Down the Garden Path

Welcome everyone to the new site of the TGC garden blog, and to our 2011 season as well. I haven’t been able to get posting up and going until now because we had a lot of technical issues migrating the blog over, but now we’re fully attached to to Toronto Green Community website, which I think is a good thing!

Now that we’re in the first weeks of June, the weather has finally warmed up in Toronto and the garden is going strong. Thanks to the greenhouse we put up last fall and generous donations from the TGC community, we were able to get an early start on the season and started our own tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, and a variety of squashes and melons from seed. Green beans are popping up all over the garden and our fruit trees are leafing out and flowering nicely. The garden is gradually expanding too, we had a youth group from the Anne Johnston Health Station come help us build a new bed which we’ve already filled up with pumpkins for this year’s pumpkin patch in fall.

We’ve got an exciting event coming up in the garden this week too! In partnership with Food Forward, a local organization focused on calling attention to food issues, we’ll be hosting a garden party this Thursday, June 9th at 6:30 pm. Food Forward has hosted “Foodie Drinks” since 2010, a successful networking event for people in all parts of the food system and with the beautiful weather coming up we’ve decided to take it outside! It’s a perfect time to join us in the garden, meet new people, and learn what’s going on in the food world this summer! Thursday’s also farmer’s market day at Eglinton Park, so you can drop in at the Appletree Market and see what their farmers are selling!

Take a look at the event listing here!

On Monday January 24, Sustain Ontario hosted a screening of The Economics of Happiness, a film that describes one more persuasive reason to support local economies – they makes you happier, and it can make everyone else happier too. The film builds the argument that globalization of food, work and culture has people all over the world feeling disconnected and allows money to flow out of formerly thriving communities, contributing to poverty, social isolation, and ill health.

Though the subject matter had the potential to become quite heavy, optimism about creating sustainable economies and food systems was in full effect at the event. The panel discussion following the film allowed us to hear homegrown success stories about inclusive food systems from local chef Joshna Maharaj and Eric Rosenkrantz of Matchbox Seed Co. The director Helena Norberg-Hodge rounded out the panel, and provided further discussion of issues raised in the film, including the connections between North American demand and developing world emissions and the numerous and far-reaching impacts of losing farmland.

One of the most interesting and exciting parts of the night was having the chance to see the infographics and videos about Ontario’s food issues created by Sheridan College Bachelor of Applied Illustration students. This artists did an outstanding job of capturing complex issues, such as the different impacts of organic and factory farming or the complex health impacts of our food system, and distilling them into short videos or one-page infographics like the one above. These films and illustrations are just the kind of creative tools that can be used to make the problems in our current food system crystal clear and, fortunately, help make some of the solutions even clearer.

Take a look at the infographics and videos here!

*This post was originally published at www.tyfpc.ca*

Toronto Green Community has recently developed presentations on a range of environmental issues including energy consumption, sustainable food and water conservation. Our most recent research has been on waste, with a focus on food waste, an issue of growing importance in North America and around the world.

These days, the average Canadian household throws away nearly one third of the food they buy for a variety of reasons: they bought more than they need, they don’t know how to preserve foods to prevent spoilage, or they are overly cautious and dispose of safe foods that appear past their prime. Food is not only wasted at the household level, but all along the supply chain: from imperfect fruits and vegetables being left to rot in fields to grocery stores ordering more than they expect to sell so customers don’t see empty shelves. In addition, many edible and nutritious items such as beet greens or meats like tripe and liver go to waste due to seemingly abundant other options and lack of food preparation knowledge. This food mismanagement wastes the resources that go into growing and transporting food, stresses the environment, and perpetuates hunger.

 Luckily, public awareness of food waste has been increasing and a variety of policies and organizations have been created to address the problem on all levels. Some focus on removing food from the waste stream and making sure it gets to people: organizations like Second Harvest, which provides hunger programs with surplus produce from grocery stores, or Not Far From the Tree, which picks and distributes unwanted residential fruit. Other programs focus on preventing waste in the first place, one example being a new Ontario policy which allows lower-grade fruits and vegetables  to be distributed by food banks, where before they would be ploughed under in the fields. There are also individuals who take the approach of eating food that has already been wasted, as in the case of gleaners, who pick over farmers’ fields after the harvest, or Freegans, who live off of food thrown away by bakers, greengrocers and supermarkets. Whatever form it may take, people are pushing back against the tendency to waste food, and in so doing are finding new ways to fight hunger and re-imagine the food system.

