A special guest joins eric to talk about wedding etiquette, IOW, how to behave at weddings, luna moths, poached eggs, moving beehives, and ledge birdhouses.
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Dutch Oven Cooking Adventures
This is the first of a series of articles about how to cook in a dutch oven, dutch oven recipes, and how to season cast iron and dutch ovens by Gary House, of Cooking-Outdoors.com. A big thank-you to Gary for contributing this.
Adventures in Dutch oven cooking
The first time I ever saw a Dutch oven in use was on TV. I remember it quite well as I was sick in bed flipping channels on TV and up pops this show about cooking outdoors and they were using a Dutch oven! Even as sick as I was at the time, I knew this was something I had to try, something new and exciting for the family and I. After lots of research, I finally decided to buy my first Dutch oven, a 12” camp Dutch oven seemed just about what I needed to start with.
The day my Dutch oven arrived, I was so excited and eager to get cooking but I had to “season” my Dutch oven first. Therefore, a day later, I was able to start cooking and it could only be a Mixed Berry Crisp for me. Of course, the day had to be a miserable one to initiate my new Dutch oven; cold, misty, windy as it was, I started cooking!
I had just recently built a new fire pit in the backyard and the plan was to cook in the fire pit just as on the show I had watched. Plans change, weather was bad, so I fired up some charcoal to start my dessert. Turns out I was going to do this little adventure alone. The family event turned out to be a “me” only event, well it was a bit cold and misty out after all.
Guys are notorious for just standing around watching this cook, that’s way we love to barbecue, looks difficult and you have to stand around and watch. Well, now you can get a visual of me “watching” my Dutch oven cook in the misty weather outside. Overlooking our backyard is this big bay window; gives you a great view of the yard from inside the house. As I am cooking, I happened to look up from my strenuous task and there was the whole family watching me and laughing at me as I stood in the misty weather “cooking”.
Undaunted, I continued with cooking my Mixed Berry Crisp until the first “whiffs” of cinnamon started to float out of the Dutch oven and I can say without hesitation, I was hooked on Dutch oven cooking from that second forward.
I have learned a ton of stuff over the years about cooking outdoors, met many new friends and have found a wealth of information in many locations. The most important lesson I have learned during all of this, is to share what you love, often and willingly. Dutch oven cooking is easier that you think and I would like to get you started with your new adventure!
Types of Dutch ovens
There are, basically, three types of Dutch oven available. A basic “kitchen” Dutch oven, a “Camp” Dutch oven and “Pack” Dutch oven in their general terms.
A “Kitchen” Dutch oven is the most common Dutch oven found. Characteristics are a rounded dome lid, porcelain coated (some) and are also available in oval shapes. All are cast iron and designed for in house cooking but do not hesitate to place one on your grill outside. They work perfectly!
A “Camp” Dutch oven is the most familiar one, recognized by its three legs and rim around the lid. Made of Cast iron and is the one I will be discussing in these articles.
A “Pack” Dutch oven, used for rafting and horse packing trips is made of aluminum, they are very lightweight and easy to transport.
Dutch oven sizes can vary from a 5” model to a 25” behemoth that can weigh in over a hundred pounds when filled with food. Here are the sizes available: 5”, 8”, 10”, 12” – Standard, 12” – Deep, 14” – Standard, 14” – Deep, 16” – Standard, 16” – Deep, 25” and more for custom Dutch ovens. Note that “Camp” Dutch oven, are measured by diameter as opposed to “Kitchen” Dutch ovens that measure in quarts. “Camp” Dutch ovens also have quart equivalents but commonly referred to by diameter size only.
The difference between “Standard” and “Deep” Dutch ovens is the quart capacity. The “Deep” Dutch ovens hold about 1 to 2 quarts more than the “Standard” size. They are great for holding stews and larger portions of meats that need more height clearance.
Choosing the correct size Dutch oven for you.
The following chart should give you some idea of the size oven that you should buy. (http://www.nwdos.org)
My recommendation is to choose a 10” or a 12” Dutch oven; no need to get a deep version yet. You will be seriously surprised how much food these produce. Stick with brand names such as Camp Chef and Lodge, their quality is the standard and your Dutch oven will last in your family for hundreds of years if your grandchildren do not sell it on Ebay first.
Next time we will discuss the types of accessories and tools you will need to get started. I laugh when I think of my expensive tools and accessories I used for my first cook on that first Dutch oven adventure; a pair of pliers and a garbage can lid …
See ya around the campfire!
Part One of a Dutch Oven Cooking Series by Gary House, creator of www.Cooking-Outdoors.com; an excellent source for all things about outdoor cooking, including Grill & Smoker reviews, recipes, and videos.Gary is also the host of a new DVD, Taking Your Dutch Oven To The Max, using the dutch oven to smoke, grill, and even make ice cream.
