PeaceCrops | Page 10

Muth Jars

Posted on August 18, 2013 by jim

It’s honey season once again in the Nehalem river valley. How time flies (and bees too!).

This year, we thought we’d experiment with some new packaging. Back in the early 1900s, there was a glass jar company called “Muth” that made some really cool looking, apothecary-type honey jars. A few companies still make them in small batches as a novelty, so we ordered two cases to try when bottling our honey. We noticed last year that a portion of our shoppers last season bought honey as a gift- so what better way to package that, than in an antique glass bottle with a cork stopper sealed with wax? The packaging and prep time is much higher, but they are so darn cute and really got a lot of attention at the market yesterday. I sent a picture to my beekeeper buddy Mark, joking “this is how you sell honey for $16 a pound.” We have an interesting difference in the honey market, between where we are on the Oregon coast and where he is in Amish country on the Indiana-Ohio border. He gets about 4 times a much honey per hive as we do… we live in a wet climate with short cool summers that gives us half the national average of production. His region has long, hot summers, and he’s surrounded by farmers with forageable crops, ideal for bees and often giving twice the national average of honey per hive.

However, his economic climate does NOT work in his favor. There are many beekeepers in his area, and the market is flooded with honey in the fall, driving prices down. In contrast, I am one of only two beekeepers in my county selling honey at the markets, and I live in a area populated mostly by liberal people who are looking for local honey for its health benefits, and tourists… both of who are willing to pay a premium for an exceptional product that is of limited quantity. It’s an interesting contrast.

And in other news, the house is still rolling along, slowly. We’ve framed in the gable wall at the sleeping loft, and installed the first round window. Now I need to get the roof off, the dormer built, and the new roof installed before the rainy season returns. We got some rain this week for the first time in quite a while, so it’s my warning to get hopping before too late! Better get on that…

Posted in Beekeeping, Construction, News | Tagged beekeeping, honey | 3 Comments

Dumpster Day

Posted on August 11, 2013 by jim

This weekend we held our first serious work party. We’ve been tearing out garbage and rotted parts of the house for months, and in the name of expedience, we’ve been simply tossing the debris into a giant pile near the house. But we’re now done (I hope) with demolition, so it seemed like a good time to order a dumpster and dispose of this stuff for good. The task seemed monumental, though, so Emily suggested that we give our friends the change to make good on their offers of aid- and they came!

trash packingSM

I figured a 20-yard dumpster would be plenty big, and I was totally wrong. We got about 80% of the trash in there, and that was even with several things going our way, like Emily and Allyson stacking the lumber and sheet goods neatly, as well as jumping up and down on the bags of fiberglass to pack them in. Anthony and Victoria salvaged much of the clear lumber (unpainted, un treated, un rotted) to use in their sauna in the coming winter, and we sorted metals and plastic out to go to the recycle place. When all was done, I could see the hillside below the house again for the first time since January. Yay! But the best part was getting rid of the stink. There’s always been a slightly nauseating whiff of rotting wood, mildew, and rat urine permeating the place, and it’s gone now. I think that the bags and bags of fiberglass insulation had a lot to do with that… they were basically one giant rats nest, and were a real mess to get rid of. It was a nasty enough job that Emily and I have been tearing it out for the last few weeks on our own, feeling guilty about asking volunteers to do such awful work (and wearing respirators while doing it).

I don’t plan on ordering another dumpster (this one was about $500 including fees and haulage), I’ll probably get the rest bit-by-bit with a pickup.

After the work was done, we settled down for a well-earned dinner. It’s great to be surrounded by friends you love, eating a bunch of home-cooked food in front of a crackling fire. Josh played for us on his guitar as we ate, drank, and told stories. The night fell around us, and the wildlife of the place started to emerge- we even saw a massive, eerie owl as it dodged silently between the hoary trees, looking for its own dinner. The final treat was something rarely seen in these parts: a thunderstorm. It wasn’t one of those windy, torrential deals like you see in the midwest, just some rumblings above followed by the first rain in weeks. Luckily, we had the canopy from the farmers’ market on hand, and could watch it all from under cover without having to go indoors.

