The Inaugural Honey Bee Sting

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Our ridiculous beekeeping outfits.

At this time yesterday, I could have told you honestly that I had never been stung by a honey bee. Yep, despite working in gardens for years and keeping 14 different hives over the past year, I was sting free.

Kelly and I certainly don’t underdress when we go out to work the hives. Our getup includes full bee suits replete with Velcro, zippers, and nylon mesh, as well as gloves with elastic cuffs that reach past our elbows. We have been told more than a few times that we look like fencers or astronauts.

But aside from our protective bee gear, the honeys are also generally quite mellow, and we move slowly with them. The aggressive insects many people call “bees” are really yellow jackets, hornets, and wasps. Humans offer little of interest to the vegetarian honey bee, and bees are focused on their jobs in the world, not (usually) intent on hunting you down. When a honey bee stings, she dies.

Last night, Kelly and I headed out to a site where we have been collecting swarms this spring. It’s a popular spot with the bees, and about 10 colonies have chosen it so far this spring, only to be whisked away by beekeepers like ourselves. Bee can’t see well at night, and they generally retire to the inside of the hive. Thus, evening is a perfect time to block off the entrance to the hive and move it to a permanent location.

Unfortunately, the bees had other plans last night. We arrived at dusk and climbed the 10-foot ladder to the generator rooftop where the bee lures are located. We were disappointed to find a large number of bees milling around outside the hive entrance.

Without suiting up, we sat and watched them from a distance for a while, and it was then, minding my very own business a good five feet away, that a bee approached me. She seemed a bit testy from the start, landing on my arm and running around. I sat quietly and did my best psychic bee communication attempt to let her know that I meant no harm and would love to be left alone. To no avail. Apparently her job was to protect the colony.

She moved to my neck, then up into my hair, and the tone of her buzzing changed as she grew more agitated. I have to admit it: I freaked out at that point and attempted to swat her away. This is a big no-no, but I felt I had nothing to lose. I swatted violently a few more times, managing to bruise my finger on the metal roof before she sunk her stinger.

I hate pain and have no tolerance for it, but I still have to say that bee stings really hurt.  It’s a fiery, focused, deep pain. It reached into my skull and landed me with a dull headache around the forehead.

But what really hurt (and I laugh at myself as I write this) was how wounded I felt. Keeping bees entails disrupting them, manipulating them for human gain, inevitably squishing a few along the way, and making choices about where they will live and how. Still, on some level I view myself as a friend to each hive, a benefactor entitled to enter at will. To be stung as I watched the hive from a distance, even after all my clumsy fumbles and missteps over the past year, felt like a betrayal.

The bees never went in last night. We finally left them around 11:30 after a bee crawled up the leg of Kelly’s suit and stung her. We’re headed back for another go-around tonight and are adding a spray bottle of water, wood, and a roll of duct tape to our arsenal. Keeping bees is hard work, but being a bee might be harder.

What Not to Compost

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The latest five-gallon bucket of compost trash.

Compost has four ingredients: oxygen, water, carbon, and nitrogen. Unfortunately for us, the previous occupants of our house had other ideas.

The chicken coop is built and our last remaining task is making it safe for the chickens. For the past week we have put aside time each day to dig through the top six inches of soil in the chicken run and remove trash.

We have been absolutely shocked by the amount and variety of trash buried in the soil. Each shovelful yields broken glass, nails, wire, plastic mesh, and a myriad of more unusual items. At this point, you may be asking yourself where on earth we live and why our garden is a veritable trash heap. Here’s the story.

Our house was a board and care home for people with mental illness for 35 years before we moved in. The caregiver was an avid gardener who loved to compost. We aren’t sure whether her residents used the compost piles as their trash bins, or if the caregiver herself mistakenly thought that plastic, glass, and metal were appropriate ingredients for compost. Either way, we find a strange and eclectic assortment of trash just about everywhere we sink a shovel in the garden.

