I'm Back!!!

Sorry that I have been silent for awhile but we took a little trip and then when we returned, I promptly came down with a bad cold which I am still fighting.  But I wanted to share with you all the beautiful place we visited here in North Idaho just 30 miles south of the U.S./Canadian border.  It's a jewel of a lake called Priest Lake.

 

We stayed at a state park campground called Indian Creek Campground.

We had a campfire which we cooked our dinner over.

Of course we had homemade cheddar brats.

 

The fish weren't biting at all.

 

But the morels were!

The Selkirks east of the lake still have some snow.

 

Can you tell which peak is called Chimney Rock?

Emma never got tired of playing in the sand.

Mosquitoville

The mosquitoes here this year are bad, really bad.  I have been to Alaska a few times and Canada's Arctic during the summer, those were the worst and largest mosquitoes I have ever experienced but this is running a close second for me.

We have a pond and a slow creek on our property that is prime mosquito-raising terrain which is hard for us to control.  The creek is constantly moving and the pond is full of fish.  Also, our bees get water from the pond so I cannot add anything to that except maybe those little barley things that float.

There's nesting boxes for the swallows and a bat house too in our backyard.  I would hate to think what it would be like if we didn't have those.  

I was trying to plant yesterday evening and was eaten alive by mosquitoes.  Later we had some elk show up at our pond and you could tell that they were being pestered by the bloodsuckers, too.  They jumped, bucked and eventually just gave up and took off running.  I felt their pain.

I'm Breaking Out in Hives!

Beehives that is!  This week I have gone from owning two hives to three.  My two over-wintered hives are boiling with bees and filling with new brood and it's getting mighty crowded.  The only way bees can make room in the hive is by swarming which is good for the bees but not such a happy event for a beekeeper.  Suddenly you lose your mature, egg-laying queen and she takes half the colony with her.

Though it can occur anytime during spring, summer and fall, May is the beginning of swarming season here in North Idaho.  One way to prevent swarming is to remove a three to four frames of brood along with the bees on those frames and replace them with frames that either consist of drawn comb or new foundation.  But incredable thing about removing the frames of brood is that you can place those frames in a new hive and start an additional colony of bees.

The new hive is often called a "split".  You have (hopefully) preempted a swarm from occurring and have a new colony of bees that would cost you anything from $75 to $125 to buy.  

Now you may ask "But where do you get a new queen?"  This is the really cool part:  The new colony will "make" one!  The main ingredient to make a new queen from this split hive are frames of "open" brood.  When the bee larvae are developing in their cells, they are tended by the working bees and are eventually sealed in their chambers to pupate and emerge as worker bees.  

When a colony of bees senses that it is queenless, it can take brood that is young enough and transform it to a larva that will develop into a queen instead of worker.  They feed the larva royal jelly to create a queen.  So when picking out frames from the main colony to create the split it's imperative to select frames that contain freshly laid eggs.  

A new queen will be raised and eventually she will leave the hive on her mating flight.  She will return to the split hive she was raised in and start laying eggs which will grow into workers for the hive.  The new split hive that started three days is the striped one on the right.

Another factor that will insure the success of the new hive is plenty of young bees.  Older, foraging bees that know what it's like to be outside of the hive will return to their original hive since they consider it home.  But all the young bees that were moved to the split hive do not know what their hive looks like from the outside yet.  When they become old enough to start foraging in the outside world they will consider this hive their home.

In the next few days, I'm going to make a split off the other over-wintered hive and it's going into this ugly hive.  Each hive in my bee yard has a different paint job to help the bees recognize and imprint on their home.  If I had all plain hives so close together there is a possibility of what's known as "drift" where bees move between hives thinking they are returning to their regular hive.  This can result in hives that are stronger than others for no other reason than bees are going to the wrong hive.

I'm hoping my next split goes well.  Wish me luck!

Another Walk in the Woods

Went for another walk in the woods yesterday.  We saw one turkey that was running away but I did get some pictures of things more willing to sit still for their picture.

 There's water everywhere and frogs in every puddle.

