Saturday, March 30, 2013

More than just honey

Anna, here. One of our many projects this spring is starting a few hives of bees. We are excited to introduce pollinators to our gardens and landscaping as well as reap the benefit of honey when available. Jessie and I consume what seems to be an above average amount of honey -- we use it in our coffee every morning, in tea, in general baking, and admittedly, sometimes eaten straight from the spoon. The prospect of being able to harvest honey from bees foraging on our land is thrilling.
     I am currently taking an introduction to beekeeping course at the Long Branch School in Bowdoinham, and this has been a sobering and informative experience. It seems that honey bees need a lot of coddling to survive in the northeast. Who knew that bees were so sensitive? With the fairly recent introduction of bee parasites (such as varroa and tracheal mites) and the viruses they introduce into the hive, honey bees need to be closely monitored and often medicated on an annual to biannual basis. There are beekeeping heros who are trying to breed resistance into honey bees to decrease and even eliminate the need to treat for such parasites, and I applaude their efforts. After much thought and research, I have decided to follow conventional medication protocols with my bees for the first few years. Eventually I would like to transition to reducing and eliminating the need for mite treatments, but the prospect of 50-100% hive loss every year without treatment is too daunting to face right off the bat.
   Another fact that I have learned about keeping bees in the northeast is that they often require supplemental feedings of sugar solution and cakes, especially in the winter and early spring. This is done when the honey supers (frames for collecting honey to harvest) are not on so there isn't any risk of the bees making honey out of white sugar instead of nectar. Regardless, I don't like the idea of feeding processed white sugar to my bees, or supporting the sugar industry by buying 20 - 30lbs of white granulated and powdered sugar a season to keep my bees alive. I would love to find a balance and take only the extra honey, leaving enough for the bees to eat over the winter and not need sugar supplementation. I have read that a productive hive can produce 100lbs of honey a season. We don't need that much. But bees are a new experience for me and I am afraid to buck the conventional system with the risk of losing my hive so early on. Hopefully over time I will be able to transition to a way of beekeeping that feels right for me and the bees. Having said this, for the first year, I am going to do as I am told and gain the experience and confidence to develop my own style.
     I think I am getting ahead of myself... The bees don't arrive until April 20 and there is still much to be done to prepare for their arrival. I am in the process of assembling two langstroth bee hive kits.
 This is the most common hive with wooden boxes containing frames of wax that the bees fill out to build their brood and store honey. The kits come as pre-cut wooden pieces and all the necessary nails needed for assembly. I just have to nail them together and paint the outside. It is simple and easy and
has given me the opportunity to learn the ins and outs of the hive.

Assembling one of many frames for our hives.

Some completed supers -- the fruits of my labor!

    Right now, all my knowledge about beekeeping is what I have read or been told. I can't wait to put  all this theory to practice and see if we can help these fragile colonies survive to enrich our land and taste buds. I will keep you all posted in the months to come.
 

Saturday, March 23, 2013

Seal it up!

One of our long term goals for our house is to use alternative energy whenever we can, and eventually, we'd like to be completely off the grid.  Before we even start to think about what sort of energy we'll be using (wind, solar, micro-hydro...), we want to make sure our house is as energy efficient as possible.  A couple weeks ago, we had an energy audit done by the great folks at the Midcoast Green Collaborative. It was a really awesome experience.  If you've never had an energy audit, here's the run-down:

They come to your house and ask you a bunch of questions about your energy consumption: how much your utility bills were for the past year, what sort of sources you use for heat, what sort of humidity generators you have in the house (watering house plants, an aquarium, humidifier, pot of water on the wood stove, etc.), and other questions associated with general energy use (including the length of our showers).  Then, we did a house tour during which they pointed out a lot of things that we could easily fix (putting insulation on the exposed pipes in the basement, for one).  Here comes the really cool part, though.

www.buildingdoctors.com


www.tlc.com

All the windows, doors, flues, etc. in the house are closed, and they attach a fan one of the external doors.  They then proceed to suck all the air out of your house, they measure the pressure differential between the work the fan is doing and what is flowing into your house (through all the leaky spots!).  With the fan still going, they walk around the house feeling for drafty areas, and it is pretty amazing how many leaks there are!

Then, they walked around with an infrared camera to see any leaky spots that were out of reach or so small we couldn't feel them.  If I had one of these cameras, I'd be walking around with it all the time.

Not our house -- www.energytribe.com

We learned that there are a lot of leaks in our house, but we also learned a lot of really easy fixes that pretty much everyone can do for cheap to save some energy.  For one, all outlets leak. There is a REALLY cheap, easy way to fix this.  Get some outlet insulation for the outlets in your house.  There are pre-cut foam pieces for this.

www.greeningneighborhoods.com


Punch out the holes for the outlets, take off the face plate, put in the foam, and put the face plate back on.  Save the pieces you punch out to make room for the outlets, and for outlets you rarely use, add the foam piece to a childproof outlet cover, and put that in the outlet.  Voila!  Insulated outlet.  :)  This is so easy, I can't believe I've never heard of it before.  They make them for light switches as well, so do those too.

Next on the list....caulking all the spaces between our support beams and the walls.  This one is daunting for me as my caulking skills are minimal.  I'm practicing in the basement first so that I can not make our house look like crap.

I just wanted to share about the outlets since it is so ridiculously cheap and easy.

Thursday, March 21, 2013

Permaculture, can it all be native?