Posted in Construction | 1 Comment

OSU Bee Lab

Posted on August 4, 2013 by jim

As I may have mentioned before, I am studying in the Master Beekeeper program at Oregon State. It’s a cool program: you get access to top-level apicultural scientists like Dewey Caron and Ramesh Sagili, attend really interesting lectures and training sessions, network with large-scale beekeepers (thousands of hives), get advice from old-timers (20+ years of experience), and participate in social service activities like community teaching and judging honey at the state fair.

This weekend was the annual Mentor Field Day. I’ve signed up to be a “mentor”, to help really new beekeepers get started. The Master Beekeeper program wants to be sure that the new apprentices get a uniform exposure to all the information, so all the mentors are brought together to discuss what we’ll be teaching, as well as filling in the gaps that each of us have in our own bee knowledge. But the best part? They host it at the OSU experimental apiary. It’s really cool: a bee yard at the university, a gorgeous garden filled with exotic and experimental hives (I’ll show a bunch of pictures at the end of the post).

We were told to bring lawn chairs for the day, as the lectures were going to be out in the sunny garden. As I set up my chair, it was amusing to me to realize that we had 40 people sitting on the grass, in the middle of a few dozen hives, bees zinging around every which way, landing on notebooks and lecturers, and everyone was totally cool with that. This is one of those classes where a non-beekeeper would probably have NOT been comfortable. To give you an idea, here’s a picture of three of the beekeepers during our lunch break, having their lunch RIGHT ON ONE OF THE HIVES. Heh.

After an hour or two of discussion relating to modern beekeeping practices and the specifics of how to teach them, we broke up into work groups to do some hands on training. This is the part where most people broke out their bee suits, and we opened up a few hives. Notice I say “most people”; some bee whisperers don’t use bee suits. This is another fun thing about the program, you get to meet a lot of people with really different beekeeping techniques and backgrounds. In this picture, you see a disabled beekeeper, a suitless beekeeper, and a Japanese beekeeper with a ventilated suit.

We also went into the classroom. Here we see Dewey Caron discussing American Foulbrood, a particularly nasty bee disease. It’s basically the Black Plague for bees… an extremely contagious disease with spores that can survive for up to 40 years and are largely immune to sanitizers and bleach. It’s so bad that the “treatment” is to seal the hive at night when the bees are all at home, and burn it to the ground. That’s it. It’s due to this disease that skep hives (the basket-looking things you see in cartoons) are illegal in most states, as you can’t take them apart to inspect for Foulbrood. Today, we’re looking at some frames of actual foulbrood from the freezer of the bee lab, and we’re taking extreme sanitary precautions as a result. There are several field identification tests for foulbrood, but one of them is smell. Once the frame started thawing, you could definitely smell a stinky cheese odor wafting through the air.

In all, it was a great time. Now I’ll follow up with some of those hive pictures I was talking about earlier. Enjoy!

Warré Have, 19th century

Ancient Greek ceramic hive (replica)

Skep hive, traditional to pre-medieval days

Skep hive, traditional from pre-medieval days

Plank hive, common in rural areas before the Langstroth hive.

Kenyan top-bar hive

“Bee gum” hive, in the bole of a tree

Posted in Beekeeping, News | Tagged beekeeping | Leave a comment

Bikers arrive

Posted on July 22, 2013 by jim

…but not big bearded guys in black leather riding Harleys. More like, two energetic young friends of ours riding their bikes from Seattle to Denver. Yes, you heard that right. What an adventure! To give themselves a break, Danny and Robyn decided to vacation for a spell with us.