But nowhere has been as bad as the orchard turned chicken coop where most of the original compost piles were situated. It’s sad and overwhelming, and it makes us very concerned for the chickens’ welfare. Incidentally, we are also both in dire need of chiropractic adjustments after hours spent kneeling in the dirt squinting at shards of glass and tinsel.

A partial list of the not-to-be-composted items unearthed thus far (alphabetized for your reading pleasure):

  • Band-Aids
  • Buttons
  • CDs
  • Ceramic pieces
  • Charcoal
  • Cigarettes
  • Coat hangers
  • Fake ivy
  • Glass
  • Legos
  • Nails, staples, stakes, screws, and other hardware
  • Pantyhose
  • Pill bottles
  • Plant tags
  • Plastic bags
  • Plastic soda bottles
  • Plastic netting
  • Shaving razor handles
  • Tin can lids
  • Tinsel
  • Plastic and metal bits of unidentifiable origins
  • A wrench

Needless to say, we’re bummed. It’s a good reminder that trash doesn’t go anywhere. It doesn’t turn into rich soil, and whether or not we have to look at it every day, it’s still sitting around somewhere. We only hope we’ve removed enough of it that our chickens won’t kill themselves eating a shard of glass or a nail. After we finish excavating, we will compact the soil as much as possible and then add layers of leaves and straw in hopes that they won’t dig too deeply into the dirt.

Roosters in Our Midst

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Sexual dimorphism, anyone? Olive and Petunia are the same age and the same breed, but they sure look different!

We’ve had our suspicions about two of the Barred Leghorn chicks. Olive and Fiona began developing handsome red combs and wattles two months ago. They grew faster overall, fought more, and in recent weeks began crowing at god-awful hours of the morning. When I say, “crowing,” I don’t mean your classic “cock-a-doodle-doo.” At first I thought it was an immature version of the cries a hen makes when she lays an egg, but now even I have to admit there are too many syllables.

At first the “girls” were shy about their new noises. Kelly or I would try to sneak in to see who was making such a ruckus, and they would go demurely silent. Now, it seems, they can’t help themselves. Usually we find them atop their roost, stretching their necks out as they crow away. Last night, I detected some distinctly glossy neck feathers on the gray leghorns—another telltale sign of roosters.

When we picked out our tiny chicks back in February, a sign prominently displayed above their feed store cage assured us that 96.4% of the babies were female. We have only four birds. If our suspicions prove correct, we will have somehow managed to pick a batch of chickens with 50% roosters. Ack! It’s a different kind of lottery winning that we neither expected nor welcome.

But even if it turns out that Olive and Fiona are simply precocious hens with a little extra testosterone I don’t see how we can keep these birds. Surely the neighbors will object to a boisterous morning wakeup occurring like clockwork between 5:45 and 6:30 AM. And morning crowing isn’t the least of it. Parking my car on the street yesterday afternoon after work, I heard the unmistakable sound drifting from the chicken room window a good 30 feet off the street.

Kelly wrote the chicken vet yesterday asking if the behavior we’re seeing sounds like roosters and, if so, what our recourse is. Dr. Peak’s message was sobering: yes, these birds sound suspiciously male, and there is no good answer for what to do with unwanted roosters. She did mention an organization called Save the Cocks. They advocate the importance of including roosters in backyard flocks, pointing out that the boys play an important role in watching over hens, finding food sources, etc. Interestingly, they also argue that all of us would-be sustainable urban homestead types are in fact practicing unsustainable chicken-keeping when we exclude roosters from the flock.

I see their point, and if anything, my attachment to Olive and Fiona has increased now that I know they’re roosters. They are really quite dear, strutting around with their wattles wiggling and resting comfortably against my side when I scoop them up under one arm. Unfortunately, the reality remains that our little slice of garden heaven is sandwiched between an assortment of apartment and office buildings in a city that explicitly bans roosters. Oliver and Finbad will have to find greener pastures elsewhere.

