Bolting Broccoli & Bee Benefaction

I had help in the apiary today.  I offered Ms. Kerry the opportunity to experience the serenity associated with beekeeping and she, being the good sport that she is, agreed to assist me with my hive inspections and preparing two nucs (baby colonies) to be re-homed.

I am thrilled to report that all five hives are currently queen right and laying down honey.  Kerry and I added extra honey supers to give the bees some more room to work.  There is one colony that looks like it might be preparing to swarm.  I may go in tomorrow to pull out a baby colony from it in order to give the queen more room to lay.

In addition to hive inspections, Kerry and I moved two nucs into the car of another local beekeeper. After benefiting so greatly from Beekeeper Jim's generosity last year in helping me re-establish my hives after losing everything, I decided that this year I wanted to so the same for someone else.  As luck would have it, I met a local beekeeper in the grocery store.  She stopped me and asked if I was a beekeeper.  The give away?  My cart was full of white sugar for spring feeding.  It turned out that she had been a beekeeper for many years but had sadly lost her last hive over the winter.  I offered to make her nucs so she could get up and running again.  Today this beekeeper came with her son to collect her new bees.

In addition to sharing bees with my neighbours, I was also able to share vegetables this week.  A consequence of the past week's heat wave was that many of my vegetables pushed right past the vegetable stage and decided to go to seed.  It started with my broccoli and then the Chinese cabbage, daikon, spinach, lettuce and even Swiss chard all followed suit.

Flowering Chinese cabbage.

Lettuce.

Daikon.

Chard.

As a result of bolting, several vegetables had to be picked immediately.  I ended up with a basket of Chinese cabbage, a basket of broccoli leaves, a basket of kale, and a dozen heads of lettuce.  In addition to making my CSA baskets, I needed to call in the neighbours to take some of my greens off my hands.  Thankfully Beekeeper Jim, Ms. Kerry and Mr. George could all be persuaded to eat a bunch of salad this week.

Needless to say, this week's CSA baskets were epic.  They included: green leaf lettuce, heads of red and green leaf and butter crunch lettuce, spinach, arugula, watercress, chard, Chinese cabbage, young turnip leaves, garlic scapes, daikon radishes, red radishes, red scallions, broccoli crowns and leaves, kale, lavender sprigs, chives, peppermint, apple mint, tarragon, summer savory, oregano, daikon micro greens, wasabi mustard micro greens, red clover micro greens, and a dozen farm fresh eggs.

This week’s bonus item was a jar of blueberry crumble jam.

My fridge is stuffed full!

What a very busy but satisfying day.  Now, if only the garden gnomes would come weed my gardens and plant my next set of seeds while I sleep - then I would really be ahead of the game!