Small Farming on Whidbey Island

We live on five acres on Whidbey Island.  About three of them are thick with alder trees with Salmon Berries as our dormant understory plant.  I’ll eat a few of the berries but our grandchildren love them.  Our honey bees will visit them early on nice days but prefer fruit trees and the flowers on the huge big leaf maple trees growing on our neighbor’s land.  Our native bumblebees love them and I can hear them buzzing at 5:30 am to 8:30 pm.

We have three honeybee hives this spring.  Two are from last year and I added one this month.  The new one was a queen and five pounds of bees.  Last week we had sunny weather and the honeybees were all over our blooming orchard.  Our Asian pears (four mature trees) were in full bloom the past two weeks and were covered with honeybees.  We had a good crop of them last year and they are our favorite dried fruit.  What we don’t eat fresh we slice and dehydrate, storing them in wide mouth jars in our cool spare bedroom.

Asian Pears ready to pick in 2012

We harvested about 30 pounds of honey last fall from one hive.  We talked to a local commercial bee person and he said, due to the color, it was probably Canada thistle honey.  Canada thistle honey is considered fine and rare, rare because Canada thistle is considered a noxious week in our state.  It grows on our land and neighbor’s abundantly.  It is almost impossible to kill without using chemicals and we don’t use them on our farm, so I’ve learned to live with it.  The flowers are nice, their fragrance wonderful, aphids attach it so they are also full of lady beetles, and the goldfinch bird loves the seeds.  So one man’s noxious weed is another’s gem.   

 

Straining Honey in our House in 2012

We have added to our goat herd this past year, buying one mature doe and breeding one that was born here January 2012.  Daisy Mae is Surely’s girl and is 50% Nubian and 50% Boer.  We bred Daisy to a 100% Boer buck so her kids will be 75% Boer.  I have read that more goat meat breeders are using dams that are the Nubian/Boer cross as the kids have the meat traits of the Boer goat with the mother’s Nubian milk, resulting in fast growing kids putting on weight quickly.  We butcher three to four yearlings every year for our annual meat supply (supplementing our chicken and duck meat).

Cheddar Cheese - one ready to eat and one ready to wax

With all of the extra milk I have begun making cheddar cheese this year – one or two, two pound blocks a week.  I found an old “farmhouse” cheddar cheese recipe and it is somewhat easy to make.  Because I use raw milk I age it for at least 60 days.  Tastes like cheddar cheese but dryer than what you would buy in the store.  With our Nubian goat milk it has no goat flavor – just a very nice cheese.