Welcome to this week’s homestead update.
Magnolia tree
We still don’t have a date for when the bees will be delivered. The instructor in my bee class said that she thinks they won’t be here until after April 20. That is annoying to me because my big magnolia tree is almost in full bloom. My neighbor has quite a few Bradford pear trees and they are covered in blooms. And the Forsithia bushes are ready to open their blooms. My bees are missing all these blooms. I’m starting my hive a month later than I should start them. That means that I’m going to have to feed them sugar syrup to build up the cluster. I don’t want to do much feeding, but the late start doesn’t really leave me much option.
I planted my lettuce mix in the garden. I wasn’t entirely happy with the mesclun mix that I bought several years in a row. That had oak leaf lettuce in it and I didn’t like the texture. So this year I went through the catalog and picked lettuces that I thought I would like. So my custom lettuce mix this year consists of Red Giant mustard, Schweitzer’s Mescher Bigg, Australian Yellow, Red Deer Tongue, Pablo Batavian, Devil’s Tongue and Drunken Woman loose leaf lettuces. I went by appearance for most of these, but a few are varieties that I like in my lettuce. I guess I’ll find out if I like this mix once we harvest some salads.
I also planted carrots in the same bed as the peas. I planted a single row of Danvers 126 carrots in each bed. I haven’t been very lucky growing carrots in my garden. I have yet to have a good harvest. I seem to have some sort of worm in there that eats black holes through the carrots. I figured this was because I fill the beds with straight compost and it may not be completely finished. But this year’s carrots are in one of my oldest beds, so that shouldn’t be the problem this year. I’ll get this figured out sooner or later.
Septic work
Over the weekend, we had some water coming up through a drain. I used the shop vac to suck out the drain, but it kept coming. We brought in a plumber on Monday and he said it looked like septic issues. Had the tank pumped and he said that it looked like a collapsed drain pipe and I should have that replaced. So today I had the septic repair folks come in.
Another shot of the septic work
Now a part of my yard is dug up now and I’m $750 lighter. But I have a new drain pipe. They found yet another problem, though. My house empties into a dry well. That is almost full, the water level is about 2″ down from the drain pipe. He recommended that we go with a drain field instead of a new dry well. It’s going to cost us another $5000 or so. This really sucks, but that’s one of the trade offs when it comes to moving away from where there is public utilities. He did say I have a year or so, so I can plan for it and get some estimates.
That’s what happened on my homestead this week.
