We had to get new bees this week – our one remaining hive just left last week. We’re not sure why. They were there one day, and a day or two later they were gone. No dead bees, nothing. Just an empty hive. It was weird.

We researched some places to order bees but just about everybody was out of them. We checked craigslist, and found a man who was splitting his hives. He had two splits left, so we contacted him and Stephen went and picked them up on Tuesday. Our previous bees were Russian bees – these are Italian honeybees.

Those little bees are active! It’s so nice to see so many around the hives again. They like our garden – you can just stand there by the squash and hear a steady buzz.

In order to differentiate between the hives, we named them. One has an X and one has an O on them, but we named them Grace and Mercy. I’m excited to see how they do!

I think it’s day 5. Guess that’s about right.

We’ve picked squash four times. So far that’s been 31 squash we’ve picked. We borrowed my mother in law’s pressure canner, and I canned five quarts of squash today. That’s not counting what we’ve eaten and given away.

It was the first time I’d ever canned using a pressure canner. It went well – but we’ll open a jar of squash soon to see how we like it that way before canning any more of it. What a waste of time and effort if we did it all summer just to discover we don’t like it! It smelled really good, so we’ll see.

S and I also picked 4 cucumbers this morning. He is REALLY excited about the pickles they’re intended to be! My herb garden didn’t survive the heat (the vegetable garden got watered enough, but the herb garden didn’t), so we’ll use the empty space in it to plant more cucumbers. Stephen’s dad’s sweet pickle recipe is phenomenal, so I can’t wait to get pickles going. If I could just figure out a way to keep the flavor but reduce the sugar in it, I’d be happy. I’m not sure though. I could maybe use Splenda but that’s a lot to use.

There are a TON of green tomatoes on the vine – I’ve come across a few interesting recipes. What I’m really hoping to can is tomatoes and peppers. My grandma canned us a bunch last year and we loved it, so I’d like to put up similar this year.

This canning is a lot simpler than I thought it was. A lot of work, yes, but much less complicated than I thought it was. Lord willing, we’ll be doing a LOT of canning this summer!

Stephen informed me this morning that he’s going to be using his blog as our “farm journal.” I get a kick out of reading his take on what goes on around here.

He’s wanting to put a bunch of pictures up on his blog. . .but our digital camera is dying. We’ve been pricing some on ebay and geeks.com but haven’t made the purchase yet. So if our pictures are blurry. . .well, that’s why.

The squash marathon has begun, so I put it on the menu several times this week.

Breakfasts are pretty similar all week – grits or oatmeal and eggs. Lunches will be leftovers, salads, tuna, or wraps of some sort (making a big batch of tortillas on Tuesday). Sides are fresh veggies both from our garden and bought on sale.

Here’s our dinner menu:

Sunday – chicken and dumplings
Monday – hot dogs, sweet potato oven fries, fried squash
Tuesday – chicken and bean tacos with homemade tortillas
Wednesday – ginormous tossed salads with grilled chicken breast, maybe breadsticks too
Thursday – goulash, green beans, grapes (if there are any left by then)
Friday – homemade pizza if we stay home, leftover pizza if we go to mother-in-law’s
Saturday lunch – pasta tuna salad (with lots of fresh veggies in it)
Saturday supper – hamburger patties and squash, potato, and onion stir fry

You can read more menu plans over at I’m an Organizing Junkie.

We just picked the first of our yellow squash. There were thirteen of them, and they overflowed a gallon bucket. There are at least that many (if not more) still on the vine, that were just a bit too small to pick. They’ll be ready before the end of the week. And there were a bazillion blossoms (I know, some of the blossoms are male, and won’t produce squash, but still). There’s going to be WAY more than I imagined.

We’ll be eating squash a lot this summer. . .

Oh yeah – I planted the hills too close as well. It was fun trying to get in between them. The thought of how it will be by summer’s end is a rather funny mental picture.

