Honey Windfall

I've shown some pictures of the beehive in previous posts. A friend at work started beekeeping 4-5 years ago and a little more than a year ago I decided to give it a try. I thought it would be cool to have a little honey for cooking, oatmeal, etc, and to help pollinate the garden. A new hive needs about a year to get established and evidently our area is bee friendly. The bees start out in March getting pollen and nectar from Maple trees, then move to holly and in late April the tulip poplar bloom, which provide a huge amount of nectar. Our area is covered in all of these sources of nectar and pollen. Last week I pulled a total of 8 frames of honey from the hive and my friend Steve Howard used his extractor to get the honey. The total was 3.5 gal of honey and I still have about 10 frames left to extract later. As indicated earlier, strawberry shortcake with honey instead of white sugar was heavenly.

Local fare

We had a great "local" dinner last night. I had the opportunity to go offshore fishing this weekend and although the luck has not been strong on our last 3 trips, we did get a few trigger fish that were grilled last night in a honey, mustard, soy marinade. The honey was from a friends bee hive as our hive is not fully ready to harvest. With the fish we had fresh spinach, canned green beans and grilled corn from last years crop.

Spinach has been an almost daily side dish or used for salads. For dinner last night we did what is becoming a favorite, spinach sauteed in olive oil, garlic, salt and pepper. The image above is our spinach patch that has been producing strong for the last 1.5 months.

Above is our strawberry patch that has just started ripening this past week. The 5-6 plants have produced at least a 1/2 gal in one week. To complete our "local" dinner we had strawberry shortcake; our local honey was used over sugar to make the syrup/strawberry mixture.

Some of our onions (left) that were planted last fall and should be ready in another month

Tomatoes are growing strong.

Carrots have been a recent favorite. I did a few last year, but upped the ante this year.

Spring 2010

Spring is well underway and after a extremely cold end of Dec through mid Feb, the weather has turned mild and even hot for a week with temps in higher than the average for mid summer. Our last frost was around the first of March, which is a full month before the average last frost. The plants have followed the weather as the blooms and pollen are emerging earlier than average. The picture above shows some azaleas and other plants in the front bed. The azaleas are doing better and better with each passing year as the first 5 years they struggled to bloom.

Cherry tree

Swiss Chard. Had some sauteed with garlic and oil last night and it was delicious and nutritious,

Japanese Maple

Blueberry and lettuce

Doggies relaxing on a mild spring evening

New expanded section of garden planted with heirloom paste tomatoes and Homestead heirlooms.

Strawberries are just loaded with flowers and emerging fruit

Top-bar beehive. This is the new hive waiting bees. The little box to the left of the hive is a swarm box that attracted a whole swarm of bees earlier this week. I dumped all the bees into the top bar hive this past weekend, so I now have two healthy hives and soon will have several gallons of honey.