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.