moment of truth for the bees

Today, Wednesday, August 14, 2013 is the moment of truth for our colony. That is six weeks after we installed the colony. Honeybee workers live an average of six weeks during the busy summer, so all the worker bees in the colony will have been born and raised in our backyard hive.

The population has dropped to about half of what it was when first installed. This made me very nervous as I inspected the combs the other day, since I had only seen a few tiny eggs during the last inspection. I was relieved to see a spattering of curled up white larvae and capped brood cells:

Not as much brood as I'd like to see, but still reassuring. However, it looks like much of the brood is has domed caps, indicating that it is drone brood. Hopefully there is at least some worker brood, or else we might have an unmated queen, who can only produce unfertilized eggs that become drones. While drones propagate the genes of the colony, they do not "work" and don't contribute to the immediate survival of the hive. In fact, they consume hive resources. Naturally, they are kicked out of the hive in the autumn.

I was reassured to learn that worker bees live 4–9 months through the winter season, and that a colony's population fluctuates: from 60,000–80,000 in the summer to 20,000–30,000 in the winter.

The weeds that make up the majority of our backyard right now are waist high. I had worried that they had gone to seed before we could cut them back. But the other day I was amazed to see a veritable metropolis of bees, like an army of window washers, furiously scanning up and down the stalks of tiny flowers so small I didn't know they were flowers until I saw the bees' interest in them. They were really loving the one weed that dominates the backyard that I haven't been able to identify (see top photo). It made me really glad that we hadn't cut it all back yet. It seems like it would be difficult to time the cutting to be after flowering and before seeds are mature. We may do the cutting in stages, so that we don't destroy all of the potential nectar sources/habitats at once.

The bees are also loving the buckwheat that I dispersion seeded in an area loosely mulched with wood chips:

verdolagas con huevos

Another great use of purslane! This is a traditional Mexican dish and it turned out really well. I coarsely chopped the purslane in a food processor which saved chopping time.

Sauté onions and purslane, then add beaten eggs, cook until the eggs firm up, and season with salt. I also added garbanzos which helped change up the consistency.

Topped with some purslane tzatziki!

Recipe: http://www.examiner.com/article/huevos-con-verdolagas-eggs-with-purslane-recipe

purslane tzatziki

I harvested an enormous amount of purslane, which is our "volunteer living mulch." One of the things I made was purslane tzatziki. Like spinach and lambsquarter, purslane is high in oxalic acid. If you're worried about oxalates, it is sometimes recommended to consume calcium within 30 minutes of eating the oxalate-containing food, so pairing purslane with yogurt makes a lot of sense.

Recipe: http://www.kalofagas.ca/2011/07/04/purslane-tzatziki/

(though I pretty much made up the proportions)

lambsquarter saag paneer

I picked a pound of lambsquarter from the various plants scattered around our yard. I really like the taste of lambsquarter; it is quite like spinach. Since it can be tedious to pick the individual leaves, it is nice when the plants get big and have large leaves. I also found it possible to twists the top leaf clumps off all at once, which speeds up harvesting a bit. What it your preferred method of harvesting lambsquarter?
I roughly followed this 101 cookbooks recipe, but instead of cream, I used almond milk, yogurt, and some ground peanuts and almonds.

Oh, and I subbed delicious Nabulsi cheese for the paneer.

harvesting mallow (malva neglecta)

Like good permaculturalists, we are trying to start small and close to the house. We have roughly 1,000 ft² of annual beds (10 times bigger than our previous two years' community garden plot) and that feels very big with all the bindweed we're facing.

As I documented earlier, the remainder of the 11,000 ft² lot is some turfgrass, some xeriscaping, and the rest a mix of mallow, glechoma hederacea, dandelion, and some native grasses and wildflowers.

There is a lot of mallow. So, I harvested a bunch for mallow tea. What is the best method for harvesting?

I tried two methods: 1) picking individual leaves and then drying; and 2) cutting large bunches of mallow, drying, and then separating the leaves.

I think method #1 is slightly easier. Pick method #1 if you want to be outside. Pick method #2 if you want to be inside.

Either way, multitasking by listening to podcasts/audiobooks or conversing is good!

Either way, drying in a paper bag is the way to go in our climate.

Also, just learned that we have one globe mallow plant, which would be even better for tea.

this is terrifying

Root system of field bindweed (can be up to 20 feet deep), Convolvulus arvensis.
Redrawn from B. F. Kiltz. 1930. J. Amer. Soc. Agron. 22:216-234.

We've been in an almost constant struggle with bindweed since planting our annual beds. It leaves me wondering: Is there some permaculture-based reasoning to embrace bindweed? Not that I know of. I read that it is possible to eliminate bindweed from cultivated areas after 3–5 years of dedicated removal.

Predictably, there is almost no bindweed in our sheet mulched beds. But most of the annual beds we planted were in the existing soil since it is relatively good soil that was already tilled and cultivated in past years. Plus, it takes a lot of effort to accumulate materials for sheet mulching, so we started small.

Well, we will continue to remove every root segment of bindweed that we find. That is, at least in the annual beds–the mallow, dandelion, etc. is fortunately keeping it away from the more wild part of the yard.

purslane chips

Faced with a large amount of volunteer purslane in the garden, I decided to make purslane chips using our kale chips recipe.

For me, the biggest barrier to using more wildcrafted weeds in my diet is that often they are more difficult to harvest.  Lambsquarter, for example, requires the leaves to be removed individually (at least in my experience).

With this batch of purslane, which I often leave in place as a living mulch around my annual vegetables, I just harvested with a scissors (like lettuce) leaving the roots in place. This is nice because if the roots are pulled, dirt comes with.

I'll definitely be making this again since the purslane is so abundant.

plant inventory

I decided to inventory the weeds and other existing plants in our yard. I hope this will help me discover potential uses for what is already growing and further understand niches and stuff.

WILD / KNOWN:

Common Mallow (edible and medicinal) - This is growing all over the back yard. I harvested a bunch to dry for mucilaginous tea for sore throats. I'd also like to try it in salads/wraps and using it as a rennet for making cheese (nicknamed cheeseweed).

MORE PLANTS CLICK CLICK

chamomile

A bunch of German chamomile is growing in the pathway at our community garden--thanks Wendy for spotting it! There's a rule about keeping the paths clear of "weeds" so I did my part. It smells so good--chamomile is my favorite.

In hindsight, I should have only picked the flower heads instead of cutting off half the plant so that it would recover faster, but you can't beat walking home with a bouquet of beautiful and useful flowers.

what is a weed anyway?

Ralph Waldo Emerson says a weed is a "plant whose virtues have yet to be discovered." In weeding our garden, there's just a handful of unwanted plants that I keep recognizing. One is purslane, a succulent edible that you often see growing in sidewalk cracks. I've also seen it featured in salads in fancy restaurants. Here it is growing out the side of our raised bed:

...that's probably a $20 salad right there.

So I've been leaving it in the garden if it isn't crowding other plants too badly. I just learned from Wikipedia that:

As a companion plant, Purslane provides ground cover to create a humid microclimate for nearby plants, stabilizing ground moisture. Its deep roots bring up moisture and nutrients that those plants can use, and some, including corn, will "follow" purslane roots down through harder soil than they can penetrate on their own. It is known as a beneficial weed in places that don't already grow it as a crop in its own right.

Another common weed in our garden and around town is mallow (malva neglecta):
I'm not sure if it is a beneficial companion like purslane, but it is a demulcent, so I've been picking it to make into a mucilaginous tea, which was nice when I had a sore throat recently (it's also an ingredient in the Ricola cough drops I bought recently).