Mushroom farming and foraging.

Spring is a great time for foraging fresh mushrooms! Our favorites to find are the morels, but we've slowly been learning to safely identify and forage other types as well. 

We found a couple dozen morels in the woods behind our house. It wasn't a spectacular harvest, but i'm not complaining. We enjoyed them breaded & fried and also sauteed with butter & garlic. They are one of the easiest wild mushrooms to identify. 

 Last spring we plugged a bunch of logs with mushroom spores, and have been patiently waiting for them to fruit. It usually takes about a year, but we were getting a few here and there this past fall so we were hoping for a good harvest this spring.  We got a large water trough to help soak the logs to make sure they were staying damp enough.  Within just a few days of soaking these elm oysters began fruiting!

One of my first harvest pictures of the season. Homegrown spinach, lettuce, asparagus and oyster mushroom. i also foraged morels, chickweed, lambs quarter and purslane.

We have another oyster log beginning to fruit.  It has several clusters like this on it. 

 We also have a gorgeous shiitake coming in one of the logs. So far these have just been one at a time, i'd really love to see them take off and really fruit. The shiitakes are really yummy.

We spend so much time looking at our cultivated mushroom logs that we tend to forget about the wild ones that often fruit on the stumps of the trees that we cut about 7 years. Yesterday i was walking through the goat field and saw this giant flush of oysters in the woods on the other side of the fence. They were growing from a Tulip Poplar stump.

So far it's looking like a great mushroom season! We are in the process of plugging more logs and hope to continue cultivating fresh mushrooms for years to come.

Our First Bee Hive Inspection

We performed our first inspection of the new hives this week. It was a little bit nerve racking, as we were hoping for the best, but not sure what we would find.   It has been almost 2 weeks since we installed the bee packages. Installation went okay, but we had a problem with one of the top feeders and were concerned with that hive especially. We didn't know if all the queens had been released or if they had been accepted. Sometimes the hive will kill the queen in those first days.

We were super pleased to find a lot of new drawn out comb in all of the hives. We have been feeding the bees syrup and pollen patties and it appears to be working for them. It was really pretty cool they way we could check the frames and only a bees were buzzing around, most just seemed focused on their tasks and ignored us. 

We were able to find all 4 queens! They are busy laying eggs and seem to have no problems being accepted by the hive.  Can you find the queen? She's right in the center of the photo. She has the long skinny body. She is depositing her eggs in each of the cells.

We also lots of comb filled with glistening nectar and pollen. We saw larvae, and eggs in every hive! The first two are larger hives and seem to be behind a bit, i think because they work harder in the larger hive. The two smaller hives are almost filled up already. Larva and eggs are really important to see, because in a couple of weeks all of the worker bees will die and (hopefully) be replaced with the new brood. The worker bees only live 5-6 weeks during an active season. So if there isn't eggs and larva, in a few weeks time the entire colony will collapse.  

We found capped brood (baby bees) in the 2 smaller hives.  Very excited to see that things are going so well so far!!!!! We were really worried about the first hive that had the problem with the top feeder, but it looks like they have recovered well and are doing great! So far no one has gotten stung! 

Kenan has set up an electric fence to hopefully deter the bears that have become common visitors on our land. They are the biggest threat to hives right now. We'll be doing another inspection this evening and we'll be adding  brood boxes on the smaller 8 frame / medium box hives. We are pretty optimistic that we may get a little bit of honey this first year, which isn't always a guarantee. Looking forward to our hive inspection this afternoon, we are waiting for the kids to get home from school so they can participate. This has been a fun learning experience for the whole family.  In just the two weeks we've had our hives, i've learned so much about bees i didn't know.

You deserve to be Pampered! Perfectly Posh Giveaway!

Have you heard about Perfectly Posh? i had never heard of it before, until a good friend of mine became a consultant and i began seeing her post about it on instagram. i admit, i was a bit intrigued and asked her about it. Perfectly Posh is a cruelty- free bath body/skincare brand similar to Lush or Bath and Body works, but their products are made using mostly natural ingredients. It is all made in the USA and never tested on animals.

The packaging is adorable and fun and there is a huge selection of products! Everything from soaps and lotions, to shampoo and lip color!  i’m a huge sucker for cute packaging and Perfectly Posh definitely has that down! With product names like Espresso yo'self, My hands are Thai'ed and Toes before Bros, you can't really go wrong! They also have an entire line of vegan products!

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The best part is that Perfectly Posh uses natural ingredients that are good for your skin.  Fragrances are gentle, phthalate-free and often over 95% natural. 

Perfectly Posh products are made in the USA. Everything is under $25, It's Paraben-free, Sulfate-free, Cruelty-Free, Mineral Oil-Free and Lanolin-Free. 

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Take a peek around Sheryl's Perfectly Posh page for more info about the products.

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Adventures in Beekeeping. We have bees!

We've been anticipating this day for quite a while, but we finally got our bees! The weather has not been cooperating, and so the date kept getting pushed back. This has been the coldest April we've ever experienced here. With snow showers several times the first 2 weeks.  All the flowers are about 2 weeks behind, so that pushed everything back two weeks. 

Kenan is both excited and nervous. Beekeeping is a pretty large investment, and the strange weather has made it feel like a bit of a gamble. Last year many very experienced beekeepers lost almost all of their hives. For first time bee keepers it's not unusual to lose a hive a two the first year. If the weather isn't cooperating the loss could be even higher. 

