What I've Learned from Honey Bees

I think this blog could very well have several chapters as time goes by because I just keep learning more and more from my honey bees.  I'm pretty sure I'm just at the beginning phase of learning and as the years go by I'll keep stock piling more knowledge.  This works out well for me because I'm definitely a "learn from experience" kind of girl.  Certainly I'll read books and web sites about anything and everything, but I don't truly grasp something until I experience it.  Honey bees are the perfect example.

Today I decided to do hive inspection #4, or maybe it's #5.  My hive inspections are kind of random.....both in timeliness and quality.  I like to check on the bees when it's a cool, calm, almost rainy day because so far the bees have always been agreeable to that and it's comfortable for me.  Today's inspection had a specific purpose:  to find out how much room the bees have left in the honey super.  I had previously checked on them to see if they were indeed busy in the hive and making honey.  Having qualified that both of those points were going well, I learned from a friend that I should see how full the top honey super was and then determine how soon I need to get another empty honey super.

So, today after a light smoking I pried off the inner lid of the hive and proceeded to pry up one of the 10 frames inside the honey super.  The bees were totally amicable to all of this and I was able to get a good look at that frame, plus peer down into the other 9 frames and.........they are all full of capped honey comb.  Yay!  But I certainly do need to be adding another honey super and quickly!  Luckily I know a gentleman in Rapid City who builds honey supers and sells them, so I'll get one this week and possibly a couple more next week on payday.

This is all very good news for my bees and ultimately for me.  I'll try to describe my hive configuration here in words.  I have two deep boxes on the bottom in which the bees care for the brood once the queen lays eggs and the bees also build up their personal stores of food for the winter.  On top of those two deep boxes I have one shallow honey super which is how it sounds, for building up honey comb and honey.  This is where I benefit from the bees' hard work.  :-)  On top of that I will place yet another honey super or two so they can keep working into the fall.  I believe I will draw off honey some time in September.

My goal is to get yet another whole hive configuration for next spring.....maybe two if I'm very lucky, so I can get one or two more nucs of bees in the spring and just keep adding to my apiary.

I believe this has been a very good, easy summer for bees.  We've had reasonable temperatures and a lot of moisture which in turn has led to some great yields of blooming crops in our pastures.  The bees have been a great joy for me to have around as they are constantly pollinating my plants in my vegetable garden and every morning I chat with them about the number of pumpkins they have successfully pollinated for me that day.

Some things I hope to do for next year's bees:

1. Add more "boxes" for additional bee hives
2. Plant even more bee-friendly garden items.  They really liked the blooming mustard this year, so I plan to have an entire crop of it next year.  I wonder if my honey will taste like mustard?
3. Read up more on the intricacies of the hive so I understand it even better next year.  I have several books waiting on my bookshelf for reading material on cold wintery days.
4. Possibly convince a friend or family member to get started with bees to share the happiness and help build up the bee populations again.

Michelle Grosek
Bear Butte Gardens
Michelle@BearButteGardens.com
http://www.bearbuttegardens.com/

What Mom Did

As I have gardened over the years, things have changed and progressed and I realize that the progression is very much based on "what Mom did".  Let me explain.  My mom was quite the avid gardener.  She loved everything about growing and harvesting.  I'm the youngest of five kids, so my "Mom Gardening" memories are certainly different than my siblings' memories.  When I was two years old my family lived on the outskirts of Newell, SD, and it was the late 60's and my mom had 5 children ranging in ages from 18 to 2 so she did the logical thing......she bought the local laundromat.  Whaaa?  Yeah, that seems logical to me, maybe not to most readers, though.  I think Mom had birthed, diapered, cooked, mopped, and laundered as much as she could through the 50s and into the 60s, now she was ready to get out and do something else.

