Harvest Dinner closes the 2015 gardening year

Our last meeting for 2015 was on Oct. 13, with 14 or 15 club members present for our annual Harvest Dinner. 

The harvest diners

We assembled at Camden Grange, and promptly discovered we had the makings for an awesome, gourmet meal!  Most of us filled our plates twice, and some of us (not me of course!) found room for a "small" bit of dessert, as well. The gathering of local gardeners was great, as we discussed what worked in our gardens this year, and, as important, what did not: early spring 2016 garden club classes include hands-on demonstrations of homemade seed tape, fruit tree grafting, and expandable tomato cage construction (club member Steve Byars is our Cage King).

Be sure to watch for the March 2016 edition of the "Elk Sentinel" newspaper for details on our first meeting of the year, and as always, enjoy your quiet, reflective season – remember to lift that heavy snow shovel with your knees, not your back!

jim

Final meeting and harvest dinner!

Our final club meeting for 2015 will be on Tuesday, 13 October – this will be our annual harvest dinner, at Camden Grange at 7 p.m.

We will dine on delicious, local food, as well as chat and gripe and discuss the 2015 gardening season in detail – what worked and what did not.

Our club will be providing the protein (meat) part of the meal, so please write back to me (or call me at 292-0326) to confirm you will be present at the dinner.

I plan to purchase/find some kind of appropriate meat-like substance (ham, chicken, fairly recent road kill) on Monday, and a head count will help. Otherwise, I will bring enough venison for me, only.

Please plan to bring a side dish/casserole/salad/dessert/bread-thing for the meal (enough for four hungry gardeners), and it would be awesome (!) if the side dish ingredients include some of the produce from your garden or orchard.

LONG-time club member Barbara will be providing us with our table cloths, plates, settings, and decorations. For those of you who don't know, she takes all that stuff home after the dinner, to launder and clean. Thank you, Barbara! 

Call me, please.

jim

Weeding Between the Lines

By Jim McGinty

As singer/comedian/entertainer Jimmy Durante would have said, “I’m mortified!” – a few measly 25-degree-Fahrenheit nights, and the tomato, pepper, bean, and basil plants in the open garden changed from green to black in color, and just turned up their toes! The same plants growing in the Earth Boxes on the deck are draped with Ree-May® frost blanket, and are still producing food, so though we cannot control the weather (and our growing conditions), we can at least moderate some of those weather effects.

This has been another amazing weather year, with new records set for high and low temperatures, number of days without moisture, pollen and particulate counts, and more.  Moderating and adapting to our local weather conditions may well prove to be very important in the gardening future – learn to be flexible, if you enjoy eating.

Here at Rancho McGinty, we learned a number of new gardening techniques this year, and we also trialed a number of new (to us) food items:  seed tape (individual seeds “glued” to long strips of biodegradable paper) was a hit, especially as my gardening partner Pat and I were pressed for time in the early part of the planting year.  The seed tapes for carrots and beets were excellent, producing beautiful, large produce, and were a snap to lay in the raised bed soil, cover lightly with more soil, and water as necessary. One can easily make one’s own tape (some see us at our local garden club meeting next spring for a show-and-do class), or one can buy tapes from Gurney’s, Burpee, and other seed merchants.

The successful, new food items include Golden Cross cabbage (smaller, softball-sized heads perfect for two hungry folks), Doyle thornless, trailing blackberries (three plants produced literally buckets of delicious berries), Sweet Pickle peppers (our pepper bushes are still covered with dozens of small, perfect-for-pickling, colorful peppers), Melenzana eggplant was a hit with our chickens, and even for the taste-bud-confused human diners, and in the tomato category, Chadwick cherry tomatoes were the first to ripen (and tasted, therefore, all the more delicious!), and the Megabite, Silvery Fir Tree and Scotia tomatoes were BIG producers. The Scotia tomato plants (a true cool-weather variety) loafed through our hottest months, but produced a bumper crop of fruit when all of the other summer tomato plants were shivering and complaining.

