Which Came First?

In the case of our chickens and their proper housing, the answer would unfortunately be the chickens.  Having raised 3 chicks from day-old before, neither of us were worried about handling a new group of young, locally grown chicks.  We had settled on 16 chicks (8 Australorp, 8 Welsummer), knowing we would likely have several roosters in the bunch.  We needed to make sure we had enough hens for the egg production we hoped for.  We also knew we would need to raise them in the house, as we have no secure outbuildings, but certainly we would have a coop and run ready for them by the time they had feathered out......?

I picked up our 16 chicks from a hobby farm south of us in Duncan, in the first week of April.  We settled them in a Rubbermaid container with food, water, and a heat lamp, and watched them be adorable peeping balls of fluff.

While they spent most of their time eating, pooping, scratching shavings into their water and sleeping - keeled over on their faces for a lot of the time - we planned and built a larger brooder for them to inhabit.

We built big, knowing that in the future we would likely be using it for 40-50 chicks over several weeks' time, and designed it with a divider down the middle to allow for more options with brooding different groups, or for use with a couple of broody hens if needed.  It's assembled with bolts, so it can be stored relatively flat when not in use.

Then, we got started on the 'real' chicken house.  This is the last project to be started in our scary workshop before the building is demolished - it's the flattest spot on the property, given the cement floor, so I'm not sure how we'll manage until we've saved enough to build again.  We assembled the base of the house, covered with linoleum for ease of cleaning, and mocked up the wall framing as best we could so that we could assemble it on site.

We built nest boxes to attach off the back of the house so they won't take up valuable floor space. The build is roughly 8x4, minus the frame, so the maximum capacity for this coop should be about 10 chickens.  We're temporarily housing more while we 'audition' roosters.  There is an attached 10x20 run we've covered with 2-inch stucco wire, to provide them a space protected from the ravens, eagles, and goshawks that might find them a little too interesting. There are also mink and raccoons to think about - even bear and cougars - but we've constructed the coop itself to lock down rather tight at night, and raised it off the ground to prevent digging in.  One can hope that there are other sources of food that would be less trouble to access.  Once the flock has learned where to eat and drink, and roost at night, we can carefully give them daytime access to the additional area outside their run, enclosed by electric net fencing.  Hopefully the rooster we select to keep will be good at keeping an eye out for predators, and there are trees and space under the rabbit hutches in the enclosure for the chickens to find cover if they need it.

In order to prepare the site for the coop, we spent quite a bit of time digging, leveling, and scratching our heads.  I bought a bigger level, just to get it right.

Which only served to show us just how off level everything else is....

Trim work and paint went a long way towards making the coop presentable, and giving it the illusion of being square.  We've added 1x4 boards at the doors, to keep shavings and poop inside the coop until clean out, and we will be adding plastic bins to the nesting boxes, for ease of cleaning.

The wired run is now attached to the front of the coop, and hardware cloth and 2-inch square wire surround the base, to give the chickens a dry covered place for dustbathing in the heat of the day.  The enclosure wire extends 6 or more inches out from the bottom, and is screwed tight to the frame, then pounded into the ground with tent pegs.  Hopefully this will discourage digging by any predators curious enough to make their way past the electrified perimeter.

The chickens are outside and loving it now - and it only took us 2 months to get things sorted out.  Word to the wise - keeping 16 chickens in the living room is not an ideal situation.  Oh, and the current estimate is that we have 6 hens and 10 roosters.  It's going to be interesting.

Work Party

This past month we had some wonderful friends come over to the Island for the day to help get some projects done.  Things are evolving on the property, and we're taking some buildings down and re-thinking our use of the land.  The rabbits needed to be moved, wood was waiting to be cut, and the fence around the kitchen garden had already proved that it wouldn't keep out the deer.

Our solutions aren't pretty, but they are practical, and they'll serve the purpose! Adrian has taken to heart Joel Salatin's words "good enough is perfect."

The fence around the garden was probably 40 years old, and was sagging severely in spots - the deer had beaten me to my spring kale harvest, and I was determined to keep them out of my vegetable patch this year.  Before the plants could go in, we pieced together salvaged pieces from assorted fencing we'd taken down around the property as well as rolls of old wire fence we'd found in the brush, grown through with weeds.  Several pairs of hands, some work with zip ties and a staple gun, and we're happy to have 2-3 more feet worth of height around the perimeter.  Hopefully it will do until we can afford to replace it.  Over the past 2 weeks there's been no evidence of damage to the garden, so the deer may be happy browsing on native plants.

After all the trees had come down on the property, there was a lot of salvageable firewood left on the ground.  We made a landing zone for chopped wood with some salvaged pallets.  We made ends and dividers with more pallets, hammering salvaged rusty t-posts (found in one of the piles of discards uncovered when the big trees came down) to hold things in place.  It's functional and will keep the firewood neatly piled to dry out for use in the winter months.