Emma Mae Lydon: June 12, 1911—April 30, 2012

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Grandma Mae--prune picker, jam maker, rose pruner, leaf raker, garden grandmother extraordinaire.

 

 

 



The Coop Builders Who Could

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The run and coop as they look tonight.

It’s been over two months since we brought home our four balls of fluff. I predicted from the start that we would end up with grown hens wandering the house and an unfinished chicken coop in the garden. This has (almost) come to pass. The girls are fully feathered, can fly quite well, and are alternating their baby peeps with noises that sound distinctly like the cries of egg-laying hens. But the coop and run really are almost finished—we promise—and the girls will soon be liberated from their cramped cardboard box.

Though the coop is not quite complete, I am proud to say that we didn’t procrastinate. Rather, it turns out that building a raccoon-, possum-, skunk-, and rat-proof home for chickens is a huge job for people with no great carpentry skills to speak of. Kelly is the hero of the endeavor, and I the sous builder who scampers to procure the proper screws and hold the avian wire in place.

This project reminds me how much I dislike hard physical work. I want to like it. I take up hobbies that require it, but at the end of the day, I am much happier admiring the completed project than I ever was digging ditches, or hauling concrete chunks, or even pounding nails.

Kelly, on the other hand, finds this project pleasing (if also exhausting and overwhelming). As I write this, I can hear her pounding away on some of the finishing touches. I got special permission to leave the job site to write a long overdue blog post, and I promised to sing her praises. This is not too onerous a task for me, and she deserves it. Kelly has spent nearly every one of her days off over the past few months working on the chicken housing. She has an eye for detail and a perfectionistic streak and has refused to cut the corners that I might have been tempted to.

Braving the neighbors

This morning, we put on our Sunday best and paid a visit to our “chicken coop neighbors”. Their kitchen and bedroom windows and balcony look directly down onto the coop. We were nervous. Turns out they seem to have guessed, due to the large cage-like structure we have been banging away on for two months, that some type of livestock was moving in. Surprisingly, they were all smiles, especially when we assured them we plan to share eggs. They even suggested that their little daughter might be able to come pay the chickens a visit when the birds move into their new home.

Coop specs

The run is seven by fourteen feet and fully protected from chicken-eating creatures. Half of the roof is covered with avian wire, and the other half is covered with clear corrugated plastic for rain protection and maximum winter light. We dug a trench a foot deep around the outside and sunk the avian wire to prevent critters from digging in. We filled the trench with “fine” concrete rubble (i.e. small concrete bits, plus dirt) and arranged large concrete chunks on top.

We built a two by four foot coop with nest boxes and mounted it in one corner of the run. There are doors for us to collect eggs from the outside. We included four nest boxes (probably overkill, as we’ve read chickens can share) and a place for the birds to roost. Kelly designed two doors that open into the run: one for everyday chicken use, and another for cleaning out the coop. She also came up with several screened windows that can be opened or closed seasonally for ventilation.

The final touch is a door for us to access the run. A beekeeping friend of ours generously offered to build it, and we should install it in the next few days. Hurrah!

From the ground...

 

...Up!

 

The partially constructed coop with roost and nest boxes.

 

The trench, beginnings of avian wire, and mounting of the coop.

Garden Grandmothers

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A springtime fig leaf.

I’ve been thinking a lot about mortality recently and the often forgotten histories of places. My grandmother, born and raised on a California fruit ranch in the Santa Cruz Mountains, will turn 101 this June. I was fortunate enough to live with her for two years when she was in her mid-nineties and got to hear many of her stories about life in the country. We live just across the street from her now, and she sometimes comes to sit in the garden and watch things grow.

An 82-year-old woman told me yesterday that she has a theory about heaven. She told me she believes that we have to find heaven in this lifetime, that all of our earthly blessings are enough, and that our lives are the heaven we deserve. She said that the finality of death only enhances the profound awesomeness of life. Amen, and yikes!

