September « 2010 « Amy Pollien

Archive for September, 2010

Sugaring the bees

Tuesday, September 28th, 2010

Sunday was a nice fall day by Maine standards; 65 degrees and calm, the sun hidden behind thin clouds and a few flowers still blooming. Now is the time to feed the hives up – while the temperature is still warm enough for the bees to freely move around and store the sugar in the hive body.

I use BeeMax Polystyrene hive top feeders. They’re about $20, weigh 8 lbs and are practically indestructible. Betterbee suggests painting the exterior with the same latex paint you’re using on wooden ware. The bees are protected from the bulk of the syrup by a plexiglass sheet at one end of the box and I find this also protects the hive from cold drafts on the late fall days when I’m opening the top to add more syrup.

Use a two-to-one mix of water to sugar for the fall feeding. Try to keep the box from running low – evidently a wax and wane of food can encourage the queen to produce new brood just at the time the hive should be tapering off for the long winter ahead. Here is a close up of the box with the plexi shield in place and about a gallon (one batch in my stew pot) of sugar syrup.

The asters are the last full crop of flowers we’ll have for 2010 – a beautiful conclusion.

Tags: autumn, beekeeping, bees
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At the altar of the Harvest Moon

Thursday, September 23rd, 2010

Time to inventory the Summer:

2 Gal grape juice (4 quart jars and assorted pints – most of this is in pints)

2 Gal tomato sauce (plain)

3 pints catsup (tomatoes, honey,peaches, onions, tamari, sea salt)

6 pints peach jam

10 pints brandied peaches (Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!)

6 pints grape jelly/jam, assorted

4 pints raspberry jam

4 pints elderberry tonic

Plus green beans, sliced peaches in syrup, blueberries and pumpkin puree in the freezer. The seckel pears will be in soon with pear butter. Oh, and some quart bags of frozen tomato sauce from when it was 98 degrees and I couldn’t bear to use the steam canner. I’m still a lousy farmer, because we couldn’t make it through the winter on this amount of food, but it will feel good when the potatoes come in, and there will be a big box of carrots and canvas bags of onions stored carefully at the other end of the cellar.There are canning jars of seeds, too: pumpkin, beans, sweet peas and hubbard squash.

This year was easy. Pretty soon (in gardening time) we’ll see what 2011 will bring.

Tags: autumn, garden, harvest, orchard fruit
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After Apple Picking

Monday, September 20th, 2010

My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.
It melted, and I let it fall and break.
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing clear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.
And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap
As of no worth.
One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
Were he not gone,
The woodchuck could say whether it’s like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human dream.

Robert Frost

Tags: autumn, dessert, harvest, orchard fruit, poem
Posted in Cooking, gardening, horticulture, orchard | 2 Comments »

Mycorrhiza

Wednesday, September 15th, 2010

A mycorrhiza (Gk.,: fungus roots, pl mycorrhizae, mycorrhizas) is a symbiotic (generally mutualistic, but occasionally weakly pathogenic) association between a fungus and the roots of a vascular plant.

I’ve been reading a great deal lately about commercial Mycorrhizal products reported to improve soil and benefit plants. “MycoBoost”, Mycorite and a host of other brand names claim to:

colonize plant roots, expand into the surrounding soil and greatly increase the root’s ability to absorb water and nutrients for healthier plants and turf. This “good fungi” also pushes out disease causing micro-organisms for better plant health. MycoBoost restores the natural partnership between plant and fungus for healthier, happier plants

I’m always looking for that kind of result so I did some research. My considered (and amateur) conclusion is that I’m not going to use the commercial products. Mycorrhiza exist in most soils and are just as specialized as many of the plants that occur naturally in the same area. In my garden,the local beneficial fungi co-exist with low bush blueberries, sweet fern, oak, spruce and white pine. Like many of the plants here they are probably “pioneers” – able to thrive in a harsh environment of sparse soil, salt air and extremes of temperature and humidity. Importing a foreign, concentrated variety overpowers the local fungi and then peters out, unable to survive for very long under those conditions. Also, it’s $20 @ pound plus shipping.

Mycorrhiza is encouraged by increased plant life, which then benefits plant life, and so on. I plan to encourage the plants, and have more respect for that white webby stuff that spreads under the mulch in the garden.

Now, I’m reading about potash. We’ll see where that goes. . .

Tags: garden
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New work

Saturday, September 11th, 2010

Hansa roses and a sterling tea set on a sunny summer afternoon. Pastel on board, 18′ x 24″.

Tags: drawing, pastel, still life
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Equipment post – Victorio food mill

Friday, September 10th, 2010

Tonight I made 10 pints of tomato sauce. I started with two full stew pots of plum tomatoes (one after the other because who has two pots that size?), cooked down to pulp and drained. Tonight I put the cooled mess through the food strainer. I like the Victorio mill – the hopper is big enough to accommodate half the pot at once and the mechanism is smooth and easy to turn. It’s a little messy but I think that’s the nature of the process – turning fruit into puree – rather than the machine.

The clamp is narrow and won’t fit on just any surface. You need a sturdy table or, in this case, the tin edge of the Hoosier cabinet. I put a section of newspaper on the floor and clear everything out of the sink in preparation. The parts fit together and come apart easily – which is nice when you’re processing peaches and find you’ve missed a pit and everything grinds (literally) to a halt until you fish it out.

Now the steam canner is full of pints of bright red tomato sauce, and the kitchen table is crowded with last night’s crop of grape juice and food mill parts. There’s no better way to spend the first cool nights of September.

Tags: garden, harvest, kitchen, summer
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The Clamdigger

Tuesday, September 7th, 2010

The “Fisherman’s Voice” has an article by Lee Wilbur about our friend and neighbor, Richard A. (Rat) Taylor;

Richard is perhaps the historical epitome of what we like to feel Maine people are made of—people who have made their living with hard work, no nonsense, and a healthy dose of ingenuity.

Here’s a link to part 1 in August, and part 2 in the September issue. It’s a good read about what it’s like to make your living with your hands in this century or any other – clamdigging hasn’t changed all that much. I did a post about Rat’s presence on our road, including his sign, last year. This year the sign is bigger and better and I’m hoping it’s a trend.

Tags: bees, economics, harvest, heritage, neighbors, summer, weather
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Great idea? Or greatest idea ever? Grape Popsicles.

Thursday, September 2nd, 2010

We have a lot of grapes this year. We had a lot of peaches, and the tomatoes are still flowing in, the elderberries, raspberries, blueberries, well, 2010 has been a good year for fruit. I’ve started making grape juice in self defense (we can only eat so much jam before the next grape harvest comes along). Then R. suggested making popsicles, so I ran right out and picked some molds up at the dollar store. They proved very unsatisfactory (there’s sticky grape juice all over the freezer now) so I turned to Amazon. The new mold was delivered this afternoon and I’ve already made and sampled a batch and, yowsa – greatest idea ever.

The new mold has a metal cover with slots for those ubiquitous wooden popsicle sticks. The receptacles are sturdy and the frozen mix slides out easily. It also came with a recipe using orange juice that I adapted for grape.

Popsicles

3 C juice, 2 Tbs fresh lemon juice, 1/4 C sugar. Pour in molds and freeze for about 4 hours. The directions suggest soaking the sticks in water for an hour first so they don’t float up in the cells, but I was impatient and skipped that step to no ill effect.

Delicious. I think I want these instead of cake for my birthday next year.

Tags: dessert, garden, harvest, orchard fruit
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Amy Pollien