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The collards were starting to bolt and I decided that I wasn’t in mood for boiling up lots of collards for dinner one night and instead wanted to do something different. In passing on a blog somewhere I’d remembered reading about collard green pesto. Sure enough there were a lot of recipes and I decided on this one to experiment with. I modified it using walnuts instead of pecans and eliminating the olives, but for the most part I followed the directions. Pesto is forgiving and very pliable, I think you could use any kind of green for a different result.

All of the collard leaves were not picked, but I did get a giant handful of them. Once you blanch the greens, they soften up quite a bit and easier to blend. Note, I also took the ribs off of the leaves.

Blends up well!

That bunch of collards and the rest of the ingredients only made six little tubs! I think I could probably get three more with what is left outside on the plants. I’m trying to let the plants go to seed so I can save seeds for fall use.

I definitely recommend trying some pesto made with collards sometime; I think chard or kale would be nice as well!

Our 5-in-1 peach/nectarine tree flowered earlier this spring and now has a few fruits on it. I think there is one nectarine but the peach limb has produced the most fruit so far. Technically I think you are supposed to pick the fruit off the first year in the ground in an effort to get the tree to have better growth but with only three or four fruits we decided to leave them on.

I guess in another month or so I’ll get to taste the peaches and savor our teeny harvest.

Gaillardia pulchella, aka: Indian Blanket or Firewheel, is one of my favorite natives. It blooms for much of the year in warmer parts of Texas and other areas of the south. They’ve been blooming very well for the last few weeks and another patch of them we put in our main garden is about to start blooming as well. We just bought a hybrid variety that is mostly yellow at a nursery. I could probably get into Indian Blanket hybrid varieties and become a collector of these flowers like we have with Salvia.

I’m over at Sprout Dispatch today showing off what is growing in the vegetable garden. Come over and say hello!

Last night I spent an hour or so working around the potting bench, cleaning up seed trays and 4″ pots that hadn’t sprouted or that had already been transplanted. I started a round of more seeds from our stash, trying to germinate some old seeds in an effort to get some new plants for the garden but also an effort to get a fresh batch seeds from that too. Some of that effort is probably futile as some of the seeds are many years old and are likely not going to germinate at all. Oh well.

I find myself outside until 8pm these days, working until almost dark and then coming in for dinner if I can stand waiting until that late. Right now I feel semi-caught up, if there is such a thing, but of course next week will come along and there will be another round of weeds to pull, seedlings to transplant, and deer to curse at for eating some new blossom.

I’m just waiting for that fig tree to fruit so I can eat dinner outside.

The ‘Kiowa’ blackberries gave me two tasty little snacks on my way through the yard as I took photos last night. The deer have been doing some light browsing too I saw. Doesn’t the spines hurt their mouth? I guess that still doesn’t stop them from eating my roses!

What? You thought I was getting broody? No, not yet, but the queen of our hive sure is! See there in the middle, the white capped cells? That’s brood, eggs that were laid by the queen waiting to develop into full grown bees!

Last weekend Chris and I took out each comb in an attempt to try to find the queen. We didn’t end up finding her, silly girl was hiding in the mass of workers and drones.

Our colony has been busy building up their comb and adding more in the last week. Now when I open the window I can actually see the combs—usually. With this freakish cold front on Thursday they were balled up tight to keep warm so I could barely see it then.

Yesterday I refilled their sugar water and I didn’t even bother to put on my suit as the bees were being docile, still balled up over the comb. I flipped up a couple of bars and spacer, reached my hand in, switched the lids to the mason jars and in a few minutes their sugar water was refilled. I did notice a couple of dead bees and was unsure if I should have picked them out or let the bees take care of them. Shortly after we put the bees into the hive Chris said he saw one of the worker bees ferret away a dead bee to the hinterlands of the garden, so this is kind of why I thought I’d let the bees do their own dirty work. I guess if they don’t bother in the next few days I’ll go get them out.

As for bees dying, it is natural for that to happen, while the queen will live several years workers only live for a few months, less in the summer. This is why you need brood!

You might remember back when I wrote about getting this hydrangea on Sprout Dispatch. If not click and you can see it in its original place before the garden was put in. Well, the deer visited it shortly after it was planted and then winter came on and no new growth was put on in the meantime. After putting the garden in and with the lengthening days the hydrangea took off and put on a ton of new growth. A flower spike came out in the last week or so and the flower began opening within the last few days. A few nights ago I decided I needed to get a few photos just in case the deer found it again. Up until that point it had evaded the deer, I guess it was too far back in the bed for them to care (which makes no sense because they walk all over the bed). So, photos taken….and then this morning? The deer had munched one of the branches down.

The deer are a constant thorn in my side.

*note the pollen in the cells on the right*

Our bees are so friendly! Chris got in there on Saturday to switch out the sugar water and to see how the comb building was going. I hadn’t been able to see any comb being built through the window, but sure enough there were at least seven bars with comb, at least three of them with a decent amount of comb too. As I noted in one of the photos above, you can see pollen in one of them. Soon the queen will be laying brood cells and the hive will really be under way. The bees have been more active over the last few days with the rise in temperature once again. However we’re going to be getting another cold front late tonight that will probably make them stay closer to home for a day or two.

