On our recent trip to Kentucky, we took our kids and grandson to a local orchard to enjoy some apple picking. Before we came to Kentucky, I pulled the needed canning supplies and spices to make salsa, applesauce, and apple cider with my daughter, Faith Hardy, and my daughter-in-law, Jess Kowalski. While I knew that…
Preserving food on the homestead can be a full-time job! We are not to the point of producing all our own food or even a big portion of it, but we are headed that way. Our goal while we live in Florida prior to full-time living on the homestead is to use this time as…
Our spring/summer garden has reached the end of its production, I picked the last few stragglers of tomatoes. As much as I hated to, it was time to pull most of the plants from the 2021 Container Garden. I did keep the last two pepper plants that are still producing. Even though it’s HOT here…
It’s hard to believe that only a few months ago we had our first colony of bees fall in our laps. Our apiary has grown from a single hive last December to now 7 colonies of honeybees! For the most part, our bees are doing very well. The hives are busy, active, and growing! While…
Welcome to the July 2021 Workcation series. The seventh and final post in the Workcation Series is a labor of love, we planted additional fruit trees on Kowalski Mountain. If you missed the overview post, about all the tasks we completed during our July Workcation you can find it here. I’ll link all the posts…
Honey bees are keeping us very busy at the Florida House! It’s hard to believe that just a little over six months ago we had our first colony of bees literally fall into our lap. Read about it here. While we have purchased only two nucs of bees, our colony has grown to 8 hives!…
Summer has official begun. While many gardeners around the country are just getting started and starting to see some real growth in their gardens, here in Florida, zone 9a, we are winding down. Its been several weeks, time for an updated garden tour. Gardener’s Nemesis Insects, my constant nemesis, are really starting to do some…
Philip has owned and operated his own tree service company for over 22 years here in Central Florida. He deals with his share of critters on the job: squirrels, raccoons, carpenter ants, wasps, honeybees, snakes and he even rescues the occasional cat when needed. If you remember, he first started beekeeping from a bee encounter…
This summer, Philip and I are caring for the home of his parents Danny and Joy Murphy. As retirees, they are spending the summer at Kowalski Mountain. They have quite the flock of birds, about 30 chickens, and 8 turkeys of varying ages. A group of the younger turkeys are escape artists and have been…
This month’s hive maintenance was all about queens. The more we learn about beekeeping, the more I realize that the correlation between a beehive and royalty is no accident. They don’t refer to the matriarch of the hive as the queen for no reason! We encountered some trouble with our queens, that we had to…
