Flooded and Fruitless

Tuesday, September 6, 2011

51° and windless here on the mountain since 4 AM. The heavy rain continues to beat on the roof and although I would like to go check the rain gauge to see how much rain has fallen since 6:30 PM, I can't make myself step out into the mess. Even Karl the Wonder Dog is usually begging to go out by the time he hears me walk back to the kitchen for a second cup of coffee but this morning he is buried deeply into the bed clothes, disinterested in the weather.

What a summer, what a week! Irene flooded our lowers gardens again and the fences were flattened and ripped apart. I waited three days for the soil to dry enough to stand on it and not sink in and Monday I began to disassemble the mess and figure out how many materials I need to make repairs again. As soon as the sun begins to rise I'll head to the nursery and get an idea of what happened last night. I don't think we received as much rain as last Sunday with Irene and certainly hope not as I did not pull the pump again. The water pump is about 26 feet above the Winooski River bed but is in a narrow part of the river that comes up quickly. The pump and pump house have not been swallowed up by the waters yet and I prefer to keep it that way.

Earlier this summer Gail signed us up for Vern Grubinger's Vegetable and Berry Growers listserv at UVM. It has turned out to be a tremendous resource but of late it has been a tad depressing with comments about what growers have lost. Growers are very generous too and many are offering surplus produce to their counterparts to help everyone at lower elevations get through this weather mess. What is amazing is the destruction people have experienced and the amount of food they had to destroy because of contamination by flooding. The amount of land that is missing is incredible too.

Monday I pulled all our tomatoes and although it was a lot of work for me, it was nothing like what a tomato grower has experienced. I had been growing half a dozen Johnny's tomato varieties as an experiment. I was going to erect a high tunnel greenhouse and the tomatoes I was trialing were greenhouse friendly. Just prior to the floods, the tomatoes were doing what they should and although I planted them a little late to begin with, the production was outstanding and the volume of fruit was significant.

Bending over to pick a tomato or two after the flood is easy but what growers repeated time and again was despite the good looking fruit, dump it all because of contamination. Warnings included wearing face masks and gloves when pulling crops because of the assortment of chemicals that adhere to plants after being submerged. Picking a nice ripe tomato and rubbing it "clean" on your shirt seems easy enough but the chemical and bacterial adherents are the problem. Pulling the plants created a cloud of dust and chemicals that clearly raises safety concerns.

A grower spoke of dumping $50,000 in vegetables and said that having second thoughts about it prevailed in his own mind until he sat by the river and watched what was floating by and over his fields. Gasoline, fuel oil, two town septic systems, millions of gallons of foul water, all forms of household, agricultural and commercial residues, dead animals, tons of manures and fertilizers. The brief summary was sufficient to forget about the nice looking tomatoes and just pitch them into the truck for transport out of the garden.


As I pulled plant after plant, I noticed that the tomato hornworms were still easting away but their numbers were quite small. As I pulled a variety known as Defiant I stopped for a minute thinking about the name and the strength of the plant. Each plant probably weighed 30 pounds, often more, including the plant and the ripened or ripening fruit. Despite being pushed over into a 45° angle by the flood waters, the plants were firmly stuck to the ground. But they were covered in layers of silt and miscellaneous "whatever" and were unsafe to use for consumption so they had to go.

As you clean up any gardens, personal or commercial that may have been flooded over, wear gloves and face protection and don't try to save, eat, sell or donate the food. It's just not right. This is not easy but it has to happen. Next year will be better.



Writing from the mountain above Peacham Pond where the darkness is broken only by the blinking green light on the electric fence that clicks on, protecting our honeybees from hungry bears. Click---click---click.



George Africa
The Vermont Gardener
Vermont Flower Farm
On Facebook as Vermont Flower Farm and Gardens and also as George Africa
On Twitter as vtflowerfarm

Checking Honey Bees

Friday, June 3, 2011

66° with bright skies and a 4 mph wind. It's a good thing the wind is blowing because the continuous rain has given us a bumper crop of mosquitoes and black flies like we have not seen in years. Here at the house where I am marooned with this broken leg, we have always had a reputation of black fly season lasting until just after the July 4th holiday. In contrast, the nursery, even though it is close to the Winooski River, never has a bug problem because water usually does not puddle up there and the wind always blows. Everything on earth has a purpose but I am at a loss as to the benefit of black flies.

