A tiny mouse house for a bee suit

While I'm reasonably happy with my current 'crazy person' bee outfit, (cobbled together using various pieces of clothing, pants tucked into socks, and an old insect net which I found at the markets), now that we've got our beehive full of bees, I feel like I need to upgrade.

Not that my current getup doesn't do the job - I haven't had too many stings - but it makes me nervous, which means I tend to check the hive VERY quickly, and perhaps not as thoroughly as I should.

So I've decided to buy a proper bee suit. With a proper hat, and proper gloves. Exciting.

To raise funds for this purchase, I'm silently auctioning off the tiny mouse in a tiny house I crocheted at the beginning of this year. It's adorable, and won first prize in the handmade toy section at the Bega show! 

The mouse, house and blanket are all crocheted using 100%wool. The house is lined in polka dot fabric, and the lid/roof zips on and off so you can get your mousie out to play and then tuck it up in bed when it needs a rest.

To be in the running to win this little mousie house, you just need to send me a message - pearlandelspeth at gmail dot com - with your offer. In a week's time I'll announce the winner. 

Of course, if you've got a bee suit lying around, we can just do a direct trade...

We're back!

Well. That was the biggest break from blogging I've had since I started the blog some years back. There have been times in the last 6 weeks where I've wondered if I was going to come back to it. But hey: this thing is a record of our adventures, and the adventuring ain't stopping here. It's a place for us to rant about the things we're passionate about, and we're passionate about a lot. It's a place for us to share stuff and (hopefully) teach or inspire people, and there's a lot to learn. So we're back.

What have we been up to since the canceled party debacle?

Heaps of stuff! And also heaps of relaxing!

We have a little break from chicken farming over the summer because we find the chickens really struggle with the hot weather. Also, chicken farming is bloody exhausting, especially after the year we've had, so we need a break!

Life without chickens is roomy and free and relaxing. There's space for new friends, foraging (blackberries! plums! raspberries! oh my!), baking, crocheting, quilting Australiana-themed baby-quilts, reading, swimming, eating, old friends, bee-swarm-catching, a trip to the big-smoke for circus shows and visiting, and general merry-making.

After processing our last batch of chickens for the year and (happily) providing delicious chicken Christmas dinners to the people of the Bega Valley (and one lady who comes all the way from the Snowy Mountains for our chicken!) we headed out to the coast for a luxurious 2 week holiday with some of our nearest and dearest. It. Was. Amazing. Eating, swimming, reading, crocheting. Repeat. Oh, and we harvested a bucketload of native wild raspberries, which we dumped onto a baked ricotta for New Year's dinner. 

Not a bad spot for an afternoon of foraging

There are no words to describe the deliciousness, but here's a picture...

When we came home to the farm the garden was ridiculously overgrown, but we didn't mind. We harvested and made merry.

Our neighbour called to say there was a late swarm of bees at his place, so we caught it in an esky and installed it in our top-bar hive. We've been waiting for a swarm for 2 years since our last lot of bees got hive beetle and evacuated, so that was a happy day.

Me in my "crazy person" beekeeping 'suit' and Gunnar in his proper suit.

The roadside plums came on, and we had a harvest-and-preserve party with some new lovely friends.

I finished a custom baby-quilt order for an Australiana fan in Sydney. Love this quilting bizzo...

The blackberries have come on, so we're harvesting and freezing daily. When the season's over and we've got our haul, we'll have a massive jam cook up. In the meantime, we pick and pick and eat our fill.

Locavore dinner parties with friends, including plum cakes with Jersey cream!

And in between it all we've been working at our off-farm jobs. I've started a new job at the local wholefoods co-op, which is AWESOME, and of course we've been running and working at our little abattoir, which continues to process for small-scale chicken and duck farmers and backyard growers around the traps. Sometimes, the abattoir cleaning (not processing!!) is a family affair. 

The kids don't mind at all (it's an excuse for us all to hang out together playing with high-pressure hoses, after all), and we feel it's important for them to see us (and share in) working hard for the things we believe in.

Oh and I've been thoroughly enjoying exploring the instagram world. Never thought I would, but there you go. Life's full of surprises, right? 

On the immediate horizon we have another little break and then we dive head first into building and chook-enterprise-expansion and abattoir overhauling and school and uni and show season and roadside-apple-and-peach season and all the other busy-ness that comes with this life we're living. I'm excited.

Coming down

I suppose it's only reasonable that we should be brought town from the outrageous euphoria we've been feeling since we moved to our land. Sure, we've been feeling bloody exhausted these last 5 months (can you believe it!?) but it's been a good feeling, because we're building our dreams - how can that not feel good? Take this morning, for example. We rose fairly early thanks to our little friend Oscar, and trotted off down the road to gather some fruits, which looked like this, 

and set to work cooking a delicious breakfast, which looked like this. 