If you want to learn more about food waste, and how to reduce your impact, check out some of the resources below or contact garden at torontogreen.ca to find out about TGC’s waste presentation!

Food Not Bombs – uses gleaned produce to prepare vegan meals for the hungry

Green Bin Info – info about the green bin program, accepted/prohibited items, and where the compost goes

Love Food Hate Waste – UK campaign to reduce food waste through engaging pubblic food education

Not Far From the Tree - Residential fruit tree gleaning program that shares harvest between volunteers, homeowners and hunger groups

Second Harvest – collects surplus produce from grocers and distributes it to hunger programs

York Region Fresh Food Partners Gleaning Program – organizes gleaning outings to nearby farmers’ fields

Media

Print:

Veggie ”Seconds” Bill  - description of the bill that will give farmers a tax credit for donating low-grade produce

Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal - Tristram Stuart

Wasted Food Blog – The author of American Wasteland blogs about food waste

Video:

GOOD: Waste Not, Want Not – short video on food waste stats in the US
DIVE – film on Freeganism and food waste in the US
The Gleaners and I – film on gleaning and Freeganism in France

Toronto Green Community is hosting an Apple Preserving workshop! Next Saturday, December 11, we will be teaching a group of canners-to-be all about preserving apples, and making some delicious apple sauce and apple butter in the process! If you’re interested in attending check out the flyer below and email programs@torontogreen.ca soon, because registration is absolutely mandatory and spaces are limited!

Great food security conference happening this weekend in Montreal! Hosted by Food Secure Canada, this conference will be discussing the wide range of ways to make Canada more food secure, with a variety of talks and workshops under the theme “Weaving together food policy and community action: an agenda for change”. The conference will look for contributions to the development of Canada’s Food Security Policy and discuss issues such as the impact of biofuels on food security and tecchniques to connect food movements at provincial and local levels.

It looks like it will be a fascinating conference, and anyone who attends is welcome to share their experience in the comments section. To find out more about the conference itself, check out Food Secure Canada’s website here. For more about Food Security groups working in your community and across Canada, check out our Food Security links here.

thisaway!

This week, as a member of the Toronto Youth Food Policy Council, I had a unique opportunity not available to the general public: to enter the off-limits to the public, high-stakes world of international security – food security that is, at the Ontario Food Terminal. While it may not sound as glamourous as getting through the doors of the Pentagon or the United Nations, for those interested in the Canadian food system, or even food systems in general, getting into the OFT feels like you’ve hit the big time. After all, the vast majority of fresh fruits and vegetables you can find in this city have passed through its doors at some point, and the machinations involved in moving 5.1 million lbs of food a day are definitely impressive.

The outdoor flower market

The Ontario Food Terminal is the central distribution and wholesale hub for the entire province, serving markets in the Prairies and the East Coast as well. The largest market of its kind in Canada (and the third largest in North America), the Food Terminal houses both an international warehouse market and a local wholesale farmer’s market on 162,000 m² beside the Gardiner Expressway.

History

As Bruce Nicholas, OFT Manager and our tour guide explained, the Terminal was founded in the early 1950′s to address the difficulty in distributing food throughout the city from congested St. Lawrence Market (the former hub). The food system was not only struggling with distribution at that time, but pricing as well. Chain grocery stores had begun dropping prices to outcompete mom and pop grocers and at the same time the US had completed construction of interstate highways, making it easy to dump low-priced American products onto the Canadian market. The OFT was born of a time when farmers were a major voting force in Ontario; it was designed to protect farmers and small grocers by bringing them together and providing fair, transparent pricing competition. The Stockyards at Keele and St. Clair was opened at the same time to provide a similar venue for meat producers, but has since closed, the majority of meat production and commerce moving to Kitchener.

