Since I think it would be peculiar to suddenly pick things back up without acknowledging where I’ve been and what’s been going on, I’ll clue you in and catch you up a bit with this quick post.

I got very ill in July and remained unwell for several months. I felt a little guilty that I didn’t give notice or post at least a little bit… but not really. I needed to focus on other things. Thanks to good doctors, good medicine and good people, I have finally started to feel more like myself.  Although I must admit that I do feel somewhat changed. I am okay. I am lucky. I am thankful. But I do have chronic illness, and I’m learning how to deal. It’s a process. Good days are becoming more plentiful, but in the past months I have experienced many not-so-good days. It has been, and I suspect will continue to be, a constant battle to find (and maintain) balance and calm.

All things considered, though, I have had some wonderful triumphs over the past months, including completing my training as a residential home inspector and passing the national certifying exam. I am especially proud of this because I am one of the youngest in the field, and one of the only lady-home-inspectors in the region! So a big *whoohoo* for breaking glass ceilings while home inspecting.  : )

I’ll fill you in on home improvements and garden updates later on, but that’s the quick  lowdown. It’s been a crazy ride, but I’m still hanging on, and I am looking forward sharing stories here again on a more regular basis.

Xoxo,

Huck

A few weeks ago we hosted a backyard BBQ and I was looking for an easy summery dessert to serve. I didn’t want cake or cookies. Candy was out of the question. I was considering making ice cream, but I wanted something even lighter and more refreshing. After much thought, I found the perfect thing….  a granita. 

A granita is a crunchy sorbet, a sweet flavored water ice with a grainy texture. Supposedly granitas are originally from Siciliy, but there are many cultures who claim the first water ices. When deciding upon the flavor of my own granita, I took a quick look around my pantries and in my garden.  I had a bag of limes on hand and plenty of lavender …. so lavender-lime it was. The process was easy and the end results were a big, big, big hit. And so I share the recipe (and pictures) with you! Perhaps this will inspire some of your own summer desserts.

First step is to make a lavender simple syrup with 1 cup granulated sugar, 1 cup water, and 3 tablespoons dried or fresh lavender flowers

Lavender? Check! (I used 3 tablespoons of  fresh lavender flowers and would recommend using a bit more)

Sugar and water go into a saucepot over medium heat. Add the lavender flowers and simmer all until the liquid is clear and all sugar dissolved. You now have 1 cup of your simple syrup! Set aside to cool, and then chill in the fridge.

Next step: In a separate bowl, squeeze out 2 cups fresh lime juice! To this add 2 tblspns honey, 6 tblspns vodka or tequila, and 2 cups cold water. (I also added a smidgen of orange zest just for an additional yet distinct note of citrus flavor).

Next Step: Mix the simple syrup with the flavored lime-juice water and pour the entire mixture into a ceramic or glass dish. A shallow dish is better than a deep dish. Place uncovered in the freezer for 45 minutes.

Next Step: When you check on the mixture after 45 minutes you should begin to see crystals forming around the edges of the dish. Use a whisk to scrape the crystals and blend the mixture. Check on the mixture every 20 minutes (or so, depending on how fast your freezer works), giving it a good whisking each time.  When the mixture consists entirely of light fluffy crystals, you’re done!

 If need be, you can leave the granita in the freezer for several days. Serve at your convenience in chilled glasses. Garnish with lavender flowers and enjoy!

 

And then painted red.

The next step was to create a pattern with some parchment paper….

….and to get started painting!

I bought a quart of the red and a sample of the yellow at Home Depot. My selection was pretty close, but I still mixed my purchased paints with what we had on hand to get things just right. The crackle background, on the other hand, was something of a learning experience. I started with Martha Stewart crackle finish in Oat… but that didn’t work at all, as in… it was total crud that I had to sand off, paint over, and start from square one. After not being able to find another type of crackle medium in the paint aisle,  a self-defined “DIY Country Boy Painter” suggested I try a mineral oil rub  and a top coat cut with denatured alcohol. The mineral oil would create a slick and slow drying surface, while the denatured alcohol, which evaporates quickly, would cause the top coat the dry, shrink, and crack. I figured I’d give it a go… I already had mineral oil at home and the denatured alcohol was just $6 for a sizable container.  And you know what?  Thank heavens for DIY Country Boys, because that did the trick!

