By Margaret Sloan, Sunset production coordinator

These nasty little beasts are varroa mites.  They attach themselves to the bees, suck their blood, transmit disease, and damage the baby bees in their cells (in a particularly gruesome way.)

We’ve dosed both hives with Apiguard, a gel that contains thymol. It smells ghastly. The bees hate it (I don’t blame them. I could smell it from four feet away. Pew) and the house bees carry it out of the hive. They track it all over the place, spreading the stink through the colony and killing the mites that are on the bees.

A week after applying the Apiguard, we did a mite count. The stickyboards at the bottom of the hive told the story. Veronica had 84 mites. Poor Betty had over 250 mites.

No wonder poor Betty is so weak. We dosed them with more Apiguard, waited a week, and then checked again. Over 200 mites in Betty. Poor thing. But she’s filled out her first brood box, so we gave her a second box so she could expand if she can.

We’re in the middle of a nectar flow, and Veronica is filling her boxes with honey, but sadly, we can’t eat it, because the Apiguard makes it taste nasty to humans. Evidently the bees don’t care about the taste. Or maybe they just get used to it.

by Johanna Silver, Sunset Test Garden Coordinator

Intercropping is my next favorite thing to building chicken tractors. It saves space (a recurring theme in the test garden), cuts down on weeds, prevents erosion by having more ground cover, and can even provide the necessary growth requirements for a plant such as shade or trellising.

So, an experiment:

I planted edamame in between the sweet corn approximately two weeks after the corn germinated. This was to give the corn a head start since beans are typically very fast growers. Now, edamame are bush beans, meaning they won't trellis the corn as pole beans would, but I am hoping they still get along just fine. The idea is that the long, slender shape of the corn won't over-shade the beans, and the beans, bushing low to the ground, won't impede the corn's growth. I'm also hoping that their root systems are compatible and won't over-compete for nutrients and water. Here is a neat shot that compares their roots as small plants. Think it will work?

I've heard a few people stroll through the test garden and remark that this is also a good idea because beans are nitrogen fixers. Now it is true that Edamame, legumes that they are, will also fix nitrogen and put it back into the soil. BUT it must be noted that nitrogen fixing only happens PRIOR TO the beans produce their seed pods. Before this happens nitrogen is stored in nodules on the roots, so farmers will cut off the green part to kill the plants and till the roots (and crop if they want additional green manure) back into the ground. Here is a photo of those nodules. But the deal is done once the beans are produced and they will no longer act as nitrogen fixers. We are growing our beans for eating so our intercropping has nothing to do with putting nitrogen back into the ground. It is simply an experiment to see how these crops grow together (and because it makes the garden coordinator happy).

By Margaret Sloan, Sunset production coordinator

Keeping bees is not all doom and gloom. Here’s a photo Kimberley Burch (Team Bee's queen bee and imaging specialist) took of a bee sipping up some nectar we accidentally spilled while checking the hive. You can see her tongue in the nectar.

I love watching these girls go about their day-to-day. Makes it all worthwhile.

Ophelia breakfasts on yogurt from a spoon, fed by Elizabeth Jardina, researcher.

Hives Veronica (left) and Betty (right) get a morning visit from Margaret Sloan, production coordinator and Kimberley Burch, imaging specialist.

by Johanna Silver, Sunset test garden coordinator

Most of the crops are coming along just fine - the tomatoes are bursting out of their cages and the melons are sprawling and tangling in delight. The onions, however, have seen better days. My predecessor, Ryan, planted Spanish Whites last fall. By the time I started in mid-April they looked, well, sad. They weren't getting bigger and many were bolting - trying to produce a flower. We wondered if something went awry with watering or temperature. We wondered if we mistakenly planted a different variety that doesn't overwinter. We scratched our heads and wondered up all types of possible causes.

Many finally bulbed up and are looking fantastic, meaning that we probably did plant the right variety. Still, about half of them didn't make it. I cut off the flower stalk in hopes of sending the energy back down to the bulb, but they were intent on bolting and continued sending up a thick stem:

What did I learn? Try as best you can to keep your irrigation regular and hope that your onions don't endure rapid fluctuations of warm and cold temperatures in the spring. Wise gardeners tell me that it's nearly impossible to stop the bolting once it's started. I should have pulled them out of the ground earlier and just used the smaller bulbs in the kitchen, but I kept my fingers crossed and left them in the ground. Silly me, the bulbs not only failed to form, they rotted.

by Johanna Silver, Sunset Test Garden Coordinator

Have you ever smelled a potato flower? I'm serious. Who would have guessed that those hardy tubers produce a flower with such a delicate and pleasant scent? I had my nose buried in the Yukon Golds the other day, happily sniffing the potato blossoms when - what's this? Potato fruit?

