The last full wall to be filled in on the StarPlate chicken coop didn't have much space for board attachment, which is why I decided to install these boards on the inside.

Two weeks ago, I harvested our Italian Softneck garlic, and this week the Music and Silverwhite Silverskin were finally ready to join their precocious siblings on the curing racks.  It's shaping up to be a mediocre year for alliums, probably because of a cold winter, lack of sun during the critical bulking up period this spring, and perhaps mineral burn.  Although I'm a bit disappointed that my garlic heads are only 75% to 100% as large as storebought rather than 100% to 200% as large, we plant extra to hedge our bets, so we'll still enjoy a garlicky season.

Half of the potato onions were also ready this week (with the ones closer to the shady hill needing a bit more time).  Again, the bulbs were smaller than last year, but larger than the year before when I gave up on one variety and changed over to this one.  With the curing racks completely full of garlic, I had to cobble together makeshift arrangements for the onions.  Most went into old freezer baskets propped off the ground, but I'm hoping even the ones on this gutter downspout (not under the gutter) have enough airflow to dry well.

Completely unrelated, we're making the transition to raspberries, and loving every minute of it.  At the peak of strawberry season, I can't imagine wanting any other berries, but now that the quality is declining in the strawberry beds, the raspberries become my favorites.  A delicious quart full!

Found a can of good blue exterior paint that we got from the Lowes reject bin years ago.

There should be enough to do the underside and maybe a second coat.

I guess I'll be checking out the reject bin the next time I'm there...It's very convenient to have a can standing by for future projects.

Our new package hasn't done all that much, but they seem to have settled into their box of partially-drawn comb, and perhaps have drawn a bit more.  By listening at the side of each box, I gather that the top box is completely empty still, so the colony has plenty of room to spread out.  These guys are going through a quart of heavy sugar water every two to three days, but seem to be finding lots of wild food as well.  Since the workers are bringing home plenty of pollen, I'm assuming the queen is laying and the hive will be expanding soon.

Since I added two empty boxes to the bottom of our oldest warre hive, taking a photo up through the bottom only tells me so much.  But I'm guessing by the mass of bees I can see between the bottom box's bars (and by listening at the side of each box) that the bees have drawn comb in the next box up and are hard at work there.  They're also buzzing busily in the third box from the bottom, but the fourth box up has gone much quieter, suggesting it's full of capped honey.

Neither hive needs another box yet, but I'm going to keep a close eye on them since the basswood buds look nearly ready to open.  This has been a stellar year for nectar, and I suspect that with the help of the basswood, I'll be getting an appreciable harvest from the older warre hive despite their swarm.

Adding a proper hitch coupler to the ATV bucket hauler turned out to be easy.

One of the top holes lines up with the Haul Master tongue. The other hole is just barely off. Securing the first hole with a bolt and nut makes for the perfect drill guide for the second hole.

I topped it off with a somewhat toxic adhesive to keep the nuts from loosening. Since Toluene was banned in Europe in 2004 for sale to consumers I make sure to not get any on my skin.

Creating a Life Together, by Diana Leafe Christian, is a step-by-step guide for building intentional communities.  Rather than summing up the key points the way I usually do in my book reviews, though, I want to take this opportunity to go off on a tangent and explore one of the exercises the book recommends as part of a community visioning process.  The idea is to write about times when you've felt like part of a community or a shared group activity, then to use these recollections to consider what makes community-building work for you specifically.

Beyond my family, the first community I met was the science-fiction club at college, which turned out to be a sort of non-drinking, non-gender-specific, geeky fraternity.  In retrospect, it's easy to see why the community worked so well --- we had shared interests, we ate nearly every lunch and dinner together (four meals a week is the book's recommendation as the minimum shared meals in a community), most of us went to folk-dance classes together (shared movement seems to bond people), and we had a high tolerance for unconventional or even problematic members (since that was most of us at one time or another).  On the other hand, our club had a seamy underbelly in that people who attended fewer events were considered para-club members, and they were never really included.  Later, I was to discover that this aspect holds true across many communities and makes it tough for introverts to find a good balance of personal space and community involvement.

During my year abroad, I spent four months in Monteverde, Costa Rica, where a band of expatriat American Quakers had developed an intentional community in the midst of Hispanic culture.  Although my father is a Quaker, he didn't convert until I was a teenager and he didn't drag the rest of us along with him, so I was definitely in the "para" category in Monteverde.  (My short-term stay also put me in that category, since the community sees lots of lookie loos passing through and can't commit limited energy to each one of them.)  So even though I was inspired by the community potlucks, their shared library accessible by walking paths, and the way they seemed to involve their Costa Rican neighbors, I never felt like part of the Monteverde community.

