Bee Ready

We are in full blown bee keeping mode around The Acre this week. We have been reading everything we can get our hands on to prep for next spring. We've planted our clover patches, but the lack of rain is slowing it down. We will probably have to replant again later this fall or maybe catch a big snow on the way and get the seeds down over the winter for spring.
Lawman is in the planning stages for the bee stands, we've chosen our locations based on sunrise and evening shade. We are really looking forward to adding crazy bees to our crazy farm.

Speaking of construction, Lawman has been planning a new clothes line for a while now. We bought a folding clothes line in the spring, and it worked OK, but every other week or so the plastic lines would sag. We would tighten them up, and a couple weeks later they would sag. Lawman decided to go ahead and sink another hole in concrete and run heavy line that wouldn't sag. We have all this high tensile line equipment for fencing, we thought it would work for clothes line. We were right.
Lawman pulled up the folding line, then measured off fourteen feet for the second hole, that gave us three lines of twelve feet.

We might not win any prize for the prettiest clothesline, but we can hang our laundry out, and we have plenty of laundry during our day to day.
Saturday we acted like high school kids, we washed and waxed the truck before we went to town.

We got the new MP stickers for the back glass.

After we got the truck all shined up, we picked our grapes. The guinea birds have been trying to get at the grapes all week, but we had them covered with mesh. We scored a five gallon bucket full.

Sunday after family breakfast, we cleaned up the kitchen then made grape jelly.
We found this little gem when we got started, a grape inside a grape.

Then we got started.

We made 26 cups of jelly, so that should hold us over the winter.
And we're still getting the occasional strawberry.

We tried to snap a picture of the eclipse on Monday, like everyone else did. It didn't work out all that well. Our focus was on how the animals would react during the eclipse, and they didn't skip a beat. Best we can tell, they didn't pay any attention at all to it.

We ended the week with wings.
K&K