There were clusters of green, grape-sized fruit hanging off some of the plants. This is not something I've ever experienced with potato cultivation. I panicked. Does this mean that, similar to when onion or garlic produces a flower, more energy will go to the flower than the part under the ground that I want to bulk up? Should I pick them off? Is it too late? Is my crop ruined?

Greg Lutovsky of Irish Eyes Garden Seeds saved the day and answered my frantic phone call. Simply put, sometimes potatoes flower and fruit, and sometimes they don't. It is a totally unpredictable occurrence in the field, and it matters not. The amount and size of tubers in unaffected. Moreover, being part of the nightshade family, those seed pods are actually poisonous.

Just as I was starting to lose all interest in them whatsoever, Greg revealed their magic. If you've ever planted potatoes you know that we grow from tuber rather than seed. This is because each of those 240 seeds inside that pod can grow into entirely different varieties due to hundreds of years of cross breeding and pollination. Tubers are the only predictable way to grow the same variety from a parent plant. Those seed pods, however, are grown out by universities and research institutions to develop brand new varieties with new flavors, colors, and characteristics. It takes several years of cultivation until that new variety is bred thoroughly and can be grown predictably from tuber.

Incredible.

By Kimberley Burch, Sunset imaging specialist and Margaret Sloan, Sunset production coordinator

The day after we applied the powdered sugar dusting, the ants came back twice over!! They were all over the place! Crazy. On the bright side, we’re hoping they’ll gobble up any mites that fall to the ground. That will certainly keep the mites from crawling back into the hive.

Bill Stephens, our imaging supervisor, made us hive stands (payment was oatmeal-raisin cookies by Margo). We painted the stands white, smeared the base of the legs with Tanglefoot and set them in plastic containers. The lids rest precariously on push pins above the containers. There's only a bit of space so that the bees can't get in. 

This did not work. A little bit of dust, and the the ants marched right over the Tanglefoot and into the hive. This morning we discovered a whole platoon of ants.

Much ant-smashing occurred.

Then we filled the containers with water; the ants can't cross a moat of water, can they?

Some bees have fallen into the containers, but only a few. Can bees learn to stay out of dangerous areas?

by Johanna Silver, Sunset test garden coordinator

Training cucumbers to climb a trellis is a great way to save space in the garden as well as ensure more uniformly shaped fruits. I'm growing the Diva cucumbers (a long, delicious slicing variety) against rusty steel grates that I picked up at Alan Steel & Supply Co. in Redwood City. I had them cut to size (increasing the cost by a bit) but the actual rusty metal cost next to nothing and we walked out of there spending less that $15. I encouraged the climbing with reusable garden Velcro ties, and now the tiny tendrils are doing the work on their own.

by Elizabeth Jardina, Sunset researcher

Ophelia came out of surgery this afternoon. When I picked her up at Adobe Animal Hospital, she was a little groggy, but seemed okay.

The vet helpfully gave us the icky — whatever it was — that had been clogging her crop. In a plastic bag. Looked like straw, maybe. There was no way that any amount of chicken massage could have broken up that gross tangle.

You can't even see her incision because it's covered by feathers.

She's not really supposed to eat or drink tonight, and I was worried about her being with the rest of the other chickens, so I closed her in the chicken house — she jumped up to the roost, presumably to sleep. The other chickens will have to stay in their (completely closed) yard tonight instead of their snug house. It will be confusing to them, but they'll live.

I originally planned to put her in with Nugget, but Nugget immediately began pecking Ophelia when I tried it out, so I whisked her out.

I have a very bad feeling about Nugget. I'm afraid Nugget is a rooster.

What are the ethics of getting a "rescue" chicken and then eating it? Re-homing a rooster can be nearly impossible, and I'm not sure what we can do with him.

But first things first. This weekend's task is helping Ophelia get better.

by Elizabeth Jardina, Sunset researcher

Ophelia is in surgery.

Her crop was worse this morning, and after consulting the vet, two Sunset staffers took her in. The vet who saw her said that the mass in her crop seems to be starting to ferment, so surgery is her best option.

She'll be under anesthesia, which is very risky for a chicken. She very well might die.

I'll post more when we hear back from the vet.

