Crocus in Bloom

Our neighbor's crocus are always among the very first crocus I see in bloom every early spring. By early February his garden is full of them. I was surprised today, out on a walk in the sunny afternoon, to see clusters of crocus in full bloom. We really have had a warm December, but it's still only December 30th!

I stood around and waited a few moments, and sure enough, a couple honeybees stopped by to collect pollen. While the honeybee was visiting some sort of fly was also hanging out on a flower.

Vanilla Pear Jam

After the family ate their fill of pears, I still had several sitting on the counter from a recent Costco run getting riper and riper by the hour. A little too soft to slice and eat out of hand, they were fine for jam. I followed the recipe on the Food in Jars blog .

The last time I had made jam, I used the requisite amount of pectin and cooked it at a hard boil for a bit too long, resulting in a tasty jam, but with a consistency that was way too hard. This time, I didn't use quite as much pectin and the result is a pretty thin jam. I was hoping to serve this pear jam with cheese and crackers, but I think it's more suited to peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and pancake topping.

The ingredients: pears, sugar, vanilla beans. Vanilla beans are super expensive. I think a little bottle holding two beans are about $12 at the local Harris Teeter. I bought a package of 30 beans on eBay for about that same price. They aren't quite as plump as the ones in the store, but they are absolutely fine and the price is right.

Mashing everything up...

The finished product...

Crafty Bastards Arts and Crafts Fair

A couple of weeks ago on a whim, I entered a contest for the Crafty Bastards Arts and Crafts Fair. As I understand it, this is a festival of all sorts of crafts vendors from up and down the east coast. This year, they have expanded to a market of culinary crafters with free lessons and tastings and there is a Crafty Food Award competition for home crafted pickles, beer and preserves. I decided to enter Drunken Fig Jam and Spiced Peach Jam into the preserves contest. Much to my surprise, the Spiced Peach Jam made the finals so on October 1st I'll be squaring off against Oaxaca Chutney and Blueberry-Lime Preserves! The fair is in Adams Morgan at the Marie Reed Learning Center at 18th and Wyoming Ave., NW from 10 - 5. The Crafty Food Awards will be at 3 pm. I'll be there!

Tomatoes, Potatoes, Pumpkins and Figs

We've been eating about a pint of cherry tomatoes a day -- plain right off the vine, with mozzarella cheese, with feta cheese, in pasta salad, in potato salad and in pasta sauce. And, of course, lots are given to friends and neighbors. It really is remarkable just how many tomatoes have grown in two small plots. Last week it finally got to the point that we just couldn't keep up with the bounty so I canned three pints and have now filled a pint jar with sun (actually oven) dried tomatoes.

Some of the potatoes were boiled for a Nicoise salad. These were starter potatoes that were on clearance at Frager's for 10 cents a package in June. They've done remarkably well and taste delicious.

This pumpkin vine is a volunteer taken from the compost pile.

Finally, figs. The fig tree down at the community garden is dripping with giant, ripe figs. They started ripening about 10 days ago and since then, I've probably picked 35 cups of them. I've made three batches of Drunken Fig Jam, a recipe I found on Epicurious, and each recipe calls for 9 cups of them. The jam has figs, brandy, sugar and the zest and juice of two lemons. It's unbelievably good on crackers with goat cheese.

I feel like I'm the only one really picking the figs down there. Every time I go, there are dozens of easily reached ripe figs that are on the verge of being too ripe. I hate to see them go bad on the vine, so I've picked dozens that I've dried. I need to let it go.

Karl here, posting a bit about our morning with the bees on the 300 block of C Street in SE Washington DC this past Monday.

As Background: The city had gotten some complaints of bees living in the base of a dead tree right on a city sidewalk. They realized they were honey bees and put the word out to the local beekeepers to see if anyone could help move them - rather than kill them all. Thank you Washington DC - well played.

Toni is our neighbor here on Capitol Hill and is a fellow beekeeper. She is affectionately known as "the Queen Bee." She's the one they called, of course, and like only Toni can, she took charge and organized a half dozen or so of us to help.

A few days before, city tree trimmers had cut back the tree to just a trunk (I forgot to photograph the 10 ft. long rotten hole down inside the center of the tree!). When they had cut it back, someone stapled a bit of netting across the top to keep the bees contained during the project. In looking at where they chose to move, you have to give them credit - they sure had found a nice pad with lots of square footage right in a prime DC neighborhood.

