RV Rehab - December 2015

I added a date to the title of this post because I doubt that our initial round of repairs will be our last!   We got a great deal on a used RV, but there was clear evidence of leaks, especially in the bedroom.  When we took the mattress out, we saw just how bad the plywood below was damaged and moldy.   I still spent the first day cleaning and we ended the day with a bug bomb to reduce the lady bug population!

That night, it rained.  And rained.  And rained.  The next morning, the bedroom was flooded, so we started to dig a little deeper.  The ceiling panels in the bedroom were not caulked to the walls and there was water in the light fixture.  We took the light fixture down and water poured onto the floor.  My husband started to take the ceiling panel down and ended up dumping a whole lot of water on himself.  At that point, we decided to take the ceiling and back wall down.   That led to taking the useless corner closet and nightstand out, and, with the closet gone, the floor started to feel like a trampoline with worn-out springs.  So, out came the walls and floor.  The wall panels did not match the rest of the RV, and we found out that was because someone had simply attached them over the old damaged ones.  The floor was the same story. 

We could wring the water out of the floor joists by hand, and I tore much of the wood out without ever needing a hammer.  This was one time when I worked with gloves and a mask.  One of the ceiling beams dripped non-stop.  The insulation reminded me of old cleaning rags that had fallen into muddy puddles and remained there for years.  The more we pulled out, the better everything started to smell!  I don't even want to think about the smell at the start of the process, never mind try to describe it!

We purchased a huge tarp from Tractor Supply to keep further rain out,  gutted the rotten wood, and set fans up to dry wood that appeared to still be sound.  We had to cut some holes in the plastic sheathing below the floor to let the pools of water out.  It was clearly not keeping anything else out anyway as we found multiple snake skins under the floor boards.

My husband and brother-in-law rebuilt structure and sistered-in support for some of the minimally damaged wood.  We decided to build the back wall directly on the metal frame of the underlying trailer even though that means the room will end up smaller.  My brother-in-law suggested recessing shelves into the space where the original wall was framed in a lob-sided V.

We now have walls, a ceiling, a floor, and insulation that are almost certainly more sturdy than anything else in our temporary home!   We did not get to sleep in our RV this trip, but we did eat one meal there on our new china from Big Lots!  It doesn't matter to me that the meal was actually cooked in my brother-in-law's kitchen -- we had a meal in our house!

I left my husband working on the RV today and returned home to grade papers and escape the rain.   While it's rained as much here in Columbia as it did at BIL's, and even our friend in Missouri watched the creek behind his house come uncomfortably close this week, I have more room to move around and there are many things that I can take care of in the house even when the rain just won't stop.    While we didn't get to do the things we had planned to do this trip, we do have a place to stay, cook, and shower that we can move to our own land just as soon as the tree thinning is complete.  We got to spend time with family, and that is what the farm project is really all about.  Did we get frustrated?  Of course we did.  But sitting here listening to fireworks instead of thunder and rain makes it easier to look back on the things that matter: the camaraderie of working with BIL, the conversations over coffee and meals, and that wonderful moonlit night with stars so clear and bright they almost didn't seem real.  

Star Gazing

Sometimes you just have to stop what you are doing and gaze at the stars -- or, in this case, at the full moon.  We have been incredibly frustrated over the constant rain and the subsequent delay in our projects, especially when Weather Bug keeps telling us that there is a zero percent chance of precipitation while we are listening to thunder and watching sheets of rain increasing the size of the puddles all around the property.

One night, I ran outside at 1:30 a.m. to put rolls of insulation back in the cabin during one of those "zero percent" downpours.   Needless to say, I was tired and cranky the next mornings and thinking of an early night for most of the day.  But my brother-in-law (BIL) headed outside to enjoy the warm evening after supper and shortly thereafter came back in to tell us about the incredible full moon and the clarity of the stars.  The view of the night sky always amazes me out here away from city lights, and that night was spectacular.  I didn't need a flashlight as I wandered about the property trying to capture the magic of the night with a camera.  Up until this moment, I didn't even think about the creep-crawlies that may have been running around my feet or dangling from trees.   (BIL's story that he told earlier this evening about a huge spider dangling from the brim his cowboy hat one time is probably what made me think about such things now, at 4:00 a.m.  Thank's BIL!)

