14×12 Nucs & Beekeeping Equipment For Sale

14×12 Nucs & Beekeeping Equipment For Sale

Location: Wotton-under-Edge, Gloucestershire, GL12, UK

Every beekeeper must get to the point when they realise they have too much equipment … or too many bees!  My wife has also got to this point and I need to make some room in the house and garage.

I find myself with a surplus of 2 nucs of bees (in 14 x 12 poly hives) and because I am moving away from honey extraction to honey sections this has also made some of my equipment redundant to me.

I also need some cash to invest in some more racks of Ross Round sections.

I will keep this list up-to-date, so if it is here, it is still available.

  1. SOLD – Two nucs of bees (video and photographs below). Also, more info at My Apiary, they are referred to as the orange nuc and green nuc.  They are both in 14×12 poly hives and have been very active in recent weeks with the warm weather.  They are heavy when hefted – so plenty of stores.  Good quality nucs typically sell for about £250.  I’m open to offers.
  2. One honey ripener (photo below).  Similar to the one here: honey ripener at £134 from Maisemore. This has been extremely useful for jarring honey.  Will sell for £90.
  3. SOLD – 162 1/2lb honey jars and gold lids. Same as the ones from Compaq South at £13.50 for 32 jars. Hence, value of about £68. Will sell for £40.
  4. Five 30lb honey buckets. Typically about £3.40 each, hence £17 value. Will sell for £10.
  5. One 60lb honey bucket worth about £5.  Will sell for £3.

I am located in Wotton-under-Edge, Gloucestershire, UK.

Please contact me (via contact form) if you are interested and leave a phone number.

Videos & Photos Of Nucs On 21 October 2016:

Green Nuc - 21 October 2016
Green Nuc – 21 October 2016
Orange Nuc - 21 October 2016
Orange Nuc – 21 October 2016
Honey Ripener Fpr Sale
Honey Ripener For Sale

The Beekeeper

Beekeeper With Insulated Hives
Beekeeper With Insulated Hives

Advice On Over-Wintering A Poly Nuc

It is generally agreed that over-wintering nucs in poly nucs rather than wooden nucs is better due to the extra insulation and protection offered.

  • Handle the nuc carefully
  • Place your nuc in the spot where you will have the hive
  • I have put some advice on where to locate hives on the bee hygiene page
  • Open the front entrance and let them fly from that spot
  • Feed fondant over the autumn and winter – Abelo sell good value fondant.  I would buy the 12.5Kg box. On 21/10/16 both nucs were heavy when hefted (ivy honey) – but the nucs will need feeding over autumn, winter and spring as it has less storage than regular hive
  • When feeding – even if you think it is cold and they won’t fly out – always wear your bee suit, gloves and protective gear
  • End October – spin the disc at entrance so it has mouse guard in place. If there is not a mouse guard option on the disc, then use regular metal mouse guard pinned over entrance
  • Feed a thin sugar syrup come spring (see feeding bees).
  • Let me know how it goes

Feeding Green Nuc

  • The green nuc looks like this inside.  The integral feeder is on the right hand side with the entrance hole in front, as in the photo
Green Nuc - Integral Feeder
Green Nuc – Integral Feeder
  • Open the roof and you will find a sheet of plastic.  With your hive tool, slowly lift the side of the plastic sheet with the integral feeder and pop in some fondant, or if it is spring pour in thin sugar syrup into the integral feeder

Feeding Orange Nuc

  • The feeder for the orange nuc looks like this:
Orange Nuc - Miller Feeder
Orange Nuc – Miller Feeder
  • You can remove the roof and the bees cannot fly out (but do it carefully). The central section where the bees emerge to get food is covered with clear plastic. (Nice to observe the bees when you wish)
  • Feeding fondant – Carefully shift the clear plastic to pop in some fondant in the 1inch space either side of where the bees emerge at the centre of this feeder
  • Feeding syrup – This is easy. Just pour syrup into each side of the main body of the feeder and the bees can access the syrup from within the section covered by the clear plastic