Fast forward ahead a decade, and Mark and I had settled a mile down the road from another intentional community.  After a few years of sporadically attending their events (and perhaps because most of them knew my parents during the 70s and 80s), there were even noises about asking us to join.  I like my crazy experiments (no way urine fertilizer and trailersteading were going to fly there), and I'm just too antisocial to live that close to anyone except Mark, so we graciously declined.  Again, we've ended up in a para-community situation, although this time I feel a little closer to the core because we're definitely in the area for the long haul and we share many of the community's ideals.

But we still miss having like-minded friends our own age around.  (As you probably gathered, the neighboring intentional-community members are primarily from our parents' generation.)  So Mark and I have considered crazy community-building concepts of our own from time to time.  We'd tossed around the idea of buying up a large tract of land, planning it as a community, then selling tracts to interested and interesting folks.  Or perhaps finding a couple-sized homestead nearby and partnering with someone who might trade labor for the cost of the land.  Or finding a partner to do the day-to-day work but being involved in the bigger-picture planning and implementation of an educational/internship program.  The truth is, though, that even if we found just the right people, neither Mark nor I has the socializing budget to put in the hours required to build a real community from scratch.

Which brings me to my main complaint about Creating a Life Together (and the intentional-community movement it portrays so well).  Even though most of the communities in the book are located in rural settings, they're essentially country homes for city people --- the inhabitants generally come from urban areas, they live clustered together on their new land, and they are presumably highly-social people.  There's a short segment titled "Creating privacy in the midst of community," but the page basically consists of telling you to plan your house so you can feel alone when you're indoors.  Isn't the whole point of homesteading to be able to do whatever you want outdoors?

So here's my thought-question for our readers.  Have you ever met a community that adequately involves introverts without draining their social energy past their limits?  Or is community really just for extroverts, no matter where it's located?

The ATV bucket hauler is near completion.

Adding the plywood extension will increase the capacity from 6 buckets to 12.

I guess I should paint the wood red to match the tongue, but will most likely go with whatever exterior paint I can find in the barn.

Even though the technical name for strawberries that crop all at once is "June-bearing," our June-bearers are usually May-bearers.  This year's cool spring pushed the fruits forward in time, but even so, we're nearing the end of our harvest season.  Monday, I put the last load in the dehydrator (bringing us to over two gallons of strawberry leather preserved for winter), and ever since we've been gorging on a mere 3 quarts a day.

Next year, matters will be different because we'll once again have a late-bearing variety to join our early and midseason varieties.  I ordered 25 Sparkle strawberries from Nourse Farms and have been highly impressed by the plants' vigor.  The roots were about four times as large as those I got from Burgess last year, and the plants are already trying to bloom.  (I snip the flowers off so we'll get good crops next year.)

In the meantime, we're eating red raspberries, the first black raspberries, and are hoping the blueberries and gooseberries start to bear before the last strawberries disappear.  It's so sweet to have eaten no storebought fruit for weeks.

Got 2 more walls on the StarPlate chicken coop done today.

Next up is the roof, a nice door, and 2 half wall sections next to the door.

Even though I didn't mention it on my post about fungal-disease prevention, another big facet of my campaign is summer pruning.  This is something I do anyway to allow light to hit fruits and to prevent trees from putting too much energy into watersprouts, but the process has a side effect of letting fruits dry off faster so they're less prone to blights.

With that in mind, I started wondering if thinning the fall-fruiting canes of my everbearing raspberries was in order.  I thin out the overwintering canes so the spring-bearing shoots are spaced apart, but last year I felt I should have repeated the endeavor in early summer to get larger fall berries.  The raspberry patches had turned into quite a thicket this year (even more so than usual), so my urge to thin was also prompted by wanting to be able to see the currently ripening fruits during this first harvest season of the year.

This is an experiment (so replicate it at your own risk) since I've never read about anyone thinning their raspberries in the summer.  But it felt right --- the photos above both show the patch after thinning out over half of the fall shoots, and you can tell the canes are still quite dense.  As an added benefit, I was able to layer the cut-off stems (and any weeds I found in the patch) along the sides of the row to top off the mulch.

Of course, I'm also thinning the trees I usually visit at this time of year (primarily the peaches, although heavy fruit set has resulted in fewer watersprouts this year than usual).  When I stopped by our largest fig, I wasn't sure whether it needed any pruning, but I did decide to rip up any small shoots around the trunk.  It turns out three had already rooted!  If I didn't kill them by leaving them in a bucket of water during a blazing afternoon, these baby figs will go into pots with my other rooting cuttings and then into the ground this fall.

The last item on my summer-pruning agenda is the black raspberries and blackberries, who get their tops pinched instead of being thinned.  Looks like we'll be adding another variety to our daily berry harvest soon!