Farm Update

An update is long overdue. So here it is by item:

The Barn

This is probably the biggest news. I won't say it's finished but it's finished enough for now. It's actually still getting some final touches before the winter rains arrived. Will is sealing the barn doors and I've been putting on some last coats but the exterior is essentially done.

Chickens

We still have seven. Some of them finally started laying but it doesn't seem that all of them are. We're only getting two to three eggs a day. It could be that the days are already shortening or some just haven't started yet. Two to three are plenty, though, and beyond that we'll have to sell or trade them.

Bees

My bees are doing great. I hosted a couple bee classes at the finca for BioFuel Oasis and learned a lot about testing for mites. My hive actually had a lot of mites and I had to treat it with Mite-Away, which seemed to do the trick. There's also quite a bit of honey and I was thinking of harvesting this fall but I'll just leave it for the bees to eat over the winter and then add a couple supers pretty quickly in the early spring and plan on doing a big harvest in the later spring.

My friends' hive that I'm hosting is not doing so well. It appears that when they went into the hive earlier in the summer they killed off all the queen cells to prevent further swarming but it ended up being that a queen had just left with the previous swarm and it hadn't been replaced yet. We tried all dropping in frames of brood from my hive and other hives in the hopes that the bees would make a queen but last time I took a look for them, there wasn't any brood. The hive won't last much longer.

Water Tank

I have not hooked this up yet but I prepped the side of the carriage house with weed barrier and gravel and actually got it moved into place. Now I just need to run pipes from the downspouts and provide a first flush diverter. Since it could fill in one good storm I can take some time getting it hooked up.

Garden

Not much to share. I had another quasi-successful year with the SFG. I'll be adding a second bed for next spring. We got a bunch of apricots this year and made jam. The fig tree did okay but didn't produce that many ripe figs. The plum tree produced but wasn't as prolific as last year. It also got a lot of aphids at the ends of branches. I did some pruning that will hopefully do it some good. The persimmon hasn't produced but it's still growing and I'm still training it horizontally. I planted the pomegranate in the ground but not soon enough for it to flourish right away. I'm hoping it recovers in the spring. I planted a passion fruit vine that I'm hoping does well. It has amazing flowers and I lover the fruit. Our friend Ayse gave us some passion fruit jelly that was delicious plus it also makes good juice. Oh, and the avocado. The branches are turning brownish so I'm hoping it's not diseased. I'll keep my fingers crossed. And then there's the Fuji apple out front that produced a ton of apples this year. I think I'm letting it produce too many because the tree itself isn't growing much. I'll thin it out a bit more next time.

Chickens 4.0

Or maybe it's 5.0. We got our first chicks in March of 2010 and since then we've gone through a number of them. We've lost chickens to raccoons, the neighbor's dog, a mysterious illness, and we even had to kill a rooster from our first batch. But with the rebirth of the farm this spring, we got eight new chicks from BioFuel. We lost one pretty quickly to who knows what but the seven remaining are a mix of Black Sex Links, Light Brahmas, and one Cuckoo Maran.

I feel like I've gotten the chick raising down now. I kept them in a large box/cage for just a couple weeks in the garage but as soon as they feathered out, I moved them out to the coop. It took them a little while to get the hang of getting into the coop before the automatic door closed. For a few nights we'd find all of them huddled outside the door, or some inside with the rest outside. Then for a few nights they overcompensated and were in super early. They have it down now so they're in every night before it closes.

Here they are one of the evenings they made sure to get in early.

Blanquira

We have a new addition to the Finca 57 family, aka Los Martinez Williams. A little over a week ago I was out checking on the chicks...oh yeah, we have new chickens. I'll have to come back to that. Anyway, I noticed Domingo hunting something, which he never does because he's fat and lazy (and the best cat ever), and saw a little white bird in the plum tree. This was obviously a domestic bird and I was guessing a parakeet, which explains why Domingo was hunting it, it's the only kind of bird that he has a chance of catching. I tried to grab it but it took off and landed in the neighbors' lemon tree.

I called Ron out to help and we both attempted to grab it but it kept flying from branch to branch. I tried one last time and missed but it left the tree and flew right into Ron's kitchen. That allowed us to close all the doors and limit the chase to one room, although that didn't make it much easier. We spent a good amount of time chasing that little bird down, much to the delight of Molly, the daughter. It was a bit Keystone cops but I think it eventually wore itself out and we got it into a box.

I posted a photo to the neighborhood Facebook group and while no owner presented him- or herself, a neighbor did offer a loaner cage for a few days while we figured things out. My first inclination was to get rid of it as quickly as possible but it actually grew on us pretty quickly and we decided to keep it. So then we needed gear. The cage was the biggest item to find and as luck would have it, a friend of a friend had an antique cage that she was willing to donate to the cause. The rest of the equipment was easy and the cage needed to be hung but it came out alright. So please meet Blanquira:

Honey 2.0

Last weekend was a full one. The jugglers from Long Beach came up for the Second Annual Genoa Street Juggling Festival. It was a slightly smaller turn out this year with only three jugglers came up, Will, Rhonda, and Aidee. Bill, my brother, who came last year is now living here but, unfortunately, he had to work most of the weekend. He's the best dressed one in the video, ready for work.



Saturday was a juggling and BBQ day. Sunday was an urban farm day combined with some juggling and socializing. Rachel and Sophie came over to harvest honey from their hive so we had an operation going in the new garage, which was the perfect place to have that set up, while others were out juggling and snacking.  The operation went a lot more smoothly last year and we beat the previous harvest by ten pounds. They got fifty pounds of honey out of about twelve frames.

