Those who cannot do

Tip: if  you cannot secure your mail server from spewing spam to the outside world, despite being given loads of information, log snips, and everything else possible fro ma perspective outside that server, perhaps your organization should find someone else to administer it, as you’re terrible at the job.

Fresh salad

It only took about four months to grow the various participants.

Small salad

It was delicious, according to the person who got to eat that small bounty. The tomatoes are the earliest I’ve ever been able to get at the ranch: sungolds and a variety called 4th of July (meant for northern growers with short summers so they can have their tomatoes by yes, the 4th of July). Here – at least for this year – they have shown themselves to be the absolute earliest of the early varieties I put in, and the sooner the tomatoes start coming, the better, as far as I’m concerned. The lettuce is a straight cos (romaine) variety that I had tossed into a row with potatoes, and the carrots had been hanging around with the kale. Strange neighbors. But tasty vegetables.

Busy bees at the ranch

Things have been a little hectic at the ranch this month: all the plants out of their flats and in the frames, the bee hives have had brood and super boxes added when needed, my sister the hurricane and her family were here for most of the month, the weeds need to be pulled in the worst way, and oh yeah, I got myself a great case of pneumonia. But! Life goes on anyway, and one of my goals for this point forward (June 1, technically) is to post every day.

I jumped off facebook at 11:30 Saturday evening, and have not been back except to post a coupe of items not to my personal page, but to a couple of other actual pages (non-individual). Things are a lot more pleasant off facebook than on it, and it’s nice o be able to type out something long that (some) people will actually read and thoughtfully comment on versus the five second attention span and hit and run commenting, and most of all, the snide, nasty remarks people feel free to lob into your own page comments. Site page comments, for news outlets and whatnot, I see as fair game. They are, after all, media. But insulting the individual page holder – and I mean really insult them, not just the “you’re nuts” sort of thing – is like walking into someone’s house and taking a giant dump on the carpet, then yelling at them about it. I got tired of it, so I left.

This will be better.

This is a frame from a brood box I added to a hive that was running out of space in their first box. A generic brood frame will usually have honey at the upper edges, a band of pollen, and then brood taking up a major chunk of the rest. This hive has a giant store of pollen in the lower box, so what we have in this is a honey band – that’s the white capped stuff running like a rainbow across the top – and then a large area where the queen is laying and the workers are dealing with the eggs/larvae and then capping them off (that’s the yellowish cappings in the photo). You can see the glisten of uncured nectar between the two, as well. This will be honey after the girls cure and cap it.

Nice frame, May 2016