold's lovely gladiolus flowers.

A small bouquet of my greenhouse carnations.   I especially love the deep magenta ones.

Hazelnut Story Part 2

Today we picked our hazelnuts!  They seemed ready, and going by everything we read about them here in Minnesota the time to pick them is early August.  We are probably a few days late, but I am pretty sure we got them before the worms!  We have shelled several handfuls of them, and split the nuts open, and have found NO worms!   So I think we got them in time!  And they are really delicious.  Small, but delicious.   We picked two 5 gallon buckets full, and so I think we will be separating the nuts from the husks for a couple of evenings.   We also discovered that we have TWO bushes of these hazelnuts!  And they were just loaded with nuts.  The bushes are right next to our highbush cranberries, which are also ready.
     It was no easy task getting to the nut bushes, though.  Harold took the tractor through the area to smash down the tall grasses, but there was still lots of stinging nettle, and thistle to fight with.   I should have worn long sleeves for picking, as I rubbed up against stinging nettle and immediately got a nasty rash, which is already blistered.   I just put some hydrocortisone cream on the rash, and it feels better now.   Next time I will wear long sleeves!
     The experts say to keep the nuts in a hot place for a few days to dry out, and then freeze the nuts, so they don't get rancid.   Crack them as you need them.   These nuts will be delicious in breads and coffeecakes, and with the high price of nuts in the supermarkets, this is a real blessing to have!  And to think we never knew we had these hazelnut bushes!  A person learns something new every day.

A whole table full of hazelnuts to separate from the husks.  Two 5 gallon buckets full. 

The nuts are encased in a thin husk.  It isn't too bad of a job to pick out the brown nut. 

 

 

 

 

Some hazelnuts that we already husked, and a couple of shelled nuts that I split open so you can see the nice white insides.

Honey Extraction 2017

This weekend we pulled the honey supers off our hives and began to extract honey from the frames.  We spent Saturday and today spinning out frames in the extractor, and we will finish tomorrow.   It has been a good honey year, and we will probably end up with about 350 lbs or so of honey.   This year's honey has a lot of basswood blossoms in it, and so it is a light, fruity tasting honey.  Some of the boxes have a more clover tasting honey, and we will mix a little of each to get a good blended honey with a little bit of every taste! We pulled the honey supers a little early this year so as to give the bees more time to make honey for themselves from the wildflowers that are still here.   We will no longer be sending our bees to California for the winter, but will attempt to winter them here.  The bees will need a good winter store of food for themselves, and we will use thick hive boxes that Harold has built for winterizing the bees.  Sturdy boxes and a heater/thermostat should insure that the bees will make it through the winter right in our own back yard.  Winterizing the bees here will be less stressful for the bees (no travel), and will help to cut down on bee diseases from other beekeeper's hives out in California.   We do not care for sending hives out for almond pollination, we just want good honey.  We have not been successful at winterizing bees in past years, but since Harold has designed and built very thick, insulated hives, we should be successful this year.
     Here are some photos of the process.

First the wax is cut off from the frame of honey with a hot knife (we keep the knife in hot boiling water).  The bees put a wax capping over honey that is 'ready'. 

Here is a hive with 9 full frames of capped honey.  The bees have actually attempted to store and cap off honey in between the spaces of the frames!

A close up of a fully capped frame.  A full frame like this of honey weighs approximately 5 lbs.   So a box of honey weighs about 40-45 lbs. 

Harold is turning the crank on the extractor.  We set up the honey process right in my kitchen (I have a very large kitchen!).  This year Harold built new support legs for the extractor out of strong thick metal to replace the flimsy ones that originally came with the extractor.   Next year we hope to motorize the extractor - we're getting too old to crank this out by hand for the required 5 minutes!

Honey coming out into the filter and bucket.

You end up with a lot of wax cappings mixed with honey.  We strain out the wax and separate the honey from the cappings.  The honey is filtered again, and the wax is melted and put into blocks to be sold. 

We have three buckets with honey gates to make bottling easier.  Additional honey is stored in plain buckets.  All the buckets are of food grade plastic.

The inside of the extractor.  It will fit 18 frames, but we only spin 9 at a time by hand.  The frames of honey are spun out by centrifugal force.

You can see the honey at the bottom of the extractor.

Harold is transferring more wax cappings into a large bin for later filtering.  We have 5 more boxes of frames to work with tomorrow. 

When we are finished for the evening, we cover everything to keep out dust and moisture.

Finished boxes are stacked up and ready to go out into the metal building we store them in.

At the end of the day, we relax with some popcorn (homegrown, of course!) and a game of Scrabble!

A batch of bottled honey from Honey B Farm!!

