Favorite Fruits

We have our first harvest of plums, peaches, and pears this season. One of the four plum trees finally decided to give back, and made a bunch of fruit. Elliott loves eating the fruit straight from the tree

Both peach trees had so much fruit that the branches almost broke. Next year we will need to thin the fruit back.

Only three pears this year... but that is better than nothing.

Ground Hogs again

We have captured two ground hogs so far this year

Alden is very excited about checking the traps every morning and it is part of our ritual to walk through the backyard before breakfast to make sure everything is in order. It feels very New England.

Elliott does not care much for animals and prefers to pull clumps of grass up and eat what he can.

Baby Possum

The critters are back and so the traps are out again. 

We caught a possum the other week and let it go. Then, the next day we caught a baby possum.

Then we caught the baby possum three more times. He is super cute and pretendes to be fierce by showing us his teeth when we come by the trap.

We always let him go and he walks slowly away into the flowers. I like possums because they eat grubs, but baby possum is getting annoying because we are trying to catch the groundhogs and he keeps getting in the way. Alden is especially fond of the baby possum.

Starting the Garden

When we got back from vacation we did an autopsy on the hive that died over winter. 

We found som mold on some dead bees and also some on some patches of wax. There were still some full frames of honey, which leads us to believe that they probably died early in winter. Ilana thinks nosema, I think the there were not enough bees to from a proper bee-ball... Whatever the case it looks like a standard colony loss (no major disease, infestation or animal intrusion) so we can do a hive-split with one of our healthy colonies later this spring and get the beehive back up and running by summer.

I also had the chance to finish pruning the fruit trees, blueberries, and one row of raspberries. I still have two more raspberry rows and the blackberry patch to prune, and then the orchard will be ready for 2013.

I also trimmed some of the trees, including the hemlock next to the garden. The next few days look like cold ones, but next weekend should be good for more outdoor chores.

Oh! Possum

We caught our first opossum today. I don't think they are bad pests, but Alden insisted we name him Julia and take him away. I am thrilled to have a captured a new kind of animal.

I checked online to see how pest-y opossums are... it turns out that they are not too bad. Mostly 'opportunity feeders' (garbage).

Summer Swarm

 The bees did it to us again!

This time it was the Ponyo colony that swarmed (Alden named it after the movie he loves so much). Sometime about two weeks ago Queen Ponyo decided to take half the colony and swarm. We noticed a decline in productivity (bees flying in and out) but were busy doing other things so we didn't check it out. Needless to say we were unable to retrieve the swarm like we did earlier this year with Queen Sally.

Today we opened up the hive and saw some queen cells that were empty... so a new queen hatched and is now (hopefully) running the colony. We could not find the queen so we will have to check back in a few weeks and see if there are babies. If so, this is merely an unfortunate population dip that will hopefully not effect the colony preparing for winter. If there are no babies then there is no queen and the colony is doomed... Maybe we could merge the remaining workers  with another colony, but that is about it. It is too late in the season to re-queen.

2 More Woodchucks, 2 New Skunks

 Varmints in our traps are like Christmas in the summer. Every morning, Alden and I come downstairs to look out the kitchen window and see what we have caught. Since the last reportage, we've caught two groundhogs and two baby skunks.

3 Groundhogs in three days!

The groundhogs just keep on coming! It seems like they are late in arriving this year.

Bee Check

We checked out our bees today. We have been much less vigilant than last year and I think the bees are happier for that. The less we poke around the more work they can get done.

We have four hives now and each colony has its own personality, it is quite fascinating.
Beige hive = extremely hard working but a little cranky
Grey hive = medium hard working and very mellow
Green hive = medium hard working medium mellow
Purple hive = hard working and medium mellow

We were mostly looking for how much honey might be coming our way this year... maybe 40lbs so far. we plan to harvest sometime soon and then do a pest treatment. Mites are supposed to be really bad this year, and even though we have not been keeping track of pest we want to be on the safe side.

So the plan is to harvest what we have in the next week or two, treat for pests, and then put the honey supers back on for a possible second harvest in the fall.

2012 Garden Update

Spring bonfire

We finally got around to taking care of the brush pile from last year. Darrell came by and Scott was up for a visit, which made it a pretty fun activity.

In hindsight, burning stuff in the spring is not as good as burning in the fall. Despite the weather being warm the ground was still frozen and some of the pile was damp and hard to burn.

Alden had a good time helping and playing with Darrell
The fire lasted through the night, although by dusk it was pretty well burned out... not counting the giant stumps that have bee there since 2007 and never burn. I rolled them into the woods and won't try to burn them anymore.

Chestnut Tree Gone

The chestnut tree that has been in a death-spiral since we bought the house has been taken care of. It was really punky so I'm glad we cut it down before it fell and damaged someone or something.

Spring is on the way

The weather is getting warmer and it looks like spring may be on the way.
The bees came out the other week and we were very excited to see they survived the winter. I have been pruning trees and other warmer season stuff.
Here is Alden in the bath, just because.

Playdate at our house

One of Alden's friends came over for a playdate this weekend and we all enjoyed the snow.
We made a snowman and gave him a bark mohawk. Alden's friend thought it should be a snow alien, so we gave it extra arms.

Skunks 4, Woodchucks 3, Racoons 3, neighbor's cat 1

One more skunk catch and an eventful night when we got this lovely couple brings the trap count up to:
Skunks 4
Woodchucks 3
Racoons 3
Neighbor's Cat 1
All but the neighbor's cat were taken to the beach.

The traps have been quiet for awhile and I hope this will be it for the season

3 skunks

Over the past two day we have captured three skunks in our traps, baiting them with catfood or sausages.

On the first day we got a young skunk

On the second day we got one young skunk and one old one.I transported them all away to the beach. I hope now our bees can sleep in peace and not be so cranky.