I just updated the ‘available plants’ page with some vegetables seeds I didn’t have last time I edited that page. I have other seeds, but the ones that I have a lot of and know they grow fine are mostly on that page.
So here’s the plan for the vegetable garden this spring.
I started some seeds already in the basement, including leeks, kale, wild chicory, bee balm, and Asclepias tuberosa.
There are a lot of things I haven’t found a place for yet, including melons, peas, squashes, beets, brussels sprouts, and potatoes. I don’t have seed potatoes yet, but I kinda wanted to try growing a bunch of them. I might need to build some raised beds to accommodate a decent number of potatoes. Remington volunteered to help and it seems like a job where help might help. Help haul the wood back from the lumber yard, right? I wish.
To that end, I should probably work more on the yard-scope plan to place all of these things.
That is an exciting diagram, as it includes a bunch of other works in progress and nice ideas.
Stephanie & Ilan visited us last weekend, and now Ilan has posted an illustration of me that he drew on the last page of The Stranger:
Click the drawing to link to his blog for the full-sized image.
I’ve been working on layout of some material for Dewclaw 2. The layout of individual pieces is going well. I need to figure out some things about customizing headers and footers in LaTeX.
I’ve got parsnips and carrots growing, and some newish turnips in now. I just planted a couple of burdock as a test to see how they weather the winter, how the yield is, and whether they can be dug out well enough that they don’t become annoying. I don’t want more burs.
I just planted the new row of fennel, but there are only 10 plants that survived drying out during my trip to MN in August. I hope they’ll survive the slugs of autumn.
I just scheduled planting time for garlic and fava beans, which I’ve been growing successfully for a few years now. For some reason, I didn’t note when I planted favas last fall. This is really annoying, because I planted them on three different dates, and the last ones I planted did much better than the others. So much for records.
I still need to figure out when to plant shallots. I did that last fall, but again there don’t seem to be any records of when I planted things after the Europe trip last year.
Outside of the front yard food garden, I just planted a bunch of herbs that I rooted from cuttings into a new part of the yard, and moved a mysterious Ribes into the gardens by the alley. I planted some Asphodel back there too. I’m excited to see what these plants do, as I’ve never grown them before.
After doing the layout for the first issue of Dewclaw using Scribus, I knew that there must be an easier and more reliable way to do this work.
Miles asked if I’d looked at LaTeX, and after figuring out what he was pronouncing, I said that I hadn’t. I had the impression that it was specialized for technical papers, mathematical formulas and that sort of thing. Well, it is, but people have done the work to make it quite feasible to produce books or magazines using LaTeX.
After some research, I installed the texlive package using Synaptic. After working with that a bit I also installed the latest version of the memoir class manually in my homedir.
I haven’t done a full Dewclaw issue with it yet, but I did lay out a small book called Not That Far, and it worked real well.
I think this will be a much better method.
The biggest limitation that I see so far is that in Dewclaw, each author’s piece may still have to be done separately with special attention to the author’s paragraph preferences and such.
One of the big advantages I see of using LaTeX is that the defaults are really sensible, and fill in the gaps in my book design knowledge. Just throwing text in gives you great-looking pages. After some configuration it is possible to compromise this good design, but the manual for the memoir class includes so much information on book design and history that there is no good excuse for making poor choices with using it.
As you may know if you read Evelyn’s blog Lisp Service, we recently completed the first issue of a literary magazine called Dewclaw. She’s written about the process extensively on her blog, so I’d recommend reading about it there.
The box of books arrived today, so now is the time to buy.
$9 plus $1 for shipping within the US (int’l shipping will cost more).
Dewclaw issue 1 is a 67 page magazine featuring the work of
Claire Donato
Matthew Simmons & Amy Minton
Mike Young
Blake Butler
Rachel B. Glaser
Claire Becker
Shya Scanlon
Cherri Wood
Amina Cain
Kathryn Regina
Matthew Salesses
Scott Garson
Jessica Treat
Leslie Patron
Isadora Bey
Stephanie Brachman
and myself.
