A Note to Aspiring or New Beekeepers

Welcome back to the blog!

New Hampshire does an annual hive loss survey of all the registered apiaries in the state at the end of the winter. They question such things as: how long have you been keeping bees, how many hives do you have, how did you test for mites (if at all), and when, how did you treat (if at all) and when, how many hives did you lose, etc. Then they compile the data, I found the results very interesting.

We kept bees in 2018 and 2019, and took 2020 and 2021 off, and this year have added honeybees back to our farm. This is my recollection of the hive loss survey results that I read in 2019, so please forgive me if it isn’t 100% accurate. My understanding of the results was that it showed very clearly the steep learning curve I had undertaken. It showed that, controlling for all other factors, 1st year beekeepers average 80% losses, whereas 5th year beeks had closer to 20% losses. In my mind, that meant that research aside, preparedness aside, that there is a difference between studying the thing and doing it. I found comfort in knowing that I wasn’t a complete failure for losing 3 hives in 2 years. I was just learning (if that seems obvious to you, then you haven’t spent any time in beekeeping groups on social media! There are always people who are quick to shame newbees for “killing” their hives through inexperience.)

BUT HERE’S THE FUN PART! This year we added bees back. This is year 3 of keeping bees, but I’m also a bit rusty as I took 2 years off. The interesting thing is how much more I can see this year! In the past I was always guessing whether I had actually seen eggs. I had a hard time telling the queen from a drone. This year I can SEE the eggs, consistently, reliably. I am no longer guessing whether we have eggs or not.

Because of this, during last week’s hive inspection, I did a walk away split. I found swarm cells (queen cells located along the bottom edge of the frames) and they had eggs in them. I found the queen, put her in a queen cage, grabbed a frame of brood (with no queen cells on it) a frame of pollen & nectar, and 3 frames of empty comb and stuck her in a nuc box (a small 5 frame box). This week I will transfer the contents of the nuc box into a new 10 frame hive. I’ll also be looking at the hive I took the queen from to make sure that the queen cells are looking right and healthy.

In year 2 I lost a hive to swarming. The queen they hatched out never returned from her mating flight, and because I couldn’t see the eggs I waited far too long to purchase a new queen. If this hive fails to requeen, I will purchase a new queen from the same lady I bought these 2 nucs from.

Links below for the NH Hive Loss Survey Results and Janice Mercieri of White Mountain Apiaries - if you’re in Northern NH or VT and getting into bees, you should be getting them from Janice. Her White Mountain Hardy strain are bred selectively for hygienic qualities and honey production, and so far I am very very impressed!

https://www.nh-honeybee-health.com/winter-loss-survey-results

https://www.whitemountainapiary.com/

Starting an Orchard

We are attempting again to start growing some perennial fruit! We tried peach trees last year - Contender Peaches, allegedly hardy to zone 4. We ordered them from a reputable online nursery. Unfortunately, probably due in part to the Covid-19 panic and the push for everyone to grow more of their own food, the nursery was overwhelmed with exponential growth, and plants were delayed/damaged in shipping. We also got the trees off to a bad start due to not knowing exactly when they would arrive and procrastinating the prep work. Two months after planting, there were no signs of growth on any of the trees.

Needless to say, none of the peaches survived. The nursery was gracious about giving us store credit. They apparently had a lot of problems that year, again, due to a tenfold increase in order volume. I was disappointed about the trees, but I have nothing negative to say about the nursery. The raspberries that we got at the same time are doing very well.

So we used our store credit, and on the advice from our neighbors, ordered only fruit plants hardy to zone 3. This year we planted 4 American Plum trees, 2 Black Cherry trees, 4 American Elderberry bushes, 2 Red Elderberry bushes, and 3 Highbush Cranberry bushes. The cherry trees will begin producing fruit at age 10, but everything else should start bearing fruit in 2-3 years.