So essentially my earliest memories are of rows of washing machines, dryers, folding tables, and a couple dry cleaner machines.  By the time I was four years old I knew how many pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, and 50-cent pieces were in a dollar so that I could make change for the ladies.  I frequently got loaned out to fold washcloths and hand towels for the farm wives as they worked their way through literally bags full of laundry.  Remember, in the 60's it was not necessarily common place to have a washer and dryer in every household, in fact it was kind of rare.  It was a lot easier for the ladies to bag up all of their laundry for a week or two weeks and bring it to the laundromat than it was to try to get through a family's worth of laundry mostly by hand at home, then put it out on the clothesline, etc.  So a laundromat was quite a commonplace occurrence at that time for many, many families.  The days were very busy and very long at the laundromat.  Mom and Dad had rigged up an ingenious little opening device which allowed the front door of the facility to be opened by the first customer any time after 6 a.m.  I think Mom went in about 8 or 9 a.m. to see how everything was progressing and to start the day cleaning the machines, doing other people's laundry and dry cleaning for them, refilling the coin-operated soap and fabric softener machines, etc., etc.  It seems she always went home and got supper for all of us, but I know many times her laundromat day ended about 8 or 9 p.m. if everything was going well.

Needless to say, not a lot of flower or vegetable gardening happened during those years.  Mom had entered into a different era in her life and all of a sudden there were some really great convenience foods on the market that made life so much easier and more fun like boxes of mac and cheese, Velveeta cheese, cartons of milk, Jell-O, Kool-Aid, store canned fruits and vegetables, and sliced white bread......pretty much all of those things that have since been deemed to have no real food value whatsoever.  Don't get me wrong, Mom was a top-notch cook and definitely spoiled us all with great homemade meals.  But along with those meals we had a sprinkling of all these new foods, too.  And we (Mom, Dad, and me) frequently got to lunch at the diner down the street because we were a two-income family and we could.  It was great!

When I was eight years old my parents made the decision to sell the laundromat, Dad quit his job with the city, and they put the house up for sale and moved 25 miles down the road to the bigger community of Belle Fourche.  Here is where my gardening experiences began.  We had a smaller place right in town, but the yard was very mature and the soil was good and Mom now had a little time to get back to gardening.  She had beautiful shade trees, lots of established perennials, and a nice side lot for a vegetable garden.  Within a couple years she had gotten four kids through high school and it was just me and Mom and Dad.  So she put up a grow light and started planting seeds in the late winter, transplanted out to the beautiful little garden spot in May/June, and gardened to her heart's content.  Of course she had gardened before and absolutely knew what she was doing, but this was all new to me.  Mom loved her time in the garden and the yard, so of course it was an enjoyable experience for me, too.  Other than the crossing with an occasional garter snake, things were very happy and mellow in the garden.

My memories of Mom's garden in Belle Fourche consist of hybrid tomatoes, onions from sets (which can indeed be planted too deep, Dad and I found out), potatoes, peas, radishes, turnips, cucumbers, beets, green leaf lettuce, carrots, and rhubarb.  There may have been other things, but I know for sure there was NOT squash, beans, spinach, cabbage, herbs (except for dill), or corn.  She always told me that cabbage crops and corn got too buggy.  She had a bad experience once with opening a jar of canned green beans and finding an intact bug, so they were out of the question.  When she was a kid her mother had a root cellar which evidently the prairie snakes and lizards liked, so easy keepers in a root cellar like squash just weren't on her list of favorites.  I don't even remember discussing herbs or mixed salad greens, so I guess they were pointless for some reason or another.  And if you could see Mom's garden, it was pretty perfect.  No weeds, absolutely straight rows, nothing that grew haphazardly, just nice and neat.  And Mom believed in canning when she had time, so we would have shelves full of her favorites......chokecherry jelly and syrup, canned tomatoes, pickled beets, and sweet pickles, dill pickles, bread and butter pickles, 10-day pickles (or was it 7 day?).  She also liked to can meat, so there would be a couple shelves of canned beef and canned heart of something, both of which I'm sure were yummy, but just never looked terribly appetizing to me.  It seemed like canning season would never end sometimes.  I appreciated all that she did, but it was a lot of hot, sticky, hard work and not always a happy, calm situation, so it left a bit of a negative memory for me.

