Sweeter than honey?

There are a lot of benefits to keeping bees around.  Of course there is the honey, which is always dynamite.  I harvested plenty of honey from one of my hives this year, it has real flavor (which you just won't find in the grocery store varieties) and expresses a range of color depending on when and where it is harvested from.

This year I was able to capture four swarms for myself, which I have hived in three large Top Bar Hives up on the farm.  On top of that, I had opportunity to capture several other swarms which we placed with some aspiring new beekeepers - nice to get some other folks into the work of caring for bees!  My hope is that the hives will all be strong enough to weather the winter and will start next spring strong.  I will be able to split those colonies next year and continue to expand the apiary.

The wax not only looks great, but it smells simply amazing.

One of the side products that is readily taken from the Top Bar Hives is beeswax.  The bees build fresh comb which they use for raising young and for storing honey.  The honey storage comb is sometimes emptied out as the bees make use of the food during periods of colony growth or low forage availability.  That empty storage comb is good stuff for processing into pure beeswax.  Evie and I built a solar wax melter this summer and have been putting it to use to render out some beeswax for a special project she's interested in.  Pure beeswax has a lot of uses, but she has her eyes set on lip balm.  So we'll combine this wax with some other natural products and start turning out Evie's first line of lip balm soon.  It's sure to be the hot item this winter for all those chapped lips out there, so keep your eyes open for our young entrepreneur's announcement about available product.

Let's Go Fly a Kite

A great gift came to us in mid-late August this year - a family in the church offered us a week at their time-share property in Long Beach, WA.  The summer temps in Yakima had been unbearable, a long string of triple-digit-days, and we were ready for some respite on the Washington coast.  The trip was our last hurrah before school started for the kids, so we packed up and headed towards the sea, making the 4.5 hour drive from Yakima in about 4.5 hours.  Textbook.

One of the cool things happening at the beach that week was an International Kite Festival.  The sky just outside the hotel was filled with fantastic displays every day of the week!  We settled into a routine of sorts, taking a stroll down the boardwalk nearly every day and taking in the festival.

 The loop back towards the hotel took us back through town and we quickly discovered a candy store on the route.  The kids liked stopping in there and perusing their merchandise! 

One of the cool features at the festival was a kids' kite pavilion which offered the kids a chance to make a kite of their very own.  They selected colors and fabric and soon enough they were joining the ranks of kite-flyers on the beach.

A kite festival has a great, mellow vibe to it.  The display of color and design is pretty mind-blowing (kite humor), but there is not much more to taking it all in other than relaxing near the beach and enjoying the view.  This makes for a pretty relaxing week, which is just what the doctor ordered.  The kids spent many, many hours in the hotel pool, which was kept at a balmy 80 degrees or so, and we spent time walking the beach every day.

The kids want it to be a new tradition, a yearly trip to the beach and to the kite festival.  Whether it works out that way or not, we certainly enjoyed our trip and would gladly do it again.  Enjoy the pictures!   

Over-exposed

I admit that I've been having a bit of a freakout.  It has taken me some time to come to terms with it, to understand what I've been reacting to, what has been driving a recent spell of rampant introversion.  And I think I have identified the source, as unlikely as it may seem to some of you who know me well, as impossible as it might seem to those who know me a little.

Earlier this summer I was interviewed by a local magazine here in Yakima.  It goes by the appropriate title, Yakima Magazine.  Initially I was talked into a profile piece.  You know, a kind of "who are the people in your neighborhood" kind of thing, an innocuous fluff article on a local pastor tucked between ads for the fair and the classifieds.  A photoshoot was scheduled.  Ok, I can handle that.  A couple of photos in several settings, surely one good one would surface for the article.

Several days before the article was published, the writer called to go over the text with me and I asked if they had found a photo that worked.

"Yeah, yeah we did.  In fact....(pause)....you are actually going to be the cover photo."

