 It's finally happened, gas prices have gotten so high that we can't really afford gas and so I'm going to the grocery store by bike and that's pretty much how it's going to be from now on. Even if the grocery store has anything left and that's a big if, so welcome to another week of Food and the Gettin'. It hasn't been yet but the bike will start to become a more central part of our lives here because there is no more efficient way to translate human leg power, you know, the strongest muscle in our body into movement so you see a lot more of the bike as we go along here. That potato bug season had been neglectful of my potatoes which is kind of stupid because potatoes are my big source of calories for the winter. It's one of the few real problems that potatoes have, these Colorado potato beetles. Usually I like to plant a little later and that takes care of a lot of them but these are already planted early and now I'm reaping the whirlwind so every night I get to come out and clean my potatoes which is actually kind of nice, it's a nice time of day except for the mosquitoes. There's a little soap water in them. I'm going to have a look see what's going on here with our bees. So this one should be raising a new queen and this one should be raising a new queen. This one has my old queen so I'm hoping that when I go in here I will see a capped queen cell. Got a kind of stunted queen cell there, I'm not very happy with that one. So right there is a stunted queen cell. I'll find another one, I will scratch that one off because you want a nice big fat queen cell so you get a nice big fat queen. These guys don't have a good queen cell so I think what I'm going to do is just combine them back with this hive assuming they have a good queen cell because it's too late now for them to raise a queen cell and go into the winter with any amount of strength. So instead of having three hives going into the winter which is my preference I'm going to have two but that's just how it goes. So I'll pop this lid back on, now I'll check out this hive so there should be some honey in these but I'm not super concerned about that yet, nope that's too light to have much honey in it. Remember this one has some honey in it, I'm starting to get some honey and here I want to see a queen cell or perhaps an uncapped queen cell. She could have already emerged meaning hatched from her cell, the queen actually takes less time to gestate than a worker, yeah we've got torn open queen cells so there's a queen in here somewhere but right now she's probably a virgin queen because once she emerges she takes about a week to adjust and then break out and go mate but right down here we've got an emerged queen cell or an opened queen cell so there's probably a queen here I'm not going to bother them much right now so I'm going to want to come back in a week to make sure that I have a laying queen. So now what I'm going to do is put a layer of wet newspaper on top here this is the wet one that one's dry so together they'll be wet and the bees will have no trouble chewing through this in a day and this slowly integrates the two beehives because bees are obviously protective of their hive and so if I were to just plunk down this old beehive over here or this beehive here with its own established population, if I were just to plunk it down there they might fight but if I put this here now they have to chew through that newspaper before they integrate and that will give them a little time to become acclimatized and also once they are into one another they will have a bit of time we'll give that a bit of time we'll have one hive and then I'll consolidate and pick out all the different honey frames and I'll move that all around so now I'm going to pop into this one which has an existing queen and they probably need more space so I plunked the queen down with a few frames empty frames and some honey man I got runny bees it's not really my favorite attribute runny just means that they sprint around rather than walk which is not great when you're trying to find the queen if everyone's running it's nicer when they're going slowly here we have worker bees filling up this honey frame with honey and here we have brood hatching out like to see a stronger brood pattern here that fresh young larva and eggs mean the queen is around boy they are runny a lot of pollen boy they are not using this resources man they are really not building up are they well due to their lackluster build up I'm going to pull out some of these non-built up frames and give them just drawn comb that's basically bee frames ready to be moved into seeing see if they can get their show on the road because they are not looking very productive right now hopefully this will encourage the queen to start laying not looking as good as I'd like it to at this point in the year these this hive should be exploding with bees and we kind of depend on our honey resources for having enough sugar to get through the winter it's a lot of calories all right well pop this lid on see what happens we'll be back in a few weeks girls okay now that when I open these it doesn't bubble anymore they've turned to kind of a dull green color instead of a bright green color it's time to never mind the the bus being pushed around by the boy over there yes so I'm gonna pull off this liquid boil it and then pour it back in here and close the lids really tight and make sure that it it'll then kind of like when you can think it's basically just hot packing it's not as good for preserving things as hot about hot water canning which I could do with these had I put them in actual ball jars I don't trust these jars to boil these and seal but it's a simpler way to do it and for the most part it's okay everything I say take with a grain of salt do your own risk don't come back to me and say I got botulism but what has worked for us in the past is hot packing these we've