What's Blooming Now - Black and Blue Sage 06/26/2011

Black and Blue Sage is so named because of the pairing of the gorgeous and rare blue flower and the black calyx. This is a perennial plant. It will die to the ground and come back in the spring. It will spread.

A Weekend at the Farm 06/24-26/2011

I was sitting on the back porch drinking coffee. It looked so pretty down the hill so I snapped this picture.
We found a poor, dead little fawn in the yard on Friday morning.
I sprayed herbicide in the Vegetable Garden and around the driveway.
I pulled up the corn (it had been pulled down by the raccoons and all the corn was stripped - that's okay, we ate plenty of it) and turned over the soil in the two beds where it was growing.
The deer ate the tops off of every single sunflower that was growing in the Vegetable Garden. It had to be deer because the plants were not pulled over. The plants were as straight as could be, they just had no flowers! And those flowers were big plus there are about 40 plants!
We drove into Carmine to buy some beer and we saw a tom turkey! It was walking along the edge of the woods. Neat. About a month ago we saw a female turkey on our road.
We sat in the screened in porch on Saturday evening and rocked in the rockers for a long time. We watched the little rabbits hopping around down the hill.
For dinner ate tomatoes and cucumbers from the garden Saturday night. Also roasted squash from the garden. I don't like that much. I won't plant it again.
Raked the paths in the Shade Garden.
It rained last week! 3 inches in the rain gauge when we got there. Yes, finally. Not nearly enough, but we sure needed it.
Swam in the pool most of Sunday, drank beer and listened to Honky Tonk on the satellite radio.
Pulled weeds in the Long Border.
Pulled up some of the dried up cornflowers in The Orchard, pulled all the seed heads off and threw them around the beds. A bee started chasing me really aggressively. He chased me all the way up the boardwalk. I went back down again, and he did the same thing again! I decided to wait a bit before I went down again to finish pulling up the cornflowers, but I never went back. It was too hot.
The deer ate all the peaches off the peach trees. They weren't even ripe! In fact they left several of them on the ground, teeth marks all over them. Too sour to finish I guess.
The Orchard is pretty well nibbled. All the blackberry vines are munched on, and all the blueberries are gone from my blueberry bushes. The leaves of one of the plum trees are almost completely gone.
Fertilized in the Star Garden with liquid fertilizer and rain water from my rain barrels. Then thew down dried fertilizer in the Rose Garden, the Shade Garden, the Long Border, and on the asparagus in the Vegetable Garden.
Weeded, weeded, weeded.

What's Blooming Now - Fireworks Gomphrena 06/26/2011

Above, I have pink and orange zinnias interplanted with Fireworks Gomphrena. I think it is so prettty.

See the little petals that are tipped with gold? I love that!

All of this came from seed that I planted at the beginning of the summer.

What's Blooming Now - Tuber Vervain 06/26/2011

Tuber Vervain is one of the seed packets I purchased from Wildseed Farms last November. I threw this seed down in lots of places, but this is the only garden in which it bloomed. It's pretty, not real showy, but I like the bloom time. All the other wildflowers finished blooming long ago. So it is useful for that reason.

Poor Little Baby

We found this fawn in the yard. Poor little thing. We don't know why it died. It wasn't wounded.

What's Blooming Now - Pumpkin Vines 06/12/2011

Pumpkin vines will climb if they are anywhere near something tall. My pumpkin vines are climbing up a fence, over an arbor, and also all along the ground. The pumpkins can be encased in a an old pantyhose if they are hanging from an arbor. I checked all four days we were at the farm last week for male flowers so that I could pollinate the flower. But no male flowers ever opened, only females! I have never grown pumpkins. Maybe it's too hot and they will perform better as it gets cooler. Don't know.

Pumpkin leaves are big!

What's Blooming Now - Broken Colors Four O'Clocks 06/12/2011

Four O'Clocks are reseeding annuals. They like to be in full sun. Broken Colors is a miniature variety. These are growing in my Long Border. They open in the evening and they close in the early morning. I call them the Happy Hour Flowers because they begin blooming right when it's time to have cocktails.

What's Blooming Now - Easy Ned Daylilies 06/12/2011

Easy Ned Daylilies are great bloomers. Of course, I've babied them a lot (regular fertilizing). they look like they are green in these pictures but in fact they are a buttery yellow. I like the flower shape. I prefer this shape to the cup shape of many daylily varieties.

More Pictures of my Pineapple Lilies (Eucomis Comosa)

So gorgeous I had to take more pictures. All the little buds are opening up.

Four Days at the Farm 06/09-12/2011

Me and my honey.

Drove Max to school then went to Burton for four days.

Thursday Bert was stung by wasps and had a bad allergic reaction. Went to the emergency room. IV, two epi shots, and a benedryl shot. Four hours later we were on our way home with an EpiPen prescription.

