Farmer Ed

Weighed in at 27.5 lbs...   everyone had their fill!

Until you have had vine ripened tomato ketchup you haven't lived... Using Mrs. Wages ketchup mix Anna was successful her 1st try. Would welcome any ketchup recipes you would like to share!  

Each mater weighs about 1lb.

This colony never did thrive this year and we noticed this weekend the bees were not around the entrance... upon investigation found the hive had just a few bees and had succumb to wax moths. Moths in the hive boxes is a big mess and cleaning them up isn't any fun. The boys are hauling the boxes out of the bee yard to start cleanup.

http://www.streetdirectory.com/travel_guide/3883/health/3_things_you_want_to_know_about_cholesterol.html

Low cost, safe and proven food sources high in omega 3's and the right fats to help keep your cholesterol levels in balance-1, 3

Add Pecans to the top of the list

Had numerous customers yesterday at the market asking for honey and since we were out we decided to pull a box.  

Grace is smoking the bees to give them something to think about besides us.

A frame of honey is about a quart of honey.

Jubal hikes the frames out of the bee yard back to the house.

To extract honey from the frame you need to uncap the honey cell.  Here Jed is raking a fork over the cells to remove the capping's.

The frames are inserted into the extractor basket and hand cranked to get them up to a pretty fast spin.

Jubal opening up the valve to start straining the honey.

All our leftover tomatoes are canned into salsa, spaghetti and chili sauce.  Anna at first was using Mrs. Wages sauce mixes but now has developed her own recipes

Squash, Zucchini and pumpkins are made into cakes and bread to be put into the freezer for winter months

I don't exactly know what got into us Saturday but we decided in 101 degree heat to build a hitch en post for our team...  Well the one of the first events that clued us in that it was going to be one of those days was hitting the water main with the post hole auger... oops.  My wife said we needed a water hydrant in that area anyhow. 

Since it has been dry and hot the clay soil is very hard and the auger just scratches the soil until you have another tractor push it down with a bucket loader.  We had some poles the power company left after they replaced them with new ones after a ice storm some years back.

Can you believe we talked our neighbor Richard Jones, sitting on the tractor, into helping us in the heat.... 

After making sure the poles where straight up and down we poured 160lbs of cement in each hole.

Everybody admiring our handy work... Can't wait to get the horizontal cross post stretched between the two vertical posts.  If the horse pull these out of the ground, I'll give up fooling with them!

Fastened the horizontal bar to the posts with 12 inch spikes driven in with a sledge hammer...  Don't think they'll pull it off