Butterfly mix-up

I guess it's not a big deal in the scheme of things, but you know how much I like to identify what I'm seeing in the garden. And my good friend Barbara pointed out that I might be seeing Gulf Fritillary butterflies rather than Monarchs on my Tithonia. On further reflection and research, I think I've seen both - but many of the pictures I've put up are mislabeled. You can see why I was confused:

Gulf Fritillary

Monarch

"What kind of butterfly is that?"
"Oh, an orange one."

Anyway, please forgive me, and I'll go back and change up my old posts. Meanwhile I found this cool  blog post about butterflies on Tithonia at the UC Master Gardeners website. I'm not the only one noticing lots of activity (rightly-or-wrongly-named) in these flowers. Put these on your to-buy list for next summer!

We've had some cooler weather and yesterday we even had a light mist - unheard of in September! - and we saw this, which I took as a sign that El Nino is on its way here. We'll see if that's true.

The Good, the Bad, and the Delicious

Well, let's get the crappy stuff out of the way first, shall we? Last night about 1:30 a.m., I heard the unmistakable sound of leaves crunching under the feet of deer, outside our window. This is a sound I used to hear nightly, so I knew immediately that the deer had somehow breached our fence. I got up and drew back the curtain, and though I couldn't see anything in the dark, heard a tremendous clattering and then silence. There was nothing for it but to go back to bed.

This morning, sure enough, evidence of deer everywhere: The cucumbers, cantaloupe, pumpkins, and a recently planted hibiscus in a container, all snipped. Over in the North Garden, trampled tomato vines and half-eaten green tomatoes.

The damage is not terrible, it could have been far worse. But here's the thing: There's no obvious broken bits of the fence, no obvious source of entry, and the gates were shut. Therefore we can assume that this deer somehow jumped seven feet in the air to clear our fence. And now that she's done that, and sampled the goods, she'll be back. And possibly not alone.

I cannot adequately describe how defeated this makes me feel.

On top of that, we had some hive-fixing to do today, which depressed us. Last Thursday, Tom and I attended the monthly meeting of our local beekeeping club, the Mt. Diablo Beekeeping Association. We went to hear the speaker, Rob Keller, of Napa Valley Bee Company. It was an inspiring talk about the biodynamic side of beekeeping, with which, of course, we agree. Rob was adamant in his opinion about the management of varroa mite, which is to do nothing. If the bees die, they die. The colonies that genetically can fight of the mite should survive and thrive and be allowed to go through this process with no help from us. I had pretty much made up my mind not to treat with any kind of chemicals, even though it is heartbreaking to lose a hive, especially one that is doing well otherwise. But the bees have to evolve on their own.

While at the meeting, we talked with another top bar beekeeper about our recent bee problems. I think I mentioned here once or twice before that the bees are building the comb just a hair sideways, instead of the comb being plumb with the bar. Why does that matter? Well, every time we try to lift up a bar to inspect it, the comb tears and falls off, undoing hours and hours of the bee's work. This is disheartening. So we've sort of stayed hands-off with the bees, adding bars if it looks like they need more room, but mostly not messing with them. This isn't good either because, while it's fine to just let the bees do their own thing, if something goes wrong in the hive, we'll never see it in time and have an opportunity to correct it. Beekeepers need to be aware of what's going on in their hives.

Here's what the master keeper told us: Bees build comb according to gravity. If the hive isn't level, the bees won't build in a level way. Remember when I moved the hive to put the entrance on the opposite side? I didn't level the hive when I did that, which was an idiot move. Because I didn't take the time to do it, the hive has been messed up for months. The bees aren't being stupid, or difficult - it's all completely my fault. Ugh.

Our mentor continued on to say that we needed to level the hive and cut off any herky comb, no matter how difficult it feels to do that.

So, today, we took care of business. We leveled the hive. It was so janky, I don't even want to confess it. I guess I have a good enough eye for hanging pictures straight without leveling, but clearly the same eye doesn't apply to bee hives. Once the hive was leveled, we opened it up and inspected it.

