April 1st

No not April fools day just the first of the month. Things have been crazy with the bees here lately. My brother and I have collected 14 of the last 16 swarms that have been found or offered to us around here. Four of these have been from the hives that were here on the homestead and the others from folks calling or the eagle eye of my brother. He can spot a swarm hanging in a tree while driving down the road at any speed. Most of the spotting has been at low speed thank God. But it is uncanny how he does it. As close as the side of the road to as far as 100 yards out behind the house in a jumble of saplings that passes as a planting of trees for management purposes. We now have 14 hives here and 4 more at his house. Can I tell you we get from 1 to 3 swarms a day and have now for about 2 weeks. We can't even build enough boxes to keep the new arrivals happy much less the ones that have been here for a year now.
On a good note Sutherlands a store in Alexandria that has anything you want or think that you need. This is a store with anything from building materials to bluejeans. Gardening supplies to grills has started carrying beekeeping supplies. A little expensive but real handy for things that you don't want to have to make or wait on a small order for. We bought all of the deep frames and foundation that they had in stock day before yesterday. There will be more in on this coming Tuesday.
Oh yes and I have to tell that I did a bad thing this past Monday. I sold 2 single box hives to a couple of local guys without telling my brother. I had to promise not to do it anymore. He wasn't happy but it didn't last long because we caught 3 swarms the next day and the money from the sale made it possible for us to shop for supplies without having to come up with anything out of pocket.
We may start a small business building hive bodies and frames out of cypress lumber that brother's eldest son cuts and mills locally. This is what we've been building boxes out of for the last two weeks and it makes some really fine boxes. This should do away with the need for painting the bodies as well as the cypress turns to a really beautiful shade of gray left on it's own. I guess it depends on if we can produce them at a reasonable cost.
Did I mention that there is a YouTube channel involved with this blog now? If you go to YouTube.com Aand type in itsmesrd in the search window it will take you to my channel. So far there is only a few videos one on transferring a nuc hive to a full size box and one showing how to can pork. The technique used in the pork video will work for any meat that you would want to can.
Follow the link for a video of me working the bees
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mfby_wr8fw

A light frost last night

Today is the 21st of March and we had a light frost last night. The temp was 34 when I got up this morning but must have dipped lower at some point last night. The Irish potatoes at the far western end of the row show some slight damage but not enough to outright kill them. I hope. The ones at the beginning of the row show no damage at all. It's a good thing that I closed the lid on the cold frame yesterday evening or all of the tomato and bell peppers that have come up from last years seed would have surely not made it. Last Friday brother and I made a trip to Mansura to pick up his car from the mechanics shop and on the way home I picked up some transplants from the local nursery. I got 6 Cherokee purple, 6 Creole, and 6 cherry tomatoes. As well as 6 egg plant and 6 bell peppers. The ones in the cold frame are not quite ready to be put out. Funny how I always end up with too many plants and not enough space in the garden.
The corn is up and shows no damage from the frost and really is probably ready for a side dressing of fertilizer. I'll probably hit the beets and carrots with some at the same time. Ineed to hill up the potatoes also. I am going to try using the mulch that I got from the molding shop for this an see how it work out. Some of the potatoes that I planted late summer last year were planted in this mulch an did pretty good. I had several folks tell me that it wouldn't work  but the potatoes didn't seem to know that. They didn't get real big, about the size of a tennis ball, but tasted just fine.

Bees Swarm

Well I've put off posting this as long as I can. Earlier this week maybe Wednesday the Easter hive swarmed on me. It's not like they didn't give any advance warning or anything like that. We had a really wet week the previous week and there were actually bees bearded on the outside of the hive during the 4.5" that we got last Friday. I know I know what's the matter with you fat boy can't you see and understand if all the bees can't fit in the hive during a storm then they are bound to swarm.
It all started while I was putting a few bulbs in the bed next to the hydrangeas and I heard this buzzing sound. I stopped and listened for a few seconds and knew it sounded like bees. Looking over at the bee yard and there is a cloud of bees that looks like it's 15 feet in diameter floating up from the Easter hive. They didn't stop till well ensconced on a pine tree limb about 30 feet in the air. There was nothing I could do... except put the trap hive I'd been working on last week on top of a 24 foot ladder tieing another ladder to it making an a-frame monstrosity that didn't fool them for a minute.
After my wife and I got this thing up we sat down and waited. Within 30 minutes while we were watching a softball sized clump of bees fell from the swarm and exploded in flight within 10 minutes the whole swarm was 60 feet off the ground headed southeast. I tried to follow behind them with a big cardboard box in hand. Half an hour later my wife found me about half a mile from the house in the middle of the tree farm next to our place. The bees... nowhere in site.
All I can say is I'm trying to do better. I've built new boxes and installed them on the hives that John and I transferred the week before. See this link for one such transfer, five frame nuc to full sized box
Now I need to get 5 other hives down the road home and worked also.

Nuc to full size box

 Nuc to full sized box

This past weekend John and I finally moved the last of the three Nuc hives that we have to a full sized 10 frame box.
Click the link for a video.
https://youtu.be/2mfby_wr8fw
We both know now that he should hold the camera sideways to get a full frame shot. Hopefully we can post more a little later.
Beets are up.
The beets that were planted mid February are growing wide open. It took a full two weeks for them to germinate.They are an experimental planting. Just to see how late in spring beets could be planted and still make something before bolting into seed. We'll see if the planting dates that LSU suggested will actually work. The latest date they gave was the 28th of February. With our early spring, thanks Phil, I am wondering if they will make it.
I have a good collection of used bricks and several old wood framed windows. So I put together as a cold frame in the garden to get a start of tomatoes, bell peppers, and egg plants. So far only some of the tomatoes are coming up. I think that the soil isn't quite warm enough for the others.
Hope to get around to canning some pork meat today, that should be the next post.

