Things started off cool, and slow this year… potatoes and onions went in early, but it was end of May before we did most of our plantings for summer. We tried several different varieties of seeds last year, so this year we could focus on the varieties that grew the best in our soil. It made seed shopping easier.. but, we did have a few surprises with germination, which can probably be attributed to the damp cool conditions we had. Some green beans, beets and carrots had to be re-sown, but once they took root (and summer decided to warm up) they all produced really well.

I flip flopped the arrangement of the garden this year, to rotate crops to different spots – and to make room for more tomato plants.  Even without a green house, the garden is up on the hill, and gets sun all day long, so after seeing how well they did last year, we decided to up our #s so we can pack away alot of sauce, salsa and tomato jam for winter.

One challenge we have with the garden is watering, since its so far up on the hill.  We have 250+ feet of hose just to get up there, so winding int through the garden was a bit difficult last year.  In the photo below you can see posts we put up every few feet, with a slot to rest a hose in.  This allowed us to bring the hose up and over the fence, and rest it on this posts, to water the right side of the garden, without crushing the plants on the left.  Might tweak the spacing, or add some more next year…. but all in all.. wayyyy easier than last year.

Our garden is over 100 ft long, so one of the keys to managing it (and keeping up on eating and preserving) has been succession planting. There’s only so many beds you can prep, and so many seeds you can plant in a weekend.  Last year, we did two plantings of a number of things, and even broke it down to three for things like green beans this year since there were still times where it was just too much product all at once.

Part way through the summer, I mulched the walk ways in the south half of the garden with straw in an attempt to keep the weeds down. This kept the weeds at bay for a little bit but not as long as I’d hoped. In retrospect, a layer of newspaper or cardboard underneath would have worked better.

Next year, I think we’ll attempt a more broccoli… and possibly both a spring and a fall crop. This is only the second year I’ve attempted it, and am impressed with how easy it is. The plants are big, and take up some space… but, because of their size, it was way less effort to deal with weeds around them, in comparison tiny little carrots plants. It also blanches and freezers well – which is also key to our plans to try to pack away as much garden food to last the winter as possible.

STRUGGLING WINTER QUEEN

In my spring update, I wrote about my one surviving hive from winter limping along slowly.  I tried to give the queen a long chance to gear back up, but she didn’t have it in her.  I eventually had to remove her and replace her with a new purchased queen in order to restore the hive back to having a chance to thrive.  The new queen quickly got up to speed laying eggs, and I also introduced a frame of brood from another hive, so when it hatched it would give the hive more nurse bees (a queen will only lay enough eggs as she feels her hive can tend to, so this extra step helped encourage her to lay even more).

Mid summer, the hive was thriving and big enough to move out of nuc boxes and into a production hive set up…. and little did I know.. just in time to help save another of my hives … hive P2.

LAYING WORKERS

Hive P2 was the second package I bought this spring, and was doing fine, until in a completely rookie move on my part I lifted a box off the hive not realizing a frame from the lower box was stuck to it until it crashed to the ground.  It certainly pissed them off a bit, and a week later, checking back in, I saw emergency queen cells everywhere – confirming, that off all the frames in the hive to drop, I had managed to drop the one with their queen.

To make a long story short, I don’t know if the hive successfully raised a new one and she had some bad fat on a mating flight and never made it back to the hive or what… but after a few weeks of wondering what was going on in the hive, and why I kept seeing new cells, I saw an emergency cell with two eggs in it – a major indicator that worker bees have started to lay.

Laying workers happens when there’s no open brood in a hive for an extended period of time.  This changes the pheromones in the hive, and workers ovaries may kick into action. Since they’ve never mated, these eggs only result in drone bees (another indicator of the problem).  It’s tricky to fix.  They won’t accept a new queen since they don’t think they’re queen-less, and there can be many laying workers, so you can’t identify and remove them.

The solution?  Merge it with the hive that survived the winter.

To do this, I placed the brood boxes of P2 on top of the other hive boxes, separated by newspapers with some slits cut into it.  The bees will chew through the paper over a couple days, but in the meantime, the pheromones from the open brood in the hive will waft up through the newspaper slits, causing the laying workers to stop, and the hive to accept the queen in the base hive.

