Been (Bee) Crazy!
The girls, checking out their new home (pre-entrance-reducer)
First let me give you some good garden advice I did not follow: carefully plan your vacations to NOT fall in major planting times, no matter how tempting the vacation! OK, I couldn’t do it either, but have been paying the price for a couple of weeks. The week before vacation I was running around like crazy trying to get all the little cool-crop seedlings (broccoli, kale, cabbage, winter lettuce, beets, cilantro, parsley, etc) I’d grown with the light table or purchased at Chicken Holler into the ground. This was a gamble since if it didn’t rain, they’d die tragically in the field… But I got lucky on that one and it rained a lot. Which was not so lucky for the vacation part of the story…but we had a good time and lots of good food and great company, regardless… My wonderful neighbor Hershel looked after the seedlings to tiny to plant and they came through beautifully. (Thanks Hershel!)
Since I’ve returned from vacation, I’ve been trying to catch back up with life, all while preparing for the new bees! After taking the January bee class series, finding a mentor (Thanks Charity!!) and ordering the amazing array of stuff and gadgets required for a brand new hive, the occupants arrived on Saturday! Driving home with 10K bees in a flimsy box (and a half-dozen or so clingers-on clutching the outside of the cage and taking occasional confused flights) in one small Corolla was a lively experience, but I loved it. I’ve loved every single thing about this bee adventure and I can’t wait to tell you more, much more! But for today, given that I’m still behind at everything, I’ll just leave you with this brief note and a few pics of the girls. More to come soon…
They are so beautiful..we've been watching "Bee TV" from lawn chairs...
—A Larrapin Garden www.larrapin.us
Posts most wednesdays & weekends unless I’ve been on vacation or I’m transfixed watching bee TV! Don’t miss any post though—you can subscribe by Email here. You can also get bonus links and recipes by “liking” our Facebook fan page at www.facebook.com/larrapin.garden. Geesh, we’re even on Twitter at http://twitter.com/LarrapinGarden.
Weeding is More FUN with Chickens!
Weeding With Hen Friends
Yesterday afternoon I was pulling some weeds out of a few garden beds that I didn’t cover with chopped leaves or cover crop last fall. The cover-cropped and leaf covered beds are beautifully weed free and will be easy to plant when I’m ready.
Easy is a good thing since I’ve been happily buried in preparing for Dig In! Fayetteville’s First Food & Farming Filmfest. I’m working with two wonderful local farm gals to bring foodie and locavore films to NWA. These films have been popular and won many awards in film festivals around the country. Several will be shown for the first time in Arkansas. The films are selected to inspire and empower us all—in a positive and encouraging way—to go local and organic. You can read about what we’ll be watching and watch film trailers here at OzarksAlive.org.
But back out in the garden… The uncovered beds have weeds, mostly henbit and chickweed. Note that foreshadowing… I actually don’t mind pulling the clumps up. In the soft raised-beds it’s very easy to do AND it’s so much darned fun using the weeds in the manner explored in the video below! But I also know that those exposed beds were also exposed to rain and weather, which compacts the soil….and those exposed, uncovered beds are much less kind the to soil microorganisms which make veggies grow so much better. So winter cover crops are my new best friend now that I’ve seen the incredibly crumbly soil underneath them.
When I do have weeds, this video shows what I do with them. I also chat a bit about chickens in your garden. Enjoy!
—A Larrapin Garden www.larrapin.us
Posts most wednesdays & weekends. Don’t miss any—you can subscribe by Email here. You can also get bonus links and recipes by “liking” our Facebook fan page at www.facebook.com/larrapin.garden. Geesh, we’re even on Twitter at http://twitter.com/LarrapinGarden. A special shout-out of gratitude to NWAMotherlode.com and OzarksUnbound for helping us spread the word about the Dig In! Filmfest!
Those two pretty days, back in January
New garden bed, freshly plowed, rocks removed.
The last couple days of January were lovely and after the past two weeks of snow, I’m thinking back to them very fondly. So here’s what I did on my two days. I tilled up the spot that will be two new garden beds in the veggie patch. Tilling is my only alternative to having my knees replaced from the shoveling in such rocky ground. Above, the rocks have been removed already. Then you have a lot of rocks to put somewhere.
Make a wire tube, and fill them with rocks for a cool column..
So I’ve started making rock columns like Ozark farmers of old, the ones you see at the corners of garden spots and fields around here. (Does anyone know what these stone filled columns are called in the Ozarks?) They are actually handy. You can build tables on top, or use them as the base for a garden planter. When you have this many rocks in your soil, you figure out variousways to use them. But one of my new year’s resolutions was to have more fun making garden ‘art.’ I’m not talking fine art, I’m talking fun art.