For the balance of this year’s gardening season, you still have time (for the next three weeks or so) to plant garlic, and any of those remaining potted fruit trees and bushes – just remember to provide each tree or bush with an identification label so you will know, next year, what you planted this year.

This also the time to divide that humongous rhubarb plant down into manageable size: just chop out a quarter of the root with a sharp spade, fill in the “wound” with compost or garden soil, and replant the liberated root into it’s own place – or maybe donate it to a neighbor.

If you have not already pruned the spent raspberry canes (the canes that produced berries this year), this is a good time to cut out all those brown and black canes, leaving the greenish/yellow fruiting canes for next spring.

Final chores in the garden include pulling up and composting those blackened or spent plants (no bug infestations or plant diseases in the compost bin, please), adding manure to ferment in the roto-tilled soil over the winter, mulching any over-Wintering plants, such as the afore-mentioned garlic, strawberries, assorted herbs, and other such (we use seed-free straw, pine needles, and maple and/or ash tree leaves for mulch). If you use drip irrigation (polypipe or T-tape), this is a good time to pull up the drip systems, drain them (so they don’t freeze and crack over the winter), and safely store them – this task is true for garden hoses, nozzles, and fittings (splitters, manifolds, etc.) as well.

One more chore is to gather all those scattered garden tools and check them over for damage or wear: cracked or splintered shovel handles, dull pruning shears, bent fork tines, etc. One would be advised to clean and oil the metal parts of one’s garden tools, and be sure to make a note (not a “mental” note, as one will forget during the required Winter nap) to repair, sharpen, or replace one’s expensive tools before spring.

With all of the autumn leaves and pine needles falling all around us, I trust you are bagging and saving these garden treasures for next year’s endeavors? Your ill-informed neighbors would LOVE to donate their forest and orchard “litter” to you – just ask.

Whew!  That’s a lot of chores and work – good thing those precious tomatoes taste so much better than the store-bought, red, cardboard-tasting produce we will avoid until next July.

GARDEN CALENDAR:

On Oct. 7, I will be teaching a Garlic 101 class at the Newport College Center from 6-8 p.m.  Just in time for autumn seeding, we will talk about garlic selection, planting, encouragement, and harvesting. You can call the Newport center (located at 1204 West Fifth Street, Newport) at 509-447-3835 for more information or to register for the class.

On the 13th of October, our local garden club will hold its last meeting for this year, and feature our annual Harvest Dinner, at Camden Grange at 7 p.m. We encourage all our local gardeners (members of our club and members of the general public) to cook up something grown in your garden (enough for four hungry gardeners), and bring it to the meeting for an evening of excellent food, entertaining company, and stories of the woes and joys of growing food in our challenging location.

On the 14th of October, I will be teaching a Backyard Chickens class at the afore-mentioned Newport College Center from 6-8 p.m. We will talk about the best methods of raising your own chickens for eggs, meat, and entertainment. Once again, you can call the center at 509-447-3835 for more information or to register for the class.

Finally, I will be teaching additional gardening classes for the Community Colleges of Spokane (in the Newport Center), starting in way, way-off January 2016:  we’ll have educational fun with subjects including old school (19th century) gardening, crosscut saws, fruit tree grafting, fruit tree pruning, seed starting and drip irrigation. You can call the College at 509-279-6025 for a printed catalog illuminating classes that are scheduled into March 2016. You need a good excuse to get out of the cabin confines anyway, so I hope to see you in class!

That’s it for this month AND year – enjoy your autumn and winter, and don’t overdo the snow shoveling – remember what I said earlier about staying flexible.

The Joys of Beekeeping

By Pat McGinty 

Spring has sprung and summer’s gone; fall is here and we’re almost done.  Beekeeping season is winding down; not because it’s fall but because as the weather gets cooler the bees know there won’t be any food and, most likely, lots of rain, snow, and cold so they go into a kind of hibernation. At this point they are best left alone with only the occasional check when the temperatures are above 40 degrees and the weather dry. I know this is hard to believe but this is the worst time of year for beekeeping. Why, you ask? Because there are so many unknowns. 

