Purple Dog Lavender Farm

Lavender Labyrinth

2013-05-19T09:53:00.000-04:00

The second spring on the farm we decided to create a labyrinth in memory of my oldest brother who passed away. It was quite a project and that winter some of the plants were too exposed to the wild and crazy King Ferry winds and died. Some grew back and the past two summer drought conditions didn't help matters. This spring, though not real wet, has given the lavender enough warmth and moisture to green up beautifully. This year we ordered some replacement plants from our favorite wholesaler, Stonegate Lavender in Oregon. The labyrinth is going to be stunning this year as are many of the changes we have in store for our customers this season. We are working furiously to get the farm ready for a wedding amongst our lavender in June. We are also working to get the gypsy wagon completed. The walls are up and hopefully this week we will get the roof on. Everything thing on this farm is a labor of love, but this time of year the planting, and pruning, as well as all the other spring farm work, can be a bit overwhelming. In the midst of summer though we will remember it was all worth the effort. Remember to check here and Facebook for upcoming events and activities on the farm as well as what we are harvesting.

The scent of lavender is just a step away at Purple Dog Farm.

Gypsy Wagon Update

2013-04-13T09:17:00.000-04:00

Now that spring has sprung, we are beginning to get more work done on our farm store gypsy wagon. Recently we finished making the form that will be used to bend and laminate the rafters.
The form will receive 12 foot long strips of ash that will be glued up to create our rafters for the wagon. After they are laminated we will run them through the planer to even them up.
The other part of the wagon we have been working on is repairing the stained glass windows that will be used for the dutch door on the wagon. These windows, donated from a friend, needed a few pieces of glass replaced and Serviente Glass in Ithaca was gracious enough to advise us on how to make the repairs and supplied us with the glass and other components.
Next, it is on to working on the walls and getting the rafters in place to receive the roof. If all goes well (and that is mostly dependent on the weather) we hope to have it done by Memorial Day.

Windows repaired and cemented

Nugget

2013-03-26T19:48:00.001-04:00

Five years ago when the farm was just a wish, a hope, a dream, my fiance decided to buy six chicks. All in an effort to live more the way we wanted to be. I had a little experience with hatching chicks but raising them to full grown layers was a bit different. We were successful, all six made it into adult henhood. Right from the start there was one chicken that had attitude and she was literally top of the pecking order. We named all our first chickens after food. Chicken Cordon Bleu was named Blue. Chicken Patty was shortened to Patty, Chicken Rosemary was Rose, Chicken BBQ was named Barbie and Chicken Marsala became Marcie. Chicken Nugget became Nugget and she was the queen of the henhouse. She ruled the roost.(pardon all the puns, but I couldn't resist) This Rhode Island Red was not fearful of anything. She would walk right up to our three golden retrievers and not back down. One day she hopped up on my lap as we were sipping wine in our Adirondack chairs. She would greet us in the morning at feeding and pick out bugs while we were gardening. Nugget passed on to the great henhouse in the sky. Her personality and attitude will be missed. We no longer name our chickens, it makes it all the harder when they do pass on. We raise our chickens for their eggs not their meat. We let them live out their lives in relative ease, realizing that as they age they give us less eggs and just eat our feed. We live in a co-existence together. The chickens give us eggs and we give them a place to live with freedom to be chickens and enjoy what they may find on the farm.

The Hive and the Honeybee

2013-03-09T08:38:00.001-05:00

The Hive and the Honeybee is a website.It is one of the largest collections of material on the etomology of honeybees and beekeeping maintained by Cornell University. Recently a friend shared the information with me that many of the books and material has been scanned digitally and placed on line for viewing. What a resource for the novice, the oldtimer and the curious. Many beekeepers and especially those looking to keep bees more naturally are looking to the old treatises for information that may to keep bees more chemically free. I am on a quest to do the same. Some of the chemical free beekeepers I read about are looking at doing this I think by shear overpowering of numbers. Raising healthy hives to replace not as healthy hives, to selectively breed stock to develop natural resistances to some of the pests that plague bees. Just as a natural beekeeper has their bees draw out their own comb instead of using pre-made foundation that may have trace amounts of chemicals in the wax, beekeepers are raising multiple nucs to have on hand as replacements to strengthen a weak hive or to replace failing hives. This summer I will be experimenting with adding my own nucs(small nucleus of bees and queen that will eventually develop into full hive). I'll be looking to split stronger hives and try to raise some of my own queens. I want to build on some of the hearty stock that has survived here on the farm.
I have one hive that I re-queened once(and I forgot to record where I purchased the queen and what type of bee) but this hive in the back of the property seems to have smaller darker bees than my other hives. These bees seem to weather winters better and though seem to bulk up slower in the summer than the others, they still seem to marshal their resources better and survive on less. I wonder if they crossed somewhere with feral bees as their smaller size suggests. I plan on taking splits from this hive and another hive and see if I can develop more hives. We are also working at developing our acreage to have more nectar and pollen sources available for the bees. All this to help the bees, but also to make the farm more naturally sustainable in the life force that uses our land.