Left: our reproduction panel. Right: the original.

Once the panels were mounted back onto the unit, I gave the entire thing a good sanding around the edges and corners and brushed the whole thing with a watered down stain to “antique” it further and to sober the red, which was still a bit to “Happy Fire Engine” instead of “Antique Love.”

If you have a superhuman eye for detail, there are five differences between the two units: 1) the top piece of trim on the original (on the right) uses cove molding instead of quarter round; 2) our cabinet is 1″ deeper; 3)  the leaves of the plant on the original are more blue-green and less brown-green; 4) the hinges on ours are a bit different, and 5) the vase on the left hand door of our reproduction was bugging me, so after taking this picture I fattened it a bit to match the right door…. so our copy’s got fatter vases.

Here’s a close up of the handles, where you can really see the “wear” I put on it with the sanding and the stain.

And another picture of the the handles that shows the crackle finish. I’m so in love….!

I’m going to rub the whole thingdown with a coat of polyurethane to protect the finish and shine it up a bit, but it’s 99.9% done and I am so proud. This has been one of those projects where we knew we could do it… but we had no idea it would be so… perfect. I’m more than happy to send the original cabinet back now because we have this beautiful piece of furniture that we lovingly made together, something with much more sentimental value.

Cost of project: $80 for wood, hardware, and paint. That price tag includes some of the mistakes we made, so if we were to make more we could probably pare it down to about $50-60, especially since we’ve got plenty of leftover paint.

I don’t think I can be categorized as a morning person since I do not leap out of bed singing and tap dancing, I do not explode with exuberance and chattiness. But I do have a tendency to wake up early. Today, a Sunday, started at 5:00 just because I rolled over and my eyes opened… and once my eyes open… there’s nothing else I can do but get up. So I did.

I washed, dried, and put away the rest of last night’s dishes, fed the chickens, cat, dogs. Checked on the bees and checked on our rain barrels and the new goldfish we added to eat the mosquito larvae. I checked on the garden, pulling weeds as the sun inched upwards. My beans are doing well. My peppers are beginning to fruit.  I hope my pumpkins hang in there.
 
I made coffee. I drink only decaff, but it’s still comforting to have a warm cup in the morning. I sat on the porch and watched the gold finches eat my zinnias. I sat on the couch and watched the dogs chew on rawhide. I folded laundry. I finished pitting the 20 lbs of cherries we picked yesterday and set 10 lbs to boil in sugar for jam. I did an inventory of my empty mason jars, set the chosen ones aside to sanitize, and then I did an inventory of the rest of our canned goods.

We picked too many cherries and we’ll have too much jam, but this is perfect. We’ll give some away, barter some of it, and have it on hand for a few years. We have a tendency to cycle through fruits. Three years ago we did strawberries and we’re just finishing them up. Last year it was blueberries. And although we’ve not made apple butter in almost 4 years… we still seem to always find a jar. This is our year for cherries.

Now I wait quietly for others in the house to stir. 

I forgot to tell you that we  finished the basement just in time (almost) for a housemate to move in. We’re all getting along very well. It’s nice to share our space. And, best of all, he loves the chickens and the bees and he likes to help me in the garden.

My days have been so very busy with my new job and other adventures and I am sad I have not found the time to share. There have been many good stories– from trips to the emergency room to rescuing wild honeybees from someone’s living room wall, as well as visits to local and rural homesteads, swims in ponds, and a variety of excellent cooking experiments.  I hope to be able to share more very soon. Meanwhile, I hope your spring/summer has been off to a great start, too!

Yours truly,

Huck

Listen to that nerd. “I love my bees.” What a loon.

Here’s a close up picture  of a bee’s corbicula, the “saddlebags” I mention. The bees gather particles of pollen all over their bodies when they visit flowers, and then they groom themselves with their hind legs, brushing all the tiny grains of pollen into their corbicula, which are not unlike velcro.

As they groom the pollen into these velcro-like “saddlebags,” the tiny pollen bits get mushed into a single larger grain that we can see with our eyes. The color of the pollen can be different  depending on the plant. It’s so neat to see bees fly in with red pollen and orange pollen and yellow pollen.  Some people harvest the pollen from the bees and use it for naturopathic treatments. Others use it as a protein supplement.