Listen to Gary on this episode of GardenFork Radio talk about how to season cast iron, how to use a dutch oven, and dutch oven recipes.
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Inside the Hive: Views from a First Year Beekeeper (Scene 6)
I wanted to talk about a couple of topics related to this photo – mite control and wax production. There are two mites which are parasitic in the honeybee hive – the Varoa Mite, which literally sucks the life out of the bee externally and the Tracheal Mite which feeds of the bee from within its respiratory system. Varoa is large enough that one can see it with the naked eye while Tracheal mites are too small to see without a microscope. In the upper part of this picture are two “grease patties” which are made of equal parts of vegetable shortening and sugar. Mixed and formed into a patty, these are most easily handled by putting waxed paper between them. Sometimes folks will put some essential oils in the mixture, such as wintergreen. The idea here is that the bees are attracted to the sugar in the patty and get the vegetable shortening on them, greasing them up a bit. Tracheal mites are spread bee-to-bee and have considerable difficulty with the grease. There are a number of ways to deal with tracheal mites, some of which are more harsh than others. What I like about the grease patty approach is that it is something that is both inexpensive and harmless to the bees. These patties go a long way so you dont’ need a bunch of them – maybe one or two per hive per year. How effective is the grease patty treatment? I don’t know, quite honestly, but it is mentioned quite often.
The zip-top bag (When J&J starts sponsoring GardenFork, I’ll consider using its brand name) in the picture is called a “baggy feeder” and is filled with a 1:1 sugar syrup (1:1 by weight, so 5 pints of water to a 5 pound bag of sugar) that is super simple to make – you could just put the water in the sun and stir the sugar in after a few hours of letting it heat up. Alternatively you can heat the water a bit on the stove (no need to boil it whatsoever), take it off the heat and stir in the sugar. Fill the bag and seal the top. Then lay the bag down on its side (making sure the top is zipped) and cut a small slit in the side of the bag so that the air escapes and the sugar syrup oozes out a bit. As the bees walk on it, they’ll be able to feed on the syrup that comes out.
Now, the idea with the baggy feeder (or any feeder for that matter) is that the bees in this new hive require a considerable amount of energy to produce wax to create comb on the frames and to fly about and forage. They’ll certainly go out and find nectar but providing a ready source of sugar water gives them all the food they can eat right in the hive and helps the bees “draw out” the comb quickly. In a new hive there’s a lot of wax to produce and shape into comb and the bees will readily take this syrup up and produce remarkable amounts of wax in a short time. As I’m not getting honey from the hives this year (at least this is my expectation), I don’t mind the bees feeding off of sugar water. When they are producing honey for human consumption, you’ll want them to be creating it from nectar rather than just storing up sugar water. I wouldn’t want to purchase (or sell!) honey that was just converted sugar water.
The nice thing about the baggy feeder is that it is cheap and convenient. The undesirable thing about the baggy feeder is that it is really a one-use feeder and can be a bit messy. I’m changing my hives over to inverted mason jars with punctured lids for feeders. Those are easily swapped out and will last for decades. There are many other feeders out there – frame feeders, hive top plastic feeders, entrance feeders. They all work but have their plusses and minuses. I’ll report later about how my mason jar feeders work.
Enjoy,
Matt
Read all of Matt’s Inside the Hive Posts here
Matt (twitter @MattInTheGarden) likes sudoku, minesweeper and the “Ticket to Ride” board game. He’s a huge fan of Ze Frank and enjoys the listening to Dan Carlin’s Common Sense. He’s got a “live and let live” attitude toward life and enjoys a good cheeseburger and baked potato wedges with roasted garlic spread on them. In his spare time he writes software.
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Inside the Hive: Views from a First Year Beekeeper (Scene 5)
How do I start a hive? Good question. I asked this myself and of Eric when we talked on GardenFork Radio and via email. Well, you’re going to need some bees and that is the topic of this particular photo. What I am holding here is called a “bee package” and weighs a bit more than 3 pounds. It is a simple wooden box that has screen tacked onto two sides to provide ventilation to the bees within. On the east coast folks down in Georgia literally shake a few pounds of bees down into a cone that is jammed into the top of this box. If you’ve seen videos of this process, you’ll notice that there are bees everywhere. I can imagine the bees don’t like it all that much, but that’s how it goes in the bee package business. There are thousands of bees in this box and one thing that you’ll notice when picking up the box is that it is warm. Bees generate a fair amount of heat and I could feel their warmth through the thin wood of the package.