Pea Pickin' Good Time

Today I picked peas for over 2 hours.  I only had 2 rows, about 50 feet long, but I guess 100 feet of peas is plenty!  This evening I am starting to pod them out to put in the freezer.   The pile on the table in this photo is about 3 feet long, 2 1/2 feet wide and a foot high.   This should give me quite a few quart bags of peas for the freezer.   I probably won't get them all done tonight, but I'll get a good start.   There will be more peas in a few days, too, as I only picked what was ready.   When you have pollinator bees, you have lots of garden veggies!!
     This is sure a busy time for us now!  I also spent 3 hours mowing grass today.   So I spent about 5 hours out in the sun.   I certainly got a good dose of vitamin D, eh?  Also cucumbers are coming in now, so I've been busy making dill pickles and bread and butter pickles.  Our market day on Thursday keeps us busy, too.   Last week we picked 35 lbs of green beans, 10 lbs of yellow beans, many, many zucchinis and cucumbers, and peppers and cabbages and fresh herbs.   It usually takes us about 4 hours of picking to prepare for market day.
     The other day Harold dug up about 30 lbs of potatoes for me, so I'll be canning those also.   And as if we aren't busy enough - this coming Friday we are pulling the honey supers on our beehives and on Saturday we will extract honey.   We anticipate a big honey harvest, somewhere around 400 lbs. 
     So if I don't put many articles on here for a while, you know I'm very busy!   But this is a good kind of busy.  We are so blessed with wonderful vegetables and everything else.   Even our apple tree is producing many fine apples.   But the deer are eating them before they're ready, so Harold put an electric fence around the tree this evening to stop that!   Those deer are NOT going to eat my beautiful pie apples!

Just getting started on a huge job of podding out peas!  Yes, peas are a lot of work to pick and pod, but fresh garden peas are SO worth the trouble!  We love Pea and Cheese Salad, Creamed Peas and New Potatoes, and Fettuccine Alfredo with Peas, just to name a few of our favorite dishes with these lovely peas.  We also love them with fresh mushrooms as a side dish.

Look What We Found!

Today we discovered something new on our property.  Hazelnuts!  Harold was doing some tilling in the pasture, and when he walked back home, he discovered a different kind of large bush he had never seen before.   He brought a branch back to the house and we looked it up.  We have a hazelnut bush!  A quick research on the internet told us that these nut bushes can and do grow in Minnesota, as well as Wisconsin, northern Michigan, and especially in Oregon and Washington.   Other states can have them, too, but these are the most prominent growing areas.   These wild hazelnuts are definitely edible.  Harold says the bush is just loaded with these nuts.  The bush is about 8 feet high, and about 10 feet across.  However right now, it is surrounded with high Canadian thistles and tall grasses, so getting to it is not easy.  When it's time to harvest the nuts, we'll have to get rid of the thistles!  We have heard that a person should pick them at the green stage, but fully grown, and they will brown up when they dry.   Then when they are thoroughly dry, you can crack them and eat them just like the ones you buy at the store.   Or you can roast them (we'll have to do some research on that one)  Our neighbor has eaten these and says you must pick them before the worms get into them.   So we'll have to keep a close eye on these, and learn something new!
     Here is a view of the branch Harold brought in:

The Hazelnuts grow in clusters with a curly outer layer.

A close up view of the nuts inside.  They need to grow for a few more weeks, I think.

Anyway, I will have to keep you posted on how we did with picking and drying these nuts.   There is always something new to learn in nature.   And I am anxious to taste these wild nuts.

On another note, this is canning season again, and I bought several boxes of Mrs. Smitcamp's canning peaches, which come from Cutler CA.  These are wonderful peaches and I have very good results every year canning up these lovely peaches.   A couple years ago I did a blog article on how to ripen peaches.  In case you missed it, or can't find the post I wrote back then, here again is the method.   First you must lay the peaches on linen, stem side down, and not touching each other.  Then cover with more linens.   The peach grower who taught me this method says to use Damask linens because they have good "breathability".  Yes, don't laugh, he said!  Old time damask linens can be bought at flea markets and antique stores for very little cost (because nobody wants them anymore!).  After a few days, the peaches are perfectly ripened and ready to can up.   Most peaches come in the box fairly green, and this method always produces juicy peaches that can up nicely! 

I put my peaches under damask linens to ripen for a couple days.

The perfectly ripened peaches ready to can.  You want the peaches to be only slightly soft, as they will cook somewhat during the canning process.   Some of these peaches have a little green left to them, and I will do them the following day, picking only the yellow ripe ones for canning tomorrow. 

I bought 3 large boxes of peaches this year, as I had some quarts left from last year.   Tomorrow and Wednesday I will be busy canning peaches!   They are easy to can up, and I always enjoy the process.   And they taste SO good in the winter when the snow is a couple feet deep and it is 30 below zero outside!

An Amazing Bee Miracle?

Today Harold checked out our 3 hives.  They are doing exceptionally well, and he needed to put on another honey super.  However, he had no sooner finished putting on a super and walking away after checking everything out, when one of the hives swarmed!   A huge swarm went into one of the trees behind the bee yard.   Harold could see where they landed, and he went to get his tractor loader to get a ladder up there and bring the hive back down and haul them off someplace else in another box.   But as he went to get the tractor an amazing thing happened!!  The swarm went back into the SAME hive box!  It's like they swarmed, and then came back home!  Within minutes!   This never happens.  Bees just don't do that.   Harold said a quick prayer when they swarmed (that he would be able to get the swarm into a box with no problems, to haul them off to the Miller farm, where we take all our swarms), and within minutes they all came back to the original hive.   Perhaps the Lord heard Harold's prayer and brought all our bees back to where they should be instead of swarming.    I tell you, this truly never happens -  that bees will swarm and come back to the same box!  We have never witnessed any such thing in all our 9 years of beekeeping.    Here are some photos of this morning's episode: 

Harold checks out one of our hives.   For a thorough checkup, he used the bee smoker this morning and suited up.