never had any issue this is a common way to do things in a lot of the Slavic world where lacto fermented super common and just pouring the hot boiling brine back into these is not sterilized or kill enough of the bad germs that things are generally safe we're gonna be doing pickles in almost the exact same way probably by the end of the week I go to the stove and now we can get this brine back in here after it's boiled there's one make sure this is nice and free of any seal that nice and tight now the next so now we'll let these sit until they cool and hopefully they'll even click in and have a good hot pack seal which should be good enough to keep them through this winter because of the high acid content we don't need to kill all the bad organisms because that high acid content from the lactic acid that was produced during the fermentation process will keep these safe enough safe enough again use this idea at your own risk time to harvest peas now just have to shell and dry all these peas then over here on the other side I've got my pava beans that have nice flowers on them and hopefully I'll start to get some beans off of these soon oh yeah here we go that's some pava beans growing right here already so hopefully this will start producing and we'll get we'll get a nice bunch of those and here we have cucumbers they're just about up to trellis level that I planted here that one just about reach the trellis we'll give it another day and really minimal weed load really just a little bit here and there coming up through the cardboard so it's a pretty good pretty good system okay my friend Herman is from Ukraine and he once gave us these amazing pickles and so I'm going to recreate his people recipe thanks to him for sending that along by email um so it's a I guess you could pick all kinds of vegetables but I'm pickling cucumbers the cucumbers have really been coming in now for a week we've been eating a lot of them but this is what I've been managed to save from the hungry masses that have been eating all my pickles or all my cucumbers and so I'm going to toss in I don't know a half dozen cloves of garlic and then Herman suggested horseradish leaves but I've got grape leaves which basically do the same thing they've got lacto friendly bacteria and other things that help fermentation on them so put those in and I've got some sprigs of dill heads of dill and now I'm cutting off a quarter inch of the blossom end of these pickles because you can the blossom has some things that will cause the pickles to become soft and unpalatable so I just cut those off as I put them in and then I pour in uh I'm starting with two quarts of water for each quart of water I add two tablespoons of salt and then to keep these things underwater down a plate that pushes them below the water line and you put a little weight on top of that who's using a jar of beans you need anything that can be washed some people use rocks that's totally fine too and now up here it's too warm so we're going to have to move this down to the basement where it's considerably colder so down here in the basement is a much more conducive spot to let this ferment it's considerably cooler under 70 degrees and I'll just let this sit and ferment for two to five or more days we'll see and then we'll move on to the next step probably in next week's episode as you can see we still have quite a few stores and we're already adding back to it we're adding here's our maple syrup and you know extra salt that we bought at the last grocery store run we're trying to build up as we start to draw down we're almost getting low on flour and oats so we should be harvesting those soon but as things become increasingly scarce at the grocery store this store that we built up in the spring is very important and I'm just now realizing that I am kind of out of chicken feet so I'm gonna have to do something I've got a little bit of chicken scratch left that's not really full nutrition for them I have a little bit of some food for young chickens but for the most part it looks like I am out of chicken feet already huh all right well that's a problem it's also raspberry season and these are going to become more important as the winter goes on just to have a little reminder of warm summer days just to have these raspberries available for us in the form of jam I'll dehydrate a whole bunch and we'll pop them in our granola just a nice little treat to have as things get cold and dark these are black cap raspberries are wild when we moved into this property it was completely bushed over this was all well still is pretty brushy and I was pulling out all these raspberries which are really good colonizers they like you know recently abandoned lake locations and I was pulling these all out and I was going to plant the whole raspberry patch anyway with purchased raspberries and I thought to myself why am I pulling out all these raspberries that clearly thrive here to buy finicky store-bought ones and so what I did was I transplanted all these raspberries over into this area and now I trellis them and keep them fertilized and pruned and happy as best I can but it was an existing resource that I thought oh should be a great money saving and also availability sort of thing so perhaps there's raspberries or other existing wild fruits in your area that you could harness during this time of of stress that we're all experiencing even this has one long circuit is maze or pathway so if you walk into her length of it you'll see both sides of every bush thanks for joining us this front of the week on foodmageddon we had another busy week and we'll have another one coming up next week so make sure to subscribe so you'll get our next episode as soon as it comes out make sure to check out our website lowtechinstitute.org you can always send me an email scott at lowtechinstitute.org all right thanks have a good week hope you're doing okay