A couple of hours' work, with barely a dent in the piles still to be cut!  We'll be working to build our supply over the weeks ahead.

Open Invitation

We installed a bat box in March, in the hopes that we would have some reduction in the number of mosquitoes on the property.  So far, we've seen small bats at dusk, fluttering through the air with quick jerky movements - obviously following the sound of food on the wing.  As far as I can tell, they haven't taken up residence in our box, so they must be nesting somewhere close by.  We're happy they're here, and hope they will stay and prosper.

Gone Again

Just an update on our bee swarm - the bees that we managed to scoop back into our hive the day after they decided to leave decided to leave once more.  Apparently they took a portion of the workers from the hive that remained, as an inspection last week showed that the queen was indeed laying, but the numbers were nowhere near the 10,000 bees that came out of the package the day we installed it - perhaps 2-3,000.  They're also building across the bars and up the sides of the hive body with fragile comb, making inspection difficult and correction of their mess too risky.  I will be going back in this coming weekend, to see how disruptive my last inspection was, and to try and remove some of the poorly build comb in the hopes that they will build again.  Better a cross-comb hive of honeybees than no honeybees.

Where bees come to Front Porch Farm, leave, and are (hopefully) convinced otherwise...

We waited for what seemed like forever to get the call to pick up our packages of local Carniolan/Italian cross honeybees, locally bred on Vancouver Island.  I watched as the first flush of dandelions and then the fruit trees were visited by other local pollinators as well as our Mason bees, and worried how long I was going to need to feed our package bees for - if the local pollen and nectar sources were in a lull when they finally arrived.  Our beehives had been sitting vacant since the beginning of the year, so I raced to pick up our order when I was finally contacted.

So we got the bee packages installed the morning after they arrived (on a rainy evening), after making sure to feed them sugar syrup several times while they were trapped in their package.  On Thursday morning, the girls were gentle and quiet - or as quiet as you would expect after being shaken into a strange wooden box. The syrup feeders were set up in the hive bodies, and the entrances reduced to allow them time to settle in and make sure they had protection from intruders. 

I was out in the garden on Friday afternoon, planting some seeds, when I heard quite a bit of loud buzzing. An investigation led me to the biggest cherry tree in our orchard, where there were thousands of bees swirling about around the top branches. My first thought was that they were reacting to the sunshine and still orienting themselves to the new location, but I wanted to keep an eye on the process. About 45 minutes later, I saw a small bundle of bees start to form up, on a branch about 25 feet in the air, near the middle of the tree canopy. Not good - the likelihood was that there was one of my new queens in the center of that mass, and I ran to get a pillowcase and don my veil and gloves, wondering how I was going to get up there with the ladder all by myself. By the time I got back outside, the air was clear, and the swarm was gone. There were still bees flying about both hive entrances, though they sounded considerably more agitated. I didn't really want to further disturb them, in case the remaining colony decided it wanted to move on as well. I waited for the day to cool off, thinking that at that point there was really nothing I could do to turn back the clock.

Just after 7:30, I got suited up and wandered with apprehension towards the hives. It was too quiet, and I soon discovered that one hive was empty, while the second had less than a quarter of the bees it had contained the day before (as a mental image, these were 3-pound packages of approximately 10,000 bees). We're still not sure if there is a queen in the hive, as there's minimal chance to find her with them clumping and building comb in an otherwise barren space - but they sound calm and are going about their business.

This morning, after a very bad night's sleep, and an e-mail conversation with the beekeeper who sold me the packages that ended with 'sorry I can't help you,' as well as a vague reminder that top bar hives aren't standard practice and there's never any guarantee with hiving, I got up with the early morning light and slowly wandered about the orchard and lawn, peering up into all of the trees, and listening hard for the sound of several thousand honeybees.

In the end, the swarm I found was on the mulch at the base of one of the plum trees, and they were almost perfectly silent. I got Adrian out of bed, and the 2 of us suited up and prepped a couple of light cardboard boxes, in the hopes of being able to scoop the swarm and dump them back into the hive body.

Unfortunately, they had settled in and around several plants, and there was quite a bit of dirt and mulch that went into the box with them as we tried to ensure that we got the marked queen. They were not happy being disturbed, and I was sweating very nervously, being stung while we both had our heads and hands down low, trying to find that green-dotted body to ensure we managed to take her with her workers. The air was filled with loud angry buzzing then, and I could actually feel the vibrations from the bees landing on me as they announced their warning.

The box contents were 'dumped' into the hive body as quickly and gently as possible, given the amount of plant matter and dirt that had to be scooped up in the process.