They tend to cluster around a queen cage that is hanging down from the top of the box and around a can of sugar syrup that is inverted and rests upon a ledge in the center of the can. You can’t see either of those things in this particular image, but you can see the thin square of wood that is tacked to the top of the package and covers the hole where the syrup can and queen cage are. The majority of the bees stay toward the top of the box though some will move around along the bottom. One point I want to make is that there will be dead bees in the package. I had approximately 1/2″-3/4″ of dead bees in the box after the live ones had vacated it and move into their hive. This is an expected situation, though if you’ve got an inch or more of dead bees you might want to raise some questions about how they were handled, etc. As a recycling guy, I knocked all the dead bees out of the box and into my compost bin, figuring that it was as good a place as any for them, but that’s a story for another day.
At package pickup I wore my beekeeper suit, veil and gloves but it wasn’t really required (though we did have one package break open and there were bees flying about) and my son and I did it mostly because we wanted to break in our suits. The bees can’t sting you through the wood (obviously) and so handling the package with bare hands and no bee suit is fine for transport.
I left my package in the garage for a couple of days until conditions were better for installing them into the hive. As long as the bees are not subjected to the hot sun and have food and water (which they do from the syrup can), they’ll be fine if you must delay a day or so. I had my son spray a little 1:1 sugar water on them – just a spritz – twice a day while they were in the garage. I don’t know that they would have done any worse if he hadn’t sprayed them, but I’m sure they were happy with the sugar water and it made us feel like we were tending to their needs while we waited for the adverse weather to pass.
Enjoy,
Matt
Read all of Matt’s Inside the Hive Posts here
Matt (twitter @MattInTheGarden) makes his living worrying about software efficiency, asynchronous program execution and end-user needs. When he’s not driving the desk, he can be found listening to podcasts like GardenFork Radio while he tends to his hobby farm in Virginia. Matt quite dislikes pickled beets and liver. His miniature Sicilian donkey is unimpressed by Matt’s musical tastes and mostly just wants him to feed her carrots and apples.
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Inside the Hive: Views from a First Year Beekeeper (Scene 4)
This picture is from the installation of hive #2, which is from a nucleus hive, commonly called a “nuc”, from my beekeeping mentor’s bee yard. My mentor has eleven hives and this year had a half dozen nucs as well. Our beekeepers association encourages new beekeepers to buy nucs from local folks. This is a good idea for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that each nucleus hive inspected and sold locally is one less package from out of state that is shipped here. Why is that good? Because the nucleus hive is 4 or 5 frames of fully drawn comb with bees, a queen, brood (eggs, larva, capped brood) and some stores (honey, pollen, etc.) and the bees are already well establish with the queen and don’t have to spend a lot of time and energy drawing out comb before things get moving in the hive. The queen is already mated and laying. These are good things.
My son and I enjoy working the bees together. He’s a fine teenager and a very calm and methodical person around the hives. He exhibits some of the characteristics of a good beekeeper, particularly knowing not to rush. Here he is setting up the hive himself. I mostly just took pictures during this install.
Our hive sits on a hive stand. Mine is painted brown (because I had brown paint) and it gets the hive off the ground and up where it is easier to work. Raising it up provides more ventilation and keeps me from having to bend over so much. Some folks use pallets, cinder blocks, bricks and other things in lieu of a stand like I have. Whatever works. I had the wood, the paint and the time so I built one. I bought some concrete piers to set it on to get the wood off the ground and to raise it up a few more inches. Again, whatever works. The bees won’t care at all.
The first piece of the hive is a “landing board” which provides a place, as the name suggests, for the bees to land when returning to the hive. I built mine but you could purchase one from a number of sources too. Landing boards aren’t absolutely necessary and I would guess that most hives don’t have them, but I liked the idea and had the wood, so I made a pair of them for my hives. The landing board is the slanted piece here directly on the hive stand at the bottom of this picture.
Atop the landing board is the “bottom board” and this one is a screened bottom board, sometimes called an “IPM” or “Integrated Pest Management” board, but I call it a screened bottom board personally. It has a place to slide in a white plastic board for doing mite counts or for covering the screen if you want to make the hive less drafty (e.g., during the blustery wintertime). They also make solid bottom boards which are, as you might guess, solid on the bottom rather than screened. Don’t buy these. The screened bottom board is far superior for a number of reasons, not the least of which is ventilation. The “screen” is actually 1/8″ hardware cloth that is tacked in place and is both more durable than actual screen and also of a size that allows pests like the Varoa mite to fall through and onto the ground. Varoa mites literally suck the life out of your honeybees. You’ll probably have them in your hive – most hives have them – but an infestation of them can kill the hive . We’ll talk more in the future about things you can do to combat Varoa.
