Wool Dryer Balls and Squash Vine Borers Round Two

Recently I discovered wool dryer balls, and while right now, I line dry as much as possible, we do use the dryer as well.  These dryer balls are supposed to lift and separate your clothes in the dryer to help them dry faster, and they act as dryer sheets as well.  It's recommended you use 4-5 balls in a normal load.   

I thought making dryer balls would be a great way to use up some of the junk wool I get off of Olivia and Blue Moon.  So, I took a sock and stuffed it with wool until I had a pretty good looking ball, and then I used a twist tie to close it up.  I threw it in with the laundry, and it felted.  I added more wool and washed it again.  Now it's about the size of a tennis ball.  I haven't tested it yet, but I'm anxious to see how it works.  I'll keep you posted.

Now I need to get some more junk wool together and make 3-4 more.  Do you have any experience with wool dryer balls?

Here's a pic:

The battle with the squash vine borers rages on.  I've seen her several times since my last post.  She is a diligent moth, and she has more time than I do to hang around the garden.  The only thing the neem oil seemed to do is burn the leaves, and the DE did nothing as well.  So, I have been faithfully checking each plant daily and manually removing the red sesame seed size eggs.  I find them on the leaves, in the nooks where the leaf grows from the stalk above and below, and at the base.  The eggs stick pretty well to the vine, and they have a hard crust, but I have been able to scrape them off with my fingernail.  Once I get them off the plant, I've been piercing them with my fingernail.  It sounds tedious, but it really only takes about 10-15 minutes a day.  This morning I didn't find any eggs, and I spotted my first zucchini developing.  Let's hope this year is better than last!

Happy homesteading,

Candace

Trespassing for Fruit and Market Finds

I've never eaten loquats before yesterday.  I don't know if I've ever heard of loquats before a few weeks ago.  My friend mentioned them to me during a phone conversation, and then she gave me some loquat jelly.  It's delicious, and I remember her discussing the location of a few trees with somone else on FB.  Yesterday, I decided to try to find some.

Long story short, I drove over the to quasi-public park and found a loquat tree almost on the street outside of the main gate.  As I was picking fruit, some homeowner came over and told me the park was closed and that I was trespassing.  He asked me what I was doing, and I said, "Picking loquats."  Then he asked me if I even knew what a loquat is.  Hello?  I said I'm picking loquats.  Obviously if I called them loquats, I know what they are. 

I left and went to our downtown market, and lookie lookie at what I found for sale.

 



















A loquat tree!  If you're curious about loquats, here's a link:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loquat

There is a girl at the market who sells "exotic" plants, at least plants that aren't commonly sold in these parts.  Her booth also had a variety of citrus trees, and last year, I wanted one, but they were out of my price range.  Yesterday, she had some sizes closer to what I could afford plus a few I couldn't.  So, I bought what I was told was a meyer lemon, but when I got it home, I looked at the tag and saw that it was a kaffir lime.  I didn't really want a kaffir lime tree, so I had to go back to the market.  I just wanted to trade, but of course, they didn't have a meyer lemon of that size, so the gentleman who helped me upgraded my purchase and I got one of the larger meyer lemon trees for the price of a small one.  Awesome!

Here's my new meyer lemon tree!

The lemon tree has to be potted because our winters are too harsh for citrus, and I'll probably pot the loquat tree for now until I decide where I can put it. 

If I can get everything fruiting and keep the birds and tree rats away, I will have quite the menagerie of fruits on the homestead.  Loquats, blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, peaches, strawberries, figs (two varieties), ground cherries, garden huckleberries, pomegranates, oranges, meyer lemons, and apples (I don't expect apples really because they don't get enough sunlight where I have them.)

Oh, and props to our outdoor kitty (OP2).  We saw her stalking a tree rat in the backyard yesterday.  I told her to park herself under the peach tree and do her job as a farm kitty.

Happy homesteading,


Candace

Things That Make Me Happy

First blueberries of the season

Not having to buy onions at the store

Gifts from a friend, loquat jelly and vidalia onion relish

Spotting the first tomato, a Green Zebra

Trying new things, garden huckleberries and ground cherries

The scent of a gardenia

Happy homesteading,


Candace

Around the Garden

And my favorite one because I caught one of my girls hard at work.

I'm trying to add more color to the garden, and I have several old window frames without glass and some leftover paint.  Nate wanted to get rid of the window frames, so I had to come up with a plan to keep them.  I decided to paint them different colors and hang them along the fence.  It's simple, but I like it.  This is my first one. 

Happy homesteading,


Candace

Oh Yeah, It's On Like Donkey Kong

This little -ucker is on my most wanted list right now!  The flea beetle has moved to #2.