We were quite chuffed, and talked about how (even though we are glad we didn't have to grow/harvest/grind the wheat for the flour in our pikelets) it is quite lovely to pick stuff for one's meals, and how it's sad so many people are divorced from this simple pleasure rah rah rah. We were feeling all excited and happy about the fact that, in a year or so, we'd even have our own honey to put on a breakfast like this. Or so we thought.

A few days ago I'd gone up to check on our loony chickens, and noticed a sickening lack of activity around the beehive. I actually felt ill, because I think I knew, in my heart of hearts, that this was really quite bad. The day before, I'd seen a lot of activity around the hive, and thought, for a second, "I wonder if the bees are preparing to swarm?" but promptly dismissed this thought because it's not swarming season. Pearlie, ever the optimist, told me not to worry - she'd seen a  few bees hovering around the entrance to the hive, and there sure were a lot of bees in the garden. So we left it. But my instinct about the bees wouldn't leave me, and I felt more than a little bit funny every time I looked at the hive.

Today when we did our egg run, I couldn't contain myself. I opened the hive, and the sick-tummy feeling got a whole lot worse. Our bees were gone. All of them. And our combs were looking as sick as my tummy felt, because they were infested with the larvae of the small hive beetle.

Small hive beetle larvae raiding our honey, which had been deserted by the bees 

When I did my natural beekeeping course, we spent quite a bit of time discussing the various kinds of pests that can affect a beehive. I was really affected by this discussion, and I can distinctly remember thinking "oh how awful it would be to get small hive beetle". And now, here we are. Our bucolic euphoria brought crashing down to a pretty depressing reality by some tiny tiny maggots destroying our beautiful white comb and eating our honey.

I was close to tears. Pearlie assured me it was a good learning experience, and I know it's true, but a 'learning experience' is pretty cold comfort when 1000 little guys who'd become a part of our daily lives had just up and left us, forced from their home by some grotty maggots. Somehow I feel like we failed them - our bees. And it's true I was really naive about the potential reality of hive pests. I was so in awe of the bees' self-sufficiency, I foolishly thought they were invincible. And I guess in a way they kind of are - they recognised when they had an infestation of unfriendly larvae, and they high-tailed it out of there, leaving us to deal with our bumbling, human grief.

It was big blow, for sure, but I know we'll get back on the beekeeping ride sooner or later. For now we need to declare our infestation to the DPI (it's a notifiable pest) and clean our hive, and then we need to find some more bees. But first we need to thoughtfully ponder the lessons we've learned from this experience, and take what we can from our feelings of sadness. 

The garden grows

We've been lucky the last couple of weeks: we've had a reasonable amount of rain. Not the massive dump kind that fills your water tank, but the slow and steady kind that doesn't run off, but sinks right in. The kind that, when you're not looking, makes your veggie plants double in size seemingly overnight. The days are warming up, too so everything's absolutely alive, and doing what we planted it to do - grow us some food.

Cabbages hearting up and salad greens going beserk

Every day we stroll around our little kitchen garden, taking in the sights and sounds and smells. Well, actually we kind of have to since our house is at one end of it and our dunny is at the other, so we have several enforced garden strolls per day, which means we can weed, pick off snails and slugs and caterpillars, monitor growth and check for baby tomatoes/zucchinis etc. It is such a joy to have the garden so close by. Those permaculturists are really onto something right? Zone 1 (having all the things you need to see and interact with every day) definitely makes sense when you read about it in books, but it really really definitely makes sense when you're living it. We basically eat dinner in our veggie patch, which means that we can see it and watch it and truly observe and interact with it, in the way we rightfully should. We're loving it.

It's called 'interplanting', and it's going beserk

We're also pretty much in love with our zone 2, as well - the things you need to see kind of regularly but not necessarily every day. That, for us, is our bee/duck/orchard area, which is between our house and the road. It's reached by the ever-impressive and gorgeous sleeper-stairs built for us by beloveds peps, Genn and Jeff, and while we do go up there very day to hang out with the ducks, let them out in the morning and put them to bed at night, and generally monitor the state of things and watch out for nasties like peach leaf curl, we don't have to walk through it every time we need to wee.

The ducks free-range in the day, coming to visit us and patrol the veggies for snails and clean up after the kids, but mostly stay close to the dam. Egg-laying location has become a mystery, however. The down-side to the roaming duck. Apparently you're supposed to keep them in their house until they lay for the day, then let them out to range, but sometimes we just can't wait. And it's oh so cute to see them all waddling out together all in a line!

