Nothing tastes better than home-grown honey harvested by honey bees from the flowers that grow wild in the fields of Wild Rose Meadows. In this picture, Dave and grandson Jacob are building components for several more bee hives.

Several bee hives are located at Wild Rose Meadows. Jacob has his own bee hives at his house in Kalamazoo. Jacob also takes care of the Kalamazoo Bee Club apiary.

Grandma Mary snapped this picture before Jacob could put his safety glasses back on. In fact, the pneumatic nailer isn't even connected to the air compressor. If Jacob was actually using the nailer or another power tool, he would be wearing his safety glasses.

Last summer we bottled 44 jars of honey from Jacob's hives and our hives at Wild Rose Meadows, and still left 60 pounds of honey on each hive for the bees to eat during the winter.

A 180 acre farm requires a fair amount of work to keep things running smoothly. Here Dave is harvesting hay, which is the winter food for our cows. Cows graze fields for grass in the summer. In the winter the cows eat hay, which is simply grass that has been mowed, then cured in the sun, and baled for storage.

At Wild Rose Meadows we harvest 350 tons of hay each year. Our herd of cows will consume about 120 tons of hay during the colder months of the year. The rest of the hay is sold to help cover expenses of the farm.

In this photo, Dave is raking hay with grandson Jacob several years ago, using an antique Farmall Tractor built in the 1940's. The hay rake is a newer rotary rake that operates off the tractor power take off. The rotary rake sweeps the mowed grass into windrows. We turn the windrows over two or three times with the rake on successive days to get it dry enough to bale. Hay starts as fresh grass at about 65% moisture and ends up quite dry at about 16% moisture.

The haying process takes about 5 days from the time we mow the grass until we bale hay.