About 45 minutes later, there was still a small clump of bees on the ground, so we collected them and quickly put them in the hive as well, just in case they had been protecting our queen. We've closed up all the entrances to the hive, and they had managed to gorge themselves on an entire quart of sugar syrup before absconding, so they won't be hungry for a bit. Hopefully a bit of time will help things seem and smell a bit more like home, and help them decide to set up shop where we put them in the first place.  Fingers crossed.

Cleaning Up

We're still working on clearing the future pasture and pond area, sorting through the limbs of the multiple trees that were felled into the natural basin.  The timber was taken away, but the tangle of branches remains - some the worse for wear as they were ground into the mud by the heavy machinery.  Some of the twisted branches pierced the earth by several feet under the trees' own weight coming down.  We're racing to beat the wild blackberry brambles, whose new growth is twining through the boughs and under the mass of pine needle litter, making clearing a frustrating procedure at times.  The piles of salvageable lumber are growing, and the piles of waste wood and twigs are getting smaller as we burn what we won't be able to use.

We've been lucky enough to have several friends come and pitch in for a day, and the neighbor has dropped by more than once to lend a hand tending the fires, so we just keep moving forward bit by bit.  Next, we'll clear the loop around back of the outbuildings and kitchen garden.  We might just get that 6-foot fencing in before the deer can do too much damage to the new growth in the orchard or eat any seedlings I plant out in the garden.  The tomatoes are starting to put out their second set of leaves.

 The before picture, These trees where throwing vast shadows and dropping a lot of needles and branches. Moss, weeds, blackberry brambles and patchy grass were all that was growing for about 30 feet in any direction. In order to have more garden area and to let the light reach a smaller secondary orchard, they had to go.

Which left us with quite a bit of work.

We're getting the hang of burning the brush that can't be used, and the wood we're salvaging from just the limbs of those huge trees will fill our (future) woodshed.

Some Rather Large Changes

I was going to write a post on boiling down maple sap for sugar, but since the sap is still sitting in the freezer in a couple of rather large blocks, I don't have anything to report on that front right yet.  We'll leave that for another time....

Instead, I thought I should document the changing face of the property.  As the days warmed enough to start doing some work outside while being able to see the lay of the land (before spring kicks all the weeds and underbrush into high gear), I got to talking with a neighbor about taking down a few trees.

Those few trees quickly became more than a few, and as the discussion progressed it became clear that we had a major undertaking ahead of us.  If we were going to commit to taking down multiple trees, it made sense to look at taking down what was necessary for our future fencing as we cleared those trees which were shading out the orchard and vegetable garden. It also made sense to take down the few that were looming over our only outbuilding and blocking the sun from what I envision to be a future planting area, pond, and pasture. If you're going to do it, do it right.  Go big or go home.... something like that.

The next step was for me to apply for a timbermark from the provincial government, allowing us to sell the timber we were clearing.  Not a very difficult process.

Things progressed very quickly after that, since the same neighbor has a friend who's a professional tree faller, they both knew who to call in to assess the trees, and wouldn't you know, they're friends with a guy who owns a self-loading lumber truck.

After the contract was signed, our neighbor and his friend took down more than 25 trees in one day, with big smiles on their faces the whole time.  A couple of days later, all the marketable timber was trucked off the property, and now 'all' we have to do is clean up, and wait for the cheque.

The second tree down, this massive hulk had some very worrisome branches hanging over the driveway, compost and firewood area.  A friend studying forestry advised us that parasitic mistletoe has made several of our larger trees become badly malformed, and therefore potentially dangerous.

Once the tree was down, the sun could reach into the wet, ferny dell along the front of the property.  I hope to be able to run pigs and goats through this area in the future.  Below, Adrian is standing at the far end of *part* of the tree, as the skidder hauls it to the loading site.

There was a ragged line of large trees splitting the property in half, shading a small secondary orchard while casting shade on the majority of the cleared area available and encouraging the growth of weeds and brambles at their bases.  After a windstorm, branches would litter the property.  Now, we can plan on adding more fruits and nuts, and hopefully a pond for water catchment and wildlife in the future.

 Below, we had enough logs to send three truckloads off to the scale.  There were a few logs that couldn't fit on the last load, and along with all of the bits and pieces left over, we have several weeks' work, and several years' firewood to cut and stack.

Rainy Days And Marmalade

We've come into a patch of what's called 'winter weather' here on the Wet Coast, meaning that it's been raining - most days, all day, for several weeks.  Can't complain too much - we don't have to shovel it! We were lucky to have a few scattered dry days spread out over the month - the New Year's bonfire at the neighbors' house would have been considerably less comfortable while sitting in the wet.  As it was, we merely had to stand up occasionally to switch from burning our shins to thawing our backsides.....

