I am finally back from my long absence! I return with episode 54: 2022 in Review (& some Chicken Math!). You can find that episode here.
I apologize for disappearing so abruptly. I just reached my limit and couldn’t bring myself to write anything, let alone record something. It’s been an exhausting few years, and the cancer scare over last Christmas, my back diagnosis, and continued mental health struggles just wore me out. I definitely prefer to retreat and ‘hermit’ when things get tough. Social media has always felt performative on some level, and that really puts me off interacting through it when I’m struggling. I just couldn’t face it.
Even though I have been largely absent from public view, I have been working away on the homestead as usual over the last year. I’ve made some changes, had success and failure, and even briefly fell victim to the infamous ‘chicken math’. As I usually do, I’m going to list the goals I set for myself for 2022, and then discuss what I achieved and what I didn’t.
To recap what goals I set for myself in 2021, you can read my blog post HERE
And/or listen to the podcast episode HERE.
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2022 Goals
Focus on my overall health, and find ways to keep gardening without straining my back
Build/buy a Long Langstroth. Horizontal hives require less heavy lifting, and I am curious to see how this works in terms of management.
Keep focusing on health in my colonies, including a strong build up for nucleus colonies (via feeding, mite treatments, regular inspections, etc).
Get more chickens! Yes, I have my sweet Orpingtons, including one who turned out to be a rooster, but I also ordered 6 for pick up in March 2022: 2 Welsummers, 2 Easter Eggers, and 2 frizzle Easter Eggers.
Expand the corn patch, try my hand at growing cucumbers, and see about getting a pumpkin patch established.
Buy more peonies since I enjoy them so much.
Continue to plant sunflowers and wildflowers everywhere I can.
Deal with that poor neglected side bed!! This one will keep going on the list until I actually get it done. After speaking to my husband about it, I decided to hire a landscaping company to do the hard work here. There’s just too much to do and I know it will hurt my back. This way, I can pay some professionals to set up an easy to maintain, lovely to look at area. Yes, it chaps my hide to be a homesteader paying others to do my gardening but this is a compromise that I think is fair to make.
Investigate tools and equipment that might help with weeding and heavy lifting in the garden.
Learn to knit!
Learn to spin! This one is dependant on time but I’d love to do this.
Continue learning about fiber arts, and making things that make me happy.
Get back into swimming regularly now that the gym is open again.
Visit my bestie in Canada as soon as it’s safe to do so. Trip planned as soon as Newfoundland announced they’re opening up! I cannot wait to see her again.
Visit my mum and brother in England.
Goals Achieved!
I have definitely focused on my health, and found ways to keep gardening and homesteading without hurting my back. Mostly, this involves modifying how I do certain things, being careful not to lift anything too heavy, and asking for help. My husband has been great about helping me move heavy items around in the garden, and I have learned to ask for assistance at the feed store. I’m still not very comfortable asking others for help but I’m getting there! My back has been doing well as a result of these precautions.
Focusing on health and overall build up of my honey bee colonies. I will do a full update on the hives in my next episode. I would say this was mostly a success but with room for improvement. I went into Spring with 2 surviving colonies before losing one to one of our nasty cold snaps. I brought home one package (for the top bar hive), and four nucleus colonies.
Getting more chickens. I definitely achieved this goal! Not only did I pick up 6 pullets from Meyers Hatchery in March but I also ended up with 4 chicks in the summer (2 raised by broodies, 2 bought at the hatchery), and I adopted 2 adult hens from a neighbour. At one point, I had 22 chickens and was under strict instructions NOT to get anymore! Sadly, that number has dropped to under 20 now due to a few losses. I’ll discuss that in detail later.
Expanding the corn patch: I did increase the corn patch but did not have much success in growth/harvest.
Growing cucumbers. Yes, this was fun and went so well! Cucumbers are so fun to grow! They’re absolutely prolific and can produce so much in even our short season. I am definitely going to grow more next year!
Buy more peonies. Yup! I brought two new plants home and I am excited to watch them grow.
Deal with the long neglected side bed. YES. It is done!! I hired a landscaper to dig everything up and a designer to turn it into something beautiful, using only native and/or pollinator plants. This ended up taking much longer than I expected and, for quite some time, it was just an ugly pile of earth and weeds but it’s finally sorted! Our designer came up with an absolutely beautiful plan but the final price for doing everything at once was way over budget. Instead, we had the beds dug out, the buried concrete chunks removed, tree stumps removed, and then everything leveled. We mulched everything and used the existing rocks and boulders to mark the beds. I had the invasive plants and bushes removed, and we replaced them with natives and one of the lilac bushes that we relocated from the other side of the property. The plan moving forward is to add plants every Spring, until we reach the final design. It should be fun!
Learn to knit. Technically, yes. I finished my class and made some cute mittens. But I didn’t knit anything else after that! I keep getting distracted by crochet!
Make things that make me happy. Yup! I’ve continued crocheting and have made a handful of pretty things that I am very proud of. Currently working on another giant snail amigurumi!
