Here’s another reason to buy honey from someone you know and trust.
You know the honey you buy at the grocery store? The honey labeled “pure” and “organic?”
Hmmm. Maybe not so pure.
In a special report on honey laundering, by Seattle Post-Intelligencer Senior correspondent Andrew Schneider, you’ll find a story of questionable dealings in the honey world. Honey shipped in from undisclosed countries of origin. Honey tainted with pesticides and antibiotics. Honey dumped on the U.S. honeymarket at unbelievably low prices. Reading this series will make you as hot as any Africanized bee hive.
On the home front We’re still treating our bees for mites. (Disclaimer: Formic acid is classified as organic. And we would not eat honey produced while the treatment was on the hive.)
The girls seem to agree with us; the formic acid treatment is nasty . Betty gets a treatment for a half a day only. We put the pad on in the morning and take it off in the evening. In the mornings, when we open her hive up, she’s fine. The bees are very calm, just buzzing quietly to themselves as contented bees do. But when we put on the formic acid pad, what an uproar!
Remember Nugget, our adopted chick who turned out to be a rooster?
Nugget in full cock-a-doodle-doo, at Sunset back in October.
Well, I've just gotten off the phone with the lovely woman who adopted him (she still asks to remain incognito). "You mean the big red one? Yes, he's still here."
How is he doing?
"Well, he doesn't tend to pay any attention to us. But he does like his little hens."
I flashed on a memory of Nugget, in the week before his exit, energetically hopping on the backs of our hens and ignoring food and water. (The hens did their best to shake him off.) I guess that was just the beginning of Nugget, The Chicken Casanova.
Is he unusually amorous for a rooster? I asked.
"He's just a young rooster that really likes his hens. He doesn't tear up their heads or anything."
What about his feistiness around people? Once he'd discovered our hens, he wasn't exactly the sweetest creature in the coop.
"To be frank, he's been drop-kicked a couple of times." Yow. "Now we're more dominant than he is. It's like how you have to be with a very hard-headed dog. You have to be alpha."
Those of you with fiesty-rooster problems might want to know that when you drop-kick a rooster (says Nugget's new owner), you have to do it "like you mean it." It will not hurt the rooster (just don't go crazy). Roosters tend to calm down after the first year and get easygoing for another three or four; then, depending on the rooster, they go through another aggressive spurt--and some develop a tendency to fly up in your face when they attack. "You do anything you can to discourage that. If he does that, he's put down immediately. No rooster in the world is worth someone's eye."
You also have to respect the rooster as the protector of his chickens, she adds, and not get between him and them. It's his gene-driven job to take care of them, after all. "Walk easy and do easy." If you have food, that's different; you're best friend to the whole flock, at least for a few minutes.
A little more about Nugget's new life:
Every morning, he and his flock of hens saunter out into the 30-acre ranch that his benefactor runs. The day is spent pecking up tasty bits, hopping on the hens, and defending them. Every now and then, the flock crosses paths with a group of guinea hens (apparently Nugget and the Guinea Rooster have gone at it several times; now they tolerate each other). Because of the many dogs around, the chickens are fairly safe from predators like racoons and coyotes. At night they're enclosed.
And any day now, mini-Nuggets will arrive on the scene. Nugget's owner has taken some of the flock's eggs to a school so the kids can see chicks hatch.
So, despite his orneriness, Nugget has turned out to be not such a bad rooster. He seems to be, er, productive. He doesn't rip up his hens. His owner thinks he's "cute and pretty." And he is definitely lucky.
Our Syrah is only 1 year and just about 4 months old, yet we can barely remember life before it. We’ve known it since the day it was “born,” when Team Wine spent an early October morning picking dusky dark grapes high in the Santa Cruz Mountains, paused for lunch, then crushed, stomped, and destemmed the literal fruits of our labor.
This Syrah consumed our lives for all of October ’07, then we worried about it all winter and into spring, when we racked it off its lees. But it’s been in hibernation since this past summer, when we last sampled it, savoring each sip and wondering how long we’d have to wait till it was ready to bottle. We decided that late January ’09 would be perfect.
Our wine’s time has arrived: This Friday—meteorologist willing—we’ll take to our parking-lot workspace and siphon our 35 gallons of Syrah into 182 bottles, give or take a few that we end up “sampling” (we’re quite scientific) along the way.
We’re counting on our experience bottling and corking our Chardonnay this past fall to give us the speed we’ll need to fill and seal close to 200 bottles in just one workday. Wish us luck, and check back next week to see video—novice videographer (me) willing—of our latest adventure in home winemaking.
Just before the holidays, we pasteurized our vinegar to put an end to the growth of its voracious acetic acid bacteria, which consumed wine practically as fast as an adult human at a cocktail party. The mothers it created—the visible sign of bacterial activity, besides the shrinking wine level and the rapid conversion of wine to vinegar—were many, glistening, and plump. Pasteurizing would halt all activity, or so we'd read, heard, and believed. We poured the pasteurized vinegar into aging crocks and expected nothing but quiet mellowing.