First Plantings for the New Year

2013-02-24T08:57:00.000-05:00

Spring is in the air or at least we hope. One sure sign for us of spring is the beginning of our seed plantings. Some of the first plantings for us are herbs. They seem to take the longest to develop and need the most care. Today we cleared out our back office and decided to make that our early spring nursery this year. We also cleared it out as we are getting ready to repaint the room so the bride that will be using the farm this summer has a nice place to prepare. In years past we have tried a lot of ways to get our seeds started. grow lights in the basement, placing flats on the radiators in the rooms of the house. This year we will probably have them still scattered through the house on radiators. The steam heat warmth really kickstarts the seedlings. We will then transfer them to the office which is well lit and warm and once the hoophouse is warm enough(it is unheated) we will transfer our seedlings to harden off and finish getting ready for sale there. We have increased our varieties for sale this year. We will have new varieties of tomatoes, more melon and watermelon varieties, a whole bunch of herbs and some new sweet pepper varieties.

Nor'Easter

2013-02-09T08:13:00.002-05:00

Ugly weather. Steady, blowing mess of sleet and heavy snow. I had a three hour drive in the mess last night driving around people who should learn to drive in the snow if they are going to be out in it. Today chilly with winds and drifting snow, we've decided to hunker down and get some indoor projects done and save the fun outdoor activities for tomorrow. The storm has blown past and now we just have to deal with digging out, but things are not quite as bad as they projected. A good book, sitting by the fire is in good order for the day. The gypsy wagon is in the next stage of building getting ready to laminate the curved roof supports. Pictures to be forthcoming as the laminating begins.

Winter Check of the Hives

2013-01-19T13:20:00.001-05:00

Today was a mild day of 43 degrees. The wind had died down and cold single digit temperatures are expected to arrive. I am a newbie when it comes to keeping bees and I have worried each winter. Did I leave them enough honey stores for winter? Did I close them up adequately? Will I have any hives alive in the spring? We had some leftover comb honey I figured I could feed them if need be. So I trudged out the hives and low and behold each one was more active then the next they all seemed to still have a good amount of stores left. I removed a couple empty frames and placed a few of the comb honey in some of the ones that seemed like they could use a bit more. Now to hope for an early spring!

Decking the Wagon

2012-11-18T17:00:00.002-05:00

I spent the weekend working on the deck. First I had to secure the crosspieces with lagbolts into the main beam support.

Next I had to mill the oak decking from oak boards a friend gave us. I milled a simple overlap on the edges to minimize spaces and gaps.

I had enough boards to nail down half the deck. We nailed down the boards with square nails from a company called Tremont which still make nails like they did 100 years ago. Now to procure a couple more boards and finish the deck so we can start working on the walls.

Windows

2012-11-16T22:22:00.002-05:00

Friends are a wonderful thing. As life goes on we cherish our friends new and old all the more. Especially the ones that are supportive and cheer you on as you begin projects and ideas. Allison a wonderful art teacher I work with is one of them and her mother a new friend and contributor to our wagon of some beautiful stained glass windows that will become part of the entry way to our wagon. They will be the split windows above our dutch door. Thank You, Thank you!

Carving

2012-11-16T22:15:00.002-05:00

I started carving the supports of the undercarriage. I stopped at my favorite woodshop (Pittsford Lumber) and picked up a beautiful Swedish antique carving gouge to help with the job. I then proceeded to roughly cut the ends of the cross supports into the design I envision. Four carvings on each of 8 crosspieces made for a long Saturday. Next step is to secure these to the main beam support and I will sand the curves once they are in place. A friend donated enough oak boards from a tree she took down on her land years before which I will mill to be the flooring for our caravan.
I read, research and peruse the net for images and details that will make this a unique carriage. Look enough online and you will find that the true beauty of these wagons are in the details. As I think about that I realize this project is just beginning. I have many more things to acquire and many new skills to learn.

