I didn’t get to planting greens for winter in the hoophouse this year. Exactly when they need to be planted depends on the specific crop, but even the quickest growing greens (like spinach) shouldn’t be planted later than September in this area. (At least, they shouldn’t be planted later if you want them for harvesting over the winter. They’ll still grow, but they won’t be ready until spring.)
Radish growing on a path in the hoophouse.
Last year, I planted quite a variety of things in the hoophouse to see what would do well over winter. It was our first year having it and was one huge experiment, but it went pretty well for the most part. Some favorites were identified, as were some that seemed more trouble than they were worth. And then there were some that seemed worth a little extra trouble. This year, though, I had to give my bees top priority. For that and various other reasons I didn’t end up planting much in the hoophouse for this winter. But as I was looking around inside it recently, I noticed that there were a few different greens and other vegetables growing amongst the weeds. There were radishes, mizuna, lettuce, Tokyo bekana, chard, maché, mustard greens, leeks, and what appeared to be a Tokyo bekana/mizuna cross. I had left some of the plants we had been eating over the winter go to seed to collect seeds from in the spring. I’m sure some of them ripened and fell early, or late, or just got missed, and wound up on the ground.
Sorrel, a perennial plant, growing in the hoophouse
That accounts for most of what is growing out there. A small amount of it I did plant, and some of it is perennial plants that were planted last year. Eventually, the hoophouse will probably be full of mostly perennials, but some of the very best cold tolerant winter crops are annuals, so there will always be a place for them too.
Yarrow is not a new plant here, but this yellow flowering variety is. It came to us through a plant swap at the local library. I chose to take this plant knowing that it was a different variety than what was already around, but I didn’t realize that its flowering time would be so different. I think it did flower when the other yarrow was flowering (around June) but the other yarrow is long done for the season and this one is flowering again. There are still unopened buds on the plant right now! It has already gone through multiple hard freezes, so I will be interested to see how long it keeps going and if it does this again each year.
The final fall flowers are still in bloom, but the time for the honey bees to be able to collect large enough amounts of nectar to make a significant amount of honey has passed. At this time of year a prosperous honey bee colony should have at least fifty pounds of honey stored away for them to eat over the winter. If not, they may run out of food before spring. For me, most years, making sure my bees have put away enough honey to last them the winter is a relatively minor concern, at least compared to trying to make sure the bees are healthy and will stay dry come winter.
Honey bees bringing pollen back to their colony
This year, though, as I was checking the hives at some point, I noticed that they were too light, which told me that they didn’t have even close to the right amount of honey. At the time there was still one more ‘honey flow’, which is a source of nectar from which they can make a significant amount of honey, but I knew that it wouldn’t be enough. One colony hadn’t even made enough comb to hold that much honey, and comb building takes even more nectar than honey does. That colony had done quite a good job, considering the unlucky start it had. When I was installing the bees, a lot of the bees got confused and most of them wound up in one hive, while the other hive had a very small number of bees. When ‘packages’ of bees are sent through the mail, they aren’t necessarily related to each other or to their queen. Installing the package involves taking the queen in her cage and putting her in the hive and then pouring the rest of the bees in around her. (She is in a cage to protect her from the rest of the bees, who may not have accepted her yet.) A number of bees may take flight when they are being poured, and because they don’t have any strong loyalty to the scent of their fellows yet, they will land at whatever hive they find first and join it. Since I was installing two at once, that gave them two possibilities and a lot of them were in the air. When a bee finds a hive after being lost and confused for a bit, she will often start fanning her scent at the entrance, to help other lost bees find their way. As more find one than the other and start fanning, the remaining bees in the air are more likely to also find that hive before the other. My early attempts to even out this disparity only switched their fates, and the hive that originally had so many now had as few as the other had had before.
Honey bee fanning her scent
This slow start left them with no way to both store away enough honey to feed them over winter and raise enough bees to generate enough body heat to keep them warm. They opted to raise a lot of bees first, which, if they had had enough time, would have given them a large enough workforce to gather plenty of nectar. They were still building comb long after most colonies stop for the year (since they usually don’t want to be stuck with a half finished project when winter arrives).
