Nancy gets a little too excited at the prospect of cheap strawberries

After canning 20 jars of cherries, I was feeling like the Food Preservation Queen. I borrowed my mother-in-law's 30 year old fruit dehydrator and dried a bunch of cherries. The dried cherries resemble large raisins, with a hole in the middle where the pit/stone was punched out. 

Yesterday, Russ went shopping and came back with a few pounds of strawberries that he had purchased for 75 cents per pound, a fabulous price. Later, I drove back to the store and bought 24 pounds of overly-ripe strawberries. I prepared them for drying as soon as I got home and today, a day later, they're nearly done.

Lots and Lots of Cherries

This morning, Russ and I woke up early to pick cherries. Our neighbors have a mature cherry tree but aren't interested in the fruit. We received permission to pick the fruit and ended up with about 25 pounds of cherries.

I've been meaning learn to preserve food by canning for a while. I have several books in the subject, but I've been too chicken to start. I figured that cherries would be an easy way to begin, as you don't have to pit or peel them, which many other fruits and vegetables require. It wasn't too bad, though I was  busy canning for about five hours. At least I have a lot to show for it.

The Lone Strawberry

A few months ago, I was excited to dedicate one of our eight garden beds to the growing of strawberries. We planted 18 small strawberry starts and then watched a late season cold snap destroy all but a handful of them.  We bought a bunch more to replace the dead ones. Everything was looking healthy until the temperature rose a week and a half ago, killing many more. in the days that followed. I've become much more protective of the strawberries now that I can see how delicate they are. Finally, one of the plants is producing an actual strawberry. Unfortunately, Rosie and Alex have seen it and whenever I take them out to the garden, I have to guard that strawberry. Whenever I turn around, Alex will lift the net that protects the plants from animal predators and reach for the strawberry. I'm glad that she's not that fast. The prized strawberry may yet live and ripen.

Bountiful Baskets

Last week I joined Bountiful Baskets. Its a food co-op where you pay $15 for about 15 pounds of produce plus 15 pounds of vegetables and then go and pick it up from a designated site on Saturday mornings. Its much cheaper than buying produce at the supermarket. Where possible, they buy from local producers and the rest is purchased from regional wholesalers. They deliver to various sites in Utah, Arizona, Texas, Wyoming, Washington, Nevada and Idaho. Twice a month they deliver at my local park.

I arrived at 7am to pick up my produce and was surprised to see the volunteer operation running so smoothly. A friendly neighbor greeted me, had me sign for my goods and pointed me to my basket, where all of my fruit and veg was ready to be loaded into my car. I received lettuce, bok choy, tomatoes, potatoes, red peppers, honeydew melon, apples, red grapes, peaches, blackberries, cucumbers and bananas. I was pleased with the variety of food, convenience of paying online and the ease of local pick up. I also liked being presented with some fruit and veg that generally aren't on my shopping list, forcing me to try new things and search for new recipes. If you're stuck in a food rut or just want to try something new and cheap, check them out.

Peas Please

The sugar snap peas were a big winner this year. I also planted little marvel and green arrow varieties, but some of those seeds were dug up and eaten by chickens. For some reason, the chickens left this bed alone and I've enjoyed watching the peas grow. Most of our acre of land is bare dirt and these peas have added a significant amount of green to our backyard landscape.

I planted these peas on a warm day in late February/early March. I've cared for them for about three months and now they're ready to harvest. We've eaten them straight off the vine (or in Alex's case on the vine), cooked with dinner and we will eat some of them this winter, as I've blanched and frozen some of them. For all of the work I've put it, there really aren't that many peas, perhaps three or four meals worth, but it doesn't seem to matter.

It sounds corny to say, but there is a great deal of drama in gardening. Its like a reality tv show is taking place in my backyard. My very own soap opera. Will it work? Won't it work? Will that late-season frost kill my plants? Will they germinate? Will pollinators, like our bees, find their way to the flowers at the right time? Will the chickens eat my seeds? Will deer eat my plants and trees? Will the neighbor's goats get loose and eat everything? Will nature, which I only partly understand, work its magic? I love the eating part of having a garden, but watching the garden drama unfold over the season is one of the great pleasures of gardening.