We all met at the tree at 9 am. A beekeeper from PG County MD drove in with his pickup truck, city agencies were represented and all the white bee jackets made us look like a biohazard team. When I drove in past the road-cones, Julie objected; "Karl, the street is closed!" I thought my reply was funny; "I know honey, I'm part of the crew!" We parked in the middle of the street behind the tree shredder truck - just like detectives at a crime scene always do on TV!

The idea: cover the holes with screens so the bees (and especially the queen) would stay together in the tree, keep the tree (their hive) intact, move it into the bed of the truck drive them all to a monastery in NW DC. The gang would then crack it open, take out the queen and move her and her worker girls into a 'real' hive. (I had to get to work, and couldn't go up for that part... bummer!).

I have to say, I think we did a terrific job. The photos tell the story better than could, so here you go.







A screen covers the bees exit while a DC DDOT guy cuts the trunk off at the base (but PLENTY of bees are flying). There were VERY few stings (2 i think), given all the noise and activity.





Getting ready to crack the trunk off the root base...












That's me in the bed, helping to pull the trunk into the truck.








Toni and friend with their noses in the bees after they were loaded and covered with a tarp.







And finally, a small hive was set up on the stump to collect stragglers. A bit of sugar and some queen pheromone were put inside to help the bees feel at home. Later that night (when the bees were inside for the night) the box was collected and the girls were taken up to NW to be with Mom. A happy ending for all!

Our Week in Flour

The kids and I went blackberry and peach picking out at Homestead Orchard in Poolsville, MD last week. For dessert, I made a blackberry-peach cobbler.

Mortgage Buster and Brandywine Tomatoes were ripening in the backyard so I made a couple loaves of bread for BLTs.

And Karl made banana muffins for breakfast last weekend. He used the recipe in the Barefoot Contessa cookbook which calls for two sticks of butter for a dozen muffins. Delicious, but not something you could eat every day without feeling your arteries harden.

Drowning in Cukes...and Tomatoes and Zucchini

We've harvested at least one cucumber and a zucchini or yellow squash every day for the last couple of weeks. The tomatoes are going strong, too. Mostly cherry tomatoes are ripe, but we did pick a Mortgage Buster a couple days ago.

Karl opened up the hive late last week and was very happy to see larvae. Seems our queen must have left the mason jar and when straight back into the hive. The hive seems really strong so Karl put another super on top. The hive is now as tall as he is.

First Tomatoes of 2011

We picked our first cherry tomatoes last week. I'm proud because I grew them from seed this spring. I've never had any luck doing that before. There are a zillion green cherry tomatoes hanging on the vine so I think we'll now start having a steady supply.

The Rainbow Swiss Chard is still going strong, too. I thought that this was a spring vegetable but someone down at the community garden told me that it lasts all summer. It's good, but I can kind of see how someone (me) could get sick of cooking and eating it all summer.

Cherry Picking

Aksel and I ventured up to northern Montgomery County on Friday to pick sour cherries. It was the first day Rock Hill Orchard was open for cherries and the trees were just dripping with them. We picked two buckets full -- about 15 pounds. So far I've made two cherry pies and sour cherry jam. We've frozen a bunch and I still have about 5 pounds still to pit.

Honeybee on Onion Flower

This was the first honeybee I've seen at the community garden a few blocks away. There are tons of butterflies and other kinds of bees but no honeybees. Happy to see one of the girls.

Pessimistic Bees

Researchers have discovered that honeybees show emotion -- pessimism -- the first invertebrate to do so. So now the question is, do pessimistic bees make less honey and do optimistic bees make more? Now we have to worry whether we have happy bees?

It's Hot and the Bees are Hanging Out

It's been really hot the last week or so -- in the 90s with little relief at night. The bees are back to hanging out on their front porch.

We still don't know whether the queen made it back to the hive or if the hive is raising a new one. One of these days Karl needs to open the hive up and see if he can spot recently laid eggs.

Karl's beekeeping friend who was with him the day the queen escaped from the mason jar suggested that he buy a new queen and install her in the top section of the hive. The way the hive is set up now there is space for brood on the bottom, then a queen excluder, and then a super full of honey and then a couple of near empty supers. Best case scenario, she thought that a queen in the top part of the hive would have space to lay eggs and still be sufficiently separated from the old queen. If it turns out that the old queen never did make it back to the hive, the hive would at least have a queen that they didn't have to raise themselves. Karl did find a beekeeper who had a queen to sell if he decides to go that route, but we've been so busy lately that we haven't gone that route yet.

