Miles Away Farm Blog

Zero to 60 in Less Than Two Weeks

May 13, 2011 in Garden | Tags: Spokane | Leave a comment

I’ve planted two types of asparagus, one green, the other purple. Guess which this is?

Building chicken pens, checking on bees, moving seedlings from the grow lights to the sunlight and back again, mowing a suddenly growing lawn, celebrating a 13 year wedding anniversary with my husband, looking for a lost cat (still looking), digging up endless alfalfa (the garden is in an alfalfa field that was plowed last fall. A LOT of the alfalfa is still happily alive), and planting planting planting. These are just some of the things that have happened in the last two weeks. Not much time to blog, I must admit. Read the rest of this entry »

Bee Mine

April 29, 2011 in Farm Life, Garden | Tags: bee keeping, bees, honey, mead, Spokane, top bar hives | 4 comments

This is how the “hive” of bees arrives. The can is full of sugar syrup, with small holes at the bottom, to feed the colony. The queen is in a small box hanging from the top. You can bet that when this arrives at the post office, they call you right away!

On April 16th, we hived an order of Carniolan honey bees. It’s good to have bees again.

I love the idea of keeping bees. What’s not to love? The ultimate in a “local” sweetener, the increased yield from fruit trees and garden plants, a source of wax for making lip balms and hand salves, not to mention the pure fascination of having this colony of insects living in harmony with humans. Bees are just amazing! Read the rest of this entry »

As Homer says, “D’oh”.

April 21, 2011 in Farm Life | Tags: spider webs, spring, violets | 1 comment

I could not wait for spring. It’s been a long cold wet overcast winter…since, like, mid November. This Colorado girl was having serious seasonal affective disorder (SAD) sunshine withdrawal. By April, I figured we were out of the woods. And we HAVE had more sunshine. We even had one day where there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. It felt like the governor had called in a death row reprieve.

So I broke ground and planted seeds on April 7th. And several rows of chard, spinach, lettuce, spicy greens (mustards), onions, peas, beets, Chinese cabbage, potatoes and radish later, I have a total of four, count them, four mustard greens coming up two weeks later. Read the rest of this entry »

Good Dirt

April 14, 2011 in Garden | Tags: clay, sand, shake test, silt, soil, Spokane | 4 comments

An unexpected surprise growing in my good dirt this spring. Nice to know that the gophers have not eaten every bulb ever planted here.

I think every plant I have ever purchased from a nursery had a tag that said “best when grown in sandy-loam”. Well thanks. That was really helpful. I’ll just run down to my local soil dealership and pick up a couple of yard sized loads of sandy-loam.

I’ve gardened in California (clay-loam), Arizona (rocky sand) and Colorado (clay-loam, with an emphasis on clay), and now in northeast Washington. And lo and behold, the soil here is sandy-loam. It DOES exist! Read the rest of this entry »

Outhouses and Pin-up Girls

April 7, 2011 in Farm Life | Tags: outhouse, pin-up, privy, Spokane | 3 comments

As I’ve mentioned before, this old farmstead was likely established around 1904, long before the days of indoor plumbing. So on the property was an old outhouse (or privy, as my father would have said). Long since abandoned to its original purpose, the back supports had slid down the hill, and what was left of the structure was being held up by a Douglas-fir tree.

Clearly not worth trying to save, we dismantled it when a friend of mine came out to visit. She was celebrating her 50th birthday, and has had a tumultuous last two years. She thought it was highly appropriate to be “tearing down some shit” for the start of her 50th year on earth. Read the rest of this entry »

Garden Math

April 4, 2011 in Garden | Tags: Deer Fence, New Garden, Spokane | Leave a comment

The soil here is some of the easiest to dig in my gardening experience. Seventeen 2-ft holes went pretty quickly. My husband gets most of the credit.

A² + B² = C². Remember that formula for finding the hypotenuse (long side) of a right triangle from a long ago math class? My husband and I were using this formula to lay out my new garden space this weekend.

I love math. I love the preciseness, and the idea that underlying what appears to be the chaos of the natural world there is this framework of concrete mathematics explaining it all. It was my favorite subject in elementary school. But alas, math has never been a strong subject for me. If I work at it, I can get the correct answer, and more importantly, even understand why (I even got through college calculus with an A), but a week later, it is all forgotten. Read the rest of this entry »

Peep Peep Peep

March 29, 2011 in Farm Life | Tags: chickens, egg nutrition, incubation, Spokane | 8 comments

OK, I was a pretty small kid, but this chicken is seriously huge. She was my buddy for sure.

Confession. I have always loved chickens. When I was just a toddler, my parents moved to a farm in the Missouri Ozarks, and my father promptly bought chickens, geese and ducks. I remember picking the day old chicks up at the post office in a big flat box with holes in the sides (yes, I have memories that go all the way back to BEFORE I was two – crazy but true). Read the rest of this entry »

Not Eastern Syrup Pt. 2

March 15, 2011 in Preserving | Tags: boxelder, Spokane, syrup | 4 comments

Here’s the evaporator in action. I built it next to a fence so I could tie a tarp over the set-up to keep the rain out, which worked pretty well. You know how you can sit and watch a fire for hours? When boiling down sap, you get to do this and be productive at the same time! Note the slightly wonky block placement. Things moved around a bit with the heat from the fire. Keep an eye on your bricks and your pans or bad things could happen!

If you’ve been following along, then you know that the big new experiment this March has been to make syrup out of boxelder tree sap. You can store your sap in food grade containers for a few days until you are ready to boil, as long as you keep it cool. Fresh sap is like fresh milk. You want to treat it the same way. I happened to have a few 6 and 7 gallon water containers and a root cellar that is currently at 40 degrees, so it was easy to hold the sap for a few days. A food grade 55 gallon drum with a lid and a spigot would be ideal. Read the rest of this entry »

Hope (and seeds thank goodness) Springs Eternal

March 11, 2011 in Garden | Tags: gardening, seed starting, Spokane | Leave a comment

This was the view out my back door on Wednesday March 9th.

Seriously?!

Thankfully, we spent the weekend getting a seed starting area ready to go in the house. We repurposed a wire rack, purchased a couple of shop lights (to add to the two I already had) for about $10 each, scrounged a few “S” hooks and chain, and were ready to go. Read the rest of this entry »

This Ain’t No Eastern Maple Syrup

March 7, 2011 in Harvesting, Preserving | Tags: boxelder, Spokane, syrup | 4 comments

Here’s what I needed for my set up. Taps, tubing, hammer to place taps (they don’t look like they will fit, but the tree is flexible and they do) and 5/16 drill bit (which I happened to already have).

Sometime last fall, I ran across a reference to making a tree syrup (ala Maple Syrup) from the sap of Boxelder trees. I’ve always wanted to try my hand at making maple syrup. I love the idea of a readily available free sweetener, just out there in nature waiting for me to come along. However, I figured it was a bucket list item that was going to go unkicked, as Sugar Maple (Acer saccharum), the tree from which maple syrup is made, does not grow much west of eastern Kansas. So when I heard about boxelder syrup, I was stoked. Read the rest of this entry »