So this finally leads me back to how and what I garden.  For years I had varying degrees of gardens.  Maybe I would only do flowers, no vegetables.  Maybe I'd do a couple kinds of vegetables, a few plants each.  Maybe I'd throw in some lettuce seed.  I just kind of dabbled in gardening, but I frequently tried the things that Mom wouldn't grow.  Of course I also had a couple kids and a job or two most of the time, so I was never terribly serious about gardening and I certainly never wanted to grow so much stuff that I felt compelled to do canning.  That would just take the fun out of it.  I certainly raised my children to work out in the garden with me and help me and have fun with growing things and I think either of them are completely capable of doing their own gardens some day if they have a desire to do so.  I have to admit I never have gotten the point of gardens needing to be weed-free and of course there are studies to back me up, so there you have it.

Now I'm at the middle age point and I'm reconsidering so many things.  This summer I've spent more time in the garden than I ever have and can't get enough of it.  I don't have a huge garden this year, but it's a nice size and I've had the chance to try a lot of new things, stick with some of my old favorites, and just experiment a lot.  Of course, most of my favorite things in the garden are the items that my mom never grew........big rangy heirloom tomatoes, pumpkins, spinach, mustard greens, all colors and kinds of lettuces, squash, red carrots, seed onions, corn, watermelon, and cabbages of every variety---broccoli, brussels sprouts, purple cabbage, head cabbage.  A couple things that I do grow in common with Mom are peas and potatoes.  One thing I may never grow is turnips.  Something I really don't miss growing is cucumbers.  A new venture this year is the pumpkin patch and I predict it may take on a life of its own in the future, just for the fun of it.

So I do have my mother's love for gardening and I am forever thankful to her for that.  It is a pleasant, calming experience for me like no other.  I can literally spend hours just "piddling around" doing this and that......weeding, mulching, picking, watering, planting.  As the years go by, I am sensing the need to preserve the foods I raise in the garden for eating at a future date, so of course that means canning, freezing, root cellaring, etc.  This phase is kind of surprising to me because I didn't honestly think I would ever view these as "enjoyable" activities, but they quite possibly might be.  Last year it was simply freezing up sweet corn.  This year jams and jellies and possibly tomato sauce and salsa.  Crazy!

Michelle Grosek
Bear Butte Gardens
Michelle@BearButteGardens.com
http://www.bearbuttegardens.com/

Red Tractor

I get a lot of questions about my new little red tractor, so I thought I would share some information about it on this BLOG.

Earlier this year, when my wife and I decided to formally start Bear Butte Gardens as an official business, we also decided to purchase a tractor.  We'd been talking about it for years.  We were mostly looking for a good used tractor, but we just couldn't find just the right one.  We finally decided to go for the gusto and get a new one instead!

Before we actually bought this one, I did a lot of research.  I compared various brands, models, dealers, options, prices, etc.  We finally decided to purchase a Massey Ferguson model 1648 compact tractor from Valley Implement.

First of all, Valley Implement is located about two miles from our home, so it is very convenient for us.  In all the years of living here, I had only stopped in at Valley Implement a few times to ask about specific used tractors they would have on their lot at the time.  We found Tom and the rest of the staff at Valley Implement to be great to work with.  They are friendly, knowledgeable, and gave us a good deal.

On to the tractor itself...  It is a Massey Ferguson model 1648.  This particular model is part of the 1600 series of compact tractors.  As I understand it, a "compact" class tractor generally has lower gearing than other similar sized (based on horse power) tractors that might be classified as "utility" or simply "agriculture" tractors.  A compact tractor will probably be a bit smaller in physical dimensions also.  This lower gearing works well for tasks such as tilling.  Other non-compact class tractors are intended to move a little faster, like maybe seven to ten miles per hour when working a field.

The MF model 1648 has a four-cylinder diesel engine that produces 47.4 horse power.  It also has a class IV three-point hitch.  This combination of horse power with a class IV hitch make it very versatile around a hobby ranch or garden & greenhouse business.  It seems to have plenty power for anything I done so far, and the hitch will accept a wide variety of implements.