If you look closely at the picture, about two inches back from the front of the bottom board is a small board that sits across the front of the hive. This is an “entrance reducer” and it gives the bees a little help defending the hive. We’ve got it positioned with the smaller hole in use while if I flipped it around we could use the larger entrance hole. As the hive gets stronger, the larger hole is preferable to the smaller one since it allows less queuing up of bees going in and out of the hive. The entrance reducer could be removed completely too for a strong hive.
My son is about to place a medium hive body onto the bottom board. It is called a medium based on its height. The length and width of the box is pretty standard but there are a couple of common heights (medium and deep) and a few less common ones. It is called a hive body because it will hold frames where the queen will lay her eggs and where the hive will raise its young. Typically the frames will have some honey and pollen on them but will be mostly filled with brood in some stage of development. You can see in this picture that the frames in the center are covered with bees while the outer ones are not. The outer ones are new frames that were added to the nucleus hive’s five frames to make up the ten frames held in this medium box. Boxes are sized to hold either 8 or 10 frames. The narrower 8-frame boxes are lighter and may be a good choice for those not wishing to pick up so much weight – and the boxes do get heavy. Something to keep in mind.
Next up, to the left are the pieces which will be added, in order, to the hive. There is another medium filled with new frames, which they will use for brood. We put this on right away though we could have waited a week or so for them to draw out comb on the new frames in the bottom box. I may need to make some frame adjustments during my next hive inspection to encourage them to draw out come on the outer frames. Bees tend to move upward. Life was going to be busy for a couple of weeks after this hive install so I opted to put the second box on right away. We will see how things look when we open up the hive for our next inspection.
Then, under the medium is an empty deep. I used this out of convenience as a “shim” piece to make space for the baggy feeders. It is really overkill for a baggy feeder (since the baggies aren’t that tall) but it was handy. Later on, it was pulled out and replaced with a medium so I could put it to use in hive #1, which uses deeps rather than mediums for the brood boxes. I’m currently using baggy feeders in one of the hives (baggy feeders are just zip-top bags filled with a 1:1 sugar syrup that have a slit in the side where the bees can access the syrup) and trying an inverted mason jar with some small holes punched in the lid on the other. I’ll probably move away from the baggies as they are a bit messy and are a “one time use” feeder.
Below the deep is the “inner cover”, which has a large hole in the center of it (not visible in the picture) and a notched opening. Inner covers are used for a number of reasons, but in this hive it is place atop that shim piece and provides an exit point at the top of the hive. I added a second hole in the inner cover and covered the hole with screen to improve ventilation. Ventilation is really important in the hive as it helps the bees regulate the temperature and humidity properly.
The “telescoping outer cover” is next and it’s job is to top off the hive and keep the weather out. It is “telescoping” because it is a bit bigger than the inner cover and boxes so it can slide forward a bit and expose that opening in the inner cover. It is covered with metal (which I’ve painted to hopefully keep it a little cooler) and as you can see on the upper left part of the picture, I use a brick on top of it to help keep it in place. If it is really hot (such as it gets here in Virginia in August) I might prop open the top of the hive during the day to help with the heat. More on that in a future post.
That’s probably enough for this image.
Enjoy,
Matt
Read all of Matt’s Inside the Hive Posts here
Matt (twitter @MattInTheGarden) thinks, clicks and types for a living. He has an unending backlog of farm chores. He recycles everything he can and has three full compost bins made from free pallets whose contents are in various stages of decomposition. Matt likes strawberry jam and the puzzles of Professor Dennis Shasha.
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Inside the Hive: Views from a First Year Beekeeper (Scene 3)
This block of wood that has been drilled out and covered with some screen is called a “queen cage” and holds, as you might suspect, a honeybee queen. There are other styles of queen cages but this is a pretty common one. The process of producing bee packages involves literally shaking worker bees into a screened box approximately the size of a shoebox and then sticking a queen cage in the box. The bees in the box don’t know this queen and might not know each other either. The queen cage is suspended in the package box next to a can of sugar syrup and is held in place by the metal disk that you can see in this picture. Each end of the cage has a hole with a cork in it and one third of the cage is taken up by a piece of candy, something the consistency of a stiff marshmallow.
Along with the queen bee are some “attendant” bees who have been with her and know her. They keep her company and, like in the hive, attend to her needs. When the package is installed, the queen cage is removed and placed in the hive. There are a number of ways folks do this – some wedge it down between the frames. I stuck mine screen-side down between two frames. The important thing to remember is that the cork on the candy side needs to be removed if the queen is to be released.
