We haven't posted as frequently as we would like to (or should). My apologies.
As usual this Spring has been pretty busy.
We lost a number of the beehives at our Strongsville location but the ones that survived are doing well. Losses at our Carrollton location were much lower. The bees went into the winter weaker and with less honey stored than the previous few winters. We bought packages and had a number of swarm calls so it is actually turning out (so far) to be a pretty decent year from a bee perspective. As usual I'm behind on cleaning up woodenware and getting it back in service - a never ending chore.
We have pulled the first honey of the season and are extracting and will be bottling as soon as we can. As with past years we expect to sell out early so place your orders and let us know if you prefer light/medium/dark and mild or strong. We will fill orders first come/first served as best we can according to your stated preference. All of our honey is raw and the only filtering we do is through cheesecloth. We have a very limited amount of cut comb available.
The asparagus crop was small but good. We definately need to plant more.
We started harvesting the first of the shitake mushrooms last month. As with other items we have available the quantities are small but if you give us a headsup we can harvest to order. We are still harvesting off of 2nd year logs. The ones we innoculated last fall have not yet started producing.
Pie cherries (Montmorency) started becoming available last week. These should be pretty much finished in another week or so.
The plum trees aren't doing so well this year. One morning we woke up to a sea of aphids on them. We washed them down with a solution of dish detergent and then rinsed them off a little later. There are still a lot of plums on the trees but....
Apples and pears are looking good so far with the pears looking especially good. We should have Bartletts and Red Anjous available later in the summer.
This is an "on" year for Black Walnuts and Hickory nuts. I'll talk about nuts in more detail in a later post.
Mike (The M in "J&M")
