Summer, Sawdust and Skillsaws

One of the high points of 2008 has been my opportunity to enroll in a program for Construction Skills for Women sponsored by Vermont Works for Women. I found out about it when I interviewed at the Department of Labor for a spot in the Step Up to Highway Construction program. Vermont Works for Women, a non-profit based in Winooski, VT, provides training and workshops for women exploring careers considered traditionally "male." In addition, VWW provides classes for girls to build their practical skills, express themselves creatively and expose them to professional female mentors.

Construction Skills for Women is really the title of a series of classes; the specific course that I participated in was for carpentry. The moderators of the program displayed high expectations for class participants. Each of us had to interview for the program twice, explain clearly in each interview why we thought we'd be good candidates for the program, and make a commitment to finish the program. Despite the sort of pedagogical spin with which I may have flavored this description, our program coordinators Rachel and Kristen showed uncanny insight in handling each woman's personal situation. I was repeatedly impressed with their "people sense" and ability to manage "situations" gracefully.




The educational aspects of these classes were most valuable. Though most of us hadn't really had much professional experience as carpenters, it became clear that all of us had little fear of getting our hands dirty. Classroom time Tuesday and Wednesday evenings broached topics such as what to expect from the construction trades, workplace environment, self-employment and job-finding skills. Fairly confident in my interviewing skills, I most appreciated the number of professional business owners, mostly women, who participated our class panel discussions. This generous gift of time gave me a lot of personal satisfaction. Women may not be common in construction or carpentry, but we do have a presence. Fab. I'm not ruling out power tools for Christmas yet.

In addition to great speakers, we also had the opportunity to accept on-site placements known as "job shadows." For one day (sometimes a few hours, depending on the work being done) we were allowed to work on active construction sites. I was able to do this three times during the course of the classes. Each time, I had access to a different aspect of the trade. My first placement was on site for a new bank building in Colchester. At this site, I got to use a drill, a circular saw, use a Paslode cordless nailer to set siding and operate a pneumatic lift. I also spent the second half of the day working with a really cool woman named Sylvia who had been in construction for about 14 years.

My next placement was in a private home in Addison County helping two guys finish remodeling work on an old Vermont home. That day, I got to cut and measure drywall, spray foam insulation, and briefly handle a Sawzall. I liked this job shadow for the opportunity it gave me to talk to the other guys on the job about their experiences in the field. It also pointed out to me how differently one has to behave in a domestic environment vs. a regular construction site. Navigating some of the upstairs rooms while wearing a full tool belt and work boots was a special sort of ballet.




The third job shadow I took had me working with the foreman installing cabinets in a new home. This was my first experience on a sustainable build, and I got to ask a few questions about standards, power usage, and materials. This crew was great. The camaraderie was palpable, and I never felt blown off or excluded. In fact, the day went by so fast at this site, that I was actually surprised to hear someone say that it was 4:00 pm! Never had a desk job like that.

Rounding out the classroom discussions and exercises, Saturdays during the course we worked on an actual construction project. As a class, we built a garden shed under the fearless supervision of Amy Judd, proprietress of Plane Jane Builders. Gotta love anyone who'd ditch the office in order to contribute to the skyline of Essex Junction, VT. Amy is not only a confident carpenter, but she is a gifted teacher in numerous ways. Most valuable is her talent for maintaining an active work site where everyone, regardless of personality type, feels at ease. She is also super at letting everyone discover their strengths, not just their weaknesses. Amy was really clear about everyone jumping in and "getting out of their comfort zone."

In any event, it was a great experience. Although I haven't landed a carpenter's assistant position yet, the experience I've had working with others in construction is invaluable. I will be spending two days (Saturday July 5th and Monday July 7th) on a Habitat for Humanity build in Milton. I am scheduled to go back again on August 16th, and look forward to sharing my time and energy with the volunteers on site. While I search for a job, the opportunity to lend my arm to building homes for others sure seems like a fair trade.

Bees Galore!

The bees are doing well. This frame has lots of empty cells where new adult bees recently hatched out. Looking through the hives yesterday I saw lots of fuzzy bees. When bees first hatch out they are much fuzzier than the older adults. It will be another 3 weeks before our newly hatched bees actually start flying.