So...yesterday we opened up the aging crocks.
What's that on top? Mold?
No, it's a mother, for heaven's sake. Enfeebled, but apparently determined. (The vinegar tasted exactly the same as it did when we pasteurized, by the way.)
How can we stop the persistence of the mother? Home vinegar-makers, do you have advice for us?
Thinning crops is often a difficult task for new gardeners. It's hard to avoid the feeling that one is wasting potential food, but really, it is a totally necessary step to make sure that each plant has enough room to form properly. And depending on when you do it, you might get some baby (read: gourmet) vegetables out of the process.
I planted carrots a while back in the test garden. I seeded them pretty heavily in case there were any problems with germination. Here is how they grew:
A good time to thin is when the tops are a several inches high. You want to wait until they are established and healthy, but not so long that the roots get in one another's way. Anywhere from 2-4 inches sounds about right.
This shot really reveals why thinning is necessary. These carrots would not have room to size up:
Be sure to thin gingerly, trying to cause as little disturbance as possible to the surrounding plants. Then again, don't worry too much. Plants often look a bit droopy after being thinned, but they usually recover.
Thin the seedlings to approximately 2 inches apart. This gives each carrot about 1 inch on either side to grow.
These are on the smaller side, but as I've mentioned to in the past, I'm not the world's most patient gardener. Waiting would have set a better example, but I'm happy to announce that these shots are from a few weeks ago and the carrots are coming along nicely. It just goes to show that you should always be free to experiment in your own little plot of soil.
This is a picture of Kimberley suited up to put formic acid in the hives to treat for varroa mites. Formic acid stinks, and the vapor burns. Makes your nose feel like it’s been toasted, your eyes feel like they’ve been torched. Our advice: Wear a respirator. Wear eye protection. We’ve treated with formic acid once, although just on Veronica. It didn’t seem to help; a week afterward, we sugar dusted, and the sticky board from Veronica was still covered in mites. Lot’s of the little vampires—almost 200 in five minutes! Even natural 24-falls yielded high counts.
To kill mites, formic acid needs daytime outside air temperatures to be between 50-79 degrees. The first time we applied formic acid we had a cold spell, and the temperature never reached optimum levels. Perhaps that’s why we didn’t kill so many mites. For this second application we’ve been in luck, with summer-like weather during the first two weeks of January. We put the formic acid in Veronica on January 14, and we’ve been slaughtering mites ever since. Hundreds, maybe thousands. Too many to count.
Betty gets a formic acid pad for only a few hours during the day. She's too weak to live with the vapor for longer periods of time. She doesn't have as many dead mites, but still there are enough to be worrisome.
Formic acid may slow down spring brood production, but the mites will weaken and eventually kill the hive. We'll take the pad out of Veronica the first week of February. We hope this works.
Our cool season edibles are coming along at a snail's pace. We can raise vegetables year-round in our mild, Menlo Park climate, but things are definitely growing a lot slower than in the summer.
These brassicas look unassuming enough, but I've been keeping a close eye on the ones in the row closest to the camera.
They finally looked like they were forming heads, so I reached my grubby hands down to peel back the center leaves of one of the plants. Sure enough, the most beautiful head is taking shape. Growing food is so magical, especially when the vegetables look like this.
This is a variety of broccoli known as "romanesco." This is the first time I've grown it. Hopefully I can keep my hands off it long enough for it to reach full maturity.
I was fooling around with edible flowers in the Sunset test kitchen the other day, figuring out a recipe for an upcoming story, and had piles of pretty baby roses left over.
Why not feed them to our chickens? We give them all kinds of tempting test-kitchen food scraps to make their eggs more luscious. Roses would make a very exciting hen breakfast. Or maybe they'd even make the eggs fragrant!
The chickens did their usual NBA impressions, leaping up to see what I had in the feed bowl. I scattered the blossoms on the coop floor and waited.
As you can see, the roses were a complete dud. I've never seen our chickens turn their beaks up at anything before.
Wow, even their backs. Clearly these roses needed a few worms or aphids to make them worth trying.
This garden, funded by Häagen-Dazs, will “be a pollinator paradise,” according to Lynn Kimsey, chair of the Department of Entomology. At a half-acre, it will provide year round blooms for bees, research material for the on-going study of bees, and inspiration to visitors interested in building their own bee-friendly paradise.
But enter soon. The deadline is January 30, 2009. You can read all the particulars at UC Davis’s Department of Entomology website.
On the home front The battle with varroa mites continues. Even after the formic acid treatment, a sugar dusting a week later knocked off just under 200 mites from Veronica. A natural 24-hour fall produced about 100 mites. Happily, the same 24 hours only yielded 9 from Betty (although with less bees, she provides less potential mite victims).
My mom once told me that hanging wallpaper is the ultimate test of a marriage. So I’ve stuck to paint.
But then I tried my hand at labeling Team Wine’s Chardonnay. And I feel like I need some counseling: Home winemakers, homebrewers, paper crafters, scrapbookers, and bookmakers, what am I doing wrong?