There was something magical about the intensity of the full moon and the clarity of a plethora of stars that night that I couldn't capture on film.  The peace and awe felt is in no way diminished by the limitations of my camera and the time I spent out there that night will sustain me through the second half of the school year.  Sometimes we have to stop to gaze at stars when things get in the way of our goals and sometimes we have to stop and gaze back at memories of starry nights when responsibilities feel overwhelming.  I will hold on to the memory of an incredible night-time walk in the woods to get me through those stressful times. 

Floating Away

When we arrived at my brother-in-laws (BIL) on Sunday, we drove over to our land and the creek was the lowest we have ever seen it.    By yesterday afternoon, the sandbars that reached half way across were completely covered.  We drove out to the road that runs to the north of our property and the water there was moving at about the speed of the Nantahala River down by the outdoor center.

It continued to rain heavily all night and we've been intermittantly under tornado watches.  As we reach every time point that the forecast claimed the rain would end, the forecast changes.  

By lunch time today, the creek was higher and moving really quickly.  We were going to walk over to the spring that runs between where we plan to build the house and where we plan to have the garden, but the rain started coming down by the bucket-full again and our phones reported lightning strikes .3 miles away.  We really want to see what the spring looks like with this kind of rain, and we want to see what the creek looks like at the back of the property, but not enough to walk in a downpour and risk being struck by lightening.

The other things that the rain has delayed are getting BILs  hot water heater installed and working on our RV.  We got a great deal on an RV that had been used as a hunting cabin, but it does have some leaks.   That's one good thing about this rain -- we think we know where ALL the leaks are now.  At some point, someone adding paneling over the original wall and put in new flooring, but that person didn't actually fix the leak or tear out any of the damaged wood.  Right now, the entire RV is covered with a tarp (Tractor Supply has a great selection of huge tarps) and we have most of the bedroom gutted.  We're confident that we can get a waterproof and mold-free room fairly quickly -- so long as this rain actually stops at some point.  

32 Goldenraintree seedlings....

Harvesting and planting Goldenraintree seedlings worked far better than I thought, and the seedlings have thrived in the greenhouse.  Some are now 6 inches tall, while others just sprouted within the past few days.  As I didn't anticipate so many of the seeds germinating, I put 2 - 3 seeds in each 1" by 1" compartment and ended up with zero to three seedlings in each tiny space.  I was reluctant to disturb them at this time of year, but roots were already shooting out of the bottom of the pots and leaves were competing for light.  I was really worried about the bare roots below the pot and the thin layer of soil between the roots and the environment as we do not yet know how the greenhouse will perform when temperatures really drop, so I decided to transplant them into bigger pots.

I thought my husband was a little crazy when he ordered flower pots in bulk at the end of summer, but I have now filled every 1 gallon pot! (Well, I still have one, 1-gallon pot, but it doesn't count because it's full of spider webs and therefore unusable until hubby evicts any squatters.)  I first used all the smaller pots I had lying around for my treelings, and the last few seedlings are sharing a pot with two neighbors.    If they all survive, we will have 32 beautiful trees to plant on our land. 

The bag of garden soil I used was dry on top, but a smelly, swampy mess on the bottom.  I ended up pouring the bottom third into two large planters to dry out.   When I was potting day-lilies a few weeks ago, I read that adding hydrogen peroxide to water or even rinsing the root ball with the solution can prevent root rot and fungal infections.  As all of the daylilly transplants are doing well, I watered the seedlings with a weak solution to eliminate any problems that the questionable soil might carry.  While skimming the article linked above, I also learned that oxygen is released directly into the soil as the hydrogen peroxide breaks down, which encourages healthy root growth.   

Everything is thriving in the greenhouse and the lowest temperatures are staying about 5 degrees above the overnight outdoor temperature.   We have a light plugged into a Thermocube that is supposed to automatically turn on when temperatures fall below 35 degrees, but has not yet turned on even when the thermometer recorded a low temperature of 33.8.  I re-positioned the cube yesterday to a location where cold air enters around the power cord, but where it is also not placed where it will get watered along with the plants.   If we don't see it turn on before our next trip to the land, I'll use a timer to just run the light every night.  A 60 watt bulb in a reflector kept the greenhouse at 45 degrees on a recent 32 degree night, and I don't think we'll have to worry about any 90 degree nights for a while, so that might be the safer solution.  Still.... I want to find out if the thermocube will kick in, especially as I recommended it to my brother-in-law as a way to keep temperatures above freezing in his well house.  Maybe I'll put some ice cubes in a zip lock bag and see if I can get it to turn on that way.....