 

This beautiful teal was patient enough for me to get his close up.

In this muddy spot there was a multitude of tracks from deer, elk and moose.

Here's my big size 10 boot next to one of the moose tracks.

This little green fellow was sitting on top of the lay of much, too light to make an impression upon it.

Babies and Blizzards ;)

Again the snow flakes were falling yesterday morning but not really a blizzard...just being a drama queen about it.  But my folks are arriving here this afternoon from Southern California and I would appreciate it if the weather was at its best behavior.  That's asking a lot for this time of year in a place where summer doesn't really begin until after 4th of July.

The grand total on my hatch turned out to be 16 chicks out 17 eggs.  I opened up the egg that didn't hatch and there was a dead chick that pipped the membrane internally but never pipped the shell.  It didn't look like a pip-and-drown though because there was no visible fluid.  It's a mystery to me.  Doesn't stop me, on to my next batch of eggs: blue-laced red Wyandottes and potential olive-eggers which are a cross between Black Copper Marans and blue egg laying Easter Eggers.  Have I lost you yet?  Hopefully not!

Tomato Babies

Now what's that old saying?  You can't be too rich, too thin or have too many tomato starts....right? That goes for peppers, too!

Here in North Idaho I have learned not to put the tomatoes out in the garden until June 1st and still there are nights that I have to cover them up due to sub-freezing lows.  I usually start them from seed the first day of Spring. 

My favorite medium to start tomatoes and peppers in are those little peat pellets that you have to expand with water before they are soft enough to place a seed in them.  We have a very small shower stall in our basement bathroom and I put a small space heater in there.  It doesn't take much to heat the stall up to 90F degrees and that is where I place my tomatoes and peppers.  The germinate very quickly in this hot environment but you have to have them in covered containers like the mini greenhouses you buy at any big box store like Walmart or Home Depot or else they will dry out. 

As soon as the seeds emerge, I move them to a sunny, south-facing window sill.  Waiting to move them is not a good idea because in the darkness of the bathroom they will grow very long, and leggy QUICKLY.  Once they develop their first true leaves beyond their seed leaves I transplant them to larger peat pots which are about 4 inches tall and 4 inches wide.  I place the peat pellet at the bottom of the pot and then add seed starting soil until it reaches the base of seed leaves.

The plants develop great root systems in this soft soil and grow quite quickly.  On warmer days, I bring them outside to help harden them up.  I will leave them out all night as long as it doesn't fall much below 50F during the night.  By June, I have nice healthy home-grown starts which are not root-bound like a lot of the nursery-raised ones that I have purchased.  On average my plants are smaller than the ones I have bought at the store but once planted in the garden they grow faster than the store bought ones and end up producing more fruit, too.

Feeding the Bees

It actually got near enough to 60F yesterday that I could open the hives for the first time this year.  We did have one day that was in the 60's early in the month but I was out of town.  This would of been the first day to open the hives but alas I was absent.

Here in North Idaho we have a very short growing season that seems to get shorter every year.  I have almost given up the idea of ever seeing a red tomato in my garden anymore.  Also, this makes our bees more dependent on our help to get them though, too.  Even well established hives that go into winter with great stores of honey can starve to death in the early spring while waiting for the first flowers to open.

Beekeepers feed their hives sugar syrup to make up for this short fall but need to be careful when they put liquid feeds into their hives.  In this region the general rule of thumb as been April 1 to November 1on giving liquid feeds.  The other five months are just too cold and the liquid feed turns out to be a heat sink in the hive which robs the precious heat that the bees work so hard to maintain.  During those cold months beekeepers use candy boards (made from sugar) or patty feeds which contain proteins and sugars.

When I opened my two hives yesterday, it was cool and windy enough that I opted not to pull frames to examine them.  Both hives were boiling with bees and bees were flying back and forth in large numbers to the hives bringing back with them some sort of pollen.  Also, along the tops of the frames I did see capped honey which, along with the live bees, indicated that their winter stores are still keeping them fed.  I think it it safe to say that my hives made it through the winter. (Knock on wood!)