Advice On Installing A Nuc Into Hive

  1. Install into a hive when daytime temperatures get to 16C
  2. Your nuc is in the spot where you will have the hive
  3. (Keep) open the front entrance and let them fly from that spot for a few days
  4. When you are ready, take the frames and bees from your nuc box one by one and place them in the centre of your hive brood box in the same order and orientation as you remove them from the nuc
  5. Shake remaining bees in the nuc box into the hive box.  (Any bees still left in nuc box, will fly into the hive within an hour or so)
  6. Fill out the remaining space with foundation frames
  7. Place feeder on top (I use jumbo feeders, see Roger’s 15 Minute Meals)
  8. Feed a thin sugar syrup to encourage the bees to draw the remaining foundation (see feeding bees)
  9. Place roof over the feeder (you might also need a super box if you have a small feeder)
  10. Continue to feed thin sugar syrup while the colony is establishing, being mindful to allow the queen adequate room to continue laying
  11. Leave the hive undisturbed for a week before a quick inspection to see how it is progressing.
  12. Your colony should expand quite quickly over the coming weeks once established.
  13. Finally – after the bees are no longer resident in the nuc boxes, I recommend you paint them with hive paint to preserve them

Wild Garlic Pesto & Pasta

Spring is definitely in the air (well, when the clouds get out of the way). This means the bees larder of nectar-hunting opportunities has become much more succulent. It’s the equivalent of shopping for-frozen-fishfingers-at-Farmfoods in February to middle-class-manchego-buying-at-Waitrose in May.

So the bees are smugly stuffing their faces now – but they aren’t the only ones who can benefit from the sweet smell of spring! Yes, it’s time to go ‘native’, pretend we’re Bear Gryls and get out FORAGING again. This is not only a chance to scoff free food but an opportunity to shred the office uniform, be at one with nature and look cool in front of your wife with your obvious manliness.

Yes, foraging might be about walking through woods and hunting out flowers but this is no Timotei advert. It’s blooming DANGEROUS!  There’s no sell-by-date on these plants. A tasty looking blossom could easily turn you into a vomiting-Exorcist-impressionist. But hey ho, it’s fun!!!

One of my favourite forage foods is wild garlic which is in blossom with white flowers right now.

Wild Garlic And Bluebells
Wild Garlic And Bluebells

The flower is edible too – making great salad decoration and the opportunity to impress friends and readers of this blog with my daring (though I doubt you would see this as one of the items you have to eat on a bushtucker trial in “I’m a celebrity … get me out of here”)!

Wild Garlic In Mouth
Wild Garlic In Mouth

Wild Garlic Pesto Recipe

  • 1 large bunch of wild garlic, washed
  • 60gms pine nuts, toasted (cashew nuts are cheaper)
  • 60gms parmesan cheese (other Italian hard cheeses are cheaper)
  • 150mls olive oil
  • Squeeze of lemon juice
  • Pepper

Method: Place all the ingredients into a food processor, except the olive oil, and mix for a couple of minutes then pour in the olive oil and mix again.

Eat with pasta and add single cream! Delicious.

Honeybees On Apple Blossom

And here’s one of my honeybees on another Spring flower.

Honeybee on apple blossom
Honeybee on apple blossom

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The Malborough Man

Beekeeping is a personal journey. For me it has been about finding purpose and nature and hence, regaining my sanity but a sub-theme has emerged. Beekeeping has made me ever more aware of my shortcomings: poor DIY skills, fear of bees and general worrying that the bees are OK (food, varroa, disease, mated queen, swarming, etc.). I’m not the self-sufficient adult I had hoped to be.  I have called this theme manliness.  I know, I know.  DIY and being brave is definitely not male-only territory but as a man I feel the pressure is on.

My last test was building a flat pack hive. It wasn’t perfect but hopefully the weather and weight of the hive is fixing the poor build.

However, another opportunity presented itself for me to prove my manliness … buying my first ever cigarette lighter, for my smoker.

Me: “Please can I have a cigarette lighter”.  I stumbled over my words, I squeaked like a teenager. It was obvious I was a virgin cigarette lighter buyer.

+ 2 man points.  It should have been a +10.

Man behind counter: “We don’t sell them” in the kind of way that made me feel like I had to clarify I was a beekeeper and it was for my smoker!

– 10 man points

I went to the shop next door and was successful in my purchase. I got the smoker to light first time.

