Freezing Wild Black Raspberries

My mom has a nice area in her back yard where a lot of wild black raspberries grow. She’s had a bumper crop this year, so she invited me over to pick the extra berries she didn’t want.

I went over several days last week and one day this week and I spent about an hour each time. So far I’ve been able to pick 10.5 pounds of wild black raspberries for our freezer! I’m heading over again today so I should be able to add another 2-3 pounds to that total. That means I won’t have to go to the local blueberry farm to buy blueberries this year since I have so many raspberries.

I freeze the berries on a cookie sheet so that they don’t freeze together in the bags. When they’re frozen, I scoop them up and put them in a freezer bag.

This way I can easily measure out what I need for a recipe from the bags and I don’t have to pre-measure into smaller freezer bags. I prefer freezing my berries and dealing with them later when I have more time and when the weather’s cooler outside.

I’m looking forward to making some jam this winter and perhaps some cobbler or some black raspberry scones.

How do you preserve berries for those long winter months?

Filed under Berries, Edible, Freezing, Fruit, Harvest Keepers Challenge | Comments (38)

Summer Fun: Swimming

Mr Chiots and I don’t have any children, but we have 2 nieces and a nephew and a new little niece (at least that’s what they say) on the way any day now. My sister has them all in swim classes this summer at the local pool. (more photos on Flickr if you want to head over there and check them out)

They were super excited to show me all of the swimming skills that they are learning so I went to one of their swim classes last week.

Hannah, the oldest, is doing great and she moved up to a level 3 this week.

It was a lovely day for swimming, nice and sunny, but it was a little cold as you can tell by poor little Heidi’s purple lips.

They sure do have fun at swim classes. I think swimming is definitely a fun activity for kids.

I don’t get that excited about swimming, in fact I think it has been more than 15 years ago since I was actually in a pool. Perhaps I’m just not a water person, I’d rather be gardening for sure.

What about you, do you love swimming in the summer or are you more of a dry land kind of person?

Filed under About Me | Comments (8)

Crazy New Beekeepers

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while you know we’re new beekeepers. We got our first hive back in April. We’ve been checking on the bees regularly and they’re doing quite well.

The week before last Mr Chiots checked on the bees one day while I was gone and he got stung. He looked inside the hive and didn’t see any eggs so he got worried that our queen was MIA. He called Dave, the guy we got our bees off of, for some advice and Dave suggested requeening the hive. So we ordered up a new queen. We were hoping to get an Ohio Queen Project Queen, but the guy we wanted to buy from was out of queens for the year. So we ordered up another lovely Italian lady.

We got the queen. We decided to do one more hive check to see what was going on inside. Low and behold the hive was bustling with activity and the queen was in there doing her job laying eggs and everything looked just like it should. We called Dave and he suggested requeening anyways, which would involve catching and killing our old queen. We didn’t really want to do that because she’s been such a great queen so far, so we decided to do what any crazy beekeepers would do, we decided to split our hive.

We ran out and bought the few things we needed and went about splitting our hive. Basically when you split a hive you take some of the bees from the orginal hive and put them in a new hive with the new queen. You leave her in her cage for a few days so the bees accept her as theirs and then you release her and you’ve got yourself another hive of bees.

Now of course, nothing is as simple or as easy and it sounds on paper or in our heads. There are a lot of steps involved in splitting the hive, the most tedious task being finding the old queen to make sure she’s not in the frames you move over to the new hive.

After searching and searching we finally found her (she is unmarked). She was of course not in the same spot she’s been every other time we’ve checked our hive, which made us a little nervous at first. But we finally found her and put her safe and sound back into her old hive.

The smoker comes in quite handy during these times since it keeps the bees occupied while you’re trying to work. Since we were in the hive for so long looking for the queen we were glad we had it around.


We then moved some frames over to the new hive and put the new queen cage in. Dave suggested we wait 4 days to release her, so today’s the day we plan on doing that. If they accept her, which they should, we’ll how have hive #2 at Chiot’s Run. The one thing we have to worry about is that both of our hives can build up enough reserves of honey and pollen for the winter. We plan on feeding them some sugar syrup through the dry nectar flow in July-Aug so give them the best chance of survival.

So we now have 2 hives at Chiot’s Run. We hope they both are strong going in to winter, if not we may combine them again for better winter survival chances. We haven’t even named the first one and now we have another.

Have you ever done anything crazy where you had no idea what you were doing but went ahead and jumped in with both feet?

Filed under beekeeping, Bees, Beneficial, Insects | Comments (27)

My First Ripe Tomato of 2009

I harvested my first ripe tomato on Saturday morning (actually I harvested 2, I took one to my mom). It’s one of my Tumbling Tom Tomatoes that’s planted in a hanging basket. I thought my Sub-Arctic tomato would be my first ripe one, but they’re all still green. The plants are loaded with tomatoes though, they should be ripening any day now.

I haven’t eaten it yet. I think I’m going to cut it in half, salt it and share it with Mr Chiots. I’m looking forward to many more tomatoes this summer!

Any ripe tomatoes from your gardens yet?

Filed under Edible, harvest, Tomato | Comments (16)

Happy 4th of July

Hope you have a wonderful weekend full of food, family, friends and fireworks! We enjoyed our fireworks last night and had a small get-together with friends here at Chiot’s Run.

How are you celebrating this beautiful holiday weekend, with fireworks?

Filed under Holidays | Comments (5)