I planted everbearing raspberries from Fedco Seeds in one of my raised beds. My thinking was that in a raised bed, the natural sprawl that raspberries do would be easier to control. I have some planted in the yard nearby, and they love to creep into the lawn and everywhere else.
Here is the raised bed while the raspberries are removed
We have more bear problems now, and the bears love raspberries. The past two years the bears have mashed down my raspberry patch, so I decided this year to give them to a neighbor and reclaim the raised bed for tomatoes.
But how do you get raspberries out of a garden bed? I don’t think you can completely, so I decided to solarize the bed. I dug out all the berries I could, and then covered the raised vegetable bed with black plastic.
the raspberry plants, removedI discovered some age damage while removing the raspberries. Fixed it.
I put 6 mil plastic on the raised bed, held down with rocks.
I left the black plastic on for a month, plenty of time to kill off any remaining raspberry plants. I then kept the plastic in place, burned holes in it with a torch for tomatoes.
I torched holes in the plastic after a month for tomatoes.
Mike and Eric talked about the recent electrical storms in the midwest and that brought up the idea of ringing up our resident weather expert Tyler, ( CEO of Allison House, sponsor of Gardenfork.TV ). We found Tyler at a remote location and had a skype conference call, and talked about lightning.
Photo courtesy of NOAA (photographer unknown)
From NOAA.GOV: The picture that Tyler was referring to:
Do you know what to do if you are caught in the open during a thunderstorm or you feel tingling or your hair standing on end? Lightning causes around 100 deaths in the U.S annually (more than hurricanes and tornadoes combined). In the picture above, the young woman and her friends were severely injured by lightning just a few seconds after this picture was taken. Notice that no rain was falling, clearly illustrating that lightning can strike up to several miles away from the thunderstorm.
Images above: Sprites over thunderstorms in Kansas on August 10, 2000, observed in the mesosphere, with an altitude of 50-90 kilometers as a response to powerful lightning discharges from tropospheric thunderstorms. The true color of sprites is pink-red. Click on images to enlarge. Credit: Walter Lyons, FMA Research, Fort Collins, Colorado
Thunder Snow – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBUYmpnjob8&feature=related
I think people ignore it if they’re inside because it sounds a lot like a snowplow going by.
Faraday Cage Example – Your car acts as a faraday cage in a lightning storm:
Today we forage for wild edible food in our own yard, forgaing for Lambsquarters, also called Pitseed Goosefit or Pigweed by some. Lambsquarters is all over our cities and yards, so whether you are doing urban foraging or wild foraging, you can learn in this GardenFork.TV show about Lambsquarters.
Do you forage for wild plants? What edible plants have you eaten or found? Let us know below:
Lightning Storms over Chicago, The Dangers of felling trees, Chainsaw sharpening revisited, How to make a flower Box on GardenFork.TV, Food Safety during a power outage, Dry Ice, and Geocaching are just a few of the things we talk about this week on GardenFork Radio. We will have a bonus show tomorrow with Tyler, our weather expert from Allison House, Severe Weather Data.
Here’s plans and video to make a window box for your flowers. Easy to build in a weekend. Many window boxes fall apart because they are made of wood, I solved that. And here is Eric’s solution: the GardenFork Window Box Plans. Watch the show and then check out our video on window box planting. Below is a window box plan and photos to accompany the window flower box video.
How to make a window flower box
The wood box is made out of pine. It’s sized to be just slightly larger than the plastic pot that holds the plants. You can use common pine, be sure to prime it first with a stain blocking primer, else the knots in the wood will bleed through the paint. You can buy a can of stain blocking primer in a spray can, hit all the knots with a second coat, it dries pretty fast.
Give the window box planter several coats of paint, it will last longer that way.
I had to offset the hanger brackets because the side of the house has board and batten style wood siding. If you are attaching this do a house with vinyl siding or clapboard, you might want to slip behind the brackets some shims so the bracket screws don’t crush the siding.
