Honey Harvest 2008!

Two weekends ago I drove up to Gualala to spend the weekend with Dave and his parents. Dave had kept the dogs that week since I had to do some field work and would be gone for 20 hours straight (they are good dogs, but no one can hold their pee for that long!).

The real purpose of my going up there was to help with honey harvest. Last year my brother-in-law, Michael, came up and brought his friend Lesley to help out, too. We bottled 220 quarts last summer. Because of the fires this year, we knew there would be a lot less honey than that so we didn’t worry about recruiting a bunch of people to help. We did have two other helpers, though—Wally and Vance—who came over just because they were interested in the process.

Since it is so late in the season they not only pulled the supers (where the honey is stored) but they also inserted Apistan stripes to ward off any varroa mites:

After sorting the honey into “dark” and “normal” they cut the caps off the comb with a heated knife:

Then the frames are loaded into the honey extractor (basically a huge centrifuge) to let all the honey spin out:

The first 10 frames worth took forever to empty so we turned on a little heater underneath the extractor, which did seem to help. Dave also closed all the windows to keep the heat inside so the honey would thin out and flow better. After a while the garage was like a sauna and we were sweating like pigs.

Dave was in charge of filtering the extracted honey through two sieves, into a clean bucket fitted with a handy little valve:

Then I bottled the honey into clean quart jars:

After only a few hours of sweaty work we were done, having bottled 98 quarts. The next morning Dave bottled the honey filtered out of the wax cappings for a total of 107 quarts. Not too shabby.

We made sure to feed the bees some sugar syrup since we robbed their hives:

Man-o-man, did I eat a lot of honey that day! Whenever I had a spare chance, Dave and I would grab wads of the wax cappings that we cut off the frames and suck all the honey out. You just pop the whole mess into your mouth, and chew and suck until there’s no more honey left. Then you just spit out the wax—it is like old fashioned gum!

Leaving on a Jet Plane

Tomorrow morning Dave and I are meeting my dad at SFO so we can fly down to Georgia for my great uncle's funeral. He passed away yesterday afternoon.

Making life even more miserable for me is my recent head cold. I haven't been sick like this since I baby sat full time in college (children in child care are vectors for all sorts of illnesses--gross!). Since I'm now on school insurance, I had to brave the ghetto UCD health center to see a doctor. She was understanding about congested sinuses on pressurized airplanes and gave me medication to take if my condition worsens and a handy device I've dubbed a "nasal douche." It is a little bottle of saline solution that you squirt up your nose, one nostril at a time, then blow all the ickiness out into a tissue. You can feel the solution swirl up into the sinues cavities in your forehead (like when you would accidentally breath in clorinated swimming pool water as a kid). It clears your sinuses and then....tada! You can breath easy. Plus it flushes out all the virus/bacteria-containing muscus so you recover faster. Genius. (I'm going to take some decongestant before boarding, just to ensure that my head won't explode mid-flight.)

Edward and Allison are driving down from NY (with Emmy in tow) and will pick us up from the airport. We'll spend a week down there--after going all the way down there, we figured we might all as well have a good time seeing each other.

I have a lot to do before going to bed tonight (packing, cleaning the house so our new roomie doens't think we're slobs, get the doggies' stuff ready for Aunt Bernie and Uncle Michael to pick them up, gather all my homework and textbooks for the plane ride, and take out the garbage).

Jeez...this week has really been crappy.

I Need a Thesis Bailout!

Wow, it has been a while since I've posted anything! I have been super busy doing a million small things--school has started up again, I'm nannying twice a week, I'm taking a knitting class, my duties as Student Representative for my graduate group have increased now that the new students are here, and I've been distracted by the sudden down-turn in my uncle's health. But that doesn't mean Dave and I haven't done any blog-worthy things in our spare time. I promise to post some of that stuff later this week.