By Kimberley Burch, Sunset imaging specialist and Margaret Sloan, Sunset production coordinator

Despite W.B. Yeats fantasy of living in the “bee-loud glade,” living off the land isn’t all romance.

Recently we found two poor worker bees wandering around on the ground, unable to fly because of their misshapen wings This is a sign of the deformed wing virus, caused by the varroa mite.

Varroa mites are nasty tick-like parasites: they suck bee blood, spread disease, and weaken the bees. These mites are a scourge of Apis mellifera, our European honeybees. Unchecked, an infestation can quickly kill the hive, and in fact, have wiped out many domestic and feral hives.

We immediatly dusted both hives with powdered sugar, a suggested technique from Randy and the beekeeping world. The powdered sugar makes the mites lose their grip and fall off the bees. It also elicits grooming in the bees (they’re covered in powdered sugar!), and they knock off more mites. We have screened bottom boards, so that the mites hopefully fall through to the ground and don’t crawl back into the hives.

One hour after dusting, the mite count was 94 in Betty, our weaker hive, and 41 from Veronica. These are pretty high numbers. Randy recommended we use a Thymol treatment as soon as possible. We’ve ordered Apiguard. We'll see how it goes.

We’ve also got a drone-brood frame in Veronica’s second brood box. Mites prefer to lay their eggs in drone brood (drones are the boy bees). Every 4 weeks we take out the drone brood comb to kill the drones and the mites living off the baby drones.

Raising livestock, chickens or bees, is full of tribulation. No wonder we all flock to the grocery store.

by Elizabeth Jardina, Sunset researcher

First things first: Ophelia is doing okay.

This all started on Monday. Today is Thursday. Her crop still feels enlarged, but it's not nearly so hard as it was before her treatment at the vet. Now it feels more like one of those gel-filled stress balls. Full, but squishy.

You can see her still-enlarged crop in this photo. Ophelia's on the right, while her normal-cropped fellow Ameraucana Alana is on the left.

She's eating and drinking, and yesterday, she laid an egg. Laying an egg is a very good sign, because it means that she's digesting food and drinking water.

When Margo took her to the vet, the vet recommended massaging her crop.

Yes, massage.

For a chicken.

So every couple of hours, I've been going out to the coop to massage Ophelia's swollen crop. At first she resisted. Now, she seems resigned to it, making little adorable clucking noises sometimes.

It definitely feels like there's still food — or maybe just stuff — hanging out in her crop, but it doesn't seem like it's getting infected or anything.

How would I know this, you ask?

Why, I've been smelling her breath, of course.

(My job is seeming weirder and weirder.)

If your chicken with a swollen crop has bad breath, sour or foul-smelling, it means that either bacteria or fungi have seized the opportunity to multiply in a vulnerable crop.

So as I've been massaging Ophelia, I've been taking furtive sniffs toward her beak. She smells like nothing, unless she's been walking around in chicken droppings, in which case she smells like manure. (These are the less bucolic massage sessions.)

Today, I gave her some bread soaked in lots of olive oil in an attempt to get the stuff in her crop moving again.

She's not getting worse, she's just not getting better.

Patience and massage are the next steps. Also, saying hello to Honey when she hops up, demanding her massage. (Her crop feels fine.)

by Margo True, Sunset food editor

Alas, poor Ophelia! Why didst Team Chicken burden thee with the name of a tragic Shakespearean heroine? For thy fate seems gloomy indeed.

Okay, it was all my fault—I LOVE Shakespeare and insisted on the name. So 'twas I who took Ophelia, suddenly afflicted with a potentially deadly impacted crop, off to the Adobe Animal Hospital in Los Altos.

Here she is, in her transport carton:

She settled right down and didn't utter a single sound on the drive to the vet's. It was actually worrisome,  but sure made the drive easy—I had visions of her bursting out of the box and flapping around the car, banging her poor swollen crop against the windows. Nada. She was an angel.

At Adobe, the receptionist immediately got on the intercom and barked, "Check check on a chicken. Check check. Chicken check check on a chicken." I felt as though I'd just ordered a sandwich in a drive-through. Then she very sweetly asked, "And what is Ophelia's last name?"  Last name?! Er—Sunset? (Ophelia Sunset: Hey drag queens—looking for a cool stage name?)

We had a bit of a wait, during which time we observed tragedy and comedy. The cute Airedale with a limp, still chipper enough to play with the kids and mom who brought him. The little orange cat, carried in motionless and wrapped in a towel, whose owner choked on her tears when asked his name. "Hobie," she whispered. The lizard, off in an unseen operating room; a technician told us that the doctor was just finishing up with him and would see Ophelia next. "He had a prolapsed rectum," she added. Who knew a lizard could have such a problem?