After a trip to the greenhouse in my pyjamas and winter coat, the bad news is that a bag of ice is not working.   More tests are required before I write-off the Thermocube as it received great reviews on Amazon, but I will hook up a timer until my doubts have been allayed.    The good news is that my transplanted seedlings are doing well. 

O, Holy Night

As I stood in line to pay for my neoprene boots at Tractor Supply Store on Black Friday, the dulcet tones of O, Holy Night wafted through the air and transported me back to the evening before, listening to a conversation about the life I married into almost eleven years ago -- that of military spouse.

Put four Army Rangers around a campfire, and conversation will inevitably turn to tales of the highs and lows of training.  Never combat.  Always training.  And tales of less-than-ideal parachute jumps are inevitably punctuated with varying degrees of profanity.  But in a way, these harrowing stories and colorful language have become dulcet to my ears because many of the stories are now so familiar to me and each of the voices has underlying tones of mutual respect and the bonding of shared experience.   Listening took me back to holiday evenings of my childhood spent sleepily listening to the steady and comforting hum of aunts, uncles, and my parents talking in soft voices. That combined with staring into a camp fire made it impossible to think of work, and my stress drifted away on the curling smoke of the fire.

I was an outdoorsy kind of girl long before I met my husband.   As a child, I never saw the point of staying at home playing with dolls when there were trees to be climbed or woods to explore.  The freedom I felt wandering through the pastures and woods of my childhood and the connection I felt to my father when "helping"  him string a fence or tend the vegetable garden are so strong that I still feel more at home in nature than at a party of any kind.  My poor mother spent 50 years trying to turn me into a lady, and all she got was a rebellious tomboy in hiking boots.

 Now that we are back in the city, I long for the country.  The evenings around the camp fire -- one with army guys, one with our daughter -- were the epitome of my ideal life.  I'm not thrilled about the possibility of running into another rattlesnake, but the woods are still where I feel at home.

Last weekend, during one middle-of-the-night trip to the outhouse,  I looked up in awe at the stars and forgot why I was outside in the cold -- or even that it was cold.   On our last morning there, another outhouse visit presented me with an opportunity to see an incredible sunrise.  Memories of my 2:00am encounter with a hissing possum make me laugh.  Don't get me wrong -- I want indoor plumbing in our retirement house, but I also want the chance to pause life and star gaze.  That is my holy night.  That is where I feel closest to God.

Lady bird, lady bird, fly away home.

Lady bird, lady bird, fly away home

Your house is on fire and your children are gone,

All except one,

And her name is Ann,

And she hid under the baking pan.

Lady birds (lady bugs to Americans) have long been known as beneficial insects that eat aphids, pine  beetles, and other annoying pests.  Each lady bug eats thousands of aphids, so I have often thought about buying some to protect our rose bushes without the use of chemicals.   Young Harris College is working in conjunction with the USDA Forest Service and the Georgia Forestry Commission to save hemlock trees from the Hemlock Wooly Adelgid by distributing lady bugs, one of HWA's few natural predators.   Clemson University recommends using them to treat scale on oak trees.

I tried to keep all of these benefits in mind as we installed our gate last weekend, but it's hard to think of lady bugs in a totally positive light when working in a swarm of them!   For one thing, they bite.  It seems that the more yellow they are, the more they bite.   And, as you can read on Garden Insects, "[w]hen disturbed, they may secrete an odorous, distasteful fluid out of their joints to discourage enemies."   I ended up with many bites and smears of the "distasteful fluid" any place they could access.  

• Tip 1:  don't wear a v-neck t-shirt as they appear to be curious little critters who are less likely to find their way under a higher neckline.  
• Tip 2:  be short.  Now, I don't have enough evidence to conclusively say this is a benefit, but both my husband and BIL ended up with dis-taste-ful lady bugs in their mouths a few times while I did not.  Maybe the ladybugs are misandristic, but I like to think my height (or lack thereof) gave me an advantage that balanced out the v-neck disadvantage.  
• Tip 3:  stay in the shade as much as possible as they love the heat of the sun, especially on a November morning.  

If they are protecting our trees from pine beetles, I will come to love them again, .....just as soon as these bites stop itching!

