Checking in With the Hives

My husband the apiarist. And my six year old, his able assistant. Yesterday they checked in with the bees to see how everything is going up there. In a word, fine. The frames are very, very heavy with honey, so Henry really needs his extractor from Thorne's to arrive! Reports from local friends who also keep bees is that the honey is particularly hard this year, which might make getting it off of the frames very tricky. Last year, beginner's luck was on our side throughout the season: no fungi or bee diseases, good weather, not a single sting, and tons of delicious raw honey. So far things seem to be going just as well this year. Fingers are crossed, and honey is on it's way.

Honeycombs

Here's what a morning of homeschool sometimes looks like. Jake was alternating between his dreaded math homework and seeing how fast he could reassemble the anatomy toy his cousin Fred just gave him. (He wasn't interested in getting out his anatomy coloring book and reading up on what those various organs do-believe me, I tried.) Meanwhile, as part of my recent efforts to reduce the clutter in our house (a Sisyphean task if ever there was one), I decided to take on the huge box of honeycomb frames that have been sitting on our counter for quite some time.

I cut and packaged about 25 squares in greaseproof paper, and slapped on the labels I made a while back for Henry's jars of honey (more of which will be coming soon). Honeycombs are very handy to have around for last minute birthday or hostess gifts. I put the excess wax in a scrap bucket I keep for that purpose, and once I have enough to bother with, I'll boil and clean and separate it to use for lip balm and various other things. They're all so time consuming, these homestead-y projects we find ourselves doing from time to time. With each new similar endeavor I marvel more and more at the amount of time and effort my great grandparents' generation had to put into getting things done. For instance, to get yourself a new sweater back then you would have to: shear a sheep, wash the wool, card the wool, spin the wool knit the wool into a sweater vs. today: order a sweater online and wear it the next day. It's crazy-crazy, when I think about it. 

For a variety of reasons I may or may not someday explain, we've decided that Jake will start back at school again in the fall. I don't know how people who home educate their kids do anything else (like write blog posts, for instance), but some do. This is the last week of school for my other boys, so soon we'll all be home, harvesting honey, staying up late, and driving each other crazy. Believe it or not, I'm ready. 

Reaping What We've Sown

It's been just over a year since my family moved from Brooklyn to England, which, although that can't possibly be right, is true. Also hard to fathom right now is the fact that summer is effectively over, but the facts support that claim, too.  (For instance, the kids are back in school today, hence the reason I have time to write this post.)

What follows is a roundup of what we've harvested this summer from the insects, animals and earth around us. We can't really take credit for most of it. The bumper crop of honey we harvested (see jars above) is obviously all down to those hardworking bees. The raw fleece, which I hope to both spin into yarn as well as make some felt from, is simply the byproduct of some sheep shearing. Even the vegetables from our garden, though we watered and weeded it, are a credit to forces way larger than any of my people. But we're taking up all of these gifts with as much gratitude as possible (all of my boys yesterday, unprompted by me I swear, said "Thank you, bees!" before digging into their chunks of oozing honeycomb after lunch).

Today I'll post about two of the four contributors to our harvest; the bees and the flowers. My next post will cover the animals and the earth.

PART I: THE BEES

Henry has proven to be a natural at beekeeping, and his three hives have flourished in this first year. Charlie learned about bees at school last year and has been keen ever since, so he has his own suit and is Henry's very able bodied assistant.

Charlie especially loves smoking the bees. It chillaxes them before we take out the frames to extract the honey.

Those frames are heeeaaavy. Underneath all of those beautiful waxy combs is liquid gold.

Henry demonstrates how a pro slices off the top layer of comb before putting the frames into...

...the extractor bucket. A frame of honey gets stuck into either side of the metal cage. Turning a handle whizzes them around to get the honey out of the comb. Super high tech, very effective.

The extractor bucket has a spout at the bottom so you can pour your honey into jars. This batch is mostly made from oilseed rape blossom, which grow profusely on the farm and look like this:

In late spring the countryside is covered in beautiful swaths of these gold flowers. The seeds are harvested in the fall and pressed into cooking oil. This kind of honey eventually crystallizes and sets into hard white honey. Jake totally turns his nose up at grocery store honey now.

PART II: THE FLOWERS

I'm crap at identifying local flora and fauna, but in June I started picking up on the unmistakable scent of chamomile during my runs. I saw all these daisies out in the field, and on closer inspection found out that they were chamomile (which are a type of daisy). The boys helped me harvest a bunch of it, which I dried and put into jars. I don't love chamomile tea to be honest, but I might use it in bath salts or soap making.

Although I did gather some lavender from home, I have to confess that most of my supply this year was gathered in France, where our friends Dave and Rachel have a house lousy with lavender. We collected a LOT of it, and spent an afternoon around the table stripping the flowers from the stems. We carried it around in a pillowcase in the car as we cruised around France for several weeks. Now most of it is in jars in my studio. 

I managed to gather a few rose petals also, which are from my mother in law's garden down the road. Because I don't know much about flowers and plants I stuck to gathering the basics this year. One of my goals for the coming year is to learn a lot more about local and native plants and herbs. My great grandmother knew all about edible and medicinal plants around her native Kentucky, and I want to do the same here. I'll let you know how that goes.

A Day at the Fair

This post is a little dated, but I wanted to include it because it gives a good sense of the sort of thing we spent our time doing shortly after we got to England. A few weeks after we arrived, in August, the harvest was in full swing. (We live smack in the middle of England's agricultural green belt.) Combines, harrows and balers were whizzing by our cottage at all hours. Grain was being harvested and hay was being packed into those lovely rectangles and rolls that now dot the ploughed landscape.

At the same time, little posters were popping up all over the road sides advertising the local village fetes. We visited several of them-some tiny, like the one in our own village which lasted only a few hours, others enormous, lasting the entire day and attracting visting crowds of thousands. But like all good country fairs, they each celebrated the pride of local life, from parades of prize farm animals to cooking contests (preserves, pies, etc.) to demonstrations by local crafts and guilds. The latter, of course, captured my interest most.

Below are some photos from the Wychwood Fair, where we had a go a shooting with the  local archery club, caught a ferret race (run by a ferret rescue organization, eww), watched woodturning demonstrations, chatted with the Oxfordshire Beekeepers about queenspotting, and saw some local wool being spun and woven. This wasn't the biggest (or the smallest) of the fairs we went to, but it embodied the spirit of the village fete completely.