An Experiment in Making Liquid Fertilizer

We haven't done the chemical fertilizer thing in quite some time.  Generally, we use a multifaceted approach to soil fertility.  We amend lots of compost into the soil, leaves, biochar, organic matter.  Then we use fish emulsion for foliar feeding as well as around the base of the plant.  Prior to planting, we incorporate composted wood chips with composted cow poop and chicken poop into the soil.

I've been looking at other ideas and wanted to do an experiment on a small scale prior to going full-throttle with it.  It has to do with making liquid fertilizer concentrate with things you have not far from the garden.  Weeds!  In my hand below is an assortment of winter grasses.  I got a sling blade and chopped a 5 gallon bucket full of weeds.  Weeds have everything you need to get started.

The next thing you need is leaf mold.  Leaf mold can be found in the moist forest floor.  I didn't even need to go to the woods.  I dug into the wood chip pile that is decomposing and found plenty of it.  Leaf mold contains mycelium.  Mycelium are the white thread-like fungi that are working behind the scenes to turn wood and leaves into topsoil.  In addition to your 5 gallon bucket of weeds, add a handful of leaf mold.

Put both the weeds and leaf mold into a bucket.

Fill the bucket with rain water.

Snap the lid on the bucket securely and set the bucket in your garden in full sun.

Leave for several weeks and let it "cook."  Then use the liquid to fertilize your plants.  I'm told that you must dilute it, starting off weak so as not to burn your plants.  We'll update you in a few weeks when we pop the top off.  I'm told this stuff stinks to high heaven, so we were warned not to get it on your clothes.  Maybe this will be done by the time we need to fertilize the cucumbers you see behind the bucket.

Double for Your Trouble

Eggs.  Everyone is talking about eggs.  The price of eggs in the stores have people wringing their hands.  I heard today that Waffle House has increased their menu prices by $1 per egg.  What is this all about?  Well, last year due to 'bird flu' the government killed millions of egg layers.  Entire flocks were wiped out - regardless if they were infected or not.  How curious!  It seems natural that you would only destroy birds showing symptoms.  Why would you kill the survivors?  They have the antibodies to fight off the bird flu and thus could provide the answers to protection from further bird flu losses.  

We do have losses of our chickens, but not from bird flu.  Many from the #$%*! minks.  One the other day from a possum.  And one last week that had hopped up on a water trough to drink, fell in, and subsequently died of hypothermia.  The rest of the remaining flock is doing well and we're picking up between 12 and 20 eggs a day.

As I picked up eggs, something caught my eye in the nesting box.  It was a big egg.  A gargantuan egg.  Take a look:

I put it in the egg carton and it looked odd and out of place, like a peacock egg.  But we have no more peacocks, since Penelope, the pea hen was struck by a truck and succumbed to her injuries.

Look at how big that thing is!  Those other eggs in the carton are normal sized eggs.

I brought it in and showed Tricia.  I said, "Watch when you break this one.  I bet it is a double-yolk egg."  Sure enough!:

Double yolk eggs are said to bring good luck, but I don't believe in luck.  They occur when a hen releases two yolks in the same shell and is said to happen with a hen that has just started laying or an older hen at the end of her days.  As I watched the double yolk egg sizzle in the skillet, I wondered if you can incubate a double yolk egg.  I discovered that you can, but you shouldn't.  You're better off eating the egg like we did.  If you were able to hatch them, if any survived, they'd be small, undersized, and unhealthy.  We made the right call in eating the double yolk egg.  It was delicious!

A "Twist" of Lime

About a year ago, I collected soil samples from various spots in our pasture as well as in the garden and in the side yard where the potato patch was.  All in all, especially in the garden, the soil tests looked pretty darn good.  I attribute that to composting and soil amendments we've made in the garden.  However, we haven't composted in the pasture obviously and one thing that was low was pH.

A low reading in pH tells you that your soil is acidic.  Here's the thing to know about low pH as it pertains to trying to grow grass or many crops.  It doesn't matter how high your NPK is, all your fertility, everything good in the soil is locked up and the plants cannot use it.  What do you do to rectify this situation?  You must do what you can to raise your soil pH - make it more alkaline.

