Food Production in Small Spaces: Honey Bees

I sort of threw down the gauntlet to my readers on the cusp of 2010. I'm curious to see how much food we can produce on our little property, and I invited others to find out and document how much food their backyards and back gardens, or balconies, or whatever, could produce. I'm far from an expert on this topic - maximizing food production in limited spaces. I wish I were, but I'm relatively new myself to serious attempts at feeding myself from my own property.

Still, having nudged people to play along at home, I feel somewhat obligated to offer some ideas to help out. I'm not going to do one monster length post on all the possibilities. I figured I would take the ideas one or two at a time and see if we can get conversations going about each of them. One thing that is much on my mind at the moment is the honey bee, because we're planning to start with them ourselves this year. I know this isn't for everyone, but as livestock go, honey bees are really quite special in a number of ways.

A bee hive takes up very, very little space; less space than you would need to allocate to just about any other livestock. Maybe you could keep a few quail in complete confinement in the same total area as a bee hive. But a hive's footprint on the ground is minuscule; you could put one on an apartment balcony. And if you did that, you wouldn't have to worry about mice, skunks, or bears that more rural beekeepers contend with. Bees also don't compete with humans or other livestock for the same feed. While the cost of equipment is undeniably high when starting up with bees, there are no pangs of conscience when it comes to feeding them. As far as stacking benefits (i.e. what else do they do for you other than produce food?) honey bees obviously help with the pollination of fruits and vegetables in the garden. Frequently overlooked is the soil amendment value of bee manure. Each colony can be expected to deposit 100 pounds (45 kg) of nitrogen-rich manure in a 120 foot (40 m) radius around the hive, each year. Over the years, that adds up to a lot of free organic nitrogen, a critical plant nutrient. Free fertilizer I don't have to shovel!! Bees are also very different from most other livestock in that they do not need daily tending. You can take a vacation away from home (provided you time it right) without getting a sitter for your bees. That's simply not true with most animals. Bees take care of themselves pretty well.

Additionally, there's no need to slaughter your bees in order to harvest. Granted, a great many bees will die natural deaths over the course of the year. But most people can handle a dead insect or several, and a strong colony will take care of most of their own mortuary duties. Some beekeepers will kill an underperforming queen, but this is a choice that other beekeepers will argue against. So if you're not up to the task of dispatching an animal, even a sick or injured one, bees may be the livestock for you.

Now as for the harvest, one can't count on any surplus honey at all the first year, as the colony needs to establish itself and build its strength. But after that, a healthy colony can easily produce twenty pounds of extra honey that you can harvest each year. Some backyard beekeepers see 50 or even 100 pounds of honey per healthy, established hive in good years! (Does it strike any of you as interesting that 100 pounds of honey per hive per year is outstanding, while 100 pounds of manure is a given?)

I can't think of ANY other way of producing as much high-quality food in a given area while still maintaining humane conditions for livestock. Obviously, yield will depend on many variables, as it does with all types of food production. Some studies show that city bees are exposed to fewer pesticides than bees in suburban or agricultural areas. So if you're a city dweller dealing with very limited space for food production, you may want to consider beekeeping. At this time of year you have almost no time left to mull the decision if you want to start this year. But a year of reading and learning about beekeeping is an excellent plan before getting started. In many areas you can find low-cost introductory beekeeping classes through Agricultural Extension offices or local beekeeping associations.

I would only caution an aspiring beekeeper not to underestimate the initial investment costs for equipment. The start up costs for bees are very high compared to some other livestock, as the housing and equipment for bees are so particular. Chickens can be housed in any number of ways and the housing can be made from easily found scrap materials. No equipment is needed for harvesting eggs (beyond a basket if you happen to have a large flock). Unfortunately, with so many diseases prevalent among honey bees, used hive boxes are not a good idea because they can be a vector for disease. Unless you know and absolutely trust the practices of the beekeeper selling such equipment, it's usually a better route to buy or build new hive boxes.

I'll be discussing both honey bees and techniques for producing food in limited spaces quite a bit this year. Stay tuned.