But the bees really need the pollen the most. After it’s gathered, they then deposit the golden kernels in the hive near their brood. The high protein pollen is the first stuff that gets fed to baby bees when they emerge!

I think I may have mislabeled my kale seed as turnip seed… so instead of planting a slightly more diverse variety of spring crops, I planted turnips, turnips, and some more turnips.

That’s not exactly true– we have carrots combing up, lots of lettuce and beets and spinach and kohlrabi and peas and radishes and other goodies. But there are a lot of turnips.  A plethora of turnips.  Turnip tallies of titanic proportions.

And so, in the case that you are tumbling in turnips too,  I present to you an excellent use of these terrific spring greens:

Turnip Greens Casserole

•  ~4 lbs turnip greens
• 1/2 cup mayonnaise
• 2 eggs
• 1 1/2 cup bread crumbs
• 1/2 cup grated Parmesan (or similar) cheese
• Juice from 1/2 a lemon
• 2 tbspns horseradish sauce
• Salt and pepper to taste
• 1 tbspn sugar (probably not necessary, but most other similar recipes called for it…)

(note: I imagine bacon is probably very good with this dish because, well, what’s not good with bacon?)

HOW TO:

Rinse greens to get the grit off of ‘em. Drain, chop, and boil in fresh water until tender. You can chop them further in a blender if you wish but it’s not really necessary. And don’t you dare drain that pot liquor down the sink– save it for soup!

In a bowl add lemon juice, mayo, eggs, salt and pepper (as needed) and 1 c. bread crumbs. Add chopped greens and mix well. Dump the whole shebang into a casserole dish. Top with remaining breadcrumbs and a little more grated cheese for a phenomenal crust.

Bake uncovered in a 375* oven for about 40 minutes.

Fasten your seat belts and prepare for some awesomeness! You ain’t never had no greens like these! If you give it a whirl, I’d love to hear what you think!

****

Hello! Beagle Tilly playing in the yard.

As I mentioned in my previous post, there are a lot of exciting things going on this spring. One of those things  has been a transition into a new job! My new role involves managing historic properties and their their rehabilitation. I’m working all over the state with all kinds of people and all kinds of buildings, so there are some very long days and some work on weekends…. but I’m really enjoying it and I already have some great stories to share! But that’s for another time.

On the home front we’ve been gardening away winter blues and doing our best to get back into our remodeling. We’re officially two years into our “project”… which might seem like a long time to remodel a tiny house, but we’ve still remained true to our DIY goals and our budget, managed to work full time and squeeze in graduate school, as well as spend time with friends and family. One day (hopefully sooner rather than later) we’ll finish this house… and it will be grand. In the meantime, we’re still chugging along and trying to enjoy every minute. More on that later.

Another one of those exciting things that has come to realization this spring was the arrival of our honeybees. Last Saturday Jeff of DC Honeybees  pulled up in front of our house with 200+ lbs of bees in the back of his car. A little more than 4 lbs were to be placed in our backyard!

  4 lb units of honey bees are called “packages” and you order them along with a new queen. The idea is that you can shove them all into a box and with a little luck have a relatively instant hive once the bees settle into their new home.  Here is our package sitting on the butcher block in our kitchen while we chatted. A few escapees flying around overhead plinking occasionally into light bulbs.

 Here the package has been moved outside near the awaiting hive. Jeff had just sprayed the bees with sugar syrup to they would be occupied with grooming themselves instead of flying- this helps when pouring the bees from the travel box into the hive. Below he is using a hive tool to lift up a can of syrup that both feeds the bees during transport and keeps them in the cage. That little box to the right of his hand is the Queen Cage– our royal lady bee is in there!

The empty hive– all level and ready to receive its new tenants!

With the can of syrup removed, Jeff dumps the bees into the hive and places the queen cage between a set of frames. The queen is kept in her cage by a small candy plug that the other bees eat through over the course of a few days, releasing her into their new home. Watch!