All jarred up.

Staging on the new hive stand I built. The peach colored box is a super and that super had eight frames. You can see the capped honey on the visible frame. The comb in the bowl was some free form construction the bees made. The brown comb didn't really have anything in it but the whitish one was full of honey and were able to bite of chunks of it for fresh honey from the source. Delicious.

An uncapped frame right before placing it in the extractor.

I built a new stand for the hives. I made room for at least one more hive with space between them to fit a super while inspecting the hives. The hive on the left is Rachel and Sophie's. The blue one is mine.

Bee Day

Today was pretty much dedicated to the bees. For those of us who bought nucs through BioFuel Oasis, we had a free class today that had us going into a couple hives from those nucs. My friends Sophie and Rachel from down the street, whose hive I'm hosting, went to the class with me with the plan to inspect both our hives afterwards. While we were there Veronica texted me to let me know that the bees were swarming back at our place.This was the third time in three weeks that Rachel and Sophie's bees had swarmed and we knew it was time to go in there and find out what was going on. So we learned how to count varroa mites doing a sugar roll test and then left headed back to my place where we found a small swarm in the plum tree.

The first order of business was to catch the swarm. This was by far the most accessible swarm I've dealt with. It was at eye level in a tree in my own backyard. We grabbed a cardboard box and shook them into it. They seemed to stay there so we assumed that we had gotten the queen. The we just let them be to make sure that they stayed in the box and moved on to inspecting the hives.

We started with my hive because it was newer and less established. I had put on an additional super the week before and I wanted to see if they were starting to fill it. Everything looked good; there was brood in the nuc frames and may have been expanding outward. The upper super had some honey in it and everything was looking as it should. Then it was on to Rachel and Sophie's.

They had a deep super with two regular supers above and as soon as we removed the lid we could see that the top super was completely full of capped honey. It is so ready to harvest that it is going to be quite the bounty of honey. We removed the two top supers and started inspecting the lower "brood" super, which was super active as well with six of eight frames dedicated to brood and the outer two frames filled with honey. The next super up also had some brood but you could easily see where the brood sphere stopped and the honey started. And then the top super was all honey. To give them so extra room and to hopefully prevent more swarming, we added an extra super that I had since they needed it more than I did. Once we harvest I'll take it back and add it onto my hive.

Now back to the swarm, who seemed to be happily staying in the box. I called up a couple friends, Sarah and Yvette, a couple blocks away, who had an empty hive that they've been looking to fill. They wanted the swarm so I carried the box of bees over to their house and dumped them into their hive. When I got back to my house I noticed that there were still bees hanging from the same branch as before as if grouping around a queen. So I shook those into another box and let them be for a while. They hung out as well in the box so just to be sure I took those bees over as well and dumped them into the box. This was a few hours later and the original set of bees were still in the hive and working away so that's a good sign. Hopefully they'll stick around.

The Barn

Work continues on the carriage house, or casita, or now with its new color I've been referring to it as the barn, as have others I've overheard. This photo is a little behind but the body color is set and I've started work on the trim. The two blind sides still need a lot of work but I'll do those over time. The porch roof is also framed and now we're just waiting on the roof, which is scheduled for next week. Once that's in place, we'll be able to final out the permit shortly thereafter. There will still be much work to be done, but that will be a major milestone.

This past Saturday my contractor was on site briefly and we were discussing the barn door while in the garage when he heard someone outside. We went out to find a woman there looking at the barn and when she tried to speak, she started crying. It turns out that she grew up in my house and was back for a wedding and came by with her aunt who knew that we were working on the carriage house. Both her parents have passed and she said they would have loved what we've done. She recalled playing in it as a child even though they weren't supposed to. It felt really good to bring that much emotion to someone with this project. I hope we've done it justice and that it stands for another hundred years.

Farm Update

It's been a few months and while very little has changed on the farm, there's been much action on the carriage house and preparation for a rebirth of the farm. The carriage house is nearing completion. The drywallers were here this past week and the taper started the wall finishing yesterday. A painter will come next Friday to do a couple coats on the inside of the upstairs and then the electrician and plumber will come a week from Monday to do their final parts. I've been working on prepping the exterior for painting with the help from various family members. We still don't have a roof and it's been a headache trying to get one. I've wanted a metal roof since long before this project started and it's unbelievable how difficult it has been to source the material for it. A roofing company is coming on Wednesday to give an estimate so hopefully we can get this major piece rolling.

In other news, and related to my previous re-post about rainwater harvesting, I received a free large water tank through a city program. It holds 530 gallons and I'm planning to capture the rainwater from the carriage house roof. Initially, I'll use the water for irrigation but my eventual goal is to use it for the toilets in both the main house and the carriage house.

I also ordered a nuc from BioFuel Oasis to get the beehive going again. Not long afterwards, a couple friends from down the street, Rachel and Sophie, asked if I would host their hive since their landlord decided that they couldn't keep them anymore. So now I'll have two hives on the farm. I still haven't gotten any chickens but I want to wait until the area can be secured. That means I need to either start building the deck or at least the railing that will close off the opening.

And today I made a quick sign for the farm. I also gave it an address. I wonder if you can just invent an address and then receive mail there. There must be some official process for registering an address but maybe not worthwhile.