Adventures on Red Moon Urban Farm.

So we finally came up with a name for our humble urban homestead-Drum Roll please…. Red Moon Urban Farm–Yes I know original right!?. But in defense of myself Sohrab and the kids like it-whew!

On another note I have to fess up and admit that here in Vancouver the weather in the past 3 weeks has been rainy and cold and I let it get to me! Feeling a little down and not very inspired to write I have been drinking tea and having chats with friends instead of writing here, or getting a farmers tan like I had hoped. We have nicknamed this month “June-uary”

But I of course having no choice was rolling with the punches getting the  kids to their last weeks of school, and taking advantage of the rain to be inside working on creations, but if I am really honest what I wanted to be doing was gardening and enjoying some sunshine!

And then a few days ago the sun came out, I was tentative at first to believe it’s staying power, but lo and behold it did stay, and then the flip flops came out to my great surprise! Now don’t get me wrong I am still wearing a hoodie when I am out because the sun is not very hot, but holy-goddess I will take it!!

Of course when one is only going outside to feed the chickens or to pop into the bee hives to make sure all is well, once does not necessarily notice the growing things, but things have been growing away in the garden and thriving on this rain!

So here is a catch up post about growing things:

In one day all of the flowers seemed to pop open giving us the most wonderful eye candy!!

And a few Blog Posts ago I mentioned that two of my hives did not have queens and I was working hard to remedy this problem, for you see a hive without a queen to lay more eggs will die out in a matter of weeks! Because it is always better to have your hive make it’s own queen it really is a waiting game before doing anything drastic, and so I waited…..

But after several weeks of no new eggs in either hive I decided to slowly move two of the hives together with the hopes of combining them, and bought a new queen for the other.  This process takes several days, and as soon as I got the hives beside each other and acclimatized to each other, I did one last check, just to be sure that there was no queen in the left hive, and lo and behold there were eggs!!!

This was happy news, but then I needed to begin moving the hives apart again, this I took my time with as there was no rush and I now have three happy and thriving hives all with Queens!

Of course the chickens-well um-er roosters had some of their own adventures, a few weeks ago when one of them started crowing/cock-a doodle-dooing in the mornings and gave us quite the surprise! And a week later one of the others chickens-er roosters started doing the same thing! So off we trucked Fathers day week-end to Anne’s farm and traded them in for hens, so now we have two new lovely ladies Crumpet and Smokey and hopefully in the next month or so we will also have eggs.

The raised beds are growing like crazy and full of lettuce, Kale, beans and other yummy things we have been enjoying in bits and spurts,and we are preparing to build two more raised bead out front as part of the small neighborhood grant I received, these beds will be full of bee friendly flowers!

Today we head out of the city for a few days to the Island, which I am really looking forward to, and hoping that the sun will stay with us too.