First, the good news: The bees have built on every bar, and there is an incredible amount of brood and nectar and pollen. On Thursday night, keepers were talking about how much they've had to feed their bees this summer, because of the drought. But our bees clearly have plenty to eat, thanks to our vigilance in the pollinator garden and our vegetables and fruit, as well as the cactus garden down the street and the blooming Chinese Tallow trees next door. Also, the fresh new combs were plumb with the bars and looked amazing.

The bad news: We had to remove two full bars of brood and honey, as they were built sideways instead of plumb.

This feels terrible, and there is no way to sugar coat it - we killed a lot of baby bees today. The only sweet side to this, and it's bittersweet, is that we can save some of the honey we removed, and we'll maybe get a cupful.

We replaced the bars with fresh ones, and added more bars, and closed up the hive, feeling sober but better about the whole thing, moving forward. I won't be making the leveling mistake again. As Anne Shirley says, "One good thing about me is that I never make the same mistake twice." Gaining experience is sometimes painful.

On to happier subjects.

Tom spent a good portion of his time off this week cooking and canning. He's already written about his hot sauce adventures, but he also made pickles from the first of our cucumbers, and both peach and strawberry jam.

We had a lovely hike on the back side of Mt. Diablo this morning as a sort of 'last-hurrah' before the kids return from camp, and it's back to work for Tom. I'm heading up the nature unit at Girl Scout camp this coming week, which is always rewarding but exhausting. So it was nice to have this week of projects and adventures, just the two of us.

Gates and a Bat Box

Another guest post from Tom about construction...

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One of our plans for this year was to raise the height of the fence that surrounds the yard, so that we could grow more food for us and less for our local deer population. This past weekend we finished the last part of that work, installing new and higher gates.

The work to make new gates gave me an opportunity to work with Elizabeth's dad Tim Killen,  who comes from a line of woodworkers and who blogs for Fine Woodworking. Tim's focus for a number of years has been in using SketchUp, 3-D modeling software, to plan his woodworking pieces. I'd dabbled a little bit with SketchUp, but I've always found that having a specific project is always a good way to learn software. This gate project would be a perfect opportunity.

After a few fits and starts and YouTube tutorials, I was able to work up a model for the gates:

Front View

Rear view

We had some lumber left over from the chicken coop construction project, and used that to form the main frames of the gates. Working with Tim gave me a chance to try making some mortise and tenon joints, and at one point we used nearly every clamp that he had:

The final gate design looks a little different than the model I'd created, as we simplified the work needed to make the pickets that attached to the frames.

The gates wound up being pretty heavy, so I was glad that I'd followed Tim's advice and ordered some pintle hinges online to hang the gates. Pintle hinges come in two parts -- there's a metal strap that attaches to the gate using carriage bolts, and a pin (the pintle) that gets screwed into the post. The gate is then lowered into position so that a loop on the end of the straps goes over the pintle. Here's a closeup:

Pintle hinge

 We used two straps per gate, and each one is rated to 100 lbs, so that should hold up. Here's one of the finished gates in place:

It was a lot of fun working with Tim on the gates, and I learned a lot (like, when you subtract off the width of the stiles when measuring your rails, be sure to add back in the length of the tenons, or your gate frames will be a lot more narrow than you had planned. D'oh!).

Our other construction project of last weekend was for an Eco-project for Adam's 7th grade science class. For this project, he needed to make something that would contribute to an environment. We've been working on making our home environment a better place for animals, both wild (birds, insects, lizards) and domestic (chickens, bees), and so we decided to follow that same path and work on a bat box.

There are a lot of plans for bat boxes online, and the construction is pretty straightforward. We settled on a design from This Old House that has a fun bat motif. The box itself has an opening on the bottom, and is fairly shallow – only about 3/4" between front and back.

Adam has to bring it in to school next week, then we'll put it up high on our shed.

