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.