It also meant that it was high time to find some organic citrus, settle in for a few hours, and get back to a family tradition that began some years ago.  While my dad's favorite preserve was Black Currant jam, for which fruit I searched the Farmers Markets and eventually began an annual pilgrimage to a local U-Pick (and which we eventually began to grow for ourselves), my mother settled firmly into an appreciation of a 3-Citrus Marmalade that I made once, on a whim.  Not the Apple Butter, gently spiced and cooked down from our own apples, or chunky Strawberry Jam, bright with the taste of summer in our back yard. Nope - a recipe that most marmalade makers would call cheating (you used boxed pectin - gasp!), from imported, tropical fruit.  Oh well, after all, we've made Durian Jam for the Malaysian side of the family from frozen fruit shipped across the planet. I'm sure the neighbors wondered what the heck that smell was, but it tasted quite good.

So, with a fire in the woodstove, armed with vegetable peelers, a sharp knife, some grapefruit, lemons, oranges, and TV shows on the iPad, I set about peeling and dicing the rind.

While I had all of that citrus on hand, I sliced up some organic Meyer lemons and covered them with a few spoonfuls of our honey - for a Vitamin C boost to add to my morning tea.

I like to use red grapefruit in the mixed marmalade with lemons and oranges, because the added color makes for a prettier finished product.

Of course, while I was buying all of that citrus, I may have overestimated what I needed - so I waded through my preserving books, and  saddled myself with the extra work of making a Grapefruit Marmalade....

and a Lemon Lime Marmalade. Both were more traditionally steeped overnight, the Lemon Lime including the seeds (in the tea ball) and the whole fruits, thinly sliced, making for a sharp, bitter tang in the finished preserve.

The finished product: 3-Citrus, Ruby Grapefruit, and Lemon Lime Marmalade. 

Bittersweet

I was out examining our remaining colony of bees today, since the clouds ran out of rain and the weather changed to cold and misty. There are still a significant number of cranky girls in residence, so I again left them alone for a clearer day with better light, and a chance to do an inspection in my veil with another set of hands. There is still the possibility that I missed a queen in residence, so I will make very certain I know what's going on in the hive before I decide what to do next.

The comb that had been accumulating in the kitchen was partially dealt with over the holiday slowdown, and I cut out just the parts of comb that were completely capped - signifying finished honey that won't spoil or ferment in storage. I then broke that comb down to put through my very basic honey extractor.  The usual method for honey extraction when you're keeping a top bar hive is called 'crush and strain,' which is a very apt term.

In the kitchen, I separated out only the comb that contained capped honey - the remainder of the wax, and the top bars were put to the side.

With some patience and my large potato masher, I made sure that I broke up the capped cells, reducing the wax and honey to a mixture that could be strained through the three grades of mesh that came with my handy-dandy crush and strain contraption. 

Yep, a food-grade bucket with a 'honey gate.' Don't worry - it wasn't expensive!

With the help of the heat from the woodstove, and lots of towels and newspaper to catch any spills, I slowly added the mashed mixture to the first of three sieves, scooping out the spent wax that remained between additions, and we patiently waited.

In the end, things got quite sticky, but it smelled wonderful while I was working, and after a couple of days we were able to cover more surfaces with towels and gather our small harvest of honey.  

The wax itself will be rinsed outside to make sure we don't add wax debris to our plumbing, then melted several times in water, to allow me to remove as much debris as possible. Finally, I'll strain it through cheesecloth or an old t-shirt into the waxed milk cartons we've been collecting. The cartons can simply be torn off the cubes of pure, cooled, solid beeswax in the end, and the wax can be used to make candles and salves in the future.

Orchard Work

We've been slowly continuing our work in the orchard, as the rain allows, and as leaf collection and rabbitry cleaning provide us with mulching material. Around the large Bing cherry tree, we've filled in the branches and garden debris with topsoil, planted black currant and gooseberry bushes we propagated in preparation for the move, and scattered snowdrop and daffodil bulbs where they'll get early spring light. Everything was covered with a good helping of bark mulch. Wayward deer, whose path goes clearly through and beyond the orchard trees, have been exploring and making a bit of a mess around the edges.....

The fruit bushes were spaced out in their pots before planting, to make sure they wouldn't be in deep shade, or close enough to encourage pests to congregate.

Some of the newly planted trees are now surrounded with their own hugels of compost, branches, soil, and mulch.  I'm  intending to plant divisions of horseradish under the 2 new cherry trees. which is supposed to be a good permaculture guild match. 

We'll finish up around the trees as the yard and animal clean up continues, taking things one day at a time.  In the background, you can see we've built another compost area, to allow us to collect debris from the orchard.  In the future, I plan to plant some comfrey in my composting areas, to encourage cutting of leaves to add to the layering process.

 The piles are still impressive, but we're working our way through our soil and mulch. Adrian was on wheelbarrow duty today, while I was laying down the last of the cardboard and tidying up the fallen leaves.