A Day At The Green Festival

Last weekend we spent our Sunday at the Albany Arts and Green Festival.  Blessed with beautiful weather and a large crowd, we sold almost all our local organic honey, as well as many of the products from our Handcrafted Herbalim CSA. 

There was a diverse grouping of  booths at the festival; everything from solar/renewable energy to The Sierra club to The Alameda County Beekeepers Association.  We spent some time promoting our classes, discussing our farm with interesting people, and benefiting from all the giveaways (fruit trees, environmental books, compost and organic vegi starts).  

Fire Cider, Herbal Body Cream, Gardener's Salve,
Eucalyptus Lavender Salt scrub for sale

Both our honey and the model Warre hive we set up drew plenty of attention.  It was a blast talking about bees with other beekeepers and hearing about many of the local apiaries in the area. The best part of the festival was networking with so many interesting, like minded people. Of course taking home peach, apricot, and cherry trees, comfrey, globe artichokes, mugwort, and a few more starts for the garden was pretty great too.  Hurrah for the Green Festival!

 

Intro To Natural Beekeeeping

a brave volunteer getting ready to install the swarm

a future beekeeper listens attentively

tapping the swarm out of the box into their new hive

Our first Intro to Natural Beekeeping class was a success!  The weather was gorgeous and the turnout of eleven students was perfect for an intimate setting.  The bees were amazingly docile.  We were fortunate enough to have a swarm land on our coyote brush the day before the class (WOW!) so the students had the opportunity to install the swarm into the new hive.  Everyone was enthusiastic and engaged with lots of questions.  We definitely learned that three hours is not enough time to cover all the material.  The next time we offer this class it will be five hours or longer with a nice break for lunch.  Thank you to all who came out.  We enjoyed spending the day together sharing, connecting, and learning about bees!

Therefore go, my People's Hive, go into all the gardens...

Go and give the children 

some nourishing sandwiches, 

and give the grown ups wellbeing in body and mind.

Go and remind everyone of the necessity of work,  

the gentleness of unity, 

the beauty of devotion, 

the prosperity 

of countless families.  

Go and fill every fireside with honey and happiness.

Mella fluunt tibi.  -Abbe Warre

In Favor of Buckwheat

This spring we are doing some more experimenting with small scale grain growing.  After doing some research on buckwheat, it really seems to be a wonder crop.  It is easy to grow, germinating in only 3-5 days and grows well in dry climates, giving up to 3-4 crops per year. Not only do the bees love it, buckwheat provides one of the highest honey yields per acre.  Bees working the buckwheat flowers make a dark sweet honey with a robust flavor that is high in antioxidants.

Used as a cover crop it will break up highly compacted soil while used as a green manure, it can be plowed into the soil after only three weeks.  It is a great mulch for overwintering beds.  (An amazing soil building combo would be buckwheat, crimson clover, borage, and vetch.)  Sowing buckwheat around your fruit trees creates a living mulch and it gathers nutrients on a deeper soil depth than the tree roots.  

tester bed about two weeks after planting, covered with young buckwheat leaves

It's edible blooms attracts beneficial insects as it also lures harmful insects like aphids away from other garden vegetables.  Buckwheat is gluten free.  It also has a feed value similar to oats so can be used for the homestead animals mixed with other grains.  Sounds like it's worth trying, we sure hope it lives up to it's reputation.  If so, we may be planting a whole lot more in the future.

Oh, and we can't forget buckwheat pancakes!

Harvest

Delicious autumn!

 My very soul is wedded to it,

 and if I were a bird

 I would fly about the earth

seeking the successive autumns.

 - George Eliot

Autumn is my favorite time of year, a time when we celebrate the bounty in our lives and a time when we begin to slow down, move inward.  The change in season brings so many beautiful colors, the air turning cool, butternut squash, fresh pumpkin pies, crisp tart apples, onions and bubbling stew on the stove, the smell of cider brewing all day long.  I suppose that's enough but really, I begin to feel more grounded, a sort of settling in.  This year I have immensely enjoyed stocking our makeshift pantry with as much of summers goodness as time allowed.  Some of the last jars to go on the shelves are filled with honey from our resident bees. 

