Black Hills - SD

Mount Rushemore

Crazy Horse

Badlands - South Dakota

The Badlands: not much to say except to put of pictures. It was well worth the 10 hour trip!

Oh and we loved the camping! We spent Thursday making the drive from northern Minnesota. We arrived around 6 that evening. We spent a while driving to our campsite -- you have to drive halfway around the "loop" to get to the free campsite. We set up camp, ate and played UNO until it was too dark to see our cards (which was pretty dark because the numbers are big and the colors just became different shades of gray). There was a beautiful sunset!

The next morning (there was a bison standing right in the campsite): breakfast, packing up, then we did a short hike (not even a mile), but it was 95 degrees today and very dry so that was enough.

Weeding

Pramod and I decided that in our free time we would weed. We made a plan to weed every row once before leaving the farm. With 40 something rows, we needed to weed 1 row a day (plus we plowed some of the rows with Paul in order to plant in them).

We started slacking by the end of the time here and some rows were more work than others (ex. tomatoes dominate the rows and its harder to get down under the plants). We didn't get them all done, sadly. Another problem that we found was that those rows that we weeded at the beginning of our time needed to be weeded again at the end. We did actually weed a couple of rows twice. They just keep coming back.

We put paper bags around the base of the squash plants to discourage weed growth. The nice thing about this is that during the winter the paper will decompose and just be good for the soil. Some plants have large enough leaves that they need weeding when they're small but they'll shade out most of the weeds later.

Paul told us that after plowing and planting seeds, weed growth isn't bad because it helps protect the seedlings as they begin to grow. As they get big enough to need all the sunlight they can get, however, weeding is very important.

Weeding is definitely a problem that can be hard to stay on top of with a garden as big as Paul's garden.

Making Hay

Making hay is a process that I didn't know anything about. It turns out that it takes multiple days, multiple steps and it's really hard work. Paul taught Pramod how to drive the tractor (because Pramod was really interested and I was not), so Pramod did a lot of the steps that I didn't.

Paul's hay fields actually belong to someone else. One of the field's owners just appreciates having their field plowed annually. I'm not sure about the other field owner.

First, cutting the field. Paul has a tractor as well as a bunch of attachments that fit on the back of it. One of these attachments is a grass cutter. Just like mowing the lawn, only the lawn is really tall.

Afterthe grass has been cut, it needs to dry. This will take somewhere within 2 days if it's warm and sunny. The next step is to wait, and rake it over to help the different areas dry faster. When we first made hay, Paul told us we were going to "rake" it and I thought we had to manually rake the entire field. I was thinking that it was going to be a long, hot day. However, there is another attachment for the plow that has wheels with needles coming off so that it rakes all the hay in it's path into a pile on one side -- upside down

from the previous pile.

Once the hay is all dried up, we need to make bales of it so that it's easier to transport. This is done by another attachment. This one was really cool. It had a thing with tines that spun to pick the hay up off the ground. Once in the compartment, there was a spiral that spun to move all the hay from the long compartment down to the end where the rectangle bale was formed. Once enough hay was in the end compartment, there was a giant knife that would

cut off the ends so that it formed a perfect rectangle. Then the rectangular bale was tied and dropped out the back. This was all done by the machine, someone just needs to drive the tractor over the rows of hay.

We weren't making the big round bales, but they were still really heavy. I was not a lot of help when it came to picking them up. I was able to roll the bales closer to the tractor so that those who could pick them up didn't have to walk so far or waste their energy walking them all over the place. We all were very tired and sweaty

afterwards.

Lastly, we needed to move all that hay into the barn before it got rained on (it's been raining a lot here). That was also a lot of work, maybe even more work than getting them off the ground. But we did it and we felt pretty good when it was all done!

Map

Click to see a larger view!

Pramod and I have changed our plans a little in order to see a few parks along the way. I wanted to see the Badlands as long as we're driving through. We have also been talked into checking out the Black Hills and Mount Rushmore, plus it's on our way. Pramod was also really interested in seeing Yellowstone National Park on our way. So we're having a whirlwind 5 day tour with lots of sight seeing and driving and I bet we'll be pretty tired when we get to Missoula. But we're looking forward to it!

Bee Keeping

The other day, Paul showed us his bees. He has said that you really only need to check on the bees once a month in the warm months and any time there are changes that need to be checked (like starting a new hive). Besides that, the only work will be in removing the honey in the fall.

Apparently, unless allergic to bees, a person can only be seriously hurt by a bee sting if it stings you in your eye. He always wears the hat thing to cover his face. At this time of the year the bees are pretty happy though. They have lots of flowers to explore. Just to be safe, he puts smoke in the hives. The smoke makes the bees think that there is a fire in the hive and they start loading up with honey in case they need to evacuate. When they are filled with honey, they move much slower.

When we first went to check the bees I was nervous. It is not often that a person chooses to stand so close to so many buzzing bees. Every itch I had to examine in case a bee was on me. We did get somewhat used to it though.

We were checking the hives. In the biggest one, we checked a few of the levels to see how the honey production was coming along. It seemed that this hive was ready for another super added so the bees would have more room for more honey. We also checked the two new hives. Paul started a new hive with a couple of slides from the biggest hive about a month ago. Because he did this, there were baby bees in the cells and when put in a new hive without a queen, the nurse bees fed a female baby bee the “royal jelly” to create a new queen. At this point, we were checking to make sure that there were new eggs in the cells. New eggs means that a queen was created and laying and the hive is starting to grow on its own. There probably will just be enough honey for the bees to survive the winter months — so no honey for the taking from those hives. However, if they survive the winter, these hives should flourish and be able to make extra honey next summer.

So I like the bees a lot. I think they are really cool. I've been reading one of Paul's books on beekeeping and it's really interesting. I think I'm going to try to convince dad to let me get bees to keep up in Sandwich. I don't know how everyone else would feel about it though! But if it's really just a once per month commitment, I think I could handle that. Especially if dad was interested in helping me out a little bit. One thing that was really surprising though was how heavy the full boxes are! Empty, it's just wood, but full of honey and water, they are really heavy. I'd need some help from dad or Pramod for that reason.

Contra Dancing

We went contra dancing with Paul and Becky last night! It was really fun. It was one of their friend's birthdays so she hosted a dance and there were probably less than 20 people dancing. Li (Paul and Becky's son) just got back from a Mandarin immersion camp where he bought a kung fu type fan (very large). He didn't dance, but he was pretty good at walking around and fanning some of us regularly. It was perfect.