Spring 2016

Well it's been a while since I've updated anything so here we go.
Finally made it thru 2015 it was a long year. seems funny how time goes by sometimes in flashes and other times as if crawls by.
Picked up 4 more bee hives this past year. I don't have them on the homestead yet, they are about 1 mile south of us right now. Will move them when the Ligustrum starts to bloom. There is about 1 and a hale acres of it about 300 yards to the southeast of us on the tree farm. The plan for this year is to really work with the bees. I posted earlier that brother and I had caught a swarm and brought them home. Well they are wide open by now. I've built and added two full size supers that were added to the top of the original one that we put the swarm into last spring. I will have to check them during the next sunny day we have to make sure that they aren't planning on swarming. If so I will split them and make two hives. It's been in the upper 60's and partly sunny for the last few days, but I've let other folks take up some of the time that should have I should have had spent here working the garden and bees and such.

LSU puts out a planting guide that gives dates to plant what and how long it should take to mature. So I've planted a 4 foot by 5 foot area of the garden in beets yesterday and will do carrots today. This is first time I've ever planted these in the spring. Next up is corn on the 15th of February and planting another area of corn every 4 weeks after that until the middle of June. Then Pole snap beans, Irish potatoes, and turnips by the end of February.
I'll post pics in the next few days.

Farm update June 8th 2015

The plants are really going wild in the fish tank. We've picked 3 tomatoes and 2 bell peppers so far. I'm trying to get a gutter set up on a portion of the garage to catch water for the fish. On one of the last really heavy rains that we had the fish tank was in danger of running over so I opened the valve at the bottom of the tank just a tad bit to drop the level... you guessed it, later that day I realized that it was still draining the tank so the water level is about 2 feet lower than it should be. I'll add pictures a little later.

One of the ongoing projects here is to get the south side yard set up with a brick paved patio. We had about 250 bricks from an old fireplace that a friend let me have just to get that part of his yard cleaned up. A pretty good haul but not quite enough to do the job. Well I've had my eye peeled while driving back and forth to Bunkie and have spotted at least 3 fireplaces that will never be used again. So ask and see all the owner can say is yes or no. Well it turns out that one of them that said no has changed her mind and let me have the fireplace that was left after the old house that used it before was destroyed by termites and then fire. I've been getting about 100 bricks a day for the past few days and should have a total of about 400 when the job is complete. These added to the ones we already have should just about make the patio happen. Now I need to get a couple of yards of sharp sand for the base. I hope to have pictures of that soon as well.
The garden is doing great considering that I don't commit very much time to taking care of it. Still have a problem with grass but we've started picking green beans every other day, a few bell peppers, Gypsy peppers, okra and fresh new potatoes, as well as 2 ears of sweet corn. The pumpkins are down to just one plant but what a plant it is going wide open and has at least 5 baby pumpkins on it now. I've also planted a patch of zinnias  for the bees.

The BEES are doing great even better than I thought they would. they have almost filled the top box that I added a few weeks ago. They are flying from first light to almost dark hauling pollen and nectar as fast as they can. The worries that I had of causing a slow down when I had to remodel some of the brood comb that they had attached to the top cover of the bee box seems not to have had too much of an affect on them.

Also go a new bulb planter shovel.Works even better than the little one that I started with. Pictures a little later

Pecan Trees

We had something happen just last week that really surprised me. There is a rather large pecan tree on the south side of the house that makes the small size pecans. Think about the end of your little finger. It made a bumper crop last year and had only one guy picking them, consequently there were quite a few left on the ground this spring. Well last week the came up! Yep seems like every last one. Now I've seen a lot of pecan trees come up from the nuts missed last fall picking but never in the number that we have here now.

This shot real doesn't do justice to the number of seedlings that are in our front yard. There are at least 200 baby trees.

Now if you've ever tried grafting trees the best root stock for for the grafting is going to be a hardy native tree species.

One of the local nurseries will give me $5 for each of the seedlings that make it to the one year old mark. The price goes up from there for every year older that the trees get. 

The best way that I could think of to get the seedlings up and into pots is a bulb shovel. The wife just happened to be in Alexandria the day that I had the idea for potting up the baby trees. She was able to get me one at a local big box.

Just center the seedling in the opening give it a good push and twisting action till the little tree spins around with the shovel as you're twisting it.

I tried to get at least 4 inches deep on each of the baby trees that way if I did happen to not get all of the tap root, it was only a very small portion that was exposed during uprooting and re-potting procedure.

Here are the seedlings potted up and under a red gum tree on the south side of the garage. Also on the left side of this picture are some wild persimmons that I got from seeds last fall. There are 50 pecan and 46 persimmons seedlings here. Those 4 spindly little trees right up front are black locust.

The chicken found out that there were bugs and stuff in the trash bag that I used to collect the persimmon seeds last year. Once they had broken the bag open the ants moved in to eat the rotting persimmons. Along with them came a ant nest with dirt and there you have it a bag full of persimmon seedlings. The hunters around here love to plant them on their food plots.

This is the tree that all the seedlings came from the coke can for scale. The seedlings will probably be at least 3 years old before I try to do any grafting on them. I may sell them before that.