Grand Island Acres

Archive for the ‘Bees’ Category

We finally got to spend a day in the garden.  Between the weather, holidays and travelling it has been slow this year.  The weather this year has been frightful.  The first potatoes went in on Good Friday and we got snow for Easter.  Then we had snow or ice every weekend until the end of April.  Kathy got two new colonies of bees installed on April 18th.  We were worried that it might be too cold for them.  We left the next day for New Orleans.  Chad was attending and speaking at the American Planning Association conference.

The weather turned gorgeous while we were gone.  The last weekend of April we picked up the first of our plants from Barb’s Greenhouse in St. Libory.  We got 3 kinds of cabbage, (golden acre, kalibos, and murdoc) and 3 kinds of broccoli (romensco, purple santee, and happy rich).  The last two are more sprouting broccoli than heads of broccoli. We also picked up leeks and shallots and a few other random plants.

We started laying out the garden and put in fence for peas and beans and planted the cabbages and peas on Saturday. Kathy also checked on the bees and discovered that while they were doing fine and the  Sunday we hope to get the broccoli, leeks and shallots planted.  We also have a couple of apricot trees that need to get in the ground.

We do still have 2 full shares available and 4 short season shares if you know anyone that would be interested. Send them to our signup page.

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The plan this year is to add bees and chickens to the operation.  I posted pictures of the bee hives earlier and we have bees coming mid April.  It is time to start working on the Chicken Coop.  We bought plans for a 4 x 8 shed from http://www.icreateables.com You can see those plans here.  They were really helpful and sent me a couple of pages from an alternate version of this shed so I could see how to add a second door.  This will all make more sense when you see the pictures of the final product.  Kathy and I went window shopping at my Dad’s house.  Okay we went to his house and dug through his shed for windows we thought we could make work in the coop.  We found 2 windows, one for each of the 8′ sides of the shed.  Will and Lee helped me build the foundation and Will helped me conceptualize the walls I was modifying from the original plans.   Here are pictures of the project in process.  I will keep adding pictures to the gallery and I hope they will update automatically.   Maybe next year we will be able to offer eggs with the CSA!

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Kathy wants to have bees in a top bar hive.  Today I built our first top bar hive.  Like all projects I will do a few things differently with the next one.  I may also have to either make the lid a little bit bigger, it goes on pretty tight and that is not a big deal now but when there are 40 or 50k bees in this box that may change how much we want to push things around and pound on the sides to get things to fall into place.  All we need to do is finish the top bars by adding the spline to them and then add some legs to the whole thing.  I also need to find some number 8 hardware cloth to put in the bottom of the hive.  Oh and we need to order some bees.  Hives without bees don’t do much.