Cover model, that's me.  So, you should know that this magazine is a free publication.  It goes out in a Friday addition of the local paper once a month and is also distributed in stacks to local businesses, libraries, etc.  In short, they paper the town with this thing.  You know those periodical dispensers outside your local grocery store...the bins where you can pick up the local paper or the nickel ads or the auto-trader?  Yeah, my cover photo was all over those things.

Of course, it was all in good fun.  The article was fine, the response was very positive and resulted in a strange level of attention.  I found myself a kind of B-list celebrity in town.  People would double-take in the grocery store as I passed, getting up the courage several aisles later to say, "Hey, you're that guy from the magazine, right?"  The folks at the church were very proud and we had some good laughs, I even signed some autographs that first Sunday after the magazine came out.....yeah, don't unpack that too much, I have tried to block it out.

But I have since found myself in something of a funk.  And I think the article has something to do with it.  One of the things people don't often guess about me is that I am an introvert.  I don't always look much like an introvert.  Mmes. Myers and Briggs label me an INTJ.  It is true that my "I" (for Introvert) is borderline....but that line is moving, moving slowly and steadily over the last several decades from the crowded mall food court to a sage-covered hill in the wilderness.  I used to be an ENTJ back in the day....but my "I" side is slowly taking over.  I am a situational extrovert, which means I can become a people-person when necessary, but it does not give me energy.  It, in fact, exhausts me, and I often retreat after public exposure, like preaching, for instance.

So the magazine article ended up being a laser-focused spotlight under which my introverted self shrank and shriveled.  I found myself retreating from facebook, from my blog, from other means of friendship, communication, and networking.  My projects and interested didn't cease, but my desire to share those with anyone else was gone.

Of course, this is an over-reaction.  I am slowly coming out of this period of retreat and gaining some perspective on it.  I think self-sufficiency is an illusion, but my introvert inclinations push me to want to believe in the illusion.  The truth is, much of the projects and passions I pursue are at their best when they introduce me to community.  Community is a basic need for humanity, even for a borderline introvert.  I enjoy the company of others, I especially love sharing the joy of discovery that comes in so many of the areas of interest of mine, whether that joy is shared with my kids, my wife, or the many friends that I meet through this poly-hobbiest lifestyle.  I really do like to bring people together, especially through shared passions - I suppose I have just had the opportunity to see some of my own demons, and might recognize them on the street the next time they are heading my way.

So I am back on the blog.  Lots going on, especially as fall, the most blessed and perfect of the seasons, comes to Yakima.  I'll try to do some catch up here and there with some of the projects that have been going on. 

Spring Pigs

Today marked a milestone in our adventures in country living.  Sure, chickens are great, but every hipster in Seattle has got him or herself a backyard flock.  Shoot, any good flock of chickens just about comes with a pair of skinny jeans, some ironic facial hair, and a can of PBR.  But you know you are going beyond the trendy when you step into bona-fide livestock.  So that's what we did.  Time to dust off the Curriculum Vitae and add "Pig Farmer" to the list of life skills.

We picked up our four piglets today from new friend Pablo at Mountain View Family Ranch (www.mountainviewfamilyranch.com).  The pigs are being raised on the farm property that we have been rehabilitating with friends.  They get a very large paddock, deluxe all the way.  We had to do some work to make it right, including fence repair, gate replacement, and electric-fence installation.  We knew that the pigs would be ready for pick-up in early May and the day finally arrived.  We had some last-minute adjustments to make, but moved the four little ladies in late this morning.

There has been a lot of interest in this project as it picked up steam.  The four pigs we have are going to be divvied up between six or so families - when word started getting out, we could easily have bought ten or more, there was that much interest.  But we are keeping our first venture into pig-raising modest in scale.  It is a five-month investment, these cuties are slated for the chopping block in November.  That's the way of things, folks.  But they are going to get a lot of attention and love in the meantime, possibly even a trip to the fair.  Stay tuned for more farm updates as we all get settled into late spring routines here!