Last year Kelly set up her orchard ladder and pruned an old fig tree at the back of our garden. The tree is slowly dying, rotting from a bad pruning cut close to its center. Still, it produced loads of delicious green figs last year, and it leafs out with the same delicate new foliage each spring. In her pruning of dead and dying wood, Kelly removed a large branch, and we noticed the fine concentric rings of yearly growth. Out of curiosity, I counted the rings, using a magnifying glass to distinguish the tiny lines.

Turns out our fig tree is over 120 years old. I counted about 113 rings before, at a quarter inch from the outside edge of the branch, they truly became too tiny to distinguish. Who knows how much older the tree is. Even with a conservative estimate of 120 years, that puts the planting date at 1892, nearly 30 years before our house was built in 1919.

The grandmother fig tree.

How did the tree get here? What else was growing on the land that is now our garden? I find these questions tantalizing, even as I recognize that there is no way to know for sure. So much information is lost in just a hundred years. I can’t know the lives of the people who came before us here. I can’t know what knowledge they took to the grave. What was common sense for one generation can be almost completely unknown a few generations down the line, made obsolete by technological “advances” and changes in lifestyle. My grandmother was the fastest prune plum picker in her family. I have never picked a prune plum, let alone for a living, and don’t know that I would recognize one if I saw it.

With all the recent talk about the release of the 1940 census records, I got online last week and did a little poking around. I know a fair amount about my own recent family history. What I was more interested in was the history of our house and garden. In the scheme of things, census records don’t yield much. I can’t know whether the former inhabitants of this house grew vegetables or kept chickens, and I can’t hear their life stories.

Still, seeing the handwritten names of the first owners of our house sent chills through me, and subsequently discovering the 1931 newspaper obituary for Lillian, the house’s first matriarch, brought me into a collision between a strange sense of intimacy and dissociation.

I think of this house, this garden, this life, as mine, and my place in them as stable and certain. But gardens, whether wild or tended, have always grown here, and animals and people before us have made homes. The poet Mary Oliver asks, “[W]hat is it you plan to do/ with your one wild and precious life?” I will keep seeking my earthly heaven among growing things.

Teenage Chickens

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Olive eyes the great outdoors.

We are now eight days past our target date for moving the chicks into their coop.  We have been doggedly hammering away for more than a month now and have made significant progress on the chicken coop, but swarming bees, busy work schedules, and taxes have gotten in the way of many a would-be workday.

As I write this, I can hear the chicks’ incessant chirping and the occasional indignant squawk drifting from their cardboard box through the house. They are impatient. Cramped, bored, and hormonal, the two gray Leghorns bristle at each other, craning their necks to stand taller than the other and occasionally leaping with sharp toenails (chicken talons?) outstretched. Olive, the sneezing chicken, seems to have claimed the top position, but Fiona hasn’t given up yet. They frequently miss out on treats because they are so preoccupied with their dominance drama.

Meanwhile, Petunia and Luma (more commonly referred to as Baby Tiny) are comparatively peaceful and much less physically developed. They lack the bright red combs and wattles that their sisters grew a month ago, and they are noticeably smaller and less bulky. Luma’s differences can be chalked up to the fact that she is a week younger than the others and a different breed (Barred Rock). We have wondered, however, whether Petunia is not actually a Barred Leghorn, but some other mystery chicken breed.

Petunia accepts a lift.

Petunia has developed a penchant for flying and is constantly on the lookout for new perches. A few days ago she flew the length of the guest room turned chicken room, flapping into the curtain before landing unceremoniously on a stool. She likes to perch on the rim of the box while we clean it and surveys the proceedings with quizzical chicken glances. She seems especially fond of Kelly and will climb up on her outstretched hand in hopes of being lifted to a better vantage point.