Cucumbers

The plot down at the community garden has taken off. We've already harvested a bunch of zucchini and cucumbers. My Daisy Girl Scout troop is finishing up their "journey" about gardening tomorrow so I'm going to make zucchini bread and a cucumber salad for the meeting.

French Macarons

After wanting to try to bake French Macarons for a while, I finally took the plunge. For a first attempt, they turned out pretty well and they tasted great. A few of them cracked on top and they look a little cracked around the edge. I'm also not sure about the color. I used a lavender food coloring paste, and I wasn't sure what hue they were turn become when they were baked. I used Nutella as the filling because that's what I had on hand, and I was too tired to make buttercream frosting.

Lost Queen Bee

Last week after Karl opened up the hive, he decided he'd like a second opinion on how everything was doing. A neighbor who is an expert beekeeper who manages hives across the city said that she'd come over and check things out with him.

They opened up the hive, found the queen, put her in a quart mason jar which they set on the window sill and finished checking everything out in the hive. All looked great -- there was larvae, eggs, honey, no wax moth larva, few small hive beetles.

So queen bees don't fly because their abdomens are too large. Apparently our queen bee is not a normal queen because when Karl turned around to put her back in the hive she was gone.

They looked all over the porch, in our yard, in our neighbor's yard, but she was gone. Toni, Karl's beekeeping friend, thinks (or rather hopes) she got out of the jar and snuck back into the hive while they weren't looking. Karl's not that optimistic and has already contacted some folks about buying a new queen.

Ugh. And they were doing so well.

First Zucchini of the Summer

I picked a couple of zucchini out of the Girl Scout garden yesterday. This is a plant that the girls started from seed on April 1st and it's doing absolutely great. In addition to the zucchini, we picked Rainbow Swiss Chard and some basil. Dinner was a zucchini frittata with Swiss chard on the side. The chard dish is from Bon Appetit and is now one of my favorites: Swiss Chard with Tomatoes, Beets and Goat Cheese.

Clover is in bloom -- here's a bee in our back alley.

I made this little pie with leftover pie crust and some leftover blackberries that were in the freezer.

Film Crew

We have an interesting, but really very crazy, life around here. This past Saturday, we welcomed a film crew to our home. They are putting a documentary together on urban beekeeping and had gotten our name from a fellow beekeeper. I think they were intrigued by the fact that our beehive is inside our house. I guess that is a bit strange.

Anyway, they arrived on Saturday morning, set up their equipment on the porch and then filmed Karl and Kai working with the hive.

Karl's goal was to take four frames that were filled with honey out from the top super. This was honey that we had left for the bees in the fall to eat over the winter. Turned out that they didn't eat it so were able to take it.

While Karl was pulling frames from the top super, the queen fell out and landed on the floor. That definitely wasn't supposed to happen as she was supposed to be safely ensconced in a lower super under the queen excluder. Oops. When Karl had rearranged the hive a couple of weeks ago, he hadn't seen her, but he thought that she was down below. Apparently not, so that rookie mistake was caught on camera.

Luckily, because our hive is indoors and there is a nice clear floor instead of grass or weeds, it was easy to collect the queen and place her gently back where she was supposed to be.

Spring Garden

Our spring garden is growing beautifully. We have rainbow Swiss chard, Easter egg radishes, garden peas, sugar snap peas, potatoes and strawberries all growing quite nicely. In the empty spots I started our summer garden by planting a two cucumber plants, a few tomato plants -- a cherry tomato and a Brandywine that I started from seed which are already flowering and a Mortgage Lifter, Juliet Plum, Yellow Teardrop and Red Teardrop that we bought at the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival.

Strawberry Season

On Wednesday, Aksel and I spent the morning picking strawberries at Shlagel Farm in Waldorf, Maryland. Strawberry shortcake for dessert.

Classroom Cupcakes

Last week we celebrated Malin's 6th birthday at her school. Buttermilk cupcakes with chocolate cream cheese frosting for all. This week we had a small party with a few of her friends down at our marina. Malin had originally requested a white cake with strawberry filling and fondant icing, but we decided that wouldn't really be that easy eating that sort of cake on a boat. I ended up baking a lemon pound cake from the Gourmet cookbook and it was so good that I didn't even have a chance to take a photograph of it before it was eaten up.

Malin Gets a Bee Sting

It was bound to happen. With all the kids playing in the back yard on a beautiful day, a honey bee landed on Malin's bare ankle. Instead of gently brushing her off her foot, she freaked out and froze, screaming bloody murder. The bee crawled up her leg an inch and got stuck in her leggings and stung. After about five minutes of panicky crying, she had forgotten about it. No swelling, no mark, no adverse reaction at all.

