Waking up this morning to the gentle pitter patter of rain is one of the most exciting and relaxing sounds I've heard in awhile. While we have had a very early, and very productive, dry summer, the lack of just a little rain has me worried about upcoming nectar flows. Fireweed won't produce much if it's a really dry year, as well as Japanese Knotweed (yes, I know, highly invasive...but makes our only dark honey of the year!). We have learned that the DNR wants to charge us a bigger fee than we'd like to pay for the use of state land in Fireweed honey production, so todays rainy morning we will try for plan #2 - ask the private...
Honey has been coming in from all the apiaries, so much so that I haven't been able to spend as much time on the website as I'd like. Someday soon I'll have really uniform product images and an updated inventory. But between driving north and south, traffic, markets, extracting, bottling, hand writing labels, and many AWESOME house guests, I just haven't gotten to it! We have extracted and sold most of the early springtime wildflower honey from our Seattle urban hives, and now just in the last two days have extracted 300 more lbs of farm fresh Blueberry blossom honey! I'm right handed and use that arm for most of the extracting (hand-crank, folks!) and as of today I'm a...
At long last, we will be back in the seattle metro area with fresh honey! come see us starting tomorrow at the shoreline farmers market every saturday from 10-3! social ice cream is making a batch of sunny honey ice cream, and we will have all sizes of blackberry blossom honey for sale as well as honeystraws and candles! Next Tuesday is the first day for the Seattle city hall market from 10-2 downtown on the front courtyard of city hall, and we will be selling at the South Lake union floating market on Thursdays for the next three weeks (except we might skip it next week because of family obligations!). When the big blackberry crop comes in,...
the answer is yes, someday there will be an easy button. Someday when I can afford to purchase land and make the honey farm of my dreams, one where I will cultivate different flowering plants in succession of one another so that the bees will always have plenty of nectar and pollen, and will make the most amazing proprietary honey ever tasted! But for now I must build my honey empire on other peoples land. Very far in distance from my rental house. And get stuck in city traffic both directions. The lemonade here is that the farther south one travels in western Washington, the warmer and earlier the blooms appear. and the bloom we are interested in in blackberry!...
Yesterday I was all planned out to head south from Skagit County to Pierce County to check the condition of the bees in Sumner (do I need to split? Super? Or both?), and then to stop at all the various packaging companies in Kent for more jars (sorry Quality Cheese, I promise I'll get honey to you soon!). When my phone rang twice in a row at 8am with an incoming call from Dusty Williams (Farmer and landowner in Everson, Wa, also a former beekeeper), I just assumed he was pocket dialing me like he had the month before, and I kept sleeping. But then at 10am when I was up and at em, packing my truck and readying...