The latest Piled Higher and Deeper (aka PhD) comic is super funny, even if you're not a graduate student:

Prayers for Uncle Walter

I just found out that my Great Uncle Walter is now under hospice care at his home in Georgia...so please keep your thoughts and prayers with his family. The picture above is of him and me at my Grandma's house back in 1984.

We love you, Uncle Walter!

Retaining Wall

This past weekend we built a retaining wall around the perimeter of the garden bed my dad and I made on Easter weekend. It makes our front yard look so organized and neat! I looooooooooove it.

Before:
We used those wedge-shaped concrete blocks you see everywhere in recent subdivisions. A few weekends ago we tried to buy some at Home Depot--the sales person checked the inventory system and it indicated that there were over 800 of them in stock. The lady wandered around the garden area, then radioed someone in the back to check, but to no avail. All we could find were a few chipped blocks on a broken pallet. But we wanted to buy a whole pallet (about 120 blocks). Apparently their inventory system needs some work. Since Home Depot doesn't offer a whole-pallet discount, charges a fortune for residential delivery, and couldn't even guarantee us an exact delivery date if we special ordered a full pallet, we just gave up and left.

On a whim this Saturday before the matinee showing of Burn After Reading, we drove Clifford the Big Red Truck downtown to the Ace Hardware rock yard to see how much similar retaining blocks cost. No more than 10 minutes later we were driving very low and very slow with a whole pallet of tan blocks in the bed of the truck. After the pallet discount, the Ace blocks were only $40 more than what they would have cost at Home Depot. We're always happy to pay a little more to buy something here in town, especially from a store with such good customer service.

After the movie we dug out the edge of the bed, put down a layer of sand, then placed the blocks. Leveling each block was time consuming, back-breaking work. We were hunkered down in an Asian squat for a couple of hours hoisting those 23-pound blocks in and out of the trench as we adjusted the bed of sand until it was level. Dave thought the blocks were light--I thought Dave was crazy (and much, much stronger than me).

During:Last night after work I tilled-in about 80 gallons of compost (two garbage cans full) and some inorganic N-P-K fertilizer. Then I wired up another sprinkler valve and laid out 150 feet of black soaker hose. I can't find the user's manual for the irrigation timer so I didn't program the new set-up yet. Hopefully I can get that done before leaving for Gualala this weekend.

After:
My plan is to plant some bushes and ground cover along the edges and then fill in the middle with winter veggies. I think multi-color quinoa and rainbow Swiss chard will look pretty out there, along with little rows of carrots and radishes--all plants that will suffer no ill effects if the dogs pee on them or plow through them occasionally.

After all that work I was starving so I made corned beef hash using potatoes we harvested from our garden:
We'd never grown potatoes before, and chose to try red and purple ones. The "seed" potatoes were from the Seed Savers Exchange but I've since been told that we can just use organic new potatoes (or big baking varieties like Russets, I suppose) instead. According to my dad, once the plants start growing you're supposed to pile the soil up over the base of the plant continuously throughout the season so that you end up with a really deep root system (and thus tons of potatoes). My dad tells me that hippies often grew potatoes in stacks of old tires; they'd just stack up additional tires and fill them with soil as the plant grew--sort of like a tower of potatoes. (Ok, I added the "hippies" part--but growing potatoes in a stack of old tires sounds like something hippies would do, right?)

Or you can just plant the seed potatoes, water regularly, and forget about it. That's what we did and it was quite successful:

Field Trip

Yesterday Rebecca (my labmate) and I ventured out into the field to download some data loggers we installed last year. Admittedly, we're just slave labor for this experiment so I don't actually do anything with the data, other than email it off to another labmate. Matt is our lab's plant-available-water guru. Last spring he and his family moved to Tajikistan for a 2-year mission. Because that country doesn't allow Christian missionaries, he's also working there as a hydrologist. So that's where I email these data sets off to--Tajikistan of all places.

Going to these field sites is sorta fun--except that the Alturas site is about 5 hours from Davis. And downloading the loggers only takes about 5 minutes. So we spend all that time in the car just to hop out, plug in the laptop, and just jump back into the car. It's a little bit of a kill-joy, honestly.

