Hive Number Two

Lighting the smoker to calm the bees.

Beekeeping seems to require two hands, and often you're wearing gloves.  The smoker makes things a bit grimy, and of course what's stickier than honey and propolis?  So I haven't been very good with bee photographs.  But here's a bunch of text about my beehives and a couple photos you might have seen before...

Bee Hive Number One: Carlota soon to be overthrown by Maximiliana

Bee Hive Number Two: Adelaide

Do to the generosity of others I began my beekeeping adventure earlier than expected.  Felipe, a friend of a friend, gave me a hive about 7 weeks ago.  I don't think it's doing well, it seems to be without a queen.  I see bees collecting honey and pollen, but I don't see brood, honeycomb cells filled with baby bees.  I went out of town and checked just before leaving and the hive looked great and I though I saw the Queen.  Two weeks later something had happened and now the hive is in limbo, it is not growing in size but it is also not disappearing.  There is also the possibility that I am wrong and I am hoping I can get someone more experienced to come look at my hives with me.  Good news is that I have ordered a new queen in a group order from the local bee club I have joined.  She arrives on Thursday.

A bee feasting on the nectar of a newly blossomed wild cactus flower.

In the meantime I have begun to look for bees to inhabit my topbar hive.  I have been looking for opportunities in the bee club on-line forum and I have been looking a little bit on craiglist in the same way that I looked for the now seven chickens I have purchased since January!  I came across a post last week for free bees in topbar hive traps, just what I needed!  I drove out with my husband at dusk on Memorial Day, stopping on the way for some Indian Food that had been recommended to me by a student.  The home was on a low ridge top and dense with a secret garden much like my mom's, but bigger.  Roses, lilies, flowers everywhere!  And birdhouses, handmade, painted, unique, different sizes, hundreds of them!  It was amazing.  Hidden in plain sight among the birdouses were swarm traps.  The home lay between different agricultural areas, orchards, and with the 2 acre garden the bees just love to show up to his property.  He had three top bar hives he showed us, beautifully made by hand, located in a clearing under some bigger trees.

The trap he chose for me was located on a low lying roof of an outer building.  He climber up a ladder and closed the door and handed the hive down to Tim who carried it to the car.  We placed it in the trunk, covered it lightly in a sheet, secured it so it wouldn't roll over, and took the fast lane home.  At home we locked up the dogs and carried the trap up to its location on the roof.  When we opened the door there was a loud buzz and a bunch of bees came out and we scampered down into the house and shut the door behind us!

Topbar hives allow bees to build there waxcomb in a more natural way than standard box hives.

The next day at noon when the sun had come out I smoked the trap and transferred the 8 topbars from the trap into my topbar hive.  I left three empty bars at the front of the hive to promote the creation of brood comb at the front of the hive, I then put the eight bars in order from front to back with three more empty bars behind and then the false wall.  There was only room behind the false wall for about 5 bars and I could see that the other guys topbar hives were several inches longer, maybe 6 more bars.

Well if you've made it through this far, thank you so much and let me know if you have any questions or if you are a neighbor and would like to participate in a hive inspection.

A favorite flower of the bee and its namesake, the hummingbird sage.

For Sale!

I have been so busy in my kitchen since my return from Esalen.  I just can't stop making cheese, I've made three batches of goat cheese so far and one of feta.  Soon I'll try camembert!  Bread making has also been an almost daily occurrence, though I'm not having very much luck with my sourdough rising and have been more successful with a little sourdough starter for taste but a packet of dry active yeast to make sure my bread isn't a brick.  So if you live in San Diego, and especially if you live in La Jolla, I've got some goodness to share at a price that will help me purchase more gallons of organic milk and 5 pound bags of organic flour.  If you are interested in trying some of my delicacies send me a message at robinoleata@mac.com, I'm sure you won't be disappointed!  Some of these items are available immediately, but most will be made to order so expect 2-6 days wait.

Goat Cheese, plain $12, herb $14 and honey $18.  This is for a crottin shaped round of cheese weighing about 6 ounces.

Feta Cheese cubed and submerged in olive oil and herbs.  Small jar, about 5 ounces for $10.

Kombucha, ginger lemon, cactus fruit, and other flavor available by request.  $5 for a 10 ounce bottle or 5 bottles for $20.

Fresh Pasta $10 for two servings or $18 for four servings.

Goat cheese ravioli, $20 for two servings and $35 for four servings.

Bread $6 loaf for plain and $8 loaf for flavored. Lots of success with a wheat and white blend with kalamata olives and my feta cheese in the bread!

Other options, I can cook for you in my home or yours...help with a party...give you a lesson...

Flor de Calabaza

Squash have been a recent trender at the farmers market, especially when you go early like I do and can get them home and into the fridge while they are still vibrant.  First I found a conventional farmer, which I usaually avoid, but for this specialty item I broke down and have purchased a few times now these beautiful squash blossoms with the baby squash still attached.  I have stuffed them and baked them, once layered between scalloped potatoes and stuffed with crab!  I have sautéed them like a stir-fry with other vegetables, I have stuffed them with cheese and battered and fried them chile relleno style, and made them traditional mexican style in a soup: sopa de flor de calabaza.