In an effort to prepare the girls for the real world of the backyard, we recently began turning off their heat lamp for periods of time. We had lifted the lamp gradually higher over the box to reduce the heat as the chicks grew older, but turning the light out entirely seemed like a natural final step. It also seemed like a good way to teach the babies about night and day. They have been living in perpetual day since they were born, and we worried that sticking them out for their first night in the dark coop might come as a rude surprise.

With the light off last night, the chicks were silent. We peeked in before bed and found them sprawled on the floor of the box. I turned the light back on and opened the curtain at 7 o’clock this morning, and the chicks dutifully took up their peeping and scratching.

With any luck, Kelly and I will finish the final touches on the coop this weekend and get the girls moved into their new abode. Note: final touches, in this case, equals filling the trench, attaching aviary wire to the frame, making and hanging a door, and notching the frame so that the coop’s egg-collecting doors open smoothly. Wish us luck!

Beekeeping Marathon

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This is what three-pound packages of bees look like.

It’s been a busy, even crazy, week for bees around here. Between hiving packages and catching swarms, we’ve barely had a breather, and since there seems to be no way to do each event justice at this late date, here’s the recap.

Saturday: bee packages

We spent all day dispensing three-pound bee packages to guild members. Altogether we distributed about 150 packages and answered multiple questions about queen cage placement, feeding, and candy plugs. At the end of the day, Mike, the guild’s “bee package guy” offered samples of his homemade mead. Kelly is even more eager now to experiment with mead-making.

We took home two packages of bees: one Italian and one Carniolan.

Sunday: hiving the Italian bees

Saturday’s rainstorm finally broke, and we hived our Italian bees in the late afternoon at one of our new host sites. We used last year’s Kenyan top-bar hive, and added a one-gallon Ziploc bag of 1:1 sugar syrup to get the bees going. While we usually use stacks of two cinder blocks for hive stands, we added a third layer to get the hive out of reach of hungry chickens.

Kelly holds up a queen cage with a black candy plug before stapling its metal tab to a top-bar.

We spent the rest of the evening pounding frames together and adding foundation for a new 10-frame Langstroth hive for the Carniolans.. Previously we used eight-frame equipment, which makes for lighter, easier-to-work hives. We are interested, however, in experimenting with Serge Labesque’s method of beekeeping, which involves using eight frames with follower boards in a 10-frame hive body to promote air circulation.

Monday: hiving a swarm and the Carniolans

After picking up a 25-pound bag of laying crumble and chick scratch for the practically grown-up chicks, Kelly received a phone call from a beekeeping friend who had two swarms: one huge one, about 20 feet up in a magnolia tree, and one small one about two feet off the ground. The large swarm went to a longtime beekeeper who experienced major losses over the winter, and we got the small one.

We raced to gather half the equipment we had prepared for our package, and set up a new hive at a second host site for the small swarm. Unlike our multi-queen swarms, this group of bees seemed extremely well organized and competent. As soon as we dumped them in the hive, they came out the entrance, fanning their pheromones in the air to let stragglers know that the queen was inside.

Back at home, we hobbled together enough equipment for the Carniolans and set off to hive them at a third host site. After spending six days in a wood and mesh box with a can of corn syrup for sustenance, a number of the bees had died, but the group seemed thrilled overall to be released.

Tuesday: feeding bees

Sarah made the rounds to all three host sites, and checked and refilled sugar syrup. All told, the trip took about two hours.

Thursday: the queens are released and we take a break

We checked the queen cages and found that both package hives had chewed through their candy plugs and released the queens. This is good news. The mated queens can now start laying eggs.

We abandoned making frames in the evening in favor of washing dishes and collapsing. Our top-bar had already swarmed, so there was no reason to be prepared for anything. Right?

Friday: another swarm and virgin queen piping

We came home from a long day of work to discover (quite by accident) a swarm in our orange tree. The bees were only about five feet off the ground. We stopped making dinner and hastily modified a top-bar hive that we deemed too deep by using a jigsaw to cut it in half.

