Okay, you dawdlers. You are now officially running out of time to take advantage of the Fresh Squeezed Deluxe Collector’s Edition Pre-Publication Package which, if nothing else, is a mouthful. “Fresh Squeezed”, you’ll recall, is the new crime/comedy novel that Bonnie Biafore and I wrote. The manuscript has been edited by a real, honest-to-god editor and the cover art is finished. For those of you who already took advantage of the special offer, thanks, and we’re still on track to get you your swag and books starting in late-June or early-July. If you haven’t yet gotten your order in, better hurry, we’re limiting the sale to one-hundred packages and, once the eBook is ready, we’ll have to cut off sales to meet certain contractual requirements that eBook sellers hold over authors’ and publishers’ heads like some literary Sword of Damocles. So click the “Support” button and select “Fresh Squeezed Package”. For the low, low price of US$25.00 you’ll get a signed copy of the print book, the eBook in both Kindle and ePub (Nook etc.) formats, and a “Fresh Squeezed” T-shirt that won’t be available anywhere else.
If you want to have a look at the prologue (and soon the cover and first chapter) just visit www.jamesewing.com/freshsqueezed.
On with the blog.
I recently mentioned some of the time-tested, pithy sayings that we use as guides, reasons, and, truth be told, excuses in our daily lives. You know those little ditties like: “A penny saved is a penny earned”; “The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence”; or “A bird in hand is worth two in the bush.” Things like that. Most of these aphorisms date back to a time when people lived in an agrarian world; a place where, for urban dwellers, the temporal-distance between living in the city and living on a farm was measured in months or years, not in generations, and chickens in the garden was still the rule rather than the exception. But that’s all changed now, and one of the downsides is that there hasn’t been a good witty generalization to come out of urban living with the possible exception of: “The other line always moves faster.”
In going through a list of such micro-proverbs (Of course somebody put together a list. What do you think people did before they had smart-phones?) at bored.comI was struck by how many of these condensed life-lessons could be attributed to 1) William Shakespeare, 2) getting dumped, or 3) farming.
The common theme in most of the epigrammatic adages is that however bad it is now, it will only get worse if you change anything. From greener grass to un-hatched chickens the warning is the same: don’t mess with what you’ve got, don’t assume anything, and, above all, leave well enough alone.
Which explains a lot.
But enough about my personal failings. They are probably better left to a posthumous memoir. The focus of the day are the wild things, tamed things, and domesticated things which, as a group, are eating us out of house and home.
The economics of this micro-farming adventure, when applied to any other endeavor, would be looked at somewhere in the range between foolish and downright stupid. When you take into account the front-end costs and out-of-pocket upkeep expenses, any hope of using the fruits of our labors as anything other than a healthy alternative to store bought produce, is a joke.
Consider the greenhouse, while not technically eating it did have an upfront expense. Yes, it allows us to start seedlings in a protected environment instead of buying them from Bay Hay and Feed. Yes, it allows us to grow things that normally don’t do well in the soggy Pacific Northwest, like tomatoes and corn. And yes, it is pretty cool to have a greenhouse. But even if we optimistically figure our savings to be a hundred bucks a year it’s going to take four years for the thing to pay for itself and we don’t even know if it will stand up under the first dusting of snow. There’s a reason the smart pig built his house out of bricks. But, if we had built the proverbial brick greenhouse, it would have cost a fortune and never paid for itself.
Then there are the birds; the wild ones, not the chickens. Most of the birds are out foraging for themselves in the bounty of spring and visit our feeders more as a social event than an actual nutritional requirement. A few will fly in, taste what we have on offer, and fly off. It’s neat seeing the colorful transient birds which are only up here for the summer, even if only for a few minutes a day. Adult birds are also bringing their offspring in to teach them about feeders. You can see a parent fly up to one of the feeders, grab a bite, and return to its young, quivering and cheeping nearby. The little one will take an ecstatic bite, the parent will point a wing at the feeder, then at us watching through the window, and say whatever the bird equivalent of “suckas” is.
But the show stealers are the hummingbirds. They provide endless hours of entertainment as they chirp and dive and flit about the four feeders we have hanging out back. The reality is that the aerial antics are really an attempt by a single bird to claim all feeders as their own by driving away the other birds and making them starve to death. One bird however, is just not up to the task. So, they take turns, thereby ensuring that everyone gets to eat enough to survive, and that everyone is perpetually hungry. They are so hungry that when I take a newly-filled feeder back outside the desperate birds are more than willing to alight on me and drink to stave off imminent starvation. When observed closely, their high-speed dogfights are packed with overt aggression, feints, subterfuge, mid-air collisions, and maneuvers helicopter pilots wish they could do. Sadly, there are casualties.
But we keep filling the feeders because our viewing pleasure is paramount and because they suck the stuff down by the gallon. Luckily, we have some spare sugar syrup lying around.
Because of the bees.
When we first got the bees and installed them in their hives we put in some sugar syrup to get them over the initial rough spot. They didn’t touch it. The big-leaf maples were in bloom and the bees were more than happy to ignore our pitiful substitute and gorge themselves on the real deal. We had a twenty-five pound bag of sugar to feed them, but it sat around, unopened. Then two things happened: 1) the first blush of spring faded and 2) baby bees started crawling out of their cells, hungry. Starting with fewer than ten-thousand bees per hive, their numbers swelled by more than a thousand new bees a day and they started chowing down. With the current dearth of nectar, the bees chomped through that twenty-five pound bag in a week. So we bought two more.
The bees’ hunger has not abated a whit. Every day they’re burning through four pounds of sugar. This, according to my fellow beekeepers, will continue unabated until the blackberry bloom starts, in another two or three weeks.
When you add up the cost of the sugar, the cost of the bees, and the cost of the equipment it comes to something just north of a grand. That, based on local honey prices, is what we would spend on honey in ten years. If we ever are able to realize the full potential of the hives and pull off fifty pounds of honey a year each, it will still take three years to recoup our initial investment; that is, if the nectar flow is strong, if the bees build a place to store it, and ifthe bees survive their first winter.
If seems to be the most used word in farming.
Lastly, there are the chickens. They are looking more like chickens and less like chicks every day. There is flying and squawking and contented cheeping. They recognize us and run over to greet us when we step out of the house. They’re just so darn cute.
But there is feed at twenty bucks a bag. There is straw and bedding. There is the cost of the chicken run, the as-yet-un-built moveable coop, and the un-purchased electric fence to keep the predators out. All in all the chickens will probably set us back about six-hundred bucks in initial expense and ten a week in food.
By the time the first eggs start showing up in the nest box in September, we’ll be out of pocket almost as much as the bees. Then, when the eggs finally arrive, we’ll have way more than we can possibly eat, but ironically enough, too few to make sense selling. Each chicken will lay about 240 eggs a year over a projected six-year lifespan. At grocery store prices, those twenty dozen eggs are worth about eighty bucks or nearly five-hundred dollars a year for the flock. But, with only a couple dozen to sell a week, it’s hardly worth the effort.
While I make fun of the voodoo economics of micro-farming, the numbers are there. The problem, as I’ve written about, is one of scale. You can’t make any money with two hives of bees. Egg sales won’t even pay for lunch when you’ve only got six chickens. A wannabe micro-farm has to support itself, provide for the farmers, and make enough excess to sell and to cover the inevitable losses. To say nothing about feeding the hummingbirds. The only way to make that happen is for us to scale up. More bees, more hives, more trees, more chickens, more plants. All of which need to be fed, tended, and harvested; tasks which represent the one thing I took up writing to avoid: Work.
Forget about getting eaten out of house and home, that sounds more like a recipe for disaster.