Thoughts on Dirt

There are two broad categories for soil amenities, "organic" and synthetic. For the proposes of this post I will focus on the "organic" methods. The synthetic methods for increasing yield from soils are harmful to the land its self and everything down stream of it. People often compare Fritz Haber's contributions to chemical warfare and chemical fertalizer. They will say on the one hand he made it possible for our worlds population to balloon from just over one billion people to just over 7 billion people in less than a century. On the other hand he gave germany the means to kill millions through chemical warfare. In my mind neither of these things are good. Therefore, and because I have no interest in it I am not going to talk about the synthetic fertilizer industry. 
 Compost is perhaps the most ancient form of soil amenities. In it's most basic form it requires depositing waste matter on the soil to break down and be reabsorbed. This process also has the benefit of being free. All I have to do is take the unused parts of the plants I grow, greens, stems, roots and more and put them in a pile. By next spring these things have become rich soft dirt. Most people don't realize this, but the matter that makes up most of a plant is derived directly from the air, not the soil. This means I am literally turning CO2 a green house gas into soil. I know that is basic elementary school science, but I find that idea almost sexy. I breath in O2 and I eat Carbon based foods, Plants breath in CO2. They use the carbon from that along with sunshine to build their structure. Then they exhale O2. This circle of life has been spinning for 3.5 billion. This ancient system has been modified thousands of times over the ages by humans. Now it includes things like vermi-composting, bio-char, compost tumblers and more. Most of these new methods have the benefit of making the process from waste to soil additive faster. Many of them also have the benefit of making the final product more beneficial for a variety of reasons. 
Over the next several days I will be talking about several of these processes, my own experience and what the leading research has to offer. Let me know if there is something you want me to research. Eddie I have the re-mineralization in mind. Stay tuned. 



http://www.ext.colostate.edu/pubs/garden/07235.html

Update 6-26-2013

I applied for my dream job today. I won't say much about it, but if it develops into anything I will let you know.
I just opened up my nice bee hive. Nothing exciting to report. I am still afraid to open the one that stung me on the face last time. I either want a bee hood or a better working smoker, before I get back in that hive. I just hope they don't swarm before then. 
I did some work for a neighbor in the last few days. This allowed me to get some MCT oil this morning. Therefore, I can make bulletproof coffee they way I want to again. 
I am about to leave for the farmers market I don't have enough money to get anything, but I want to do some job hunting there. 
Oh! and I almost forgot I have little tomatoes on one of my tomato plants. 

Momentum in The Garden!

In my last post I was really excited about having a job. I am again without a job. Due to some safety issues and a distinct lack of job training I could not morally continue working there. 
I have been able to find some comfort in my garden. Today, I was given a bunch of tomato plants by my father. Some were from our neighbor, they are pear cherry tomatoes. Also. he gave me a bunch of volunteer tomatoes from our garden at home. I got all of them planted over on Moe's side of the garden.  Then I began the daunting task of adding more soil to my sweet potatoes. I did every other tower, so I still have four towers to finish. I am quickly running out of soil to fill in. The compost I brought from home is almost gone. There is a pile of mulch in the gardens that has turned mostly into soil, but I don't know how using that would effect my sweet potatoes. I put some of the mulch-compost in one of the tires already. I may be forced to use some more of that mulch-compost at some point. A result of adding more dirt to some of the potatoes is I had to juggle around some of the tires to make my towers taller. I started noticing that I have a few places in the garden that I could still plant!
I think in the one corner I want to try to get an herb garden. It will be hard cause I don't have any money to buy plants, but I cant let that stop me. 
The other thing I am noticing is how FREAKING many of those seed sprout radishes I have! Last year, I grew between a 5th and a 10th of what I am growing now. Based on how fast they are growing I would not be surprised if I got two crops of this stuff this summer. I got about one and a half cups of seeds from my single crop last year. About one table spoon of seeds makes one salads worth of microgreens. That is a Theodore sized salad! Based on some quick maths that is about 480 salads. Maybe with my other open plots I should try to grow some other kinds of microgreens so I have some variety in my winter salad selection. I love it when I have good ideas when I am writing this blog. Well back the garden!