Additionally, this year when I pruned the blueberries, I attempted to start some additional plants from the cuttings I took. I have probably 100 sticks in dirt right now. I am certain many of them died (we had some unseasonably warm weather, and then boom, snow. Go figure.) But looking at them, I see at least 10 that appear to have new growth on them, so we’re going to give them another few weeks before we check for roots and separate into new buckets. If enough of them rooted, there will be a few available for sale locally! I hope to plant at least 4 new plants here, as I would love to have enough to make blueberry jam, but I am in competition with the ducks, the wild birds, and my husband who will just stand out there and eat them right off the bush like some kind of bear!

Starting Seeds

Hello! Welcome back to the Homestead!

Last week I started some seeds. I’m trying to limit the seeds that I start indoors this year. Every year I get overly ambitious, start an absurd number of different types of plants, and then it’s a stressful race against the clock to get everything in the ground before it becomes leggy, rootbound, or straight up dies from being over or under watered. Then 2 years ago I learned the importance of properly hardening things off when a bunch of my seedlings died of sun scald. Hardening off is kind of a pain when a person has a full time job off the homestead. My commute is 45 minutes each way; I can’t just run home on my lunch break to pull the plants in if the sun is more intense than I expected.

All this to say - this year I decided to do as much direct seeding as I possibly can. The only things I am starting indoors are my tomatoes, bell peppers, and possibly corn. I know corn is an uncommon one for starting indoors, but my growing season is so short that I can’t plant the corn outside until the second week of June, and I just haven’t had good luck with that. So this year I will try starting it inside the second or third week of May, harden it off to the best of my ability the first week of June, and transplant it the second week.

Wish me luck! And good luck to any of you that are planting this season; may you have sunny days and get enough rain. Let me know what you’re growing in the comments below!

Think Spring

Hello! Welcome back to the blog.

It’s March. Historically, this is the month where my winter blues start to lessen. This year has been odd; with the new baby “Bug” I have not had any of my normal sadness. Nevertheless, this is the month where spring feels as though it’s just around the corner, and I am looking forward to starting seeds for the garden, prepping a spot for the bee yard, and possibly even getting the first round of eggs into the incubator!

I am going to try to be conservative this year with the seed starting. I’m hoping in the next week to start 9 bell pepper plants and 9 tomato plants. Two weeks after that I will start one or two 72 cell flats of shallots. Then, the second week of May, I will start 2 flats of corn seedlings. Everything else is going to be direct seeded this year.

I am super excited to try corn again! I’m trying 2 different varieties, hoping to get some satisfying sweet corn to eat and to can. The best part is, they have different germination windows, so I can get them in the ground at the same time but they won’t cross pollinate. That means we can save some of each variety for next year!

That’s all for this week, folks. If anyone has suggestions for super sweet open-pollinated corn that grows well in the White Mountains of New Hampshire (or any other thoughts) feel free to share them below!

New Additions

Welcome back to the blog!

Mr L and I spent our New Years discussing the future of the farm - our ideas, our hopes, our strategies… It was a truly wonderful way to spend the holiday.

We decided to focus our efforts this year on building the elements we already have going. Specifically, we decided to expand our rabbitry. Mr L had the idea that we should be able to offer breeding trios for people who want them, that are completely unrelated. That is a hard thing to do with 2 bucks, but I couldn’t justify a rabbitry with 3 bucks and 3 does. We decided to expand to 3 bucks and 6 does. I would like to introduce our new additions; Rygel, Lola, and Sandra!

We are also expecting babies in about 3 weeks from Boulder out of Victoria, our first pairing of 2022!

I am in the market for a way to track breedings, due dates, etc and hopefully also be able to create pedigrees. If you have any suggestions, drop them below!

Thanksgiving comparisons

Welcome back!