The king and queens of zone 2 poultry division heading out for the day

Like I said - we'd read about the zone bizzo in about a million permaculture books, and had always been a bit "yeah yeah" about it, never having really had the opportunity to put it into place. Our last house, for example, only had 1 (kind of) sunny spot, so we were forced to have our veggie patch on the street verge and 'car port' area, which was about 60 big sandstone steps away from our house. While we did pass our veggies every day while leaving or coming home, we were inevitably rucking to get a train/carrying groceries or kids/basically focused on something else. Not so now (though we are still frequently carrying our little Oski-boy). Now we have the time to take it all in. To meander the paths. To pick, and weed and mulch and hill up potatoes, just as part of our day to day life. I can do it and still have a conversation with Pearl while she's cooking the dinner, and she can do it while I'm sewing at the table. Last night, I did it while Pearl and the kids were in the fire bath. We chatted and joked and planned and plotted. It was gorgeous.

Heritage tomatoes go beserk

The moral of the story? Put your veggie garden as close as possible to the centre of your life. Our veggie garden, in the middle of our kitchen/bathroom/dining room is giving us more joy than we ever could have imagined. Every day.

The duck dome that Grug built

Pretty much every morning, we're awake with the sun, and we peek out our window to see what we can see. Sometimes something's changed - a new flower has bloomed or there's another couple of buds on a tree - or the weather's a bit different or the sun's shining in a more summery way. It's always exciting, but this morning's excitement was a little bit extra because yesterday some new friends came to live on our land with us - 3 Indian Runner ducks. 

A few months back, while we were still in the throes of our insane hand-building-a-house-while-working-full-time-and-trying-to-raise-2-little-kids adventure, I answered a freecycle offer of a family of 17 muscovy ducks. I thought the offer was too good to pass up! Pretty much everyone I told laughed at me, except Pearl, who absolutely and very definitely told me that I was not to take custody of 17 ducks. Reluctantly, I let them go. But when the same guy offered 3 Indian Runners a couple of weeks ago, I wasn't going to be put off, so I accepted, and set the date for pick up, this time keeping the excitement to myself. Friday, while Pearl was marketeering, Olive and I built a duck dome. I followed Linda Woodrow's chook dome instructions (our dome will eventually house chooks) and thought I was doing a pretty good job of it too, measuring and drilling and reading the instructions word for word. When it was finished, though, it was more than a little bit wonky. 

In fact, it looks like something that Grug would build, which is, I suppose, fine, given that pretty much nothing here on our baby farm is very square or straight.

And the ducks don't seem to mind at all, even obliging us with an egg, only 12 hours after arriving! Olive is no novice egg collector, but she was more than a little bit thrilled by the surprise egg we found laying in the early-morning grass of the dome.

Olive, aged just-turned-six, thrilled to be holding the very first bit of produce made on her very own farm

Olive, aged 2-and-a-bit, thrilled to be holding the produce from her very own suburban backyard

The ducks are ridiculously cute, and we are all a bit smitten with them all. I am allowing myself to love - they're all past their prime, so none of them will be eaten. It's only their offspring who will end up crispy-skinned at some point down the line when we have the infrastructure to support ducklings (and a broody chook who will oblige us by sitting on the eggs - Runners are not the best sitters). And for now, we enjoy gentle quacking and regular eggs. Yay!

Muttley, our man-duck (also known in the biz as a drake) showing of his cute little curly tail feathers and lady-friends Bluebell (left) and Indi (right)

A little further along our orchard path, Olive and I made a stop at the beehive and, joy of joys, discovered not only 3 bars of the hive being busily filled with stunning, pure white comb, but some cells already filled with honey! 

Ok, Ok… it's not actually honey yet, seeing as it hasn't been capped and cured, but it looks bloody good, and my heart was beating pretty happily when I realised that there is some happy-bee-action happening in our hive.

The queen-cage, which now, mysteriously, has 4 normal bees in it, but no queen...

Pearly was feeling a little snotty headed and beleaguered this morn so she had a bit of a lie in while the kids and I roamed the farm. But once she was up we had the most delicious breakfast we've had in some time. You see, when we were on our duck pick-up road trip yesterday, we passed a teeny roadside stall selling asparagus, eggs and lemonade fruits. Ever the sucker for a roadside stall, I stopped the car and peeked inside the esky and discovered the most exquisitely fresh asparagus spears I had ever seen. They were so fresh and sweet that the kids and I ate some raw on the way home. To complete the deliciousness we ate a breakfast of grilled asparagus spears, soft boiled eggs and freshly toasted herby breadcrumbs sitting in the warm Spring sun under our soon to be finished pergola (more on this at a later date) followed by a breakfast dessert of homemade chocolate chip biscuits and lemonade fruit. Oh how good is this life?!

We got bees!

For exactly 2 weeks now we've been anxiously monitoring the activity around our bee hive. Yes, almost a year after Olive and I first installed the swarm lure into our hive on the day after we moved to Bega, we finally have some bees. Not a wild swarm who were inspired to set up home in our hive on account of the lure, mind you. In the end, we decided to buy a package of bees - a queen and a heap of other colony members who come in a box. I wasn't going to wait around for another season and risk missing a swarm, and some friends of ours who had gotten bees from a local beekeeper last season were getting some more, so we just jumped right in!