What I was trying to say in the above video before I got distracted by all the bees flying around was how remarkable I thought it was that Jeff was working the hives (his own and ours) without veils or gloves. I had seen a video of him checking his hives with his daughter– he was calm and never got stung, yet his daughter got stung when she panicked and waved her arms around. Check it out here.  As you can see in our own video, the bees are pretty docile.  Jeff even scoops up a handful of the bees… and one even lands on Banjo Boy’s face without incident!

Studies have shown that when bees are allowed to build their own wax from scratch instead of on commercial foundation, they vary the size of the cells in the wax and are better able to resist disease and pests.  Since this is a more natural approach to bee keeping (and cheaper!) we opted to give it a shot. We’ll see how it works and weigh the pros and cons at the end of our first season. Meanwhile, the bees had 8 days to get nice and settled, and it was time to see how much building the bees had accomplished…. so in we dove!

 This is a before picture of a “foundationless” frame. The strips of wax are meant to act as guidelines for the bees.

Already there’s considerable comb being built– see?!

Here’s a close up of the comb and bees.  Good job bees! Way to go! Keep it up!

Once they fill out most of the frames in the first box, we’ll stack another “deep”  (hive box) on top and they’ll keep on building. So far they’ve been easy easy easy, totally pain free, and lots of fun to watch. We’ll keep you posted!

It looks like we’ ve made it through yet another winter! We didn’t get nearly as much snow as we did last year, but it was a cold winter for sure, and I am so ready for spring. Looks like everything else is ready for spring, too. The crocuses and day-lilies started popping up about 3 weeks ago and all the birds are chirp chirp chirping.  Speaking of birds, the chickens are doing well and are back to laying regularly… although we had to put yet another rooster in the freezer a few weeks ago. I was very disappointed because it seems like all my favorite chickens are roosters (FYI- we live in a no-rooster-zone and can’t keep roosters)… but it’s a learning process. Our Rooster-Recognition is being honed, as are our culling skills.

This week's batch of eggs all cartoned up and ready to barter with my amiga for a haircut!

We’ve been hard at work finishing out our basement with the help of Banjo Boy’s Papa. We ran into some structural problems with our plan for putting in a separate entrance, so we instead installed a large egress window which allows more light into the basement and functions as a safe emergency exit, making the space a legal bedroom/basement area. Other than that… the original walls have been knocked down and reconfigured, wiring and plumbing run for the bathroom and a kitchenette, and dry wall is up and mudded! We also  finished out a laundry/utility room area in the basement and roughed in plumbing for a powder room on the main floor!

Banjo Boy installing drywall in the new laundry room.

On the garden front— I germinated seedlings a few weeks ago in moist paper towels on my lovely heat mat. You can see some of the resulting baby plants in mouthwash cups below. We’ve got Hot Cherry Bell, Poblano, and Cayenne Peppers, as well as sage, chamomile, parsley, cilantro, 4 types of eggplant, and a million different tomatoes! We also have cabbage, kale, collards, and leeks.

Baby plants under grow lights!

Below you can see the secondary leaves of a Hazelfield Farm tomato. Isn’t that beautiful? 90% of my seed comes from Mamabear’s garden or from my own, which is great when it comes to sticking to a tight budget and controlling where your seeds come from and what they’re exposed to. However, sometimes there are still soil born diseases or blights that are carried in the seed, or other factors that you just can’t control. Most of my Hazelfield tomatoes germinated very, very well… but then died very suddenly. It could have been something I did to them, but I think it was probably some kind of blight. I was left with just a few… but the few Hazelfields that made it are looking really, really healthy and are the first of my tomatoes to pop out secondary leaves! If we follow Darwin’s crazy notion of selection of the fittest, these should have some good genes for my tomato breeding program!

Other varieties that we have include Mortgage Lifter, Moscow Early, Cherokee Purple, Brandywine and Beefsteak, and I’m sure I’m forgetting several others.

Hazelfield Farm Tomato

On one of the coldest days of the year Banjo Boy and I constructed three 4′x8′ raised beds in the front yard that will supplement the rest of our yarden. We then spent the next several weeks filling them with soil and compost and last weekend I built arched frames out of PVC pipe and covered the beds with 6 mil plastic. I managed to plant one bed with some early spring crops like broccoli, snow peas, onions, radishes, etc., before rain set in. I know it’s a bit early for some of the things I seeded, but I’m putting all my faith in Mr. Groundhog who called for an early spring! If things dry out enough by this weekend, I’ll plant the rest of the beds and till the rest of the yard.