This year we had an opportunity to purchase a heritage breed turkey for Thanksgiving. We got a 20 pound Narragansett tom, and we cooked him side-by-side with a conventional turkey that my mom received from work. Narragansetts were the breed of turkey I had settled on when we were considering adding turkeys to our farm (they're still in the list, just not for next year!)

We brined both birds overnight; same brine (we use this one https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/234005/thanksgiving-turkey-brine/), same cooking method, made gravy the same way in order to taste the differences between the 2 birds. This experiment 100% confirmed for me that we need to raise our own turkeys! The meat has better texture and richer flavor.

This year I made my own jellied cranberry sauce again as well, using the recipe from Leda Meredith (http://ledameredith.com/jellied-cranberry-sauce-recipe-with-spicebush-and-orange/). It was such a hit last year that this year my mom did not insist on having an open can of the store bought stuff. I love the bright and complex flavor of the above recipe. It calls for cinnamon stick and spicebush berries, with a substitution of black pepper and allspice. I am determined to find spicebush to add to the homestead eventually, but for this year I'm settling for a couple of highbush cranberry plants!

Step 1

Notice the small bag of spices! Cinnamon sticks, black peppercorn, and while allspice.

Step 2

Cook until all the berries have popped, then boil for 5 more minutes. Be careful; that goop is HOT and it boils aggresively!

After cooking but before canning

I dont have a food mill yet, so I just ran it through the blender. Look at that color!

If anyone has any leads for spicebush plants near the middle of New Hampshire, let me know in the comments!

New Projects

Welcome back!

We are starting to think on ways we can make the farm pay for itself. We have a new baby (mentioned in the previous post as “baby A”, who will from here out go by Bug), and my goal has always been to stay at home and raise my own children vs putting them in daycare. No judgement on people who make other decisions; every family has to decide what's right for them. Mr L and I talked about it way back when we were dating (fairly early in to dating, actually) and we're on the same page that it would be preferable for us to have 1 parent stay home with the kid(s).

Bug is sound asleep as I'm salting these pelts to cure. He takes his best naps in the wrap carrier. He is 3 months old.

With that in mind, expect to see the “store” component of this website opening soon! We have a very limited quantity of dog treats (100% dehydrated rabbit liver) and a few Rex rabbit pelts (fleshed and cured but not tanned) that will be available for sale in the next week or so. The rabbits are raised for meat, but they are loved and spoiled every day they have on Earth, and we make our dispatch as clean and painless as possible.

One of 7 pelts we will have listed in the store, coming soon!

In the future we hope to have more pelts, Angora yarn, and various dehydrated organ dog treats for shipping (Next time we process chickens and ducks I'll try to save those organs as well). If I can figure out how to delineate that some items are local pickup only, we will also offer breads, duck and chicken eggs, fresh herbs, chicks and ducklings, plant starts, and mushrooms for anyone local to Littleton NH. If anyone is looking for anything else that we should offer, drop it in the comments section or email info@honeybunnyhomestead.com!

A Whiting's true green (or blue), thanking you for following along with our story!

Big changes

11/6/2021

This year brought some big changes to our farm plans. We brought Baby A into the mix! He was born in August. Unfortunately, that meant that there was very little in the way of a garden this year, as the pregnancy combined with working full time off the farm left me with almost no energy. I couldn't even keep up with laundry (honestly me favorite household chore, I know I'm a weirdo) nevermind haul myself out to the garden to plant or weed.

The garlic harvest was great, though! And I planted Johnny Jump-Ups, Sage, and Shallots that all did fairly well in spite of the neglect. We have next year's garlic in the ground, some exciting fruit plants ordered for spring (stay tuned for the big reveal!) and I'm pouring over seed catalogs now.

By the time we start getting veggies from next year's garden, Baby A will be able to eat some solid foods, so I'm planning with that in mind.

All in all, it has been an exciting year, albeit mostly unproductive farm-wise. Time to get back on track!

2021 Garlic Harvest hanging to dry. This year had neglect and lots of weeds, but also abundant rain.