+ 10 man points

I was very proud of myself and felt the testosterone radiating from me. When I got home my wife (not to be messed with at four months pregnant & yes, I have told the bees and now you) informed me it was my turn to do the dishes. I reassured myself that in 2014 it is still considered manly to wear Marigolds.

Smoking Hive
Smoking Hive

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It’s A Sticky Business

As most of you will know, last year there was a lot of beekeeping effort on my part – involving approx. 2 swarms, Queen Less colonies, high varroa and several panic attacks. And there was not a lot in return – 4 jars of honey, 2 of which were unripe and the other 2 scraped out of the comb. Read: The joys and guilt of harvesting my first honey for how my first harvest panned out.

This year however, I have actually PRODUCED! Or rather my bees have.

Yes – one of my hives has produced a surplus of honey – about 13lb which has filled 25 jars.  It might not be enough to sell to shops, but it does mean that I have enough to give to friends (very discerning ones) for Christmas. Not bad for three frames of bees with a Queen that I put in their new home on the 9th June!

Frame Of Capped Honey
Frame Of Capped Honey

I consider the success a joint effort. Yes the bees have worked hard (to produce this quantity the bees have flown about 700,000 miles – that’s the equivalent of almost two trips from the Earth to the Moon and back and visited about 26,000,000 flowers) and I, of course, have done the vital task of peering at them occasionally (a.k.a. “inspecting”).

If you find these numbers mind blowing, check out my new page on Honey Facts.

The process of extraction was fun, if time consuming and sticky. Here’s my STEP BY STEP GUIDE TO EXTRACTION

1 – FIND A LOCATION – And by this, I mean find somewhere other than your own home to do the extraction. In my case, it was my parent’s house. This was agreed with simply bribery and promises of a year long supply of honey.

2 – GET HELP – In my case, my Mum and Dad. Basically they couldn’t resist getting involved.

3 – DO NOT GIVE TOO MANY INSTRUCTIONS TO YOUR HELPER (and definitely do not “ssshhhh” her when she is trying to give advice) – Or your mum might decide she can, in fact, ‘resist’ the urge to help you.

4 – MARVEL AT THE CAPPED HONEY FRAMES – It’s true! The evidence! These bees really do make honey.

Fat Supers Full Of Honey
Fat Supers Full Of Honey

5 – CUT THE CAPS – Uncapping the honey is like undressing a gorgeous woman. Only a little bit less intimidating and even more fiddly.

Cutting Caps Off Frame Of Honey
Cutting Caps Off Frame Of Honey

It’s fascinating to cut off the wax cappings and watch the honey ooze out and reflect on the process that has resulted in this golden liquid, before putting it in the extractor (which I borrowed from a fellow beekeeper) and spinning it.

Frame Of Uncapped Honey
Frame Of Uncapped Honey
Honey Frames In Extractor
Honey Frames In Extractor

It’s surprising to see that the comb is empty after just 1 minute of spinning.  You think that you haven’t got much in the bottom of the tank but before you know it you need to empty it into a plastic tub.  And 14 frames later you might have filled that 30lb tub.

Empty Honey Frame After Extraction
Empty Honey Frame After Extraction

6 – STOP FOR TEA – It’s a long process. I optimistically started at 7.30pm thinking I’d be back in time for a bit of News at 10, but came staggering back home at 2am.

It’s a sad day when your late nights no longer involve snakebite, clubbing and kebabs, but tea, biscuits and your parents … Mind you, both have the same sticky floor effect.

Filtering Honey Using 1.5mm Filter
Filtering Honey Using 1.5mm Filter

7 – TAKE PRIDE IN YOUR JARS – Yes! Finally a use for my labels! I am inordinately proud of my jars. Have a read of my labelling advice page to find out what you legally need to put on there, and how to go about producing them.

Wotton-under-Edge Honey
Wotton-under-Edge Honey

8 – TIDY UP – Or promise to. I had to come back the next day. My Dad and I (I know, it’s shameful) both had a go at mopping up the honey but the floor remained sticky three washes in.

I’ve subsequently spent some time researching the best ways to clean up honey and it seems it’s … hot water and hard scrubbing. Exactly what you do not want to hear.

9 – REMEMBER TO KEEP THE WAX CAPPINGS – I put the wet frames and cappings back on the hive and amazingly they were dry within a few days.