Ode to an old friend

Farewell my friend
I will miss you
You were a great friend
A hard worker
You could handle anything I sent your way
But not the plastic spoon.
I don’t understand why that spoon
Got you all bent out of shape
Perhaps that’s why
You made a funny noises tonight
Goodbye my old friend
Faithful servant
My mixer
Good bye

I guess stand mixers don’t like plastic spoons. . .duh. . .but I used one a couple weeks ago in my mixer bowl. I had been using a flexible rubber spatula. Those never really got caught in the dough hooks. But when my last spatula’s handle snapped (guess it couldn’t handle bread dough either), I grabbed a plastic spoon to scrape the bowl sides down. Big mistake. It got caught in the dough hooks and bent one out of shape. I bent it back, hoping the motor hadn’t been damaged.

Tonight I went to make a double batch of chocolate chip cookies for tomorrow (the kids in my Sunday School class will be giving their dads cookies for Father’s Day). I stuck the beaters in and turned the machine on. It turns on, but the beaters hit each other. Apparently I bent the shaft they fit into.

Nuts. I guess it’s time for a new mixer. This was only a $30 GE mixer from Walmart, but it was wonderful. Hopefully we’ll get a new one soon. I sent a “Wanted: stand mixer” email to our freecycle group. . .we’ll see what happens. I posted the same ad in the Wanted section of Craigslist to so between the two groups, maybe I’ll find something.

But maybe I should have titled this post, “Comedy of Errors.” The baby cried the entire time I was making cookies – he’d just get quieted down when I’d have to put him down to get a cookie sheet out of the oven. Then, right as I finished, I went to get a glass of milk, and dropped the gallon of milk on the floor. It did spill (EVERYWHERE), but thankfully it wasn’t completely full. But then the baby started crying again when I put him down so I could mop up my mess. I hope I got all the milk mopped up from under the refrigerator. In this heat, I don’t want to think about how pleasant that won’t smell in a day or so.

So. The baby finally fell asleep. Poor little guy is trying to get over a cold and doesn’t feel well, and has a tummyache on top of everything. I put him down in bed and sat down to work on sewing a new skirt.

Somehow I didn’t buy enough fabric for it. There was enough to cut the pattern out as is, but not the extra I usually get to lengthen the skirt the 4″ I usually lengthen it. Oh well. I sewed it up, and held it up to me to try it on. It doesn’t fit. The seams will be easy to let out since the skirt is only a little bit too tight. But after the way the rest of the evening has gone, I just folded it up and put it on my desk. I’m afraid to work on it any longer. I really wanted to wear it tomorrow but it will have to wait until next week.

Stephen took S with him to church for a men’s get together tonight. Boy, is he going to laugh when he gets home and hears about MY evening!

We quite the thunderstorm last night. It woke S up, and he climbed in bed with us.

Shortly before 3 am, I felt a little hand tap my shoulder. Using the loudest possible whisper he could manage, I heard:

“Mommy, I love you.”

What a way to wake up! That boy melts my heart.

He so sweet. He broke one of my good Corelle bowls this morning by dropping another bowl on top of it. Poor boy – he was just trying to put his breakfast bowl into the sink. He felt so bad that he told me he was going to buy me a new one. A really BIG one. Hopefully he’ll remember the importance of being careful next time.

I love having boys!

This is so silly. I was so proud of how big our cucumber plants were getting. See them? I had S stand beside them to show just how big they are.

There’s just one problem. Stephen kept insisting that they were yellow squash. I told him there was no way – that I wouldn’t have planted four hills of yellow squash (with five plants each!).

Then we got to looking at them, and there are indeed four huge hills of yellow squash. There are so many buds on the squash that in about two weeks’ time, we will have FAR more squash than we will know what to do with. The hills that I thought were the squash are instead cucumbers. We wanted to plant a lot of cukes so that we’d have plenty to pickle for ourselves and a lot to share with Stephen’s parents so they could pickle some. Except the squash are cukes and the cukes are squash.

If you look closely, the little plants in the front of the picture are the cukes. They have itty, bitty, cukes on the vines too.