Highly populated honey bee colony
I was glad that they were able to raise enough bees, since if they hadn’t, I wouldn’t have been able to help them. And I was impressed with how healthy the bees they were raising looked, especially compared with the other colony. I decided I needed to start feeding them. Honey is the ideal thing for bees to eat, but I didn’t have enough honey left over to feed them all honey. The next best thing is usually to feed bees sugar syrup. Sugar does not have all the nutrition of honey though, so it isn’t ideal. I have a recipe for a bee tea, which is sugar syrup made with an herbal tea instead of water. I decided to feed them the tea since the herbs make the sugar easier to digest and provide a bit more variety of nutrients for the bees. I made it from herbs growing here, some of them wild, some of them planted on purpose. I can’t remember now where I got the recipe, but it originally comes from Spikenard Farm Honeybee Sanctuary. https://spikenardfarm.org
There have been several hard freezes here now, and there aren’t too many flowers still open, but some plants don’t mind the cold. Asters, wild arugula, chrysanthemums, and even a little left over goldenrod are all in bloom right now.
Chrysanthemums
The chrysanthemums are only just starting to open, although it seems that the variety growing here is a particularly late flowering variety. As nice as they are, chrysanthemums are not a favorite of the pollinators. So the chrysanthemums sit there looking pretty when not much else is flowering, but it is the other plants that are still flowering that are offering the last sources of food for the pollinators that aren’t already hibernating or otherwise dormant for the winter.
Honey bee and bug on wild arugula flowers
The wild arugula has already been flowering for several months and won’t be done soon either. In one particularly warm year, I was able to photograph a honey bee getting pollen from wild arugula flowers on December 15th! It isn’t so much the cold that marks the end of the flowering season for the wild arugula, instead it just ends when the whole plant gets buried in snow. I have noticed that the flowers only open on days that are warm enough for the pollinators to come out to forage. As the weather gets really cold, it waits for the warmest parts of the warmest days to open and make itself available for whatever comes.
Honey bee with pollen on wild arugula, 12-15-15 New England asters and one of the white asters in the chicken yard
Asters don’t mind the cold, but they only flower for so long after they first open, so on warmer years they may be done before it really gets that cold. There are a few different varieties of asters around. New England aster is large and purple flowered. Then there are the smaller white ones which all look very similar. I have not been able to identify any of them down to the species. Although I can tell them apart well enough, figuring out which of the many small, white flowered aster species they are would entail looking up all of them to compare. And then there is a rarer light purple one that I would like to figure out how to propagate. It is low growing, so it doesn’t take up as much space as other asters, and the flowers are clustered extra thickly, which makes it especially nice looking. It may also be, since I am mostly going by one plant, that that plant is especially healthy (I have noticed that asters in the chicken yard are especially large and have thickly clustered flowers; the actions of the chickens and their droppings seem to favor the asters). If that is the case, I would still like to collect the seeds of that especially healthy plant and see if I can figure out a place to plant them where they would do equally well.
The light purple aster Male carpenter bee on New England aster
What’s flowering where you live right now? Do you have a favorite? Let me know!
The land that is the setting for most of my photos and activities, Crossing Hedgerows Farm, came to us in 2013 covered in about seven acres of woods, and thirteen acres of field. The field had been being conventionally farmed until we bought it, and was planted with a rotation of corn and soybeans. The canopy of the woods was (and still is) composed mainly of oak, maple, sycamore, and hickory. The maples are silver maples, which are also known as ‘swamp maples’, which is fitting, since we are in the Huron river watershed and much of the woods and field area is flooded in the spring. The maples dominate the wettest areas of the woods. There are also elms, muscle-woods, and spicebushes in the understory throughout all but the wettest areas. The spicebushes are probably the most numerous of the larger woody plants in the woods.
Among the giant ragweed in the field
Once the field was released from being farmed, it promptly sprouted a thick covering of giant ragweed. This was undoubtedly due to the high amounts of herbicides still in the soil. Giant ragweed, one of the so called ‘superweeds’, has developed resistance to the herbicide used on the field and was one of the only plants that could survive at first. The first year, giant ragweed was about all that grew in that field. It was impressive, standing taller than an average adult. Over the next few years the plants growing in the field slowly changed from pure giant ragweed to a variety of common weeds, to a wildflower meadow, and now it is growing a number of woody plants like autumn olive, cottonwood, willow, and dogwood. The wildflowers are still there, among the shrubs and young trees. The giant ragweed, on the other hand, is almost completely gone, although it is still common in the neighboring fields that are still being farmed.
Autumn olives in the field
The woods have not changed much over the time we have been here, but pretty much everything else has, and will likely continue to change, as our farm ecosystem comes together and matures.