It’s fun to see what we do through other people’s eyes. Yeah, I like weeding, but to visitors our garden work is a whole lot of fun. Or at least, it must be, because they spent DAYS weeding the beds and paths of our vegetable plot. A huge help to us, and fresh air and good time for them. They also wanted a piece of the construction action, so we were happy to provide that opportunity to them. Here we see them destroying the last of the walls that need to be removed, in order to get rid of the LAST piece of dry rot in the structure. At least I hope it’s the last- I don’t think there are any parts of the building left that I haven’t seen. So, congratulations Danny and Robyn, you are the 15th and 16th friend and family member to become a part of our building community. 🙂

We had a work party on Saturday, and even my parents helped out. Did I mention that they are in town? It made me really happy- when we were fist looking at the project last summer, they were the source of the most resistance amongst our friends and family. Everyone else was positive and excited for us, but they were pretty negative about the idea. Even at the time, I realized that it is their self-appointed job to worry about the sorts of trouble I can get myself into. And, as my dad pointed out, “it’s a lot of work.” But these are the sorts of things that get me up in the morning. And you have to do the things that get you up in the morning. Otherwise, what’s the point?

Well, I’m pleased to announce that they now seem pretty pleased with the whole thing. Rather than seeing the immense mountain of work that remains, they too are now able to see into the future, and visualize what could be. We took sandwiches out and they spent an afternoon helping me out, a thing that in some ways made me feel more complete. Despite his lack of wind due to worsening lung capacity, Dad ran the DR mower. He has worked out a system where he takes breaks as needed, and we made sure he had a comfy seat in the shade.

Emily got busy with the weedwacker, which is a tall order on this piece of property at this time of year. Everything is full-on rain forest right now, lush and big and green. This means that the weeds explode when you hit them- check out the spray of chlorophyll and cellulose surrounding Emily! For the first part of this, my mom was sitting on a chair on the deck, reading.

This is my fault, due to a preconceived notion that she would prefer that to sweating in the sun and doing a lot of work. After a few minutes of that, though, she came inside where I was pulling out out fiberglass insulation, and asked if there was a second machete. It seems that Emily had moved on to the thicker weeds, and was mowing them as we do in Guatemala- and Mom didn’t want to be left out. As luck (?) would have it, I had two more in the cabin, so she went to work. How could I have doubted? After all, she DID survive the journey all the way to our village in Guatemala! Here we see the two ladies in the midst of a garden mêlée. Note Mom’s shirt reads “∏rate”. Yarr, indeed!

On a side note, as I was removing some of the last of the insulation, I found another funny archaeological artifact. Here’s a cool looking face that was drawn on the side of one of the rafters. I think it is a genie, who has been watching over the house for almost three decades. That has to be it, otherwise it surely would have been destroyed by the big storm in 2007, or a forest fire, or SOMETHING. Who drew him? Why? These things make my mind go wild with imagination.

Posted in Construction, News | Tagged machete | 2 Comments

Backhoe archaeology

Posted on July 14, 2013 by jim

I have long been dreading the coming battle against the blackberries. The new farm at Gravel Creek has a beautiful lower field that is about an acre and a half, flat, close to the creek, with good sunlight that is just perfect for the new orchard. However, the entire thing is covered with a dense thicket of blackberries that is literally twelve feet high.

Or, rather, it WAS covered with them. As of this week, that’s all been changed. Our farmer buddy Lance was extremely generous, and offered to let us borrow his Kubota 41hp hydrostatic diesel tractor, complete with front loader and bush hog mower deck. Yes! After cutting blackberries with a machete and hoe for months a few years ago, I can tell you, this is way better. After mowing his field for him as a thank-you, I took that monster across the street and began tearing up blackberries. I have no experience with operating heavy equipment, but had a good time learning. I can see why operating engineers like their job! Once you get the hang of the controls, it’s like being a superhero. You can lift enormous things with hydraulics, and shove dirt around like it was nothing.

I also discovered some tricks that are old news to experienced operators. At one point, I got so stuck that I couldn’t get out with the traditional “rock back and forth” method one uses for a car in deep snow. But with hydraulics, you can literally put the bucket down and “push” yourself out of the hole by pressing against the ground, a rock, or a tree. It’s awesome.

This tractor is also nice because it’s got a hydrostatic transmission. This means that you set the gear, let out the clutch, rev the engine up- and then you control forward/stop/backward with a little pedal on the floor. Easy!

