June, glorious June. Summer, glorious summer. Lush green canopies to drive through along our favorite country roads. Perennial flowers in full bloom, daisies, lilies, dahlias, native sunflowers and echinacea (cone flowers). The night sky filled with the tiny lights of fireflies. It’s a beautiful time of year. It’s also the beginning of HOT, MUGGY days. The kind of days that kick off mosquito attacks the second the sun thinks about retiring and send chiggers by the dozens into our ankles and waste lines. The kind of days that turn itty bitty little weeds patches into miniature forests, overnight. But it sure can be good for growing things so long as those hot days and rainy days have a bit of balance. This June brought extremes of both. One hot stretch got us up to 103* followed by 10 ½” of rain in eight days. The balance was there just enough. The plants are happy.
There is a sort of magical feeling that comes with warm rainy summer days. Although eight days is a bit much, I find that sitting on the porch with a good book and a cup of coffee while the rain pours straight down from the sky is one of my favorite summer enjoyments. On to the farm notes!
Bee’s- Almost ready for honey
Humans can intervene with bees only to a certain degree. Because we check their hives consistently, we can prevent them from being destroyed by beetles, mites and wax moths. We can see a hive has made queen cells in preparation to swarm and split the colony before half of the bees leave. Some humans take bees from the Midwest out to warm regions of the country and trick them into pollinating mega crops when those bees would normally be wintering. So, some of our interventions are good for the bees and some are not. Either way, there’s nothing we can do to make them have honey ready for us when we want it to be. The bees decide when the honey is ready in their own time.
When the bees make honey, they store it in frames. Our hives are Langstroth hives, meaning they are boxes stacked on top of each other. Because of this the bees use the frames in the top levels to store the honey and use the bottom level (s) frames for brood (baby bees). This honey is put into cells in the frames until the bees decide they are done making honey for those frames. Once that decision is made, they cap the honey with wax much the same way we put a tight lid on a food container. Until the honey is capped, we can’t take it. Even then we have to check to moisture content before we can bottle it. Honey has to have a moisture content below 20% to keep it from fermenting. If honey gets too dry it will start to crystalize.
So back out to the bee yards to check! Not capped. Not ready. Almost ready, but not quite.
It could have been because it got too hot and then that eight days of rain. For whatever reason this June did not bring a honey harvest. One thing it did bring was a surprise colony! A stack of unused hives against the shed caught our attention with hundreds of honeybees collected around one of the hives. Turns out, a swarm moved it! You just never know.
Dan and his mom getting ready to move the volunteer colony
Chickens- Milah the chicken herder
Oh Miss Milah.
Five years ago, we lost our beloved Baloo. We were devastated beyond comprehension. She wasn’t our dog, she was our family member. We weren’t prepared for her loss or for the painful grieving that came with it. We also weren’t ready to get another dog. But our daughter had a dog foster friend, who had a puppy, and the puppy needed a home. The puppy was the last of her litter yet to be adopted and because the shelter was so full, she was house hopping from one foster family to another.
Meet Milah. Milah was scooped up in a puppy mill raid in Oklahoma. The raid resulted in so many puppies that neighboring states were needed to help take them all in. Our local ASPCA got many of them, including Milah.
Becca and puppy Milah
We were still emotionally weary, but the picture of the cute little puppy with the big sweet brown eyes was enough to land me at the shelter. A volunteer brought her out to me. I tried to hold her despite her constant moving, licking, and gentle gnawing on my arm. Of course, you know how this part of the story ends.
I brought her home and she quickly became our most expensive pet ever. She was difficult to poddy train and by the time she got it we had new carpet and a new couch. She was difficult to train period. And yet, the tiny little cuddle bug that couldn’t stand to be anywhere but where we were quickly stole our hearts.
Milah is part lab, part Australian Shepard and part unknown. Just one awesome, always a little challenging, but ridiculously loving dog. And then one day she found her job in the family.
We didn’t train her. She just did it. We went out one evening to put the chickens up and as usual, Miss Milah came along. However, instead of walking or running around nearby, she ran very intentionally along the chicken fence. She then began hopping like a giant bunny across the yard to the path along the north woods. She was “checking it out”. Soon after, whenever the chickens would start squawking, she would be at the door, back fur up and pacing to get out. Every single morning, she watches for me to put on my rubber boots and grab the feed bucket. Every single evening, she watches again for the boots and eagerly waits at the door to go check it out.
Now, it is an amazing thing that she wants to protect the chickens. We’ve watched her run after a hawk for at least 500 feet, body check a visiting dog that gets to close to the chicken fence and even attempt to send a coyote back into the woods. What we weren’t sure about was how she would actually do herself with the chickens, until one got out.
Milah “Letting the chickens out”
If you’ve ever chased a chicken, you know how practically futile it is. Those little topsy, turvy birds can pop out of your hands before you can touch a feather. A rouge Rhode Island Red had slipped in and out of grasp long enough to bury herself into a fence corner filled with weeds, and Miss Milah was on it. I should say her mouth was on it. She quickly placed her entire mouth over the screaming hen. She didn’t hurt her. She simply used her mouth to hold the hen in place until we reached in and grabbed her. Now she is known as Milah the Official Chicken Herder!
Growing- A reality in permaculture
I tried it. I read Gaia’s Garden by Toby Hemenway. I studied and watched YouTube videos. Come June of every single year, I still spent hours and hours trying to keep up with the myriad of non-vegetables (popularly known as weeds). The all too happy to live in Missouri, Johnson Grass found its way into the garden a couple years ago and this battle became a near war. We don’t use any chemicals here so its good old-fashioned yank and pull. This year I decided to go with garden boxes, weed barrier and mulch. It’s been a much slower process for planting because the boxes are made of pallets as we can get them, however this will be a permanent solution. We did get one load of mulch (thank you awesome neighbors) and the rest is grass clippings and straw. Our grass is a wonderful blend of actual grass, clover and dandelions. Its all green. Its also not only fantastic mulch, it works wonderfully for chicken bedding as well.
Here are a few basic permaculture principles in case you are interested. Outside of the kitchen garden we’re doing quite well applying them even though several were accomplished by accident.
Keep whatever requires the most attention the closest to the house. We tend to tend what we most often see. Vegetables, herbs and flowers need care at least several times a week. Chickens need care daily. Apple and peach trees need trimmed in the spring and harvested late summer. Plant them further away from your home.
Think about symbiotic relationships. Chickens eat bugs that eat vegetables. So, keep your chickens near your vegetables. Bees pollinate flowers that produce vegetables and fruit so keep your bees near enough to your gardens and trees to aid in pollination.
Waste Not Want Not. Using pallet wood to make garden boxes and even chicken coops isn’t just smart and responsible, it saves money! Cardboard boxes make for good weed barrier and grass clippings make for good mulch. Rainwater has no chlorine. Your plants and chickens prefer it. You can purchase a rain barrel or make one yourself from a used 50 gallon barrel. Finally, compost! Every bit of food has nutrients so put them back into your own soil and grow something awesome.
Leave the woods alone. Love them for all their randomness and refusal to fit into our cultures concept of organized and tidy. The woods are a magical place known as home to animals, birds, reptiles and insects. All of which are needed for that functioning ecosystem we rely on to survive. Ours also share with us by providing morel mushrooms in the spring and paw paws in the fall. They probably have hundreds of edible plants that we just haven’t learned about yet.
On to July. I’m dreaming of…………canning lids.
Audrey L Elder
Fourteen Acre Wood
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