An Old Shed, A New Coop

There have been some exciting developments recently that have resulted in a great deal of work.  Real, get-your-hands-dirty, be outside kind of work, which has prevented a lot of blogging.  Blogging about work and life is a kind of derivative, a downstream product of life, like shadows on the cave wall.  I would much rather be occupied with the font of experience than the products of experience, so I make, once again, no apologies about the trickling pace of posts.  There is a great deal going on, however, and I suspect that 2012 will produce a great collection of photos and reflections!

Things like this - a new farm!  Well....an old farm....and not our farm.  Some friends have recently acquired a small, run-down farm property located just minutes away from our house here in Yakima.  They have graciously included us in a rehabilitation effort, as our two families, both interested in homestead-y kind of living, work to put animals of various sorts back onto the property.  Our plans are ambitious and far-ranging, including chickens, cows, sheep, goats, pigs and who knows what else.  We have been working hard to get the place ready for the first couple of move-ins and I have learned the first of what will surely be a whole host of important lessons.

Lesson #1:  There is no such thing as an "animal-ready" farm.

Even a property that has previously housed animals will probably need a surprising amount of work to get ready for new residents.  A great example is the new chicken coop.  We quickly identified a shed that looked like a likely candidate to be repurposed into a chicken coop.  It had previously housed a couple of varieties of pigeons and then just the scatalogical remains of pigeons.  There were various design considerations to deal with, not the smallest being that the shed had been cobbled together with a variety of materials and not a square angle in the structure.  Also a consideration was our desire to make great use of recycled materials, of which there was a large supply of around the property.  The very first step, logically, was to purchase 5 chicks from the local feed store.  These we began raising in our garage, which was a great delight to our kids.  It also started a stopwatch on the coop project.....we had about 5 weeks to get the thing ready.  Nothing motivates like a deadline.

The shed was torn apart and cleaned out.  No less than three front-loader buckets full of guano were carted away as we made the space as disease-free as we could manage.  The coop is a large design, more than capable of housing the now 14 chickens that make it their home.  A front run is open-air, surrounded by fencing and accessed by a recycled door.  The chickens access the coop proper by way of a ramp that leads to a small door.  Inside, there are roost areas and nesting boxes for all those eggs.  Four of the chickens are laying adults, and so there are already eggs being produced and enjoyed!  The nesting boxes are accessed through individual sliding doors, which the kids check daily.  New tin was put on the roof and on the sides, to make the thing look a little less like a shanty (though putting tin on that structure was a challenge, to say the least).

The chicks are all moved in an enjoying the new home, which has light and heat provided so that it will be able to sustain them through all seasons here in Yakima.  The kids check in on them just about every day, keeping close tabs on their personal favorites.

We've also been working overtime on getting one of the large paddocks on the property ready for new residents that will arrive this Friday - four pigs!  Pictures of that project and the little porkers will soon follow.  I've established my new apiary on the site as well, and will probably have about 3-4 hives working by the time summer is in full swing.  Green acres is the life for me!  Stay tuned for more updates from "the farm". 

Putting the Kids to Bed

It has been some many months since I last posted, and I have no apologies to give, it has just been a busy time.  There have been several projects that have progressed since October, some new ones, some that have been completed.  This post is about one of those latter categories.

As the kids have grown bigger, we have been experimenting with different sleeping configurations to get the whole family to sleep.  The girls expressed interest in bunk beds, so we got this bunk frame and got it all outfitted and then found that nobody wanted to sleep on the top bunk.  Workarounds were tried, but it became clear that a new arrangement was needed.  So, off to the workshop....

The goal was to produce two identical twin beds that would come in at reasonable cost.  The girls also needed input so they would have some ownership.  Here's what came out:

I built the beds out of pine and worked off of a model I created on Google's SketchUp program, which gave me a chance to think through the design.  I laminated the legs to include through mortises which would receive the sideboards.  The headboards were the most complex, though pretty straightforward as well.