When cutting the front and back wood pieces, be sure to cut them 1-1/2″ longer than the width of the inner planter. If you have coated screws, or deck screws, use those, as they are less likely to rust and bleed out of the paint.
This is how I make a window flower box, please tell us about your window box experience below.
Emergency Room Stories, The Proper use of LinkedIn.com , buying power tools, Grace Piper of FearlessCooking.TV and pickles , Growing and cooking garlic scapes, Organic lawn care from The Family Handyman , how to eat thai red curry, Real World Green and hypermiling, Hiking the AT in Falls Village, and viewer mail! You can check out Family Handyman here
Mike and Eric talk about a road rage incident and how to deal with road rage, recent weather info from the Allison House : Severe Weather Data weather station at GardenFork HQ , Eric’s excellent experience at Bakespace.com ‘s TechMunch NYC , Eric requeens a beehive, and the proper use and care of soldering irons
Plus Viewer Mail!
Photo by Marykbaird http://morguefile.com/creative/marykbaird
Learn how to requeen a beehive in this beginning beekeeping video. Requeening the hive is not rocket science, but you do need to know how a few things when you do this. This Beekeeping video will show you how to replace the queen in your beehive, or at least how we do it. As with many things in life, this is how we do it, others may do it differently.
You replace the queen in a beehive when you want to improve the hive’s characteristics or when the original queen of the beehive has died for some reason. You also requeen a beehive to keep it from swarming.
We are going to try requeening our hives in late August to prevent swarming the following spring. I’m told that queens replaced in the fall will not swarm in springtime, so we’ll see. Of course we’ll make a video about that.
Watch all our shows on GardenFork.TV : The Solar Powered Clothes Dryer , aka the clothesline is green and saves money. Installing a clothesline is super easy, if Eric can do it, you can do it. So go out and put up your clothesline and be green and save money.
This ketchup recipe is from a viewer and food blogger, Kathy. Kathy has a blog, What’s For Dinner, sent this and I wanted to share it with you all.
I love ketchup, and I’ve never made my own ketchup, but why not try this ketchup recipe?
Homemade ketchup recipe
There are a million versions of this on the internet, but my kids and husband prefer this version. I have 3 sons who put ketchup on EVERYTHING.
• 6 ounce can tomato paste
• 1/3 cup tap water
• 2 tablespoons vinegar
• 1/4 teaspoon dry mustard
• 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1 pinch cloves
• 1 pinch allspice
• 1 pinch chili powder
• 1/3 cup brown sugar
This is simplicity itself. In a medium bowl combine all of the ingredients with a wire whisk. Blend well. Scrape the mixture into a pint-sized, resealable container. Chill overnight, to blend the flavors. Use wherever ketchup is desired.
To reduce the sodium content simply omit the salt.
As written this recipe makes 12-ounces or 24 servings, 1-tablespoon each.
The recipe freezes extremely well. When I have a time I make up a very large batch, place it in a Ziploc bag and freeze. When our ketchup supply runs low I simply thaw the frozen supply over night. Then I snip the corner of the Ziploc bag and squeeze it into an existing ketchup bottle.
This essential oil recipe for honeybees is similar to the several commercial essential oil concentrates you can buy from beekeeping suppliers. These essential oil mixtures are said to have several benefits. They improve the disease resistance of the honeybees, they calm the bees when you are working them, and they can help introduce a new queen to a beehive.
NOTE: I now buy the essential oil mix from a beekeeping supplier here. Its saves time for me, is easier than putting together all these ingredients, is safe, and works very well.
I keep getting questions about what is an essential oil. An essential oil is the extracted oil of a particular plant. That’s it. For some reason, people ask if they can use mineral oil, and no, you can’t.
The two main ingredients here, lemongrass oil and spearmint oil are said to reduce the presence of diseases and pathogens in the hive.
You MUST use food grade essential oils for your bees, do NOT buy oil used for aromatherapy, it can contain ingredients toxic to bees.