Get back to swimming regularly. Yes! Part of my success with this was due to moving gyms. I’ve been using the University gym since we moved since it’s so affordable and used to be super convenient. Since Covid, however, they have been making the swim times more and more restrictive. They’d also randomly cancel open swim, or have the swim team taking up all the lanes. I never knew if I was going to be able to actually swim or not. On top of this, the changing room is old and cold, and often has no hot water. The final straw for me was when I noticed blood on the floor of the bathroom that wasn’t cleaned for a WEEK, and when some idiot brought a tour of prospective students through while I was changing!! So I decided to try out the gym at the medical complex where I see various doctors since it’s close to home. It is much better!! The hours are great, the changing rooms are clean, there’s consistent hot water available, and it’s not too much money per month. Overall, I am very happy I made the change, and it’s much easier finding the motivation to go when I know I’m not going to be faced with cold water and possible pool closures. If the pool does close, however, I have access to two other locations. Yah!
Visit my bestie in Canada. YES. Hurrah!! I flew out to Newfoundland at the end of June and we had a great time. It’s so beautiful there, like walking into fairy land! We squeezed in as much as we could and all went well until the last few days when she caught Covid. I quickly followed suit but, thankfully, was able to get back to the US before testing positive. I hope I can visit again very soon! It was amazing.
Goals Not Met
Build or buy a Long Langstroth. I couldn’t find the time to build anything, lumbar prices have been high, and I had no luck finding a ready made one for sale. I still want to get this done but will probably have to ask my husband to take the lead on this since I need help with the build. Breaking news! Just saw that one of my ‘local’ beekeeping supply stores will be selling Long Langs! Downside is they’re $425 each. Gotta price the lumbar and consider. But this is very exciting!!
Establish a pumpkin patch. I set up 2 different pumpkin mounds and grew lots of vines but no fruit. I think some of the issue was location and some was the super short season we had this year. Spring was a mere blip and summer is always short here so there wasn’t enough time. I’m going to try again in a different location that gets even more sun, and I’m going to buy starter plants or start seeds indoors so they’re ready to go out as soon as the ground is warm enough.
Corn. I did achieve my goal of expanding the corn patch but I got zero corn harvested this year. Again, I think the seeds went in the ground too late due to how cold our Spring was and how distracted I was with my Canada trip approaching. Next year, I will plant much sooner in the year and keep my fingers crossed that the cold doesn’t hang around too long.
Sunflowers. Almost none grew for me this year! Not sure if the seeds were too old or I put them in too late but it was a major bust. Will try again next year!
Investigate tools and equipment that help with weeding and which are easy on my back. Not really. I did look into getting more raised beds for next Spring so I don’t have to bend down/kneel as much as before. Otherwise, I haven’t really spent much time looking into tools for those with mobility issues. I did bookmark a few websites so I can look into that again as needed.
Learn to spin. I couldn’t find a local class, alas. But I’m keeping an eye out!
Visit my family in England. Nope. Between doctors appointments, the homestead, my Canada trip, Covid, and then the usual madness, there was no time for this. My mum has also been busy visiting her mum, my Nan, who is 94 and needing extra help/care. I am hopeful my mum might be able to visit us next year, and I finally renewed my British passport so that will make things a little easier.
Reptiles. I forgot to add this to my goal list last time but I did want to breed my pink tongue skinks again after a year off. Sadly, neither of my girls took. I have no idea what happened. Europa really seemed to be pregnant for a while but nothing. I tried Pandora with a new male and nothing happened there either. But I am cautiously optimistic about this year! Europa is still with Titan, Pandora is with one of the skinks I imported from Europe, I have a suspected female in with another of the imports, and I have paired Hyperion with a suspected female. If even one of them produces for me, I will be delighted!! It is definitely challenging working with a species that is so hard to sex reliably and breeds just once per year.
Goals for 2023
This year, my focus is going to be on keeping things as simple as possible! I often felt so overwhelmed last year because there were always a million things to do, and I had a long list of yet more things that I wanted to accomplish. So I’m going to try and keep things a bit more manageable!
Homestead Goals:
The biggest one is putting up fencing around the chicken coops and apiary. We’ve consistently had stray dogs swinging by the property and, thankfully, we haven’t had any real issues with them until this past year. Last Fall, a neighbour’s husky came over and terrorised the chickens. I spoke to the owners and they assured me it wouldn’t happen again. Well, it did, and it killed one of my Welsummers (my husband’s favourite hen, actually, so he was furious and devastated). This is the final straw for us. It’s going to be a huge pain in the ass but we’re going to get some basic fencing up so we can let the chickens roam without worrying about neighbour dogs coming by. We’ll be doing it ourselves to save money.
Keep working on the vegetable gardens that are already established (corn, cucumber, strawberry, tomatoes, bell peppers, herbs).
Set up raised beds and containers. I received a few of these as gifts for my birthday and I’m looking forward to getting them all set up! I think they will be easier on my back. Fingers crossed!
Trying again with pumpkins!
Keeping the new bed weeded, and adding a few plants from our design plan.
Hive Goals:
Keep working on health and staying on a good mite test and treatment program
Making time to just enjoy the bees!