To do that, you'll want to apply lime to your soil.  I went to our local Helena Chemical office and ordered a ton of pelletized (fast acting) lime.  I borrowed a spreader cart from them and selected a day to broadcast it right before a light rain.  Here is what the pelletized lime looks like.  As opposed to Ag Lime, this will go right to work.

Since Dad has a 4WD truck, he graciously drove his truck to spread the lime in the pasture.

His tire tracks were a little hard to see in the grass, but he tried to line up 5 feet outside of the tracks to ensure an overlapping coverage.  I walked behind him to see that the lime was coming out fine and we were getting it put out.  It is not an exact science, but we were trying to get about 650 pounds to the acre.  My pasture is about 3 acres.

I walked behind the truck for a bit until the bees started buzzing around me.  I don't think they appreciated all the racket, so I got out of the way.

Once he finished, Dad dressed the corners and then entered the "bull pen."  It's a smaller pasture where we segregate the bull because, well, he's trouble.  This pasture is narrow and it was still a little wet.  I was a bit concerned that Dad would bog down, but his truck did a good job.  There's only one little spot where it was wet and his tire spun.

We got all the lime put out and returned the spreader cart.  The very next day we got a nice, slow, soaking rainfall of 0.9 inches and the following day, we got 0.9 inches again.  Not enough to cause run off, but enough to dissolve the pellets and send into the soil.  Now we'll patiently wait to see if the lime releases the NPK that was tied up to allow the grass to grow in the pasture.

Moving the Chicks Out to Grass

When the 16 chicks hatched out of our incubator, as soon as they were dried off, we moved them out into the garage.  We have a makeshift brooder with a heat lamp set up.  I put newspaper on the concrete and then covered it with hay so that the chicks don't make too big a mess.  We always aim to move them out on grass in a natural setting as soon as possible. 

Besides, they share the garage with Ginger, our cat.  She aggressively hunts, recently killing a bird that got trapped in the garage.  I don't want her to eat our chicks.  Tricia did not like that I suggested that Ginger would do such a thing.  I didn't mean to impugn Ginger's character, but I don't trust her, fully, so I loaded up the 16 chicks in a tub.

We're moving the birds out to our chicken tractor that will be the chicks' home until the hens lay their first egg and the cockrels identify themselves as males.  At that point we'll move the hens out to the pasture with the rest of the flock and the roosters into our freezer.

Since it can still get chilly at night, I moved the brooder out and set it up in the chicken tractor along with the heat lamp dangling from a chain to keep the birds warm and toasty.

They seem to really like being on grass.  Their instincts kick in and they began scratching and pecking at grass seeds and grass.  Pretty soon, we'll have an onslaught of beetles.  They are attracted to light and so I catch them and feed them to the birds.  Good protein for them!

The chicks look healthy and alert.  We want them to get a good start.  They will start laying somewhere between 18-24 weeks.

Just this week, for some reason, we've lost 2 chickens to drowning in the water trough and one to predators.  I'm already itching to get the incubator running again to hatch out some more!

Making Splits

We've never done this before on our own.  As relatively new beekeepers we've made our share of mistakes, and we're certain to make more.  We decided to make our own 'walk-away splits' this spring.  A split is where you take a colony of bees, split it, and make two colonies of bees.  It's like compound interest.

Of our four hives we had at the end of last year, we have two left.  One was lost due to wax moths.  The second is a mystery.  Perhaps the queen died?  Perhaps they were a little weak and the cold weather did them in?  Whatever happened, we are told it is a common occurrence.  "If you want a beehive, get two," they say.  Some people lose all their hives, but they catch more swarms and resume.  

Tricia and I put on our suits and unstacked one of the hives we lost.  Here she is cleaning the bottom board.  She'll put that back down as it will serve as the base for one of our splits.

The two remaining hives appeared to be very healthy, and that is a must in order to make splits.  You'll note that we have two deeps with a queen excluder and then medium supers on top.  To make a walkaway split, you simply move one of the deeps and put on top of a bottom board and you're done.  But there's a few things you need to check before doing that.

Despite not feeding our bees, they have plenty of stores of honey in the supers.  This is money in the bank.  Spring has arrived and the bees are bringing in nectar and pollen and will have lots of honey to spare when we pull honey in the summertime!