Building the Under-carriage

2012-11-04T15:29:00.001-05:00

I have begun working on the under-carriage to support the gypsy wagon. I have spent the past few weeks gathering the materials. The main support piece I needed was taken from an old 1830's barn that was being salvaged in the nearby town of Groton. I had to split this massive 12 inch by 10 inch beam in half which though straightforward in my head, proceeded to take me more than 2 hours to split the 12 ft length. The first struggle was to get the great timber from the demolition site to the farm which was assisted by my neighbor John and his pickup. We had the beam precariously perched on the cab and the bed of the truck and made it the 15 minute ride back to the farm. Today I proceeded to chisel out recesses for the stringers that will support the floor and bolt the main beam to the chassis. The next step is to carve decorative scrolls to the end of each stringer. Sixteen scrolls in all. When the wagon is completed these small decorative features will give the wagon the semblance of a gypsy wagon while not quite being a traditional wagon. What I have enjoyed with this wagon is how it has come together with support from so many avenues. The chassis as previously stated is from a 1930's farm wagon. Four Oak windows we salvaged from Significant Elements, a local architectural salvage company in Ithaca. The old barn beam and in our basement we found an old dutch door which is the perfect entrance for a gypsy wagon. Lastly, my wonderful in-laws, Lottie and Gene, knowing I always have some project going on the farm, gave me a gift card to Lowe's for my recent birthday,which paid for the hardware and miscellaneous tools I needed to assemble the base. The support of friends, neighbors and family, odd mix of materials truly make it a "gypsy wagon."

Good Bye Sandy

2012-10-30T09:27:00.001-04:00

We battened down everything in preparation for Hurricane Sandy, but this being my first year with so many beehives and making sure all the animals were safe I forgot to secure the hives. It was dark and too windy before I realized it, but with the sunrise this morning all the hives were intact. I have situated them to be sheltered from most winds. They are situated in the orchard and the rear lavender field in a way where they get a good amount of sun but stay sheltered form the elements. All and all we weathered things well, no loss of electricity and no downed branches or trees. Lucky, and next time the hives will be battened down as well.

Farm Store Project

2012-10-13T09:37:00.000-04:00

Reading style vardo

Our winter project is to build a small farm store to help us sell our wares by the road. We wanted something unique, an eye catcher and have settled on building a gypsy wagon, or otherwise known as a vardo. We procured an out of print classic volume on the history of English gypsy vardos or caravans and designed a version to fit our needs. It will be about 14 feet long and six feet wide and will hopefully be completed by the spring. We found an old 1930's farm running gear to add a bit of the character we were looking for. We will post the progress of the project here through the winter. The first steps were to strip off the rust and prime and paint the running gear.

Rusty arrival

new coat of primer

Satin black coating ready for the deck

Creamed Honey

2012-09-30T16:13:00.004-04:00

I have read online and in beekeeping books the steps to making creamed honey. I thought I would try it sometime. Well I guess I don't have to wait. For those who have never seen creamed honey it is not quite as it sounds. Creamed honey is made by a slow crystallization of the honey. Typically the crystallization process is aided by seeding regular honey with a bit of creamed honey to start the process and then the honey is placed in a cool place to continue the process. After we closed our roadside stand for the season we left a few jars in our hoophouse and we forgot about them. Yesterday lo and behold we found the jars and noticed the honey was all cloudy. I opened the jar and sure enough we had a beautiful jar of lavender creamed honey. My guess is the cool 40-50 degree nights that we have been having were just right to make the process take place. The beauty of creamed honey that I never appreciated before is it makes it so easy to spread. If your toast is a bit warm the honey melts back into liquid honey too. Just so good!