Dr. Nicolette Zarday, blonde and with an unusually kind and sympathetic face, examined Ophelia. "I've never dealt with a chicken before," she said. "But she seems to have crop stasis [another term for impacted crop], which we see in other birds too." 

Dr. Zarday examines the stoic Ophelia.

To loosen the mass, Dr. Zarday suggested running a tube down Ophelia's esophagus to fill her crop with a solution of warm water and mineral oil. "You can watch if you like." Er, no thanks.

Through this door, Ophelia is being intubated.

I retired to the waiting room and saw Hobie's owner rush out the front door. "Hobie didn't make it," said another technician, when I asked. Poor Hobie! Rest in peace, little kitty.

Things turned out much better for Ophelia, who emerged from her procedure looking exactly the same as she had going in—i.e. totally calm—but with a slightly looser crop. It felt more bean-bag-ish and less like modeling clay. "We hope she'll regurgitate," said Dr. Zarday. Well, good thing the box is heavily lined with newspaper.

No regurgitating on the way home, just a silent chicken. But she seemed to perk up when I set her down back in the coop, to welcome squawks from her coop-mates.

Maybe we should change her name to Olivia...

Oh, and in case you're interested, the fee for chicken intubation is $60, which we calculated would buy at least three decent chicken dinners. Then again, Ophelia has laid delicious eggs faithfully on a near-daily basis since January; we figure she's paid for her bill. Plus, she is a very sweet chicken.

by Elizabeth Jardina, Sunset researcher

We'd been really lucky.

A lot of things can go wrong when you get a flock of chickens: Chicks can catch colds. Flocks are attacked by wily raccoons. The pecking order can get so crazy that you end up with a fatality.

None of this had happened to us. Our chickens had grown up like champs. Just like chickens should. Healthy, hearty, squawking.

And then I went out to visit the girls yesterday morning. I picked up Ophelia, who was our first girl to lay.

Her chest felt puffy. Confusingly puffy. Had our chickens always felt this way?

I put Ophelia down and picked up Alana, our other Ameraucana. Her chest felt like it should: Slight and bony.

I grabbed Ophelia again. The puffiness was definitely not normal. It was definitely not muscle. It felt hard — just barely pliable. It was round, and about the size of a tennis ball.

Also, she was making a peculiar stiff-necked side-to-side motion with her head. I swear, it looked like she was trying to clear her throat.

A quick lesson on chicken anatomy: Their esophagus runs down the front of their chest, and then widens into a little sac called the crop. That's where food is stored and moistened until it continues its way inside the chicken to its two stomachs. (Extra credit: The two stomachs are the proventriculus, which contains gastric juices and acid, and the gizzard, where seeds and other hard things are mechanically broken down by strong muscles.)

Anyway, the organ in question here is the crop. Ophelia's was big and firm. Also, she didn't seem to be eating. (She would politely take a pellet of food from my hand, but then drop it without consuming.)

It was obviously time to do two things:
Ask our copy chief, Erika Ehmsen, to call her husband, Steve (a vet), for consultation, and pore over the archives of the BackyardChickens.com forum.

Pretty soon I realized that what had happened to Ophelia sounded an awful lot like an impacted crop. What this means is that either a tangle of grasses or hay has formed a knotty ball in her crop, and it can't empty itself.

Judging from anecdotes on the Internet, there are typically four outcomes:
1) The problem magically resolves itself.
2) The chicken dies, often unexpectedly.
3) The chicken goes to the vet.
4) Home remedies are administered.

Home remedies run the gamut. The most benign is massaging the crop while the chicken is upside down to try to make her vomit. (Didn't work. I learned later that this isn't a great idea because if something is so large that it's stuck there, it's too big to come up. Plus it stresses your chicken out.)

The next step: Feeding your chicken a syringeful of warm water and mineral oil and massaging the crop to help break up the contents. This isn't as mild as it sounds: If you accidentally squirt water or oil into the windpipe, you'll kill your chicken, sometimes instantly.

Then, home remedies go straight into shocking: performing chicken surgery. Yes, seriously. People on the Internet — nice, otherwise normal-seeming people — sometimes sterilize an X-acto knife or sewing scissors, and cut their chickens' chest open, remove the ick that's blocking them up, and glue the skin back together with superglue.