I finally figured out what happened. I went to the farmer’s service center to buy our seeds, and bought them in bulk. A store employee came over to help us since both the boys were with me and I had a few questions about some of the seeds. He scooped them out for me, and forgot to label them. So he peeked inside each packet and labeled them. Apparently the squash and cukes were labeled wrong. We got the packets out tonight to look at the seeds again, and the cucumbers and squash are mixed up.

Although the difference in seeds is pretty obvious when you’re paying attention, I missed that when I planted them. Oh well. I told Stephen tonight that it’d be hilarious if I made a mistake again and accidentally planted 3 or 4 MORE hills of squash instead of cucumbers! HA!

Here’s a picture from the bottom of our garden. The bare spot in front actually has beets planted there. They’re up but they don’t show in the picture. We need to till more ground to do some more planting (later plantings of corn and beans, and of course the cucumbers). You can’t see the corn or the broccoli from this angle.

Yesterday there was enough broccoli to almost fill an entire ice cream-sized bucket (a local farmer’s market sells their produce in these buckets). S helped me pick the leaves off the bunches. He did a great job and was so proud of how big a helper he had been! I need to blanch it so it can go in the freezer.

Our tomatoes are doing great also. Some of them are waist high already, and most have little tomatoes on the vine. These are about two inches across.

YUM. Our gardens have never done this well and it is so exciting. I can’t wait to see how it does this year. There’s a lot we planted that’s new to us (green peppers, pickling cucumbers, pumpkin, watermelon, beets), but it’s so fun.

This is funny. S went out there yesterday and looked at the tomatoes on the vine. “Mommy! My watermelon is doing SO GOOD!” Well, his watermelon plants are doing well, but unfortunately for him, that wasn’t his watermelon! That’s ok. He’s learning.

We had fun taking pictures today. Can you tell? ;O)

I love the expression on C’s face in this one. It’s almost like he’s saying, “I TOLD you not to touch me!”

I took this the other day. It was SO hot in the house and C just doesn’t tolerate the heat well.

We have two beehives. We got them in October. Stephen went to examine the hives about two weeks ago to see how they’d survived the winter, and discovered that one of our hives had died. What a disappointment!

The top super was full of honey, so we took all the frames out and brought them into the house to extract the honey. Our kitchen was a sticky mess! We had honey everywhere. It tastes SO good – and SO much better than the stuff you can buy in the stores.

We found out that ours is tulip poplar honey. It’s very, very dark – looking more like molasses than honey. It also has a very rich, kind of dark flavor. It smells and tastes a little bit like cinnamon. It is phenomenal in wheat and oat bread.

We extracted the honey using the crush and strain method explained at Linda’s Bees. Instead of putting our crushed comb into a bucket (we would have if we had one, lol), we put them into glass jars.

Here are some pictures of the process:

A full jar with a lot of honey still mixed in with the comb

A jar that has drained more – not much honey left with the wax

This is how we had our jars set up – some cheesecloth and duct tape. It really worked well.

We ended up getting just over two quarts of honey from the one hive. We gave one pint to Stephen’s sister and the rest we’ll save for ourselves. We didn’t get the hives with the intention of selling the honey – though that would be nice if we had an excess. We actually got the bees so that we could pollinate our garden better. :O) The honey is definitely a plus.

I couldn’t resist playing a joke on Stephen though. When I went to get the cheesecloth out, I discovered a baggie of little plastic ants that someone had given us (it was a wedding present – everything needed for a picnic – paper plates, plastic spoons and forks, napkins, plastic tablecloth, and plastic ants, lol). He had stepped out of the house for a moment, so I quickly lined up the ants across the stove leading toward the frames that we had placed on the counter. There had been a couple of ants on the frames, so I figured this would be funny. It was.

Stephen walked back in the house and did a huge double take. He told me later that his first thought was, “How in the world did they find the honey THAT quickly?” I laughed so hard!

This weekend a local beekeeper is coming over to help Stephen split our remaining hive. It is strong enough to split into two, so we’re pretty excited about that process. We’re liking this beekeeping business more than we anticipated – it kind of makes us want to have a whole bunch more hives.