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Honey Harvest | A Video
We harvested two bars of honey this morning! The bees are in crazy comb making mode right now and Chris thought we might be able to nab some honey from them while they are still building comb and storing up for the winter. Around 6:58 the volume goes off, so no it isn’t your computer. I forgot to turn the volume back up for that segment and didn’t realize it until the video was uploaded. Sorry! I’m a newbie at this video editing stuff. Around 8:30 we switch to indoors and show you the crushing up of the comb. This was our first time noticing small hive beetle in our…
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Fig Season!
It’s fig season around here, or just starting up really. I tried one out about a week ago and it wasn’t quite ready yet…but now, now we’re talking. Last night I walked back and forth under the fig tree as I passed by doing garden and yard chores and would snag one off as I passed. A deliciously fresh desert! I also noticed some other garden animal had enjoyed one too as it was half eaten on the stem! Last year we harvested from the community garden. I’d forgotten we’d done that around the same time we’d closed on our house. We’ve been here a year—time flies!
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Austin In A Day
Last Sunday I made a very quick trip over to Austin to spend the day with my friend Rosemarie. We were college friends, having met aboard the Texas Clipper II when we sailed the summer before our freshman year in college. She’s from a town just outside of Austin but now lives in California and had come to visit her family for two weeks. We met at the Treaty Oak, a tree I’d heard about but had not visited. I found it tucked between parking lots and a shopping center, so it was hard to imagine the many other oaks that used to surround this now lone oak. After spending…
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Lunch Tomato
My kitchen does not have good food photography lighting so I apologise for the dark tomato shots there. I finally carved into the German Johnson tomato, the only tomato off of that plant so far, that had been sitting in my fridge for several days. It was high time, too. I only ate the two slices but I think I’ll polish the rest off at dinner, only after I save some seeds. It is definitely one of the larger tomatoes I’ve grown so I think I’d like to try again with this variety next year, though if it is a poor producer once again it is being struck off my…
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Life of a Black Swallowtail
I’ve been sitting on these images since April and have just now got around to working on them to get them posted here. I had several dill plants growing out on the side of my house. Dill is one of the a host plants to the black swallowtail butterfly in its larval stage. We had multiple caterpillars chowing down on the dill throughout their lifecycle and I even managed to catch one not long after it had emerged from its chrysalis when I came home from work at lunchtime. It was really fun to check on them daily to see which instar they had grown into, sometimes it seemed like…
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Leo Says…
…don’t forget to change your blog feed reader service if you’ve been using Google Reader. It’s gone starting July 1st. I’ve switched to Feedly and based upon Elizabeth’s review to Bloglovin’ as a backup. They both have platforms to import your current feeds, but you can also type in Oceanicwilderness.com into either and add me in or use this link for Bloglovin’. You can also copy in http://feeds.feedburner.com/oceanicwilderness to either of those services, or click the link, but it seems Feedburner has narrowed down their list of potential subscription services significantly. Email subscriptions still work currently with Feedburner so that is also an option until Google does away with Feedburner…
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Evening On Top of Aasgard Pass | Enchantment Lakes
Pitching our tent on top of the Pass turned out to be perfect. We found an out of the way alcove, pitched the tent and took an afternoon nap. I alternated between reading and napping and of course poking my head out to check on our gear in case the goats were out snacking on it or our food. Chris saw some other folks climbing one of the mountains nearby so he followed in their tracks after dinner in order to try to see about taking sunset photos. I can’t remember if it was a success or not, but I’m sure the view was even better a few hundred feet…
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June Harvest
Black from Tula Ceylon Red German Johnson French Breakfast radishes Schimmeig Striped Hollow Strawberry Popcorn Striped Togo Trifle Black from Tula & Striped Togo Trifle Monster squash The heat is killer now. Sometimes I am tempted to get up early in the mornings just to work outside but then I laugh at myself and realize just how crazy that is—me, get up? Nah! Although, I have been getting up early to rollerblade a few times a week—some weeks—when I manage to get up after Leo pokes me in the face with his paw a million times. But, it is hot. Now I try not to work outside until 7pm and…
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View From Aasgard Pass | Enchantment Lakes
I stared at the snow covered peak in the far background on the right for a long time. It looked gigantic, threatening, exciting. I later determined it was Glacier Peak. When we arrived back at Aasgard Pass we stopped to take a short break and take in the view. I hadn’t taken any photos on our summit, having been tired and ready to filter water at one of the lakes. That afternoon we were planning on descending and camping somewhere down at Colchuck Lake but I decided that we should camp up top, enjoy the view through the evening, especially since we had the permits to be up there. So…
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Sweet Potato FAIL
For the last several weeks I’ve been noticing a very small, really tiny bug in our kitchen around our pantry. I’ve just swept them up or killed them if I saw them walking around, but I get bugs in the kitchen coming from the sink, up through the pipes from the septic tank, so I really just expected it was something along those lines. Finally as I was cleaning up last night for a visit with family coming to town I decided to Google the bug with a weird description. It had a long snout and a rotund abdomen and went from there. The initial results gave me the idea…