In each hive, I left a Bee Pro Patty on top of the frames and closed them back up.  This will only be my third year raising bees and my first time using a solid food.  I'm hoping I will be able to make a split off both hives and end up with four hives. Last spring I made a split off my original hive and also started a hive with a package of bees. The split hive has thrived but mid summer the package hive lost their queen and never was able to replace her even though I added frames of uncapped brood weekly.  In the fall, I ended up combining this hive with my split hive which saved the bees from the queenless hive.

In a week or so, I plan to start adding liquid feed to both hives and examining some frames.  I promise I will get some pictures to show you all, too.

North Idaho Fair 2011

The North Idaho Fair comes to Coeur d'Alene, Idaho in late August. We have missed very few of them in the 15 years that we have lived here. Now that I think about, the only year we missed was the summer I had our daughter in 2002.

Before Emma came into our lives, I was very big on entering canned items every year. I even won the Ball Canning Pickling Award twice. When Emma joined 4-H four years ago, she started entering her insect collections as a Cloverbud which is a non-competitive 4-H group for kids 5 to 7 years old.

This year was Emma's first year has a full fledged 4-H kid. Her projects were Entomology and Poultry. Once we found out that we had to come twice a day for the five days of the Fair to feed her chicken and its cage, we decided to have some fun and enter some things other than her two 4-H entries. Heck, maybe even win a little cash to help cover the gas on two twenty mile plus trips we had to make daily.

Emma entered a frame of honey comb from her beehive and a dozen large eggs from our Marans flock. Both went second place which made her very happy to say the least. The judge said the comb would have placed better if it did not contain two colors of honey: light on the edges and dark in the center.

I entered 9 canned items and did really well in Salsa divisions, both green and red by getting a second place ribbon for my salsa verde and tomato salsa. My sweet pickle relish also got a second and 3 of my jam entries placed in third. I was happy :)

Now Emma's 4-H Entomology Project did really well by going Grand Champion. She was so proud and cannot wait to participate in the project again next year.
Here's Emma showing her little Belgian bearded d'uccle pullet named "Pengu". In quality judging the little bird was awarded a blue ribbon and Emma took a fourth in Junior Fitting and Handling.

We are all looking forward to attending and participating in the Fair next year. We'll probably even enter more things, too and stay in the 4-H Camper Village so we don't have to drive back and forth so much.

Diggin' in the Dirt

Here in North Idaho we have two fun attractions that do not always get the attention they deserve both are near the small town of Clarkia. One is the Fossil Bowl and the other is Emerald Creek Garnet Area. If you have kids or like to dig in the dirt to find buried treasure then these activities are for you.

Here's a few of our fossil finds. You can take home as much as you want, there is no limit.Dawn redwoods are often found.Here's two halves to a leaf impression.Another dawn redwood.

Off to the garnet area. Yes, we actually paid to dig in the dirt! LOL!Cleaning our dirt in the sluice box with water to washing it away.

Picking through the remaining rock to find our garnet prize.

Here's some of the garnets we gleaned from our buckets of dirt. There are a couple in there over half an ounce in weight. What fun, this was a blast and I want to do it again before summer ends.

Huckleberry Hounds

One thing that I didn't even know existed until I moved to North Idaho was the mountain huckleberry. It's not the same huckleberry that grows east of the Rockies but is actually a wild cousin of the blueberry which also grows in the wild in addition to being domesticated. As far as I know the mountain huckleberry that grows in the western parts of North America has never been successfully cultivated to produce its fruit in commercially large scale amounts.