Sadly, one thing I do know is that I will be taking only one of my colonies into winter.  Somewhere in the past month I lost a queen and there is absolutely no brood anywhere in the hive. The bottom brood box is completely empty except for a frame of honey and the top brood box has a mix of empty frames and honey/pollen frames. When I put the organic miticide treatment in the boxes a week ago (more about this shortly), the remaining bees in the north hive were still busily preparing their food frames but they know it is too late to try to raise a new queen (I am finding dead drones that have been ousted from the hives because they don’t do any work so there are no drones to fertilize a new queen if there was one.) So they are basically trying to live the best they can until their lifespans are up. As sad as it sounds it is the way of nature, all nature including human nature. All of God’s creatures instinctively know what is coming and do what is necessary despite the outcome. Only human nature has lost (or ignores) that instinct. So what am I going to do with my “north hive?  Let’s talk about the mite treatment first.

It is the belief, especially of commercial beekeepers, that all bee colonies get mites and these mites weaken and eventually kill the hive. You have probably read about it if you have seen any of the articles on Colony Collapse Disorder.)  I have done some pretty extensive reading on the subject and my jury is still out on the truth of that belief because many of the sources I have read say the mites are part of the symbiotic relationship in the natural bee world. However, as long as I don’t have to dope up my bees with laboratory produced miticides I want to give them every chance I can (which is probably a mistake since they got along without human intervention for centuries. But then we all know that “humans know best” what every other species [and often other humans] need to be happy, happy, happy.) So I did my beekeeping duty and put the miticide pads in place on Monday, Sept. 21, wearing rubber gloves and trying not to breathe in the very smelly fumes. I know what you are thinking; if it is organic it shouldn’t be harmful to anything but the mites.  I agree but I also read the instructions first (something I don’t always do. Yep, I am human and dang proud of it.) Will it really help; I don’t know but at least if some other beekeeper asks I can say I did it even though I never found any mites in either hive in the first place.  So now on to what I am going to do about the north hive.

Saving a colony without a queen is not possible. By now she would have been laying brood that was specific to surviving the winter (these are known as “fat bees” and, no, that is not a reason to claim that extra weight you are carrying around has the same purpose.)  Since there is no queen there are no fat bees so the hive will die out. However, with a little intervention from the beekeeper, they can at least have useful lives helping out the remaining hive. On Monday, Sept. 28, (which hasn’t happened for me yet but will have happened by the time you are reading about it) I will be doing my hive check and remove the miticide pads. At that time I will move the remaining bees from the north hive to the south hive. The process is fairly easy and will, hopefully, improve the survivability of the south colony.  

After checking the health and well-being of the south hive I will place a “queen excluder” (a small flat piece of plastic or metal with openings large enough for worker bees to get through but not a queen just in case she is alive [very unlikely]) on top of the second brood box on the south hive. I will set the honey-filled brood box from the north hive on top of the queen excluder and brush any bees from the bottom brood box of the north hive on to the top of the frames of the honey-filled brood box (the empty brood box will be put away for next year.) If all goes well, over the next week the north-hive bees will be accepted by the south-hive bees. Once that happens I can take the remaining north hive brood box, remove any honey/pollen frames and store them in the freezer in case of need before the next food gathering in the spring of 2016 (did I mention that the south hive has two frames of honey in the bottom brood box and eight frames of honey in the top brood box.) I will also feed some extra pollen to the hive so they don’t deplete their food supply too early and starve to death.  Then, God willing, I will have at least one strong hive from which I can build one or more hives using NUC (pronounced “nuke” short for nucleus) boxes next year and continue keeping bees. If not, then I will be buying packages again if I want to keep my hives going.
  

In addition to combining the two hives I will need to keep the remaining hive warm and dry. In the past I have successfully used inch-and-a-half closed-cell Styrofoam wrapped around the hive with openings at the top and bottom for air flow. I also place one on the top cover to keep it from getting cold and sweating as it interacts with the heat the colony produces (remember that bees keep their hive at 95 degrees year around without help from the sun.) I also plan to slightly reposition the hive to face more easterly and toward the trees which should keep down excessive wind thus keeping rain and snow out of the hive.  As I said at the beginning there are way too many unknowns. We shall just have to wait and see.