Lifting up a frame of bees and honey from the top super.

The frames look really good.   The bees are filling them up with honey.

Shortly after inspection the bees swarmed, and then came back.   Here is what THAT looked like:

The front of the hive was just covered with bees trying to get back in.

The bees were everywhere, waiting to get back into the hive.

Another view of the bees trying to get back into the hive they just swarmed out of.

They are all back home now and all is just like it originally was.    I wanted to get a photo of the swarm in the tree, but they weren't there long enough for me to get a good shot of them.  Sometimes a beekeeper just can't figure out bees!  But thanks be to God for bringing the bees back, and without us having to do anything!  We witnessed a very rare thing indeed!

Nanking Cherries!

My Nanking cherries are ready!   I have not had a good crop of these wonderful cherries for several years now.  For a few years we have had freezing temps when the bushes were in blossom, and all of the blossoms died.  And even this year I was afraid I would have none of them because of the tent caterpillars this spring.  But the birds took care of the bugs for me, and the good Lord blessed me with a truly bumper crop of these cherries this summer!  We planted these bush cherries about 8 years ago, starting with small bare root cuttings only about 15 inches high.  Now the bushes are about 7 feet tall and thick with branches.   I have 6 good sized cherry bushes.  Usually every summer the birds eat most of the crop, and even the deer and bears get them.  But this year I was able to harvest the fruit before any of the critters got to them!  And what a huge crop!  I am just thrilled, as these little tasty cherries make a wonderful juice, and even better jelly.   Nanking cherries are smaller than regular tree cherries, but they have an intense cherry flavor.  Today I picked a pail full of them, enough for a couple batches of jelly.   There is still plenty of fruit left on the bushes, not quite ripe, and if the birds don't beat me to them I will be able to pick another pail full later on next week.  I spent an hour picking these this morning, listening to the birds "scolding" me.

Nanking cherries do not 'hang' from the branch, but grow closely attached to the branches of the bush.  They are ready to pick when deep red, and when they taste sweet.  They are about 1/2 to 3/4 inch in diameter. 

Every branch of the bushes are just loaded with cherries!

One of the "farm hands" who came to "help" me.

A pail full of these sweet delicious beauties!

Busy Bees (And Us, Too!)

It's been a while since I posted anything on this blog.  I have had cataract surgery on my eyes earlier this month, first one eye, then a week later the other one.  In between surgeries, my vision was not the best, as one eye was 'perfect' and the other one was very cloudy.  Now that both eyes are done and healed, I can see great!!  I am still in the recovery stage of having to use eye drops several times a day, but that's no big deal.  At the end of next month I will be able to be fitted for new glasses to correct for astigmatism and reading, and a slight vision correction in one eye.  Cataract surgery apparently doesn't give a person 20-20 vision, but comes close.
     Then, we have been busy weeding and tilling and doing yard work.  That is, in between rain storms!   With all the rain, weeds sure can grow!  But everything is growing very nicely, and we have started up our farmer's market booth, selling several varieties of fresh leaf lettuce and head lettuce and romaine and spinach and herbs.   Soon we can add lots of cabbages to the booth.  Check out these (very straight!) rows of cabbages:

Three rows of various varieties of cabbages beginning to head up.  Each row is 50 ft long. 

Our bees have been really working hard!  This year so far our hives are doing well and are very healthy.   Lots of activity today as the bees bring in lots of yellow pollen.

All three hives have bees coming and going like crazy!

I've had a big problem with barn swallows lately!  These birds insist on making a mud nest above either the living room door, or a back window.  I don't want them there and have tried just about everything to discourage them.  I've tried hosing down the mud they gather with a pressure hose, and using "fake birds", too.   But so far, what has worked the best is to tape strips of shiny tin foil above the door and windows.   The birds just don't like that! They don't know what it is, and the shininess of the foil must scare them.

Hanging strips of tin foil above the door seems to deter the barn swallows from building mud nests above the door!

My flowers are so pretty now, especially with all the rain we've had lately.   Here are some views of my petunias on the Ferris wheel Harold made for me, and also the specialty marigolds I started from seed in a pot just outside the greenhouse door.

Lovely shades of pink, purple, blue and red petunias!

A colorful and large variety of marigolds.

We have had many new kittens this year so far.   Some are doing very well, and some died early due to weather exposure and Mama cats who didn't care for the newborns like they should have.  But we still have plenty of mouse catchers on the farm!  Here is one of the older kittens born in mid April.

One of the 10 week old kittens contemplating life under the porch.

And that's the way things are as of today!