40 Pounds Of Honey...

I went and picked up my honey from Trees N' Bees. They spun the honey in their centrifuge for 1/3 of the honey. So they got 20 pounds and I got 40 pounds.


I picked up some smaller jars, so we could sell some of the honey. I got a box of 6oz. jars and a box of 2oz. jars.

Here's the idea for the label:
The wife is going to sell the honey at her hair salon. $5 for the big jars, and $2 for the small jars.
















Here's the size of the little jars.

Since we took this box of honey, Loren at Trees N' Bees recommended that I get a top feeder for the hive and to feed them sugar syrup so the girls can catch up before winter.

I did one gallon with meds in it. Two and a half quarts of water to 10 pounds of sugar. It was a really thick syrup. I added Fumadil to the syrup for the winter.

I had to put the box that the honey was in back on the hive, and add the top feeder.






I also put in my order for another hive for next year.

I learned a lot this year. Hopefully I'll do better next year.









See You Next Time...

Indian Summer - Amazing Horse Back Ride

We've been having an amazing September here in the Pacific Northwest. I think it three weeks without a single drop of rain. That must be some kind of record.

We decided to go for a trail ride up Taylor Mountain. It was a beautiful day, and there was quite a view waiting for us at the top.









This trail head is just south of Highway 18 off Issaquah-Hobart road. There's a nice big gravel parking lot, and the main trail is pretty wide and well groomed.


There are several smaller trails that break off the main one. We found this loop that goes up to the top of a ridge then back around and connects back up with the main trail.


Close to the top of the ridge, we came to an opening, and suddenly Mt. Rainier came into view. It was an unbelievable view.

It was one of the best rides in my short riding life.


See you next time...

Charles In Charge: Blackberry Liqueur

I've always been a sucker for fruit liqueur, so now that I have the beginners wine making kit, I thought I'd try my hand at turning some of these wild blackberries into some wine.

My first try at cherry wine didn't turn out to be drinkable, so I called in some reinforcements. My friend Charles is a pretty good home wine maker. He came out to the ranch with a bunch of wine making toys that I don't have, and we got to picking. We needed 12 pounds of blackberries.

The recipe also called for 5 pounds of bananas, and 3 pounds of raisins.
The bananas are suppose to mellow out the acid. I went to Costco and got the raisins and bananas. Charles stopped by the wine supply store and picked up the yeast we needed.




It took us about 90 minutes to pick all the blackberries. I had about 5 pounds in the freezer that I had picked earlier. I thawed them out, and included it in the 12 pounds.


We put all of our ingredients out and we were ready to go as soon as we sterilized everything.


Charles mixed up a few cups of water with "Meta" and washed everything. He also put the yeast in warm water (about 105 degrees) about half an hour earlier.


Here's the berries and bananas and raisins.


Charles brought out an industrial sized potato masher, and went to town on the berries and bananas. After squishing them up pretty good, we used our hands to get the bananas fully mashed.


You want the sugar content to be really high for making liqueur. So we added some sugar syrup that Chuck made.


We checked the sugar content with a hydrometer. It's also called the "brix" count. The higher the sugar content, the higher the alcohol content will be. With liqueur, you want a fairly high percentage of alcohol.


Charles added an 1/8th tablespoon of meta. Charles said the meta kills the bad microbes. Then he added some pectic enzyme. Otherwise known as yeast food. It basically jump starts the yeast. I accidentally hit the stop button midway through this video, so here's the rest...



I let the yeast do it's thing for about 5-6 days.


Every 12 hours I would "punch the cap" that forms on the top of the juice. The berries rise to the top and form a crust. I just used a big metal spoon to punch it down and mix it up. Twice a day.




I put a mesh bag inside a second clean 5 gallon bucket. By the way, I did sterilize everything with a meta solution. Then poured the fermented juice and berries into the clean bucket. I wrung out the bag as best I could to try and get as much juice as possible out of it.

I had a bit of airspace in my second jug, so I added some regular wine to fill the space. I put the air locks on and set them aside to finish any fermentation and for time to let the solids settle to the bottom.


Now we wait for a while, then rack the wine again. After we transfer it to another container, we'll need to fortify the liquid with everclear or brandy for the final product.

See you next time.

We're Getting Some Honey!

This was my first year at keeping bees. I bought a beehive this spring with a modest goal: I wanted some honey this year. Most of the stuff I read said that most new hives will not produce honey for the keeper the first year, so I was keeping my fingers crossed.

I tried following "the rules" as close as I could. I went out there in the spring and kept the feeder full of sugar syrup. I would go out to the hive all the time to check on the girls. I did exactly what I do when guys stand around and look under the hood of their car - "Yep, that's an engine."