This last week one of the certified organic vendors had these squash blossoms without the baby squash.  I stuffed them with a little grass-fed cheese and then beat together one of my home-raised chicken eggs with a little buttermilk and drizzled that on top and baked the stuffed flowers.  The buttermilk and egg mixture turned into the most delicious, pale-hellos, creamy, souffle-like substance.  Delicate and Dreamy!  I served them up with toasty flour tortillas, white rice and green salad.

Pizza for Dinner

These photos are from a few months back, home made pizza crust topped with tomato sauce, a little sausage, kalamata olives, onion, goat cheese and fresh basil

Fermentation of Veggies at Esalen

A few months ago I was at church, and by church I mean I was driving home from my noon corporate yoga gig in my 2011 black Prius, listening to Terry Gross interview someone on Fresh Air.  That interview is my connection to source, my lecture on humanity, my rebirth in faith of my fellow wo/man.  On this particular day I was listening to Terry interview Sandor Ellix Katz on his new book The Art of Fermentation. It was actually an interview she extended over two days covering topics such as beer, kraut, pickles and yogurt.  It was a beautiful seed that would sit in my mind for the winter.  

Fermentation was really the thread that brought the different aspects of my Esalen course together.  Bees add an enzyme to nectar and transform it to honey.  Yeasts break down the coatings on grains and emit carbon dioxide causing the bread to rise.  In cheese we carefully manage the curdling and spoiling of milk to perfect parameters that make it healthy, lasting and tasty.  

For vegetable preservation we add salt, extracting the water from the vegetable and promoting the growth of inhibiting breakdown by submerging in its juices creating an anaerobic environment.  In all of these situations we are carefully managing the "spoiling" process to promote the growth of one organism and inhibit the growth of others.  Anyway, after I left Esalen and went on a pilgrimage to restaurants in the Carmel/Monterrey/Big Sur area looking for products from Charlie's Farm.  I discovered a shop/school/cafe called Happy Girl Kitchen.  They were making this particular dream real with kombucha kits in the fridge, a fermented beet drink for sale on the counters, a whole group of ladies taking a course in the community kitchen.  There I found Katz's bible of a book on fermentation and spent the $40 to add it to my growing library of homestead information.

Charlie brought us produce from his hilltop farm,  kale and cabbage.  I was fascinated by his bags, hadn't seen these before.

Interesting equipment I had not seen before, pickle presses!

Organic cabbage from Charlie's Farm

Liam mentioned a few cutting techniques I used immediately at a shift in the kitchen

Loading the cabbage up into the press with lots of squeezing and sprinkling of salt.

Here's some cucumbers submerged in their juices after about a day and a half.

Here's the cabbage and carrots after a day and a half, no water added, juiced there own extruded juices.

We sampled our cabbage and cucumebers after 3 days, but really they need 6-12 weeks to cure.

This product isn't fermented, but we used a dehydrator to make some kale chips and also some fruit leathers I forgot to photograph.

When I left for Esalen I had a big jar full of apple skins and cores that I had submerged in water in the attempts to make apple cider vinegar.  Well, as many other things were melting down at this time, the sweet mash had become infiltrated with small flies and I could see little magot larvae swimming in the juice...into the composter!  I have recently begun this project again, having asked my teacher Liam for advice.  I am using a jug with a small opening so I can push the plles down and force them under the liquid.  We'll see!  Takes two months to complete the process.  I also recently began a batch of sauerkraut in the way taught to me by Liam, it also takes about two months to finish.

Recent Deliciousness

I have been so inspired in the kitchen since my return from Esalen.  The food they serve there is excellent, healthy, varied and with the new skills from the course I was taking there I have been creating some healthy yet decadent selections.  I have been sticking to my no-nightshade diet but have become a bit more indulgent with high quality cheese and bread.

Mushroom crostini with manchego cheese

Carmelized onion and mushroom on polenta with spinach, sunflower sprouts in my salad!

Chard from my mom's garden and olives from Charlie's Farm

Nicoise salad with quail egg.  Mushroom crostini and cooked carrots

Sure, there's a lot of repetition here, but it's repetition of yumminess.  Is started with a loaf of sourdough we bought at the Big Sur Bakery, it was begging to be made into crostini.  And after slicing a big box of mushrooms for an hour at the Esalen Kitchen, that has become a theme through my food lately!

Bringing home my two sourdough "mothers"

At Esalen I learned to make sourdough bread, something I had been thinking of for a few years now.  Like my kombucha, the sourdough "mothers" are living cultures of wild yeast.  They must be cared for by feeding them a diet of flour and water and making them useful by separating out portions often to bake into lovely bread.  I think I've baked about 6 loafs since I've returned!  One starter is for rye bread and one is for white bread, although the possibilities expand from there.

Here's my first ever loaf of sourdough!

It sliced up lovely!

The first loaf of Rye, crusty!

His and Hers Morning Toast

Rye Bread topped with my own fresh goat cheese, honey from Charlie's Farm and Bee Pollen.

Beautiful Breakfast with my love!

I've begun to get these beautiful eggs from my chicken, Madame Chocolate.