Wet Wax Cappings For The Bees
Wet Wax Cappings For The Bees

This video shows how dry they were:

Bee Update

In brief – the Queens are now marked (unbelievable I know), the varroa counts are low, the colonies are healthy and currently have Apiguard on top.

All the notes on the number of frames of bees, amount of brood and stores, feeding and treatments are detailed in my hive records. These include photos and videos.

If you like this post please “like”, tweet, forward to a friend, subscribe, etc.

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  • If this post is the alternative guide to harvesting, I have written a more traditional guide here: Harvesting Honey

Good Value Chicken Coops (UK)

I usually write about bees and beekeeping but in my journey to find the good life I’m considering chickens.

I have written a review of the Eglu by Omlet – a beautifully designed, plastic, assembled hive, which houses 4, 6 or 10 chickens.

Amazon is also a good source for value chicken coops.  The leading brands often put their products on Amazon and sell at a discount.  I have researched flat pack and assembled chicken coops and identified the following three represent good value:

Small Chicken CoopLarge Chicken CoopAssembled Chicken Coop
- 5 bird chicken coop
- Metal pull-out tray for easy cleaning
- Totally fox proof
- Flat pack, requires assembly
- 12 bird chicken coop
- Metal pull-out tray for easy cleaning
- Totally fox proof
- Flat pack, requires assembly
- 6 bird chicken coop
- Hand-built

RRP: £300, reduced to £100RRP: £350, reduced to £125RRP: £320

If you want to buy a book on keeping chickens, the following one is very popular:

Good luck with your chickens.

Eglu Review

Eglu Review: Verdict, Pros, Cons

I usually write about bees and beekeeping but I am a huge fan of the Beehaus (by Omlet) and in my journey to find the good life I’m considering chickens and the Eglu chicken coop (by Omlet).  Us beekeepers are known for being frugal and looking for good value and as usual, I like to do lots of research and read online reviews.  I thought I would write it all down as it might be useful to others out there considering what type of chicken coop to buy.

Eglu Classic Cutaway
Eglu Classic Cutaway

Eglu Verdict (My Personal View)

  • Highly functional with excellent design – appeals to hearts and minds
  • Appears expensive, but: (A) cheaper chicken coops come as flat packs and take time/stress to assemble, (B) it has a fox guard, so less dead chickens (saving £20 a time), (C) the Eglu may help chickens produce more eggs and be less likely to get diseases (rationale: easier to clean, good ventilation). Hence, it might give better value than first meets the eye.
  • All reviews on the Internet are 3 to 5 stars with the vast majority being 5 stars

Eglu Options: Eglu Classic, Eglu Go, Eglu Cube

The table below may help you find which option is right for you.

Eglu Classic
Eglu GoEglu Cube
Eglu ClassicEglu GoEglu Cube
Suitable for 2-4 medium sized chickens or 2-3 larger breeds.Suitable for 2-4 medium sized chickens or 2-3 larger breeds.Suitable for up to 10 chickens.
From £450From £360From £699
Functionally the same as the Eglu Go but the production process is more expensive and you are paying extra for the design as compared to the Eglu GoBetter value than the Eglu Classic for 2-4 chickens.Standard model houses 6 chickens, can be extended to 10 chickens

Overview

+ Pros: Low maintenance, easy to clean, fox resistant, easy access, good ventiallation, warm in winter, cool in summer

– Cons: Expensive

£ Value: Chickens will live in optimal conditions: this may lead to them producing more eggs and be less likely to have disease.  Product will last a lifetime.

Assuming a chicken costs £20 and one a year would be killed by foxes.  Assuming 3 chickens produce 3 eggs a week more due to optimal conditions and these 3 eggs are worth £0.80. Extra value per year could be up to £60.  I appreciate these estimates are very rough. Some readers might consider that chickens will be equally productive in any coop.

Delivery: They ship to the whole of the UK, including the Channel Islands, France, Germany, the Netherlands, the Republic of Ireland and the United States. Use the links below.

Customer Reviews

The reviews from those who have bought and use the Eglu are overwhelmingly positive.  You can read 100’s of reviews here: Eglu Customer Reviews

Useful Links

In the past they used to give a 10% discount when you bought online rather than over the phone. Follow these links and login (top right of page) to buy online. They often have other freebies on offer.

