Bottling Bulk Honey

Bottling the honey took longer than extracting the honey from the hives! It was a learning curve and I have a few tips. The best tip is to heat the honey to 60 °C. Otherwise the honey will take forever to flow through the filter material.  Muslin was used as the filter material. Before heating the honey it took about 15 minutes for each bottle to fill, after heating only 20 seconds! The photo shows the final product. I bought the bottles at Cospak. They have all sorts of bottles, jars and containers, normally in bulk supply only. The 20L white container with honey gate I purchased from Hollander Imports for about $29 ... so who's going to eat the honey?

Bee Stings in Painful Places

One of the three places where you don't want a bee sting

Honey Extraction Time!

Finally the Cambridge Division & Co are delivering some produce. HONEY After a few hours (including several stings) we extracted about 18kg of the sweet goodness from 13 frames. The video above shows the wax being scraped off to allow the honey to be spun out of the frame. The pictures below highlight the Super and Frames and also the excess of wax & honey due to a healthy hive.

Vegetables in January - What to do?

Vegetable sowing and associated new works for January are less than other months. This month is more about harvesting and maintaining existing crops. Our 77 tomatoes plants (Acton Smallholding), for example, are looking very promising. The vines are bursting with fruit. First harvest should be in a week or two. Care on these plants will mean keeping the watering even over the month of January. Without even watering tomatoes can develop split like scabs to the top of the fruit.

What new works can be starting in January? Two very important ones: Silver Beet and Swedes. January is the time to prepare the beds and sow for a winter and spring supply of these two vegetables. Personally I would not 'throw a party' for Swedes but Silver Beet I love.

Silver Beet Recipe:
Wrap a piece of cheese - 'coon' for example - in Silver Beet. Steam till the leaves wilt. Serve with Cape Grim Beef. The cheese melt surprise inside the silver beet has put the smile on many a child's face, including mine when mum served this to us as children.

Both Silver Beet and Swede will occupy the group for about six months. It is therefore important to have a well-prepared and manured soil. Doing so you should expect to provide food for the kitchen for half of the six months these plants will spend in the ground.

Ultimate Manure Delivery

We absolutely LOVE a new shipment of manure @ the Cambridge Division. Chicken poo is definitely the manure of choice. After shoveling a ute load you come to understand why the plants grow so quickly once this is sprinkled around them. The stench is astounding, any plant just wants to grow fast to get away from it!

Garlic Harvest

Cambridge Farm finally had the opportunity to harvest the first fruits of the garlic crop for 2010.

With plenty more to come and also the Elephant Garlic this year the winter stews and roasts will certainly be tasty so make sure you put your order in... (especially when cooked in the pizza oven).

The harvesting was a pleasure as was the braiding (see image).

New Additions to Cambridge Farm

We are PROUD to announce we have some new additions to the Cambridge Farm: QUAIL!

Born on the 19th of December 2010. The video at 1 hour old shows they are very healthy. 8 in total were born from our incubator, with some more eggs still to hatch.

The Leisure Center Nears Completion

Over @ the Cambridge Division the Outdoor Leisure Center is very close to its first chance to entertain!

After a hard days work/exercise in the lovely surrounds @ Cambridge Farm or @ the Acton Park Small Holding nothing quite beats relaxing under the Ole Oak Tree whilst sipping some home brew and enjoying home grown pork sausages and chicken on the BBQ.

As time passes the wood fired pizza oven and the built-in roasting oven and webber will provide ample cooking facilities.

The Escaping Wallaby

Where's Mushi when you need him? Can you see the wallaby escaping from our vegetable garden? Tasmania is abundant in wildlife, and they enjoy early morning trips to the vegetable garden, just like us. This morning I also spotted a rabbit and two potoroos.

We protect the garden with a chicken wire fence held up with star droppers, driven into the earth. Kangaroos and wallabies have been known to jump our fence, a future goal is to build a stronger 6 foot high fence. With rabbit and possum protection to bottom and top of fence.

Bee Hive II not looking good

A brood box frame has very dark brown comb.

Our second hive doesn't look good. Very dark brown/black comb in the brood box. The supers have a similar look. But there are some eggs in the cells and on the top photo you can see drones walking around, maybe the queens there somewhere. 

Our bee keeping books says, the tan/brown cap is brood. That means there should be little baby bees under these brown caps. You can see this in the bottom photo.

Brood in a super

There is a lot of bees in the hive so I hope it will be ok. But when I compare this hive with the other hive it looks poor. The other hive is dripping in honey! Heavy frames loaded with capped honey! We really don't know what we are doing, so I wonder if there is something wrong. Perhaps the hive swamped and the brown comb is because it's old and they are re-building the hive with a new queen.