Backyard Chickens & Bees

Bins of apple scions at the fruit propagation fair. This past weekend, my neighbor Charles and I went to the Home Orchard Society’s fruit propagation fair. It was held at the Clackamas County Fairgrounds in Canby, Oregon. I really wasn’t sure what to expect, being that I’m fairly new to the orcharding scene, and was [...]

Last year, my parents put me in touch with one of the neighbors who rent out a property across the street from their house. The neighbor’s house has a nice, fully-grown apple tree in the front yard that, as far as I know, is an incredibly tasty Gravenstein. That fall I picked about 250 lbs [...]

OK. All my blogging software is up to date, I have nice weather ahead to work, and there is no excuse to not write about my fun in the yard… The bees have done well this winter. There are, of course, only two hives that survived the winter (the smaller one died off last fall), [...]

The new apple trees are ordered! I went with Cummins Nursery in New York State, since they have such a wide selection of fruit varieties and are experts with rootstocks (Dr Cummins was a professor emeritus at Cornell University, working on developing new rootstocks for fruit trees). The apples I will get are all dwarf [...]

OK, so I guess it is time for something new. This past weekend during the CHIC get-together at our house, V and I were talking with Harriet and others about growing apples, and the difficulties of training grapevines. The subject was broached about pulling the grapes and planting apple trees instead, and since then, I [...]

Once again, too much going on and not enough time to write about it. A few recent things that merit some mention include: I rebuilt the water pond after seeing that two of the fish survived the raccoon assaults. The additions made to the pond include a red water lily, several clumps of hortwort, two [...]

Ah, so I got home from work tonight and was changing into shorts in the bedroom. One of the windows overlooks the back raised bed and wine barrel pond. I happened to look out at the pond and, lo!, there were the two shubunkins that I thought had been ravaged by the raccoons this past [...]

I think the title says it all. While I am not vanquished, I will concede that they have won this round. The little buggers even managed to bend the copper stub-out bracket that was holding the fountain in place! It’s not super thick, but still was fairly sturdy. No signs of fish, either, so I [...]

I woke up this morning to find that the water garden was all trashed, the lilies were shredded, the water was murky from the dirt in the lily pots being dumped, the bricks in the bottom and the pots were upturned, and one of the fish (the tri-color shubunkin) was missing. Stupid raccoons. I was [...]

So, the wine barrel water garden was put in a couple of months ago to provide a water source for the bee hive(s). The basic idea is that when you have all the proper components in place it will take care of itself and there is no need to do anything except add new water [...]