To keep the bees passive they've been sprayed with a sugar syrup solution. They are so busy sucking up the sweet treat, they become docile and kind of 'sugar drunk'  and so they don't attack.

When it warmed up we added our bees to the hive. Bee behavior is affected by temperature. They rarely work when the temperature is below 57 F or above 100 F. They cannot fly when the temperature is below 55 F.   So we wanted to wait until it was warmer to add the bees. First thing is to remove the feed can. 

Next you remove the queen cage and make sure she's alive. The queen has to be separated from the hive until they get use to her and accept her scent. There is a 'candy' plug at one end of the queen box. It should only take the worker bees a couple days to eat through the plug and release the queen. 

Once the feeder can has been removed and the queen is set aside you remove a few frames from the center of the hive and literally dump the bees in. Once the bees are in the box you replace the frames and place the queen box on top of them. Then you close up the hive box and hope the bees release and accept her. We checked our queen cages after 2 days and 3 out of the 4 queens had been released (we have 4 hives). So today we'll check the remaining queen to make sure she is out. If not, we'll have to remove the plug and manually release her and hope that she is accepted into the hive. 

We had a few hiccups with the top bar feeders we used in two of the hives, and switched to canning jar feeders.  It looks like all four hives are doing well now though We had a couple days of cool wet weather right after we installed them, but yesterday it finally warmed up and they were flying in and out and very active.

  

We may or may not get any honey the first year. It's all a learning process at this point, and we are really just hoping our bees survive. We hope to see an increase in the pollination our gardens and fruit trees and eventually we look forward to harvesting honey, pollen and honeycomb. 

We purchased our bee boxes from Brushy Mountain Bee Farm and our bee suits from Humble Bee US.  The bees were ordered through the local bee association.  If you are interested in keeping bees i would recommend taking a bee class and connecting with your local bee association. Although raising bees isn't difficult, there is a lot of information to learn. It's definitely the kind of thing you want to research before jumping into it. We'll be sharing our beekeeping journey on the blog, as well as the many other projects we have going on this year. 

Spring Break 2018 TN road Trip- Gatlinburg

This year didn't really make any plans for spring break. The kids Spring Break is kind of lame anyhow. They get Friday and Monday off, giving them 4 days, not even a full week. So it really isn't enough time to take a vacation.  In the past we've taken extra days off of school and gone down to Florida to visit my folks, but they already headed back to MI. So that wasn't really an option.

We had started looking into day trips and found a group of waterfall that were in close proximity in Gaitlinburg TN. i had always wanted to go to Gaitlinburg,   so we decided last minute to drive to TN. Kenan had printed up a few maps, and programed the gps into his phone so we headed on our way. Since it was pretty spontanious and the trip took a bit longer than we expected, so we didn't get to Gaitlinburg until around 3pm.  We had no cell connection, so the gps wasn't working and we couldn't find the road that was on our printed map. So we got a bit lost, and then ended up pulling over in a spot where lots of other cars had pulled over. 

We got out of the car to walk around and found that we were at the Historic Noah ' Bud' Ogle Farm. 

The terrian is extremely rocky, and it was neat to see the way the barn and house were built around the rocks. It's hard to imagine anyone farming here, but the Ogle's grew corn and had an apple orchard. The also had a tub mill along the LeConte Creek.

Ogle's cabin and outbuildings were built in the late 1880s and early 1890s. It's pretty amazing that they are still standing, especially since last years wild fires, came right through this area.

This is the last of at least 13 tub mills once located along LeConte Creek. The hollowed-log flume had very recently been replaced. Not sure if it had been burned in the fire, or just deteriorated from age.

Only a few yards from the house was an area that had been burned in the fires.  It was crazy how close it was and yet the house and barn were left untouched.  We saw many trees that had been scorched and others that were untouched. 

We hadn't really thought about the fires that had completely devasted this area last year, when we hoped in the car and headed this way, but our first stop was in an area that was hit pretty hard. After hiking through the burned area, we got back in the car and went looking for our first waterfall. That's when we really started to notice all the newly constructed buildings, and burned areas.  We continued on to the first waterfall on our list, but the found the roads were still closed for the season. 

This first waterfall we came upon was Meigs fall. It looked much more impressive online.  It's veiwable from a pull off along Little River Rd, but isn't marked and is incredibly easy to miss. The only reason we found it was because there was a couple doing their wedding shoot on the road in front of it.  i guess we are a little spoiled by the waterfalls here in Virginia, because this one was really pretty disappointing and nothing great.  

We had actually drove right by The Sinks, and had to go back to find it.  This one is listed in the top 5 falls in Gaitlinburg and again we were really not impressed. It can be access from the road, so if you've never seen a waterfall and are unable to hike, then i can see it being recommended.  

We had several other falls we wanted to check out, but with roads still being closed for the season and the extra time it took us to get around gaitlinburg we ran out of time. We ended up heading on to Knoxville to get a hotel and spend a day there visiting the zoo and Botanical Gardens.

i thought i'd enjoy Gatlinburg more than i did, but honestly once we left the actual town it looked exactly like here. The road we were on looked so much like Indian Creek here, i kept forgetting we were in TN. We did see bear and wild turkeys while driving around, but again i see those here at home on a pretty regular basis. :)  i would like to go back and check out the town sometime, but it looked crowded and expensive and i'm not sure how much i'd actually enjoy that either.  i did at least get to check Gatlinburg off my bucket list even if we really just drove through.