Brief Update 6-19-2013

I have gotten a job painting houses. This by no means my job hunt is over, but with a pay check it will be less stressful. This job is tiresome work. Today, was cut short at only 10 hours. I should have been there 11. I think after a week or two when I am used to this long of days things will be much better. Needless to say I am tired so this is gonna be a short one.
Tuesday night, I decided to check my new hive later in the evening than I should have. They had built some comb on the inner cover. On the one hand that means they are settling in. On the other hand that is wasted time and effort on their part. By the time I was getting ready to open up the second box the bees were getting pretty feisty. I got one sting on the hand. Then quickly one on the neck and one right next to my left eye. I was loosing the light fast and decided to close them up and try again later. I still haven't gotten back in. I really want to do it all tomorrow. I guess it depends how slammed I get from work.
I have not been in my garden in a few days. Its also on my list.

Part Two: The Instillation

If you did not read part one go back and do that. 
I got home and ate lunch. When I had gotten the call I was fasting and it was almost lunch time. After two hours of frantic beekeeping I was very hungry.
After lunch I cut down a board to block the entrience. When you install a swarm you need to block them in for the first day or two because the bees still have the mentality to swarm. If you don't block them in they are likely to take off again. I then spent some time fighting with my smoker. That thing is very cool in theory, but in practice it leaves something to be disired. Finally, it was time to get the bees in their new home.
 I had seen Mike shake bees into a new hive once before. His method involved two violent bangs of the box. The first band on the bottom corner of the box to shake all the bees off the sides and lid of the box. Then whip the lid of box off, flip it over and bang the open end over the open hive. Unfortunately, this exact method would not work for me cause I had a shoe box inside my xerox box. I did my best to replicate the first two shakes. Then I had to pick up the shoe box in a cloud of bees and try my best to repeat the same process. However, with the shoe box the lid was attached so the whipping was not as easy. The bees were much calmer for this part than they had been for the collection. Therefore they put up with my antics. 
By the time I had gotten all that done my smoker had gone out. I went ad got some more cloth to burn and this time just lit it like a torch and blew it on the bees. This was about when Moe showed up. I put her in charge of smoking. I have seen beekeepers that just smoke cigarettes when beekeeping.  I started trying to get the feeder on the hive and close them in. 
We left the entrance unblocked for a few minutes so a few more bees could get in. Then I sealed them up and walked away. 
I had a superman costume to finish and after an afternoon of rescuing all these beautiful ladies I felt the part. 

Part One: Catching a Swarm

On Thursday, as I was making my superman cape, I got a phone call. It was from Mr. S. He had gotten a call about a swarm that he couldn't take. He gave me the number. I called it and took the address. It was in a woman's back yard. Her daughter had some bee hives back there and one had swarmed. They didn't want to deal with it so it was mine for the taking. No one was gonna be there when I got there so they told me to just let myself around to the back yard and have at it.
I hastily threw some tools in a shoe box and headed off to the house. About twenty minutes I got there and could see the swarm as clear as day. They were in a tree branch about 6 feet off the ground at the high end of the clump. Two things were clear to me at this point. One my Leathermen was not gonna cut that branch with its nips, so I would have to use the saw attachment. Second, the ability for that mass of bees to fit in a shoe box was questionable. 
I got to work. First thing, I set up the shoe box about 5 feet from the swarm and opened it. I dawned my "safety equipment". By safety equipment I mean I put on gloves and got my hair out of the way. Later I would be very glad for the gloves. Then, I grabbed the tree branch just above the mass of bees to steady it as I sawed. I got the branch off with out upsetting them too much. I walked them to the box and with one violent shake got about 80 percent off the branch. This part of the process, they did not like. Immediately four or five bees locked onto my right hand and started trying to sting me. As I ran away from the box/swarm/mess I was able to pull off that glove and only got one sting for my trouble. 
Over the next several minutes I managed to get the box closed. There was still small hole in the box. Theoretically if the queen is in the box and there is a whole the bees will smell her pheromones and march into the box to ball around her. That works in theory, but if you are trying to fit 5 or more pounds of bees roughly 20.000 bees into a shoe box they just can't fit. After about 20 minutes of staring at them really trying to fit themselves in the box I broke down and called Mike. 
"Mike?"
"Yeah?"
"I seem to have gotten my self in over my head catching a swarm. Any advice?
"What'd ya do?"
"I brought a shoe box and I should have brought something bigger." This next thing he said is what keeps me believing there are really good people in the world.
"Where are you?"
About 30 minutes later he was there with a Xerox paper box and a knowing smirk. All I had to do from there was lift up my shoe box and place it in the Xerox box. 
Mike then caught sight of the hive these people were keeping. I had been looking at it for the last hour as I waited. The bees were all lined up at the entrance facing in. Just sitting there. They weren't fanning or anything just sitting. Mike told me that they were getting ready to swarm again. This was a sign that they were way over crowded. Without another word he started taking two boxes from a dead hive next to it and taking the lid off the over crowded hive when he got the lid off they were jam packed in there. Also they were angry. We managed to get two new boxes on top of that hive and with in seconds the bees at the entrance moved back into the hive. It was really amazing that they were able to react that fast to the change in their hive. 
I put my box of bees in my back seat and thanked Mike for probably the 100th time. He told me "Don't give up now. Just cause this one didn't go so well" 
To which I said "Give up? I just now know I always need a bigger box!"
Then I drove home with 20,000 bees in my car. 
"Part Two: The Instillation" will be post tomorrow. 