In the process of clearing all those blackberries, I found some interesting artifacts that had been lost to time and nature. Here we see, if you look closely: a rear differential, a front axle, some cast iron plumbing, a few big pieces of concrete, and a big block engine. You can still see the fan on the engine, which actually wasn’t even bent up until I bashed it around with the tractor as I pushed it out of the field. I have heard from several neighbors that this is the location of the original Hill homestead. One of our friends suggested yesterday that we pop into the historical society and see what they have on file, so I intend to do that this fall when I have some spare time. I’ll let you know what turns up.

We also discovered a patch of bamboo growing on the property. I’m excited about all the possibilities of using it for trellises and so forth, though we will have to keep an eye on it and make sure it doesn’t spread too much. Many kinds of bamboo grow like crazy and can cause environmental havoc in this ecosystem.

Meanwhile, back at the garden, we have blueberry success! After two years of not much, our blues are finally producing. Not a bunch, but definitely enough that the nieces can gobble some down when they come to visit in a few weeks. Maybe their poop will turn blue? My brother got a call at work once to pick them up from daycare due to that particular mysterious illness, and it was hard for him to explain that they were perfectly healthy- they just eat a LOT of blueberries.

Posted in Construction, News | Tagged blackberry, blueberry, tractor | Leave a comment

More Markets

Posted on July 8, 2013 by jim

The market season is in full swing now! Last week we did our first Tillamook market, though at this point, it’s more of an advertisement than a money making venture. Though, things are going well- at the Manzanita Market on the day after Independence day, we grossed more than at any point last summer until well into September. That’s a pleasant, objective landmark that makes Emily feel better. It shows that we are producing more (and earlier) than last year, despite her feelings that we just aren’t making enough. That’s a common problem with both of us lately, feeling like we’re just not doing enough. Here we see Emily, spreading the gospel of fresh farm vegetables to some innocent bystanders. OK, they’re not than innocent, she knows them from work and we sell to them all the time. But they sure do eat tasty produce!

The housework has slowed to a crawl. Work has been really busy lately, with several architecture projects coming to a close, as well as the summer kayak tour season starting up. Here we see all the boats ready for a Boy Scout tour I gave on the morning of the 4th. What fun, to get out on the water and take a little break from thinking about construction (mine and others) and farms.

Luckily, things are about to heat back up on the house. My buddy Ryan has returned from his vacation, has the summer mostly free (he’s a schoolteacher), and is a good sport about helping me out. We’re going to plan the summer work this afternoon, and hopefully in the next few weeks we can also drag other friends and family into the larger work parties. This will be a nice change, as it seems like most of the work I’ve been doing for the last two weeks has been me, alone, and painstakingly slow. I spent DAYS installing the cedar shingles on the window seat bumpout. It’s mostly trim around windows, soffits, etc. so many of the pieces had to be hand-fitted. The corners are woven and hand-trimmed with a block plane, which is a craftsmanship detail that is expensive if you pay someone else to do it. But if I do it, it just makes the project take longer. Not something I need at this point, but man, it looks great!

Posted in Construction | Leave a comment

I’m a lumberjack, baby!

Posted on June 27, 2013 by jim

Again with the song titles! Part of the problem is that I work with Ryan a lot, and he reminds me of all these obnoxious songs from the 80s as well as some cool ones (the title track is by Jackyl, by the way, and features chainsaw noises).

This weekend, I learned about cutting down trees. We have a LOT of trees that need to come down for many previously mentioned reasons, but I’m going to get professionals to do that. Because by “a lot,” I mean hundreds. No, this weekend was simpler. A friend of ours is planning to start shiitake mushroom farming, and he has offered to collaborate with us. For his part, he will “plug” the logs with special mycologically fortified dowels to start the mushrooms. Our part is to provide a pile of alder logs, which shiitake particularly like living in. Then, we split up the logs and each put them in our respective forests and wait. Luckily for us, we have a ton of alder trees that need to come down anyway because they are dangling precariously over the driveway, ready to come down in the next serious storm.

This is where Ryan comes in. He likes this sort of stuff, which is handy, but even better than that: he has an awesome chainsaw. It’s a light, powerful, NEW Husqvarna. Starts on the first or second pull, eats trees like a beaver. I’m extremely new to the chainsaw thing, and I am rapidly becoming addicted. It’s fun! So much cutting! But I am also well aware of how dangerous they can be, so I always work very slowly and methodically with the chainsaw, and always with a buddy.