Another hive check -- all looks well

Karl opened up the hive today and saw that the queen was going gangbusters laying eggs. She was in the super just under the queen excluder because those frames were filled with eggs. The super on the bottom of the hive was nearly empty though so the bees were coming into the hive and just going straight through. Trying to prevent the hive from swarming due to lack of space, Karl rotated the super with the queen down on the bottom and placed a new super on top of the queen excluder. Hopefully that will keep them happy and leave plenty of room for them to get busy making honey.

First Produce of Spring

Easter Egg Radishes!

Little Tikes Bee Water Cooler

Aksel left a plastic toy car out in the rain today. Once it cleared up a bit, the bees were out looking for water to drink. The word must have spread through the hive that the little car was the place to be this afternoon -- there was a steady stream of bees drinking from the shallow pools of collected water.

Honeybee on a Redbud Blossom

Our redbud tree in the backyard is situated a few feet in front of the entrance to our hive. It's just about in full bloom and the bees were out in full force. An Arkansas beekeeper has a great blog on bees and posted all about redbuds. From him I learned that redbud trees are a member of the legume or bean family, as is clover, alfalfa, and the black locust tree, all very important sources of nectar for honeybees.

New Hive Base

Karl built a new base for our hive so that he could incorporate small hive beetle traps into it. The new base consists a layer of beetle traps that small hive beetles can crawl into, but are too small for honey bees. When the beetles go into the traps they fall into a tray into which Karl poured a layer of vegetable oil. This picture shows how it all slides together. He also had to make sure that the stand was the exact right height so that the new entrance would align with the slit cut into the exterior wall.

Karl also used installing the new base as an opportunity to open up the hive and check out how everything looked. Bottom line, everything looked pretty good. There still was capped honey, there was larvae which means the queen was still around and healthy and there was newly stored pollen. Kai got to help this time. Next time it's Malin's turn.

Honey Bee in Action

This isn't a great picture and I don't know what kind of flower is in the planter, but I just can't resist snapping a photo of a honey bee in action on a beautiful spring day. I saw this one around the corner from where a fellow beekeeper lives so it likely was hers.

Pea Shoots

Our porch is a greenhouse this spring. We have peas, sugar snap peas, swiss chard, a raspberry bush, arugula and tomatoes growing in various buckets, pots and Chinese takeout containers. I was hoping to harden off the peas during the last few days, but it's been so cold here (it snowed this morning!) that I decided to keep them inside another week or so.

Here are the garden peas.

And the sugar snap peas.

Daisy Girl Scout Gardeners

The girls all picked out and planted seeds this afternoon. Hopefully they'll sprout and we can eventually plant them in the Girl Scout community garden plot. For the next several weeks they'll stay up on our green house of a porch.

Honey Bees on Phlox

At the National Arboretum this morning, tons of honey bees were gathering pollen from phlox. The National Arboretum is about two miles from our house as the crow (or the bee) flies so it's possible that they were our honey bees. More likely, however, is that they are bees from hives that are on the Arboretum's grounds.

King Cake

This was my attempt at a King Cake for Fat Tuesday earlier this week. It rose so much while baking in the oven that the ring turned into one big circle. We didn't have purple sugar so we made purple icing and sprinkled yellow and green sugar on it.

Bee Feeding

Karl and the kids marked the mason jar of honey to see how much the bees were eating. They took about a half quart of honey in a week. This mason jar held honey that we had extracted last October. Karl punched pin holes through the lid and its set upside down in the hive's screen top. We've put towels on top of the screen lid to keep the bees warm.

Peas, Swiss Chard and Radishes

We planted Sugar Snap Peas and Radish seeds last week. I also started Swiss Chard seeds up on the porch by setting them on a wet paper towel inside a plastic take-out container. Roots started to grow within 3 days. After a few more days of root growing, I wasn't sure how long they could stay like that so I planted them in the garden. No sprouts yet.

The average last frost around here is April 15th so I may be pushing it by a week or two. We'll just see what happens.

Virginia Avenue Community Garden

The kind folks at the Virginia Avenue Community Garden have given my daughter's Girl Scout Troop and my son's Cub Scout Den a 3.5 by 20 foot plot in the community garden. I'm really excited about getting the girls out there.

Last Bee Feeding of the Winter?