The orange tree swarm.

As dusk approached, we suited up and Kelly skillfully pruned off two small branches from which the bees were hanging. While Sarah stood at the ready to put top-bars in place, Kelly slowly walked through the garden holding a dangling swarm. She shook the bees gently into the hive and we replaced the top-bars.

Had our top-bar hive, Mondo, swarmed again? We weren’t sure. Lying with our heads under Mondo, we looked up with a flashlight and watched bees tending a queen. The hive appeared much emptier than it had, and the bees seemed agitated. As we watched, the queen darted out of sight between two combs, but minutes later we spotted another queen alone on the back wall of the hive. She began piping. The noise is strange and distinctive. It sounds like a high-pitched, bleating buzz. From our understanding, this is a behavior exhibited by virgin queens to call out other virgins to fight. The piping continued for 10-15 minutes before we went back inside to fix dinner and make frames.

Saturday: re-hiving the swarm and yet another swarm 

During breakfast, we noticed a handful of bees with their butts protruding from the entrance of the new top-bar hive. We saw little in the way of orienting flights, which we would expect to see from a new hive just getting their bearings.

The new top-bar bees preparing to swarm.

As the morning progressed, the bee butts grew more numerous and we became anxious that the colony was preparing to swarm again. We hastened to anchor foundation wax in the frames we had built, and Kelly abandoned painting hive equipment.

We suited up and took a look inside the new top-bar. We saw a total of five different clusters of bees, with the largest spilling out the entrance. Presumably, each cluster surrounded one queen. To prevent the larger, more vigorous group from getting away, we dumped the whole box of bees into the Langstroth hive we had prepared.

We theorized that this would at least slow down the swarm which was beginning, that the bees might be more apt to stay put when they found themselves in a hive that already contained wax, and that the smaller space might force the multiple queens to finally duke it out. It appears we were correct.

In the aftermath of the hive transfer, there was a cloud of bees trying to figure out where they belonged.

But while we congratulated ourselves on our quick thinking, Mondo was on the move again. At lunchtime, we noticed large numbers of drones at Mondo’s entrances. As we pounded away feverishly on our still unfinished chicken coop after lunch, we heard a loud buzzing. Sarah went to investigate, and spotted yet another swarm high in the camphor tree. We are almost sure that it came from Mondo. In a matter of minutes it dispersed, moving as a cloud over the neighbors’ house, dipping toward their wisteria, then through the liquidambars and across the street. It finally settled again about 30 feet up in a huge tree.

Like any mothers, we feel glad and proud that they are in the world, and we worry for their safety.

The First (Multi-Queen) Swarm of the Year

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The swarm clustered on a camphor tree branch.

This morning our top-bar hive swarmed, settling in the nearby camphor tree on a branch about 20 feet off the ground over the neighbors’ yard. We panicked of course, unsure what to do first and acutely aware of the possibility that the bees would pick up and leave before we could collect them.

A beekeeper recently told us he’s had luck getting swarms to stay put by slowly clanging metal on metal.  He speculated that the bees are drawn to the vibrations. I grabbed a kitchen pot and ladle and pounded away, while Kelly brought a ladder to set up against the back of our neighbors’ house (and earplugs for herself).

Then we looked up and realized just how high up in the tree the bees were. We decided to call for backup. We lucked out; our good friend (and president of the Beekeepers Guild of San Mateo County) Rick Baxter arrived less than twenty minutes later with all of his awesome swarm-catching paraphernalia in tow.

As it turned out, though, our bee drama was far from simple. We were able to use Rick’s swarm bucket duct-taped to a long PVC pipe to shake down and capture most of the bees from their branch. Unfortunately, after dumping them into a hive in our garden we noticed two disturbing things: first, a large number of bees still buzzed around the branch in the camphor tree, and second, the bees already in the hive gradually moved out the entrance and took off again, heading toward the same neighbors’ front yard.