The concrete chicken (thanks Jane!)
So you take a concrete chicken, and add it to your stone column. Oh, and I built the column on top of a stump, which I’d previously decorated with a broken rake, painted purple of course…
Voila! Garden Art!
And there you have it. I’m going to add a few more objects, and call her “Our Lady of Larrapin.” That’s what I did with my two pretty days at the end of January.
—A Larrapin Garden www.larrapin.us
Posts most wednesdays & weekends. Don’t miss any—you can subscribe by Email here. You can also get bonus links and recipes by “liking” our Facebook fan page at www.facebook.com/larrapin.garden. Geesh, we’re even on Twitter at http://twitter.com/LarrapinGarden. Tell me about your favorite garden art!
Counting Chickens
Fall is settling in. The leaves are changing and the chickens are molting. Most of them look ragged and rough, some half-bald. It’s an embarrassing time to have your friends see your chickens for the first time! Hopefully their feathers will be grown in by the end of the month when we expect guests… These pics are from when they have their regular feathers.
It’s a motley bunch of chickens but we love them. Except for Hell-Kevin the white guinea, who is available, free, with free local delivery, to anybody who would take him off our hands. Don’t be fooled by his charming demeanor. He has been so vicious to the hens (and even to Handsome, who outweighs him by about 3X but nonetheless succumbs to Hell-Kevin’s wrath) that we had to put him out of the chicken pasture and coop. He free-ranges on the property now, looking for things to beat up, when he isn’t outside the fence yelling at the chickens. We’re kinda rooting for ‘natural causes’ but no such luck yet.
I love the Buckeyes more than ever and plan to raise more. (If you don’t know about Buckeye Chickens you can read about them here at the ALBC website—one of my favorite organizations to support… )
Then there’s our old girls: Little Bit the one bantam and Old Yella who could be six or seven and still lays an ENORMOUS egg every few weeks. It’s so big the top won’t close on egg carton. Chickens lay regularly their first two years, then laying dwindles down quickly. Old Yella has a solid black sister (not pictured) who does the same. These chickens were from my original batch when we bought the place five years ago now, they were purchased as at-least second-year adults from the Centerton poultry auction—a rural and cross-cultural experience you should experience at least once!
We’d been wondering just how old chickens can live to be and I thought it was seven or eight till I read about R. Creasy’s Mr. X who was FIFTEEN!! Most chickens, lets just say, live much, much shorter lives. Even seven is not the fate of most real country chickens….but they all have a good, good life at Larrapin, and the length is almost always MUCH longer than found in nature. Most wild birds don’t make it thorough their second winter…the common lifespan in nature can be startlingly short! Farm chickens are luckier, but still, a Chicken’s list of ‘natural causes’ includes about everything on four legs, two legs, crockpots & freezers, two wings, colds, health issues and the mysterious DFO (a descriptive but distinctly unofficial radio code from Mendy’s policing days for “done fell out”) where the cause is unknown…but a chicken is down for good. For the record, Mr. X was a pet and came in the house every night to a pet-carrier! But our old gals are going strong for now and in chicken-universe, now is what counts!
Finally, there’s the one chicken who causes no problems whatsoever: Herald the metal chicken, yard art we were lucky enough to find down at Daisy’s and Olive’s vintage shop in Prairie Grove, Arkansas. He is well-behaved and good looking year round. We should all be so lucky!
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Read MoreSneet & Snain: The Wintry Mixes
- Next winter’s warmth
The snow has melted away from the white Christmas we had here in Northwest Arkansas, but we’re still having variations on cold precipitation. Not exactly the dreaded “wintry mix,” as the Noaa weather report often calls for, but yet another of the endless combinations that winter can bring. Back in NC, we made up some new names for the Southern variations on snow. “Snain” was snowy rain. “Sneet” was snow laced with sleet. Glad I’ve got good gardening books to read!
Ada The Farm Dog - 9mos old
Ada loved, loved the snow. She couldn’t figure out who would leave such yummy fluff everywhere. You could run, play with and then eat some! But for Ada, the world is a toy or a meal. Hey what is that she’s eating??
Oh great. She picked her own collards for a snowy snack. Back in the summer, her favorite U-pick snack was yellow squash and young cantelopes. Only fitting I should get a veggie loving dog! But don’t let her fool you. She’s no vegetarian and so the chickens must be carefully kept in their pasture till she’s a more trustworthy farm dog…
- Yum, cold DOES make collards sweeter!
