Sewing backwards

     I have to admit that I have a sewing machine problem.  I own 5 and would never dream of getting rid of any of them, as they all have certain qualities that make them useful.  My first one, a Kenmore,  is a workhorse that has never given me any problems and can sew through nearly anything. My second one, an Elna,  does button holes better than any other.  I have a 1889 treadle machine that I actually used when we had a power outage during tech week and I still had costumes to build.  I dragged it out of the cave darkness of my costume shop and into the hallway with its floor to ceiling windows, and stitched on.
    A couple weeks ago I opened up the machine my husband's grandmother had.  It is a 1948 Singer with a table.  I  had the table/machine folded up and was using it to stack laundry on in the basement.  I decided that this year, any sewn gifts were coming off of that machine.  I am so glad I did. It is so smooth!  It only does straight stitching, but has all the accessories it came with, as well as the original instruction manual!

   So this season, the Bernina is staying in its case, and Gran's Singer is doing the work.  Who knows, maybe next year, I'll do it all on the treadle.  Or maybe not....

The Hopeful Farmer # 6

Snowy and his girls

I am learning things as we enter into what looks to be a long, cold winter.

1.   Even if the chicken coop is in the barn for the winter, the water  will freeze.  So we got a heater for the water.
2. The chickens are not as ready to leave the coop to go into the run when it is below freezing as they are when it is warmer. Infrared heat lamps are good.
3. Chicken poop freezes into  oddly sculptural, yet seemingly permanent shape when nights are in the teens and single digits.  Tried to clean the run this morning - nothing moved! So we will have a dirty run until things warm up a bit.
4. Chickens will eat nearly everything - they have a great love for left over salad greens,  yoghurt, stale bread, and adore peanut butter and jelly sandwich left overs.

Snowy, our unexpected, loud, and over sexed rooster.

When is it time?

      She is sick.  We know this.  The vet found a tumor in her mouth/nasal passages which is why our oldest dog is breathing like an old man with a bad cold and sleep apnea.  We have decided (with the vet's agreement) that surgery on a 13 1/2 year old dog is not really a viable option.  We have her on prednisone to try to reduce the size of the tumor and make breathing easier.  Still, she has difficulty if she closes her mouth.  
      Eating is tricky too - she has always had dry food, but she has difficulty chewing it and breathing at the same time.  So, I have been softening her dog food and adding egg, ground beef, and veggies.  She seems to be able to manage this more easily than having to chew.
     So, having said all this, how do we know when enough is enough?  She has some periods of the day that are good and others when her breathing is really rough.  Those latter times are when she will be trying to sleep, then she leaps up, and half stands, half sits, and just stares at us.  She doesn't want to be cuddled and she seems to be tolerating having her back scratched.  She is still aware, and will shift from room to room to be near us.  But how do we decide when to say goodbye to a friend who has been part of the family for over 12 years?
    I am learning that I am not good at this...

crafting on the cheap

            Okay, Christmas is my favorite time of year, and the time when, as most of do, I feel like I need just two more weeks of time for making gifts.  I also always need more money.  This year is not an exception, so I started looking for supplies in various places.  First, in my search for copper wire, I went to Walmart.  Here is what they had:

This is what it cost for 7 feet of coloured copper wire, which is 16 gauge, and very pretty. It will work for some of what I am doing. 

     I really wanted copper coloured copper wire, so I planned to get the old telephone wires that maintenance pulled out of my office years ago (and were throwing away) which I pulled out of the garbage and stashed in my file cabinet.  Stripping the insulation is not fun, but free is good, right?  Then today I was in Lowes looking for washers, and a few other things, and I wandered into the electrical aisle - just to look.  Ha! Gold mine - or a copper mine in this case.  I saw all the various well insulated cables they carry, and then, at the end of the aisle, the spools. Spools of pure copper, non-insulated wire. Gorgeous!

  Even more gorgeous was the price.  

It was 93 cents per foot, and $1.32 per foot.  HOWEVER, we are talking 7 strands of wire, when untwisted. So for $1.86 and $2.64 respectively, I got 14 feet of copper wire - 6 and 4 gauge.

Very happy; now I have to get very busy!

Apples and honey and ticks, oh my!

    The college had a three day break - do not ask why, I never understand these mid term breaks.  My husband and I spent some time tagging the apple trees on the farm.  We were also tagging the crab apples, but realized that all but possibly two were ornamental and not as important as we thought for a crop.
    We drove the truck all over the pasture, tying pink surveyor's tape to the  branches of the apples tree. Now, come mid/late winter, when we need to prune, we can hone in on the correct trees and get moving.  Pruning time will come just as we are very busy with the Spring musical production of Carousel - a gorgeous monster of a show - so we want to be as efficient as possible.  As we tagged, we tasted.  Some of the apples are good, some fabulous, and a couple were just blah.  There are twenty-six trees, if we do not count the rogues that have self planted.  All need pruning, and tending.  They have scab and are not beautiful to look at, but a couple years of attention and I
think we will have decent crops.

    Many of the apples have already come down in the wind, but some are still tightly on the trees.  Tree #25 turned out, to our delight, to be a Granny Smith.  These are the backbone of my "family famous" apple pie, so we had to grab some to bake up this weekend.  I shinnied up the tree and tossed the fruit to my husband, scraping my arms in the process, but altogether thrilled.  I had forgotten how much I love tree climbing.