I have also researched cheaper, bigger and more expensive chicken coops – but all representing good value – and created a couple of posts:

Learn More About Chickens

If you want to learn more about chickens for free, the Omlet website has some excellent pages which I have linked to: Click Here

If you want to buy a book on the subject, I have linked to the most popular ones in my UK Chicken Coops and USA Chicken Coops posts.

Final Word

I hope you found this useful and good luck with any chickens.

I know more about bees, so please have a look around this blog if honey bees interest you. You might want to start with my post: I Am Not A Beeman.

Regaining my sanity without bees

Just a quick update on the bees:  they took down 14Kg of sugar in October, so that should help them through the winter.  On my last inspection I could not find the new Queen even though she was marked.  There were 43 varroa on the board over 9 days and this calculates at 660-1,300 varroa in the hive – too many.  There’s not much I can do now.  Oxalic acid in Dec/Jan and hope there’s a Queen in there.  I need to get better at this.

However, I am finding some other ways of regaining my sanity.  I saw a bloke picking some berries and asked him what they were.  He explained they were sloes.  I have tried my friends sloe gin in the past, so thought I would give it a go.  Heidi and  I picked 1kg of sloes at the weekend and made some sloe gin. Recipe: 750ml gin, 500g sloes, 340g sugar.  Have to resist drinking it for 3 months.  Using the liquer as an ingredient in crumble and mixing the left over fruit with dark chocolate sound like good ideas too. (Nat – do you have any sloe gin cocktail recipes you can share!)

sloe gin

I have also really enjoyed gardening (now that I have a garden for the first time in my life).  It’s a lot less stressful than beekeeping.  I planted some honeysuckle at the weekend.

Planting honeysuckle

I would love to hear summaries of your 2012 bee experiences.  Have I been a terrible beekeeper (possibly losing both my colonies even before Winter), or has my experience been common this year?

You might not hear anything from me for a while.  Heidi is due on 18 November.

Let’s hope I am better at babies than bees.

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Learning from mistakes – the cheesecake story

Learning to be a beekeeper is a constant struggle.  I keep reading books and asking for advice but I think it is true that you learn best from your mistakes.  Or do you …

This is not a bee story but it is a story of learning and it makes me laugh every time I recall it.

Neither Heidi and I are very good cooks … but we do own a lot of recipe books and one day Heidi decided to learn some “signature dishes”.  She chose to make a lemon cheese cake but when I got home even I was surprised at what I found.  Heidi evidently did not know what lemon zest was.  She had unpeeled the lemon and painstakingly picked out the white pith on the inside of the lemon skin and added that to the ingredients.  It was too late.  The cheesecake was in the oven.  Despite my concerns, she proudly served up the cake to my unsuspecting parents insisting the pith was softer than the outerskin of the lemons so surely it must be better.  To be fair even stringy cheese cake is surprisingly edible.

Anyway, I thought Heidi had learnt from this and she now knew her zest from her pith.  But when she made fish cakes last week I realised she still did not fully appreciate where the zest ended and the pith started.  Yes, the fishcakes contained the zest of lemon but the lemon was now bald and the fishcakes also contained all the pith on the lemon.

So maybe we don’t always learn from our mistakes but I find these cooking episodes rather endearing.

On a similar note, this is a carrot cake she made recently:

carrot cake

If you enjoy these posts, you might want to subscribe to this blog.

Holiday reading for beekeepers

We’d had our mini-moon – two nights in a B&B in Devon off Vouchercloud – but she wanted a week in the sun, on a beach.  As the Summer progressed it became more evident that I could not persuade her that this exotic dream could be achieved by me offering to pack up the tent and drive us down the M5 to a deluxe* Cornish campsite.

* i.e. it has nice clean loos.

A week before the Greek voted on their new government and whether they would stay in the Euro, we booked our last minute honeymoon to Skiathos.  It was the only place that met my wife’s criteria for relative luxury and my pursuit of a good deal.

On a side note, I read a few weeks ago in A Short History Of The Honeybee, that the word honeymoon comes from a tradition of newly-married couples drinking honeymead for the first month of their marriage in order to increase the likelihood of having a boy.

