broad-breasted bronze turkey poults
Lucy is sporting a new, blue halter. She’s really growing! New turkeys joined our farm yesterday.
Month: June 2019
A Shout-Out to Mark and Beth at Green Meadows Goat Dairy
We had the opportunity to meet and visit with some great people and goats in Jonesburg, MO. Check them out at https://www.greenmeadowgoatdairy.com/!
Solstice Eve! Garden and Food
Gladiolus are starting to bloom! 
From left to right: Oleanders, kiwis and table grapes, potatoes, corn, pumpkins and okra 
Foreground: fennel and young wine grapes. Background: tomatoes and glads 
Boysenberries! 
How to start the morning: fresh berries from the garden, quiche from the chickens, and a homemade, raspberry-chocolate chip scone!
A View from the Pool Deck
A little of everything:, Lucy the heifer grazing in the middle Anatolian Shepherd’s pen, goats grazing everywhere with an Anatolian Shepherd dog in the background on extreme left (brown) and extreme right (white). At about 6:30 p.m. it finally cooled off a little and the grass grazers were busy!
Bee Box Maintenance
Cleaning frames from inside a bee box 
Scraping old honeycomb to recycle the beeswax from a frame out of a bee box. 
Closer view scraping old honeycomb to recycle the beeswax from a frame out of a bee box. 
A container of old beeswax that was scraped from the frames. 
A very bad infestation of wax worms that killed this hive.
As previously reported by our local newspaper, David gathers bees when they swarm. He is on a police dispatch call list when a swarm is discovered, they call him and he goes and gets the bees.
He got a new swarm two days ago and that necessitated cleaning out some of bee boxes so the news bees (along with an active hive already here) could have more room.
In the picture gallery above, you can see the frames that hold the honeycomb in what is called a “super” from a bee box. A super is a square, wooden box that holds a collections of frames. The bees make honeycomb on the frames. A super with frames is basically a one-story module in a multi-story bee box that a hive lives in. Supers get added on top of one another as the bees grow and make more honey. When extracting honey, a super is removed, the frames are pulled out and put into an extractor and spun so the honey comes out of the honeycomb. Then the frames are returned to the super, wax intact, and the super is put back in place if the bees still need it.
The wax pictured above is dark brown — that’s what happens to it when it gets old and there’s no honey in it. In one picture above you can see the terrible damage that wax worms do to beehives. They actually killed both of our bee hives from last year. That wax, and possibly all the frames, will need to be destroyed, unfortunately.
Mariposa Lily
Found these little gems growing on the hillside …
Still Sawing on the Massive Oak that Broke Apart Last Year
Click on a photo in the gallery below to see a larger version without the caption.
It’s all cut and ready to move, small pieces on pallets and we’ll drag the logs out with the tractor and work on them in a place less difficult to access 
The trunk is massive 
About the same amount of wood from this tree as last year.
For a look at what the tree looked like before we started working on it, see our post last year: https://twobucksranch.com/2018/03/31/getting-to-next-winters-firewood/
Goats Kids Turn the Pipes into a Playground
Planning Ahead … A Project for Next Winter
After a good cleaning, some repair on the wood case, we think this will be a fine, functioning antique clock. We will not attempt to monkey with the painted face or pendulum. After nearly 200 years, some things deserve a little patina!
Here’s a similar clock, in excellent condition, that sold for many thousands of British pounds: https://lapada.org/art-and-antiques/early-victorian-scottish-grandfather-clock-by-john-pringle-of-earlston/