The girls picked out their colors of choice.  "Sparkling Lime" and "Strawberry Shortcake".  After the beds were finished, we created some letters out of 1/4" mdf (Evie did some of the scroll-saw work).  Shannon decorated them in color schemes consistent with each bed, and we affixed the letters to the headboards for a finishing touch.  Voila!  The girls love them, which is really all that matters in the end.  A pretty reasonable project with a fine result.

Enological Adventures in the Garage

It is hard to pick a favorite of all the great aspects of living and working in the Northwest....but this particular possibility is fighting for a top spot!  This fall we started a new adventure, one that I've been pondering for a couple of seasons now - home winemaking!  Although the Yakima Valley has long been known as the Orchard of America (I don't think that's an official title, but it should be), and the Hopyard of the US (again, making this up....but we do produce most of the hops grown in the US) the region has also been producing some great wines over the last 30 years or so.  Vineyards cover much of the hillsides of the lower valley and I have been contemplating jumping into winemaking for some time.  In preparation of the adventure, I enrolled in an evening class at the local community college last year, The Essentials of Winemaking, and got familiar with the particulars of producing wine, focusing on reds in particular.  It was also a great opportunity to get to know some of the folks in the industry - this investment of time would pay dividends later!

This was to be the year for our first foray into winemaking and I contacted a local vineyard and winery to see about buying some grapes at picking time.  The cold spring we had this year delayed the ripening of every fruit produced in the region.  The grapes I was hoping for, local Cabernet Sauvignon, would normally have come off the vine in late September, but they needed more time to develop their sugars.  Harvest kept getting pushed back one week, then another, then another.....finally the e-mail notice arrived, on the 25th of October - it was go time!

Piper and I headed out to the spot in a borrowed truck with two 20 gallon food-grade containers that I had picked up earlier this fall, outfitted with drain spigots, marked for volume gradations and sanitized.  The grapes were in large bins, picked early in the morning and then collected at the winery.  I loaded 200lbs into a separate container and then those were loaded into the crusher/destemmer (this was a very nice added bonus, to have the grapes crushed).  The crushed grapes were pumped into our containers right in the back of the truck.  We strapped them down and went to pay for them - the vineyard owner and I had been chatting through the process and he waved me off as I reached for my wallet.  "They're on me, enjoy!"  Pretty amazing....we expressed our gratitude and I promised to bring some homebrewed beer in the future (one topic of our conversations) for his warehouse crew.

Winemaking is more complex than brewing beer, but it is also more forgiving in many respects.  Wine can be adjusted at multiple stages, right up until in goes into the bottle - the chemistry is a bit more complicated than I generally have to deal with when making beer, and one is presented from the start with a dizzying array of options for additives that can enhance the process and outcome for small-batch wine.  I leaned heavily on the fantastic information available from www.morewinemaking.com as well as everything I had picked up in my class last year.  It has all helped lend some confidence as we've launched into the experience in earnest.

The must was treated with SO2 to wipe the microbiological slate clean, then yeast was pitched about 24 hours after we got it home.  Also added was an enzyme to assist in the maceration process, the extraction of color and tannins from the skins.  Other additives included a fermentation tannin, an inactive yeast product meant to increase body and mouthfeel, and yeast nutrients to aid in fermentation.  Test were run on the pH, total acidity, and sugar levels of the must - the numbers came back solidly in the ballpark for proper fermentation....I'm learning a bunch of chemistry that I probably should have learned in high school if I'd paid more attention.

The wine is fermenting nicely already and the "cap" has already formed - this is the layer of skins and pulp that is pushed to the top of the fermenting vessel because of CO2 produced during fermentation.  That cap has to be punched down twice a day and the must stirred up vigorously to help in the extraction of color and body.  I also take measurements on the fermentation with a hydrometer each time I punch the cap in order to track the progress towards the finish.  Once it has fermented "dry" (meaning all the residual sugars have been converted), we will move to the press phase.  Very exciting!

Stay tuned for updates!