FAILING PACKAGE QUEENS

Chatting with other bee keepers in the area who had bought packages at the same time in the spring, there seemed to be a several having issues with the queens suddenly slowing down or laying in spotty patterns. Theory is, the bad weather in the south around the time that the packages were being prepared may have shortened the queens mating flights.  Soon after, one of my packages started to show the same signs. I tried to replace the queen in this one, but they killed her and started to raise their own.

One of my packages was showing this same activity, so I removed their queen, and attempted to install a new queen. They did NOT appreciate this, killed her, and raised a new one on their own.  This is totally fine and natural, but as you wait for her to hatch and mate, it causes a gap of a couple weeks where the colony could have been increasing in size.

LATE SUMMER SWARM

Two of my other hives were doing really well, and were very strong in late July, and for a couple inspections I was a bit of a slacker and only checked on the honey supers and the top brood box.  This came back to bite me in late August, when I did a full hive inspection and in one found all sorts of swarm cells, and no sign of any queen.  The hive had swarmed.  Not much to do at that point but admit my mistake in monitoring, and move on.

The other hive was performing equally as strong, but fortunately for me, when I inspected them they were just starting to make swarm cells, and the current queen was still present.   We were able to take her out, with some frames of bees and brood and move her into a nuc, to start a new colony, and preventing the original hive from swarming.

By early September, both queens were mated, and successfully laying up a storm in their hives.

ONE QUEEN PLAYED NICE

The last of m hives, a package I had bought late in May, was the only hive that didn’t have any issues this year with queens.  I didn’t have any hopes of getting honey out of this hive, since it was started to so late… and may have not given it as much of a watchful eye.  But they surprised me, building up slowly but strongly all summer – and the queen never missed a beat.

The first things in this year were the onions, and the potatoes.  For onions, in addition to the traditional white storage onions, I’m trying a new variety called Alisa Craig. It’s a large onion that I’m hoping to use for my fall salsa.  Also, for the first time, I’m trying some shallots.

For potatoes, we’re also mixing it up a little.  In the winter, I had some blue potatoes at a friends house – and was hooked.  I was able to order some Adirondack Red and Adirondack Blues from Fedco Seeds this year – and can’t wait to enjoy some solid red and solid blue potatoes come fall.   A just planted a small bit of each of these – and the majority of our crop this year will be traditional white & yellow flesh potatoes.

We’re still trying to figure out what an average harvest season is, but between last year with the dry weather, and this year cold and rainy, it’s hard to get a baseline.  The one thing that has been consistent, is there’s always one week where it booms, and it’s nearly impossible to keep up with.  We have to pick at least once a day – rain or shine, until the boom is over.  At its craziest, we harvest close to 20 lbs in 48 hours.   And then… the growth almost stopped completely.  We had an unseasonable 90 degree, which I think negatively impacted the plants somehow, slowing new shoots from coming up for a bit.

We’re done harvesting now for this season – we sold a ton to many very happy customes, and have eaten far more than normal consumption the past couple weeks … and this year, I even tried pickling some.  We usually get some stalks where the ends have either started to fern before we had a chance to pick them, or where the asparagus beetles have damaged the tips.  Last year I tried blanching and freezing – but this year, thought I’d whip out the canner for an early season appearance.

Once we’ve had a bit of distance from asparagus season, we’ll have to give it a taste test.  In the meantime, my taste buds are dreaming of summer tomatoes.

The queens are laying, and the packages are building up nicely.  On the other hand, the nuc that survived the winter has been very weak.  Knowing it was definitely not going to be able to move up to a full size hive any time soon, we took another package in May.

In the weak nuc, the queen has not been laying a lot of eggs.  The number of bees is so small, and with the chilly streaks and nights we’ve still been having, the queen can only lay as many eggs as the cluster can keep warm.   Unfortunately, after a hive check this weekend, I found an no capped brood left, no eggs, and only a handful of larvae – and right in the middle, an emergency queen cell with larvae inside.  Looks like the queen is no longer with us, or they decided she isn’t do her job, so they’ve started to make a new one.   We’ll have to monitor this hive closely, and hopefully things will turn around.