Bee-ing ready for bees!

Here's a few pieces of the beehive that we purchased at Beez Neez apiary supply in Snohomish, WA. with most of the primer coat of paint.

These need to be ready to go in just a short few weeks when our bees arrive, a variety called Carniolan which are supposed to be very gentle. Let's hope so!

Above are the deep supers. Just below is the outer cover.


The cover is insulated, made special for our climate, to help the bees winter over.
Below are the deep supers, a shallow super and part of the base assembly.
These are painted the same color the main part of the house will be, if all goes as planned this summer. This is the same color that our small barn and run-in are painted.


Hive stand and bottom board as well as the lid are all painted to the new trim colors our house will be painted this summer.



This is the painting supervisor. Newt made sure I did a proper job on everything for the entire painting project.




And like any job the bedroom has taken us longer than intended, but should be worth the wait. This weekend most of the trim got finished up. Painting the top trim was slow and arduously completed with a small artist brush and a steady hand. Also in this picture you can see the new light fixture/fan. This'll be handy come summer!

Last, but not least, Magnus demonstrates his patented tail chasing abilities in the kitchen!

What a cat!!

Weekend project runs amok!

Re-doing the south bedroom was supposed to be a 3-day weekend thing. Install a ceiling fan, replace all the switches & outlets, shampoo the carpet, paint & make new drapes.
It took most of Friday just to get everything out of the room. Gemini was doing yardwork, when he wasn't busy chasing chickens, cats & dogs all over.

Here's a look at the entire bedroom, spewed out all over the living room. Chaos!

The minty-celery green was just too pale for that room. It gets full sunlight, even in winter, and needed something dramatic.

Same corner with partial paint & new ceiling fan. The trim, including the tiny bit around the ceiling edge, will be a dark bronzy-brown.

Another view, partially done. The room is so small that it's hard to get a picture showing perspective. The closet will stay the light green color, as a memento, and because it's a pain to paint it. There was a spiffy beaded curtain with a bright yellow sunflower painted on, but we'll replace that with a plain dark wood beaded one.

Painting done but for the trim. We just got the bottom trim done so we could shampoo the carpet and start putting furniture back in. We ran out of weekend, so we'll finish the trim painting and get the drapes done hopefully this coming weekend.

The kitties enjoyed a slumber party during the mess.

We also secondaried our first-ever batch of grape wine. A neighbor gifted us with buckets & buckets of grapes last fall, and we made jam with some and wine with the rest. Wines made from North American wild & hybrid grapes are often said to have a "foxy" quality. Whatever they call it, it's pretty darn tasty! We'll try more in about 6 months.

Our batch of chicks should arrive this week, and the bees not too long after. The garden is underway as well. Busy times, but we're planning to check out opening day at the Bellingham Farmer's market April 4th, and seeing Dan Savage at WWU later that evening.

Pick a peck of Peppers

The garden hasn't been a complete loss. The meal on the plates here came almost all from our own little piece of earth. Squash, stuffed pasillo peppers, all the salad and a chunk of the second of our two watermelons grown in the greenhouse. The beer as well is a pale ale that we brewed right here at Seven Trees. Now that's eating local!

Here's the pepper dish up close. The pasillo and the pimento peppers seen here were stuffed with sauteed hamburger, onion, garlic, corn and taco seasonings, then covered with diced canned tomatoes and baked 30-40 minutes. J then uncovered them, placed a slice of local made pepper jack cheese on each one, and baked them another 15 minutes uncovered. It was so tasty a meal we almost wept!

Strange harvet this year though. While we lost the tomatoes to blight... the pasillos and the red pimento peppers all grew like gangbusters as well as our two little watermelons. I'd say things are warming up in the northwest, when southern crops grow better than the cooler weather varieties. Although we had some nice cabbages, spinach, kholrabi, kale, carrots and the like, they did come on early. Next year we'll plant cabbages and other crops a bit later, so we can enjoy a later harvest. Plus some crops like kale taste better after a frost. It sweetens the flavor considerably. Our kale plants were so early that they may be too spent to winter over for this.

We still have a bunch of carrots, some lettuce, and spinach ready to eat now plus more successsion planted through the summer that weather permitting we might also see make it. The drying bean harvest continues, specifically Hidatsa Shield Figure Bean ... not only beautiful, but also prolific. The other dry bean we planted was Good Mother Stallard's, but they are not quite as happy where we placed them, so we'll have to keep that in mind for next season.

And of course when either of us have a moment to spare, we've been painting our small run-in barn. The weather hasn't always been cooperative, but we should get it done this week... fingers crossed... including adding the last of the 1"x6" cedar trim, and painting it as well. The colors were matched from a 1920's craftsman/bungalow house book that showed color palettes from that era, and we intend to paint and trim the house with the same colors... even the chicken house. We'd like everything to match when all is said and done. The idea of craftsman/bungalow's was that they blend in to the natural environment rather than protruding starkly from it, and while the picture doesn't convey this; the new colors have seriously made this structure "blend" much better into the nature that surrounds us here. Exactly what we wanted to happen. Once we get the chicken house painted, then we might try to do the house one wall at a time... see how much we can do in between rain, freeze and snow. Worse case is... we'll start that project next spring, once we build up our sorely depleted nest-egg again! Living and buying locally isn't always inexpensive, but it IS the right thing to do.