One of our needs is to move snow in the winter.  Before we bought this tractor, we were also considering skid-steer loaders like a Bobcat.  Based on conversations with several people, I came to the conclusion that a small 4wd tractor with a loader will move snow better than a skid-steer loader.  As I understand it, skid-steer loaders work great for moving snow on level pavement, but have problems getting traction on uneven ground such as a long, gravel driveway.  The MF 1648 has four-wheel drive with an easy pull of a lever.  It works great!  I'm looking forward to testing it this winter. 

I also got the matching MF loader.  I use the loader more than I ever thought I would.  It has a standard six-foot-wide bucket that attaches with the standard "quick attach" mount -- just like Bobcat skid-steer loaders.  I'm told that many attachments that can be used on Bobcat can be used on this tractor as well.  The loader is easy to use with a "joy stick" controller.  I have not removed the loader from the tractor yet, but it is designed to be removed quickly and easily by disconnecting the hydraulic hoses and pulling a couple pins.

As for implements that use the three-point hitch, I have three so far.  I have a six-foot-wide rotary, finishing mower, a six-foot-wide maintenance blade, and a post hole digger.  I use the mower to mow the ditches, the yard around the house (the wide open areas), and a fair amount of area around the gardens and greenhouse.  Before we got this tractor, I used a standard 16-hp riding lawn tractor with a 42" mowing deck.  Because the MF is so much larger, has so much power, and can move so much faster, I can mow for one hour what would have taken four to five hours with the lawn tractor.  And when it comes to mowing deep grass, the MF cuts through it with no problem.  The lawn tractor would have required 1st gear and maybe two passes just to get a good clean cut.

The blade works great for maintaining our gravel driveway.  It mounts easy, it's easy to adjust, and easy to use.  The height of the right side of the three-point hitch can be adjusted separately with a turn handle.  This allows me to make just a bit of a "crown" down the center of the driveway so that water runs off instead of making puddles.  And of course, the total height of the three-point hitch can easily be controlled with a lever on the tractor.

The post hole digger is a huge time saver!  Anyone who has ever dug post holes in hard ground by hand surely envies this piece of equipment!  Wherever we have used it, it digs with ease.

We have also used a tiller with this tractor.  When we bought the tractor, Tom at Valley Implement was nice enough to let us use their rental tiller free of charge.  This is another great time saver!  The tiller was six foot wide and the tractor had plenty of power to turn it in virgin soil.  The first pass would go through the sod and dig in about four or five inches.  With another pass or two the tiller would dig in to about eight to ten inches.  And when done, the ground was so beautifully tilled, I didn't even want to walk on it and leave my foot prints!  If possible, we plan to purchase our own tiller next year.  I think it will be very handy to have at a garden & greenhouse business.

There are a couple of other things I want to get for our tractor.  I need to mount a toolbox somewhere.  I'm thinking about using a military surplus ammo can and mounting it to the step tread on the right side of the tractor.  It would be nice to keep a few basic tools, a pair of work gloves, some wire, and some tape with the tractor.  Another item is a shade canopy that can be mounted to the roll bar.  When we were buying the tractor, it didn't seem like a necessary item, but after spending many hours mowing in the hot sun, it seems like a good idea.

I'm also considering some kind of wheel weights.  We sometimes use the loader to move fairly heavy items.  It works pretty good for loading or unloading heavy items on/off a trailer.  One time I was unloading an old antique two-bottom plow and the back tire of the tractor started to come off the ground just a bit.  The loader seemed to handle the load just fine, but the back end of the tractor was just too light.  I've heard that beet juice can be used inside of the tire for weight.  Apparently it won't freeze and it is fairly heavy.  Anyone know about this?

Overall, we are very happy with this tractor.  I would highly recommend this brand and model, as well as Valley Implement as a dealer.  If anyone has any questions, comments, or suggestions, don't hesitate to contact me.

Have a nice day!