Waning Summer

2012-08-15T07:45:00.001-04:00

My summer gig as farmer is almost over. I now have to go back to my job as a teacher of young ones. I love my work both on the farm and at school. Yet I will miss being outdoors in the fresh air and the work doesn't end on the farm just because school is in session. As the growing season moves into fall we have work to do. The hoophouse needs to be readied for fall. Plantings started for fall and winter food, lettuce, carrots, beets, spinach. Our lavender cuttings will be re-potted in about a month. Our garlic bed prepared for October plantings and all the other garden beds dressed with manure and compost and turned over to be ready for spring plantings. All this along with the typical weekly chores of mowing, feeding the animals and harvesting the last of our summer produce and preserving that for winter use. Our nights are getting cooler a bit earlier it seems. A bit of summer remorse is setting in. We are already looking to next growing season and what we will do differently. How will we support tomatoes next year? Which beds will hold the lettuce, onions and beans. What worked and what didn't this summer. As we look to fall we are also looking to begin working on our farm store. This will be unique. Different than what you might imagine. I will be a bit vague here as I will share the building steps as we begin work this fall. It has been in the works for a year now. We have been working out the design and costs. Our store will also be a place for local craftsman to sell their wares and bring tourism attention to this side of our lake. We have a potter, candle maker, woodworker, wool spinner and soap maker all lined up to stock our shelves, along with all our own lavender and farm products. So another growing year almost complete and an exciting year ahead.

More Honey

2012-07-31T17:01:00.000-04:00

Well we have harvested and extracted more honey. My wife and I were trying to define the taste.
Sweeter? Maybe. flowery? Isn't all honey from flowers? So all we can say is that it is a definitely a different flavored honey. I didn't think I would be able to tell the difference. But the lavender flavor really comes across. As I wrote earlier we have four hives. Each hive has four supers, these are the boxes that hold the honey comes and each super holds 8 frames of comb with a total weight of somewhere between 25-30 pounds of honey per super. Even with harvesting a minimum of one super from each hive, you can do the math on the yield of honey we are looking at having. We will be selling this by our roadside stand as well as at the King Ferry Winery Farm Market. Golden nectar, mmmm, so good!

Grading Garlic

2012-07-20T16:05:00.002-04:00

We grow our own garlic. Many of the things on the farm are things that we enjoy and grow so much of that we sell the extra to visitors or at our roadside stand. It doesn't mean that they get our family cast-offs. Above is a picture of three heads of garlic all the same variety. The one on the right is what we use for seed stock. We look for uniform large size heads for our seed stock. The one in the middle is what we sell to our customers. A uniform size head not quite as large as our seed stock, though once we have enough seed stock any extra is sold by the road. What we eat at home is the smaller head on the left. These are the runts, the garlic that may be misshapen, too small to sell.
Though small they still taste delicious.

Greenhouse Mural

2012-07-20T08:27:00.004-04:00

All this week we have been focusing on watering the crops,
(who isn't) and working on a mural on the hoophouse. We face a main road and we wanted a bit more visual interest as people pass by. I have never painted something so large, all be told, I have never painted anything decoratively. My painting expertise are walls with a roller and trim with an angled sash brush. So this is a creative challenge. I am enjoying the process of seeing an idea go from paper to reality.

Lavender Honey

2012-07-15T15:21:00.000-04:00

This weekend we had family visiting from out of town and decided to show them how honey is collected from our hives. As I wrote earlier we have been hoping to harvest a honey that was decidedly lavender honey. Bees can travel up to three miles for nectar but they are insects of opportunity and will fly to the nearest source, especially if it is plentiful. I pulled a few frames for company and the color was right. It wasn't the deep orange of clover honey but light yellow, barely a tint of color. I had never had true lavender honey before but my sister-in-law had traveled to New Zealand and sampled lavender honey there. She pronounced it truly lavender in taste. To my joy and utter delight the taste was flowery but not overpowering, a taste of camphor but not cloyingly so. So in the next few weeks as we harvest , process and bottle we will have lavender honey available for purchase.

Garlic!!

2012-07-06T16:50:00.002-04:00

We love garlic. For the past few years we have been growing and harvesting our own heads of the luscious allium. This year we have enough to sell to others, store for us to last the year(we use on average 2-3 heads a week)and enough leftover for seed stock to increase our plantings from 600 head to closer to a thousand heads. We harvested the first bunch yesterday they look large and lovely. They now need to cure for a week or two in the carriage barn and then the will be cleaned up and trimmed for sale. We trim the roots cut of the top unless they will be braided and the dirt and outer layer of skin removed. We have 10 varieties and of course many of them are purple. Can't wait for the ripening tomatoes to come in so we can make Shari's great bruschetta and try a recipe we found for roasted garlic tomato sauce using six heads of garlic in each batch!