Capped honey in the supers

Then we got down into the deep boxes.  We used our smoker to calm the bees.  One hive is naturally calm.  The other hive is aggressive and get up in your face.  The first thing you want to see is drones or at least capped drone cells.  The drones are the males and you need males so that when a new queen is made, there will be drones in the area (from your colonies or another) for the virgin queen to mate with.  We went through the boxes and found capped drones.  Good news.  The drone cells are laid on the bottom as their cells are larger and don't fit in the regular foundation.

Now we look for the queen.  In the frame below we found eggs, larvae, and capped brood.  All letting us know that we have a laying queen somewhere.  We flipped the frame over and found her!  Her tail is longer than the others.  She's a little difficult to see, but once you get the hang of it, she kind of stands out.  Good.  So that box with the queen gets moved to a new location.  This is done to fool her into thinking she's swarmed.  That's what we're told, so we did it.

Nurse bees and eggs

The other box must be gone through frame by frame.  The boxes must have at least 3 or 4 frames of eggs and brood and these are positioned in the middle, and then several frames of honey and pollen and drawn comb on the outside.  As long as you have this in both boxes, you should be good.    The box with the queen will continue going as normal (but with half the bees).  Not to worry.  She's laying eggs like crazy and the hive will grow exponentially in size.

The box with no queen...  Well, what happens next is simply amazing.  The bees in the queen-less box will realize there is no queen in about 5 hours.  They will begin to feed royal jelly from a gland in their heads to some larvae and these will make queen cells.  In about 16 days a queen will emerge.  She will get her wits about her and will make her maiden breeding flight where she will fly up to the drone zone and get bred.  She'll return to the hive and begin to lay.

So in the photo below, you'll see that we made two splits.  The bricks on top of the hives denote what's in them.  The bricks laying long-ways (the first and third hives) have a laying queen.  The hives where the bricks are laying cross-ways (the second and fourth hives) have no queen.  We will check both of those boxes in about 3 1/2 weeks to a month.  What we're looking for is eggs.  If we find eggs, we will know that the split was successful.  

You can buy a queen cell and speed up this process, but we opted to let the hive do it themselves.  You lose a little time, but that's okay with us.  Now, we wait...

What happens if the split didn't work?  Well, we'll be disappointed, but we'll stack the boxes on top of the existing healthy hives and we will try to make another split OR we'll try to catch wild swarms in the yard.  We actually got called to go get a swarm in someone's yard last Saturday, but we had company over.  When the company left, we put on our suits and started to go, but the swarm had left!  Oh well.  We'll keep you posted with our first attempt of making splits.

The Mysterious Case of the Missing Electric Fence

I was always a fan of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.  I have a collection of Sherlock Holmes mysteries where the deductive reasoning of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson solve cases that befuddled Scotland Yard.  Sherlock Holmes paid attention to every minute detail in solving cases as he famously said, "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

That leads us to the mystery that we have at Our Maker's Acres Family Farm.  We like to wait until May to mow.  I have a solar powered fence charger, shown below, that charges up a reel of poly wire rope strung on temporary, step-in posts.  I set these paddocks up and run the cows through the yard over roughly a week.  By the time they've made it through the yard in a week, the first paddock has grown up and is ready to be grazed again.

The cows have learned, like Pavlov's dogs, that the sound of the reel unwinding the wire rope means that they will soon have access to fresh, tender White Dutch clover, and they begin to moo loudly, impatiently.  Here they are in all their glory in the first paddock of spring:

At night, I put them back in the permanent pasture, but leave the temporary fencing in place. Yesterday something bizarre caught my eye.  There was no wire hanging between the posts.  I did a double take and walked over to look more closely.  The solar charger was still there, fortunately, but the reel and all the wire was gone!  Of course this photo is before the "Great Fence Heist."  If you look closely, you can see a post near the road and then if you look to the right of that one, you can see a post between the crepe myrtle and the telephone pole.

At this point I'm getting a little angry, thinking, "I can't believe someone stole my fence!  Nothing like that has ever happened before.  I felt violated and began thinking, "It is time to get a Ring doorbell camera and an outside camera as well."  Between the Gallagher fence reel and the wire rope, the value missing is probably somewhere in the neighborhood of $75-$100.  The solar charger is worth more than that.  Why would you leave that?