I like these chickens, but I wasn't ready for the home surgery route.

Then we heard from our vet consultant, Steve Randle. He's an excellent vet, but one who doesn't typically treat chickens. He listened to Ophelia's symptoms, and after doing a bit of research, he agreed that it sounded serious. He gave me names of a couple of vets who worked with chickens. Or at least birds.

I called Adobe Animal Hospital in Los Altos. Their one vet who would treat a chicken said that an impacted crop was an emergency and should be treated within 24 hours.

All this time, one question kept rattling around in my head: Why did we name her Ophelia? Didn't we realize that a tragic name was bad news for a chicken?

Our food editor Margo True took the ailing Ophelia to the vet.

Next time: Margo takes over the story. It's totally Chicken ER.

By Margo True, Sunset Food Editor

Yesterday, a large package marked "PERISHABLE" arrived in our test kitchen. The fromage blanc we made at Cowgirl Creamery had arrived. Would it be noticeably novice-like?

Team Cheese's Fromage Blanc, fresh (in tubs) and aged, made two weeks ago at Cowgirl Creamery.

They sure looked good. And I must say they tasted wonderful. The fresh cheese was tangy and pure-tasting, yet luxurious--like very creamy yogurt. And the little aged cylinder had the texture of super-dense cheesecake, with a velvety ripe layer just beginning to appear beneath the rind and the slightest mushroomy flavor. They tasted worthy of Cowgirl.

We have the recipes. We have our notes. Now if we can just make these, or something approximating them, by ourselves...

By Margaret Sloan,   Sunset production coordinator

Despite warnings not to anthropomorphize our bees, we’ve named the queens. Our hives each have a distinct personality, and besides, we kept getting confused about which hive was “front” and which was “back.” And hey, the chickens have names, don’t they?

Drum roll, please.

Readers, meet Betty and Veronica. At left is a picture of Veronica (the red arrow is pointing at her). Betty wouldn’t sign on for picture taking that day (ok, we admit, we couldn't find her. But we did find lovely little eggs, which means she's around). 

Pretty cool photo, isn’t it? It was taken by E. Spencer Toy, from our imaging department (the brave soul didn’t wear a suit or veil!).

If you look closely at the cells next to the red arrow, you can see some uncapped baby bees (They’re white).

Cute, aren’t they? In a few days the worker bees will cap the cells, the baby bee will uncurl, spin a cocoon, and metamorphose (change into a worker bee).

The light brown cells are capped brood; there are baby bees in there, growing until they’re old enough to chew through the wax and join their working sisters.

Then their life of ease ends and they'll spend their days taking care of Veronica, their beautiful queen.

By Margaret Sloan, Sunset production coordinator

Last Wednesday afternoon the bees were agitated as all get out. There was a big cloud of them hovering around the back hive. A few of them bonked us in warning, bee talk for “get away or we’ll fill you full of holes”.

Just then three big blue Steller's jays started screeching at us. We had interrupted them in the middle of a little bee feast. (Above is a photo of a Steller's jay by Kimberley Burch, our Team Bee leader and imaging specialist. I’m sure she looks at jays differently after finding them eating our bees.)

A few days later I watched a scrub jay fly through the stream of forager bees as they left the hive. The bird gobbled bees on the wing.

I’m a pretty good shot; a well hurled stick scared Mr. Jay away from that little dinner on the go, but I’m sure I saw the bird grin slyly as it flew away. And now there's a little black phoebe lunching at the Sunset hives.

We can put Vaseline barriers to keep the ants out of the hive, but now there’s a new question: How do you protect a flying bee?

by Elizabeth Jardina, Sunset researcher

Thanks and hello to everyone who came by the chicken coop today! It was wonderful to meet so many Sunset readers who are excited about our lovely chickens, and who are thinking of starting their own backyard flocks.

Above, Hannah and Katrina Linn of Burlingame, Calif., meet the flock. The family has been reading the blog and decided to come see the coop for themselves with an eye toward getting their own. "It seems really doable," said dad Walt.

If you're in the area tomorrow, do come by and say hello. I'll be giving out six freshly laid eggs to the first visitor who mentions the blog!

A number of questions keep coming up over and over again, so I thought I'd toss them up on the blog for anyone who might be curious.

Q: How much space do they need?