Rick Grosek
Bear Butte Gardens
Rick@BearButteGardens.com
http://www.bearbuttegardens.com/

Pumpkins = X + Y

I went up to the pumpkin patch about 7 a.m. this morning to see if I could find a few more female flowers earlier in the morning.  The patch was a beautiful sight......loads of male flowers standing up over the tops of the pumpkin leaves, as if shouting "Look at me"......."No, look at ME".......boisterous, big, beautiful flowers....thick in the patch kind of like Navy Seamen on weekend leave on shore.  On closer inspection, down under the leaves a little, I'd find the occasional female flower.....equally beautiful, but already heavy with fruit, keeping low to the ground.  I decided to help out a little with the pollination process and plucked a male flower, stripped him down to his pollen-laden stamen, and then found a female flower and rubbed the pollen all over her stigma.  It's kind of personal when you think about it, but it's what pumpkin growers have been doing for centuries.  I noticed that there was only one female flower for every 2-3 pumpkin plants.  This was not exactly calming my pumpkin anxiety.  I worked on this project for a while, noting that indeed there were bees, ants, and spiders trying to help the process along a little.  One honey bee in particular was so full of pollen, over his entire body, that when he attempted to fly up out of the flower, he sounded like a small aircraft engine which was cutting out......bzzzz.....ump......bzzzzz.....ump, and then finally got up to an adequate elevation and took off in a horizontal flight pattern straight for the bee hive which was sitting maybe 50 yards away.

Contemplating the future of my pumpkins, I decided to go visit the round garden for a while and feed some tomato horn worms to the guineas.  This is a pretty entertaining morning activity as one guinea always lays claim to the worm when I throw it into the middle of the flock, pecks it a couple times, then runs like a banshee to keep the others from getting it.  I'm honestly not sure if I'm successfully killing a tomato horn worm or just ensuring that it gets dropped elsewhere in the garden, simply to go on munching and frassing.  After ridding my tomatoes of a couple horn worms, then tying up some tomato plants a little tighter to the fence, I decide to head out of the gardens.

On my way by the pumpkin patch (maybe an hour later) I can't help but stop in and look again for female flowers.  I immediately spot a few and have to pluck a couple male flowers to do a little pollinating.  I realize that possibly female pumpkin flowers are similar to human females in that all of them don't rise at the same time in the morning.  I see several flowers which have already opened and shut, several more which look like they may yet open today sometime, and many adolescent flowers which will be opening in a day or two.  I am somewhat encouraged by all of this and reminded that God probably has a great plan for the pumpkin patch and doesn't really need me to help out much.  Imagine that!

Michelle Grosek
Bear Butte Gardens
Michelle@BearButteGardens.com
http://www.bearbuttegardens.com/

The Guineas in the Garden

Last year was my first attempt at raising guineas.  They are funky little birds that are cute and pretty oogly at the same time.  Their bodies are shaped like a feather-covered football, and about that size, and then they have smallish heads with pretty good-sized beaks.  The reason I became interested in guineas is because for the last couple summers we had hoards of grasshoppers.  I'm not just talking a lot of grasshoppers, but literally hoards of them.  Chickens, ducks, and geese all do a fine job getting grasshoppers, too, but I've had all of them and you really need some kind of a coop or house for them and they can all be problematic in the garden when they get gung-ho about pulling up small greens and scratching and pecking.  Guineas tend to be pretty garden-friendly.......hence the reason I decided to give them a try.

So, last summer (2010) I ordered 10 guineas from the local farm supply store and, as usual, set them up in a small tank in a bathtub that we rarely use.  Guineas are VERY sensitive to temperature at a young age, so you have to get a heat lamp, brooder lamp, or something along that line to keep them quite warm until they start getting feathers.  Everything went pretty well last year, but as all young birds do, they started getting pretty stinky at a few weeks old.  I believe I made the decision to put them out in a little-used dog kennel at about 5 weeks old, which was way too early.  They could actually fit through the diamond shaped holes in the side of the kennel and they were pretty flighty.  Out of desperation, I took them straight to my new garden (an old round corral recently converted to a garden) and set them up in there.  We had lined the bottom portion of the corral/garden with some old garden fencing which worked pretty well to keep them inside the garden, but they could get through very small nooks and crannies and were frequently outside the garden, which greatly excited our St. Bernard.