The populations of both hives look good; both "Thelma" and "Louise" seem to be laying well. Thelma's hive has a slight edge in population, and I saw two drone cells on Louise's comb. In about 3 more weeks all the original worker bees that came with the packages will have died off, and our new bees will take over all the jobs in the hive. We expect the population to spike upwards soon -- from the approximately 3,000 that came in each package to the full strength of 50,000-60,000 per hive.

Crap. No Raspberries.

So now we know what the Mystery Shrubs weren't. However, it's not all bad news. We seem to have a kind of old-fashioned, culinary style rose known as rosa rugosa. So, for the time being, raspberry jam: no. Home-made rose water: yes.

Hits and Misses

Here is some of our first harvest. It's a mixed bag of bolting spinach, red Russian kale and mizuma. Mmmmm. Stir fry! The kale and mizuma have been cut for thinning purposes and should continue to yield in quantity for months to come. The spinach is another matter:





Near the center of this image you can see the flower stalk starting to form. It's been quite dry and the spinach has decided the top priority is to reproduce while it still can. Doh! It's not the end of the world, but the greens do tend to get bitter when the plant goes to flower. So we're cutting those that have started to bolt and using them immediately in salads and stir fries. We've planted more spinach next to the strawberries (which are now up), so that will be along in 6-8 weeks.

Here's a shot of the bok choi which has also bolted and is very leggy (that's red clover on the right). The small yellow spots are the bok choi flowers. It still isn't too bitter, but it's never going to amount to much now, so we'll cut it out and replant it. A total loss, but that's the way it goes. This year is for learning. Well...every year is for learning, but this year especially so.



What's in a name?

We've gotten some feedback that we should rename this blog to something indicating that we're now "farming". Well, not quite. We're sort of "pretty serious gardeners" now. Farming will ramp things up about another order of magnitude. So we're going to keep the blog name for the near term, at least until we sell something.

Bee update

No images on this, but the bees are doing very well. We've dubbed the two queens "Thelma" and "Louise", and both seem to be laying well. We've seen eggs, larva, and capped brood in both hives. This Monday we took a look inside we saw several bees doing the waggle dance to indicate the location of a nectar source. That was very cool! The bees are very gentle, and don't seem to mind us handling them. In temperament our Italian bees are to bees as black labs are to dogs. The only issue with them is their burr comb production. That seems to have mostly settled down, but we still call them our bauhaus bees when we find new, creative features to their comb.

By the way, as many of you know, bees are responsible for at least a third of our food supply. And it's the best tasting third that they contribute to: fruit, nuts, berries, and some veggies like tomatoes and squash. I read recently that a melon farm will produce 80,000-90,000 pounds of fruit per acre when bees are available to pollinate the flowers. Without bees the yield is 10,000-12,000 pounds per acre. That's a really good reason to keep bees!

Tiny Veggies!

Here are photos of our early greens. These were taken last week, after three days or so of rain. These are a sample of what we hope to be growing in somewhat larger quantities next year. All of them were planted in rows about two feet wide and 38.5 feet long. They are respectively Red Oak Leaf lettuce, Russian Red kale, mizuna and spinach.

Power Toyz

Oh yeah! We're havin' fun now!

As you can see we received the Grillo and got it into action. It took me a while to learn how to engage the PTO. This has an automotive-type clutch and transmission. That is, an Italian automotive transmission. Mi parlo en po Italiano (I speak a little Italian), but I don't do it well: learning the ins and outs of an Italian transmission took some time. By the end of an hour, though, I was able to put this bad boy pretty much where I wanted it. The Grillo is a nice machine. It has 4 gears forward and 3 reverse; the forward/reverse control is in the right hand, the clutch in the left. It has independent wheel brakes, so swinging it around at the end of a row is pretty simple. The control column swivels to either side, and reverses 180 degrees entirely if the implement is to be pushed instead of pulled.

The tiller itself is just one of 4 implements we own. In due course we'll bring out the 53" sickle bar cutter, the chipper/shredder, and the rotary plow. I predict more fun will ensue.