Let them eat 3000 calories.

Recently I have been letting my focus on what I am trying to do here laps. Between Job hunting and beekeeping I am doing less food related things. This job hunting has really started to consume my focus. I have been trying to eat cleaner for the past two months or so. Mostly, through better sourced animal products. The primary result of this is that I am eating about 2000 calories a day. I don't preferentially track for calories, but I use a diet tracker "my fitness pal" that tells me where I stand in many ways including calories. I know from past experience that I feel and preform better when I am closer to 3000 calories. Though I have never eaten that much in the intermittent fasting method that I am now. Nor have I ever eaten that much of well sourced foods. 
These days I get up around 8 a.m. and drink a 30-30 bullet proof coffee. Which is coffee, coconut oil, butter, whey protein, and creatine. Then I am full till about 1 p.m. at which time I eat a good sized omelet. Then I have another meat based meal in the evening around 7 p.m. There is little snacking through out the day. However, I have noticed that when I spot the chocolate my mother stashes around the house I can't help myself. When I am purposefully eating a higher calorie diet it is much easier to resist this temptation. I have also recently been drinking too much hard cider. I think that has something to do with my being unhappy about the job hunt. 
In addition to the lighter calorie load I am also unable to consume the supplements I would like to. When I use the word supplement I don't really mean supplements, but its the best word for what I mean. I would ideally be adding MCT oil to my coffee in the morning. I also would like to be able to throw about 2 tbs of turmeric into my eggs everyday. When I eat more turmeric I notice a significant decrees in joint pain. For the last week I have noticed the tendinitis in my right index toe flair up, that is one of my early warning signs.
I don't mean to complain. I just wanted to post about my food. I endeavor to eat well and train well, but it has been difficult for the last several months. That is all

Name My Queen!

I opened up my bee's again today. I wanted to figure out a way to put a plank under this top bar hive to keep them a little warmer. When I did that though it got really wobbly, so its still just on the bricks. I also moved all the top bars down to the far end of the box and took out the divider.  I think the main problem this hive is having is that most of the bees that are in there are getting kinda old. Worker bees only live about two months. If a queen takes 16 days to develop and another 7 to 10 days to go and get mated then her eggs take 21 days to develop and emerge as worker bees. The bees running that hive are about 3/4s of the way through their lives by the time the new bees are ready to take up their role. 

Here she is though. 

The Queen 

I think on facebook I will have a naming competition. 

This is a bee on her way out. She was so old her wings were torn. But she was still working hard. 

Fun in the Bee Yard.

Yesterday I did some work down in my garden. I planted some more squash, buttercup and butternut. I also picked some of the salad greens and radishes and took it to the COBA bee yard for the pot luck. 

At the bee yard the cows were over visiting the bees and eating the mulberry trees. The cows really seem to love the bees. They come over to check it out when we are checking the hives a lot. I would have gotten closer to the cows for more pictures but I had some barbecued shredded beef from the COBA picnic and I think they may have been offended. 

At the meeting I met a queen breeder. She had all kinds of information about queens. She also gave me some good advice on how to get better pictures of my bees. I have been trying to just hold my phone really close, but she told me to hold it back some and use the zoom. She had really wonderful pictures of her queens. 

Oh! and some one brought garden fresh strawberries!

