Harvest Time, Birds and Bees

The bounty of summer continues to roll along. The past two weekends have been exhausting.

One weekend was spent harvesting honey from our bees. Our one Langstroth hive was the winner, producing nearly 60 pounds of honey. That translates to 5 gallons of honey. Our two Layens hives, which have tended to be bigger producers in the past, struggled this year after we applied mite treatment. It looks like both swarmed this year, which seems a little odd. We have plenty of honey, but I am worried that the two hives may not may it through winter. We have never been able to get a Layens hive through winter, so this may be our last season with this hive style. We let the honey settle for a week, and then filled our jars.

The second weekend, we harvested our meat chickens. This is the first year we have done this, so it was a learning experience. We raised Cornish Crosses, which are the typical meat chicken. They are bred to grow quickly and eat a lot, and ours did both. By 8 weeks they were twice the size of our new laying hens, which were at about 16 weeks. I had built a moveable chicken coop for them, so they could have fresh grass every day. They mostly sat around, and were not as interesting as the laying hens. We would open the tops on the coop to let in more air and light, but after a couple of weeks our free-ranging laying hens discovered they could fly into the coop and eat the food. Not sure what the meat birds thought of this, but hopefully it gave them a little more stimulation. It was another long day, but we processed 11 birds for the freezer. That gives us about a chicken a month for the next year.

Both of these jobs seem to take a lot of equipment. It almost took as long to set up and clean up everything as it did to actually do the work. I still need to melt and clean the wax from the bees, which will be a task this weekend. I made chicken liver pate from a classic Jacques Pepin recipe, which turned out to be one of the best things I have ever eaten.

The garden continues to produce. We are in tomato canning mode right now, and have been eating fresh salsa every day. We also have a lot of peppers, which we have been smoking and drying. September starts soon, so it will be a month's rush to get as much from the garden as we can before pulling it all up.