This may or may not be the last column until January. The weather will dictate how much time I can spend with the bees and therefore how much I can share with you concerning their condition and my experiences. If I don’t get another one out please have a blessed holiday season and remember that Jesus is the reason. 

The Backyard Beekeepers Association will have their last meeting of 2015 on Thursday, Oct. 15, at the Deer Park Library (208 S. Forest Ave.). The meeting starts at 6:30 p.m. and we will have a honey tasting with honey supplied by some of our members as well as “Winter Preparation Peggy’s Way” as our educational segment. We will also recognize those that completed the Beginning Beekeeper training.  

Speaking of which the training is taking place on Saturdays, Oct. 3 and Oct. 10, from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., also at the Deer Park Library. The cost is $30 and you can still register by bringing your registration fee, a notebook and pencil to the class on Saturday, October 3.  

I hope I see you at one or both.  

Tomatoes or raspberries, anyone?

Here's a Diane Lukas Recommended Grower of tomatoes: Utecht Produce has u-pick $.40 lb. or they pick for $.50 lb. Call Cammie at 999-5937.

And Diane's dad has raspberry starts. U dig (in the Newport area), but hurry as he'll be tilling them under soon. Shoot her an email at dianelukas@rocketmail.com.

The Joys of Beekeeping

By Pat McGinty 

It’s extracting time!!!!!  For beekeepers that were fortunate enough to have plenty of nectar-laden flowers in the vicinity, the extraction process has been going on for a couple of weeks and will continue into early September depending on when the beekeeper can get the job done. What is extraction, you ask? Extraction is the process by which all that honey the bees have been storing up in the supers (you remember, the boxes above the brood boxes) becomes fair game for the beekeepers despite how the bees may feel about it. And the bees don’t give it up easily.

As you may remember from last month, the supers are added to the hive sometime around June. Once the bees have filled (or nearly filled) the second brood box with honey for their winter storage they will start looking for other places to put it, so the beekeeper adds the supers. The bees, figuring they will be sitting pretty with all these food stores, obligingly start filling the super frames with honey. If these are new frames they will first have to be drawn out (wax cells built to hold the honey) which will slow down the process so it is always a good idea to use previously drawn out frames if you have them. This year I used a mixture of both but without much nectar flow (see last month’s column) it didn’t really make any difference in the amount of honey being stored in my hives (yes, I am whining.)  However, the little girls are so organized they had teams working on both types of frames even if they wouldn’t be needed.  

The months of June, July, and August are the time when the colony is busy storing a lot of food. In April and May, the queen has been laying eggs at an incredible rate (2,000 per day minimum) and those new bees, for the most part, are now the food gathering team (give or take some turnover since bees only live about three to six weeks depending on the workload.) I am talking thousands of bees travelling thousands of miles and gathering nectar from tens of thousands of flowers. No easy task! The bees have brought the nectar back to the colony, passed it on to the workers in the hive who then store it in the wax cells and fan it until the moisture level is about 17 percent water. When they are satisfied it has reached this point they put a wax seal over it to keep it that way. Then comes mid-August (sometimes sooner) and the beekeeper arrives to collect the capped frames of honey from the super. This is where it can get interesting.  

This is probably not the time a beekeeper wants to go hive harvesting without a good bee suit, because the bees do not give up their hard work willingly. Every beekeeper has his/her own way to harvest honey; I use a large plastic storage box with a lid.  As I remove each frame from the super I brush off the bees (no, they are NOT happy about it) and as quickly as possible place the bee-less frame into the box, moving the cover as little as possible.  Other beekeepers have empty super boxes and, after brushing off bees, put the frames in the empty super and cover it so the bees can’t get back on the frames. Still other beekeepers go out a day or two early and replace the inner cover of the hive with a cover that lets the bees get into the brood boxes but not back up into the supers. Then they put another cover on top of the supers that has the most awful smelly stuff imaginable on it (a skunk would run away) which causes the bees to empty the frames out pronto. After a day or two they go back to the hive and just walk away with the filled supers. Now the frames are ready for extraction.