This morning my friend Michelle came up to help me check our honey bees. Michelle and Mike have gone in on this endeavor with me and it's nice to have partners. Michelle has no fear of bees and almost seems reluctant to need a bee suit before opening the hive. I'm a real neophyte and a suit between me and 4000 bees still seems quite nice!

As history, we bought the bees on Tuesday the 24th and set them up at the nursery that night at about 9:30. The night of the 26th over 6 inches of rain fell and by the morning of the 27th, the hive had been entirely under flood water and we thought everything was probably dead. With the help of my neighbor Kim, we screwed the hive together for transport and brought it here to the house. We headed it into the southern sky and hoped for the best. Each day the exiting and arriving worker bees seemed stronger but I still wasn't sure if the queen had survived or the hive was in the process of being requeened by the remaining bees. Today was the test.

We removed the roof, then the honey super and then the inner cover to the growing sound of disturbed bees. These bees are hybrids from three crosses made at Singing Cedars Apiaries in Orwell, Vermont and I have to say, they have nice personalities. There may be a few loose canons out there among the thousands of bees we have but all and all they are friendly and not prone to stinging.

I started with gloves, then found that trying to take pictures just didn't make it. I removed my gloves and despite plenty of bee company as we removed frame upon frame for inspection, not once did we get stung. Part of this I am told is just relaxing yourself and of course the personality of the bees is the other part. People place the blame on the queen and tell you "Be sure to get a queen with good personality" but except for giving a few laughs as you think about the suggestion, what you get and how you react are in the cards. If you question me, Google up "queens with good personality" and it will become more clear.

On the last frame we found the queen and that was a welcome sight. She had a long "to do" list so we slid the frame back and buttoned things up. The bees are making honey, the queen is laying more bees and the buzzing bee music sounded good to our ears. The bottom half of each frame had been lost to the flood waters and the bees had already retrained their thinking as if they had been through this before. They are a mystery but ever so much fun to watch. Here's a brief video to see some of what we saw.

Writing from the mountain above Peacham Pond where the warm sun makes me smile.

George Africa
The Vermont Gardener
Vermont Flower Farm
On Facebook at Vermont Flower Farm and Gardens and also as George Africa
On Twitter as vtflowerfarm
At VFF we help you GROW your GREEN THUMB!

Honey Bees

Wednesday, May 26, 2011

A beautiful day here on the mountain. It's already up to 68.4° with a mild wind that barely ripples the tree leaves. As much as I want to jump into the list of things to do, I'm a little tired after a six hour round trip to Orwell, Vermont yesterday with friend Michelle to pick up a joint project--our first hive of honey bees.

Honey and honey bees have been an interest of mine since I was perhaps 5 or 6 and saw bees tended by Harold, a local beekeeper who was known for his skills as well as his reputation of being a hermit. When people had trouble with their bees or when hives swarmed or were found, Harold was always called to come remedy the problem.

Being a farmer or gardener makes one more tuned to insects including bees. It's an interesting symbiosis. Trouble is that wild bees are almost nonexistent any more and mite and virus problems exist now that never prevailed when I was a kid. Local author Rowan Jacobsen wrote a good book on the demise of bees titled Fruitless Fall: The Collapse of the Honey Bee and the Coming Agricultural Crisis. It's a good read and it sure wakes you up to the trouble we are in. When he wrote the book there was no definitive cause of colony collapse but now there are strong theories and additional challenges to all theories.

So part because I wanted to and part because I felt obligated to and mostly because my friend Mike came up with a free hive, frames, hats, gloves, and smoker, I located a beekeeper named Roland Smith, owner of Singing Cedars Apiaries, and I ordered up one-five frame nucleus, a laying queen and bees like you can't count. The purpose of our trip to Orwell was to place the frames, queen bee and other bees into our hive and begin an exciting hobby.

It's an interesting affair to pull into someone's driveway in the middle of nowhere and find yourself surround first by people you have never seen in your life all donning once-white beekeeper suits..... and then being surrounded by flying honey bees in numbers that aren't even imaginable. Many people had been into beekeeping before as contrasted by our hospital-clean suits. To say that Michelle and I were standouts as beekeeping novices doesn't tell the story. Everyone we met was helpful and shared their experiences and advice freely even though we were the cleanest dressed people there. So much so that we decided on the way home that we needed to roll around a little and dirty-up the suits before returning next year so we looked like the more experienced keepers we will be by then.


