The Belties will be ready for harvest next year (2013), but we have customers that want beef sooner. So to fill the gap we purchased three steers this spring (2012) to grow up to harvest size and be available near the first of November. This is going as planned, and we will have beef available by the whole, half, quarter and piece available soon.
This post got lost somewhere and I just found it!
Well, we did another inspection on Oct 6 and were very disappointed to find that during the continual weeks of rain, the bees have consumed quite a bit of what I was hoping to extract. I was really expecting at least 5 frames and optimistically hoping for a whole super, but it was not to be. Judith and I went through the whole thing and re-arranged things to get them ready for winter since some of the nights have been in the mid to low 30’s. I restructured the bottom two supers to have 9 frames each, so now all the boxes have 9 frames. I know most people don’t do this, but after reading some of Walt Wright’s stuff, ok, well all of it, I’m changing some of my practices starting with 9 frames in all boxes. Anyway the inspection led to a discovery of about 4 frames of brood, total, and the rest was empty or honey. There was very little uncapped nectar, and there was a bit of pollen. All of the nectar that was previously uncapped and occupying several frames and almost one entire super was gone. Here’s the structure as it stands now:
box 1 (counting from the bottom) has some brood and pollen
box 2 has honey on the outside 4 frames and a little brood and empty comb in the middle
box 3 has honey except two middle frames
box 4 is 1/3 full of honey and the rest empty or nectar
box 5 is empty drawn comb
box 6 is empty mostly drawn comb, but poorly drawn comb
The next step I think is to put the inner cover down with the bee escape, or catch them on a really cool (not cold) day and yank box 5&6 off for the winter. After that, put down the entrance reducer to keep the mice out for the winter and cross our fingers and hope to see the little gals again in February or so.
This past weekend I was able to finish planting all the stuff in the back of the truck. There were several (maybe 12 or so?) forsythia and two Concord grapes. We also got the retaining wall built that will contain the cover for the water line that was exposed during some of the heavy rains. Dad was able to get the last of the concrete in it to complete the filling and it’s now ready for dirt!
Plants, plants everywhere and there’s still more to do. I got the Brighwell blueberry plant in the ground, so we now officially have 31 blueberry bushes. I’ve also planted several more forsythia bushes along the property line between us and our front neighbor. I’ve got a pot with several more in it, I just need to take the time to break them all apart and get them in the ground. I’ve also started the small retaining wall that is necessary to get the water line covered up before winter. We’ll see what Saturday brings in the way of progress with plants and progress on covering the water line.
We’ve sold out of honey for this year and the bees are all tucked in for winter. I was updating the front page and wanted to preserve the slide show of the extracting process in a journal entry, so here it is: Honey Slideshow.
Well, after having blueberries on the brain after planting the ones from early last week, and circumstances being favorable (read: I had a long day at the farm on Saturday), we planted 9 more plants yesterday, and still have one more to plant! We purchased 4 more Tifblue plants, a Brighwell plant and Mrs. Betty wanted her blueberry plants thinned out, so I dug the ones up that she wanted gone and was able to get 5 plants out of them. 9 of them made it in the ground before dark leaving only the Brighwell to get planted tomorrow. This will make a grand total of 31 blueberry plants! I think we’re done with the blueberry plants for now, finally 🙂 I also have two more concord grape plants to get in the ground along with a huge list of other things to plant. You’ve gotta love the never ending farm “to-do” list!
Yesterday we planted 7 more blueberry plants to bring us to a grand total of 21! We still have spaces for a few more to completely fill out the patch, but we’re cheering for these 21 to take off and produce copiously! Hooray for another item marked off the “Farm To Do” list!
I’ve added a new category of “Fruit” to the Journals. We’ve been cultivating some blueberry bushes and grape vines and we’ve finished cleaning up the blueberry plants for winter. Right now we have 13 blueberry bushes, all low bush varieties. We’re trying three varieties, Climax, Premiere and Tifblue and we have an odd row of other one-off plants and we’ll be adding some unknown varieties in that row as well. All the blueberries got newspaper for weed block and a nice cover of wood chips that have been composted with the offal from this summer’s chicken processing. This will help keep the vegetation down around the plants as well as help keep moisture in. We have seven more plants that we hope to get in the ground near the end of the month after the weather cools down a bit more. This year there were very few berries, but hopefully next year we’ll have enough blueberries to share! We also have two grape vines at the moment, one muscadine and one concord. They just got planted this spring, so we’ll see they fared the winter next in spring.
We did our big pre-winter inspection on Saturday and have good news and bad news. The “bad” news is that we won’t have any honey to extract this fall, but the good news is that all three hives seem to be in good shape for the upcoming winter! Hive two is getting re-queened in the spring; they are mean and have produced nothing for me and just generally need an upgrade. The other two hives seem strong and have good attitudes. Hopefully we’ll add one hive in the spring and re-queen #2 and have more of a harvest next year!
Wow! I never got around to making a journal entry for our Spring 2011 broilers! We did one batch of broilers this year in the spring and processed near the beginning of June. It was a pretty successful batch and I think we finally got our ration to a reasonably repeatable formula. The broilers did very well and I went and looked up the numbers so we could share them! We were VERY pleased with the outcome of this batch. It was the first and last batch of 2011 since we’re focusing more of our time on the house construction, but this next spring we plan to be raising broilers at the farm, so on pickup day when you come by and sit on the porch and visit and we’ll have a little more room and more chairs. Enough with the formalities, here are the numbers:
# of chickens processed: 86
age of chickens: 8 weeks, 0.5 days
culls: 1
birds >= 5lb: 76 (86%)
birds < 4lb: 3 (3.5%)
average dressed bird weight: 5.93lb
median dressed bird weight: 6.0lb
lb of feed used: 2000lb
total weight of dressed birds: 505.49lb
THE BIGGIE ... feed conversion ratio: 3.96 lbs of feed to 1 lb of dressed bird!!!