Rick vacuums the last of the bees off the branch to transfer to the hive.

Rick brought out the big guns: a vacuum cleaner that sucks the bees down the long PVC pipe into a wood box, where their fall is cushioned by crumpled paper towels. By the time we got the leftover bees in the camphor tree into the hive, it was apparent that the original group was on the move again.

Bees on the go: the bees make their way to a juniper branch.

We stood in the neighbors’ yard and watched as the cloud of bees formed a new cluster on a juniper branch. Another ladder set-up and a good strong shake into the pole-mounted bucket, and we were able to bring these bees back to the hive. Our best guess was that we had missed the queen in our first capture and that the bees had taken off in search of her.

As it turned out, the story was a bit more complicated. As the bees clustered on the outside of the hive, we spotted the queen in the crowd, and Rick nudged her gently toward the opening of the hive. Once the queen is inside, everyone else will follow. But moments later we spotted a second queen, and then a third. In the constantly moving mass of bee bodies it can be hard to know for sure if you’re counting the same queen more than once, but we are confident that we counted at least three individual queens, more likely four to six.

With all the bees back at the new hive, it still took them a while to find their way inside.

This is extremely unusual, but it happened to us last year as well, and we’re concluding that we have some strange bee genetics going on. Ordinarily, a hive will raise multiple queen bees, and the queens fight to the death at birth. The victor becomes the hive’s new queen.

Last June, we found at least eight queens in a single swarm, and though we asked every beekeeper we knew and posted queries on the guild’s beekeeping forum, we found no one who had ever witnessed such a swarm. The hive that swarmed today was originally part of that multi-queen swarm, and it appears the genetics have been passed on.

Garden Record-Keeping

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A page from our garden records binder.

I’ve already confessed to being a record-keeping junky, albeit a very disorganized one. When it comes to planting seeds and harvesting vegetables, jotting down notes and weighing produce brings me great satisfaction. But how necessary is garden record-keeping, really?

For Kelly, there is little joy in keeping records, and the only compelling reason to bring along a pencil and notepad on garden workdays is that the records we make today will serve us in some future season.

I’ve seen all manner of record-keeping. When I interned on a two-acre organic farm in Santa Cruz one year, we penciled our spring planting notes into a tattered, water-warped Mead composition notebook. The notebook lived in a greenhouse at one end of the farm, and half the time we pieced our notes together from memory several weeks after sowing. These were fulltime farmers, relying on the farm to sustain them financially.

More recently, volunteering with other Master Gardeners at a local high school, I’ve seen the opposite end of the record-keeping spectrum. In place of an old Mead notebook there are excel spreadsheets, seeding plans, and bed planting guides. There are tables showing days to maturity for different crops, and tables showing the range of soil temperatures in which a particular crop will germinate. There are planting dates for spring crops depending on location within the county.

I must admit I find it all rather thrilling (if also a bit overwhelming). But I have to wonder whether such extensive record keeping is really necessary to grow a big, beautiful, bountiful garden.

I came up with my own record-keeping system last year which falls somewhere between these two extremes, and though Kelly occasionally grumbles when I insist on hearing the details about her greenhouse planting sessions, I think we both agree that having records at our fingertips is helpful.

Among other things, we try to keep track of seeding and transplanting dates, the crop varieties we plant, which raised bed we grow each variety in, and the dates and quantities of our harvests. Our records are far from perfect, or complete, but it’s still good to be able to look back a year later and remind ourselves of the varieties we grew and how they did.

I keep our records in a binder so they are easy to sort and add to. I also like the fact that the binder is easy to bring along on trips to the greenhouse, so we don’t have to enter notes into a computer (though there are obvious arguments for doing this). In addition to recording information on the plants we grow and harvest, I keep another section to log any work we do in the garden. That way, we can look back and know when we built a new raised bed, started compost piles, or weeded the back forty.