At minimum, you want to have at least four square feet of chicken yard per laying hen. That's much less than you're imagining. Our chicken yard is 10- by 10-feet, which means that we have 100 square feet of yard for only 6 hens, giving them each a kingly 17 square feet each. This is way more than the recommended minimums. Personally, I would be comfortable adding four or so more hens to our flock in the same amount of space without worrying about the ratio of poop to square feet of straw, or worrying that their proximity would cause excess squabbling and pecking. But we don't really need more hens.

Q: What do they eat?

Mostly layer pellets and chicken scratch. We get ours from an organic supplier, Modesto Milling. That's the backbone of their diet. It's supplemented by scraps from the test kitchen (they love leafy greens, anything wilted, fennel and dill, arugula — their favorite, cilantro stems, chile seeds), weeds that we pick from the garden (especially anything in the dandelion family and wild grasses), apple cores, overripe strawberries and other fruit, and insects they find in the dirt. They also eat oyster shells (mixed into the scratch) to give them a calcium boost, which gives their eggs nice, thick shells. Chickens aren't naturally vegetarians, but we don't feed ours meat. Because we think it seems creepy.

Q: Which one is the rooster?

We don't have a rooster. We're not allowed to have roosters in Menlo Park, and they can be trouble — aggressive, loud, feisty. Some of our chickens have big red combs and wattles, but they're still not roosters. Whether or not they have big combs depends on their variety, not on their gender.

Also, while we're at it, chickens lay eggs with or without the presence of roosters. Since we don't have a rooster, the eggs are not fertilized, which means that they will never hatch into chicks. (This is just as well, because we're not really in the market for any more chickens.) If we did have a rooster, the eggs would be fertilized while they were, ahem, still in the hen; the rooster doesn't do anything to eggs once they've been laid.

Q: Why are the eggs different colors?

Different varieties of chickens lay different color eggs. Two of ours lay blue-green eggs; the other four lay brown eggs. White eggs come from varieties used in industrial agriculture; they lay two eggs a day. Our chickens lay one egg a day.

Q: What do you do with the eggs?

We give them to staff members. We originally thought we'd use them in our test kitchen, but they're different than supermarket eggs — a little smaller, with more tender whites and richer yolks — and so they'd throw our recipe testing off.

Q: They look really clean. Did you bathe your chickens?

Um, no.

by Elizabeth Jardina, Sunset researcher

Want to meet our chickens? You can, this weekend.

It's Celebration Weekend here at Sunset, our annual open-house festival. We're inviting everyone to our offices in Menlo Park: Come check out the gardens, tour the test kitchen and garden, meet Sunset editors, taste wine and food, listen to music, get great green home ideas, and all kinds of other fun stuff. It's our big shindig, and it's lots and lots of fun.

I'll be there, standing by the chicken coop, ready to introduce our flock to anyone who comes by. (The chicken coop is in the test garden.)

You can meet Nugget.

Also, the long-promised Honey update: She snapped out of it. She's not broody, she's not mopey, she's not being pecked. She has rejoined the flock.

The timing couldn't have been better. Honestly, we were getting tired of squirting the other chickens with water when they pecked her; we were tired of grabbing her out of the nesting box every day and putting her in the yard so she would eat and drink.

She's hanging out in the yard with the other chickens now, and acting like a normal chicken. She lays her egg in the nesting box, but then she comes right back out. Her comb is pinker and growing in. And she's acting perfectly perky.

Come by this Saturday or Sunday. I'll introduce you.

"I can't go out to the bees like this. I'm dressed like a bear!" — Margo True, food editor, who was, in fact, wearing a black shirt and brown pants.

That might look bear-like. If you're a bee.

By Margaret Sloan, Sunset production coordinator

Victory! The PVC, jar lid, and Vaseline barriers are keeping the ants out. But had we been too slow, allowing the ants to build nests in the hives?

Friday was the scheduled day to open the hive, and we had another burning question: Were our queen bees alive and laying eggs?

Opening hives is stressfull on bees. Imagine how you’d feel if someone filled your home with smoke, yanked off the roof, and and pulled out your babies’ beds to peer and poke at your sleeping family.

We had 8 people doing that to our bees. And we sort of forgot to mind our bee manners. We crowded around, waving our arms, being loud, moving fast. Some of us  did not cover our (dark) hair—in short, we acted like 8 big bears. Bees do not like bears, for obvious reasons.

What gentle bees! They did not sting us for our bearish behavior. The hum of the first hive we opened rose scarcely a half-tone, even when we cheered on finding a frame full of tiny little eggs, a sure sign of a laying queen bee. And no sign of ants. Whew.