Swam every day and drank lots of beer!

Weeded everywhere.

Read Keith Richards autobiography.

Watered the roses deeply over a two day period with the hose. Fertilized with liquid fertilizer until I ran out.

Saturday I drove to the antique Rose Emporium. That was a waste of gasoline. Everything was crispy. I was hoping to buy some parsley, but their herbs looked bad. I bought some zinnia seeds to fill out some places that are bare. Stopped at the grocery on the way back and bought some canning jars for the honey.

Watered everything well.

Picked tomatoes and cucumbers. Made a tomato, cucumber, and onion salad with everything from my garden including the garlic and thyme. Made several tomato tarts - I have so many tomatoes!

Almost stepped on a snake, it was just an ole hog nose, but they get your heart pumping nevertheless.

Sprayed herbicide in the Orchard, the Rose Garden, and the driveway.

Pulled up the chicken wire in the bed with all the Erlicheer daffodils. Too difficult to weed. I'll just have to deal with the armadillos.

Erected a small metal arbor in the Orchard for the morning glories to climb.

Harvested some more honey. That took about four hours. Six 12 ounce jars of honey. What am I going to do with all that honey?

Cleaned the house.

On Sunday Bert disassembled the bed in the master bedroom and we hauled it home. Now that Max is away at school we are going to move his king sized bed into the master bedroom in Houston, move our queen size bed to Burton, and move the double bed in Burton into Max's bedroom. Now that we do not need to keep a refrigerator full of Gatorade and bottled water in Houston, we are also moving the refrigerator from the house in Houston to the house in Burton.

Picked all the corn, ate some of it for dinner Saturday night. I'm going to grate the rest of it and freeze it.

Planted the zinnia seeds - Raggedy Ann Cactus, Little Lion, and Cut and Come Again - in the Grass Garden and the Star Garden.

Raked paths clear of debris in the Greenhouse Garden and the path from the house to the boardwalk. They look better.

Bert made a really neat metal sculpture painted in a variety of blue colors. It is situated in a flower bed that I made but have never really put to use - too far from the water source, another example of poor planning on my part.

Lots of cow manure around the place. No sign of the cow. Must have found it's way back to the pasture from whence it came.

Spotted a blue bird on Saturday. Lots of Painted Buntings. And a Blue Jay, although a common sight in some places it is rare in Burton.

Harvesting Honey

I find that if I wear a baseball cap backwards - the bill in back - the head gear will stay on better. The bill anchors it in place. It can be really frustrating without something to anchor the head gear because, since it is zipped to the rest of the bee suit, it moves around a lot and blocks your vision, etc. I used the smoker this time around because the bees went crazy last weekend when I pulled out the supers. It was intense! It seemed to help quite a bit. But I was more prepared this time. I brought a wheelbarrow down with me and put four supers in the wheelbarrow rather than opening up the hive each time I retrieved a super. They are really, really heavy.

A super filled with honey and covered with bees wax.

The bees were not completely finished filling this super above. At the very top you can see what a super looks like when it is new. Then just below that you see compartments that the bees are still filling with honey - they have not covered them with wax yet. Below that, the rest of the super has been completely filled with comb. The other side of the super also is filled with honey. They build comb on both sides.
Above I am scraping the bees wax off the super. When the bees are finished filling a compartment with honey they cover it over with wax. If you try and spin the super without scraping off the wax you will not have much luck. It's pretty tough. Plus it makes a big mess inside the extractor. By way of comparison, have you ever tried to clean up candle wax off a table or some other surface? Not easy. So you want to get rid of as much wax as possible.
Two supers have been placed in the extractor.
This is the honey extractor. There are three wire "holders" inside where you place the supers prior to spinning.
This is a picture of a super after all the honey has been spun out of it. All that is left is bees wax. I scraped as much wax off the supers as I could before I put them back in the hive. The wax rolls off pretty easily once the honey is gone.

My pride and joy - six great big jars of honey. I've no idea what I'm going to do with all that honey. Interesting how dark it is. And it is very thick, like molasses. But it tastes just like honey!

What's Blooming Now - Zinnias 06/05/2010

All my zinnias returned from last year. If you let the flower heads dry out they will reseed. When I deadhead zinnias, I cut the flower head off and drop it in the garden. I throw away the stem and leaves. It is a good practice to deadhead zinnias aggressively. What I mean by that is you should cut the stem at the lowest point, just above a leaf node with new growth on it, and sometimes even lower. If you don't do that they get really leggy and cannot support themselves. As soon as a flower starts looking tired, cut it to encourage more flowers. Also, start spraying them with fungicide even before you see powdery mildew on the leaves. Once you see mildew they will never look good. As with any chemical, treatment should be undertaken very early in the morning or in the evening after the bees have returned to the hive. Chemicals can rub off on the bees and then be carried into the hive thereby endangering the enitire hive.