    When we got home, I felt something tickling my chest, and looked down to see a deer tick climbing out of my bra.  Ick. Mashed him to a pulp (after taking him off my chest).  Later that evening I was sitting at the computer, and realized my eyelid was really sore.  I rubbed a finger over it, and felt something rough, so I thought I had unwittingly scratched it while in the tree.  I asked my husband to take a look, and he did.  Then he said,  "It's not a scratch.  Don't ask.  Close your eye."  Then he proceeded to try and pull a deer tick off my eyelid.  It did not come off.  We went to get tweezers, first putting some Vaseline on it, hoping it would back out. Ha! no luck!  So my husband grabbed that little sucker with the tweezers, and pulled.  Nothing.  Pulled again.  Nope.  It liked where it was and was going to stay put.  It took sever tugs, a great deal of pain, and the lost of a chunk of skin to remove that beast, but he finally succumbed.
     Earlier in the day we had decided to harvest the honey from the second hive.  The blue hive has always been interesting - heavier on the propolis, lighter on the harvest.  This year it was also very heavy on the propolis (this is the glue like substance the bees make from sap to fill any holes and keep out drafts - very sticky and nearly impossible to get out of clothing). We pulled the covers and checked the super and found nothing.  The bees had drawn out the comb (built out the cells meant to hold the honey) but there was no honey at all.  The hive sits about 3 feet away from the flower hive, and the only difference it there is a branch from a pine tree shading the top of the blue hive. Next Spring we are going to move this hive.  There are several places on the property where we could put it, or we can find a place on the farm.  The advantage of the farm is there are so many flowers and they will help pollinate as we get started planting.  The disadvantages include: bears and needing to protect the bees from them; distance from the house for processing; and finding a place that will not interfere accidentally with the livestock.
   So this weekend I have been harvesting the honey from the flower hive.  It is quite a lot, and oh, so delicious!  I am doing the "scrape and crush method" as this allows me to harvest the wax after the honey has dripped out.

 

Field mice and pee

   Yesterday, I went into our shed to get my big gardening bag in which I hold all my beekeeping equipment. It was initially purchased for  raking a few leaves into and dumping them on the compost heap when we lived in Baltimore in a house with a tiny yard and leaves from the neighbors' trees. Then we moved here, and with our four maples in the front yard and ridiculously abundant number of backyard trees (I have never counted how many we actually are growing) this bag became laughably small. But it is perfect for holding a couple of hats and bee nets, a smoker, three hive tools and a bee brush.
   Apparently it is also perfect for building a winter nest, particularly if you are a field mouse.  They like to fill the hats up with grass clippings, leaves and other snippets of soft things, and bed down for the winter.  It is usually in the Spring that I discover them.  I do not begrudge them a home. Truly I do not, but my hats?
    Yesterday, I pulled out the aforementioned bag and a very frightened field mouse scrambled out, leapt the three feet from the edge of the bag to the shed floor and dashed away under some sports equipment in the corner.  Hmm...having played this game before, I took the bag outside and dumped the contents on the grass and saw a very distressed little mouse  caught in the netting of the hat, trapped and terrified.  I let her go, and discovered that in her terror, she released the contents of her bladder into the hat.  And I am left to ponder the age old question: WHY???

Start of the harvest

    As a bee keeper I have been moderately successful.  Success can be measured in pounds of honey at harvest.  Or you could measure it by how many years you are able to keep a colony alive.  Or perhaps your measure is just the fact that you chose to do this crazy beekeeping thing at all.  I measure success in all of those ways.
    This year in the Northeast where I live, the weather was spectacular for apples, and wild flowers, and thus, honey.  I just harvested the first of my hives today.  Wed. I will get the second one (I have Wed. off due to a college break) and start the extraction process. It is going to be a huge harvest.
   Backing up a bit - last year, both of my hives absconded.  We found a mouse nest in one, which explains a lot.  If the colony was weak to start with, they would not have been able to drive out the mice.  The other looked fine, but alas, they all left, not died, just went away, which was really a certain death, since by the time of year they absconded did not leave them enough days to make winter stores.  Sad, but part of the cycle sometimes.  So this past Spring I bought two nucs from my local beekeeping guru and started again.  (A nuc is a small section of an already active hive, with a queen - usually four frames of drawn honey comb and some honey, if you are lucky. Nucs start off more quickly since they do not need to spend as much time making wax for their brood and for their honey stores.  They are, however, more expensive than starting with "package bees" which is a box of many thousand bees and a queen they have yet to know.)
     As I stated - this year, with our cool, wet Spring and our summer of moderate temps (except for two really nasty hot weeks in July) and occasional rain, it was perfect for flowers, so the bees had everything they could wish for.  Additionally, we have had a pretty mild Autumn thus far, so the goldenrod and fall flowers have stuck around for much longer than last year.  Today, when I opened the hive, it was crazy with bees.  This is a great sign - you want a strong colony going into the winter.  They will kick out all the drones, if they have not done so already, and cluster together through the cold winter.
     When I lifted the super off, I was gobsmacked by the weight of it.  There must be 30 pounds of honey in that thing! (A super is a box of frames with the honey for harvest, as opposed to the lower boxes, which are the bees' stores for the winter.) I know many beekeepers who will put a second super on top of the first, in order to give the girls room to make more honey - but I have never done this.  Not for any reason other than I have never had the need.  I have always had moderate honey harvests, not massive ones.  Quite frankly, this year with the  beginning of our farming career and all the time spent learning and making mistakes, I didn't pay much attention to the girls.  I just left them to their own devices. Adding a second super was the last thing on my mind. A shame, because this would have been the year to do it! Each one of the ten frames is completely filled with honey.  I am interested to see how the second hive has done.  It has never been as strong, and I think it may be a less ideal location.
   So lucky as we are, we will be incredibly busy extracting the honey and the wax.  If I look a little sticky at week's end, blame it on the bees.