Claire Donato
Matthew Simmons & Amy Minton
Mike Young
Blake Butler
Rachel B. Glaser
Claire Becker
Shya Scanlon
Cherri Wood
Amina Cain
Kathryn Regina
Matthew Salesses
Scott Garson
Jessica Treat
Leslie Patron
Isadora Bey
Stephanie Brachman
and myself.
My role in the publication was mainly doing layout, though I also provided second opinions on submissions and moral support and things like that. This issue includes a poem that I wrote in a style cribbed from Diane Williams about eating at a Japanese restaurant. I like this poem, but I have to give significant credit to Diane Williams and sake.
A lot of the first brood I observed seems to have been drones. When I first saw the capped comb I thought they looked too domed for worker brood, but never having seen either in person before I was not sure. Is it normal for queens to lay a bunch of drones when they are starting their laying career? I don’t know. Since then I have observed lots of capped worker brood, so I am not worried about the drone production. Just curious.
Though the drones were obviously young, having hatched in the last few weeks, I found a number of dead ones. Did they kill each other or did they get killed by workers?
Getting the bees to build their comb such that it lines up with the bars on a top bar hive is a pretty significant initial challenge. I don’t know if using a Langstroth hive would ’solve’ this problem, but fuller frames seem likely to help.
Sometimes on a hot sunny day the bees have a really active period. Then they stop abruptly when the wind picks up or a cloud covers the sun. This makes me nervous about swarms, but I am also skeptical, since I haven’t seen any swarm cells and I still seem to have a lot of bees.
Some workers are lighter and some are darker. I don’t know why this is. It could be that some are from my queen and some are from the initial batch. It could be that younger workers are lighter or darker than older ones. It could be a seasonal difference.
The bees have been in the hive more than a week now.
On Friday I had a bit of a gala to welcome them. It was an excellent time. Thanks for coming and thanks for bringing excellent food and drinks.
Saturday I inspected the hive to see how they’re building comb so far.
This is what the bees looked like when I opened the hive:
It was a bit rough, because the queen cage had caused the bees to build comb across a few of the bars instead of lined up with them nicely. First a shot of the empty queen cage.
Then on to the carnage. Here the sixth bar has been cut free from the diagonal combs, which are still connected to bars 4 & 5:
The top bars have a channel of wax running down the center of them so that the bees build the comb along the bars. When something causes the bees to build comb that doesn’t line up with the bars, the comb can normally be cut from the bar a little at the edges and straightened. I’m sure this works fine with comb that’s just curved due to being farther from the entrance, but the method (or my finesse) was not up to handling this soft new comb in this configuration.
Here’s the most hopeful point, with bars 4 & 5 separated from each other:
Unfortunately, neither of these bars had strong enough comb or connection left to survive straightening. I tied the biggest comb to the 4th bar and left the 5th bar’s comb on the bottom of the hive. I wasn’t confident that tying the comb back on was worth the time to find another piece of string. The bees should just chew it up and make new comb. Straighter hopefully.
Here’s the aftermath:
Comb images (mostly covered in bees) from the entrance back:
| 1 entrance | 
|
|---|---|
| 2 entrance | 
|
| 2 back |  |
| 3 entrance |  |
| 3 back |  |
| 4 entrance |  |
| 4 back |  |
| 6 back |  |
I built a bee hive. It’s based on top bar hives built by a guy in Wyoming.
I built it of materials found in our basement or nearby construction work. I did have to buy a replacement pulley for the table saw when the pulley broke, but that doesn’t count. I spent no money on this construction. It’s glued and screwed, built of pine, cedar, spruce, 1/4″ luon plywood, 3/4″ plywood, 2″ foam insulation in the cover, and a corrugated fiberglass roof.
It fits 24 bars maximum, and uses a melted wax channel as a comb guide on the bars.
Next month I’m picking up some Minnesota Hygenic bees from an apiary to the north.
I’m growing garlic, shallots, and three varieties of onion in the garden.
I bought the day-neutral onion collection which contains 50-75 onions each of red candy apple, superstar and candy varieties (150-225 total). I planted about a third of them today, but I haven’t figured out where to put them all.
I will plant what else I can find places for today and give my leftovers to Kalen and Claire.
I also have a few leeks leftover from last year still growing, and some kind of ornamental Allium I have not identified yet.