Fabulous Fall

-Posted by Isaac

The fall honey is almost done! Today we extract the last of the honey from around here. We've still got those darn Holmes County hives, three hours away. Who knows when I'll make it up there.

It's been fantastic. Just awesome. The best fall honey flow I've seen. And other beekeepers are saying the same.
We're just swimming in goldenrod honey at the moment. Thanks to the great weather and awesome bloom.

Goldenrod and aster everywhere you looked. Combined with a three week stretch of dry 80 degree days.
The result:

I take most hives down to one super for the fall flow. This year I wish I'd left two on. Not only did the bees pack that one super full, they nearly plugged their brood boxes full. There will be little feeding this winter.

So we weren't the only busy harvesters.

My brother just finished up yesterday. For the last couple years, he and I have finished up our respective agricultures at the same time.

Bridger decided he prefers grain farming to beekeeping. Hours and hours in the combine. Every day.

Every morning I'd take him out to meet the grain farmers. He just begged for it.

Bye Dad. Have fun with your frumpy old bee truck and aching back...

Even little Eden is trending toward the more mainstream agriculture.

But I'll stick with bees.
Especially when it's this fun! The hives are strong. The honey came pouring in.

So strong in fact, many hives had built comb down into the internal feeder below.

Every yard I found myself astonished. Honey! Wall to wall!
I've just never seen it this good.

I caught myself popping lids and reaching for the camera.

A little eye candy...

Hive porn for beekeepers...

For at least a month we've been busy in the honey house.

The new equipment really came in handy when we needed it.

A few lessons:

Things I already knew, but had to learn again the hard way.

One, aster honey granulates fast. Keep it moving! We've got about fifty gallons of granulated honey sitting at the bottom of the big holding tank.

Two, take the clean-out trailers far away! 

I have made several extended family members mad with our crazy bees.

Even post-cleaning, sitting in the barn, the supers are attracting much attention.

I guess this would qualify as a third lesson learned again. Put the pollination bees elsewhere! We've got about 50 hives now sitting within a few hundred yards of the honey house and barn. This makes for some craziness on warm days.

But I don't have to deal with it. Only Jayne. Sorry Honey.
I'm gone. These wonderful warm days are great for treating, feeding if needed, getting the girls ready for winter.

The work never ends, it just changes.

Roasted Butternut Squash with Honey Butter

-posted by Jayne

Let me just start by noting- this is not a food blog.  If it were a food blog, you would most likely see artfully curated photos of delicious food on white plates with perfect lighting.  A sprig of rosemary tucked into the side of the dish.  A checkered cloth napkin sitting to the right of the plate with an antique silver spoon.  But here, you only get pictures of our real food snapped with an iphone seconds before it was devoured- so sorry about the poor quality photos!

Today I bring you a favorite recipe for roasted butternut squash, finished with a simple honey butter glaze.  If you're like me, during this time of year you are quickly trying to find recipes that will feature your fresh rosemary, before frost comes and finishes it off for the winter.  I can never bring my rosemary indoors in the winter- our house is just too dry for it to thrive.    Here's a picture of our herb bed, in its' fall glory.  Basil, Sage, Rosemary, a tall Dill jumping out of the picture, and some spinach peeking out up front.

Here's the recipe:
4 pounds butternut squash, cleaned and cut into 1/2 inch cubes
1/4 cup olive oil
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon ground pepper
1/4 cup unsalted butter, at room temperature
1/4 cup honey
3 tablespoons fresh chopped rosemary

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Toss the vegetables in olive oil, salt and pepper and spread onto a foil-lined baking sheet, or two if needed. Rotate the tray halfway through cooking until vegetables are lightly caramelized and fork tender, about 45 minutes. Toss periodically to make sure they cook evenly. While vegetables are cooking, whisk honey and butter together into well incorporated.

During the last 5-10 minutes of cooking, remove vegetables and brush them with honey butter mixture. Sprinkle with rosemary and return to oven to continue cooking.