The cage keeps the bees from killing the queen before she has had time to convince them that everything is cool and that she’s the queen of the hive. Remember – these bees were all shaken together into a box and have spent some amont of time traveling to their destination. Things are a bit messed up in their world and, like all honeybees, they thrive in an ordered world and really don’t like it when their world is upended by humans shaking them into some box and shipping them to some far off land. The queen produces pheromones and generally speaking these will convince the workers that things are looking up in their world. Occasionally they will kill the queen anyway, but this isn’t typically the case. It takes some time for the attendants to eat the candy from the inside out and the bees in the hive to eat from the outside in. And, like the Apollo-Soyuz, they do a meet and greet in the middle. By the time this has happened, the queen is accepted and everyone begins to do their jobs – making wax, foraging, laying eggs, etc. Pheromones keep the hive humming along and are one of the ways that the bees communicate with one another.
Enjoy,
Matt
Read all of Matt’s Inside the Hive Posts here
Matt (twitter @MattInTheGarden) has a head full of questions. He likes the simplicity of the metric system and wishes the USA would just take the plunge and switch over already. He couldn’t care less about what celebrity X is currently up to and can’t understand why anyone would spend money on magazines like People. He favors the crayon color Raw Umber, introduced in 1958 by Crayola.
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Inside the Hive: Views from a First Year Beekeeper (Scene 2)
My second image is a close-up of brood on a frame of wired wax foundation from hive #1. The bees in hive #1 had a lot of work to do as they came from a package brought from Georgia, installed about one month prior to this picture. I had installed a box of ten deep frames in that hive and the bees went through a lot of sugar syrup over the month and drew out a lot of comb on those frames.
Visible in this picture are a bunch of busy workers tending to this frame of brood. The yellow capped cells have bees in their pupa stage (remember from school the idea of egg-larva-pupa-adult?) and below those capped cells are cells with larva in them of various sizes. Note how large the larva is near the lower left corner of the picture as compared to the larva in the center there. These cells are all “worker” sized cells and will eventually be female workers like the adult ones visible in the picture.
Enjoy,
Matt
Read all of Matt’s Inside the Hive Posts here
Matt (twitter @MattInTheGarden) is growing Asian cucumbers in his garden this year, tired of the reliable but uninspiring “Straight 8” variety. In a former life he sold computer and game system games in a mall and now can’t stand shopping in malls. He finds the Vicar of Dibley amusing.
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Inside the Hive: Views from a First Year Beekeeper (Scene 1)
As a first year beekeeper, everything is new and exciting and, quite frankly, I find myself yammering on to anyone who will listen about the comings and goings around my bee yard. My intention is to capture images from in and around my hives this year and post them here for others to enjoy. I’m neither a great photographer nor a bee expert so I hope that we can exchange some tips, ideas and knowledge along the way.
My first image is a close-up of newly drawn comb on a frame of wired wax foundation. This particular frame was installed a week earlier than this photo was taken and that itself is a testament to the industrious nature of the worker bees. All those cells you see in the picture (and those on four other frames) were created in seven days. In a week, the bees created a lot of wax and sculpted it into the comb you see here. Fascinating, huh? Nearly uniform in size and shape, this comb is the result of chemical processes within the bee’s body to convert food (such as honey or sugar water) into wax and then a physical manipulation of that wax.
I wanted to point out a couple of things from this particular image that I think are noteworthy. First, the orange-brown globs in the cells are pollen. The foraging bees collect this and bring it back to the hive in their “pollen baskets”, which are located on their hind legs.
Also you’ll notice a variety of coloration on these bees. These bees are from hive #2, which is from an established nucleus hive I purchased from my beekeeping mentor. Unlike the Italians in hive #1, which were from a package and are of more uniform coloration, the bees in this hive are bright orange, and yellow and grayish and dull yellow. The queen has mated with a number of drones and since they all have slightly different “bits” flipped in their DNA and pass a bit of that along, you get variation, which is a very good thing. I like my “mutt” bees in hive #2 and think it is interesting to examine the slight differences among them.
Enjoy,
Matt
Read all of Matt’s Inside the Hive Posts here
Matt (twitter @MattInTheGarden) slings code by day and plays the role of handyman on his family’s hobby farm in Virginia. He makes his own Greek yogurt and enjoys time with his family. He is horrifically bad at the banjo, a mediocre juggler and can make a pretty good omelet. His black lab mix thinks he’s pretty nifty too.
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Power Tool FAQ GF Radio
Power tool questions answered here, Tracy joins Eric to ask about the torque settings on her cordless drill, what are those numbers on the ring near the chuck? Tracy declines Eric’s offer to answer more of life’s deeper questions though.
Move on to grounded and not grounded power outlets in your house, can i replace the outlets that don’t have a ground plug with a grounded outlet? why or why not? Again, Eric provides the answers to this and a few more of tracy’s questions.
Have a question? ask us on GF Radio.