I waited and waited for this honey.  The beekeeper in the family decided to change his philosophy and follow the Warre beekeeping method (which is supposed to be more bee friendly), so there was alot less human honey harvesting going on around here.  But I have to say it was worth the wait.  Above is a super from one of our hives.  Each super is filled with eight frames and each frame is full of honey.  This year however we used top bars instead of frames, which just means that instead of giving the bees an already built rectangular base to start with they had to build their own comb in any shape they please. 

Since the top bars are frameless we couldn't use our homemade extractor.

we soon discovered another method of extraction.......packing the honey comb into jars.....

 

covering with wire mesh............

 

and inverting over a larger glass jar so the honey filters through the mesh but the beeswax stays behind.  The process goes especially fast when jars are placed in the warm sunshine...(just beware of robber bees!)

SWEET!




Walter William's "Harvest"

 

Flight of the Humble Bee

Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and

the winds long to play with your hair.

-Khalil Gibran

For the last two weeks it has been honey bee central around here.  Over the winter we put our names on a local swarm list and all of a sudden the phone has been ringing non-stop.  We got six calls to retrieve swarms in a little over a week and with only a couple of empty hives ready for the bees that meant a lot of last minute woodworking.  Fortunately that is a strong point and an enjoyable father son activity for our family.  We had already been planning to change our hive design after reading the book, Beekeeping for All, by Emile Warré, a french monk living in the late 1800's-mid 1900's who kept bees.  Warré developed what he called the People’s Hive after experimenting with over 350 hives of various designs and types. It was his goal to find a hive system that was simple, natural, economical, and bee-friendly.  Not to mention sustainable, right up our alley!  So after catching all those swarms our order of 3 hives came in from up north....more bees. 

one of three packaged hives we picked up this weekend

placing a small piece of foundation wax on each top bar for the bees to build on

up in the wee hours of the night assembling the top bars into place

Here are our three new Warre hives after painting and before the bees moved in.  Not quite sure about the colors but it's all about recycling all the old paint in the garage.  

Creativity in the Garden

One of the ways we love to brighten up our planted areas is with hand painted signs.  They are easy, fun, and make the garden way more child friendly (for the little ones you love or for the kids at heart).  Just use your old wood scraps and some nails long enough to hold the signs together, recycle those used gallons of house paint in the garage, or use acrylic paint for more color!



our son's garden where he grows a variety of vegis and herbs

yarrow blooming in the medicine wheel

newly planted squash patch

Reflection and Gratitude for Busy Days



Keep knocking

and the joy inside

will eventually

 open a window and look

  out to see who's there.

-Rumi

silent moment to relax


These last two weeks have been busy and jam packed with activity.  The farm is coming along.  With the change in weather we have been spending more time on our outside projects, specifically, building a mini greenhouse and getting our garden beds ready for planting.  This will be our first growing season here and we are super excited to put as much in the ground as we can manage.  Inspired by this informative site, http://neo-terra.org/default.aspx, we decided to try and stick with the biodynamic approach to gardening/farming instead of dabbling here and there with different philosophies.  (So since we already started sheet mulching some beds we will finish them and then double dig the rest.)

This week we had two truck loads of steaming horse manure from the local stable dropped off in our driveway which will become the base for our compost heaps, mulch for my kitchen garden, and the last ingredient for our sheet mulching experiment.  

future pole bean tepee

potato patch is almost ready to plant

Our weeks have also been filled with creative endeavers like repainting the old, empty bee hives, making mexican hot chocolate...

and sculpting mud men!



Now that the rain has nourished the earth and all of the new greeness is emerging, I find myself compelled to give more time to my passion for collecting and studying plants. The mullein I harvested from the medicine wheel is now dry and ready to be stored in glass jars.  The Amaranth hanging in the kitchen is releasing it's seeds for us to file away for spring planting.   The medicine wheel has been mulched and as I meditate on more medicinal plants to add to the wheel I am reminded of a great woman who I wish I could have met, Juliette de Bairacli Levy, my favorite herbalist and wild woman.  You can view a clip from this amazing documentary about her life filmed a couple of years back.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBY76schtNU .  

Juliette wrote many herbals but right now I am particlarly interested in her book, The Complete Herbal Handbook for Farm and Stable.

l

  

Also, check out our upcoming classes and calendar of events.  If you are interested in more information on any class or would like to register, email us at soulflowerfarm@gmail.com.