"Yep, those are bees." They come in, they go out. Sometimes you see pollen on their back legs, sometimes you don't. I really was feeling like a bee-haver more than a bee keeper. So I called up the folks at Trees N' Bees where I had taken a beginner bee keeping class to see if Loren, a master bee keeper, could swing by the ranch and take a look under the hood for me.

The first thing Loren noticed was that the girls were kicking the drones out. The drones are male bees, and in the fall and winter - they are a liability in the hive. They just sit around and watch football and don't do a damn thing. So they get kicked out of the house for good. You can see this happening in this video if you look close there are several worker bees pushing out the bigger drone.


Mistake #1: I put the Queen Excluder on too soon.

Earlier in the year when it seemed like the bees were doing a good job of filling up the bottom two brood boxes, I put on one honey super and a queen excluder. Because it was brand new gear, the bees didn't really like it that much, and since the queen could not get up in there and take her scent with her, the bees didn't do too much in the honey super. I should have left the excluder off for at least one cycle of baby bees, then put the excluder on.


I also learned a cool tip from Loren: to put one or two old frames into your new box. The "bait frames" will draw the bees up into the new gear and encourage them to work on the new stuff faster.


There wasn't very much honey in my Western Super (that's the smaller box that is suppose to be for the bee keeper,) but the top brood box (the big grey one) was absolutely packed with honey.

Mistake #2:
I should have had three or four Western Supers on top of this hive. I thought that since it was the first year, that one box would be plenty. I was wrong about that one.

So we decided to break the rules and take the entire Brood Box of honey. The full box weighed about 80 pounds.


Here's all the frames stacked up. If I would have had an empty box, we would just take the full frames out and put them into the empty. Then you would just replace the frames you took. But I don't have a bunch of spare boxes, so we took the whole thing. Loren took the box back to his store and spun the honey out for me.


More at the truck.


Now that we had the box full of honey off and put in a plastic bag for transport, we went back to the hive to look for the queen or evidence of the queen. Loren estimated there are between 60,000 - 80,000 bees in the hive right now.


Mistake #3: Make sure you have 10 frames in your bottom brood box!
When I purchased this bottom box, it came with 9 Frames. The reason why is because there was a queen cage hanging in the middle. When you put a new queen in a box, you take out one frame and put the queen cage in there for the bees to get use to her scent. I took the queen cage out and did not put another frame back in.

Now I have to wait till spring when the box will be emptied of honey to pull the frames out. It's going to do some damage, and I'll probably lose some frames.


I have to admit, I was a bit worried at this point. I had a sigh of relief when Loren found the babies.


I'll put a post up soon when I get the honey back.

See You Next Time...

Can A 60 Year Old Barn Work As A Wood Shop?

That's the question I tried to answer this Labor Day Weekend. Three years ago I lived in New Orleans and I took a wood working class at a local community college. I'd always wanted to, and after years of watching hundreds of hours of wood working shows on TV, I finally put together a shop.

After the class, I build our kitchen cabinet doors out of Spanish Cedar. I was pretty pleased with the results.

Well a little thing called Hurricane Katrina came through town and not only took all the tools I just bought for my first wood shop, it took our house too.

So on the third anniversary of Katrina with Hurricane Gustav closing in on the Gulf South, I felt a bit inspired to do a renovation of our barn and try again at wood working.

First thing that needed to be done was to demolish an old animal enclosure that took up half of the bottom floor of the barn. It was not pleasant at all. The previous owner had put down corrugated plastic and old plywood that had just accumulated urine smell for years. Yuck.

We pulled enough trash out of that side of the barn to completely fill my neighbor's panel truck. Only a hundred bucks to throw it all away at the dump. What a deal.

Next up, we had to fix the floor. We think that someone spilled battery acid on the wooden floor and just let it sit there. So we had to cut out a big section of floor for the repair. The old floor boards are about 3" think. Don't make em' like that any more.



Here's how the floor turned out.

We cleaned out the entire side of the barn and build a new work bench.
Here's the bench framed out. I'll get some more pics up soon. We got the bench done, and a few other tool stands. I think another full day of cleaning / organizing and it will be pretty close to finished and ready to use.

See you next time~

Tractor Endo = Fail Part 2

My new horse June Bug is a compulsive walker. All she does is walk around her confinement area. On the positive side, that's probably the main reason she's in such good shape for her age. On the negative side, she's driving the massive amount of gravel I've put in the run right into the ground. Her stall gets muddier than Squid the Horse's side. So it was time to add another four inches of 5/8" minus crushed gravel.

Side note: for people in Washington State, most places I've seen use the 5/8" minus or 5/8" clean. The minus has gravel dust in it and is cheaper. The 3/8" is too small and just turns to mud. Believe me, found that one out the hard way. Anything bigger starts to hurt the horses feet.


