First Harvest and Bees!

Harvest box, ready to fill

Stephen talking about the choy harvest

Stephen at the weigh and rinse station

Tyson, explaining wash up procedure

How exciting to have our first harvest!  We harvested a Mesclun salad, several kinds of Kale, chard and bok choy.  All of this went to the market in Belmont.

A beautiful day to harvest

Kale, in the box!

Nora, giving the mesclun a haircut!

Betsy and Sophia

Sophia, Washing the choy!

Bees with Jen!

We had a session with Jen Smith on bee hive maintenance.  She showed us how to clean the frames and put in new foundation comb.  Then she took us, half-group at a time, to the hives to see how the new bees and the old bees were doing.  All the hives our group looked at were in  need of feeding--sugar water and/or pollen patties were distributed.  We checked to see each hive had a queen and if she was laying eggs.  Also we checked to see there were brood cells with different ages of brood--newly laid eggs, capped cells, etc.   I took the chance to open up a hive--I thought I ight feel nervous about being stung, but really, I wanted to focus on taking good care of the bees so that occupied my mind.  They move like liquid gold and I felt a deep caring for them.

Jen, teaching us about new foundation

Larva uncovered as we opened the hive

Looking for the queen, for brood cells and for honey

Kiyoshi, pulling out a frame

Not much activity

Jen, concerned for the bees

Justin, cleaning up a frame

Cleaning frames and adding new foundation

Chicken Coop graduation:

Here is a snippet of the Chicken Coop graduation song:

These children are amazing.  I will miss them a lot.  We did little projects together through the year and some of them helped me with chores--weeding, winding up electro-twine, feeding lambs, etc--and they were precious!

Congrats and good luck to the children moving on!

Other fun photos for the week:

Carlen and Kiyoshi discussing the soy beans in the home garden

Red cow with the white heart!

Justin disk-shaping the South Waslaske field (I did the first half of the field
and it was amazing to get sooo much work done in so little time.  No wonder farmers love their tractors

Pride's google-eyed calf

Rebekah and Amour bonding

Pea flowers, grown by Caitlin!

PS  I've been under the weather for the past couple of weeks and now that I've got a clue what I'm dealing with, I hope to be more focused on good blogging!