Having said that, though, I know that caution doesn’t guarantee excitement-free working. The first tree of the day was a leaner (as many alder around here are). The fall area was clear, so I started the downhill cut. This is done in two passes, that intersect like a pie wedge, so that when the uphill cut (on the tension side of the tree) happens, the tree levers itself away from the stump and breaks the connecting strands cleanly. The thing you have to be careful about, though, is that since the downhill cut is in the compression side, you can’t go too deep, or else the tree will lean a little extra and bind the blade. And, with a zillion pounds of tree levering down on your blade, you’re never going to get that saw out.

And that is exactly what happened. I was JUST about to stop, figuring I was deep enough, when I found out that I indeed was. The saw lurched to a standstill, Ryan and I looked at each other, and he tried not to laugh. Or cry, since it was his saw. Luckily, I still have the same old rusty axe in my truck that’s been there since I first bought the truck in 1999. It did yeoman service, cutting the tree down the old fashioned way about two feet ABOVE the chainsaw, which by now was stuck in the tree like Excalibur in the rock. But when the tree was down, the pressure was released, and we were able to extract the saw, undamaged. And it made short work indeed of cutting the tree up into logs.

And now, for something completely different. Here’s a tasty deer, walking across the driveway as I was working. He didn’t seem to be in any hurry, and his antlers were oh-so-velvety looking. I hope he comes to visit again during hunting season. It would be both fantastic and extremely hillbilly of me to shoot him from my porch. Mark would be so proud. If only I had a hot tub… (prepare to be rickrolled!!)

Posted in News | Tagged chainsaw, deer | 3 Comments

Joe & Katy visit

Posted on June 23, 2013 by jim

joe-n-katySM This week brought something exciting and new… two of our friends from Peace Corps came to visit! Joe & Katy shared in many of our adventures while we were serving in Guatemala, and we are especially close with them because we were two of the three married couples serving together (only 7% of Peace Corps volunteers are married). We love seeing old Peace Corps people, but it doesn’t happen as often as we’d like- everyone is so busy with their re-started lives, ourselves included.

But, as it is with old friends, it seemed like just last week when we’d seen them last, despite being over three years. They are doing well- Katy has a job with the Center for Disease Control, and Joe is making it in the art world, touring and selling his (very cool) art. We showed them our town, our beach, or farm, our new house… all the things we’ve been up to. We love those guys.

On the farm front, things are starting to heat up. We’re finally taking off the last of the Agribon, letting the most cold-sensitive of our crops get the full sun they deserve (as well as pollination services, courtesy of my happy happy bees). All of you midwesterners are probably thinking “what the heck?”, but here on the oregon coast, our daytime average temps are still in the 60s. We won’t get into the intense heat of the 70s until well into July. 🙂

Things are still progressing on the cottage, though slowly. The avalanche of architectural work won’t start letting off until July, so I’ve not been spending the time out there that I’d like. Today was a great advancement, though, since I had a team of FOUR today! We got the damaged floor faming for the loft replaced, the opening for the stairs framed, and half of the subfloor down. Little by little, we move forward. Will we be in by fall? Still don’t know.

Posted in Construction, News | Tagged peace corps | Leave a comment

First market of 2013

Posted on June 18, 2013 by jim

The summer must be here for real. The first farmers’ market of 2013 us upon us. Last Friday, I sorted through the shed and dug out all the goodies that make up the stand: scale, table, canopy, flags, markers, cash box. We even have a spiffy new banner this year, and it looks great! The one thing we don’t have much of, though, is produce. Heh. It’s still pretty early in the season. We brought turnips, bolstered heavily by a selection of plant starts. The take for the evening: $39.