Some beekeepers do their own extraction and others use extraction services because the cost of an extractor isn’t cheap. The extraction services are often done by commercial beekeepers who have the beekeeper bring the capped frames to the extraction site and come back to pick them up a couple of days later. There may be a dollar cost for the service and most services keep the wax caps that are removed so the honey can flow freely in the extractor. I, for one, prefer to do my own and it is a hoot. Not to mention my kitchen is never the same afterwards. This is my experience.

I borrowed my bee-buddy, Steve’s, extractor. It is a manual extractor that holds four frames.  I also borrowed his electric de-capping knife. I had already been on YouTube and made my own de-capping tank (this catches the caps and any residual honey.) I had my grandson, Gregory, to help and I am glad I did. First we moved the kitchen table out of the way and put a large tarp on the floor (this does not help the cabinets, refrigerator, or stove, however.)  The extractor was set up near the kitchen sink and the de-capping tank next to the stove, because it was closest to the electrical outlet. I had about five supers of frames to extract.  Gregory would take a frame, slice the caps off of both sides, and hand the frames to me.  I would use a “scratcher” to open any caps the knife missed and load the frame into the extractor. When the extractor was loaded I started the spin by using the handle on the top.  I would spin three minutes one direction and then spin three minutes in the opposite direction. Then I would check the frames and if they were mostly empty I would turn them over and do the same process for the reverse side of the frame. The extractor, by the way, only holds about a gallon and a half of honey so at the same time you are extracting, honey is flowing out a valve at the bottom of the extraction tank, through a filter, and into a bucket. Five hours later we were finished (I was physically finished a lot sooner, but that is what grandsons are for.) My kitchen was the sweetest smelling (and stickiest) place on Earth and I had about eight gallons of honey and more draining into the bottom of my de-capping tank. It was heavenly; then the cleanup started. 

The extraction tank and the frames were the easiest to clean because you never get all the honey out of either.  So out to the bee yard I went with the extractor and 40 mostly empty super frames and spread them out near the hives. Two days later the bees had cleaned them up spic and span and everything was ready to put away. The kitchen was another story. A bucket of warm water with vinegar, and two hours later 98 percent of the stickiness was gone. I fully understand why beekeepers doing their own extraction have special rooms or sheds to do it in.  

So the good news is the 2015 honey is available; the bad news is the cost has gone up due to the lack of nectar flow and thus less honey. The latest reports are showing the wholesale price at $7 per pint so expect to see at least $10 per pint from your local beekeeper or outlet if not more since the finally tally is not yet in. 

For those of you that want to know more about beekeeping don’t forget the Backyard Beekeepers Association has a monthly meeting you are welcome to attend. The September meeting is a Field Day to be held Saturday, Sept. 12. We will be visiting a commercial bee yard as well as a hobbyist bee yard to learn about the differences in beekeeping styles, what to look for in a healthy hive, and what kind of hives are being used in the area. We will meet at Beemaniacs, located at 7619 W. Woolard Road in Deer Park, at 10 a.m. We will be around bees so it is recommended to dress accordingly; if you are a beekeeper bring your bee suit and, if not a beekeeper, wear clothing that covers you well including some kind of hood for your head. No perfumes or sweet smelling scents unless you want a lot of bees crawling all over you looking for nectar. Backyard Beekeepers Association, Bob Arnold, and Beemaniacs take no responsibility for the unprepared. If you can’t make the Field Day our Oct. 15 meeting will be back at the Deer Park Library, and honey tasting is on the docket, among other interesting topics, including “Winter Preparation Peggy’s Way.” If you are in to social media you can find us on Facebook at backyardbeekeepersassociation.

Look forward to seeing you soon.

