spring ephemerals, and bartering too

The primary reason I began writing and posting pictures on this blog was to preserve a timeline. Something(maybe?) for the recordbooks: Let it be known that by the official first day of spring, it had already sprung at TellTheBees. 

The apricot tree

Check out the pollen on that (flying) guy!

Chives in the herb garden

Crocusi



Forsythia!



The lilac bush

Future rhubarb crisp

 Bartering has also recently popped up, and is a welcome arrival to our lives! We traded some maple syrup and honey and a few other goodies to some good friends in St. Paul for a case of their homemade wine. How cool is that?

May your week be merry and bright!

Telling the bees about the bees

TelltheBees' bees are up and at 'em! The weather this winter wasn't too harsh, but still, we're proud of these guys for pulling through.

Bees are simply amazing! The more I read about them, the more wonderful they reveal themselves to be.

Our little colony has been cleaning house already.

Yesterday they were visiting the birdfeeder- soaking up the sweetness in the corn, I suppose- and scouring the buckets we used to collect sap.

Later in the afternoon they were bringing in big bunches of pollen- some pollen balls so big they fell off their legs before they could get them home. We ate some- sticky, and quite sweet. I love that stuff. When we lived in Minneapolis I had a big jar of bee pollen on top of the refrigerator that I'd sprinkle on my cereal in the mornings. Jake would just dip in a spoon and swallow the whole lot. You can also bake with it- it makes lovely yellow-crumbed muffins.

 We're considering the addition of a contraption called a pollen trap, that is designed to brush off some of the pollen from the bees' legs. Bee pollen has long been  touted to possess a wide range of healing powers, from restoration of the female reproductive system to reducing cholesterol, but when I've taken it is was as a method to fend off spring allergies. Now I just eat a lot of our backyard honey, and it seems to do the trick. Last spring I was blissfully free from my typically annual itchy eyes and runny nose and lingering headaches! Some people are allergic to bee pollen, so read up about it first if you intend to try it.

Where did that pollen come from? What is blooming already? Besides a single yellow crocus the ducks discovered and promptly demolished, we can't tell. But... soon!

Sap Season

Last Thursday, the entire local girl scout troop came out to visit and check out how we make maple syrup. The sap was flowing then, but this delicious warm weather has since staunched it. A short sap season, but successful nonetheless!

On Saturday, we went to pick up the custom-made welded stainless steel pan we'd ordered from some Amish fabricators. From another Amish neighbor, we bought a trunk-load of cinderblocks, and Jake pulled some old fire bricks out of the ravine near our road to build this backyard evaporator. Its quaint compared to some of these fancy-pants evaporators in a catalog we have, but it did the trick!

We ended up with about 100 gallons of sap which cooked down really efficiently this way- much more user-friendly than last year's set up of boiling the sap in soup kettles on the old cast iron cook stove in our yard.

When we were down to about 4 gallons, we took it inside to finish it- we were afraid we'd burn it directly over a fire. From yet another Amish neighbor who runs a maple sap supplies shop, we'd bought a syrup hydrometer, a tool that measures the density of liquids and that is used to determine when maple syrup is at the standard consistency.

Then we strained it, poured it into jars, and set them upside down to cool and seal.

We canned about 2 gallons of delicious, dark, sticky syrup this evening, and are christening this batch with a brunch with friends in the morning.

May your weekend be just as sweet!

Baby Broccoli



spring is coming!



DayLight Savings Time Show on Saturday 6p - 8p! DeVotchKa, Palace, Florence & the Machine, the Weepies, She & Him, St. Vincent, Bright Eyes, and more...

Tune in at wdrt.org

Seeds are started!

Our seeds are started! Four of these trays are resting in our greenhouse, holding seeds of tomatoes, peppers, leeks, onions, basil, fennel, kale, broccoli, and cabbage. In just 8 weeks it will be May 5, which is a little early, but last year we planted on May 5 and got lucky.

These trays were made by Mark, Jake's dad and my FIL, for their family's greenhouse for the same purpose in the early '80s, and they served their purpose well. When Mark and Cheryl moved to Puerto Rico, Jake made sure to snatch these up. They also serve as kindling catchers in the wintertime.

For the past three years, we've used a soil block tool to create these 2" x 2" cubes of compost mix to start our seeds in. We used to start our seeds with those little peat moss cylinders, but found that some plants became root bound, and we were ending up transplanting spindly starters which didn't thrive.

The tomato and pepper seeds (including some seeds we saved from last year's peppers) are under pyrex pans for extra greenhouse effect.. hopefully that will help increase the soil temperature to support better germination. Last year we had a lot of failed plants.

Here's last year's garden plan, drawn out on a manila envelope, with all the seed packets we used inside.

Changes for this year will include growing more dried beans, pumpkins, and leeks, getting spinach, onions, carrots, and potatoes in earlier, planting more peas, and growing squashes outside of the fence so they don't take over everything.

Exciting times!

In search of antlers and watercress

I love finding things. So joyful is the discovery of treasures, from morels and berries to agates and bones, that simply looking for them is among my favorite pasttimes. Jake and I spent our Saturday hiking around in different wet and boggy and woodsy areas, looking for two hallmarks of March, antler sheds and watercress. In the process, we found other exciting things.

Ancient riverbanks



Mink (we think) tracks

 

Wintergreen

No sheds, but in the last place we looked, watercress!

 Right in a spot where the spring bubbled up through the sand, a large healthy patch.

We snipped about a pound.

I made a soup for lunch, by sauteing leeks and the cress and some chopped potatoes in some duck fat (butter or olive oil would be good too, but when one has duck fat, one uses it), whisking in some flour and herbs, adding milk and broth, and simmering until the potatoes were soft.

If you go cressing, bring a scissors- the plants will grow back quickly if you don't remove the roots, and the bottom rooty parts of the plants are bitter, anyway. One last tip- careful where you snip! We found this ewwy mole floating in the first place we stopped.

Also, make sure you rinse your cress really well- there were wiggly little shrimpy guys in our batch, that the ducks were happy to snatch up.

We'll go back and collect more later this week... its just too good not to! Delicious, and so good for you. I think I'll try a cress pesto. Cressto!?

I hope you find whatever treasures you're looking for this week!