PASA Conference Coming Up Soon

I have no idea how many readers visit this blog from my home state of Pennsylvania, but any of you that do might want to check out the annual conference coming up soon for the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture. The conference is called Farming for the Future, and it's held each year on the first Friday-Saturday in February in State College, smack in the middle of the state. This will be my fourth year attending, and I wouldn't miss it! I always come back from the conference bursting with excitement about my gardening projects for the year. I learn so much from the speakers, and my fellow attendees as well. It is both comforting and hugely energizing to be surrounded - just once in the year - by people committed to healthy food, to preserving the living soils that we depend upon utterly, to finding workable solutions to the problems agriculture is facing and will face in this century, and to teaching a new generation of farmers.

If you live in Pennsylvania and eat, you should know about PASA. If you garden or farm, or aspire to do either of these things, you'd be giving yourself a huge treat by attending this conference. The amazing selection of workshops and speakers at this year's conference is going to make it tough to choose which ones I attend. Check it out. And let me know if you'll be there!

We Now Have a Root Cellar

The root cellar project took shape as a twinkle in my eye about the time we had an energy audit for our home, last April. In the course of discussing insulation for our basement, it occurred to me that, left uninsulated and then sealed off, one small room at the northwest end of the basement could be turned into a root cellar. So when the house was air sealed and foamed, that part of the basement was left alone, to let the heat continue to leak out through the walls. We consulted the Bubels' excellent guide, Root Cellaring, for pointers on design. My husband tackled the messy and difficult job of drilling two seriously large holes through the ceiling of this room and up through the cement slab of our front porch, in order to provide ventilation. He got this done in an afternoon with a rented impact drill.

The last pieces of the puzzle were a custom built and professionally installed door to create a good air seal from the rest of the basement, plus running a light for the room. Given the weird dimensions and lack of square or plumb doorway openings so typical to old farmhouses in this area, no off-the-shelf door was going to work. In the end this project cost us quite a bit more out of pocket than we imagined it would. On the other hand, it's a pretty big room for storing food, and the root cellar cost a lot less than a new refrigerator. I'm looking at it from this perspective: now that the root cellar is built, it will require no further energy or monetary inputs to function as long as the house exists and someone is around to use it. We spent now so that we have this valuable resource later, whether we have money or not.

I know that picture up there looks like there should be bloody streaks on every surface and manacles mortared into the stone walls. What can I say? Old farmhouse basements can be kinda creepy. The room measures about 4' by 9' (1.2 m by 2.7 m). Undoubtedly, it and the adjacent room of similar size once held coal for the original furnace of the house. At 5' 7" (170 cm) I can stand up in this room comfortably, but my 6' 2" (188 cm) husband cannot. No matter. It'll be mostly me going in there. We'll still need shelving before this year's harvest. In the meantime, my husband has promptly taken advantage of the free cooling for his beer, using scavenged wooden pallets to keep the boxes from the dampness of the unsealed floor. This room is naturally humid, and sometimes even has a little standing water in it after heavy rains. For the most part, dampness is not a problem in root cellars. Many crops hold better with plenty of humidity in the air. We may need to add moisture at times if the air is too dry.

I've been watching the temperature in the root cellar since the door was installed. Outside daytime temperatures have been below freezing for about a week now. The basement temperature, just outside the root cellar and very near to the furnace, has been around 63 F/17 C. Over the last week the root cellar's temperature has dropped slowly from the high 40's to 39 F/<4 C. That's pretty cold! I'll be very curious to see how the temperature changes over the year.

I'm planning to experiment with keeping ice in the root cellar. I started with a few plastic jugs, but found that they are thawing fairly quickly at current temperatures. I am waiting on the collection of plastic soda and juice bottles from relatives. When I have a bunch I'll fill them with water and let them freeze on the porch, then put them together in the root cellar. I'm curious to see how long ice can be kept in there. I would like to try to get a sufficiently large number of containers packed together in an insulated box of some sort. In earlier times, people kept massive quantities of ice all year long, even in warm climates, just packed in sawdust or other insulating materials. Of course, I can only fit so much ice into this root cellar, so I won't have the advantage of a large thermal mass. But it's a wintertime experiment to keep myself occupied.

