The Honey Harvest (Part 4)

Once all was said and done we had all our extracted honey loaded in food grade buckets.  We estimate we have 22 gallons or 264 pounds of honey.  For sure we got more than last year.  We'll know the final tally once we go to bottling.  We're adding a step this year.  Dehumidifying the honey.  Honey is honey when it is between 15.5 and 18.6% moisture.  If it is any wetter, you risk fermentation.  We're not producing Meade.  We want honey.  So we are dehumidifying the honey, stirring twice a day and dumping out the water.

In order to properly determine the moisture level of our honey, we purchased a honey refractometer.  It sounds all fancy, but was only $25.

Here's what it looks like out of the box.  Quite an impressive looking piece of equipment.

In order to work it, you put a couple of dots of honey on the glass portion and close the plastic hinged cover.  When you press the cover down, the honey should cover the glass portion completely with no bubbles.  Allow 30 seconds and then hold up to a bright light and look through the eye piece.

I was able to take a photo through the eyepiece.  The Water % scale on the right hand side is what you are looking for.  On this particular day, the honey is about 19.5%.

We will continue the dehumidifying process until we get the moisture % within range.

Preparing For the Spring Garden with... Metal Mulch

Several years ago I watched The Back To Eden Film to learn about a neat gardening technique.  The Back To Eden Gardening method is one that Paul Gautschi tells about in the Back to Eden Film link I provided above.  You can watch an informative free movie that explains it by clicking the link, but essentially, the gardening method seeks to re-create the habitat and environment that naturally occurs in the forest.  (Created by God, of course) 

Ever notice how you don't have to water (or weed) the wild berries that you pick each year?  That's because God takes care of it.  Paul Gautschi explains how to use wood chips and mulch in your garden to preserve moisture in the soil and crowd out weeds.  I don't have a readily accessible source of wood chips, but I've used hay to mulch to pretty much achieve the same effect in our garden. 

This fall, however, with no wood chips and no hay, I've resorted to using another mulching material, not so much to plant crops in, but to prepare the soil for spring planting.  This mulching material is not biodegradable, but it does serve a purpose.  It's "metal mulch!"  Let me explain...

After building our barn, we had a lot of leftover tin, consisting of 3 foot sections of tin that we didn't have a use for.  I'll be the first to admit it's not aesthetically pleasing,but it works.  Below you can see how I'm using it.

I've spread out the tin to be used as a ground covering.  The barrier cover of tin on the ground will crowd out any weeds, smother and kill them, and not allow any sunshine through to allow weed seeds to germinate.

Below is an example of the soil condition you'll find beneath the tin when you pick it up after a few weeks:

See how there are no weeds underneath?  Another bonus is that the soil beneath the metal mulch is moist and arable.  The soil can be easily turned over with a shovel and worked into rows for planting.

The photo above shows the area in the walkway of the garden that we picked up the tin from to place in the center of the garden where we'll be planting onions.  If we didn't have the tin laid out, rhizomes from bermuda grass would have run into the garden and created a situation that would have made preparing the seed beds exceedingly difficult.

Come springtime, we'll compare the area covered with metal mulch to the area that has grown up in winter grass.  It will be evident which method is superior.  Even if you don't have leftover tin to use, you can do this with leaves, wood chips, a tarp, cardboard, newspapers, or any other item to re-create the same situation.