This, my friends, is a squash vine borer.  It was the cause of my lack of zucchini or any squash for that matter last year.  This time last year, I saw evidence of my first zucchini and shortly after it started developing, I would come home from work, and the plant leaves would be wilted.  I thought the plants just needed more water, and my lack of knowledge did me in.  Not this year.  I have been on the lookout for it this year.  I have been faithfully checking my squash for signs each day.  A few of my plants are just starting to bloom.  Today, as I was checking each plant, something caught my eye.  I looked up, and then surprise, recognition, and shock flooded over me.  She was hovering over the squash plants in the bed next to me and looking me dead in the eye!  The nerve of this -itch!  I know she knows I know what she is and what she plans to do to my squash plants.  Before I could react, she flitted away.  Last year I was too late, and she had already laid her eggs and they had already bored into the vine.  This year I plan to be as proactive as possible.  I doused every plant with neem oil and then dusted them with diatomaceous earth.  I found every container in my house that had yellow in it and filled them with water and put them in the beds.  Of course, they are attracted to yellow, the color of squash blossoms, so these are supposed to work as traps.  I've read mixed reviews about wrapping tin foil around the vines, so I haven't done that yet.  I've already been battling flea beetles on my eggplants, so I'm trained and ready to fight.  It's on!

Happy homesteading,

Candace           

More Bunny Photos, Please!

You all seem to love the bunny photos, and why shouldn't you?  They are to die for! 

A friend is buying a bunny for her daughter's 4H project, and she and her husband brought their daughters over yesterday to pick out a bunny.  And for good reason, they couldn't decide.  Do they want the super cute doe who has the sweetest face known to man or the lilac buck or the blue buck I call Buddha Boy?  He is so fat and mellow!  So they left a deposit with me, and I'm waiting to find out which one they've chosen.  Plus, my friend wants to harvest the fiber, so one of my babies will be the perfect pet for them.

So, I have pedigree English Angora rabbits for sale.  They will be 7 weeks old on Monday, 5/9, and I will start to wean them at that point.  If you live within driving distance of eastern Georgia/western South Carolina and are interested in a bunny, let me know.

Without further delay, here is the main attraction!

This is the one I've been calling Buddha Boy.  He has the most mellow personality, and he is a chunky monkey!  His smokey wool is starting to grow around his mouth, so it looks like he has a moustache.  He looks like his daddy! 

This is my lilac buck, and one of the girls commented yesterday that he looked lavender in the sunlight.  That's exactly what he should look like.  He was frisking about today acting a fool and throwing the toy rattle I keep in the cage.   

Finally, this is my lilac tort doe.  She is fawn and lilac colored, and like I said above, she has the sweetest face! 

I can't believe how much they've grown in the past few weeks.

Happy homesteading,

Candace 

The Five Queens of Colony Two

Oh, the trials and tribulations of beekeeping.  I tell you, if it can happen in beekeeping, it has or is happening to us.  The fact that we continue to persevere means we're really stupid and don't know when to quit or we just aren't quitters (yet). 

This is the story of a chemically-murdered queen, a queen-cell queen, an unprotected installed queen, a pseudo usurper queen, and a protected installed queen.  This saga is almost as bad as Henry VIII's parade of queens and almost like them:  divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, widowed.  I love Anne Boleyn by the way. 

We had a swarm delivered to us three weeks ago.  The person who delivered it discovered once it was delivered and opened that it didn't have a queen because he killed her with miticide (ugh!).  That's one queen down.  A queen cell was naturally formed to replace the queen the colony lost, but the person who brought the swarm to us tried to rectify the situation by bringing us a new queen.  He installed her directly into the hive unprotected, and they immediately balled her and more than likely killed her.  When he installed the queen, I asked him if we needed to destroy the queen cell or leave it.  He said leave it and check it in a few days.  In the meantime, a worker bee decided she wanted to be queen, and she started laying eggs, which if you know anything about beekeeping, you know she can only lay drone (male) eggs.  A pseudo queen bee does not a queen make.  This also told us that the installed queen did not survive.  Now, back to the queen cell, she hatched, and up until yesterday, we were hoping she was still in there even though we had a usurper pseudo worker bee queen on our hands.  If the hatched queen was indeed still in the hive, we were waiting to give her time to make her mating flights and assume her throne.  We checked the colony yesterday and could not find her or any evidence she was present. 

So that brings us to our last queen, the protected installed queen.  Believe me, she will be our last queen for this colony.  We bought her today locally, and she came in a Benton queen cage.  We were told this is a risky attempt at re-queening because once a worker bee starts laying, it's hard to convince the rest of the colony a new queen is needed.  They see eggs being laid and they go about their respective jobs.  Everything to them is dandy in the bee world.  So to help ease her transition to the colony, we took two frames containing capped and uncapped brood from our other hive, inserted them in the queenless hive and suspended the new queen in her box between the two frames.  Apparently capped brood emits pheromones, like the queen, so between the brood and queen pheromones and by the time the bees eat through the candy plug of the queen cage, the queen should have had time to establish control of the colony.  If the new queen is accepted, the usurper will be relieved of her duties. 

Long live the queen!

Candace