Bees, Bikes, and Broccoli

Saturday I tended to our bees. We have a top bar hive and they had all 18 of the bars that I had in there full of comb. I added two more bars just last week, and since they already filled them I added four more bars yesterday. I am no bee expert (I recently inherited the hive from my father in-law), but with such a big hive I am starting to feel excited about the production capacity that we'll have.

For those that do not have a bee hive, it is way easier than having any other animal that we have had (including cats, dogs, birds and fish), or any other livestock that we have had (chickens and goats). All I have had to do so far is keep opening up more room for them to build comb in, about once a week. Once the hive is full, all that I'll have to do is harvest the correct amount of honey each week until winter rolls around.

Once winter is here, apparently I need to do some more work to prepare them for winter, but not really that much relative to the amount of work that other animals take.

Either way, I would recommend bees to anyone that is on the fence. They are great.

Our peas are finally producing (we got them out a bit later than the old folk that I talk farm stuff with, so it isn't too surprising that they took a little bit longer than some other people's).

Today we also discovered a rapini broccoli that volunteered. This is a bit of a mystery, since we have never grown broccoli in the front yard before, and none of the mulch that we used was from our back yard. We love all broccoli, so we are going to tend it and hope that it goes native. Having broccoli all over our yard would be a great thing.

Mrs. True has been looking for a while at alternate means of getting around with three kids. One thing that has been useful to her is our bike trailer. She really likes being able to take the kids around on the bike and not only conserve gas money, save the world, and get to where she is going easily, but also she likes not having to buckle five point harnesses on all the kids while bent half over in a minivan.

She recently found a used Madsen Bucket bike for sale, and we decided to get it. It fits all of the kids in it easily, and it drives pretty well. The bike is made using solid construction techniques and handles pretty well considering the fact that you are carrying around 60+ extra pounds in the back. We are considering making it into an electrically powered bike. We will post about that if we decide to do it.

We found a few new mushrooms growing in the yard today. We must have imported them with the compost that all the new gardens are composed of. They are deliquescent (which means that they dissolve into a black inky mess pretty quickly after sprouting up), so I have not tried to identify them, however they are not really growing in that big a quantity either. Next time that one sprouts up I will make sure to take some pictures of it and try to identify it.

I have eaten field mushrooms, and scotch bonnet mushrooms that grew in my yard, and have some other varieties that grow in my yard that I have identified as poisonous. Make sure that you identify any mushroom that you are considering eating before you try it out. Eating random mushrooms will probably kill you.

My go-to identification book is North American Mushrooms: A Field Guide To Edible And Inedible Fungi, which has excellent pictures of all of the mushrooms that it tells about, and is very thorough at explaining the characteristics and pointing out other mushrooms that are similar. My biggest beef with the book is that it uses really long words when shorter ones would do. You will have to memorize the glossary, or you will have to leave a book mark in it.

I would not, however encourage someone to eat mushrooms that they have identified using just one source. A Field Guide to Mushrooms: North America is my second source that I use. I also like the MycoKey, and Roger's Mushrooms websites (both of them provide excellent keys that can help identify mushrooms). Finally, for those who haven't heard the old mushroom hunter's adage "When in doubt, throw it out". Don't eat anything that you are not entirely sure of. Lots of people die every year over bad identifications.

Back to Eden and Mallow

Hello, I am Mr. True. My family and I live on a quarter acre lot in a suburb of Salt Lake City Utah. We are interested in growing, harvesting, and making our own food, providing for our own basic needs through our own efforts, and living in a more healthy, and sustainable way.

This blog will chronicle our efforts, and serve as a repository of the things that we have learned. We hope that it will be enjoyable and helpful to you.

This year we planted a garden in our front yard following the advice of a movie called Back to Eden. We first placed down a layer of cardboard that we got from a local store (decomposed shipping boxes), and then we got a load of horse manure compost from a local horse owner. We put the compost on top of the cardboard and planted seeds deep enough that it was moist. So far we have a lot of green growing, but we haven't seen much fruit yet (it is after all not yet late enough that anything should be producing fruit).

We have, however gotten a few salads out of the leaf crops. My personal favorite is a volunteer crop that grows wild almost everywhere in the world: mallow weed. It started growing near our tomatoes (the stuff sprouted through the compost, and grew so large that we had to eat it to help the tomatoes get more sun.)

We learned that mallow was edible by reading the book The Wild Wisdom of Weeds: 13 Essential Plants for Human Survival, which is a highly recommended book about edible plants that grow virtually everywhere that humans live. We might write a post just about this book some day because we liked it that much.

Mallow is a mild wild green with circularish leaves. It tastes excellent as a salad, cooked, or on sandwiches. Between that and the other "weeds" that we have in our yard I wouldn't expect that we are going to buy much (if any) lettuce this year.

Another favorite volunteer crop that we have is Swiss chard, which we planted a few years ago, and which went native (so we keep getting it back every year).

There is more to say about our garden this year, so next post will probably be in a similar vein.