To buy food grade spearmint essential oil on Amazon click on this link → Spearmint Food Grade Essential Oil. Double check the Amazon listing to make sure the oil is food grade, Amazon’s search function isn’t perfect.
To buy food grade lemongrass essential oil on Amazon click on this link → Lemongrass Food Grade Essential Oil. Double check the Amazon listing to make sure the oil is food grade, Amazon’s search function isn’t perfect.
I got this and many other beekeeping recipes for honeybees from Cass, whose blog is WVBeekeeper.
I have tried to contact Cass to ask permission to reprint this recipe but could not, so I’m hoping he’s ok with the idea of us all helping honey bees.
Essential Oil Recipe For Honeybees
A well known commercially available general purpose essential oil product for bees that is similar to the following recipe claims many benefits even though many of those claims have yet to be proven. The following recipe should work about as well as that product and is way cheaper. It can be added in small quantities to feed to encourage feeding. It has been known to occasionally cause robbing behavior due to its great appeal to bees.
> 5 cups water
> 2 1/2 pounds of sugar
> 1/8 teaspoon lecithin granules (used as an emulsifier)
> 15 drops spearmint oil
> 15 drops lemongrass oil
Bring the water to a boil and stir in the sugar until it is dissolved. Once the sugar is dissolved remove the mixture from the heat and quickly add the lecithin and the essential oils. Stir the mixture thoroughly. This solution should have a strong scent and not be left open around bees. Cool before using.
NOTE: i have had difficulty getting the lecithin granules to dissolve in the mixture. I have made this without the lecithin and it seemed to be ok.
Cass says: “Use the Essential Oil Mixture in early spring and during periods when no nectar is available and to build up packages, nucs ind swarms. Two teaspoonfuls in a quart of 1:1 sugar syrup delivers a total of one cc of both essential oils. The essential oils are evenly distributed throughout the syrup. The Essential Oil Mixture helps produce rapid build up of bees when used as a feeding stimulant. In addition, using 4 teaspoons in a quart of one to one sugar water of the Essential Oil Mixture as a spray instead of smoke helps calm the bees, and spraying caged new queens and bees helps with queen acceptance during cage introduction and reduces balling during direct release when sprayed on new queen and bees. It also helps to reduce stings: mix a little on your hands and watch the difference in bee behavior-very few or no stings at all. Acts as a bee calmer when sprayed on the bees and helps prevent fighting when combining nucs, swarms, and colonies. Spray on a colony while doing a cut-out for some extra calm bees! When sprayed on new foundation helps encourage the bees to draw out new comb or plastic comb.”
Road Trip! Well, at least a trip to NYC, and we tried out our new microphone that plugs into the iPhone. The Camera Operator joins us to talk more about the Beer Cooler Sous Vide video how to, a Bat Removal learning experience, Planting tomatoes, a Beekeeping update and more. Listen to GardenFork Radio on GardenFork.TV or on iTunes.
I was watching our hives last week, and thought Hive #1 was looking less busy at the entrance. I was thinking it had swarmed. So we opened up the hive, and found our marked queen, which means the hive had not swarmed. ( When a hive swarms, the original queen flies off with half of the honeybees ) But we did find lots of drone cells and 3 queen cells that are being built. We removed the queen cells, but I know we can’t stop them from swarming that way. We are going to do a split to reduce the hive population, and remove any more queen cells.
We just received the queens we ordered from Jennifer Berry, so we have to do this quickly. Its best to do splits in May, I understand, but this being early June I think we’ll be ok.
Our original queen is still in the hive, so it has not swarmed yet. The queen is the bee with the blue mark. the beginning of a queen cell among drone cellshere are 2 queen cells being built at the bottom of a frame
This week we learn that Mike is a hockey fan, and he is not pleased with the NHL Network on Cable. And we talk about bees and beekeeping, and bee swarming and why you want to avoid swarms in your hives. Then we digress into many tangents. Like earthquakes and basement insurance, back up sump pumps and more.
