Honey bees at Mulberry Farm

Two weeks ago this past Sunday my brother got a call about a swarm of honey bees at a friends house. We went right over and found that they were about 18 inches off the ground on a guy wire to a power pole in the guys side yard. A fine bunch of bees. We were slightly worried that the queen may be inside the yellow plastic covering that the owner company uses on the bottom ten feet or so of the guy wires but no problem she wasn't. It took us a few tries to get all the bees into the box. We finally just stopped and watched, some of the bees at the entrance of the hive started fanning with their butts up in the air. This is a dead giveaway that the queen was in the hive. It was a couple of hours before dark by now so we left the hive in place for any scout bees that would come back. Well it turns out that we left the hive there for four more days just due to scheduling conflicts.
On Thursday night I went and retrieved the hive and brought it home. I carefully sealed the entrance with a stick of wood an a couple of screws. This is when I got my first sting. As I was lifting the hive box to put it into the truck it slid off to the side of the bottom board just enough for a few bees to get out. As I lifted I held the hive against my stomach mashing a bee. BAM she popped it to me. I know that it was completely my fault that I got stung because these bees have shown themselves to be completely gentle during all of the handling that I done to them since then. When I got them home I put them on a couple of cinder-blocks to keep the hive up off the ground.
Friday morning I removed a 2 inch chunk of the wood blocking the entry. It only took a few minutes for the bees to find the feeder jar just outside of the hive and get right to work moving the sugar water. The feeder jar is just a pint mason jar with five small holes punched into the lid. Once it is turned upside down a vacuum form in the jar to hold the feed in place till the bees suck it from the holes.
The area where we live is definitely in the country and there is lots of forage for the bees. Two days and 4 pints of sugar water later and they are bringing pollen into the hive. We feed them for one week and they haven't missed a beat. The only problem that I've found since then is that they have taken over one of the hummingbird feeders the wife puts out. No biggy though.
I've ordered frames, smoker, and a hive tool from Dadant as they are the closest supplier around here. Also built two more deep boxes as I had a couple of 8 foot 1x12 pine boards in the shop. The frames will be filled with pure beeswax foundations when they get her in a couple of days. It won't be a minute too soon as I was checking the hive day before yesterday I discovered that we had left an empty frame slot in the hive box and the bees are starting to build comb from the cover, not something that I can let them do.
I hope to get pictures and an update here when the supplies arrive.

Aquaponics at Mulberry Farm

Aquaponics at its cheapest

I'm thinking that I first read about aquaponics, a combination of hydroponics and aquaculture about 4 years ago. I was instantly intrigued with the notion of growing plans and fish in the same system. I had known about hydroponics for quiet a long time and was toying with the idea of trying it out. At the time I had watched for over a week as it rained and rained and flooded my garden to the point of killing some of the plants. So I was on the web reading about hydroponics when I came across this site that used a re-purposed IBC tote to grow fish and plants. I just had to try and do this.
Within 2 weeks I had my tote and was happily cutting away at it.
Using the top section that was cut off for the grow bed.
However finding a medium for planting in that was cheap wasn't easy. The stuff most folks were using Hydro-ton, little clay balls was very expensive and not readily available in my area. Some people were using small gravel but this seemed too heavy for the simple structure that makes up the grow-bed. Then I found out about expanded clay that is used for light weight concrete. There is a cement plant about 15 miles from here and they were happy for me to have all of the light weight aggregate that I could load as it was a left over from a job from years ago. This stuff was full of poison ivy and weeds from being left in one spot for so long. I managed to get enough of it cleaned up that day to get 12 five gallon buckets. This turned out to be enough to fill my first grow-bed. Now a trip to the discount store for a pump. Did I mention that this whole thing needed to be cheap to build?  Two years later I'm on the second pump. The first one was too cheap and only lasted about 8 months. The new pump is from a big box lumber store and has a two year warranty. The pumps for these systems are small needing a flow equal to the total volume of the tank to be pumped in one hour. A year an a half later and this one is still going strong. I think that I'll try a solar powered one after this one. This one uses only about $0.70 cents of electricity per month so the solar one will have to be cheap to buy and last a long time as well. The pump runs full time filling the grow-bed with fish waste water. As it reaches a preset level the water overflows into a siphon pipe that drains the grow bed back into the fish tank even as the pump continues to fill it. The whole process takes about  minutes to do a cycle. So the grow bed fills and drains 3 times per hour.
As there are lots of sites on the internet that tell how and why these systems work I won't go into a lot of detail here.
What I can say is that of the plants that I've tried cabbage,bunching green onions, and mustard greens. They have all flourished. This year I'm trying tomatoes and bell peppers as well and so far it seems like they are wide open an growing. I will follow up as the season progresses. I am hoping that the tomatoes will drape over the sides and stop some of the sunlight entering the tank.

