Harvest time!

I don't have any pictures to post this time, been too busy to take them lately.   Besides working and trying to be a part time dad I haven't been good about carrying my camera around with me.  Not that there hasn't been things to take pictures of.  Since my last post I've harvested honey two times, been picking Indian corn and popcorn, digging potatoes, carrots and sweet potatoes, canning salsa, pizza sauce, pickles and my fall duty of teaching has started.

In terms of the farming biz, this year has been great.  Just about everything did very well this year and the corn and pumpkins are looking good.   I still have the last sweet corn and I will probably freeze one more batch of that before the 1st frost kills it all off.   It's really satisfying to have a freezer and shelves full of my own produce that I will eat all winter long.  What truly astounds me is how much I could have if I had the time to weed my garden and pick everything before it spoils.  For example - the green beans were very strong and I froze almost 20 quart bags of them - had I kept picking them I could have frozen 20 more.  The same is true of cucumbers, tomatoes and broccoli.  I guess it's probably OK though since I would need to buy a bigger freezer and put up more shelving to hold everything.  Part of me doesn't feel too bad though either since I am not taking as much from the land by leaving some crop behind.

The honey harvest was exceptional this year (for my third year of keeping bees) from the three hives I kept I have well over 100lbs of honey left over from them.  I had sort of bee-keeping emergency - other than the swarming issues I had earlier this summer.  One hive had so many boxes on top that were getting really full of honey and they actually collapsed the base of hive.  Also some animal, possibly a skunk, had been digging around the base and the whole hive was swaying in the wind.  My dad came up to help extract the frames which we then put back on for most of the month of August.

Labor day is the best time to take all of the honey off to help the bees start preparing for winter and I did just that.  The nearly collapsed hive filled half of their frames with honey again and did most of the work this summer.  The other two hives though were new and typically these don't have extra honey to give.

Next year though things should go along better, the odds are in my favor that at least one of the hives will survive the winter.  Even if I loose two of them the one that survives can be divided and a new colony can be established.  

So the harvest and field work will continue into October and I'll try to take more pictures of things along the way.