Backyard Chickens & Bees

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 [...]

We just had our first frost and (tiny bit of) snow here in Portland, and fortunately we were more or less ready for it! At least, ready as far as the bees and chickens are concerned. Well, OK, as far as the bees are concerned. But the chickens are easy to work with so I [...]

I promise that I haven’t forgotten about this, or am giving it up after only a few months. This summer has been very busy (as noted in my last few posts) and V and I have been taking some well-deserved vacations, including an absolutely fabulous trip to Vermont! Still, some things that are stewing in [...]

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 [...]

The other night we took on the task of killing and cleaning the two chickens that ended up becoming roosters. The two roosters in question were from the group of chicks that we bought last Spring. The chick supplier claimed to have 90% accuracy for sexing the birds, but we still somehow ended up with [...]

This month has been super BUSY, what with the bees swarming, the chickens getting bigger, and all the salads and peas that have been eaten. This past week gave us a nice respite via a road-trip vacation to Park City, Utah to see Veronica’s cousin be married and to party with the rest of her [...]

In light of the swarm incident of the last week (and all the bee poop that ended up on my car as a result of parking beneath the tree that they swarmed to), I went and bought all the goodies for a new hive. This includes two newly assembled deep boxes, 20 Pierco (integrated plastic) [...]

Yesterday I was out working the hives again, this time making sure that the first (big) swarm was happily settled in thier new hive box, checking on the original hives, and capturing the two swarms that had taken up temporary residence in neighbor Charles’ tree. The video above shows the capture of the second swarm. [...]

I’ve been following up on the chicken illness that hit George and seeing what can be done to minimize spreading it to the other chickens. While there is probably a lot of anecdotal evidence to support a variety of holistic treatments, I am (as a scientist) more interested in proven, peer-reviewed methods that do not [...]