Here are two beauties that I served at a dinner party with sausage and gourmet mustard.

Maria soup goes great with Sourdough!

Transforming milk into cheese, it's magic!

The other major lesson from my course that I wanted to get busy with right away was the making of cheese.  I found a local cheese production supplier called Curds and Wine and invested in some molds, some cultures and some cheesecloth.  I started with the easiest and quickest cheese, chèvre, or goat cheese.  I started with one gallon of goats milk from Trader Joe's and heated it to 86 degrees and then added two types of cultures as well as rennet.  Then I let the milk sit about 18 hours until the curds formed a mass and separated form the whey.  Then I cut the curds and scooped the chunks out into my molds.  I let it sit a day, salted it and flipped it over and back onto the molds for another day.  Then I placed them in the refrigerator for two day to get a bit more dry.  I rolled one finished cheese in herbs, I submerged one piece in honey for three days, and I left the hearts plain.

The Curd has formed one big mass with the Whey separating

We cut the curd the extract more liquid, or Whey

Honey chèvre 

Honey chèvre 

Apple Pie is the way to my man's heart!

The Dark Side

I'll warn you now, this isn't a pretty post.  This is an ugly post, even a violent and graphic post.  If you are looking for sunshine and sweetness, you should skip this post and read something else like this or this.  This post is about what can go wrong with raising chickens.  I am embarrassed to share this story, I am uncomfortable of how it will make you think of me... but to be fair in journalism, if you can call my blog journalism, I'd like to show the bad with the good, the dark with the light.

You can read about my chicken foundation and my on-going adventures which will give this post more context.  But the short story is that I bought 3 pullets, or young chickens, on craigslist and it turns out all 3 were roosters.  It is not legal to have a rooster here in San Diego, and with good reason, they are f%$^ing noisy!  All my chickens were guaranteed to be hens, so when first one began to crow, I was able to exchange it with the person who sold it to me for a hen that was laying eggs.

Two days after we got rid of rooster #1, two glorious quiet mornings, one of my other as-yet-to-lay-an-egg chickens began to crow, and after a few more days both of them were crowing.  I called that seller and his phone was disconnected!  I began to research on-line anywhere I could take the roosters to be processed, and by that I mean slaughtered and prepared for consumption.  No luck.  I posted on my homesteader meet up group for ideas, and no luck there either.

I decided to do something, the big something, myself.  I read detailed instructions on-line, prepared the necessary tools, chose the more noisy of the two roosters, and slaughtered the creature myself.  It was a scary experience during which I managed to cut my finger with a very sharp knife.  Killing the creature was the worst of it, preparing the bird was much easier.  I think the experience stayed with me for 3 or 4 days, in a funk... and now I find myself with one rooster remaining, crowing a half hour before sunrise and carrying on all day.  The good news is that we are eating fertile eggs which are lower in cholesterol than regular eggs.  There will be a solution to this problem and some day soon I'll have my 4 laying hens, but for now I am learning the ways of the land and the reality of eating flesh.  It was a painful experience, deliberately taking a life, but I think all people who choose to eat meat should experience this.  I roasted the bird and ate him/her with friends.  Then I re-roasted her bones and boiled them into a deep brown stock and made several meals, soup, polenta, beans.  I prayed for her in gratitude and she has shaped my vision of reality, of nature and of consumption.

I wrote this about a week ago, still haven't found the courage/insanity to post it.  But here's the update.  I listed Rooster #3 on Craigslist, first for $10 and then a few hours later for free.  I also contacted someone on craigslist that they would take in birds you wanted to get rid of.  That person contacted me and I drove the rooster out to Paradise Hills.  A really nice young man greeted me and he offered me a Jungle Fowl, a genealogical predecessor of the chicken.  A beautiful bird about the size of my silkie but with brown and orange coloring like a pheasant.  He had about 8 of them as well as some guinea pigs and a creative repurposing of a fireplace into a brooder for about 50 4-day old quail!  I took my new Jungle Fowl home and named her Penelope of the Forest, or Penny for short.  She and Madame Chocolate have become quite bonded and I usually see them in very close proximity.

A few days later I visited the home of another craigslist contact back in the neighborhood of my first acquisitions, along the intersection of the 78 and the 15.  From her I purchased two pullets, or adolescent chickens.  She ASSURED me they were females and that I could contact her in the future with any questions or to exchange a bird.  I appreciated my first purchase from a woman, as all the previous vendors had been men.  My husband mentioned wanting a white bird, she had Buff Orphingtons, which are a golden yellow color, so I picked the fairest one she had.  And she had Black Stars, which are black with brown, the coloring very similar to my new Jungle Fowl, but of a standard chicken size.  I picked one out that was acting a bit bashful, hiding under her sisters.  I brought them home and named them Goldie and Luana Luana.  We had added a pallet to our chicken run, dividing the space yet allowing exposure between the new chickens and the old chickens.

Penny the Jungle Fowl, lucky chickens eating fresh goat whey!

We separated the new chickens from the old chickens, but let them get acquainted.

Madame Chocolate lays the brown eggs and Lady Moonbeam the small cream colored eggs.

The new girls!