PIckled Beets and Eggs

2012-07-06T16:35:00.002-04:00

My mother was Pennsylvania Dutch and during my childhood, summer was a season of canning to put away the summer's bounty for winter. One of those delicacies was pickled beets and eggs. Never a lover of beets I always ate the eggs. Now as my tastes have changed ( I love beets) I thought I would try making a jar of the beets and eggs. My mother passed away a few years back so I had to rely on some of her cookbooks for a recipe. I just finished the jars with beets from our garden and eggs from our chickens. Now to wait for at least 48 hours for the flavor and color to create the desired effect.

Honey For Sale

2012-06-21T22:54:00.002-04:00

We harvested some honey from one of our older hives. This is a first for us. Taking the honey and actually extracting the honey with a honey extractor which is a big stainless steel centrifuge for honey frames. It pulls the honey out of the honeycomb by force leaving the empty comb undamaged relatively so it will be easier for the bees to refill the comb. The bees won't have to draw out new comb they can just fill these cells. We wanted something handmade for our labels. We spent a bit of time hand-carving on wood blocks and printing our labels.

Extractor and filter


Breakfast fresh croissants and our honey

Spring Chores

2012-05-30T15:22:00.001-04:00

Every year we seem to underestimate spring. We forget all the work that gets done to get ready for the growing season. Planting seeds, raising transplants, tilling beds, making beds for the new transplants, along with weeding, mowing, digging, fixing, raking and any other thing that needs to happen. Our family garden is now finished with an addition of eight new raised beds. We are trying out raised beds to alleviate and control some of our weeding chores. We have created eight, 50 ft long beds outside the main garden for growing more things to sell by the road. We have planted 30 tomato plants almost the same number of peppers. We have over 250 feet of beans, both for dried beans and green beans. Three varieties of onions and four varieties of melons. We still haven't finished cleaning up our lavender beds and with the unseasonably warm weather they are starting to flower almost a month early for us. On top of all that if you have read the previous posts you know about our new bees and the orchard maintenance. So this weekend while mowing, the radiator sprung a leak on the old gal, a 1952 Ford 8N. So I am working on fixing that in between weeding lavender and oh yes selling the last of our vegetable plants by the road. Now to just find time to till and plant sunflowers!

Another Batch of Bees

2012-05-19T19:20:00.001-04:00

Came home from work went to mow the orchard and what to my surprise was in a tree, another swarm of bees. I don't know if it is typical, or just that our apple trees still have blossoms on them so they look enticing to the bees. What ever the reason I was able to cobble together another hive to deposit this second swarm into. We now have four active hives on the farm and now I guess that makes me a sort of an inadvertant beekeeper. I had only wanted one or two successful hives to give me a bit of honey and sell the extra to friends and family. To my chagrin the four will eventually produce much more than we can consume and I will now have to focus on managing these critters a bit better. Up till now I have had a laizzez-faire attitude about them if they survived great if they didn't oh well. Now the potential for lavender honey as just doubled!

Batch of Bees

2012-05-14T21:15:00.000-04:00

About two weeks ago my wife saw a cloud of bees above our orchard. I have this one very large and productive hive and thought "Arrrgh, I didn't prevent a swarming from that hive!" (swarming is a natural reaction to not enough space in a hive or perceived lack of space by a hive of bees, usually occurring in the spring). For the last two weeks, there was still a lot of activity around that hive, so maybe it wasn't my bees that my wife had seen swarming. But today, as I drove passed our orchard on my way home from work, I glanced at the orchard and saw a dark mass in one of our apple trees. Another swarm! This is the season and as I checked my hive in the orchard I realized that this swarm was too massive to have come from my hive and my hive was doing just fine. I quickly gathered some odds and ends of hive bodies and frames I had in our shed and luckily was able to assemble a new hive structure from pieces I had recently ordered (with the only problem being that I hadn't painted two of the supers yet but I figured that was the least of my worries). It was threatening to rain and I had to try to move the swarm into the new hive before the swarm traveled somewhere else. I placed two frames of honey from my large hive into the new hive. I then proceeded to shake the bees off the branch of the apple tree into a bucket and transfer them to the new hive. Success with the transfer! I will know in a few days if they have taken to their new home. Now to order a few missing parts for the hive and then we will be all set with three hives instead of two. As for the swarming in the orchard, I reflect on this spring and think that maybe swarms may be attracted to the orchard because of the apple blossoms as a plentiful close source of food. So in the future I may have to insure I have a spare hive at the ready in the spring for just such an event. An exciting Monday!