• Tag Archives swiss chard

  • Harvest

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Fall                                      New (Harvest) Moon

    Second round of apiguard in the parent and the divide.  The top box on the package colony has gotten heavier, but I plan to feed them some more as I will do to the parent once the apiguard comes off in two weeks.  Sometime in early November I’ll get out the cardboard wraps and cover the hives for winter.  That will pretty much finish bee work for the year until late February or early March.  I’ve given away honey and plan to give away more.  Part of the fun.

    A quick walk through the vegetable garden shows kale and swiss chard looking good, a few rogue onions that escaped the harvest, plenty of carrots, beets and butternut squash.  The harvest is 2010-10-04_0351not yet over and will go on until the ground threatens to become hard.

    While I drove through the countryside on my way back to Lafayette on Monday, I passed field after field of corn and beans, some harvested, some not, about half and half.  Seeing those scenes put me right back at home, especially the corn fields.  Here’s a field near Peru, Indiana with the combine spilling corn into a tractor trailer for transport either to a corn bin, grain dryer or even straight to the grain elevators, all depending on the price and moisture content of the corn.

    Indiana is no longer home, Minnesota is, but Indiana has a large section of my heart, the chamber of childhood and early young adulthood, a room full of corn fields, basketball, small towns, a baby sister and brother, county fairs and James Whitcomb Riley poems.  I was glad to be there the last few days and to walk again in the part of my heart filled there so long ago.

    We move now toward Samhain, Summer’s End.  Blessed be.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Bees Family Friends Great Wheel Memories Travel 📎and tagged

  • The Garden in September

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa                                       Waning Artemis Moon

    The onions, red, yellow and white, are in the storage room ready to go on the wooden racks when I have a minute.  The honey, too, is on the bottom row of our shelving unit, collected in canning jars and resting in the boxes that held the canning jars in the store.  Kate’s just put up 7 packages of frozen kale and swiss chard, for use in the dead of winter when greens from the garden seem very special.  She’s also making applesauce from our six apple crop.  I picked them a bit too early for eating.  Chicken breasts and pie dough have been set out to thaw since I will make chicken and leek pot pie later today.  This is a busy time of year, but it is also a fun and satisfying time.

    The potato plants have not died back, so they await digging and drying and storage.  The garden of 2010 has begun to wind down.  I still have to plant garlic, mulch a few beds, weed the perennial flower beds and later plant the bulbs, but the number of tasks has begun to dwindle even though the size of some of them make a lot of work still left.


    📂This entry was posted in Garden 📎and tagged

  • Another Northern Summer Day

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer                             Full Strawberry Moon

    The full strawberry moon, evocative.  Our strawberries have wound down  for this season, but we enjoyed them while they ripened.  I had blueberries on cereal this morning, blueberries from our patch.  Finished the  planting for a third harvest:  beans, spinach, swiss chard, beets:  golden and detroit red and carrots.

    Kate has been picking  currants like a woman possessed.  She has I don’t know how many and won’t rest until all five bushes are clean.  That’s a lot of currants.  Last year I couldn’t even spell currant and now I have more than I know what to do with.

    The whole garden, including the bees, has proved a bit much this year.  The longer season didn’t help, it got stuff off to an early start, ahead of me.  Plugging away though.  I’ll probably get back to even about time to put the sucker to bed for the winter.

    Hilo helped me plant, each hour with her more precious now that we know her days will wink out in the not too distant future.


    📂This entry was posted in Dogs Garden 📎and tagged

  • Queens, Vegetables and Latin

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                         Full Flower Moon

    Under the full flower moon I inspected my new colony of bees.  In this instance I checked the frames for larvae.  I couldn’t tell if they were there or not.  This is important because it indicates the presence or absence of a laying queen.  I’ll check again on Saturday.  The queen excluder went into the overwintered colony.  The queen excluder prevents her from moving either up or down in this instance.

    On the weekend when I try my first division, I’ll take the hive box with no new larvae (the queen is not there since it takes larvae four days to appear) and put it on a new hive stand and bottom board.  Then, I’ll slow release a new queen.  That is, I’ll put a mini-marshmallow in the end of her cage, suspend the cage between the two central frames and let the queen eat her way out or the worker bees eat their way into her.  This makes her acceptance more likely.

    One undignified note.  A bee crawled up my pants leg and stung me on my butt.  Boy did I howl.  Jumped around.  OUCH.

    After the bees I spent time in the garden planting dill, basil, marigolds, radicchio, foxglove, spinach, swiss chard, kale, golden and red beets.  A few more bags of composted manure went onto the raised beds, too.

    The garden worked preceded a session with my Latin tutor.  He’s good, supportive but demanding.  I like that.  This was not my best week.  I did this work a couple of weeks ago and had not gone over it again, so I sounded somewhat like the village idiot.  Being a good student is important to me, so I promised Greg I would do better next week.  He said, “Be a good boy, you mean?”  Yes, that’s exactly what I meant.  Geez.  Even at 63.


    📂This entry was posted in Bees Garden Humanities 📎and tagged