Driving a tractor

My husband and brother-in-law (BIL) both have the amazing ability to treat me like a princess while concurrently challenging me to expand my horizons.  They also know that while I am likely to insist that I  just want to watch first if my husband shows any intention of getting me to try something like using a circular saw or driving a tractor, I am far less likely to stubbornly wimp out in front of my BIL!   I don't know if they had this in mind when my BIL told me which side of the tractor to climb up on and then calmly proceeded to instruct me on how to start it, move it, and use the implements.

Once I had the basics, I was tasked with picking up a wood post with hay forks.  After what seemed like a 500-point turn, I had the tractor perpendicular to the post and BIL kept motioning me forward, and forward, and forward......   Now, on one level I knew that he could move out of the way if the tines came too close, but my English 4 students have been watching A Knight's Tale, so I could not help but envision the impaling of BIL by my mechanized jousting horse in a A-Knight's-Tale-meets-Christine video clip that insisted on running through my head.  He patiently and fearlessly stood there and then celebrated my small success with me once the post was on its way to wherever I took it next.

Patience:  I think I value and admire it so much because I have so little of it myself.  I do have a hidden well-spring of it that opens up when I am tutoring a student, but most of the time my husband has to endure lots of huffing and eye-rolling when he's being detail oriented and I'm just wanting to jump in and figure out the details as we go!

Back to the tractor.  I drove it uphill and in reverse out of the woods the next day, which was a little scary because it tilts a whole lot more than feels safe.  If it were a motorcycle, it would have keeled over, and I know what that feels like!  I will come to trust it in time, but for now rough terrain makes me very nervous.  I spent a good bit of time on level ground breaking up piles of tree branches that had been decomposing for years and then picking up some of the trash (tires, mattresses) that had been dumped in the clearing.  I earned some undeserved praise for fortuitously spearing a Cola can that I couldn't even see with a tine on one of my many attempts to spear a tire that had been irritating me for months.  I was so happy to get that tire out of there and gained confidence in use of the tractor controls when I subsequently had to shake the thing off onto our trash pile.

Tractor controls still baffle me to an extent, as do many other mechanical things.  My inability to remember whether the clutch or the brake is on the left on a motorcycle is the reason I no longer drive my motorcycle and the reason I know what it's like to fall off one!   When my husband or my BIL motion for me to raise the bucket, I look like I'm crossing myself as I try to remember which direction does what and then I still get it wrong most of the time.  I keep reminding myself that it took a while for shifting gears in a manual transmission car to feel natural and to not let my lack of patience with my progress defeat me.

As a tilting tractor still makes me nervous, the men took care of bush-hogging the deck and the front of the property.  It's simply amazing what a difference that makes.   The deck is larger than we thought and we will have more than enough room there for gardens, orchards, and greenhouses.  The erosion ditch running outside the tree line at the front of the property is not as bad as we thought it was.  The culvert up by the road is in good shape.  The tractor work this weekend answered so many of our questions about the land.   The gate we built  makes it less likely that anyone will add more trash.   There's one more trash pile to clean up, and then we'll be mattress and tire free.  The spooky blue bag that I suspect belonged to Bluebeard will soon be gone and my imagination will no longer have to wonder just what is in there!

We are making progress.  And maybe, just maybe, parallel parking my car will not seem so hard now that I've driven a tractor.

Bee stings and toothpaste

When we were visiting family in Texas this summer, my husband was stung on the forehead by some red wasps that he was attempting to evict from his aunt's house soffit.  We were both surprised when his aunt exclaimed that she was going to get the toothpaste and disappeared into the house.  We were even more surprised when smearing toothpaste on the sting relieved his pain.

Then, a few weeks ago, my brother-in-law kindly loaned me a bee-hat so that I could get a little closer to the action when he and my husband were working his hives.  The day before, the bees had already shown their dislike of dark colors by dive bombing my husband's black baseball cap the moment he plonked it on my head.  So, the following day, with my head safely ensconced in a white cover and face-protection, they decided to go after a different dark item -- my navy-blue thermal shirt!  That was my first bee sting since childhood and considerably less painful than I anticipated.  (But still something to avoid, when possible.)  We were too far from the house to make fetching toothpaste seem worth while, but the bees had fired a warning shot.