Huckleberries are very much part of the culture here. Even our Costco carries huckleberry jam! I have two cookbooks both written on the huckleberry and how to use them. Go to the local farmers market and a one gallon zip lock bag full of these little gems is going to set you back $30 to $40 because picking them is so labor intensive
But they do deserve the attention because they are so extraordinarily good tasting. Huckleberries are a blueberry with an attitude. They are tart and sweet at the same time and will leave you calling their domesticated cousins "blawberries"! I make batches of huckleberry jam to ship out to my family in California and though they have never tasted a huckleberry before I have no doubt in my mind that they are going to love it. It's so good that they hide it from others and ration it out!
The huckleberries that grow here in North Idaho generally occur in altitudes above 3000ft. We usually take a drive up the local forestry roads to check on their progress ripening in late June but these last two winters have had such great snow totals we have been able to wait until early July to check on them. In contrast, during hotter summers following a lighter winter, we have completely all of our picking before the 4th of July.
Of course the higher in altitude or further north you travel the later the huckleberry season begins. We have seen grizzly bears in Glacier National Park feasting on ripe huckleberries in mid-September. On the subjects of bears, it is a good idea to carry a can of bear repellent when picking huckleberries because they like them, too. Some of the best huckleberry picking we've experienced has been in grizzly country over in western Montana.
Huckleberry picking has become a tradition in this household for over a decade. I think the only season I missed was when I gave birth to my daughter the summer of 2002 and still a great neighbor was kind enough to bring us a half gallon of them. This year we added another picker to our team, Bentley, our new boxer pup who after tasting a few huckleberries began picking them off the bushes himself. I'm not too sure if that is a good thing because who needs the competition?

Planting Fruit Trees...At Last!

Boy does time go by fast! We have owned our place in Northern Idaho for 12 years now and have never planted a fruit tree. Oh, we've talked about it many times but just never acted upon it. It just seemed kind of daunting to try to figure out what and where to plant. Also, we haven't had the greatest of luck on the few trees that we tried planting here due to the depredations of mice, gophers and deer.

Our home came with three fruit trees: a greenish/yellow apple of some sort that we thought might be a Granny Smith, a tiny plum tree that makes tiny plums and an apricot tree that bloomed so early that it generally got its blossoms froze off. The apple tree usually makes enough fruit some seasons to make a few pies and a batch apple butter.This year, with the encouragement of my brother-in-law Doug, we decided that none of us were getting any younger and it was silly to keep putting off planting fruit trees. Most fruit trees will take at least 2 years to be mature enough to produce any fruit so that even delays the wait for your reward even longer.
We ordered four trees from Stark Brothers: a Honeycrisp semi-dwarf apple tree, a Jonathon dwarf apple tree, an Intrepid standard peach tree and a Harglow standard apricot tree. Honeycrisp is our favorite apple and the Jonathon is a baking apple that blossoms at the same time so they can pollenate each other.
The apricot and peach trees were both described as late blooming varieties which will hopefully work well here. We are at USDA Zone 6 so our winters are not that cold compared to most northern states. But the springs here take a long time to get rolling. It is normal to experience frosty nights here well into the first week of June. I don't dare put our tomato plants in the garden until June.
The sight we picked for our "orchard" was the backyard. It slopes downhill towards the west and to the east is our house which we hope will help divert cold air around it as it travels downhill. The slope continues past the border of the backyard so there is no risk of cold air pooling there either.
Since these trees were bare root we soaked them in water for about 4 hours before planting. Each hole was dug about 2 feet wide and a 1 1/2 feet deep. We mixed the soil from each hole with Eco Organic Compost (1 part compost to 2 parts soil) and 6 TBS of Vigoro Timed-Release All-Purpose Plant Food which feeds up to 6 months. I never use non-organic fertilizers on my vegetables or raspberries but we made the exception this time because we wanted a time-released product to help get these trees well-established. The fertilizer will surely be gone by the time these trees produce fruit...I hope!
To address all of our predation problems we put a layer of defenses (or should I say fences!) around each tree. Before we back filled the the holes, we surrounded them with 2 foot wide hardware cloth to hopefully prevent an attack from the gophers. Then we cut the tops and bottoms off of 2 liter Coke bottles and wrapped the remaining part of the bottle around the base of each tree to deter mice from chewing on the trees at their base. To keep the deer and Greg's geese from nibbling the trees we placed a cylinder of welded 5 foot wire farm fence around each tree. These were stabllized by T post, too.
I'll keep everyone posted on how these trees do. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that they make it!