The Food Terminal in 2010

Zipping along the corridor

Our tour began at 8:30 am, by which time most of the activity in the market had died down for the day. Since the OFT provides fresh produce to restaurants and green grocers, selling is done before regular business hours, which vendors opening their doors at around 4am. Buyers, whether they are shop owners, ”jobbers” who buy and resell at a variety of locations or representatives chains like Longo’s arrive even earlier to get first pickings. Buyers talk and haggle with local producers in the farmers’ market area and international wholesalers inside to find out who has what products, and where the food is freshest and the prices best. Young guys zip around on forklifts, seeming almost to race eachother as they bring pallets of produce looking fresher than you’ll ever see in stores from trucks to vendors and vice versa 

Ontario-Grown Sweet Potatoes

Bruce Nicholas views the OFT as a place that incubates new businesses and new innovations. Many of his Ontario growers started out bringing truckloads and are now supplying tractor-trailers of produce to the Ontario market. He proudly showed us evidence of import-substitution: the sandy soils that used to grow Ontario’s tobacco now being used to produce local sweet potatoes, removing the need to ship them from Louisiana. The support of innovation is seen elsewhere too, in their decades-old waste management system which sends compost back to farmers and was recycling before the blue bin system. This seems to stem more from financial necessity than environmental consciousness, though the OFT is an arms-length organization it receives no government funding, and Bruce makes it clear that the six american cents he gets for returning each of hundreds of plastic pallet corners to the US are definitely worth the trouble.

Food Bank Pickup

Like the Toronto Food Policy Council, the OFT is an important part of what makes Toronto a world-renowned city in the food security sphere, and groups come from across Canada and the US to find out what makes it tick. The end of the day sees social service groups come in for a share of the produce, the Daily Bread Food Bank arrives for a pickup as I’m leaving and Mr. Nicholas tells us about a group of gleaners who purchase and freeze dry food in bulk to send to hunger programs abroad.

Piles of Peppers

Making Connections

It’s clear that the Food Terminal is connected to a variety of players in Ontario’s food web, but exactly how it fits into the picture of a food secure province is complicated. Mr. Nicholas volunteers his frustration about the policy of many farmers’ markets that all vendors must also be growers, farmers are not allowed to pay someone else to sell their products, or products from a variety of farms, at most Toronto markets. Many markets have a policy of “grower-only” vendors, which allows customers to meet their farmer and ask questions, ensures a short chain of accountability, and provides a venue for small-scale and niche farmers who don’t produce enough for grocery stores, to sell their goods. However, as Bruce Nicholas argues, if the whole point is to help Ontario farmers and get people eating as much local produce as possible, should we bother being strict or should we just make like the OFT and allow anyone who wants to vend access to an affordable space? The topic sparked a great deal of discussion among those of us at the tour, we discussed the toll it takes on farmers to drive in and market their goods instead of being on the farm working and yet the potential impacts of not regulating re-selling at markets. We’d love to hear from you, how you think markets can best promote food security and any other impressions or questions about the OFT too!

We did it!!

We’ve got another new addition to the garden! This is the big time: a greenhouse! In contrast to the hoophouse I discussed building in my last post, this greenhouse was not exactly easy to put together, nor could you throw it down anywhere and tweak it after the fact. Rather than building one from scratch, which it is possible to find instructions for, we decided to purchase a kit with a portion of our money from the TD Friends of the Environment Fund.

A (hopefully) solid start to our greenhouse

The kit provided the insurance of being structurally sound, expandable as needed, and seemingly straightforward to put together, without requiring any tools other than those provided. We ordered it online from Rion Canada, a manufacturer with excellent reviews and a product that can withstand snow, winds, and low temperatures – perfect for gardening in Toronto!

Sorting out the pieces

I think we will be very happy with this greenhouse, as it will allow us to start a wider variety of seedlings, try different heirloom varieties easily and get this growing and in the ground much earlier. Since we’ll be starting seedlings ourselves, it won’t be a crisis if we put some tomatoes in too early and lose them to a frost, we’ll have more available and at only the price of a seed! The greenhouse seems structurally quite sound, and with dimensions a little under 7 feet by 8 feet, it gives us a good chunk of space to work in.