Drip System Conversion

Another guest how-to post from Tom...

When we first bought the house in 2004, we had a number of large-scale renovations done – central heat and air, new kitchen appliances, a fence around the property (at the time, to keep the kids in), and a sprinkler system. I'd had some experience installing sprinkler systems myself, having created the system for our back yard in the old house, but this was a major renovation for us, so we contracted it out. They installed a pretty typical system – sprays for the lawn areas, mostly sprays covering the fence border areas as well.

As we've worked to convert lawn into growing area, the old spray system became less and less appropriate. It threw a lot of water into the air, and did a pretty good job of spraying the driveway and the sidewalk. We did a little bit of renovation of the spray system to support the beds in the south garden, but a spray system was still very inefficient, watering the mulched areas between the beds as much as the beds themselves. Now that we're converting more lawn to growing area, and entering the "new normal" of California drought, it was time for a change. So, for the past month worth of weekends, I've been working on converting our existing spray system into a drip system. While it's fundamentally a pretty straightforward process, there are definitely some lessons learned.

A basic converted sprinkler head to drip line looks something like this:

Our old sprinkler heads were attached to 1/2" PVC risers, so we had to remove the sprinkler head, possibly add a higher riser, attach a pressure regulator, then a 1/2" PVC to 1/2" poly coupling, and then a length of 1/2" poly hose to act as a water main (secured with a hose clamp). The individual drip system components would then get hooked to this 1/2" poly hose main.

Before actually doing any work, my first step was to walk around the whole house, mapping out where the spray heads come up, thinking about where I'd like the 1/2" poly main lines, and thinking about the kind of drip emitters that would be appropriate to use for the different areas of the garden. Finding all of the existing spray heads was sometimes challenging – I had to turn on the existing sprinklers occasionally to see where they were, and to re-learn exactly which sprinkler system valves controlled which sprinkler heads.

Next, I had to cap off the vast majority of the sprinkler heads. Our old lawn sprinklers were installed around the perimeter of the lawn, about every 6-8 feet, and nearly all of them had to be capped. This meant excavating the old sprinkler head, installing a cap over the end of the PVC riser, and burying it again. I consider myself fortunate that we do not live in an area where the ground freezes, or I would have had to excavate all of the pipe, too. All in all, I probably capped about 40-50 sprinkler heads.

Pop-up sprinkler on left, cap on right

Installing the pressure regulator, PVC to poly coupling, and poly hose wasn't too hard. Based on some advice I got from one of the innumerable YouTube videos I watched about this, I used a little WD-40 on the end of the coupling to help get the poly hose onto it. I had to make sure to apply pressure in both directions (holding the coupling on the riser, opposing the force of the poly hose), so that I didn't snap the pressure regulator.

The ends of the 1/2" poly hose mains are secured with these easy little clamps – you just bend the end of the hose onto it. For drip emitters, I used different things in different areas:

The woodland garden, the pollinator garden, and a few other areas have some sprays installed on some risers.

The raised beds are getting some drip-a-long hose – 1/4" poly hose that has inline drip emitters installed every 12 inches. I also used this in some narrow areas along the fence.

It's important to use tie-downs to keep the hose on the ground

In other fence areas, a couple of strawberry patches, and a few other spots have 360º or 180º little microsprays.

Finally, I've got 1 gph (gallon per hour) emitters installed directly into the 1/2" poly hose running to individual plants, like the blueberry bushes and raspberry canes.

Elizabeth posted recently about learning and mistakes, and there are definitely some lessons learned from this experience. Here are some:

Pressure regulation is important. The pressure regulators are among the most expensive parts of this operation (about $7/pop), but they're vitally important. Without lowering the pressure in the system to about 30psi, you're just asking for those 1/4" hoses to come loose and your drip system to turn into a small fountain system. It's also important for the drip-a-long hose – without pressure regulation, the water comes jetting out of the emitters, instead of dripping out.