They did a fine job of cutting down the grasshopper population in the garden very quickly.  Unfortunately, after a week or so I began noticing about one bird missing each morning.  When comparing notes with a fellow guinea raiser down the road, we realized we had both had a lot of owls calling back and forth after dark and came to the conclusion that the owls were plucking off the guineas one by one after dark.  So, that's basically the end of my 2010 Guinea Experiment.

This year, I decided I again wanted guineas.  Fortunately, the grasshoppers have been much lower populated this year, but there are still a number of them.  I got my 20 guineas on June 16th and put them in their indoor tank with a warm light.  The second night the light bulb burned out in the middle of the night and I subsequently lost 7 guineas over the next few days.  But then there was a turnaround and those who were still alive started thriving and growing.  Once again I had 13 guineas.  This time I determined I was going to keep them warmed and inside a structure until they had most of their feathers and were closer to 8 weeks old as per most advice.  When I could no longer stand them in my bathroom, I moved them out to the garage and luckily we were having some very warm weather and they adjusted nicely.  I kept them pretty confined in a 100-gallon Rubbermaid stock tank with a chicken wire lid and an occasional light on cool evenings.  As they feathered out I started setting them outside in the shade to acclimate them to the outdoors.  I'd throw in the occasional grasshoppers to supplement their bird starter food.

One week ago I decided they were big enough to be moved into the unused dog kennel with their Rubbermaid stock tank.  I put a blue tarp over the kennel to discourage them from flying out and provide some rain relief.  Now they could fly out of the tank, but not out of the kennel and they were big enough not to fit through the sides of the kennel.  They seemed to enjoy this arrangement a lot as they could get the occasional misguided bug, yet still have some security of rain cover and daily feedings and water.

During this time my husband I have been beefing up the fencing around the garden, preparing for the guineas.  I also determined it was necessary to cover the entire garden with bird netting to keep the owl out as he has basically taken up residence in the partially completed greenhouse next to the garden.  I've always been an owl lover, so I don't have the heart to chase him away, so we just have to do some creative co-existence between him and the guineas.  My round corral garden is approximately 50 feet across, which amounts to a lot of bird netting.  We installed a vertical pole in the middle of the garden which is approx. 9 feet tall to hold up the center of the netting.  I did several searches on the internet and finally came across a reasonably priced roll of netting which measured 14 feet by 300 feet.  Once I received the netting I laid it out and cut it into pieces 14 feet by 60 feet and then sewed the sides of the pieces together with fishing line until I had 5 pieces of netting sewn side by side measuring approx. 60 feet by 60 feet.  Next my husband, daughter, and I rolled the netting up on two sides towards the middle into a long roll and carried it into the garden, placed the center of the roll on top of the pole which now had a plastic saucer sled screwed upside down atop it so as to keep the netting from tearing on the pole.  This process went relatively smoothly, although would have been much simpler had it been done prior to the garden getting as tall as it is now and so many obstacles within it.  Next we pulled the netting out in all directions and where it draped over the sides of the round corral we tacked it in place on the outside of the top railings with miscellaneous boards we had lying around the place.

So now the guineas have a relatively safe place to roam inside the garden amongst all the plants, plenty of natural hunt-and-peck food to eat, and little chance of an owl plucking them off at night.  Hopefully.

Michelle Grosek
Bear Butte Gardens
Michelle@BearButteGardens.com
http://www.bearbuttegardens.com/

Time to Blog!

Yay, I have a blog now!  For whatever reason I like blogs more than most other social methods of sharing info.  Maybe because you can read as much or as little as you want and generally it follows a theme.  Kind of like reading a book.

So the reason I'm starting this blog is so I can share my experiences (successful as well as failures) with others who may be interested in gardening and all the things that can be associated with gardening.  I've got a hundred ideas about what I should blog about first!