But we make the most of these road trips. Like all regular outtings, we have our little rituals.

I get the rental car from fleet services at the butt-crack of dawn then pick Rebecca up at her house. We drive up I-5 to Redding to download the loggers near the airport. This site is COVERED is unnaturally-dense manzanita bushes (there was a recent fire and the bushes haven't gotten to the point of crowding each other out yet.) I'm always a little skeptical that we'll even find the logger.

We litterally have to plow through the bushes, then hunker down to look for the logger box through the trunks. We come out with manzanita leaves and bits of red bark in our hair, down our pants, in our pockets--everywhere.

Then we usually stop at the Sundial Bridge for a grilled panini (yummy!) and a stroll across the hot glass.

We always forget how to get onto the 299 highway so we have to drive around a bit. This next part of the drive is beautiful but frustrating. The scenery is amazing along the windy road, but there is inevitably road construction that forces all traffic to stop for about 15 minutes to let the opposite-direction vehicles pass.

Finally we reach Alturas mid-afternoon, turn onto highway 395 (also the main drag through this sleepy, dilapitated town), and head south to the unmarked turnoff. We always forget where to turn (notice a trend?) and have to whip-out my handheld GPS to remind us. Then it is another few miles on a horrendously bumpy/rocky/dusty dirt road. We navigate our standard-issue exempt-plated sedan ever so slowly on this road, lest a rock rip off some vital part of the undercarriage.

We wander around the field for a while, looking in vain for the plastic irrigation box containing the logger (I usually use the GPS again for this since the annual grasses that have sprouted between the sage bushes make it very hard to find unless you're standing right on top of it). Last time we went, we stacked a bunch of rocks on the side of the dirt road so we'd know where to stop. We're not supposed to alter the landscape at all, so we're hesitant to use flags or a post or anything to mark the logger boxes. But this time I just strapped a Ziploc baggie to one of the sage bushes--sacraficing a hairband to secure it. With the rocks, the 3 sets of GPS coordinates, and the baggie we should be able to find it next time without too much wandering. I've marked that site three times now with the GPS but all of them mark it about 20 feet apart so I don't want to rely on only on that information.

After all is said and done, we make a pit stop at the gas station in Alturas for gas and scrumptious artery-clogging, blood pressure-rising snacks. Rebecca's usual is a mug of the flavored coffee from those little espresso-looking machines. Yesterday she tried toffee. Last time it was a mix of vanilla, creme brulee, and toffee. I always get a bag of chips--usually nacho Dorritos--and a chocolate candy bar. I almost never eat this type of crap, but treat myself on road trips.

Monday we have to venture over to a reservoir in Marin to do the same thing, plus take some vegetation measurements. I love going to this particular site because we pass the Marin French Cheese Company, where we always stop for a quick taste. (You didn't think being a graduate student means all work and no fun, right? Being a grad student in the environmental sciences sure does have it's perks. Especially when your field sites are located next to cheese factories!)

=)

Seeds Are Sown

Whew...the wind is really picking up. And it is getting dark. But I feel good because I just planted the first set of seeds in the empty beds for our winter garden. (I planned-out the whole layout in my gardening diary. Yes, I know that's dorky.)

I just pulled my third trial-loaf of gluten-free bread out of the oven. I'm experimenting with this type of bread for my friend John, whose girlfriend thinks be might be gluten-intolerant. For years he thought he was lactose-intolerant but after some research, she thinks it might just be a wheat allergy. Hopefully she's wrong because most of the non-gluten breads I've had have been nasty and chewy. I already made 2 loaves last week using different flours and gluten alternatives (xanthum gum and guar gum) combinations but they were so dense and gooey that I tossed them into the garbage:
This third loaf looks much better; it rose up just like real wheat bread. Once it is cool I will taste it and will report back on the texture and flavor.

Third time's a charm, I hope: