Where our bees go in September

It doesn't seem that much is flowering these days. The bees, however, continue to zoom out of their hive as soon as the sun hits their entrance. I often wonder where they go. Here's one place:

The picture was taken with my iPhone so it's not the clearest photograph. Honeybees were all over this flowering plant. What is it?

DC State Fair 2012

Karl with his Blue Ribbon

The Barracks Row Day Festival was the home to the DC State Fair this past Saturday. Contests celebrating the culinary, craft and artistic talents were held all day. Aksel (with a bit of help from Karl) won an honorable mention for his DC-themed bike and Malin won a 2nd place red ribbon for her poem about tomatoes.

And Karl won a blue ribbon for his honey! It was really interesting to see how meticulous the judges were in their decision making. First, after lining up all 15 jars of honey in a row from darkest to lightest, they decided to give out three first place ribbons in three honey categories -- dark, medium and light.  They then tested the honey for water content and judged it's clarity and lack of "stuff" in it by shining a light through it. They graded the honey on the presentation and cleanliness of the bottle and cap and, of course, they tasted it.

Karl won the Blue Ribbon for dark honey. Top honors also went to two other Capitol Hill bee keepers for medium and light. Way to represent, Capitol Hill!

Ma'am, you know you have bees flying into your house??

As I was getting home from picking up kids after school, a well-meaning telephone repairman who was up on the pole adjacent to the back corner of the house called out and got my attention. "You know, you have a whole lot of bees flying around the back of your house," he said. "They're flying right up inside your wall. You and your kids really need to be careful!" He then went on to tell me that I should go to an auto parts store, buy some carburetor fluid because that comes in a container with a long nozzle and I can just squirt that on in there.

Do I fess up and tell him that we're beekeepers? Do I keep quiet? He was working just yards away from the hive. What if he got stung?

So I simply replied, "Huh. We need to do something about that." And told him we were sure to be careful.

I guess you really can't see the six foot tall set of supers just inside the window if you're not looking for it.

Who's Your Daddy?!

The sting hit my pinky knuckle 24 hrs ago

While taking out the trash on Monday at around 7 a.m., one of our honey bees must have been sitting on the trash can lid - or maybe she was on the door to the kitchen. As I walked in the door, zap, one of my girls got me on the knuckle of my pinky finger. Didn't she recognize her daddy?!?!

Or maybe she remembered me as the guy who took 80 lbs of their honey a few weeks ago.

Anyway, I pulled the stinger out, rinsed it off and went to an uneventful day at work. I felt fine, and even did a lot of typing. Sure, it was a bit sore, but by the kids bedtime it had started to swell. By morning, I figured I should ask a professional and called a nurse at Georgetown. By my 3 pm doctors appointment, the skin on my hand was so tight you could see every scar I've ever had. I was glad to get a 3 day supply of steroids to cut the swelling.

So it seems this is an allergic reaction, not an infection from a dirty stinger. The doc said that her training did not enable her to predict how I'd react to my next sting, but that an OTC antihistamine right off the bat would be a good idea. She also said I don't have to give up beekeeping - yet. Oh, and Mom, don't worry, she updated my Epi-pen prescription. :)

Looks like I'll keep using the gloves for a while yet. No matter how you slice it though, it's a bummer to love bee keeping and, possibly, not really react well to bee stings. Hummm.

Homemade Plum Fruit Leather

The other day when I wrote about our plum bonanza and all the different ways we've used up the hundreds of plums we picked, I forgot about fruit leather. The kids don't love it because it's not overly sweet, but Karl and I think it's pretty good.

Here's what I did:

I pitted and coarsely chopped about 4 cups of purple plums and put them in a sauce pan with about 3/4 cup of water and about 3/4 cup of honey. We had just harvested honey so instead of adding sugar, I used last year's honey in an effort to really start using it up. I cooked the plums at a simmer until they were really soft, about 15 minutes. I then poured the plums, in small batches, into a food processor and blended until the mixture was a thick puree.

After laying a Silpat baking sheet on a large jelly roll pan, I poured the plum puree into the pan and tried to get it as even a layer as a could. The first time I made fruit leather, I thought the mixture would seep under the edge of the Silpat and be a big mess, but I guess because the mixture is so thick and the mat is sticky, that just doesn't happen. After the mixture is fairly evenly spread, bake the leather in the oven at the lowest temperature at which your oven can be set for several hours (180 degrees is what our oven does) until it's dry to the touch. The fruit leather peels off the Silpat easily and then can be laid on a plastic wrap and rolled up.

Plum Brandy Part 2

After a couple of days on the counter, the plum brandy builds up a lot of pressure. The lids of the mason jars are bulging. I guess one of the jars wasn't closed exactly right, and that one began dented and started leaking all over the counter when we turned it upside down this morning. When I opened it, it exploded,  foaming and bubbling all over the place like a can of pop that's been shaken. Because it was so full, in order to close it up again -- with a brand new lid -- I had to remove three big, bloated plums. I tried to put a bit of the liquid caught in the cereal below back into the jar, but the jar is just too full. Not really sure what's going to happen with this jar so we'll just have to see.

Plums Galore

The community garden down the street has two plum trees -- one with small purple plums and the other with larger yellow plums -- that were just dripping with fruit this spring. Malin and I picked buckets of them over a couple of weeks. This week the temperature has been in the high nineties and I think the tree is finally done. We made plum jam (which cooked way too long and turned into plum butter), baked a half dozen plum cakes and ate dozens fresh. We still had about 15 pounds of them left so we made plum brandy. According to several recipes found on various blogs, the ingredients and process are simple. Fill glass jars with plums, add sugar, add cheap vodka and let sit for three months. We used quart jars and added 3/4 cup of sugar to each plus about a cup of vodka.


The jars are now on our counter awaiting a more permanent home for the rest of the summer. The white stuff at the bottom of the jars is sugar. It's been two days since we filled the jars and all that sugar has dissolved. One of the recipes says to flip the jars upside down every day. We'll probably do that for while until we go on vacation.

In other news, here is the potato harvest from one of my garden buckets. I honestly don't know how whole cultures survived on potatoes. I can't grow them.









And now for the drum roll......along with yellow squash that is already overflowing, here are our first tomatoes and cucumber of the season. The cucumber was grown from seed and I think I started it mid-March. The tomatoes are Super Sweet 100s and were planted by my GS troop in mid-April. They were pretty big when they went into the ground.

Baguettes

My latest obsession is baking baguettes. I've made Acme's Rustic Baguettes, a recipe from Maggie Glezer's "Artisan Baking" cookbook, four times in the last couple of weeks. I meant to take a picture of them before now, but they were eaten before I could get the camera out. It's not that much actual work time to make the baguettes, but you do have to start the dough the night before by making a poolish and a starter dough. The next day you have to mix the dough, knead it, shape it and shape it again. There's a short step nearly every hour for about 6 hours in a row. They're not perfect, but they are delicious.

Taking advantage of warm spring days

Let's see, in the back alley garden we planted onion sets and Easter egg radishes and I transplanted the arugula and Swiss chard. I also planted rhubarb inside our back garden in a spot close to the kitchen window. I am not a patient gardener and the thought that it will be two years before harvesting rhubarb is pretty annoying.

Kai and Malin want their own garden plot this summer so they've pulled a ton of weeds in the space next to the vegetable garden. I'd like to build a frame around this area to make the soil a bit deeper so that's a project for the weekend.

Down at the community garden, the snap peas that I've neglected are starting to come up. I planted a bunch more today and have resolved to water them more regularly. I also transplanted Swiss chard and argula and onions down there and planted lettuce seeds.

While I was working there today, a guy from the DC Department of Transportation rode up on his bike. He told me told me that his department was interested in placing four pairs of beehives in fenced community gardens in Ward 6 and was there to check out our garden. It's my understanding that a few years back, some folks wanted to place a beehive at the garden, but others were worried about allergies to bee stings.

As an aside, that sort of thinking drives me crazy. Honeybees don't fly around looking for people to sting. And, it really makes no difference if the beehive is located at the garden or if the hive is a block away, the honeybees will find their way into the garden. In our two full summers of having bees literally above our back door, our family has been stung two times by honeybees in the backyard. The first time, our older son stepped on a bee with bare feet. The other time, a honeybee somehow flew up the leg of our daughter's pants and instead of brushing it away, she freaked out (which was understandable) and it stung her.

Anyway, I outed us as beekeepers on the Hill and he was pleased to learn that there would be advocates for bees at the garden. In the end, however, after eyeballing the space, he didn't think there would be room for a hive. The Virginia Avenue garden is a pretty compact garden and nearly every square foot is used. Instead, his recommendation will be to avoid the politics of beekeeping at the garden and house the beehives in a fenced in yard that is used to store trees ready for planting. It's only a couple blocks away so the garden will still get the benefit of honeybees.

Finally, several of the fruit trees down at the community garden are in full bloom due to the mild winter and really warm days we've been having. Not a honeybee in sight that I could find, but the trees were covered with dozens of fast moving smaller bee-looking insects.

Potato Surprise

Malin and I had a surprise while turning over the garden. I guess I missed harvesting some potatoes last fall.

The peas I planted last month are finally sprouting.

Arugula and lettuce is taking off up on the porch.

And on top of the beehive, we've placed spinach, Swiss chard and tomato seedlings.

Sugar Snap Peas and Beekeeper Meet Up

The unseasonably warm weather continued with a 72 degree sunny day yesterday, and there were scores of honeybees flying around the hive all day. Karl keeps feeding them their own honey from an inverted mason jar with little holes pricked in the lid. They don't seem to be eating it very quickly so I assume -- at least I hope -- they are getting what they need from the few plants that are flowering.

Karl went to a meeting of local beekeepers tonight, and I'll be interested to know what the collective wisdom is about taking care of bees during this last month of this weird, warm winter.

The other rather banal new is that Aksel and I planted Sugar Snap Peas in the back alley garden and I re-potted a bunch of arugula seedlings into bigger pots. Swiss chard and spinach seedlings will probably have to be repotted in the next few days. I wasn't expecting all the seeds I planted to sprout and I know that it's dumb, but it pains me to thin those little plants.

Peas Planted

Aksel and I planted peas in the back garden yesterday. We also started spinach, Swiss chard and arugula up on the porch last week. The arugula and chard has sprouted and is already growing well. With its southern exposure, it must be 75 degrees out there during the day.

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.