The finished product.  Wah-la!

And to insert some personal pictures into our business blog- here are some pictures from the backpacking trip I took to Dolly Sods, West Virginia 2 weeks ago.  The weather didn't exactly cooperate- but it was still beautiful, invigorating, and tons of fun to get away with some girlfriends.

Lunch break!

Our picture before we set off on our journey.

I can't wait to go back again.  And special thanks to Worthington Market for canceling the market the last weekend of Sept. so I could take this trip.  We're back on schedule and going strong in the outdoor market until the end of October.  Won't you come see us?  Farmer's markets in the fall are the absolute best.  

Wholly smokes it's big!

-Posted by Isaac

By now I'm sure many of you know there's a big new Whole Foods in Easton.

It opened in early September, and I finally got to check it out last week. Wow! They went big with this one.

Whole People, Whole Planet--  I'll say!

Come on Whole Foods, a little heavy on the old environmental impact? A slight bit of Carbon in that footprint?  Tisk tisk...

Just kidding Whole Foods. 

We're all capitalists here.

So I got the call, the emergency 'We're out of honey!' call last week. Henry was off winning fiddle contests somewhere in Appalachia. I had to run the delivery.

When I came on the scene it looked like this:

We love you too, Columbus!

The Honeyrun section nearly vacant. Crickets chirping back there.

Hmmm... is there a market for local honey?

What began as an annoying unscheduled trip turned into a morning adventure. I got to explore this big beautiful new store. And I'll share a few pictures with you.

Good eating everywhere I looked.

From the oceans, 

and the tropics, the mountains, the temperate climes...

A pound of espresso for Jayne...

organic, fresh roast, whole bean of course.

A little something for me.

And out of the classy new store. Out of the dreadful city. Back to work. Back to real life. Got to tend to some bees.

The busy interstate. 

The two lane road. 

The one lane road. 

The dirt road. 

The grass path.

The creek. 

The sunset.
The fire.

Pass me one of those fancy beers, will you?

Parenting, Pollination, Pumpkins.

-Posted by Isaac

Jayne has run off again. This time to the Dolly Sods Wilderness in West Virginia. Four women and four days of hiking and camping. A little September fling, a get-away, a "girl's trip."

And here I am once again, alone with my four little angels. 

Really, it's not so bad. We're more than surviving. We're thriving. For the life of me, I can't understand why Jayne gets so frustrated. So frazzled. This is easy. Feeding, clothing, entertaining, cleaning.... easy!

Let's see... Feeding: 

Sure the line at McDonald's can be frustratingly long, but there are some wonderful distractions if you use a little creativity. Like those new soda fountain / condiment dispensers-- at least five minutes of focussed joy for a three year old. Ice cubes and ketchup? Even better than finger painting! i'm lovin' it!

Clothing:

Not that hard. Simple actually. We have plenty of clothes, I mean I'm finding drawers full. Our kids are all almost the same size. And they can all almost dress themselves!

What else?... Entertaining:

This is as simple as finding the remote.

Beautiful sunny day outside? Let's watch Sponge Bob!

Finding the remote being the key. And this brings us to Cleaning Up:

No problem. I have found everything we need in the short stretch between the kitchen and the honey house--
Shop broom. Check.
Grain shovel. Check.
Leaf blower. Got it.
And the kids even help out... because it's fun!

Bridger shows us what bad kids do when left with Daddy for four days:

"They turned into monsters who hollered and raged."

 Not my little darlings.
Jayne will be so impressed.

Enough about the parenting. Let's get to the matter at hand. As that one guy... on that one movie....? says, "It's time to put the children to bed and go looking for dinner."
Where's this from? It sticks in my head... a guy I ran with in college loved to quote it before a race.

I'm talking pollination. Pumpkin pollination. I just brought 32 hives home from Circle S Farms last night. (Grandma took the kids. Thank you!)

