October 29, 2009 at 9:35 am
· Filed under Personal, Technical
With apologies to Terry Prachett, I feel like I being dragged (dragging myself?) into the Century of the Fruitbat. As I mentioned a long time ago, I don’t care for Facebook. I prefer my blog. That said, many of my friends and most of my family use Facebook. So I’m going to start a bit of an experiment. I’ve downloaded and installed the Wordbook plugin for my blog software (wordpress).  Starting with this post, in theory anything that’s published on the blog gets cross-posted to fb.
Kill me now.
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October 21, 2009 at 8:28 pm
· Filed under Bee space
I need another hobby about like I need a(nother) hole in my head. But at the same time, ya gotta keep life interesting. Several times over the past few years, K and I have talked about keeping bees. I think that next year we’ll finally do it. We’re interested in the bees themselves (hive mind! hive mind!), the pollination and the honey, so why not. I’ve read a couple of books and was originally planning to take a class, but the one I wanted isn’t offered until 2011. But hey why let that stop us.
This afternoon, I took a trip up to our local apiary. Actually, the only apiary (to my knowledge) in a 150 mile radius: Busy Bee Apiary. There a very lovely woman, Betsy, whom I am certain had better things to do, talked to me for almost an hour about beekeeping. What is the equipment like? What would I need at first? What kind of clothing do I need? What’s an extruder look like? How much space does the hive need in NC? When should we feed bees in NC? Do you just feed sugar water or pollen too? When can I order bees? What kind of bees do they recommend and sell? You get the idea. The poor woman.
The upshot is that I seem to have a good head start, having read as much as I have and we’ll probably host two colonies come spring. After the grilling, I did pick up another book and a jar of their honey – it really is much better tasting than the clover honey you buy in stores. Maybe I’ll make the next batch of breakfast bars with this instead.
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October 6, 2009 at 8:57 pm
· Filed under Cooking, Gardening
I went out to the garden on Sunday and took a look at how the okra was doing. Now I’m feeling somewhat, um, inadequate…

as a gardener.
Really, who lets okra get that big. I should have been picking them every two or three days so that the maximum size was only 3-5 inches, not 8-12.
In other gardening news, I opened one jar of the pickled peppers early (they should still be pickling for another 3-4 weeks), and they are delicious.
Oh, and I am *so* jealous of these people.  They also seem to have a great stuffed pepper recipe that I would bet even K would eat if I fixed them with sweet banana peppers (as opposed to jalapeños).
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