For my new wife, lying next to a pool in soaring temperatures is like some kind of spiritual retreat.  But for me, such holidays are like an M&S meal for two, it tastes good but it only feeds the body.  Camping near beaches in Cornwall is my Zen and, like a home-cooked meal, feeds my body and soul.

Whilst my fellow holiday makers worshipped the sun, tested their brains on Sudoku puzzles, read The Mirror and books with people like Richard Branson and Steve Jobs on the cover, I had brought the adult version of The Famous Five – proper old-school adventure with some big words thrown in for good measure.  (My wife had banned me from reading beekeeping books due to me waking her up on two consecutive nights with bee-related, anxiety nightmares).

Holiday reading for beekeepers

I had come across The Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy whilst browsing in Waterstones.  A few words spun off the back cover which prompted me to buy it: desolate, beautiful, award-winning, two cowboys, drifters, journey, coming-of-age (I relate to the coming-of-age thing despite coming-up-to 40.  Is that true of all early-middle-aged men these days?).  The only word missing was bromance.  I half recognised one title in the trilogy, All The Pretty Horses, and I recognised some other books he had written: The Road, No Country For Old Men.

I haven’t read enough books to know if it’s a “masterpiece” or a “landmark in American literature”, but it contained wisdom and meaning and made me want to jump on a horse and travel.  Unfortunately, if I did that back home in Bristol, people would just think I was crazy.  In fact, many of the things I dream about doing would mark me out as crazy, so I’ll stick to my backyard beekeeping adventures … and then I will appear relatively sane!

I checked the bees as soon as I got home (it had been two weeks).  They looked good from the outside.  The clip below is of my newest colony (the swarm I hived three weeks ago).  I’ll let you know what I found in my next post … Proud Dad.

 

Communicating through the medium of dance

Bees do the waggle dance to let fellow bees know where to find nectar and it works just as well as a Joanna Lumley voiced Sat Nav.  So I am going to try some bum-waggling to improve communications with my nearly-wife.  I will test this new method of communication by trying to describe directions to the biscuit jar.

If you liked this post, you might like to read some of my other favourites.

Is Foraging The Answer (to regaining my sanity)?

I am still alive!  Who would have guessed that foraging is like an extreme sport with more bravado than a skate boarding park?  Is that a delicious, edible plant, or a deadly looky-likey?  You first!

Whilst my nearly-wife ate blackberries from a bramble for the first time last year I have to admit that I am not much further behind in the foraging stakes.  Despite the advantages of growing up in the countryside and a Dad who studied botany I have walked past wild garlic and other wild foods all my life.

The half-day foraging session by Dave Hamilton was inspirational and has challenged my food boundaries.  This introduction has made me want to spend time on the process of finding my food and cooking it rather than a quick trip to the supermarket so that I can spend my spare time in front of the TV.  Foraging will provide food for my soul as well as my body!

Dave Hamilton explaining how to make tea from pine needles

Me frying and eating Woods Ear mushrooms

 gardner and forager  Eating Woods Ear

My new resolution is to buy Food For Free (classic foraging text by Richard Mabey) and go foraging one day a month for nuts, berries, fungi, leaves and birch sap.  Well, that’s the plan.  Bees forage every day through necessity. I hope I am strong-willed enough to do this once a month!

So, what did we learn?  We tried numerous foods but here are my favourites.

Wild garlic: Eat the leaves and flowers. Add to salads, make pesto Sorrel: Tastes fresh and lemony.  Add to salad or eat with fish Dead Nettles (not to   be confused with regular nettles that have died): Squeeze the flowers and suck out the nectar
 Wild Garlic Flower  Sorrel  Dead Nettle Flower

Warning: Make sure the food you eat has not been sprayed with pesticides; take a bottle of water with you to wash the food; know what you’re doing.  It’s this last one that’s the stumbling block!

Books written by Dave Hamilton and his brother Andy:

Recommended links:

You might like to read some of my other foraging posts.

A Wild Food Walk

For Christmas, my nearly-wife (3 weeks and not counting), bought me a Wild Food Walk – but will it improve my sanity or lead to a new obsession?  I need to get to Ashton Court Estate (5 minutes drive … oops 30 minutes walk) by 1.30pm to meet our leader Andy Hamilton.  You can check his website Self-Sufficientish or read to see how it went at Is Foraging The Answer (to regaining my sanity).