But by the time we opened the second hive, the bees were thouroughly tired of us. Despite puffs of eucalyptus flavored smoke, they kept lining up along the frame tops to glare at us (a precursor to attacking). Nervously, we inspected a few frames but found no sign of a queen.

As the pitch of the colony’s hum rose in irritability, we closed the box and made yet another call to Randy Oliver. There’s no queen, we said, no eggs. Just one full frame of honey and some weird little combs at the bottom of the frames.

Randy did reassure us that the queen had probably not died horribly in the Tanglefoot, but it was possible that she did die in transit. A bee colony without a queen is not a good thing.

He sent us out to inspect the hive. This time we minded our manners, the bees minded theirs, and—hurrah!—on the drone frame (more on this in a future post) we found the queen going about her business. We cheered (quietly) and put their roof back on, leaving them to recover from our bear-handed inspections.

Will we get honey for our One-Block Diet dinner this summer? We're not sure. The bees are still alive, working like, well, like bees, and we're keeping a good thought.

By Margo True, Sunset Food Editor

How lucky we are that Sue Conley and Peggy Smith, of Cowgirl Creamery, have agreed to be consultants for Team Cheese. They make some of the best cheeses in the country. Not only that, they've been mentors to many other cheesemakers, and do all they can to support the growth of good artisan cheese in America.

They've also agreed to give us a cheesemaking lesson! This is like Rafael Nadal saying he'll help you work on your serve.

Cowgirl Creamery's barn in Pt. Reyes Station, CA.

         Sue Conley (left) and Peggy Smith.   

Our "Class" at Cowgirl: Fromage Blanc and Cottage Cheese

Bright and early last Monday, Sue Conley and Cowgirl cheesemaker Jonathan White met us at Cowgirl's Pt. Reyes facility. We started out like any sensible cooks do, by reviewing the recipes.

Together, we review the recipes we'll make today.

First up: fromage blanc, a soft, mildly tart, spreadable fresh cheese. (It's great on toast with honey.) Jonathan had already pasteurized the milk the day before, added culture (to help preserve the cheese, create flavor, and develop texture) and rennet (a coagulant; they use chymosin, a microbial rennet), and let the milk sit overnight to ripen.

"With hard cheese, all flavor develops in the aging room," says Sue, wearing her usual adorable French cheesemaker's cap. "With fresh cheese, flavor develops as it's coagulating, long and slow."

Now, at 9 a.m., the fromage blanc has finally formed soft curds. Our task: to pour those curds into cheesecloth-lined colanders and let them drain.

                                                Pouring the fromage blanc curds.

Associate Food Editor Elaine Johnson, with fromage blanc curds.

"You can put that colander right over a bucket, too," says Sue. "You get whey, and you can use that to make ricotta."

I'm noticing how much attention is paid to cleanliness around here. All the equipment is sparkling stainless steel. The sink is full of bleach solution for scrubbing equipment and floors. All of us are wearing hairnets, and our shoes are covered with paper booties. Cleanliness is absolutely essential for cheesemaking—almost an ingredient in and of itself—since so much of a cheesemaker's job consists of controlling bacteria. Let the right microbes thrive, and you have good cheese; let the wrong ones invade, and your cheeses are inedible.

Every now and then, we'll stir the curds so that they drain evenly (if we  don't do this, the outside will dry out first).

While our fromage blanc drains, we start in on the cottage cheese. Cowgirl's cottage cheese is a rich, creamy, small-curd type that, amazingly enough, starts with nonfat milk.

"Cottage cheese was a farm cheese you'd make after churning butter," says Jonathan. "Because it was something you could do with skim milk." Aha. So it gets its name from all the nameless cottages in which thrifty rural women have produced this cheese. 

As with the fromage blanc, the milk ripens overnight. It gets a sprinkling of culture (in powdered form, from a little packet), to develop the flavor just like a bread starter would, but no rennet. At Cowgirl, this ripening happens in a big steel bath with hollow walls that fill with hot steam, controlling the milk's temperature.

Now Jonathan slowly raises the temperature of the milk. It takes about half an hour to get it to 90°F. How the heck are we going to do this back at Sunset, without a giant steam-jacketed steel tub? I wonder. "You could try a bain-marie," suggests Sue. Good idea. We will.

At 90°F, the cheese is ready to be cut, using a very large, delicate-looking rake-like object (the cheese harp) to slice the curd into 1/2" squares.

Recipe Editor Amy Machnak rakes cottage cheese curds.

Then it needs to "heal" for 10 minutes. This means that each tiny curd square rapidly forms a protective skin, which will become a plump, distinct morsel of cottage cheese.