You would think that would be a lesson that would stick with me, but apparently I'm a little slow today.  Now that I have my own bee suit and gloves, I headed out with my husband to put new fondant in our hives and to see if there was any left from the batch we placed in a week ago.  My husband lifted the lid on the least populated hive, and I got to see a wonderfully healthy cluster of bees through the hole in the top cover. Then I got to see that they had eaten almost all of the fondant, and then they let me know very clearly that a bee suit may protect my face and hands, but wearing thermal weave, dark pants is inviting them to find the weakness in my defense.  Of course, they went after the largest and most obvious target area and I was subsequently able to gain first-hand experience about the effectiveness of toothpaste on bee stings.  

While cooking a new batch of fondant for the ungrateful little critters, I researched reasons why toothpaste would actually help soothe stings.  According to Rapid Home Remedies,  the alkalinity of toothpaste neutralizes the acidity of the venom in the bee sting.  Apparently fire ants have an alkaline venom, so toothpaste probably will not work on those.  I'll let you know next summer....

The new batch of fondant is cooling, and the kitchen smells are invigorating.  First of all, the smell of the boiling sugar water reminded me suddenly and very strongly of memories of my mother making red-currant jelly.  I guess the lemon juice in the mixture is what transported me back to my childhood home.   Now the smell of the lemon grass in the Honey B Healthy I mixed into the fondant pervades the kitchen and makes the stress in my life just float away.  It smells so good that my husband recently felt compelled to tell me that the label clearly warns against human consumption!   The bees love the smell even more than I do, so it's a good way to attract them to supplemental food supplies when there's a dearth of plants to provide pollen and nectar.  Toothpaste and bee vitamins -- what a weird mix of components to make a day on which I got stung still simply perfect!

Adding "farmer" to my resume.

There's a progression to my career path that for now ends with farmer: electronics technician, computer programmer, English teacher, and tree farmer.  It's an odd mixture, but it represents my personality and my eclectic range of interests and abilities.  I do so love the logic and the beauty of math and science, but I also love the beauty of a well-written sentence.

Still, who would have thought I would ever become a tree farmer?  Or know so much about bees?  Or wear snake boots?  But, as of Wednesday, we own 20 acres of pine trees, so we are officially farmers!   We'll still be teachers for at least 10 more years, but we will be able to recharge our mental batteries by working in our woods on long weekends.    Spending time in nature has always helped us get back to enjoying teaching when the demands of teaching start to obscure the rewards.

Wednesday itself was not a stress-free day!  We've bought and sold enough homes to anticipate surprises at closing, and this time was no exception.  Those surprises were followed by learning that the utility company we were told to contact doesn't actually own the power lines that run along our property.  Their lines end a mile away, which makes connecting to their supply an expensive prospect at $4 a foot!  We're meeting with an engineer from the company that does own the power lines next week and hope to be able to get electricity for less than $20,000!   On to the septic system permit -- after much back and forth and $450, we finally have a permit for our second choice of locations at which to build our cabin.  We don't know why the septic permit guy didn't give us specs for our first choice, especially as the soils engineer typed his report with analysis of both sites.   That's going to necessitate another round of phone calls and probably more money.  We've been researching composting toilets as an alternative, but as this will be our retirement home we have to consider our ability to empty the compost when we're in our 70s and beyond.

The good side of Wednesday was spending time on the land, walking down to the creek, and investigating a natural spring that may become a series of shallow ponds with mini water falls on its way downhill.  Now that we own the land, I feel that I am allowed to snap off dead branches and vines to make my path through the woods a little easier!  As I now also own the brambles, I can threaten them with retaliation when they stick their thorns in me.

Back in the city, I can look at my 30 pots of day-lilies, my rosemary cuttings, my Goldenraintree seedlings, and all my magnolia seeds hibernating in the crisper drawer of the refrigerator in the garage as they apparently need that in order to germinate.  I'm already mentally planting the trees they will (hopefully) produce.  So, while my husband plans building foundations and septic systems, I plan gardens and avenues of pretty trees.  I envision a grove of Goldenraintrees -- our own little Lothlorien nestled among the pines. 

Experimenting with canning.

Figs:
We have had a fig tree in our yard for 10 years, but have left most of the figs for the birds until this summer.  As our thoughts moved toward retirement and how and where we want to spend it, I decided to retry canning -- something I have done sporadically since learning how in high school.  The figs seemed like a good place to start.

