Lumby Circle of Friends

8/5/10 Swarm Interuptus

8/5 12:05pm Returning after a long break from blogging, I’m glad to see all is well on Main Street. The last six weeks have been mostly dedicated to finishing a manuscript that was finally submitted a few days ago. Although it’s not set in Lumby, I love it just as much, and will share the details as soon as I’m given the okay to do so. But I now have time to say hello and get caught up.

So, what’s been happening at Lazy Goose? A lot. Where to begin? We had a fantastic Garden and Studio Tour in July. The weather could not have been nicer for about a hundred folks who swung by, many spending most of the afternoon walking between our vegetable and flower beds, or just visiting with us in the studio. As always, it was wonderful to once again say hello to some die-hard Lumby fans who had traveled from both Boston and Virginia to see us. It was great day with a lot of laughter.
Primarily because of the Garden Tour, at the beginning of the month Art and I took on some major projects preparing our grounds – many back burner to-do’s got moved to the front burner, leaving Art, our crew and me exhausted for a week. When all was said and done, though, the property looked well-landscaped, and it’s something we now enjoy every day.

Unfortunately, our construction wasn’t quite on schedule, but at least the front porch and pergola were completed for the Tour. With luck, the guys should be wrapped up tomorrow having built five decks and one screened in porch. (As many of you know, Lazy Goose is a work in progress – our “outdoors living” is the last phase of the main house.) The outside furniture should be arriving from North Carolina tomorrow and a commercial grill arrives Saturday. With any luck, we should be enjoying buffalo burgers, grilled corn and blueberry margarita on our new porch day after tomorrow.

But no tomatoes quite yet. The heirloom plants are about eight feet tall filled with huge green tomatoes that just need another week to ripen. But the two cherry plants are producing ample sweet yellow and reds for our salads. The peppers, on the other hand, are turning out to be an interesting and not totally successful experiment. First lesson learned: they hate temperatures under 70° which is quite problematic for upstate New York when three nights ago, the temp dipped down to 58 (great sleeping weather, though).

The bees are doing well, although one colony split yesterday, with a swarm of about 30,000 leaving for greener pastures. What an amazing sight and sound that was! It looked like small black tornado moving between the fruit trees. Arrivederci, bees, live well and be safe. So, this morning, I looked into the hives to ensure there were no problems, which there were: the bees had run out of space in three hives (thus explaining why half the colony of one hive moved out yesterday). I quickly added two new supers per hive, almost doubling their space. That should keep them happy for the rest of the summer.

Other than that, same old same old, at Lazy Goose. We’re just working hard and enjoying the summer.

I wanted to send a huge thank you to all the blog reviewers who wrote such generously kind words about Lumby, and to my readers who are spreading the word by personally recommending the series to friends and family! Thanks very much, and I’m so glad many of you enjoyed reading Lumby on the Air.