The property is packed deep in little brooder boxes, each a small hive in itself. Each contains a queen bee and 5 frames of unborn bees and also a little honey. There are live bees already contributing to the health of the little colony and it is this entire collection that you swap out into your hive. You need a hand held smoker to quiet the bees and a hive tool to pry apart the frames and dig them apart for inspection as you decide what boxful you want to transfer and take home. I had prepared torn up newspaper and pine needles in my smoker and peers deemed this acceptable. Never got to use it myself though as I begged for help from the owner's helper--who by the way was the only person to be stung in the crowd of +20 customers standing in the midst of a bazillion bees. Michelle and I had no problem with any of the bees--not even one colony that was aggressive from the minute the top of the box was popped. We left those there for someone else.

All the customers wanted to know how many hives we were picking up. Having a spanky clean suit on was as bad perhaps as saying "One" when others were picking up 2, 3, 5, "lots". One was quite fine for us as we journey into beekeeping.

If you get a chance, read the book I cite and see what a dilemma we are in. And if you are out and about and close by Vermont Flower Farm, stop for a visit, but please don't go near the bees. They are working all day long, just like me!


Writing from the mountain above Peacham Pond where the apples are in full bloom and the lilacs are finally breaking. Shad bushes are in bloom which means the trout are finally biting.

George Africa
The Vermont Gardener
Vermont Flower Farm
On Facebook as Vermont Flower Farm and Gardens and also as George Africa
On Twitter as vtflowerfarm

New picture album on the trip will be posted to the VFF and Gardens FB page in the next day. Take a look!

Fall Hollyhocks

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Already 9 PM and the rain is finally quieting after a couple hours of pounding like a heavy fist on the standing seam roof. The weather people predicted more than an inch of rain and I won't be surprised if we surpass that amount. It is such a contrast to California and the South where serious problems continue. We are lucky here at Vermont Flower Farm to have several excellent supplies of water. It's not just any water, it's the best tasting water I have ever tasted.

Fall 2007 has been interesting. The weather yesterday was like a July day but without the higher humidity. After work, I rode the tractor making a 10 foot by 200 foot long garden at the new property. It will serve as a buffer between the parking area and the sales building and will have a split rail fence the entire length save for the opening for delivery trucks and entering/exiting customers. I misread the amount of clay I would have to remove and backfill with good soil, compost and manure and I had to order up another 25 yards of soil tonight. The garden will be the first thing a customer sees as they park their vehicle so I want it to be well prepared and good looking.

This morning I had to head south for the day down towards Brattleboro. First I had to get the truck back to a tire place on the Montpelier side of the Barre-Montpelier Road because they sold me a defective radial tire last week. They did a weird trial and error thing until they figured out what to do with it and that left me less than pleased. Today was my third visit and now I'm driving on $600 worth of tires that track straight. I left them with my message in economics: If I tell ten friends of the problem and they don't buy $600 in tires, that's a $6000 loss. If they tell 10 friends each, that becomes $60,000 in potentially lost sales. Customers are not always right but when they are, they need to be treated appropriately.


When I returned tonight I needed a good walk to stretch out some arthritic joints. For some reason, hollyhocks caught my attention. The first picture above shows some plants from this summer when hollyhocks were in their glory. Now singles are opening and although the masses are not there, the individual flowers are noteworthy. The flower bees are slowing down their visits but the bumble bees and a neighbor's honey bees keep working every available flower.




Many visitors ask us to dig up hollyhocks but we won't. This is a plant that is best seeded into your garden space and this is the time of year to do it. Our garden seed production was not that good this year but this is a plant which produces more than I want to deal with from year to year. It was a nice surprise today to see so many in bloom. There are still some trollius showing color, several campanulas, the last of the monardas and one last Hemerocallis 'So Lovely'. Looking back on our gardens this past summer, I can reiterate, "They really were so lovely."


Writing from the mountain above Peacham Pond where sunsets come too early, daylight is too brief.

Best garden wishes,

George Africa
The Vermont Gardener

http://vermontflowerfarm.com
http://vermontgardens.blogspot.com