Really.  Out on the ranch we can sense the change of season coming by the changes in the wildlife around us.  In the evenings, we love to sit on the porch and just watch and listen to our little valley.  As day fades into evening and evening into night, some of our friends go off to bed as others arrive.  Our son needs to ”say good night” to the Great Horned Owls- they start to hoot and he hoots back and then off to bed he’ll go.

Spring arrives with the Swainsons thrushes .  Their haunting flute-like calls serenade us in those cool evenings.  Spring means counting and identifying our new fawns, scores of mama quails followed by their scurrying chicks, baby rabbits everywhere and incredibly darling raccoon cubs (it’s so hard not to adore them, even knowing how truly awful they’re going to be in  a month or so).

Look at that little monster. He doesn't even care that I'm two feet away...

Last night, while we were sitting out on the porch, enjoying a glass of Scherrer rose, an all-time, summer-time  favorite- Late Summer arrived.  With a vengeance.  As the sun set, and the nest of Great Horned owls, up in the old pine above the vineyard, woke up, and the warmth of the day shifted abruptly to the cool of the evening, the summer chorus of cicadas and tree frogs started.  Just like that.  I know it doesn’t sound that exciting- but you really had to be there.    Out of nowhere, this cacophony of sound erupted from the creek and voila!  Summer’s here.

You know what makes it so exciting, right?  Blackberries.  Tomatoes.  Gravenstein apples.  Melons.  Corn.  Shell beans…. On and on.  When the cicadas and tree frogs come, so does our summer bounty.  The first berries are ripening as we speak.  The vines are heavy with our summer harvest and  we are ready!

Here they come...

“The only reason for being a bee that I know of is making honey….and the only reason for making honey is so I can eat it.”
Winnie the Pooh in A.A. Milne’s
‘The House at Pooh Corner’

Pooh and I have a lot in common.  More than I’ll actually get into here.  A whole lot of what passes as important, I can take or leave.  But honey, now that’s serious. 

Spring Honey, 2009

When I moved back onto the Ranch in 1997, the place was an absolute disaster.  Being an Italian family, feuds are in our blood.  We can’t seem to help it.  So, when  my great-grandmother died back in ‘78, the family couldn’t come to grips with what to do with the place.  She was the absolute glue that held everything together, and she was something really special (the memory of her and how she and my great-grandfather lived really does drive our vision for Farmhouse).  Well, when you can’t figure out what to do, and you’re a certain kind of Italian family, what do you do?  Talk about things, clear the air and come to a resolution?  Nope, you fall back on that old saying,  ”If you can’t stand the heat…” and you get the heck out of the kitchen and don’t look back. 

Until some little pain-in-the-neck in some future generation grows up and just won’t leave it alone.  That would be me.  Well, I mean really… You have this amazingly gorgeous property, in an absolutely heavenly location, with all of your family history just rotting away.  Wouldn’t you take on the elders and have a go at getting it kick started again?  Boy, did I not know what I was getting into…

But, here we are, 12 years later.  Talking about honey.  After we took care of some of the “bigger issues”, you know propped up the house, replanted the vineyard and dug out about one hundred million poison oak and blackberry plants, we started thinking, what next? 

Not being inclined towards farming ourselves- Rod and I love living on a working farm, participating and, well, reaping all of the benefis…but don’t have the time or actual inclination to do all the never-ending work associated with each individual endeavor- we started looking around for people in our community who are farmers without farmland.  And lo and behold, we’ve met an incredible, number of passionate, talented people who share our vision. 

One of the first brave participants in our little scheme came our way via some friends who have a gem of a  farm, right up the road.  Mark and Rob have a few acres, a lot of gophers and a great vision.  They have enough olive trees to make a little olive oil, enough grapes for a little wine and enough bees for … You get the picture.  When Rob brought me a jar of honey, I couldn’t believe it.  My oh so fastidious friend, out there in the full garb, with a little smoker, convincing a hive of angry bees to just “give it up”? 

Turns out they were just reaping the benefit of someone elses bravery.  He’d heard of a local bee keeper who was searching out prime locations to place bees.  Can you imagine?  How incredibly cool!  He brings the bees, cares for the bees, extracts the honey and then gives you some??  So my trees, vegetables and flowers get polinated, I don’t have to do any work and then I get honey from my own property?  We’ll you guessed it, I called them up that same afternoon.