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Workshop Bench from recycled Kitchen Cabinets & Counter RWG Video
Recycling old kitchen cabinets into a new workshop bench on this Real World Green show. Upcycling or repurposing kitchen cabinets that would have been thrown out, we make these into an upcycled garage or basement workshop bench and storage cabinets. This how to re-use kitchen cabinets video shows one way to recycle construction materials, or materials from deconstruction of a kitchen renovation.
These kitchen cabinets are from my parent’s house and we made them into a work bench for my sister’s basement workshop. There are all sorts of ways to re-use kitchen cabinets, they make great storage units in your basement or garage, and if you don’t like the color, you can clean them with a grease cutting cleanser, sand them lightly, then paint them. Use a foam roller for best results when painting kitchen cabinets.
When deconstructing a kitchen with the plan to re-use the old cabinets, be careful when removing the cabinets. Many times they are screwed in without the thought of someone wanting to re-use them with lots of screws. Kitchen counterops are usually screwed in from underneath, but there may be construction adhesive holding them in as well. Use a pry bar, aka wonder bar, and gently wedge it between the lower cabinet and the countertop.
How have you re- used kitchen cabinets? What ideas do you have to put cabinets and counters to a second use?
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Workshop Organization is not genetic
While visiting my family I am always in the workshop fixing something. My dad’s workshop is like mine, semi-managed chaos. There are many projects scattered in various stages of completion, some have been there a few years. There are bits and parts of things you can’t bear to throw away, thinking you might be able to use them for something one day. There are still things in dad’s workshop from when I was a kid, a pair of garden tractor tires for some sort of cart we have yet to build, but those tires will be good for something.
Then there is my sister’s workshop. Immaculate and organized, one project at a time on the workbench, which is a recycled kitchen countertop and cabinets. [ we made a Real World Green video about making this work bench here ] The shelves have nails and screws in plastic storage bins with the actual screw length information present. The screw gun’s batteries fully charged, tools on the pegboard.
Sister's workshop I still struggle with organization. I’m close to hiring someone to come in and organize the place. The trick is to keep it that way. Its hard to part with stuff that may have a use some day. The anxiety of knowing that a year from now I will need those small ikea counter brackets left over from a job to hold together some wood frame i’m building, but I already have a ton of brackets.
What do you do to deal with the workshop chaos? Are you the organizer or the keeper of stuff?
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Compost Tumbler DIY Composter
I saw this simple compost tumbler made out of recycled materials at a gardening display at the St Louis airport. This easy compost maker is made of 2x4s and a used barrel. Wondering how to make compost? This barrel composter makes it easy.
Compost piles need to be turned and aerated, compost that sits in compost bin needs to be turned upside down, basically. This compost tumbler does that for you, so you don’t have to break your back bending a lot. The limitation is the size of the barrel, but i’m thinking this would be a great kitchen composter. It would be even better to have two of these composters in the yard, fill up one, and just turn it every few days to allow it to cook down, and use the other one for your fresh compost materials.
I’ve found it helpful to use some compost ‘starter’ in a new compost bin. All this is is some finished compost from one of your other bins, just throw a shovel full into the newest material to jump start the composting process. Fresh manure also works well as a compost starter, be sure to let the manure cool down before using that compost in the garden.
This barrel composter uses a few pieces of pipe to attach the barrel to the stand, but other than that, I bet you could get all the materials out of a dumpster.
Have a barrel composter? let us know how it works for you, maybe share a picture?
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Bee Swarm Capture Video – GF Video
Honey bee swarm capture, or bees swarm rescue, or hiving a swarm caught on video. Capturing a honeybee swarm is a neat experience. Bees swarm in the spring, and then they move to a tree limb to start looking for a new home. This is when we can capture the swarm.
This honeybee swarm was in Carroll Gardens Brooklyn, where there are a lot of urban beekeepers. In the spring the honeybees swarm, half of the bees leave the hive with the queen to form a new colony in a hollow tree, ideally. The swarm bees will cluster on a tree limb while their scouts fly out and look for a new home.
Beekeepers can take advantage of this cluster to create a new beehive. The bees are very docile while they are swarming, they have no hive to defend, so they are not out to sting you.
Luckily, these bees here on a low hanging limb that i was able to get to with a ladder. You take a bucket, place it below the swarm, and thump the branch on the bucket so the bees drop into the bucket.
Next time i should have a helmet cam on, it was a very cool thing to watch. This video shows the view from down on the ground. It was neat, to say the least. What is key here is I had an empty hive on standby for a swarm call like this.
You can also drop the bees into a cardboard box that has large vent holes covered with screening. The bees NEED lots of air or they will overheat.
We leave the swarm box on the ground for several hours to let all the bees fly into the box, ideally you will move the box in the evening, when its cooler and the bees are calmer.
Check out some nice photos of a swarm capture by Phillipe here.
