Busy little bees

Due to all of our electronics being tempermental(everything always has to go wrong at once right?), I am just now able to share these pictures with you guys. They are from the Saturday after we installed them, and this is what they did after 3 days! It truely amazes me what these girls can do in such a short ammount of time.

You cant really tell due to all the bees covering it, but there are 3 little ovals of comb under there, and the bees are filling them with the sugar syrup. :)



And this is from my Langstroth hive, dont worry its comb that was covering the queen cage so we had to cut it out. The yellow stuff is pollen! And I cant even believe how perfect each little cell is, bees are amazing creatures!

After these pictures were taken, we have had a cold rainy spell, and when we checked on the bees next, they were all huddled up together. We didn't stay in the hive too long, because of the cold though. They are still getting their 1 to 1 sugar syrup, so I hope they dont die off, not being established yet and all. I guess all we can do is wait and see, and we will be checking again on their progress this week hopefully. Wish us all the best of luck with this crazy weather.

Russians and Italians..... new bees that is!

The new bees are here, the new bees are here!! We are now official Apiarists!

Wednesday we finally went up to pick up our bees up at Parsons Gold Apiaries. They have so many hives, just sitting around the place, and bees flying in and out of the garage, so we knew that was where to go. You would not believe the sound the bees made in there, it legitimitely sounded like all the fans were on, but it was just thousands of buzzing bees. And there were bees flying free just around your head and landing on you, it was all I could do not to freak out at first :) Anyway we had ordered two 3 pound packages of bees, one with a Italian queen for me, and one with a Russian queen for Dad. The family there really helped us out, and gave us a dry run of installing the bees, just to give us an idea, which turned out to be really helpful by the way, and we asked every question we could possibly think of, and hoped we were ready!

The Italian queen went in a Langstroth hive, and the Russians in Dads top bar hive. My hive came as a kit from Walter T Kelley, but Dad's hive was built by himself and Rick, a good friend of his. The installation went without a hitch... and no one got stung! We just hope and pray that they do well and produce a bountiful harvest :) I am just so excited I cant contain myself :0D

So here are our 2 videos, we hope you like them!

Using the Dehydrator Again

WOW! Sorry for the lack of posts in April. It has been a hectic month for sure! Anyway on to the good stuff!
      This last week we dehydrated frozen hashbrowns. We love to keep them around the house for just frying up, or casseroles, but they take up a lot of freezer space. So with dehydrating them, you can keep them anywhere really. And you can keep alot more of them for the space.
     These are one of the easiest things you can dehydrate, because all you have to do is open the bag and pour them on the trays. About 1 bag fits on 2 trays. Don't worry about them touching though, with hashbrowns, it really doesn't matter. Leave them in the dehydrator for six hours or so, or overnight (much easier). And one frozen bag, dehydrated, fits in a quart mason jar.

To rehydrate them, just pour boiling water over them, just to cover. Let them stand about 5 minutes or so. then just treat them like regular hash browns. In fact we just made my Grandma(Nan's) signature recipe, Cheesy Potatoes, with the rehydrated hash browns and they turned out really good, not like her's, but nothing tastes as good as grandmas :) Enjoy the video guys

Garden Beginnings

Prizehead Lettuce, Banana Peppers, Danish Ballhead Cabbage, Mary Washington Asparagus, Yellow

Sweet Spanish Onion, Bunching Onion, Golden Bantam Corn, Straightneck Squash, Pickling Cucumber,

Burpless cucumber, Long Green cucumber, Small Sugar pumpkin, and Sugar ann Snap Peas

We ordered 12 Packets of seeds this year. Yes I can count, I know there are 13 here :) The company sent us an extra packet as a thank you gift, Burpless Cucumbers. They are so nice, we even got a little thank you sticker on the receipt.

The seeds came from Sustainableseedco.com, and they are all heirloom varieties. This is our first year growing heirlooms, so I guess we will all see how that turns out.

Oh and I almost forgot we had some tomato seeds kept back from our Amish friends, Strawberry Tomatoes, and Low Acid Tomatoes and we ordered some Tobacco Worm, and Half Runner Beans too! From a different company though :) 

Thats all for now, More on the planting later :)

Dehydrated Strawberries, My Favorite

This is our new video on dehydrating strawberries! We probably dehydrate these the most beacause they are just so tasty. But be careful about 2 1/2 pints of dried strawberries fit in a quart jar, you could easily eat a whole pint, trust me I've done it before.We bought 9 pints to dehydrate this time. There was a great sale at 1.50 a peice, when they are usually about 3.45 each.

We have a 9 Tray Excalibur dehydrator at our house. This one is nice because the fan is in the back and it blows across the food, not from top to bottom, but any dehydrator will work.

Strawberries are really easy to dry because there's no blanching, or spraying with lemon juice, just washing and slicing. Just rinse them off with cold water and slice off the green tops, and cut out the bad spots. The bigger strawberries you can get about seven slices out of, and you can slice them either lengh wise or width wise, it does'nt really matter. We just slice length wise because it's easier to hold on to that way. Lay your slices out in a single layer on the trays and stick in the dehydrator at about 125 or so. Leave them in overnight and just take them out in the morning and put them in jars with a oxygen absorber. Store the jars in a cool dark place, and thats all there is to it!

My favorite way to eat these is crushed up on top of Strawberry Banana yogurt. Mmmmmm In fact I think I'm going to go get some of that now:) Enjoy the new video!!

Our First Real Post! Canning Clementines

Here goes! Bear with us this is our first video, we're no Steven Spielberg but it gets the point across. Hopefully they will get better for your sake!

So you all know the little cans of Mandarin oranges you get at the grocery, well not only do you get a lot more bang for your buck, but these taste a lot better too.

Just like all the other fruits, for oranges we use a water bath canner. We used a light syrup for our clementines, but by all means you can use a heavy syrup or anything in between, to make it as sweet as you want. That's part of the beauty of canning yourself, you control all the ingredients.

Here is the chart for the sugar to water ratio in the different syrups.
                                 Sugar                     Water
Extra Light                 1 1/4 c.                   5 1/2 c.
Light                          2 1/4 c.                   5 1/4 c.
Medium                     3 1/4 c.                   5 c.
Heavy                        4 1/4 c.                   4 1/4 c.

Canning these is so simple, you sterilize everything, cold pack the clementines in the jars, then pour in the hot syrup. Pour it up until you have a half inch head space left. Screw on the lids and set in the canner. Then you let them boil for ten minutes. Thats it! We got about 6 pints out of our 6 pounds of clementines with a few extra pieces. And don't fret if one of your jars doesn't seal, it happens to everyone, in fact it happened to us this time, but we just put them in the fridge for eating first :0)

Hopefully that wasn't too long and boring for you, I tried not to be! Anyway, here is the video I promised.

Welcome!

Hey Everybody!
       First off, we hope you enjoy the blog, and the posts to come. Now I guess we should tell you what the blog is going to be about so here goes.....We are Mother and Daughter bloggers, Lori and Sasha, and we started a blog to share what we know about the old time skills that have been long lost and forgotten. We'll be talking about a wide variety of things so if you have something you want us to post about feel free to drop us a line. We hope this is as enjoyable for you all as it has been and will be for us. So thanks for dropping by and we hope to see you again when we have some real posts up :0D