Weeding Between the Lines

By Jim McGinty

It’s been a long, hot, dry summer again, and the garden here at Rancho McGinty is looking a mite peaked:  the Red Lasoda and Red Gold potatoes performed wonderfully, and we’ve been rationing them for our favorite fried potato meals. The cabbage trial is winding down, with Golden Cross cabbage as the first to be harvested – the heads are about softball size (perfect for two or three diners), and the leaves have a slightly sweet taste -  excellent steamed with bratwurst. Doyle blackberries, once again, took top berry honors regarding sweetness AND production – we are still harvesting the berries, and I’m thinking the three plants have produced two or three gallons of sweet, sticky goodness. Our bush and trellis green beans are just starting to produce (we started the poor guys a tad late this year), while the Silvery Fir tomatoes in the Earthboxes on the deck are loaded with red, ripe fruit – sliced and served with bleu cheese dressing – worth the wait. 

This month is garlic-planting time, and I prefer to wait until the cooler end of September for the task: I have been preparing the garlic bed with mounds of last year’s maple leaves, this year’s grass clippings, and lots of aged goat/sheep/horse/cow manure.  I’ll rototill that mess under with the Troy-Bilt tiller, smooth out the hummocks, thoroughly wet the area, and plant.  I like to plant the individual cloves (pointy end up, please) about 6 inches apart, and the rows about 18 inches apart (I’ll need room next summer to walk between the rows, weeding and clipping off the garlic scapes). Once I apply a six-inch-thick layer of maple leaves and/or pine/fir needles over the bed, that’s pretty much it for this year – it’s an easy crop to grow, but homegrown garlic is SO much better tasting than the “mild” product in the grocery stores.

With autumn rains (hopefully) in our near future, now is an excellent time to wander around the property looking for new, perfect sites for planting fruit trees and berry bushes: full sun, some wind protection, good-ish soil, water availability, and protection from deer predation are all important. September and early-October are very good months in which to plant trees and bushes, but you’ll want to provide water right up until the ground freezes, especially after months of drought. Speaking of fruit trees, remember to prune your plum trees right after this year’s harvest, so as to insure a larger crop next year, and be sure to pick up any apples that have fallen to the ground around those trees, as they are a vector for a number of very bad apple-tree pests and diseases – your chickens and pigs will be glad to help you with any of the “drops.”

Now is the time to critically look at your tomato plants, regarding the First Frost of Doom that is rolling downhill at us on a daily basis: will all those flowers turn into actual red tomatoes, or will the fruit still be green and nasty when they turn to mush at 33 degrees F? Right about now, many tomato aficionados will start thinning the plant’s flowers and smaller green tomatoes in favor of larger red fruit – some folks will remove older branches or even sever the plant’s roots half way around the main stem to stress the plant, and thus, encourage a speedy harvest. Tomato lovers are a focused bunch – don’t get in their way.

GARDEN CALENDAR:

On Sept 8, our local garden club will meet in Camden Grange at 7 p.m. for an interesting gardening-related class, and we’ll no doubt grouse and complain about our year’s experience with drought, high temperatures, out-of-control weeds, and refugee white-tailed deer – and we’ll also discuss what we did (or what we did not do) to alleviate all those problems. Gardeners are very adaptive people – and we love to learn from the experience of others, so come visit with us (the public is always invited to our meetings), learn something, or teach something, and we’ll eat snacks and start rumors about absent club members.

On Sept. 23, I’ll teach a class on garden-season extension techniques at the Newport College Center (1302 W. Fifth St., Newport) from 6-8 p.m. We’ll discuss how to increase your gardening season by two to four weeks, using hoop houses, floating row cover, hot frames and other devices. You can call the Center at 509-447-3835 to ask questions and to register for the class.

On Sept. 30, I’ll teach a class on seed-saving techniques, again at the Newport College Center, from 6-8 p.m. We’ll talk about methods of saving seed from year to year, and how you can keep your grandmother’s special sweet-corn variety from going extinct. You can call the center for more information and to register for the class.

That’s it for this month: stay hydrated, and dress appropriately for all those ultraviolet rays out there in the garden – we do NOT want to see a wrinkled, first-degree sunburn-peeling you at the garden club meeting!