So that’s it for my quick update. We’ve got other irons in the fire, too, but you get the idea. It’s going to be a busy, wonderful spring!

During my holiday visit to Maypop I met up with a buddy of mine and fellow forager for a hike down by the Chattahoochee River. We were not just going for one of our usual rambling winter hikes. We had a mission. We were looking for toppled deciduous trees,  especially poplars or beech,  with the hopes of finding a few clusters of oyster mushrooms attached.

Many folks are wary of foraging mushrooms. And they absolutely should be. There are many varieties out there that can mess you up. However, like  garlic mustard and chicory, oyster mushrooms are a pretty safe wild edible to go after. While the Pleurotus ostreatus (oyster mushroom) has a number of look-alikes, none of them are dangerous and at the very worst you’ll end up with a woody or unpleasant-tasting surprise if you’ve got the wrong one.

Still, no matter what you forage for, make sure you triple check your findings with three or more reliable sources. If you can, go foraging with someone who is familiar with the edible.  I’d never gathered edible fungi before, but my buddy has experience as a mushroom cultivator and has foraged mushrooms for many years now,  so we were set to go!

We spent about an hour in the woods and found enough oysters to top pizzas at a “make your own pizza” party the next night.  I went foraging again a few days later with Banjo Boy and we came home with even more! We turned out bounty over to Mamabear who used them in an Asian stir-fry.  That batch, which were larger than the first, were a little tougher than the younger ones I’d gathered earlier… but they were definitely yummy.

Here’s a good site to explore if you’d like to learn more about  some of the more common North American edible mushrooms!

Huck checking a friend's hives down in Georgia.

Although I’ve never kept bees before, I’m not a total newbee. For more than 20 years we had wild honeybees living at Maypop (more on that later). We also had a neighbor who kept bees and he’d sometimes invite me to help him with his hives.  Still, while I know some very basics about honeybees, there is much to learn! So we started out Beeventure at the county library where we found a surprising number of books on apiculture and the history of honey. (If you’re curious, I highly recommend Robbing the Bees by Holley Bishop and Fruitless Fall by Rowan Jacobsen)

Cave painting of honey collector!

At first we had just wanted to keep bees for the heck of it– it’d be good for the garden and, of course, a potentially yummy project! But as we read more and more about the role the honeybee in agriculture and the crisis of CCD, our Honeybee Project become more like a Honeybee Mission. If we get honey from our hives, terrific, but our real goal is to simply to have fun, learn, and, most importantly, keep the bees alive.

Probably a good goal any way.

Just like with spring gardening, honeybee planning begins in the middle of winter. Although it’s the middle of January we’ve recently moved past the “research” phase and into the “action” phase of accumulating gear and placing orders. Lucky for us, a bee keeping friend of ours has offered to loan us all of her equipment for the next few years (she’s amidst a big move), so we now have  on hand a variety of hive tools, a honey extractor, a thingamajiggy for bottling honey, and a hive (empty) with spare frames! We have been advised to not use the second-hand hive even if it is most appealing to our budget because of the possibility of transmitting bad-bee-bugs to our new bees… so we might just use it as a model for building our own.  Still, having the rest of the gear certainly helps a lot!

As for acquiring the bees themselves… we were connected through friends to DC HONEY BEES,  an up and coming group dedicated to the growth of beekeeping and bee colonies in our urban environment. DC Honeybees has two programs -  one for helping you purchase and start your own  rooftop or backyard hive, and one in which you sponsor a hive on your property that they manage and maintain. For our residential project, we have opted to order for 4 lbs of Russian honeybees which DC Honeybees will install for us in April.  We will also receive some “support” until we feel comfortable with our hive. As for the other program, I’m currently in negotiations with my Place Of Work to allow DC Honebees to park a hive on our downtown rooftop! The negotiations are off to a good start, so wish us luck!

To learn more about DC Honeybees, their programs, and their services, check out their official website. To learn more about their day-to-day adventures with urban beekeeping, check out their blog!