4 Catfish and 4 berm those marshmallow looking things are pieces of floating fish food. We are thinking about adding a dozen or so of goldfish to help boost plant nutrients 

Green bunching onions are over 2 years old.
I just keep pulling them up breaking them apart
and putting them back in. I need to add a wooden
rail of some sort to cover those pieces of steel frame
from poking me when I work around this thing!  

Where we're at now

Welcome to

Mulberry Farm

Today is April 22, 2015 and we've come a long way since moving in. We haven't did a lot to the house yet besides tear out two small closets that were back to back an make one large one for the wife and me. New handicap toilets for the extra height that they provide. I'm getting a little older and it's not as easy to get up from the lower models of some toilets. Also tore out a cabinet on the washroom back porch to make room for the upright freezer. The back porch is totally enclosed with windows on the two exterior walls so it makes a great laundry room as well as doubling as a place for a storage pantry of all the canned goods that came with us and the ones that we'll do this year. The dogs Pam and Alpo also have their kennels there as well.
We installed a timer for the electric water heater

 so that it runs 8 hours a day instead of 24. According to the label on the heater it will cost $408.00 per year to run it. If i run it for 1/3 of the total hours it should save about $272.00 per year. The timer will pay for itself in a little over two months.
A few weeks after we moved in I talked with the foreman of the tree farm that is our neighboring property to the south, and asked him make up a few rows for a garden. Well I ended up with four rows about 48 inches wide and 144 feet long. Waaaay more than what I needed. Especially since I didn't have a tiller or any way to work the area. I went from no garden to one that covers over 2800 square feet. WAAAY more than what I needed. I've since purchased a 4 tine potato type fork and a friend gave me a Mantis gas tiller, LOL, but if you break up the row with the fork the tiny tiller works pretty good. How do you eat an elephant......

20 feet at a time

I've planted about 20 feet on three of the rows so far.

The same evening that the rows were made it rained 2 1/2 inches. If you ever need it to rain just invite me over to start a garden or a building project.
Having said that in the last month or so I've managed to plant a 4 foot by 4 foot block of sweet corn that's as many as 64 stalks of corn, I really need to hoe this area badly.

A 20 foot block of red potatoes,

 3 eggplants

I've learned that any more than 3 eggplants for my family of 3 leads to neighbors who close the door when they see you coming with more eggplant.

5 bell peppers 

Really the grass just looks bad, yea I know break out the hoe.

5 Gypsy peppers sort of like a yellow wax pepper,

15 hills of pole snap beans, you can never have too many green beans, these  are Kentucky Blue one of my favorites

7 okra, should be more than enough, I got to hoe these yesterday

3 hills of small pie type pumpkins, 5 hills of black diamond water melon, and a

15 foot row of sunflowers. 

I also have two bell peppers, 2 tomatoes one each Arkansas traveler and one Mortgage lifter and 2 bunches of green onions in the aquaponics set up.

The onions do very well in this setup the tomatoes and peppers are an experiment. I've grown mustard greens and cabbage in this as well. It was amazing that in the winter two years ago that the whole grow bed and about 4 inches on top of the water froze solid with no noticeable affect to the plants. We've only managed to use a small portion of the garden so far. In fact while I was mowing the day before yesterday I cut the grass on top of the rows so it wouldn't look so bad.
We will probably eat some of the corn but save the best for seed. I also hope to save seeds from everything else except the pepper plants. The peppers are not open pollinated types.

Naming the farm

Well it seems like everyone who has a blog about their small farm or homestead has a neat name for it. This is how I came to name ours Mulberry Farm. We moved into the new place on January 15, 2015. Well it's new to us. The house has been here for at least 40 years that I can tell and maybe more than that. It once belonged to a fellow that was a distant cousin to my grand mother on dads side of the family. I didn't know this when we first looked at the property. But that's not why I decided to call it Mulberry Farm.
Just this past Monday while I was cutting the grass and making circles around a large decaying tree in the back yard I noticed little green, red, and black fruit hanging from one of the twig like branches about eye level. I stopped the mower and looked up into the living branches of the tree and was astounded to see loads of mulberries in various stages of ripening. This is the same tree that I wanted to cut down just a few months ago due to the sad shape of its branches. When the ornamental pear trees bloomed and this one didn't I figured it was dead. Little did I know that it was just waiting for some warmer weather to show its true colors. This tree is about 30 inches in diameter where comes out of the ground it's one of the biggest mulberry trees that I've ever seen.
Sure glad I didn't cut it down. Now if I could just find a way of invigorating it.