• Tag Archives peppers

  • Getting Things Ready

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                       Waning Flower Moon

    After checking the parent colony with the queen excluder in, I found larvae in the top hive box.  That’s evidence of the queen.  That meant I shifted the middle hive box over to the new foundation and bottom board.  A syrup feeder pail went on top of the new, child colony.  This calms everything down and allows for a peaceful slow release of the queen tomorrow.  Leaving the queen excluder on the hive box in which I discovered larvae, I put two honey supers on it and replaced the inner cover and the telescoping outer cover.  The parent colony now has two hive boxes, one with a queen and brood, plus the other, lower box, which will get reversed on top in 7-10 days.

    Tomorrow I’ll check the package colony for larvae a second time.  If they have none, I’ll have to get another queen for them soon.  If there is no queen in the hive, the lack of her pheromones turns on egg laying in the workers, but, since they’re not fertilized they produce only drones.  Once a hive converts to worker egg-laying apparently you have to start over.

    This has been a busy couple of weeks for the bees.  Kate’s been making supers and frames and hive boxes, too.  If the divide and the package colony take, things will calm down for a while until the honey flow ends.  Then, there’s an end of the whole process I haven’t encountered.  Honey.

    Two more bags of composted manure on the leek/sugar pod pea bed, another on the sun trap and a lot of planting.  The herb spiral has the herbs Kate bought Friday at Mickman’s.  I also planted beets, mustard greens, fennel, onions and a pepper plant in the sun trap.  The tomatoes and other peppers will go there, too.  Those two beds, along with the other bed where I have green onions plants along with radicchio, beets from seed and thyme will be our kitchen garden for the growing season.

    Kate did a lot of weeding, including the blueberry patches.  It really makes a difference to have her focused on that aspect of gardening.  She’s also in charge of pruning which has its on rules.

    The leeks, onions, kale, chard, garlic, parsnips, butternut squash, other beets and carrots will also be available during the growing season of course, but most of these will get canned or dried or frozen for the winter.

    I would not like to do the cost accounting on these vegetables and the fruit because the two fences and Ecological gardens have created a lot of sunk costs.  It will take years for them to zero out the costs, more years, I imagine, than we have left in this house.  In our case, of course, that’s not the big point.  The big point is a more sustainable and healthy lifestyle and in that regard the cost accounting has already tilted in our favor.


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  • A Prolegomena to All Future Gardens

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    17  bar rises 30.08  3mph NNW  windchill 13  Samhain

    Waxing Crescent Moon of Long Nights

    The black plastic has been laid down; the marsh hay rests on top of it in fluffy abundance.  A good snow right now would marry the two until early spring.  May it come soon.

    This was a long project.  I had to cut down weeds, trees, raspberry canes and shrubs, pull vines and dislodge a deadfall. All this was prolegomena.   The black plastic had to be rolled out, made to conform to the odd shapes created by various impediments, then cut and staked or held down with logs.  After a piece of plastic was cut and laid in place, then the marsh hay went over it.

    This process, too, is prolegomena for the next phase.  In that phase we will plant serviceberry, hawthorne, and other shrubs and small trees that produce food edible by and interesting to birds and varmints.  That phase ties in with the orchard as a distraction from the human edibles, in the hope that more–or enough–will end up for us.  It is this linkage of one piece with the other, all in the service of creating a sustainable enviornment for people and animals, that excites me about permaculture.

    I have also mulched all the bulbs I planted and/or transplanted at the end of August and the middle of September.  These are daffodils, tulips, hyacinths, snow drops, lilies of many kinds and iris.  I have both mulched and not mulched over the years and find that mulching the first year for all new plantings and after for those plants sensitive to cold increases the germination rate considerably.

    There are also many peppers now in the hydroponics.  Only one is large so far, but they keep sucking down nutrient fluid at a rapid pace so they are growing.  I have not yet convinced any eggplant blossoms to move on to fruiting but I imagine that’s only a matter of patience.


    📂This entry was posted in Great Work Hydroponics permaculture 📎and tagged