One of the magazine’s designers used Adobe Illustrator to create labels for all of our One-Block “products” (here’s a beauty shot of them). For our 2007 Chardonnay, she used our lovely, scripty Sunset logo, a solo grape leaf, and the grapes’ place of origin: Thomas Fogarty Estate Vineyards in the San Francisco Bay Area’s Santa Cruz Mountains (practically in Sunset's backyard). And then she printed them on Avery 5265 labels, which she, being the crafty type, expertly, neatly, and evenly sliced with an X-Acto knifeon a self-healing mat. She was so confident, I was sure I could replicate her motions without trouble.
Wrong. First I learned that my own craft mat is too compact to accommodate an 8 1/2- by 11-inch sheet of labels. And then I discovered that my craft knife is a little dull. So I of course mucked up the first sheet of labels.
Cutting my losses, I decided to switch to the trusty industrial paper cutter in our office. It’s old but reliable—so much so that we collectively scoffed at a new paper cutter that was positioned next to it for months, collecting dust and scraps of trimmed paper from our favored cutter. (Someone finally took pity on the younger one and found it a new home.)
But I didn’t think about what the adhesive hidden beneath each label would do to our beloved paper cutter. It wasn’t pretty. The first slice wasn’t bad, but just that one exposure to the labels’ gummy glue noticeably dulled the slicing blade, and suddenly a sticky scrap was flapping around on the blade edge. From there on out, my cuts weren’t straight. And, then through my frustration, I realized that I’d potentially wrecked Old Reliable.
So I ran away from the paper cutter with my one somewhat decent label
and tried positioning it on an empty bottle that I’d practiced my
corking on. (It was my job to guide Team Wine in bottling and corking,
and I studied up.) There’s no drawing a straight line with a ruler on a
rounded bottle, so I figured that unsticking one corner of the label,
affixing it to the clean glass surface, and then reaching under the
label and continuing to unfurl the paper backing was the way to go. I’d
(seemingly) figured out the where and how, so I decided to go for it.
And … sigh.
At least when I’ve crookedly stuck an address label on a holiday card or birth announcement, I’ve been able to mail it away. But a wine bottle lingers on. A wine bottle you (should be able to) proudly display. Not only is my label slightly askew, it has a crease and a bubble in it.
So I humbly ask for your help: If you have experience with beer or wine labels, or if you’ve worked with adhesives and learned how to apply paper straight and pretty, please post any and all advice in our Comments section. I’ll report back with what managed to straighten me out.
Backyard composting is one of the most rewarding aspects to gardening. It plugs you right into the cycle of life, transforming garden debris into gold.
Sunset has covered composting for decades. Here are links to a few helpful pieces on our website:
I also recommend checking out any of the composting techniques at Instructables (this is a fantastic DIY website, by the way).
Composting goes in and out of style in the test garden, depending on what we're working on and how much space we have. I am currently testing out the Sun-Mar 400. Though I am more of a purist when it comes to compost (preferring to build a pile on the ground and turn it by hand), I am rising above my skepticism to give this above-ground tumbler a fair shot.
The idea is that you feed it yard scraps, pour a diluted microbial
solution in it (an 8oz. bottle of Compost Swift is included in purchase), turn it often, and harvest finished compost out of the
center chamber.
I love building a bicep rather than breaking my back, but I'm not having great luck with perfectly finished compost coming through the center chamber, as is pictured above (photo not taken in our garden). My chamber spits out a mix of compost and yet-to-decompose yard waste. Supposedly it can take some time to start working properly. I will keep you posted.
In December, Todd Schofield wrote that he and his young daughters often found dead or dying bees in their yard. And, concerned about the troubles facing bees, he asked what they could do to help bees.
It’s always sad to find a dead bee, but the sad fact of bee life is that a worker bee's allotted time is short. A summer-born worker bee lives only 28 to 35 days. They simply wear out; their tattered wings can no longer carry them and they often die in the field, on the job. So, Todd and daughters, don’t be too upset about the bee bodies you find.
But do help bees! European honeybees are in some serious trouble, as are native bumble bees. Here are some things you can do (and not do) in the new year to help bees of all kinds.
1. Don’t use any pesticides. This is probably the single most important thing you can do. Many researchers (and beekeepers) suspect that the low level of pesticides found in bees is weakening them and making them more susceptible to other diseases. (Sharon Cohoon wrote about a common pesticide in lawn fertilizer, Imidacloprid, a nerve toxin which is taken up by the plant and goes into all parts of it, including pollen, in our Fresh Dirt Blog.)
2. Plant a variety of pollen bearing plants. Don’t go for flashy, sterile blossoms. Let clover grow in the lawn, and dandelions too. Relax. An added benefit of bee-attracting plants is that they’ll also attract beneficial insects and birds to your garden.
3. Buy honey! Buy it from local beekeepers if you can. We want to keep these folks in business; their bees pollinate our gardens, forests, and meadows. And, on the plus side for you, you’ll be tasting the terroir of the land as found through the honeybee.
Read More