Getting to Grips with the Bees

Yesterday, Russ was putting on his bees suit and asked me if I wanted to join him. I've been enthusiastic about keeping bees, but haven't ventured too close to the hives. The bees are fascinating to watch. They wake up and rest with the sun and are active throughout the day, travelling all over our little community collecting nectar and pollen. On particularly busy bee days, you can hear the hives literally buzzing with activity from about 100 feet away. I like to watch the bees, but from a distance of about 20 feet. 

Since my most recent bee adventure though, I've been feeling a little braver. I put on the spare bee jacket and veil and went out with Russ to check on their progress. I also brought the camera, but the battery died just as things were getting interesting. 

This first photo is of our three hives in their bee enclosure, which protects them from the wind. Our oldest hive, now 2 months old, is on the left. We bought a second hive, on the right, and the recently-captured swarm is in the middle.

The second photo is of Russ smoking the bees. The smoke from the smoker confuses the bees and encourages them to eat, which in turn sedates them and makes them easier to work with. Even though we used smoke, the bees were flying all around us and buzzing very loudly. Normally, this would cause me to run away screaming, but my late-night-angry-bee-garage experience taught me to be calm in the face of this intimidating behavior. It was all for show, as the bees weren't landing on us and  so we didn't get stung. 

The third photo is of Russ removing the inner cover of one of the hives. This was his first time checking on the bees without thick leather gloves for protection. 

The last photo shows the interior of the hive and the tops of the ten hanging frames inside. The bees build their comb in the frames, which they use for laying brood and for storing honey.  As we pulled the frames out, there were hundreds of bees clinging to the comb. We saw lots of cells with little white worms (brood) and lots of cells with golden honey, which makes the frames heavy.

 

                                                      

Nature's Freebies/Free Bees

A few nights ago we arrived home from a family barbecue to find a series of post-its stuck to our front door. One of our neighbors had a swarm of bees in the eaves of his roof and wanted to know if they were ours and could we please remove them. They weren't our bees but were wild bees that had swarmed, or left their home in search of a new one. Swarming bees aren't aggressive, as they don't have a hive to protect. Russ thought we should try and catch them, doing ourselves and our neighbors a favor. We've spent a lot of money on bees and bee equipment over the past few months and so we were excited at the prospect of free bees.

We had a friend staying with us and he and Russ collected the necessary swarm-catching equipment, namely a box, ladder and flashlights, and headed over to the neighbors to catch our very first swarm of wild bees. We had some confidence that this would work, as we had seen it all on the tv show River Cottage.

As it happened, catching the swarm was straightforward. Russ and Alex climbed ladders and Alex held the box as Russ brushed the basketball-sized and shaped swarm into the box. Things got a little more difficult once we got the box home, where the goal was to get the new bees into a hive as smoothly as possible. We set up operations in the garage and did everything just as we had seen on tv, only the bees weren't interested in forming an orderly queue and marching into the hive in an efficient fashion.

We should have just left the bees in their box until morning, as they would have been just fine and much more prone to cooperation in the daylight. But by this time, it was nearly midnight and we were eager to get the bees into the hive and go to bed. So Russ opened the box, containing perhaps ten thousand or so bees, and tried to dump them in the hive. This plan probably would have worked if we'd used a smaller box or just cut open one small corner. But the box we used was much wider than the hive and when we opened the lid wide and tried to dump them in, many of them missed the mark. It was very late at night and it seemed like a good idea at the time. It only took a few seconds for our garage to be filled with thousands of angry bees. At that point, I decided that the whole thing was a little too intense and went to bed.

Eventually Russ and Alex were able to get the bees to calm down, mainly by turning of the lights for a while. They collected the majority of the bees into the hive and set the new hive next to the other two at the far end of our yard. Miraculously, Russ was only stung twice and Alex and I managed to get away without being stung at all. The bees that remained in our garage were dead by the next morning, as they needed the whole colony to provide necessary heat. Still, we were very pleased to get a new colony for free, if you don't count the stress of standing in a mostly-enclosed area with thousands of angry bees.