Building the roof

Putting it together, however, was a definite hassle! We tried to get it started on the day of our final workbee, October 14, but were faced with unexpected heavy rains and decided to postpone. This weekend, six dedicated volunteers and I got together to take another shot at it on a cold, but thankfully mostly sunny November day. Since I was trying to do this on the cheap, I chose not to order the greenhouse base that was an optional addition to the package and instead built one of lumber, which added an addional $100 or so to the tab. 2 large boxes of pieces and attachments were sorted out carefully according to letter and number codes, and assembly of the different parts began!

Finishing Touches

The base in place, we fit together the bottom of the greenhouse frame and secured it using lugnuts (which were, of course, not exactly the right size, but that’s a story for another time).The roof was assembled separately, going well at first, but leading to some quiet (and not so quiet) cursing when it became clear that previously installed pieces had to be removed in order to attach the windows properly. The experience felt not unlike following IKEA instructions to build your entire home from the ground up. If you think you can jump ahead without reading every single letter, you’ll find yourself angrily pounding windows into an already assembled frame.

Everything's ready!

My volunteers handled the experience beautifully, however. Everyone knew that taking a break and having a cup of tea and some banana bread was a better solution than kicking the greenhouse over and stomping on it, so I followed their lead and we got it assembled in a professional way. The final step of raising the roof was a really satifying moment, where everyone got to see that this thing we’d built did in fact fit together, and we all got a feeling of triumph and excitement for next season. Assembling the greenhouse in November seemed like a chore, but it will be fantastic to have it available for early early spring when the snow is still on the ground. Though I’m not entirely looking forward to cleaning snow off of it this Winter, I’m definitely excited to have it as a refuge next Spring!

Easy season extension with a hoophouse

Another fall-themed post today! Over at the garden we’ve had our final workbee of the season, and have been steadily putting the garden to bed, taking care to improve the layout and soils to ensure next year will be even better than this once! The garden hasn’t gone completely to sleep yet though! Fall is a great time to grow a wide variety of salad greens, root vegetables and brassicas like broccoli and cauliflower. These crops can handle cold weather and some of them, like kale,  actually taste better after a frost! There are a variety of techniques out there to allow you to grow these late season crops later in the year than you would expect, methods which are collectively known as season extension. Two common and simple techniques are cold-frames and hoophouses.

Cold frames are simple boxes often made from wood which are placed in a sunny spot and covered with clear plastic or glass. These work like a miniature greenhouse; although they are unheated they trap enough heat from the sun to serve as a place to start seedlings in early spring, or as a permanent home for late fall and early spring crops. We intend to include a cold frame in our garden next year, either buildling a cover from plastic and wood or recycling an old window frame, a simple and inexpensive option for building a coldframe yourself.

Last week, we installed a hoophouse in the garden, a simple and flexible structure that we hope will let us grow some leafy greens into December. Hoophouses are basically miniature plastic greenhouses and are also called “low tunnels” as they generally stand no more than 2 feet high. There are a variety of different ways to build hoophouses, techniques which provide varying stability and ease of transportation. Generally speaking, they are made of a few simple materials: thick plastic, flexible pvc piping and wooden framing or rebar. This creates a covered area which is easily accessible for watering and harvesting, but generates enough heat to grow vegetables for an additional month or more!

We decided to go with the rebar method as the materials are simple to transport and dissemble into small, easily stored pieces as opposed to

From Left: Plastic, rebar, zipties, pipes, radiator hose, hammer and saw

constructing a large wooden frame as a hoophouse base. Our required supplies were: 1/2 inch diameter rebar cut into 8  2 ft long pieces; 100 ft of 3/4 inch diameter pvc piping; 60 ft of 6mil plastic sheeting; 2 ft of radiator hose cut into 8 equal pieces and slit open lengthwise with an X-acto knife. All of these supplies can be purchased at a home depot or other building centre, but in a variety of different sections: construction for rebar, plumbing for pipe, and painting (around the tarps and drop sheets) for the plastic. You’ll also need some stones or bricks of any size to weigh down the hoophouse cover for security.