More Connections, Less Waste

Last year I posted a piece over at the Simple Green Frugal Co-op about the complexity of life on our little homestead. Complexity is not bad, not at all. It's just that I nearly always have to bite my tongue when people talk about "the simple life." Nature is far from simple, and though agriculture isn't necessarily "natural," it moves in the same realm. The human routines of self-sufficiency are rarely more simple than for those who are plugged in to the industrial way of life at every juncture. What people mean when they talk about a "simple life" is really anything but. As we started producing more of our own food, and started adding livestock to our system, the connections between living things just became more and more apparent.

I speculated in that co-op post about what new connections would become apparent as we continued to add different kinds of livestock. It turns out that we haven't even added bees yet, and I already see new connections that are going to happen. We grow our own popcorn. The stalks and husks and cobs from the plants have up till now only been material for composting. Now I learn that dried corn cobs make excellent material to burn in the smoker for the bee hives. It's not as if I would have gone out and paid for stuff to burn in my smoker; there are plenty of free options. It feels good to know however, that from now on at least some of the cobs will be set aside for beekeeping supplies. It will make me happy, when the green corn stands tall in the garden, to look at the plants and see not just food, but useful materials.

Connections happen a lot between animals and plants on our little homestead. But they can happen between plant species too. I put in four blueberry bushes last spring, where we'd cut down a white pine tree. I had expected the tree to have acidified that soil pretty well, but a soil test showed the soil was nowhere near the range that blueberries prefer. We've been dumping our spent tea leaves, and what few citrus rinds we still buy on the blueberry patch. I also brought in several large bags of pine needles from a relative's property to mulch with last fall. I neglected however to save the apple pomace from our fall apple pressing. Apple pomace is highly acidic. So much so that it's not advisable to put it in the garden without first thoroughly composting it. Blueberries are a different case however, especially in a situation where the soil pH needs to be lowered. Usually when we press cider we give the pomace to a farmer with goats who shows up to press with us, for use as feed. Last year the farmer couldn't make it, so the pomace went into my relatives' (the press owners) compost pile. I could have, and should have brought that pomace home for the blueberries. This year I will.

When people describe life as a web, it sounds poetic and a little corny. I don't live in the wilderness; I'm not a new age-y sort; and I don't come from a line of people who have retained a mystical connection with the earth. But I'd have to be blind to do what I do and not see at least a few of these connections. Corn and honeybees. The apple tree and blueberries. These things make me happy.

Using It Up: Deviled Bones

We had a prime rib roast with Yorkshire pudding for Christmas dinner, rounded out with carrots from the cold frame and parsnips dug from our garden. Roast beef is a once-per-year extravagance for us. For the past three years, our roast has come from local farmers who raise their beef cattle on pasture. The roasts have all been superb, and a much appreciated change from our normal diet that is contains the occasional roast chicken, or perhaps a little ground pork or ground beef now and then. Roast beef is special indeed for us.

As we ate our way through the delicious leftovers, we looked forward to the ritual of the deviled bones. Even the bones of a prime rib are to be treasured - the wrap up to the traditions in our holiday season. To think of discarding them seems sacrilegious! I like to serve these deviled bones with a green salad to balance out the carnivorous mess that takes center stage on the plate. Eating deviled bones is an extremely primal process of gnawing off the meat clinging to the bones. You can dress it up with wine and a cloth napkin, but this isn't a meal for any but the most intimate company. I feel the regression of a few hundred thousand years when eating this meal. Growling is optional. There's no doubt at all in my mind that human teeth were selected at least partly for tearing meat from bones.