This year it wasn't quite the back breaker it has been in the past.
I've got a new rig:

And we've got many of the hives on pallets:

I was so proud of myself, I had Seth take a picture so I could put it on Facebook. But not ordinary Facebook. This went to a page solely devoted to commercial beekeeping. My very first trip with PALLETIZED hives!

Yes, I have become a Facebook junkie thanks to this page. It annoys Jayne, but I try to explain that it's all in the name of education.

A few of the comments on this particular post centered on my dirty bee suit.
Huh? Dirty?

Lest I be mistaken for a doctor.

Other than a few 4am stings on Seth's neck, we had no problems at all. Got there without a hitch.
Not literally.
This was early August.

I made it back a couple weeks ago for a check and some supplemental feed. The bees were doing great.
And they had obviously done their job.  Surrounding the hives were around 30 acres of vines thick with still-green pumpkins.

And in a few weeks Circle S Farms will be a flurry of activity.
Pick-your-owners out reaping the harvest provided in part by the diligent hardworking honey bee.

Honeyfest 2015 - Outtakes and all

-posted by Jayne

Isaac requests a blog about honeyfest, so here it is!  Did you come check it out?  If not, here are some snapshots of what you missed.  Mostly just pictures of our booth, because that's where I was all weekend.  Part of the reason I take so many pictures of our booth and post them here is so I will remember how to set it up next year.  

The booth always looks best on Friday night... everything fresh and clean.  But this year, we got a healthy dose of rain on Friday, which creates havoc for our display.  Cloth table clothes get soaked, meaning the soap that sits on the table cloth also runs the risk of getting wet.

But the rain didn't damper too many spirits.  People still came out to sample our honey and support local beekeepers.

I thought I had done a good job tidying up Friday night before I went home.  I boxed up all the soap and placed it under the table.  This way it would be protected from rain- with a table above, and boxes below so the soap boxes wouldn't get wet. 

This is where that outtakes part comes in...

This is what I found in our tent 1st thing Saturday morning.

Yeah- so I'm not so good at stacking, planning, and fore-seeing potential rain disasters.  As I tried to clean up... it just got worse.  Fresh dry soap falling on wet pavement.  Boxes torn apart from too much moisture.  And all the soap on bottom had already soaked up too much moisture- the wrappers wet and clinging to the wet soap.  Looks like our family will have plenty of soap to use in the coming months!

But you know... this is what I saw when I left my house, driving on my way to honeyfest Saturday morning.  A great reminder that good things will come, even with the rain.

I tucked the wet soap away in our truck and fixed up the remaining soap that wasn't wet back into a nice display.  And all was well.  Saturday morning- the booth was "abuzz" once again with crowds and samplers.  Petyn (pictured below), our usual Saturday morning babysitter, got yanked to Honeyfest so she could handle crowd control.

If you were at the Honeyfest, you may have had a chance to wander over into the Scioto Valley Beekeepers booth.  Dan Williams, former SVB President, and his son Hunter were spinning out fresh honey for an extraction demo.  

Pictured below are the cappings that were scraped off the frames of honey.

These are later cleaned of excess honey, melted down, and used to make beeswax candles, put in soaps, salves, lip balms, etc.

Below is an up-close shot of the extractor.  Frames in motion.

And throughout the weekend, you could catch demonstrations of bee beards.  Even the honey princess did a bee beard!  Pictured below is Arnold Crabtree.  Arnold, also known as "the bee man" helped start many bee clubs throughout Ohio.  He was also the genius with the driving idea behind the 1st Lithopolis Honeyfest.

So another Honeyfest is in the books.  Time to slow down... focus on all the wonderful things happening on the farm.  This past week, I found a beautiful monarch in the yard.  They've been more plentiful this year than in any of the past years I can remember.

The buckwheat is blooming over at my sister-in-law Becky's farm.  She planted this as a cover crop and we were so happy to see it in full bloom, we took a few extra hives over to her location.

Eden's pretty happy about it too.  Happy Fall!