The temperature, meanwhile, continues to rise in the vat, to 110, then 130--very, very gently. Every five minutes or so, we stir the curd very gently with a large slotted spoon, to encourage moisture release.

At 130°F., the curds have shrunken quite a bit, and look like bits of pasta floating in lime soup.

Jonathan pumps cold water through the vat's jacket, rapidly cooling the cheese; at the same time, he turns on an overhead sprinkler to rinse it and reduce the acidity. Then they're left to drain for an hour or so. In a home kitchen, you'd just rinse the curds with cold water and let them drain in a colander, says Sue.

The Last Steps to Fromage Blanc

We scoop the mostly-drained fromage blanc into perforated tumbler-size plastic molds and sprinkle them with salt.

                                            Me, packing fromage blanc into molds.

They should be filled almost all the way to the top, because the cheese will shrink as it continues to drain. Some we spray with candida mold, which will give the cheese a soft, downy, delicate white rind. (This is how Cowgirl makes its Inverness cheese.) The rind development will take several days.

The fromage blanc, undergoing its final drain (another few hours).

When finished, it'll have a wonderfully rich texture, similar to that of cream cheese but lighter.

The Last Steps to Cottage Cheese

Jonathan has moved all those itty bitty curds over into sturdy plastic tubs on tables. All that's left to do is to salt the curds and then mix in a rich, creamy dressing of half cultured milk and half creme fraiche.

                                                Sue does the final mixing.

The cottage cheese is like nothing we've ever tasted from the grocery store. It makes us realize that we've only known weary, stale, plasticky cottage cheese...how can we ever go back?

We leave with tubs of fresh cottage cheese, Sue's promise to send us our finished fromage blanc (both fresh and ripened), and a determination to, yes, try making these at home.

We'll let you know how it works out.

By Johanna Silver, Sunset test garden coordinator

The most common question posed to me by visitors to the test garden is how much to water a vegetable garden.

The short answer: It depends.

I wish I could make this super simple for people, but the truth is that effective watering takes some exploration and experimentation. Here are some helpful hints:

Learn your soil composition

How often and how long you need to water depends largely on the makeup of your soil. There are three main compositions, and all have different capacities of water absorption and drainage:

1. Sandy soil - absorbs quickly, drains quickly

2. Clay soil - absorbs slowly, drains slowly

3. Loam - absorbs fairly quickly, drains fairly well (read: ideal)

Seeds of Change has a great summary on how to get to know your soil, including the classic jar test.

You can improve any soil type by adding plenty of broken down organic matter. I've always loved that the solution on both ends of the spectrum is to add more compost.

Specific climate conditions impact a watering schedule

Hot weather and wind will make soil dry out faster than a calm, overcast day. When in doubt go outside and dig your finger into the soil. If it comes out dry it's probably time to water. 

Not all vegetables are created equally

Most edibles need to be kept evenly moist during seed germination and early establishment, but crops  have different needs as they mature. For example, leafy greens can turn bitter and go to seed if they don't get regular water, while established tomatoes thrive with deep, less frequent, deep waterings. Too much water will prevent tomatoes from developing. Consult the Western Garden Book or The Edible Garden Book for crop-by-crop instructions.

Drip irrigation is where it's at

Drip systems (or even a soaker hose) emit water more slowly than overhead watering, allowing for maximum absorption with minimum evaporation. It conserves water (saving you money), minimizes weed growth, and prevents disease on certain crops by keeping leaves dry. I also enjoy the puzzle of putting it together. Check out The Urban Farmer Store (and go to one of the three Bay Area locations to experience some serious drip-irrigation know-how).

Hand watering also works well in a small vegetable garden, particularly if you dig small basins around each plant and water directly over the root zone.

Mulch makes best use of waterings

Placing mulch on the bare soil around your plants increases water retention. Like drip, mulch also fights weeds. Careful though -- organic mulch (such as straw) decreases soil temperature, so don't apply to your garden until it's warm outside. Plastic mulch, on the other hand, heats soil.

Additional tips:

1. An over-watered plant often resembles an under-watered plant. Be sure to get outside and dig around to determine what your garden needs.

2. Don't panic at the first sign of wilting. Many vegetables will wilt during the later hours of a hot, summer day and regain their strength at night. They should not, however, be wilting first thing in the morning. This is definitely a red flag that it's time to water.

3. Consistency is the trick of the trade. Figure out what method and schedule work in your garden and stick to it.