Monday, April 27, 2009

The weather has taken a turn for the cold and I am not so inclined to spend my day outside. But from my window I can see our four goat kids grazing with the elder goats in the field for the first time. We keep them penned up for the first few weeks, but today they decided they'd had enough, and I surmised that if they were adept enough to jump the five foot fence holding them in, they would do fine outdoors.

Last week we had a WWOOFer (which stands for willing workers on organic farms or worldwide opportunities on organic farms depending whom you talk to) here from France. Rosaline arrived ready to work and we spent a week fencing in chickens, fencing out deer, building pea fence, planting potatoes, transplanting brassicas, beets and swiss chard and seeding several rows of carrots.

We painted bee boxes and on Saturday, I drove an hour to Stillwater to pick up my first honeybees. A worker carefully placed two small crates containing two pounds of bees and queen each into my trunk. They asked if I would prefer them in the car with me or in the trunk, but noticing the few bees on the outside of the cage, I thought the trunk would be a better option. At home, we took sugar syrup and pollen patties up the hill with the bees to their new homes, sprayed them with sugar syrup, set the queen aside and dumped the bees with several thwacks into their boxes--not quite as easy as I was made to believe, because several angry bees came charging toward my face (I was not wearing a bee suit at the time). I released the queens, closed the boxes and left in a hurry.

Last night under a deluge of rain, the farm turned green. Asparagus shoots are up, and rhubarb has emerged. In just a few weeks, the garden will be in.

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