Cutting pvc pipe

To start, we decided on the area we wanted to cover. Building a hoophouse is something you can do with a great deal of measurement and premeditation, but we just eyeballed it and threw it together, and it worked out great. It is good to keep in mind, however, that your hoophouse will do best if you orient it east-west, that is the short sides facing to the east and west, the long sides facing north and south. This maximizes sun exposure, but if you have powerful winds, position the hoophouse however will best protect it from gusts.

Set out your area and drive in your first two pieces of rebar about 3 feet apart. This will be the location of the first hoop of your hoophouse. The remaining hoops will extend behind it, so drive in your rebar parallel to your first two rods, at a distance of no more than 3 feet apart.

Pipe bent over rebar

The rebar forms the base onto which you will slide pvc pipe, creating the 4 arches of the hoophouse. Cut the pvc piping using a handsaw or pipe cutters into 4 pieces of equal length that will give you arches about 2.5 feet high when stretched across the rebar. If you aren’t growing anything that gets tall, or if you want to save on piping, feel free to make it even shorter, but keep in mind that the lower part of the curve should provide enough space to grow in too. An additional piece of pipe the length of the entire hoophouse is also needed to provide stability.

Securing centre support

Bend your pipes over the pieces of rebar, and attach the longer piece along the centre of the arches using zip ties in order to provide additional support. The final step is to cut the plastic sheeting into a piece long enough to cover the entire structure with at least 10 inches of overhang on the soil. Drape it over your structure and put bricks or stones (or anything heavy that can stand up to the

Draping plastic over structure

 elements) on top of the plastic overhang every couple of feet to prevent the plastic from blowing off in a heavy wind. The 1 inch radiator hose is used to clip the plastic around the piping near the top of the structure to help keep its shape and prevent wind damage. We used radiator hose because the neighbourhood hardware store didn’t have any 1 inch pvc piping, but I wouldn’t recommend it, it’s more expensive and too flexible, ours keeps falling

Finished structure with stones and clips on (place your clips a little higher though!

off. I’m going to get some one inch pvc piping and use it to make 4 clips for each hoop, its increased rigidity should make the structure much more secure!

Lettuce growing under hoophouse!

That’s it! You’ve got your hoophouse! Simply fold up the plastic cover as needed for watering or harvesting, and otherwise leave it down to trap heat and allow your garden to produce greens into the winter. Make sure to fill the area under your hoophouse with plants as it is the transpiration from their leaves that really helps the plants to stay warm and keeps the soil moist.

For more info on building and using hoophouses check out:

Instructions to build a much larger and more permanent hoophouse here

Video: Building  the White House winter garden here

Video: Harvesting from White House hoophouses here

Videos: Different hoophouse building approaches here

As Autumn is officially here (I could see my breath walking home last night!) it’s time to start thinking about putting the garden to bed and preparing for next year. Taking stock of what worked this year and what didn’t is an important part of having a successful garden, and one of the best ways to set yourself up for a great start next year is to put some thought into how to improve your beds now. Although Winter can seem like a lost season for the garden, even though nothing (much) is growing, it’s a great time to build your soil for next Spring. We’re going to explore two ways to do this in the garden this year, cover cropping or green manuring, which I’ll discuss in a few weeks, and sheet mulching/lasagna gardening, which we’re going to look at today.

Contrary to the confusion of some of my friends, one who referred to it as “spaghetti gardening” and another who speculated that a lasagna garden was full of wheat, tomatoes, basil and spinach, lasagna gardening has nothing to do with noodles or italian food at all. It is a method of layering different compostable materials directly on the soil to create a nutrient-rich planting bed with minimal effort. Sheet mulching, another less cryptic (and less catchy) name explains the process more clearly. Also known as the lazy man’s answer to composting, this process builds a weed-free and nitrogen-rich soil bed right where you need it, removing the need for mixing and schlepping compost around. Lasagna gardening is great because it allows you to easily improve existing beds or create a new bed without the trouble of digging up grass.