Our bees hanging in their box, awaiting installation (and slaughter?) into the hive

The delivery was made to Pearl at the markets a fortnight ago. We carefully made sure that the box didn't get too hot, we were gentle with them, and then, at dusk, I shook them into the hive (now positioned in our full-of-spring-shoots deciduous orchard) and we left dishes of sugar-syrup (organic rapadura of course!) to feed the bees while they got acquainted with their new surroundings. It all seemed to go well - no stings - though it was difficult to get some of the bees into our top-bar hive: the box the bees came in is made to go into a conventional (Langstroth) beehive, so it's not sized or designed in any way to fit with a top bar hive. But I shoved it in anyway, and hoped for the best.

Annie rocking a characteristically dodgy beekeeper's get-up consisting of a couple of pairs of work pants (tucked into socks), a fleece and a not-pair of gloves

In the morning, though, things weren't looking too flash. Indeed, to my untrained eyes, it seemed like what we had was a whole box full of dead bees. I panicked, felt terrible, and spent most of the morning feeling like a mass murderer. What had we done wrong??

Mid morning, however, things were looking a bit better, and there seemed to be a good amount of bee activity around the front of the hive. I felt a little better, though there were still a lot of dead bees lying around the place.

As the days passed, things were looking better and better, with more and more bees flying in and out, some even carrying pollen on their legs! This was very exciting for me, and I started feeling that hey, why would they be collecting pollen if the colony was about to collapse on account of my inadvertent mass murdering of many of their comrades? Maybe they'll just make more bees and it will all be OK?

I'm very tempted to look into the hive to see what's going on, but my curiosity is being quelled by a desire to just leave them alone and hope they'll work something out, if something is indeed terribly wrong. Also, I'm painfully aware of the fact that, even if I looked into the hive, I wouldn't necessarily know how to recognise if things were "OK" or "disastrous". Not helping the situation is the fact that my beekeeping books and all my notes from the beekeeping course I did are buried somewhere in the shipping container!

Our Kenyan top bar hive, lovingly crafted by Mr Happy Earth, next to a baby fruit tree

I may have a peek over the weekend to see if they're drawing any comb, and also to check if the queen's been rescued from the cage she comes in. Yep - she comes in a cage. When you buy a box of bees like ours, you're not buying a colony who've been chummy for a while - you're buying a bunch of workers with a new queen who they've never met before, so when you shove them into a hive together, she needs to be protected for a few days in case the colony rejects her, in which case, she'd be killed. Pretty wild. So she comes in a little cage, which is plugged with some sugar, which the bees slowly eat in order to release her. Theory goes, while they're chowing on her cage plug, the bees get the hang of their new queen so they don't kill her. Here's hoping!

If there's no rest for the wicked, then I reckon there's also no rest for the compulsively-concerned-by-the Earth's-wellbeing, either.

Within 24 hours of landing in Bega, Olive and I were down at the farm, organising the capture of our very own hive full of bees.

The hive was delivered some weeks ago when my Parps and I traipsed down the hill to the dam, carrying the delightfully sturdy (read: heavy) Kenyan top bar hive through the rain. (The hive was built for me by Mr. Richard Happy Earth, as a trade for Mrs Ally Happy Earth's wedding dress, which I made.) We deposited the hive on the dam wall, providing, as recommended, a clear flight path for the bees. That's what they like, you see.

I learned this, and many other useful, weird, wonderful and quite frankly, frikking amazing facts about bees when I attended Milkwood's natural Beekeeping course, taught by Tim Malfroy of Malfroy's Gold honey (who is, I should say, awesomely inspirational and downright cool). Amongst other things, Tim recommended trying to catch a swarm and then house it, rather than buying bees in from somewhere else.

So I diligently purchased a swarm lure (I know - cool!!) which is basically a pheromone for attracting the scout bees who go out looking for a new home. This lure was supposed to be put in the hive when Parps and I delivered it, but I diligently left it (and the delicious Feather and Bone salami sandwiches that were keeping it company in the esky) on mum's kitchen bench.

So, first farming project was to attach the lure to the top of the hive. Now, we wait.

But while we're waiting, we have plenty of other things to occupy us, like swimming in the dam,

watching the ducks,

hanging out with the resident frogs (who seemed to think the hive was quite fetching), watching the bees bumbling around en masse in the mud next to the dam

("Hey! Did you guys see that awesome Kenyan top bar hive over there?") and planting up a bit of a kitchen garden at our rental house in town.

Like I say, no rest. But I'm pretty sure that if you look up "chicks and a little dude who fully dig being busy" in the dictionary, there's a picture of us, so it's OK.