Put the top bar hive on an oxalic acid schedule for treatment as my mite tests seem to be less accurate for this hive (more on this later!)
Catch up on the recent science. A lot of very interesting papers have been published on honeybees in the last few years, and I am very behind!
Continue to support my new mentees.
Personal goals:
Keep swimming! I recently started working on my front crawl, and I would like to become proficient in it.
Keep working on my mental and physical health.
More time/dates with my incredible husbeast! As I write this, he’s in Borneo doing field work, and I miss him so much. We’ve been good about going on coffee dates and the occasional meal somewhere nice but I’d like to step up our quality time even more. We’re coming up on 15 years of marriage, and he’s still my favourite person in the whole world.
Getting back into creative writing. I used to be a prolific writer of short stories and poems but I have barely written anything in the last 10 years. There are two book ideas I have been playing with for ages, and I’d really like to flesh those out. Both are fiction, and one is heavily influenced by beekeeping!
Chicken Math Strikes Again!
Chicken math is a running joke among homesteaders and chicken enthusiasts. It’s based upon how many people tell themselves “I’ll start with just 4 chickens” and then wake up one day to realise they have 20+! It’s similar to something we say in the greyhound adoption world: “greyhounds are like potato chips, you can’t have just one!”.
Up until the past year, I had managed to avoid this. I expanded my flock carefully and with great forethought and planning. But then things got a wee bit out of hand!
I had brought 6 pullets home in March and actually seeing them in the coop made me realise that maybe 6 was a little too many. Oh well, I could make it work! And then, as the pullets reached sexual maturity, one of them (my black frizzle easter egger, Dahlia) went broody. I’ve wanted to try raising chicks naturally again since the disaster that happened with Cheddar so I let Dahlia sit on some Orpington eggs. Out of the 6-8 eggs, only one hatched on Litha, the Midsummer Solstice. This was a beautiful dark chick who grew into a HUGE and gorgeous red hen, who I have called Litha due to her birthday.
Once Litha was a young adult, Dahlia went broody again, and so did her sister (my white frizzle easter egger, Petal). So I put eggs under them both! Once again, of the eggs sat on, only one hatched (under Dahlia), a beautiful grey/lavender chick. Around this time, my closest chicken hatchery had a bargain bin of female chicks that you could choose from. They could be any of the breeds that they regularly produced and you could buy as little (or as many!) as you wanted. So I drove out and picked up 3 chicks to put under Petal.
Sadly, one of the chicks passed away the first night but the other two thrived, and soon my small coop held the two mamas, two increasingly large orpington hens, and two unknown pullets. Around this time, my husband started to ask me intrusive questions like, “just how many chickens do we have now??” and “Are you sure the big coop can house all these hens?”
Sure enough, I did some quick addition, and it turned out I had 19 chickens; 1 rooster and 18 hens. Whoops! I had fallen fowl (hehe!) to the dreaded chicken math. I promised not to get anymore chickens.
But then my neighbour reached out to me. . . could I take her remaining hens? She had started with a flock of 10 but a local hawk had been picking them off one by one (her run was uncovered so it was basically a hawk buffet!). Now she had just 2 left, who were traumatized and lonely. To my great shame, I didn’t even ask my poor husband; I immediately agreed and we picked up the two hens that evening. Betty and Boo, as I called them, went into the quarantine coop. They would freak out whenever a twig or branch or leaf fell near them, and clearly knew death came from above!
Thankfully, they are sweet, docile girls so we quickly became friends. My chicken numbers continued to grow.
Well, life sadly has a way of evening things out. One day in the Fall, I came out to the coop to find my sweet Ophelia in a bad way. I actually thought she was dead when I found her lying on the floor of the coop. Initially, I was relieved to see she was still with us, and started planning how I might help her recover. Tragically, while I was holding her in my arms to bring her inside, she died. It was very upsetting. When chickens die, they jerk and flap and kick quite a lot. It was distressing to hold her through that. She was one of my most beautiful English Orpingtons and a sweet girl. I performed a necropsy and found a very small, soft heart. I think it was a birth defect and her weak heart finally gave out. I buried her out back with the hens that had come before her.
Then we lost a Welsummer to that damn dog.
So now here we are with still more chickens than I might have originally intended but not more than I can handle! The orpington pullets are still in the small coop with the frizzle mamas, and the mystery chicks are now (mostly) identifiable. I have a white silkie (yah, so exciting!! I love silkies), and what I think is either a sapphire gem or a blue sex-link easter egger (I’ll know once she starts laying!).
Here’s my conundrum however: the silkie and the sapphire/easter egger are both bantams, aka miniature chickens. I can’t introduce them to my primary flock because I’m worried they’ll be hurt, especially if the HUGE rooster tries to mount them. My plan is to keep them in the small coop, and I am considering getting 2 more bantams to keep them company. Ooo, that’s more chickens isn’t it? Oh well! I’d love to get a buff or splash silkie so watch this space!!
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Thanks for listening and reading! Join me next week for an episode on all of my hive news from 2022!