But I’m not sad. We figured we’d go no matter what we had, just to be seen and to enjoy the opening day. And what fun it was! The weather was balmy, there were tons of shiny happy people there, and I saw dozens of friends I haven’t seen in months. It was great. And we didn’t really look that ridiculous, either: we had enough to cover the table, and the other farmers were also much lighter than would be expected. Next week, though, I think we’ll be fine, as there were a lot of things THIS close to ready: radishes, peas, arugula, spinach, lettuce. And maybe in two or three weeks, we’ll have enough produce that we can do the friday AND saturday markets. I like the saturday one in Tillamook too, but it’s a different crowd and farther away, so we do Manzanita when we only have enough goods for one.

There hasn’t been a house update in a while, so here’s a picture of the siding. It’s clear cedar. It smells great, is super hippie natural, and fun to work with. The bugs and mold hate it… and the pocketbook isn’t too fond of it, either. But it’ll be a long time before we have to replace it. It’s attached with stainless hardware, which also adds a bit to the price. That’s the theme of the material palette: cedar and stainless. We have stainless flashing above the window heads, too; you can see it if you click on the photo to enlarge. Swank.

Posted in Construction, News | Tagged market | Leave a comment

Two Wheeled Tractor

Posted on June 12, 2013 by jim

So, for quite a while we’ve been toying with the idea of a two wheeled tractor. What on earth is that, you ask? Well, it looks kindof like a rototiller on steroids, and performs most of the same service as its four-wheeled cousins. Although not seen much in the US, they are fairly popular on small scale farms in Europe. Two-wheeled tractors have interchangeable implements, much like “regular” tractors, and can do a wide range of farm chores: tilling, plowing, reaping, mowing, chipping. They even make specialist attachments for odd jobs like snow blowing and combining. Our farmer buddy Carolina (of Corvus Landing Farm) has been using one for years, and is an expert, so we were finally able to take her up on the offer to have a “tractor demonstration day” at her farm after talking about it for over a year.

Here we see Carolina instructing Emily on the proper use and technique of the two-wheeler. It’s quite an instrument, with tons of controls on the handles: split brakes, clutch, differential disengage, 4-speed transmission, reverse gear, throttle. There are also two levers to adjust the angle and elevation of the control yoke. This is handy, as you sometimes need to be off to the side of the tractor, depending on the task and implement you are using.

Emily and I took turns plowing and tilling portions of Carolina’s fields. It was fun, and while working and talking with Carolina, many of the advantages of this tool soon became apparent. In two hours, we were able to completely prep soil on an area the size of our entire garden, for starters. That is a task that would normally take WEEKS by hand. We also burned about half a gallon of gasoline to do it, which is amazingly efficient. The machine is efficient in other ways, too- it’s a fraction of the cost of a full-size tractor, has very low maintenance requirements, and is simple enough that all the maintenance can be done by the farmer. From an operational standpoint, its size makes it easy to maneuver in the sorts of tight spaces that small-scale vegetable growers like ourselves have to work in, and you don’t need a giant barn to store it out of the weather. But best of all? You farm with your feet on the ground. It may sound hippy-dippy, but it just feels like real farming. Good exercise too, and no way to fall asleep in the seat and get munched by your own equipment.

One other great thing about this machine is an implement called a “rotary plow.” It’s unique to this type of tractor, and works much like a moldboard plow, but it has a vertical spinning shaft with an auger. This makes it turn up a LOT of dirt, without packing down a hardpan 18 inches below the soil like a moldboard would. It also makes great rows and raised beds. Here’s a video of Emily running the rotary plow.

But, like all things, it has some disadvantages. It has enough power to do all the things we’d need, but no extra for things that might come up in the future, like hauling logs out of the woods, moving vast piles of compost, or dragging skid buildings around. And speaking of moving, it has no front loader. That is the biggest negative everyone comes up with when we talk about these things, and Carolina admitted that she really wishes she had that utility. Getting used implements is impossible, because two-wheelers are uncommon, but three-point implements for more traditional tractors can be found on the used market everywhere… making this one aspect where four-wheelers are cheaper.

We still haven’t settled on what we’re going to do, but we need to start thinking about some degree of mechanization if we are going to successfully expand our business. Luckily, we don’t have to act on this for several months, so there will be plenty of time to ponder it. Hopefully, while looking at something peaceful like this.

Posted in News | Tagged tractor | Leave a comment