Spring Planting Moon Yes! Planted under the planting moon even if I couldn’t get the bloodroot up for the bloodroot […]
Read the rest of this entry »A Force of Nature
Spring Bee Hiving Moon In these months, when I go to bed, the full moon shines in our bedroom window. It keeps me awake sometimes, […]
Read the rest of this entry »Making Pot Pies
Fall Waxing Autumn Moon We had our final straight from the garden meal last night. Roasted potatoes, onions, fennel, carrots and a lone beet. Raspberries for dessert. Marinated chicken for protein, not from here. Today I cut up the leeks, cooked some chicken breasts, carrots, celery, peas and corn (none of these ours), and cooked […]
Read the rest of this entry »The Final Harvest
Fall Waxing Autumn Moon Going out today to collect the rest of the rest of the harvest. A few potato plants I missed the first time around remain. Leeks, those Musselberg Giants. Some carrots, some chard. Beans. Rain has appeared in the forecast for the first time in weeks. A good thing, but it reduces […]
Read the rest of this entry »A Melancholy Garden
Fall Waxing Autumn Moon In spite of the 80 degree plus weather it felt like a fall day outside. The sky blue, the clouds white, the sun weak. Collected the potatoes. After Mark carried the harvest inside, I put the potatoes on slatted wooden shelves that slide into our root crop storage system. They went […]
Read the rest of this entry »Sunday
Fall Waning Harvest Moon A gorgeous fall day. A little Ovid in the morning, a nap, a flu shot, drop off audio books at the library, help Mark practice parking. The bonus of the ongoing visa madness is that he may be able to take, and hopefully pass, his driving test. That would give him […]
Read the rest of this entry »Bee Diary: August, 2011
Lughnasa Waning Honey Extraction Moon Checked the honey supers this morning. On the two package colonies that I do not intend to overwinter, we have approximately four full honey supers. That is, we have for harvest the amount of honey they would have needed for the winter, close to 200 pounds. Figure that 40 pounds […]
Read the rest of this entry »Pick and Plan Eating
Mid-Summer Waxing Honey Flow Moon Kate and I have decided on a pick and plan eating method. That is, we’ll pick fresh vegetables, then build a meal around what we have. I picked this morning, for example, green beans, beets, golden and bull’s blood, lettuce, dill, and 7 garlic bulbs. We still have onions from […]
Read the rest of this entry »Bee and Garden Diary
Mid-Summer Waning Garlic Moon Today I performed partial hive box reversals in all three colonies. The second hive box of three gets rotated to the bottom and the first or bottom box rotates up to take its place. This means that all the hive boxes have to be moved, so it is a labor intensive […]
Read the rest of this entry »In the Garden
Beltane New Garlic Moon One of those nights last night, unable to get to sleep, still rolling around awake at 1:00 a.m. Up a little bleary. Wrote few e-mails, then out in the orchard, first. I’ve had tent caterpillars on two trees. Each time I have removed the tent and stepped on it or crushed […]
Read the rest of this entry »