The right tool for the job. There are a couple of tools that will make this job easier. One is a PVC pipe cutter. Mine looks something like this:

In addition to working on PVC pipe, it works wonders on the 1/2" poly hose, making quick clean cuts.

The other little tool I got is used to punch emitters and 1/4" hose couplers in the 1/2" poly hose. I initially bought a cheaper punch, but it's nice to have a tool that you can put the emitter in directly, and so it just punches the hole and installs the emitter in one step.

Shopping. I like supporting our local hardware store, but for this project, I found I needed to visit that big orange home improvement store. Their selection of products was vastly superior (our local store just didn't stock things like the pressure regulators), and they had quantities that I needed.

You don't have to be perfect. When setting up the system, you'll be tempted to obsess over getting the various emitters to drip directly on the roots of your plants, but you don't have to be that obsessive – the water will get into the soil and spread out.

All in all, it probably cost us around $400 and four(ish) weekends to get this project done, but it's very satisfying. We've got the drip running in the mornings, and it's great to see water going directly to where it's needed, and not just all over the place. I'm especially looking forward to its use in the raised beds, where the drip-a-long hose gets the water right down into the soil, instead of spraying on top of the leaves and hoping the water gets down where it's needed.

Project FAIL

We make plenty of mistakes here on our hobby farm, and I think it's important to share them. Sometimes plants don't grow,  the deer get the choicest fruit, or bee colonies die. Things go wrong. In the now-immortal words of Taylor Swift (yes, I have a 'tween girl), I try to shake it off and move on, and learn from the experience (sometimes that's hard). One of the first things you realize when you start a garden - you can do everything right and still fail. And it's ok! The important thing is to keep trying, and rejoice over the successes (which by the way, far outnumber the failures, thank goodness). And sometimes, you set yourself up for failure without even realizing it.

For instance, this past weekend, I told Tom I needed a simple box made out of scrap wood. He started the project at the end of the day Sunday when he was bone-tired from working on the drip system. He tried to  knock something together. A little piece was wonky, so he tried to correct it; then another piece looked weird, and he tried to correct that, and before he knew it, the whole thing snowballed and he ended up winging it across the yard in anger. Lesson learned? Plan your project, don't just try to throw something together.

Now that I've had time to think about it, and watch the chickens more closely, I realize that they are doing just fine for their dust baths (a necessary activity for chickens, as it helps keep them clean and mite-free) by scratching down in the run and finding a nice patch of sawdust. No special box needed. I wish I had thought more about it before I requested Tom make one, as I could have saved him a great deal of frustration.

You can't see it, but there are deep holes in the litter where the chickens bathe

My own fail came when I made suet cakes for the wild birds. I've noticed the birds don't like the store-bought cakes; they really prefer the homemade ones, no surprise there! I made suet cakes this past Christmas with beef fat, and the birds went wild; I swore to always keep a supply on hand. This weekend I used the pork fat that Tom brought home from his sausage-making class. I rendered it in a huge pot, added peanut butter and birdseed just like last time, poured it into a dish and let it harden in the fridge. I added a slice to the suet feeder and waited for the birds to go crazy for it. Nothing. Not one bird visited. Then this happened:

Yuck

In our recent warm weather, the suet melted and dripped out of the feeder, and the whole thing fell apart. Every day our delighted dog goes out and licks up whatever he finds on the ground. I didn't realize that my homemade lard, without stabilizers, would drip away in the heat. I've wrapped up the remaining cakes and put them in the freezer, to wait for winter. Frankly, the birds have enough to eat right now without my help, as they showed me when they didn't even visit the feeder. Lesson learned? It's time to clean and store the bird feeders for the summer, as they can take care of themselves right now!

I tell this to my kids all the time, but it bears reminding ourselves as well: It's good to make mistakes. We learn better when we mess up. Success is wonderful, but it doesn't always provide the best lesson. Let's give ourselves permission to try, and keep trying!

Oh, and sorry for the Taylor Swift earworm. You'll be singing that all day. Another mistake. :)