In Brooklyn, honeybee swarms have become a regular occurrence, and people will walk right by without even looking sometimes. Check out all of our how to raise honeybee videos here
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Simple Rain Barrel Plans
Neat rain barrel DIY system here using recycled materials from our neighbor Priscilla. She had two large water tanks that were not being used, placed on on top of the other, directed the rain water in to the tanks with a piece of leftover rain gutter. You could do the same thing with a rain barrel.
rainwater collection DIY system The tanks holding the rain water are slightly higher than the vegetable garden, and attached to the bottom of each tank is a spigot. Attach a garden hose to either tank and you have a gravity fed soaker hose system.
Watch these soaker hose drip irrigation videos:
DIY Soaker Hose Drip Irrigation for a Vegetable Garden
Soaker Hose Drip Irrigation for Rooftop Container Garden
I imagine one of our math enabled contributors, maybe Rick or Mike, could figure out how much water rains down on a particular roof during a rainstorm of x inches, and then we would know how much water this can collect. But rainwater collection math is beyond me.
One thing to watch out for with this kind of large open system is mosquito breeding, you can buy these small discs that float in the water and take care of the mosquito eggs, covering such a large tank with screening might be impractical.
Are there other was to keep mosquitoes at bay? What other ways could you improve this rainwater collection system?
Let us know your thoughts below:
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Combining Hives – Beekeeping How-To
Last week I discovered one of our honeybee hives had lost its queen, we had a drone laying worker in the hive. A laying worker is a worker bee who, after the queen of the hive dies for some reason, starts to lay eggs in the hive. The eggs of a worker bee are unfertilized, so they are all drones. Learn about a drone laying worker hive in this GF Post.
Newspaper placed over top super of strong hive There are few remedies for a laying worker hive. One is to combine the hive with a stronger queenright hive. This laying worker hive was very weak, and its population low, so we decided to combine the hive with a stronger one next to it.
To combine two beehives, first you want to get as many of the bees in the weak hive into one super. I did this by smoking the bees down into the lower brood super. The remaining few honeybees in the upper supers I brushed into the bottom super.
Super from weak hive is placed over newspaper Then open the top of the strong hive you are going to combine the weak hive with. Place a sheet of newspaper across the top super of the strong hive, and cut a few slits in the paper with a knife or hive tool.
Place the super of bees from the weak hive on top of this newspaper, put a notched inner cover on top of the weak super and then the outer cover of the hive, and leave it alone for a week. Be sure the super being added has the upper entrance a notched inner cover provides.
Combined Hive. Strapping is part of our bear defense plan The newspaper allows the new worker bees to get acclimated to the strong hive’s queen scent, and allow the strong hive to slowly accept the new worker bees. The bees will slowly open up the newspaper sheet, and in the process, accept the new worker bees. After a week you can remove any remaining newspaper.
Let us know any suggestions or comments below. How do you combine hives?
Remains of weak hive on left, strong hive on right -
Lawnmower Tune Up and Oil Change Tips
Time for the lawn mower tune up. I pulled the lawnowers out of the garage today, ready to change the oil and do a tune up on both mowers. We have several how to tune up a lawn mower videos on GardenFork ( links are below ), here are some photos and tune up tips as a refresher.
Lawnmower Oil Change and Tune Tips:
- Change the lawnmower oil at least once a season
- Replace the Air Filter every year, more if its a dusty environment
- Change the spark plug each summer
- Sharpen the mower blades when the grass cutting suffers
- Remove debris from under mower deck after each use
Add and Drain mower oil here. The Lawnmower Oil Change is crucial to the mower engine. The oil lubricates and cools the engine, and the oil slowly breaks down and loses it ability to do this over time. If you use your lawnmower more than the average person, consider changing the oil more than once season. I change the oil in the mowers twice a season – i’m a firm believer in the idea that regular oil changes prolong the life of your lawnmower. Most mowers drain the oil through the same tube where you add oil.
Always recycle your waste oil, bring it to a car repair shop or oil change shop. Some towns offer used oil recycling.
Make sure the gas cap is tight first. Replacing the air filter is something many people don’t do, but it should be changed or cleaned when you change the oil. Air filters are not that expensive, and easy to change out. We show you how in our How To Tuneup Your Lawnmower video here.
Use a spark plug wrench to remove the spark plug If your mower is hard to start, it may be because the spark plug is failing. The spark plug provides the ignition in the engine cylinder, and if its failing or dirty, the engine runs poorly.
Sharpening the lawnmower’s blades is crucial to cutting the grass, dull blades tear the grass leaves. You want the blades of grass to be cut cleanly. Its not rocket science to sharpen mower blades, we show you how in this How to Sharpen Lawn Mower Blades video.