The first recipe (see link) I found is the one I used all summer, with some modifications.   With just one tree, I was making small batches of 1 - 2 pounds of figs at a time and found that I needed to add more water.  After a few batches, I also grew tired of all the chopping and started tossing the figs in the food processor and using dried lemon peel.  The food processor actually made the jam better because the pieces of fig were smaller.  (They were probably what they should have been in the first place, but that's a lot of slicing and dicing.)   I eventually developed a routine of picking figs first thing in the morning and again early evening.  If I had just made a batch of jam, I picked figs that were still firm.  As I gathered more figs toward my ideal quantity of at least 2 pounds, I allowed them to ripen more.  Figs that were almost ripe in the morning were pecked by birds by mid-afternoon, so how long to leave the figs on the tree became a balancing act.

One day, we were going out of town and didn't have enough figs to make a batch, but I did have apples.  Fig and apple jam is good, but I later found that fig and blueberry jam is even better!   With 10 jars of fig jam in the pantry, the addition of other flavors was a fortunate experiment.

Orange Marmelade
I was so excited over the fig jam success, that I tried my hand at orange marmelade.  It was a lot of work and peeling the pith from the inside of the skin was a far more tedious job than suits my personality.  After all that slicing, and chopping, and cooking, and cleaning, the marmelade didn't set.  I eventually dumped it all back into a pot and added orange jello.  It still hasn't set 4 months later, and it never really tasted the way it should.  I have thought about pouring it into a cake pan and using it in a as a substitute for pineapple in an upside down pineapple cake, but I've also thought about just pouring it down the drain and freeing up my mason jars!

Baked Beans
For years, I cooked beans in a crock pot, but a year ago I bought an enameled cast iron Dutch oven and have been much happier with the results.  My two favorite recipes are Carribean Black Beans and Boston Baked Beans from The Joy of Cooking cook book.  I have only canned Boston Baked Beans, and found that I need to add more water than the recipe calls for if I want to pour the beans into cans without leaving air pockets.    I also tried to substitute peppered bacon for the salt pork, but when my husband came home with salt pork, I found out that sticking to the recipe as far as that goes produces better beans!   (After 30 years in the South, I'm finally using salt pork!)

Freezing beans is easier, but regardless of the type of plastic container I have used, I always end up with some beans becoming freezer burned.  Canned beans can't be stored for very long, but a batch of 2 pounds of dried beans doesn't last us more than a couple of months anyway.  We don't have to deal with freezer burn, and we don't have to defrost the beans so it's easier to just grab a jar from the pantry.

I have tried adding curry powder (after eating some Heinz curry beans) and red pepper flakes to the recipe, but always go back to the original, unadulterated recipe, other than the extra water.   After filling the jars, I can the beans in my pressure cooker for 75 minutes.  I can fit 5 jars in the pressure cooker, so I usually end up with a couple of jars in the refrigerator (unpressurized) for immediate use and 5 jars for longer-term storage in the pantry.

There probably won't be any new adventures in canning until next summer when our garden and my brother-in-law's farm start producing again.  I know for sure that I'm not going to try marmelade again!

Cooking for bees

I finally made a successful batch of bee fondant using the recipe from Honey Bee Suite.  I like the common-sense approach of the author, and I was able to use my experience from three failed batches to improve what I was doing with recipes in general.   Five pounds of sugar yielded six paper dinner plates of fondant.  We'll let you know later how long it takes the bees to eat a plateful of sugar!

Why fondant?
If a hive has not had enough time to create a store of honey that will get them through the winter, the bee-keeper needs to supplement their food source.  This is our first year with bees, and it has been an interesting learning experience.  We started about a month before the summer dearth arrived with only a Nuc hive, but there were plenty of resources for the bees at the time. Things were going well all the way up to the dearth when the hive began to get weaker and weaker, then sometime between weekends, wax moths invaded and decimated our hive.  We placed the infected frames in the freezer to kill the moths and larvae, but the hive was weakened severely and they were not able to protect themselves from the next attack -- robbers.  Feral bees attacked the weak hive and stole most of the honey and effectively ended the life of that hive.   We restarted again, early fall season with two ongoing hives we purchased from a beekeeper who was getting out of the business.  We currently have two strong hives, but they do not have as much stored honey as they should at this time of year.  When it's warm, one can supplement natural food sources with sugar mixed with water, either outside the hive or in a feeder placed inside the hive.  In cold weather, bees stay in to keep the hive warm and cold syrup dripping on them doesn't do them much good.  Fondant is table sugar that has been cooked to break the sugar down into fructose and glucose -- molecules that are more like honey and easier for the bees to digest.  
The first attempts
My first attempt used a scaled down recipe from Bamboo Hollow Apiary, and it's a recipe I will go back to try again.  Mistake one was thinking I could do this without a candy thermometer!   I ended up with a brown sticky mess that I tried to give to the bees, but it acted like fly paper, so we very quickly removed it.

