We made the Black Soldier Fly shelf long to accommodate a propane stove top.

Next up is to figure out how to match up the small connector to the big one on a regular tank of propane commonly sold at grocery stores around here.

Mark and I were thrilled to get our summer purchase of straw last month...until it started to sprout.  That's right, I laid down several bales of straw in the vegetable garden as mulch, figuring the straw would do its usual weed-suppressing job, but the mulch turned out to be a source of weeds.  Looking more closely, I saw that the grain heads were full of seeds --- seems like our supplier forgot to thresh before he baled.

Mark's immediate answer was: "Let's buy a flame weeder!"  But I decided to try a low-tech solution first.  As I've been weeding this week, I've grabbed hunks of seedling-filled straw and flipped it over as a unit.  I'm hopeful that the baby grain plants will be smothered by this cruel treatment and will give up the ghost.

In the meantime, I'm setting aside the rest of these bales of straw to use as deep bedding in the coop, where our chickens will be glad to remove the grains.  Looks like we'll have to hit up the feed store for some replacement straw for the garden.

I built a bench like shelf for our new Black Soldier Fly project today.

A big upside down lid makes a good water moat to keep ants away.

The goal is to cultivate enough grubs to supplement the chickens' diet.

We ran of our storage onions this year in May --- better than most years, but still leaving me with a two-month drought.  With most vegetables, I simply substitute or do without if our crop isn't sufficient, but I can't quite imagine cooking without onions.  So we ended up buying a few bags at the store (plus planting 20% more to feed us over the next year).

We learned the hard way that garlic just doesn't taste quite right until it's been cured, but onions are ready to go in the soup pot as soon as they reach full size.  I haven't even harvested most of our onions out of the garden yet, but I've been pulling the biggest ones for soup for the last week or two.  It seems like we can never freeze enough soup or grow enough onions --- maybe those two problems are related....

It took a few minutes of trickle charging to get the ATV going today.

I cleaned the contacts last week due to a low charge and I guess the short trip from here to our parking area wasn't enough to charge it up.

I've come to understand that a natural beekeeper's primary job is to make sure the bees have just enough space to continue working without wearing themselves out patrolling large expanses of empty hive.  So, when the third box of our mother hive went from looking like the top photo to looking like the bottom photo in a mere seven days, I figured I'd better give them some room to grow.

The question was --- should I add the extra box to the top or to the bottom of the hive?  In general, Warre beekeepers nadir instead of super, meaning that empty boxes are added to the bottom rather than to the top of a hive.  The theory is that keeping the lid on the hive and simply hoisting the whole thing up to put a new box underneath causes less disruption to the critical heat and scent within the brood chamber.  In the past, I have only nadired Warre hives, and last week I added the third box to our daughter hive at the bottom, as usual.

However, once a Warre hive has more than two boxes mostly full of brood and honey, it becomes much less feasible to nadir the hive without rigging a lift (or roping two more people into helping you).  In addition, this excellent page suggests that supering is really the best way to add extra boxes onto a booming Warre hive during a heavy summer nectar flow.  In case you don't want to read the long version, the gist is that bees only build down as quickly as they need the space for brood, adding honey into cells above the brood chamber as young bees vacate that space.  So during heavy nectar flows, nadiring simply doesn't give the bees enough room to store the sweet liquid as quickly as it comes in.

With that data in mind, I opted to super the mother hive (and then to clean up the weeds around the hive entrance, a task that was long overdue).  Before supering, a quick peek down into the top box proved that the upper chamber was full of capped honey, so hopefully that buffer will mean taking the top off the hive had less impact on that all-important brood chamber.  And if this flow keeps up, we might get a box or two of honey this fall despite slowing our mother hive down by splitting her in half this spring!

I had to replace the flywheel shaft key on the lawn mower today.

It's my second flywheel shaft key, and it went faster this time. Less than 30 minutes.

The things I'd like to remember for next time would be try not to forget the bell shaped spacer that goes on top of the flywheel and the oil spout goes first before putting the gas tank back on.

I'd been planning on setting out our newly grafted apple trees into the tree alleys in the starplate pasture this winter, but my gut says the soil there isn't ready to support tree growth.  Sure, the texture looked great when I dug into it last winter --- well-drained and loose --- but plants have been slow to colonize the bare soil.  In our climate, all I should have to do is avert my eyes if I want weeds to grow over my head, and instead, the ground is still spottily covered with bits of grass and white clover despite the copious addition of chicken manure from our pastured flock and the last mowing over a month ago.  As a result, I figure those tree alleys need another year or two of TLC before I put beloved perennials in place. 

So...what am I to do with 11 beautiful apple trees?  Even though a late frost kept our two-year-old high-density apples from fruiting this year, I've been very happy with the vibrant growth resulting from the training method.  So I decided to keep this new round of apples small and closer to home using similar high-density methods.  Sure, if I train the trees to stay diminutive, I'll probably end up getting fewer apples from each plant, but I suspect I'll get the same or more total apples since close-to-home trees are more likely to survive and thrive.

Time to find gaps to fill!  I have five trees on M7 rootstock (usual spacing 12-15 feet) and six trees on MM111 rootstock (usual spacing 15 to 20 feet) to play with, so if I planted them traditionally, they would take up most of our garden.  However, the M7s should make good espaliers along the front of the trailer and the MM111s can be trained to the high-density method if I space them at least five feet apart (based on this handy calculator).  I'm curious to hear from folks who have played with espaliering --- do you think a six-foot spacing for apples on M7 rootstock will work?  And, given that I'm most interested in productivity over beauty, which shape would you recommend?

I first started using these cheap plastic hose repair kits 4 years ago.

There's been no trouble with any of the repairs all this time.

I used the last one today after a mower mishap.

It seems like I reinvision the forest garden every couple of years, always thinking this new plan is going to turn a problem zone into an area of bountiful harvest.  So take what I write here with a grain of salt.  But, really, I think I've got it this time!

This year's reinvision is the result of rain and rodents.  When voles girdled the three apple trees that were supposed to grow into the canopy of the forest garden, I finally had to admit that those trees had been ailing for quite some time.  The issue in the forest garden is the same as in the neighboring back garden --- high groundwater drowns anything with roots more than two or three inches below the surface in the winter.  I've worked hard to build tree mounds up out of the wet using copious organic matter (logs, branches, leaves, weeds, manure, etc.), but as the plant materials inevitably break down, my trees' roots end up right back down in the submerged zone.  As of this year, the only perennials that are thriving in the so-called forest garden are a hazel bush and tons of comfrey.  Time to change gears.

The first thing I'm admitting is that high groundwater probably does mean a poor place for trees.  All of my soil amendments have created a rich layer of topsoil, but the quality dirt soon gives way to waterlogged clay that kills deep-rooted plants in the winter.  While I could keep working to make the forest garden a tree habitat, chances are I'd be better off using my efforts to turn it into a shrub and herb (in the botanical, not the culinary, sense) playground.


However, raising the planting zone up out of the groundwater enough to keep a foot or so of soil dryish does seem feasible now that I've experimented with a sky pond and chinampas.  Both have worked quite well, with Mark's only complaint being loud toads singing on spring nights (requiring him to turn on a fan before bed).  Why not combine the two winning strategies, using dug-out aisles to raise the planting surface while gently sloping excess water toward a sky pond at the lowest point?  As a bonus, I'll get to discover whether a sky pond with no gleying will hold water as well as the experimental one I semi-gleyed last year.  And, as Mark said tongue in cheek, we really need more toads.  Right?  Who doesn't!?