Sharpen blades and clean mower deck Clean out all the cut grass from under the mower deck. This will help the mower last for years. Wet grass clinging to the underside of the mower allows the deck of the mower to rust out prematurely. It only takes a few minutes to scrape the underside of the mower, put the clumps of removed grass in your compost pile.
Watch our Lawnmower Repair Videos:
How to change the oil and tune up your lawnmower
How to sharpen lawn mower blades.
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Foraging: Garlic Mustard & Nettle Pesto Recipe : GF Video
Foraging was on our minds this weekend, seeing some edible wild plants in our yard, after listening to this NPR story on eating and cooking wild foods like edible Garlic Mustard and Nettles.
Yes, you can eat nettles, despite the fact that the stems of the nettle plant have tiny barbs that sting if you grab Nettles without gloves. The secret is blanching before eating the nettles.
Garlic Mustard is an edible wild green, its leaves have hint of Garlic taste, though the mustard leaf taste is more prominent. Garlic Mustard is a non-native invasive plant that crowds out woodland native flowers like trilliums, bloodroot, etc. When harvesting Garlic Mustard, be sure to remove the entire root base, so it doesn’t grow back.
Our Wild Edible Plant Pesto Recipe made with Stinging Nettles and Garlic Mustard is inspired by an NPR interview of Leah Lizarondo whose food blog is Brazen Kitchen. A big thank you to Larkin Page-Jacobs of NPR and Leah.
Please tell us about your foraging recipes and tips below the recipe, thanks.
Foraging Videos & Edible Plant Identification:
Here are other plant identification foraging videos we have done:
Dandelion, How to find, forage, and cook Dandelion Video
Lambsquarter, Foraging and Cooking Lambsquarter VideoClick for photos of Garlic Mustard and Stinging Nettles for plant identification.
Garlic Mustard & Nettle Pesto RecipeRecipe Type: pestoAuthor:Prep time:Cook time:Total time:Serves: 2 cupsA simple pesto recipe made from foraged edible plants, Garlic Mustard, Stinging Nettles and DandelionIngredients- 1 cup Blanched Nettles
- 3 cups Garlic Mustard Leaves
- 1 cup Parmesan or Romano cheese, grated
- 1 cup Extra Virgin Olive Oil
- 1 cup Dandelion Leaves ( optional )
- 1/2 lemon
- 1 tablespoon lemon zest
- 1 cup toasted walnuts
- 2 medium cloves garlic
Instructions- Wash all greens in a salad spinner – wear gloves when handling stinging nettles.
- Take 2 large handfuls of nettles – wear gloves! and blanch in boiling water for 5 minutes, drain in a colander.
- Grate 1 cup of cheese using the large holes on a box grater, don\\\\\\\’t buy the pre-grated cheese, it tastes awful.
- Toast the walnuts in a fry pan on the stove, keep an eye on them, the burn easily.
- Place the greens, walnuts, cheese, garlic in a food processor, pour olive oil over the ingredients in the food processor.
- Add lemon zest and the juice from half a lemon.
- Turn on the food processor and watch the fun, you want the greens to become a roughly chopped paste, but not turn to mush.
- Serve this over pasta ( whole wheat pasta goes well with these flavors ) or in white bean soup, or on bread, its great.
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Garlic Mustard Plant Identification & Foraging : GF Video
Garlic Mustard is an edible wild plant food. Here is video on how to cook garlic mustard, we made a great pesto recipe. You can forage for the leaves, but you can also eat the flowers and the seeds.
Other names for Garlic Mustard are Jack-by-the-hedge, Poor Man’s Mustard, Garlic Root, Hedge Garlic, Jack-in-the-bush, Penny Hedge, Sauce-alone.
This wild mustard is a non-native invasive plant, its just plain bad to have it growing in North America. It takes over the growing areas of trilliums, bloodroot, and other slow growing woodland and hedgerow plants, taking up sunlight, nutrients, water. Deer do not eat Garlic Mustard, btw. When you harvest it, be sure to remove the entire plant, including the roots. I bring along a garden trowel or forked digging tool to remove the whole plant and roots.The plant is a biennial, it grows over 2 years, the first year the plant is a low to the ground rosette, the second year the plant grows up and flowers. The leaves are spade shaped with ridges and about 2″ across. After the plant flowers, the seed heads are upright, they look like small string bean pods, about 2″ high and green. You want to remove the plants before they go to seed, as spreading the seed is a bad thing.
So until we eradicate this mustard green from North America, lets enjoy as what I call ‘free food’. In other words, yet another plant we call a weed yet is actually a nutritious plant that should land on our table. According to Wikipedia, mustard plants in general are a rich source of vitamins A, C, & K. I didn’t really think about the vitamin value, I just think its always good to have more greens in your diet. Maybe we can add this to some sort of power smoothie? What do you think? Let me know below.