The solar charger was close to the house.  Perhaps the thief was too chicken to come close to the house with our dog, not to mention that we might (we do) have firearms.  They could have just stood by the road, grabbed the wire rope, attached it to their truck hitch and the wire rope, reel and everything attached would be pulled to the road where they could throw it in the back of their truck and escape.

But when I walked to the road, I noticed a couple of clues that made me re-think my theory.  Namely, the two poles near the road were bent, and there were tire track marks that clearly showed grass mashed down.  Someone had driven off the road, through our fence and bent the poles in the process.

Upon this happening, the fence probably got caught around the suspension of the vehicle and as they motorist regained control, he (or she) unwittingly drove off pulling 350 feet of poly wire, a reel, and several broken poles bouncing behind them.  Tricia and I got in the vehicle and drove due east.  We saw nothing.  We drove due north and due south.  Again nothing.  All would be good if we could've found the reel, but we didn't.

My thinking is that the driver was either impaired or distracted when they hit our fence.  They didn't want to come back and apologize and/or "face the music."  I was hoping that once they got a safe distance away, they would have pulled over, cut the fencing away, and left everything in the ditch somewhere, but no dice.  We couldn't find any evidence.  We could sure use Sherlock or Dr. Watson to help us solve the mystery.

Until then, we'll likely get a camera and install.  We'll still run the cows through the yard.  I do have another reel and more wire rope.  But we'll operate a little smarter and we'll roll up the fencing and put it all in the garage until the following day.  "Fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice, shame on me."  We're just happy that the solar charger came unhooked from the fence.  That would have been a shame to have lost it!

Success & Failure After the Deep Freeze

Prior to the deep freeze that rolled through our area, bringing 10 inches of snow and temperatures in the single digits, we listened to a gentleman at our bee club meeting tell us about a technique he used to save all of his citrus trees from temperatures in the low 20's from the year before.  We've always piled mulch real deep around the base of the trunk.  That didn't work out so well.  We didn't lose the trees, but it hurt them so badly, the next year we had no blooms, thus, no citrus.  We had to prune back all the dead branches.

I was interested in this man's tactics as his trees were loaded with satsumas and oranges where our poor trees were barren.  This guy purchased tarps at tractor supply and covered the entire tree.  Then, he ran extension cords to each tree and put a heat lamp under the tarp.  That's it!  So we endeavored to do likewise.  Note to self:  Purchase tarps in advance of the freeze.  Don't wait until the last minute because the shelves will be bare.  

Let's look at each of our three citrus trees.  We had more, but had lost them in previous freezes.  Here below is a small satsuma tree.  It's only about 3 1/2 feet tall, so what I did was turn a heavy plastic trash can over it and put a heat lamp underneath.  Look at the results.  The heavy trash can did a pretty good job of keeping the heat inside.  The uppermost limbs and leaves are dead, but there is green growth toward the bottom where the heat lamp was positioned.

Looking more closely at the bottom of the satsuma tree, you can see fresh, new, green growth along with LOTS of blossoms.  We WILL have satsumas this fall!

Here is our navel orange tree.  As I told you, it is big.  Too big, in fact, to get the tarp over it and fastened tightly at the bottom.  We did the best we could.  I wonder if it would be beneficial to prune the tree back to ensure the ability for the tarp to completely go over and seal good with bungee cords at the bottom.  We were able to put the heat lamp underneath, but from a distance, the navel orange tree looks bleak.  We may have to chop it down.

Not so fast, my friend.  As you look closer, there is green growth coming out of the central trunk!  That's great news.

Looking closer, you can make out orange blossoms.  What a nice fragrance!  We'll have oranges this winter.

Well, things are looking pretty good.  Let's check in on the tangerine tree.  It had been hurt badly by the previous freeze, so it was smaller.  We wrapped it completely with a tarp and put a heat lamp under the tarp.  Uh Oh!  There's no growth.  This thing is toast.

We'll have no tangerines this fall.  These were so tart and tasty.  Their color was what I describe as "electric orange."  We'll have to buy another to replace this one.  I'll chop this one down.  Things were looking pretty good with our new freeze protection protocol.  However, I try to be a glass half full kind of guy.  And like ol' Meatloaf sang, "Two outta three ain't bad."