Kai put on his kid-size bee veil and gloves today for the first time today. He fed the bees what may likely be their last feeding of the winter. It consists of an inverted mason jar full of honey -- honey that we had harvested from them in the fall -- with small pinholes punched in the lid. The jar sits on the top screen of the hive so the bees can get up there and take the honey out. Karl has covered the jar and the screen with a few old towels so the entire hive stays warm.

It's hard to know how much food they need now. Because their hive sits inside a sunny enclosed porch, it certainly never got as cold as it would have if it were out in the backyard. In the winter when it's cold, the bees cluster together in a tight ball to keep themselves -- and most importantly, the queen -- warm. Because the porch is relatively warm, they may have been moving around a bit more and therefore needed more food during the winter. The last few days have been warm enough that the bees have gotten out and about, but there isn't a whole lot blooming just yet. It would be terrible if the hive starved to death during these last few weeks of cold weather.

Honey Bee on Witch Hazel

Honey bee hunting has once again begun in earnest on our walks around our neighborhood. About four blocks away from our home, we came across a large witch hazel shrub in full bloom. Witch hazel is one of the earliest blooming plants so its sometimes called winterbloom. After looking for just a couple minutes, sure enough, it was visited by a honey bee.

Carrots

We had another 70 degree February day so the kids and I took advantage of it to a bit of early spring cleaning. We also picked some carrots that had been languishing in one of our pots all winter. Our 2010 urban garden is officially done.

Spring Weather for Valentine's Day

It got up to 70 degrees yesterday, Valentine's Day, and the bees were out in full force. In the morning they were simply flying in loops right outside the hive entrance to get their bearings, but by midday, they were zooming out and flying away to who knows where. I saw crocus in bloom in a sunny, south facing garden on our block for the first time this winter so maybe that's where they were headed. The weather forecast calls for warm days ahead so I'll have to stake our those crocuses to catch a glimpse of our bees at work.

For Valentine's Day dessert I baked a white cake with coconut pastry cream filling and whipped cream frosting with a raspberry-strawberry coulis from the Gourmet cookbook. Delicious.

New Video of Bees in the Winter

One of the things I like about living in Washington, DC is that you do get short glimmers of spring in January and February. Sunday was one of those sunny and kind of warm days that melted snow and helped to combat cabin fever.

Our bees enjoyed the day, too. Around 1 pm, we noticed a bunch of the girls flying in and out of the hive. Check out the video Karl made.

Urban Beekeeping on WAMU's The Animal House

Toni Burnham, a Washington, DC urban beekeeper, and Aron Weber, pastry chef at the Fairmont Hotel were interviewed on The Animal House program on Washington's NPR station. The Fairmont Hotel is the DC hotel that has three hives on its roof and hosted a spinning party for local beekeepers last summer.

It's a great interview. Give it a listen. Urban Beekeeping

Kindergarten Snack Week Part 2

Day 4: Snow Day!

Day 5: Blueberry Muffins with Struesel Topping

Kindergarten Snack Week

Day One: Chocolate Chip Bread

Day Three: Oatmeal Raisin Cookies

What was Day Two? Goldfish crackers and apple juice. Even I can't bake every day.

Bulk Flour

My baking has hit another level of craziness -- I bought a 25 pound bag of flour last Friday.

January Bees

It's been really cold for the past few weeks so we haven't seen any bees lately. Last week, Karl tapped on the hive and got a lot of buzzing in response so we took that as a good sign. Then yesterday, the afternoon temperature got up to 53 degrees. When I went out at lunchtime, there were several bees flying around in front of the hive. While I stood watching them for a couple minutes, a few of them zoomed away, but mostly they stayed close to home. A few dead bees were pushed out and were on the ground in front of the hive opening, but not many. Hopefully these are all good signs that our hive is going to make it through the winter.

Orange Marmalade

9 oranges, 3 lemons, a box of pectin and 9.5 cups of sugar. 9 and a half cups of sugar is only a half cup shy of an entire five pound bag!

Making orange marmalade seemed to take all day. Slicing the oranges and lemons took nearly an hour (I think it's cool how you use the entire orange, peel and all), then they had to simmer in water for over an hour. Bringing the orange and pectin mixture to a boil was another 10 minutes or so and then adding the sugar and boiling and stirring that took at least another 20 minutes. I usually just fill hot, sterilized jars with hot jam, put lids on them and turn them upside down for a several minutes. You then flip them over and as they cool, the lids pop and they're fine. Today, however, after I filled the hot jars I processed them the proper way -- 10 minutes in the boiling water bath.

The jam tasted delicious -- with all that sugar how could it not -- but marmalade supposedly can take up to two weeks to fully set so we'll just have to see how it works out.