Phantom Queen

So the good news is I have a laying queen. The bad news is I have no evidence of my laying queen other than my own memory. 
Today, I got back into my hive to check on the progression of the two queen cells I installed last wednesday. According to how far along they were they should have been emerging today or tomorrow. However, they were both open and empty and in addition to that there was uncapped larva all over. These two facts mean that the queen cell that came with the bees that I have now must have been successful and I just missed her last week when looking. After some searching I found the queen, but when I went to get my phone to photograph her a worker started buzzing around my head and I had to step away. When I was finally able to return with my phone I couldn't find her again. 
Let me tell you she was beautiful though. I saw larva of all sizes which was really cool. When I looked down into the cells they were all curled up and some were no bigger than a grain of rice but some were almost bee sized. I took lots of pictures but sadly due to the sun they all look terrible. 

New Home.

Yesterday, I finished painting my new hive boxes! 

There is a new model home in my little neighborhood. Now I just need to find a nice family to move in. 

Reaping What I Sow.

Yesterday, I painted my new hive boxes and I got a lot done in my garden. That wasn't the important part of yesterday though. 

After all the work in my garden I sat in my adirondack chair with some cider and just enjoyed looking at my garden. Everything in that space I made happen. I built the chair I was sitting in. I gathered the tires My plants were growing in. I planted those plants. I built that fence. It was a wonderful feeling of accomplishment. 

Those three tomato plants are volunteer tomatoes that I found on the edge of my garden yesterday. 

Those are the brandywine tomatoes that I was given about three weeks ago. They are really taking off.

Those two tomato plants were one plant. When I moved them in to this space the top broke off the longer one. I thought I would stick broken off bit in the ground just to see what happened. Three weeks later its still alive and looking pretty good if you ask me. 

I found a tick. Nothing's perfect. 

Swarm Chasing!

Yesterday I spent all day riding around with a beekeeper, Mike. I met him through COBA. We started the day by inspecting a bee yard with three hives. The first hive had a lame Queen. She was not laying adequately. The second hive we opened seemed to have no Queen. It seemed that a worker bee had started laying in that hive. When workers start laying they lay only drone (male) brood. In the last hive we opened the bees were doing great there was nice brood pattern and they were clearly running out of space. Those last bees were even starting a new queen cell cause they wanted to swarm. This happens when bees get over crowded. We took the queen cell from that last hive and put it in the laying worker hive. 
After the hive inspections we drove all around central ohio. He had a list of different calls he had been sent on. We had two trap outs that were in trees and a cut out from a house. When you do a trap out you just get all the foragers and end up leaving the house bees, the Queen and all the structures inside the tree. In a house cut out you get to scoop all of it out. It turned out that Mike's ladder was too short and we couldn't reach either of the trees where the hives were. Then we drove an hour to get to this last house, with the cut out. 
When we got there it was raining. The house was clearly not currently inhabited, but being fixed up. No one was home. They had told him it was on the north east corner of the house. We waited out the rain. Then went up a ladder looking for any signs of bees in the northeast corner. Even after cutting away some of the eves there was no sign. So we looked around the house and on the north west corner I spotted the bees flying in and out. They were flying in and out right in between a coil of live power lines. There was just no way to get up there (two stories) on a ladder, and fiddle around with hive tools and power saws and get them out of there. Two hours on the road for nothing. That was the last call Mike had that day. 
We started driving back dejected. Suddenly Mike's phone starts ringing. Not five minutes down the road from his house, 45 minutes from where we were then, there's a swarm hanging on the side of some women's house. Speed limits stopped being a thing for Mike at this point. We got to that house to find this! 

The woman and her daughter were standing outside stairing at it like it was radioactive. That pile is about 4 inches thick in the middle, three to four pounds of bees. That means about 12,000 to 15,000 bees. Thats a lot of bees if you ask me. Mike and I got out the ladder and dawned bee jackets. My job was to stand under the swarm and hold the box as high over my head as I could. Mike climbed the ladder and used his hive tool to scrap the bees off the house into my box. Sophisticated stuff I know. The hole time they woman was asking us questions. I got to answer most of them and sound like I really knew what I was talking about. Little did she know this was my first time doing this. 

After, we got all the bees we took them back to the bee yard we looked at that morning. We pulled out the lame Queen and smashed her. Then we shook out most of the bees and dumped this new swarm in there. Before you get all worried about our killing all those other bees. We just killed her a few months earlier that nature would have. If she had not laid enough eggs and hatched enough bees by winter the whole hive would have froze. 

After all that excitement Mike and I went back to his house. He show me where he had some old beat up boxes and let me take two whole boxes with frames in it. I will have to pay for them some how at some point but until then I have a new hive to clean and fix up. Hopefully the next swarm we catch I will be ready for!