Here's a quick sketch of a recipe for deviled prime rib bones. Take a tablespoon of salted butter for every bone you have, usually it will be three or four. Melt this butter and add 1 teaspoon of dried mustard, plus one teaspoon of cayenne or a milder ground chile pepper. I like to use chile molido. Alternatively, you can substitute two teaspoons of any curry powder you like for the mustard and chile. Add about 1 teaspoon of Worcestershire sauce and freshly ground black pepper to taste. Stir these ingredients together. Brush the butter mixture over the bones with a pastry brush, coating all sides very well. Dredge the bones in a shallow dish of salted bread crumbs. Place the bones on a baking sheet, resting so that their meaty sides are upward (curving upwards in the center and resting on their two ends) and broil them for about 7 minutes. Turn the bones over (two ends will point upwards) and continue broiling for about 5 minutes. Credit for the general idea of this recipe goes to Jennifer McLagan and her book, Bones: Recipes, History, and Lore.

The bones look impressive on a plate, even though there's very little meat there. Fortunately, the flavor of meat so close to the bone is exceptional. And it takes long enough to eat deviled bones that you will be satisfied by the time you're done with a bone or two and a salad.

When we had gnawed to our heart's content, and our faces and fingers were coated with delicious grease, and the salad had put a civilized facade on our carnivorous glee, I still couldn't bear to throw the bones away. Having slathered them in strong spices, and on account of their meagre quantity, I didn't think they'd be worth making into stock. But I saved them for the hens, thinking about how cold it's been lately, with temperatures not even getting up near freezing. I wouldn't do this with poultry bones, but with a difference in species as profound as chickens and cows, I don't worry about any possible disease transmission.

The girls went absolutely bonkers over the first bone I tossed into their enclosure. With their sharp little beaks, they stripped down whatever tiny shreds of meat we'd left behind. I had intended to save the bones to dole out to them. But there was such a ruckus over that first one that I tossed in the remaining two just to avoid flying feathers. When the ground thaws those bones will be buried in three separate spots in the garden, where they'll slowly leach nutrients into the soil.

In this way, I feel satisfied with having not only gotten full value out of our expensive purchase, but in also respecting the animal that died that we might eat it. We will waste none of it, because someone gave a damn about this food. And because food is precious.

P.S. I failed to snap a picture this year, so that's a picture from the aftermath of 2008's feast.

The Better Angels of Our Nature

It's that time of year that encourages us to listen to the better angels of our nature. People are writing about their goals, resolutions, revolutions and projects for 2010. I know that over the past year many of the blogistes that I read regularly have inspired me to do better, do more, keep pursuing my ambitions, strengthen my community, make the world a better place.

Last night a thought came to me as I contemplated what more I could be doing. "What would Rob do?" Conveniently, Rob had just told us what he would do. He would be proud of me if I got to know my neighbors better than our current nodding acquaintance affords. Then I continued with that train of thought...what would make El proud of me? She and Ali both would encourage me to get my act together this year with regards to season extension. Kathy would be so tickled if I gathered up my garden tools, and cleaned, sharpened, oiled and organized them all so that they're ready to go in the spring, and if I finally figured out how to organize my canning lids and rings. Julie would be proud if I made a pledge to use absolutely no more plastic shopping bags - ever. Sharon would be proud if I resolved to use less electricity in 2010 than we did in 2009, and actually managed to do so. And Wendy would be proud of me if I made a commitment to source all of my dairy locally.

It's not so much that I crave the approbation of these writers. I think rather it's that in various ways these writers are the voices of the better angels of my nature. I think that's what draws me to their writing in the first place. As I sat there going through the mental roster of my blog roll and what actions they spur me towards, I realized that each one of these things are possible for me, starting right now. There's nothing stopping me from doing any of these things. Having already changed many of my behaviors that were once routine, I know that however accustomed I am to doing something, however inconvenient a change may initially seem, once a new habit replaces the old behavior, it seems normal and unremarkable to practice the new habit. It only takes a bit of short-term discipline and motivation to adopt many a new habit; after that the new habit is the routine. There are countless examples of this in my own life.

So I'm going to work on these things this year, in addition to all those other crazy projects I've already posted about. I may not succeed perfectly, but that's hardly the point. The point is to begin and to try. But what about you? Are you drawn to read blogs which sound like the better angels of your nature? Or do you read for other reasons? Would you like to make your blog roll authors proud? What are some things you could do that you think would accomplish that? I'm dying to read your responses, and you can name names, or not, as you wish!