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04/23/2007: "Of Raspberries, Bees, and Hoo Haas"

It's been an action packed couple of days...

Now you might ask what my leg is doing in a three foot deep hole, and I'll tell you: It's filling in for a post! Over the weekend I put the trellising up for the raspberries, we attended the Organic Growers Club Annual Hoo Haa, and took care of our delightful bees.

The bees need a little help in their first few weeks. So we're feeding them some sugar syrup that they seem to enjoy. Nate got suited up to check and see if there was any activity spreading through the hive. The first frame he pulled out came up empty.


But, wow, there were a few packed frames too! Here's our friend Chris posing with a loudly buzzing frame of bees. He seems a little skeptical because he was just dive bombed by an angst-y bee that chased him all the way to the barn. But he was brave enough to come back and check out the frames.


Finally we got a peek at what we were looking for: comb! The bees are starting to build wax comb, which means they are feeding and starting to settle in. In the next few days we'll smoke them (no no, not like that!) and check the combs for larvae. We need the larva to grow and replace the bees that are dying. Did you know bees only live 4-5 weeks? And it takes 2-3 weeks for eggs to develop into adults. So it's extremely important that the Queen gets busy and starts laying eggs!


On Saturday we went to the Organic Growers Club Hoo Haa. (I think it's the Organic Grower's Club, but others say that's not so.) Nate, Rebecca, and I have a common origin in the Orgs Club, but we've all moved on to other adventures. So it's nice to go to the annual event and see old friends. There's live music all day, planting seeds and starts, booths, activities, and free food! It was beautiful for the first two hours of the event, but then it started pouring. The HooHaa cleared out pretty quickly after that, but it was still pretty fun. We're going to try and link to the Orgs site, and there should be plenty of pictures of the event there.


And today I decided to dig the holes for the raspberry trellises. It just seemed like the task for the day. Little did I know how overwhelming it would be! I ended up putting in six posts. The posts are 8 ft long, and I needed to dig a three foot hole to fit them in. Nate showed me how to use the "tamping" bar. It's a long, thin, 30 lb bar that's tapered at one end and flat at the other. I back filled a little bit of the hole with dirt, and use this 30 lb bar to completely pack the earth around it. Little by little I added the dirt and tamped it down until it was full of hard packed earth that did not allow the post to move.


After the first two posts were up and packed, Nate stepped in with his amazing fencing capabilities. He used the come-along with two "wire grippers" to tighten the wire. The wire grippers are black rings with a cylinder on them. The rings move up and down on the cylinder. There's a break in the ring that the wire fits through, and the ring moves down and tightens the wire so it can't move. So Nate tightened it right up, then clamped it with a neat little thingamerbobber that I don't have a picture of. After clamping the two wires together, Nate released the come-along and the wire grippers. And, like a miracle, the wire was nice and tightly joined.


We trained the larger (year-old) raspberries up the trellis. In theory, the berries will get 5 ft tall or so, so we need a strong wire for them to climb up. But right now, the berries are pretty small. so I added a string of twine just to support the upward growth. The two new rows of raspberries are still just little canes without leaves. They'll grow up a bit this year, and hopefully with mulching we can control the weeds enough to allow them a healthy start.


My goodness. Using the tamping bar on those six posts is about the most taxing fore-arm workout I've ever had! My muscles burned with each pull of the bar. Luckily gravity did all of the work on the downward thrust. But I think tomorrow might be a day spent without heavy lifting.


So the next job is to mulch the raspberries. We're going to try and track down a large quantity of cradboard boxes to throw around the raspberries, just like the blueberries. We'll give them all a helping of Nate's Amazing Compost, then we'll spread woodchips to drown out the weeds. And if all goes well, we'll be enjoying the beautiful berries soon!