We got this machine with a little (8 hp) Lombardini diesel engine. While diesel fuel is more expensive than gasoline these days, a diesel engine burns only half to a third as much fuel as a gasoline engine with the same torque (in our case 8hp diesel = 12 hp gasoline). In two hours of tilling this quarter acre plot into a finished seedbed I burned about 1/3rd of a gallon of fuel. Added benefits are the reduced maintenance of the diesel engine (on average they last twice as long as gasoline engines), and the flexible fuel potential. We're going to plant oil-seed sunflowers so in a real pinch we could use some of that pressed oil as fuel in the tractor, with some minor modifications.

After the tilling fun was over we planted some asparagus crowns, and companion planted some tomatoes and basil. We planted some strawberry crowns, so we'll soon have a bevy of strawberries (we hope). And we also transplanted our pak choi and tat soi which we had started in paper tube planters. Hopefully the deer won't get them before I get the higher electric fence into action. Another concern is that we have frost potential tonight and tomorrow night. I covered the sensitive things with straw this evening, so hopefully we'll weather this cold air without loss and get on to growing in earnest.

Da BeeZ

Check...it...out!!







We are now livestock owners! As of a week ago, Edward returned from a business trip to the D.C. area with two packages of bees.

In the interests of general FYI, we did take classes in beekeeping back in 2006 from the Montgomery County Beekeepers Association. Boy, did we learn a lot! Ed has had a long-standing interest in beekeeping, and he found out about the class. When we found out that Yvonne could take the class for less if she came along, we thought, "That's a deal!" Turned out to be an even better deal than we imagined. In addition to the broad range of experiential data we received, beekeepers are some of the most colorful human beings on earth. Attending MCBA classes and meetings were educational in more than one sense of the word.

The important part, however, was how helpful and enthusiastic the club members were to get new beekeepers (the "new-bees") started. In the past 15 years or so, a great number of hives in the U.S. have been decimated by various blights, parasites and other less transparent factors. Knowledge of these issues is important for anyone planning to keep hives. Beekeepers have to know what they are looking for in their colonies to accurately assess the well being of their bees. Seasonal awareness of weather, nectar flow, pollen availability and neighbors' attitudes have all got to be on the beekeeper's radar. This preparation helped us greatly to start our own hives.

Last week, we started out bright and early Sunday morning to introduce our bees to their new homes. We carried the two packages out to the spot we'd selected between our blackberry brambles and the garden. Fortunately, the temperatures were balmy and there was little wind. We carefully pulled the queen cage (along with dedicated attendants) from the first package, quickly covering the opening it left on top of the main package so only a few more bees would fly out. We balanced the queen cage between the hive frames as we had been instructed so that the rest of the bees would be able to find her quickly. The cage holding the queen is often stoppered with a candy plug which the worker bees will chew through to release the queen. This cage had a small cork plug as well, guaranteeing some insurance that the queen would make it to her new home safely.


Later we would assist our workers in getting the queen out by gently pushing in the cork when we discovered her still in the cage a day later. The workers now had greater access to the queen's chamber and could enable her escape.




Then the real fun begins. We have to remove the can of sugar syrup that has been feeding the bees, while one of us (Ed) up ends the cage and dumps the buzzing, excited contents into the hive body. Only our bottom section has frames to get the hive started so there's room for two feeders to give the new occupants a food supply. Ed deftly handled this duty with verve and élan. Then we did it all again for our second hive.

We are happy to relate that few injuries were sustained. We both already possessed beekeeper's jackets and kept our hoods on during the moving operation. A day's inspection later revealed that the bees were starting to build out the wax foundations, gather nectar and generally make themselves at home. There was some burr comb on the floor of the hive bodies and between some of the frames Burr comb= any comb built in a random fashion around the frames.


It's best to scrape this off as soon as it is discovered so that later the hive body doesn't resemble a random mess of labyrinthine combs. In addition, it's best not to let the queen to have time to lay eggs in this stuff so that when it's removed, you are not killing off developing bees at the same time.

Here at the end of Week One, we were happy to see both of our queens busily moving about the hive, attendant bees on duty and eggs clearly present in the comb. There were even a few capped cells with honey! We also had to scrape out a bit of burr comb to abort some extracurricular building projects. One small piece of burr had some capped honey and pollen. So far, the apiculture experiment seems to be well under way.