So how does it work? There are many different online and print guidelines for building a lasagna garden which range from dead simple to impressively complicated. The basic idea is simple: a layer of newspapers or cardboard to smother out weeds, a layer of things that will rot in a mixture of greens and browns, compost, soil and whatever amendments you deem necessary. If your soil is extremely poor or you want to create a raised bed, you can thicken your layers and alternate soil and mulch layers, otherwise a single layer of each should do the trick.

We decided to lasagna garden two of our beds at the garden this year. We have two large raised beds, and two smaller in-ground beds that were a later addition. As the park soil has grown grass for years, had people walking on it for decades, and is naturally clayey due to the park’s geography, the soil is high in clay, touch to dig, and has terrible drainage. A perfect canditate for lasagna-ing! I decided to follow the simple and unintimidating instructions in Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture (mostly online here)

Here are the steps:

1) create a layer about 1cm thick of wet newspapers/cardboard. Finally found a great use for back-issues of TGC’s newsletter! This layer serves to smother any existing weeds or grass already growing in your yard. If you’re building over grass, give it a quick cutting and then lay the newspapers directly over the sod, making sure to overlap the pages and taking care not to tear them, so that no grass or weeds can get through. You can either lay the papers down and spray them with the hose after, or soak them in a bucket first, if it’s windy out, I’d suggest the latter. You want to make sure the newspapers are well soaked, because once the other layers are in place water may not reach them for awhile. This layer should be at least a centimetre thick, which is easy to do if you just lay entire sections of the paper down rather than going sheet by sheet. Keep in mind that if you skimp on this layer now, you’ll be doing more weeding later, so it’s up to you!

2) at least 30 cm of weed-free garden waste. Once the newspapers are down and soaked, put thick layer of compostable materials down. This layer will rot down over the winter and build the nutrients and structure of your bed. Fall is a fantastic time to do this because there is so much free organic matter lying around - I built a lasagna garden last week entirely from leaves raked up along my street! Take care to keep a good carbon:nitrogen balance, including grass clippings and other greens is great, but they need to be balanced by browns in the form of hay, spoiled straw, wood shavings or dried leaves. You also want to be sure this layer is weed-free, because otherwise what was the point of all that newspaper? Put this layer down and wet it well too, soaking it thoroughly so your leaves or straw don’t go flying away.

3) apply any soil amendments. If you know your soil is lacking in nitrogen, phosphorus, or any other nutrients, now is a great time to add the required amendments. Take a look at this post on soil health for ideas on what you can add. If your soil seems fine, and doesnt require any amending, you can skip this step, or consider adding a little bone or blood meal to prevent animals from digging in your bed, as we did at the garden.

4) a layer at least 20cm of soil and compost. Or, a 10cm layer of each, depending what you have on hand. At the garden we just used compost, because we had a huge amount on hand, at home we used triple mix. Either way, with this layer you want to completely cover your mulch layer, and provide a thick enough coating of soil that your layers won’t blow away if the wind picks up.

That’s it! For a basic bed, the steps are easy! If you have a bed in need of a serious nutrient boost, consider adding manure or repeating the layering process, putting another layer of mulch and soil on top of step 4. You can also finish it off with a layer of mulch on top such as straw, chopped leaves or wood shavings if you want to give the bed a “finished look” but it’s up to you and the supplies you have on hand. Give lasagna gardening a try, it’s a great way to kick start your planning for next year’s garden, and an easy way to promote fertile soil for next season. We’re planning to plant garlic directly into our lasagna bed, so I’ll give an update on how that works out in the months to come!

keepin' bees

In my September 23rd post I discussed the Honeybee tour I attended in Grey County, and some beekeeping and farming organizations in the area. Today I’m going to share a bit of what I learned on the tour, things about bee colonies, honey extraction, and beekeeping basics. It’s fascinating stuff – read on!