Doug and Katia Vincent own a local business called Beekind.   And, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVaYD3e9KOA- here’s a video of them on YouTube.  They really are “all things bee”.  They have hives all over Sonoma County, sell honey, sell candles, teach bee keeping, specialze in dealing with swarms and are huge advocates and proponents for bees in general. 

Doug Vincent, see his funny hat?

It was through them that we first learned about the incredible and potentially catastrophic decline in world-wide bee populations.  (If you haven’t heard and would like to, helpthehoneybees.com is a great place to start).  We also learned the difference between commercial, heat pasteurized honey and real honey- the raw stuff that’s full of enzymes and not only tastes a thousand times better, but has medicinal and healing properties. 

The bees, like every other endeavor on the Ranch, have taught us so much and have opened our eyes to how perfectly interconnected our world really is.  Our kids are learning that the bees polinate the garden that grows our vegetables, the vineyard that produces the wine that makes Mom and Dad so happy… and the orchards that give us cider and applesauce and pie!  And then, at the end of each season, Doug comes out and puts on his funny outfit and gives them honey still in the comb and warm from the sun.  Not a bad scenario.

Doug just delivered our Late Spring Honey.  We don’t have a ton of it, but it’s unlike any honey we’ve produced yet.  Doug says that the late rains and the additional growth that came with them, account for the delightful cinnamon character in the honey.  Our spring honey is usualy lighter and more butterscotchy.  This one is really deep with great acidity- kind of like wine. 

We have some for sale, and we’re serving it at breakfast and in the restaurant.  So if you come and visit, you’ll surely see some.  We’ve taken a page out of Pooh’s book.  The honey pot doesn’t stay empty for long!

After months of conversations, research and back and forth-  last summer we became “Chicken People”.  Seriously.  It’s a big deal.  Over the 4th of  July weekend, last year, we finally took a deep breath and went down to Western Farm Supply (absolutely the coolest farm supply place) and bought ourselves a flock of chickens.  Seven of them to be exact.  Two Araucanas (for the blue eggs), three Buff Orpingtons (mostly because we like to say Buff Orpington), one Rhode Island Red (because they’re so pretty and lay great eggs) and one Sexlink (we don’t know why).  And we got a cat.  Because he was there and he was irresistable and everyone knows that kittens with baby chickens is a great idea… 

It’s been a terriffic adventure.  We got our first eggs on Christmas Day.  I was out behind the woodshed with Helen and Rocco (my kids) and looked down and saw an indention in the soil, right up against the building, and full of eggs!  We counted twenty four of them total.  We don’t knwo when they actually started laying- but we did appreciate Christmas surprise.  It had been cold enough that they were all still fresh and we made an incredible scramble for the whole family.

One year later, we have four of our original flock left.  We lost three in the usual ways, and have seriously evolved our chicken strategies to cope with our special selection of predators.  Out on the ranch, we have foxes, racoons, hawks, bobcats, you name it.  And they all like chicken!

Yesterday, we took a deep breath again and went down and picked up six new babies.  We’re watching Joe’s two-month-old chickens while they’re on vacation and thought if we’re babysitting his, let’s add some for ourselves. 

Our baby chicks on the left and Joe's on the right.

This year we’re a little more concerned with egg production and so went with two Pearl-White Leghorns (they’re supposedly not so nice, but great layers), they’re a lovely lemon-yellow baby, two Barred Rocks (again, super layers), one Americana (green eggs) and one Rhode Island Red (we still have one from last year and we like pairs). 

Helen, our 4-year-old, has fallen in love with the Americana and has named her Chocolate.  Poor Chocolate.  Being the beloved of a four-year-old girl isn’t always easy… And Rocco, our two-year-old son, is simply fascinated.

Rod constructed a new “baby coop” out of half pallets that had piled up in the wood shed, and so they are all happily housed on the back porch.  The Chicken Guy at Western Farms told me that two-month-olds and babies will be “perfectly happy” together.  Wrong.  So we employed an out of service baby gate to separate the two sections and everyone is happy!

Rocco and his "babychikins"

Helen and Chocolate

If you’re considering chickens of your own, they really are easy, they live happily in back yards, they don’t stink, and as my Grandmother said, “What’s not to love about chickens?  I feed them my scraps and they feed both my family and my garden”.