Alessandro Frescura

Hi!

Next spring I will start to convert a new plot into a small experimental forest garden. At the moment the area is planted with a green manure (sunflower, perennial rye, buckwheat, phacelia).
I also have cow manure available from September (a sufficient amount to eventually cover all the area).

I know the basic principales of forest gardening, but have no direct practicle experience about It.

Which tips would you give to a complete newby, based on your experience?

Thank you!

Hi everyone!

Here just to share my new Layens hive in the case someone is interested in the project.

I built it last winter based on infos and plans found into the well-known book "Keeping bees with a smile".

Since I also had the necessity to install a 100 W solar panel to keep a 120 Ah battery well charged, I put this on the front side of the hive roof. A charge regulator is placed in the empty space below the roof while the battery is located inside one of the old Dadant hives besides the Layens one.

This allowed me to save the material for one of the roof sides, while discouraging any theft of the panel thanks to the presence of the bees

Have a nice day!

Hi!

I know this post is a bit old, but I'm quite new to the forum.

I also started testing a Layens hive this year after 16 year of conventional beekeeping with Dadant hives. I built it during last winter and put bees into it in april. As a consequence I have no specific experience in the winter period, which maybe is one of the most important concerns and I'm also very curious about what will happen.

By now, I noticed that the familiy tends to become much larger that my standard Dadant hives. I treated it against varroa in july as I usually do since I'm quite cautious about any claim of an higher resitance to it and I want to test this aspect much more before risking my bees.

My hive can contain 24 deep frames, but this first year the family is limited to 11 frames. I noticed that bees are very happy to wander and gather also into the empty hive volume though, even if the occupied part is not so full of bees to justify a further expansion of the nest.

I'm also very curious about your experience so far, so please let me know!

I'll happy to share my experience on any other specific aspect, so feel free to ask

Have a nice day!

Hi!

August always remembers me that fall is coming and then the long boring winter will be here... Since a couple of years I've began to appreciate also colder months of the year in a permacuture perspective, finding some activities that can be done (and are better done) during these days, when I cannot grow anything or doing other interesting stuff. For example I love the period during which I can get new bare-root friut trees and plant them in late november/early december.

What are your favorite late fall/winter activities in the homestead?

Just to add something more to my anti-boring list ahah

Have a nice evening!

Hi!

I've been a beekeeper since 16 years now, but it's my first season trying and testing a horizontal Layens hive with extra-deep frames.
Since it is quite different with respect to standard Dadant hives I'm used to and I'm starting to prepear my bees for the winter season, I would like to ask more experienced people some advice about what they do on their Layens/horizontal hives before the cold season comes.

I noticed that in the last ten days my Layens bees completely sealed any gap into the hive with propolis: they basically glued all the frames top-bars togheter and the hive top to its main body. If I correctly understand this hive's philosophy, this probably means that I must not disturb the nest anymore, since they are setting it up for winter.

Am I wright? Forgetting something important?

Thank you!

Yeah, I mean systems used to take and save meteorological data and other related measurements, so they are not related to domotics but are devoted to actively monitoring these quantities on some piece of land.

They can be also easily used to control some actuators, for example to vent greenhouses, start irrigation automatically and so on, even thought I've not any direct experience about this last aspect.

This can be done to get useful patterns about climate on out land or any place of interest, and data can be collected and organized to any purposes, for example to identify the last expected frost date, rain amount during some period of the year etc.

For example, I realized this way that heavy rainfalls produce a rise in background radiation at ground level, due to radon decomposition byproducts brought down to the ground by rain itself.

This kind of systems are very cheap and easy to realize (I'm using Arduino clones to realize them) so I was wandering if someone else Is using them and which solutions have bene applied, to compare with my experience and maybe learn some different approach

Thank you, let me know!

Hi everyone!

Is there anyone using microcontroller-based systems to monitor environmental conditions on its land/homestead?

Since a couple of years I've spent some time in building simple modular dataloggers using Arduino clones, to monitor temperature, pressure, relative humidity, radiation level, wind speed and rain amounts.

This gave me some interesting insights and I think is much cheaper and funnier than buying a commercial meteo station and the systems can be customized to adapt them to any specific situation.

I'm also happy to share projects if anyone Is interested.

Have a nice day!

Mark, happy to hear that you also noticed the presence of recurrent patterns in new hybrids.
I've been thinking about this fact since I began to get hybrids and noticed their similarity to named variesties coming from all around the world. There are often heirloom varieties here and there on the web, reported since centuries, and almost equal to other varieties found in very far countries. I imagined that this was mainly due to migration of people, for example from Europe to America, bringing their beans with them, but I'm now thinking that these almost-equal-looking populations could have also developed independently.

The fact that your environmental conditions influence the presence of colorful beans is also fascinating.
Are you referring specifically to climatic conditions? How is your climate like?

Thank you!

Thank you again for sharing such an interesting experience!

I found the idea of beans hystograms so useful, I think I will try it this autumn as soon as I will get this year harvest, just to compare with older seed lots left from last years after spring sowing. So far I've never metodically followed my mixture evolution but I think that getting a quantiative idea besides the qualitative knowledge that the mixture is evolving could also be interesting.

I also find amazing the fact that the white black/dark-brown dotted bean you isolated and showed in the last picture is exaclty equal to one of the hybrids I got from my F2 generation. I don't remember if it is still there, but I will post it as soon as I'll be able to check.

Just to know, how is the climate like where you cultivate these beans?

Have a nice afternoon!

Thank you Joseph.
So I think I definetly have to consider that my original "pure" strains already had some degree of hybridization when the seeds came into my hands.
Indeed, I observed exactly what you say: a homogeneous phenotype in the F2 beans (which I wrongly considered my F1 hybrids) and many new phenotypes from them the following generation.

By the way, your mix looks wonderful to me, a piece of art. It is also so interesting to observe how many beans in our mixtures have very similar appearance even thought we are far away.
This makes me think that beans phenotypes are probably relatively few.