Bee Basics

Honeybees live in colonies made up of three types of bees: workers, drones, and the queen. The most common type of bee is workers, who are all female, and take care of everything necessary to keep the hive going, collecting pollen, making honey, cleaning, feeding, defense – everything!

Drone Cells (centre)

Second most common, drones are slightly larger, and come from specialized drone cells. They are male, and basically laze around the hive all day eating honey until at one point they mate with the queen and die. Those who don’t get the chance to mate get thrown out of the hive when winter comes to save resources and are left for dead. There is only one Queen, and she is selected as a larva and fed royal jelly so that she becomes extra large. When she mates with the drones she stores sperm inside her body,  allowing her to produce new bees for the next 2-7 years.  To survive the winter, the bees huddle around the Queen, moving their wings to create warmth. They eat up their honey stores to stay alive through the winter, though in large-scale beekeeping facilities the majority of the honey is harvested and the bees are fed sugar water. Whether or not this is good practice is open to debate, some argue it’s healthier as it causes less waste buildup over the winter, while others say it’s not natural.

Honey Production

Honey Varieties

Honey is made from pollen that bees harvest, partially digest and store in cells. The bees fan their wings over the cells, causing water to evaporate from the nectar, until the point where it turns to honey. Then they cap the cells with wax, allowing the honey to store without fermenting. Because bees only travel within 3-5 km of their hives to gather pollen, it is possible to produce different varieties of honey depending what plants are in the region. Honey from different flowers have different colours and flavours, for example blueberry honey being light and thin, orange honey (my favourite!) medium colour and extra flavourful, and chestnut honey being dark, thick, and very strong-flavoured. The average honey you buy in the grocery store is wildflower honey, meaning the bees have foraged from a variety of sources.

Yellow Brood Boxes and green Honey Supers

In order to ensure that the hive is creating surplus honey for harvesting, beekeepers provide a brood box on the bottom for laying eggs and a honey super on top for storing honey. A Queen Separator is included between the two to ensure that the Queen cannot get through and lay eggs in the super. Some colonies are more productive than others, so when the first super is 3/4 full, another may be added.

Honey Extraction

Smoking the hive

When extracting, you want to consider the mood of the bees. If the hive has recently been attacked or weather has been bad, there’s a good chance they’ll be agitated, but generally a hive with a good queen will be docile. Light the smoker with wood shavings or pine needles, and approach the hive from the side so you don’t enter the bee’s flight path. A hive tool is used to crack the top cover open, it will usually be sealed with wax and propolis. You can begin to smoke the hive,

Hive Tool

which signals to the bees that they should start eating honey rather than stinging you. If the honey cells are capped they are ready for harvesting, and can be brushed free of bees and taken for extraction. It’s important to extract at a good distance from the hive,

Robbed Honeycomb

because bees rob honey – they will try to steal it back from you by eating it! (take a look at this picture of comb left near the hive – this is a great way to clean off honey extraction tools with little effort).  Moving farther away means less bees will follow you and less honey can be robbed.

Commercial Comb Cutting

The first step in extraction is removing the caps from the honey, either with a sharp tool or with heated blades, as in the commercial system. The room must be kept at at least 30 degrees C for honey to be extracted, though it shouldn’t spill out of the uncapped comb as the cells are sloped at a 15 degree angle which keeps the honey inside. The comb is then put in a centrifuge, forcing the honey to spin out and collect at the bottom, to be released by a spigot, or pumped elsewhere in larger operations.

Look at that 15 degree angle!

Honey can then be directly bottled,  innoculated with “seed” crystals to form creamed honey, or pasteurized, an unnecessary step that gives honey a longer shelf life without crystallizing, but removes some health benefits. Unpasteurized honey can be reliquified by placing the jar in boiling water for a few minutes. An interesting fact I learned from Catherine at Chatsworth Honey was that honey from different sources crystallizes at different rates; canola honey can crystallize in the comb, whereas honey from fireweed won’t crystallize for five years!

I was going to go into bee diseases and hive problems in this post, but I’ll save it for another day, this post is long enough! Please feel free to email or post with any bee-related questions, and I’ll do my best to answer them!