Attempt two:  I used the same recipe and my brand new, shiny candy thermometer.   That was far more successful, but the temperature kept rising for long time after I turned the heat down.  With the successful batch, I turned the heat down as the temperature approached 230 degrees and adjusted it up and down by one number on the dial until reaching the desired temperature.  I plan to make the next batch on the gas burner on the grill to see if that is easier.  So -- I had a batch of fondant that had been heated a little too much, and when I went to pour it into a pan, the pan wasn't where I had left it!   By the time I found a pan, I had a huge sugar lump in the pot!   I managed to break it up and scatter it on the pan, but it wasn't pretty.   The bees seemed to like it, but there was no way to fit the chunks under the hive lid.

As the chunks weren't really usable and leaving them outside the hive attracted ants, I decided to try dissolving  and reheating them.  By then, we'd watched a couple of YouTube videos that used Karo syrup to make the fondant more malleable (although other resources recommended avoiding Karo syrup and corn starch), so we stirred a little in.  We poured the resulting mixture onto a wax-paper lined pan and it set very nicely.

However -- this mixture was hygroscopic, as we found when we cut the sheet into usable sheets and placed those sheets on a shelf in the refrigerator until we could place them in the hives.  The next evening, our left-over pizza was firmly glued to the glass shelf and we dumped the remaining fondant into a glass bowl.  By the next morning, the mixture had absorbed even more water and was quite runny.  The bees are enjoying it, regardless.  In fact, when I went to check one of the bowls this morning while it was still only 40 degrees outside, the guard bees from our strongest hive let me know that I needed to leave their bowl alone! 

Embarking on the project

Next week, we will take the second major step in our journey toward retirement in the countryside on what will become Magnolia Hill Farm -- closing.  The first step was finding the right piece of land.   Our real estate agent, Kent, Morris, not only helped us, he has also restored our faith in real estate agents in general.  We highly recommend him to anyone looking for land around Pine Mountain.

Finding land is a lot like dating -- you are unlikely to find the right one without first finding a lot of wrong ones.  Land that looked wonderful on Google Maps turned out to have been bulldozed and then left to whatever managed to grow on it afterward.  Land that was supposed to have mature hardwoods had a few scraggly scrub oaks and a couple of damaged trees that were probably beautiful before the invasion of the bulldozers.   Then we found "the one!"  We could not believe that the last piece of land we looked at on a long, discouraging day was a little slice of heaven.  Well, maybe not heaven -- there are enough briars growing to make walking through some parts of it a painful process.  Then there are the current inhabitants -- but more about that later.

The land is mainly planted pines, but as the land slopes sharply down to a creek on two sides of the property, beautiful old hardwood trees predominate in the areas close to the creek where neither our neighbor, a timber company, nor we can harvest trees. We love this harvesting restriction as we know those two property lines will always be as beautiful and peaceful as they are now.  The loading deck created when the pines were once thinned does not currently make the best first impression when driving onto the land, but we see such possibilities for that area.  One of our first chores will be to clean up the weeds, tires, and dumped mattresses to see what we really have there.   It's a very small eyesore on a large piece of land, so we see its future rather than seeing its current state.  Our plans have so far included a little red school house to store garden equipment, a greenhouse, a shipping container for storage, a garden and an apiary.  And, of course, this entry to the rest of the land will be a home for all the magnolia seedlings I hope to have by spring so that the name of the farm makes sense!  I'm sure those plans will continue to evolve until after we at least have a place to sleep and bathe!

We think we've decided on our future home site, but we'll make our final decision after closing and our meeting with the power company next week.  We'll refine our ideas over Thanksgiving Break and then finalize them over Winter Break.   It's going to be a lot of work, but it will be good exercise and great stress relief!

Oh yes -- back to the current inhabitants.  We know we have deer, wild turkey, and some wild pigs.  We also encountered a huge rattlesnake on our last trip.  I am now looking for a pair of knee-high work boots to wear and I also pay far more attention to where I am going!   It's going to be an adventure full of surprises.