Luckily my buddy Bill was over to help out. One man on the tractor to scoop the gravel, one man on the wheelbarrow to move it into the stall. Why don't you just drive the tractor into the stall you ask? Good question. The way we've got the thing oriented, the tractor gets really unstable if we try to take a bucket full of gravel down the hill. So we're back to the wheelbarrow method.

We started off with me on the wheelbarrow, and Bill on the tractor. He got a bit carried away with this load.

After watching this video a few times, it's a good laugh, but I really need to get a roll bar welded onto old blue. Another thing that we think caused the endo was there was low air pressure in both of the front tires. After we got the back wheels on the ground, we got out the compressor and filled them up. It performed much better after that.

I did about half on wheel barrow, then we switched. Here's how it looks from the tractor point of view. It's definitely the better of the two jobs.


It took us a little over 2 hours to fill and rake out the gravel for June's run. Most places got 3-4". Some places that were extra wet got about 6" of gravel. At some point the soil has to reach it's saturation point of gravel and then it should become like a gravel road. At least that's the idea. I'm hoping that point comes soon. The last batch of gravel we got was over $600.

Here's how things turned out:


I'm told the other benefit for the horses is foot health. When you have a horse that walks all the time in muddy conditions, they get foot injuries. So it's best to keep ahead of it.

One more thing off the list for now.

See you next time~

You Say Tomato, I say "What's Taking So Long?"

It seems like it's been years since I planted the tomatoes. Finally we've got one that is starting to turn red. Nice.


I have to say that if I was to give myself a grade on my first garden ever, it would be about a C+. Nice effort to start off with, not such a good effort at weeding and thinning. I also think I planted too many different kinds of things. That's a rookie mistake. Next year, I'm definitely going to be more selective in what I plant. And now that I have a better idea as to what things are suppose to look like, I'll be more confident in pulling weeds.

Now if I could grow a cheese tree to eat these with, that would be perfect.

See you next time.

Anyone Got An Onion & Potato Soup Recipe?

So I decided to dig up all the potatoes and red onions today. I was pleased with the amount of stuff.

I picked some rosemary and oregano too.

I made up a batch of roasted taters and onions, and gave a bag to Jane and Dan from work who helped me build and plant the garden this year.

I also picked my carrots. They were a lot smaller than they should be because I did a terrible job of weeding. I definitely learned that I am not a weeder. So for any garden next year, I 'm going to have to really plan out what I'm going to do to minimize the weeding.

So now I'm going to try and make a nice soup with the bag I have left over.

See you next time.

Riding Lawnmower Capacity = FAIL

Have you ever wondered how much weight a riding lawnmower could pull up a slight hill? Not as much as you'd think.


It was time to build a new fence line on the property. For longtime readers of the Farmer Ron Blog, you might remember the saga I went through to get a basic survey done so I would know where to put this fence.

The actual property line came in less than 5 feet from my neighbors house. Although I could have put the fence right on the line, it seemed like really bad karma, so we ended up putting it down at the bottom of the little hill his house sets on.


First off, a quick homage to the Cowgirls new F-250. It carried a shocking amount of weight with ease. I had 50 bags of cement and about 1000 lbs of lumber in the back of this thing, and it didn't even hiccup.


Stacking all this stuff was a bit harder when you don't have a fork lift like Home Depot. That'll put a kink in the 38 year old back... Where's that hot tub again?

Next on the agenda was digging post holes. I'm no stranger to the working end of a post hole digger, and after several fence building sessions where my hands ended up feeling like clubs the next day I decided this time I'd rent a post hole digger.

I was super pumped and spend more money to get the Easy Auger that sits on its own trailer. I went to the tool rental the day before and had all my supplies and the auger ready to go. We got through about 1 hole with this and it kept dying on us.


So it was back and forth to the rental place 3 or 4 times, and finally we came back with the Little Beaver - I know, who names these things? This one had an engine on wheels and an umbilical cord that powers the auger. It actually worked just as good. The auger was a few inches smaller in diameter, but it did the job just fine.


After we got the Little Beaver going, it made relatively short work of the 175 feet of fence. Only one problem: Blackberries. While I love whipping up a batch of blackberry jam as much as the next guy, when a giant blackberry plant is in the way of your straight fence line, it's not that fun.
We hit it with a machete this time, but I want to see if I can borrow my neighbors llamas to eat it down.


We then had our little garden tractor incident as described above, dropped all the 4x6 posts into the holes, and called it day.


Next up, we'll be adding the cement, then the pressure treated stretchers, and then finally the 5 foot fencing that I scored at the auction.

See you next time.

We've Got A Peach!

I really didn't expect anything this year when I bought a close-out peach tree at Wal-Mart for $5.
But my friend Becky noticed that there is, in fact, a peach on the tree... Nice.

Things are looking up for next year!

See you next time~