Life after grad school has most certainly not been a halt in learning.  In the past 3 weeks or so, Anna and I have collectively read about 6 books on self-sufficient living.  We've covered topics from beekeeping to chicken raising to building our root cellar (lots of rainy/snowy days has helped, too).  We became members of the local library, we know just where our section is, and we've also purchased several books from our local bookseller.  We're slowly building a library of references from which we can glean information on how to make this dream a reality.

Oliver oversees the newest to-reads (and some we've finished already). Our fuel is on the right -- we'll get through these in a couple weeks.

One stark difference between learning outside of grad school is that my response to this 'daunting' stack of books is that I don't find it daunting at all.  I cannot wait to dive into all this goodness!  We've had the same Netflix movie for over a week now because we can't motivate to watch a movie when we have all this at our fingertips!

I'm currently reading this book:

Amazing -- a must read.
It is a wonderful introduction to permaculture, and it gives a lot of information about how to do permaculture on a scale that is not too overwhelming.  In short, permaculture is a way of designing, growing, and maintaining your 'yard' that is beneficial for all players -- the land, the soil, the animals (insects, birds, mammals, microbes, worms, etc.), and the humans.  It is a fair bit of work up front, but in the long run, the landscape takes care of itself -- much like a mature forest takes care of itself, is highly productive, and looks beautiful without a gardener weeding, fertilizing, tilling, etc.  The end result can be a stunning, productive landscape from which everyone benefits!

One complaint I've read about permaculture is that it advocates for planting a lot of non-native plants and even some that have been known to become invasive.  In our climate, however, can we really use all native plants and still end up with a favorable result that provides food, materials and beauty for us to enjoy without hurting the land?  Or, are the complaints about permaculture and non-native plants coming from people who haven't quite mastered the correct arrangements of plants to prevent the non-natives from taking over?  One book I read mentioned planting bamboo since it can be used for so many things and also does so many great things for the environment around it, but bamboo is known to spread quite easily.  The author suggested places to plant it to prevent the spreading (around a pond, near a paved path, etc.), and also suggested just paying attention to it.  When you see small shoots emerging, harvest them and eat them -- the baby shoots are the best anyway.  I guess I'm just not sold on introducing a lot of potentially invasive non-native plants to my property....we have enough Asian bittersweet as it is!  

I'm about to take a permaculture design course, so I'm hoping to get a lot of my questions answered there, but I'm impatient (hence I'm already almost done with one of the class texts).  Anyone have any experience with permaculture and how to do it with all native plants?

Sunday, March 17, 2013

A budding orchard...

One benefit of the land we're living on is that, at one time, there were several homesteads on the property.  As a result of this, there are many old apple trees around.  One of our projects is to try to revitalize some of these old apple trees and to encourage the young ones around them to flourish.  This is what the 'orchard' looks like now -- can't you see our vision?!?! ;)

The wild orchard -- we have our work cut out for us.



First we need to clear away the old brush and let some light in so the trees can start producing again (we hope).  Our chainsaws are out of commission right now, so we're limited to small stuff. We spent about 2 hrs clearing things this morning, and we're pretty happy with our progress.

Anna gets to work while Blaze (we're dog-sitting) supervises.

Some dogs were more helpful than others.

After the clearing is done, we need to decide what trees we're going to keep and then prune them. It took a long time for these trees to get so big and out of control, so it is going to take more than a year for them to get healthy and producing apples again.  I've been doing a lot of research on permaculture in preparation for a permaculture class I'm taking, and I have great plans for this orchard.  We're going to plant low growing things that will nurture the soil rather than fertilizing, and eventually, it will be very lush and green under the trees with small footpaths to access the apples.  It is going to be awesome. We think it is pretty awesome now, but in a few years, maybe everyone else will agree too.

Much more cleared after a couple hours of work. 

And now...the dog aftermath of a hard days work in the woods...




Monday, March 11, 2013

Hello!

This is the long awaited, much anticipated blog of our progress in our new home.  We'll use this space to update the progress of our house renovations, chicken keeping, beekeeping, and general rural life.

So to catch you up to speed -- we moved to our new home on 800 acres of land in midcoast Maine in mid-October.  When Anna (my wife) was in college, her dad wanted to invest in some land to put in conservation easement, he found this plot and snatched it up.  We are now the fortunate land owners/caretakers/explorers. :) When he bought the land, there were several old farm houses on it in various states of disrepair.  For safety, he tore down all the houses and rebuilt one house in the footprint of one of the older houses.  He also saved all the original posts and beams to build the new house (and some floorboards as well).  We are living in that house....lucky us!  Here are some pics right before we moved in:
Here's the view of the house when you pull up.

Living room

Kitchen (with Anna working away)

Dining area (boxes and boxes of tomatoes)

Guest room

Upstairs bedroom (with crib -- obviously we haven't moved in yet)

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Upstairs hallway
The house is in pretty good shape, so when we moved in we decided to just do some cosmetic repairs that are easier when the house is empty.  We had the floors refinished, and the main floor painted.  Here are some pics of after we moved in:

Upstairs bedroom


Guest bedroom (come visit us!)

Living room
































Kitchen (bless our mess)


Dining area























Since then we've been really busy with travels and visitors, but we've been most busy with homesteading and spring planning.  We're planning to have chickens for eggs, bees for honey, and we're planting a pretty big organic garden.  We're also going to do some selective logging in our woods to get our own firewood.  There are many things that I want to post now, but I'll save them for later to keep this post quasi short.