Notes From Zone 4

This weekend has been hazy hot and humid. The kind you’d much rather spend at the lake. However we got quite a bit done. I actually got the sawmill running Friday night. A new blade finally got it working. We got four logs done, then I had to change the blade again, and it’s

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We have got to butcher chickens again this weekend. These boys are getting out of hand. We’ve got a gang of unruly teenage boys wreaking havoc in the farm yard, and it’s just got to end. The awful crowing at starts at 4:30 a.m. and goes on throughout the day, picking up in earnest again

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I’ve been so busy canning lately. It’s that time of the year. Besides peach jam last week, this week I bought a bunch of tomatoes at the farm stand because I don’t have enough of my own yet, sadly. All those tomatoes turned into 10 jars of catsup and one pitcher of

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I called SMG (who is now Champion) on Monday, and got some advice on the sawmill. (Yes, they now have bilingual tech support.) I’ll be writing some pages about maintaining the sawmill soon. There’s a lot that’s simply not in the manual. Anyway, the advice was on shimming to extend the length of the

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High summer means there is an abundance of fresh local produce around, both in my garden and the local farmer’s stands and markets. I took a drive around in the morning, to see what was available, and found so much. So our all local meal this week featured our own chicken, butchered over the

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Doesn’t it look like she is saying “what’s in here, Mom?” This girl is trouble! She is so curious, so brave, so loves to be naughty. She almost giggles at this game, and it is very easy to get her to play. All I have to do is go check for eggs, and there

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We slaughtered our first six chickens today. There are six in the fridge plus a bag of pieces for stock in the freezer. But first the housekeeping updates. Bees: They are slacking. There is a little progress in the leftmost hive, nothing at all in any of the others. I’ll be skipping next week’s check.

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I got a little ambitious for my all local meal this week. Frank had to go down to the Boston burbs for work, and I found a Mexican grocery by googling around, and he stopped to pick me up some masa harina. I bought a simple tortilla press, and decided that I

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Jeremy came over this weekend, and helped us knock together the frame of the horse structure. We busted our tail non-stop, and barely got enough done. We had a drop dead time of dark on Sunday to meet, and we did, but have so much more to go. We just covered the frame with

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I skipped the bees last week because of the summer doldrums. I could have skipped this week as well. The leftmost hive is finally drawing the comb in their first super (after four weeks). It’s about half done, with no nectar. Interestingly, they’re drawing all the frames at once rather than working from the center out as they normally do. The next hive is just not up to par. No comb drawn on their single super, many fewer bees than the other three hives. It might be time to requeen this one. The other two hives, with two supers each are about the same: plenty of bees in the top supers, no drawn comb. The rightmost hive seems more populous, but both seem fine. I am going to check again next week. The left hive might be ready for a second super, and as long as I suit up, I’ll poke into them all.