I really love having the hive so far!

Oh goodness. Trees. I should have bought a house on a prairie.

Yesterday was a good work day outside. I went and picked up a truck load of mulch for $10 at a local landscaping place, came home and did some mowing, and then spent some peaceful time weeding the makeshift veggie area by the side of the house. I’m letting the dill finish flowering and go to seed while the black swallowtails finish their life cycle of caterpillar and chrysalis before turing into beautiful butterflies. The onions and garlic have another month and the collards are almost done, bolting as we ‘speak’.

Chris came home in mid-afternoon and we did a few things around the yard and then took a nap, afterwards deciding on the dinner movie theater for the evening. He was showering, I was on the computer telling Facebook about the summer tanager we saw earlier in the afternoon when shortly after I’d submitted the message I heard a crackling, rustling noise from outside. It sounded like a branch fell and I went outside to investigate. I wasn’t on the front porch long when my neighbor spotted me and told me “Your tree fell!”

Sure enough I peered around to the backyard and there was what had been a perfectly alive and well pine tree earlier that morning as I mowed around it broken at its base and being supported by a sweetgum near the pond.

Crappity, crap, crap. Actually it was more like damn, damn, damn.

My neighbor and her boyfriend had been in the back room of her house and heard the sound too and were stunned to see the tree laying there. I couldn’t believe it either! I expected pine beetles to be crawling out of it but didn’t see any and there hadn’t been any sign of pine beetle infestation there anyway (no sawdust at the base). My next thought was perhaps it was red heart but I can’t tell from the broken base and I never saw one of the outer conks that are prevalent.

So, I don’t know.

It is just so strange! All I think is, what triggered it? Did the ground shift a bit and then *bam!* it fell? I dreamed about it last night, imagining a sinkhole taking over our yard and other pines falling down.

Ack. It just sucks to lose what seemed like a perfectly good tree. Chris isn’t going to attempt to cut it up due to its precarious nature so I’ll be calling for quotes to get it taken care of this week. I guess the ‘ok’ news is that now the sapling pine that was just in front of the pair of pines there will be able to grow and take over that spot, but now I’m worried about the pine tree next to it, will it fall someday?

I think it was three years ago, right before we left for the AT, a storm damaged a tree at my grandfather’s house and it had to be cut down. I can’t remember his exact words but I think he said he had ‘tree-itis’. Well, Grandad, me too.

This is the back of our middle building, the shed/carport/my studio building. When we had our inspection last year before moving in the inspector mentioned that bees had been boring holes into the wood on the back of the building along the top near the roof. I mentioned this to Chris after we moved in but we never really saw the bees and coupled with the busyness of moving into we didn’t investigate into it.

A few weeks ago I noticed that what I suspected to be mason bees hovering in the area. Since then we realized they were heavily utilizing that area and sure enough Chris found them chomping out holes to lay their larvae. Even if you stood near the back of the building you could even hear them chomping out the wood. Not so good.

Last weekend Chris spent time plugging the holes and then we hung up three mason bee ‘houses’ for them to use instead. I actually haven’t gone to follow up and see if they are using them yet so this weekend I need to poke my nose in and see what’s going on. I thought it was funny that the houses we ordered happened to be the one that Chel wrote about on Sprout Dispatch in early March.

So, that is nice we’ve got the mason bees out there!

On Monday I had to get into our honey bee hive to check and see if the queen had been freed by the rest of the bees. I was extremely nervous about doing this as Chris is out of town and he’s definitely read more about them than I have but we went over everything before he left. I almost forgot that I needed to wear jeans when going out there and was about to go out with the top suit and some shorts and then realized that was not a smart thing to do be doing as a novice keeper.

Jeans on and suited up, out I went.

I was also going to be switching out the sugar water that had come with the hive. We won’t be feeding them sugar water permanently, this is only temporary until likely this weekend, something to supplement them while they get established. We had noticed a few bees buzzing around over the weekend in the flower garden but not enough for us to be satisfied with them getting enough food to get started. So, Chris put the sugar water in there and then promptly came in and brought three bees with him! Note: check clothes a second time before coming in the house. Don’t worry, the bees were returned safely outside without any harm!

Anyway, back at the hive I had to open up the hive, move the bars slowly back and check out the little box that the queen was in. The bees were definitely noisy and got louder if I moved too fast, reminding me to move gently. It was fun to see how they hold onto each other, creating little tails of bees clinging fast as I moved the bars. Finally I arrived at the queen box and I noticed they had already started sealing wax on the top as I had to pull pretty hard to get the box off the lip of the bar. There were bees clinging to the outside of the box as I lifted it up and I did glimpse a bee inside the box but after I shooed the bees off the outside I noticed the inside was now empty. Hmm. I flipped the box over and noticed the ‘candy’ that had sealed up the bottom had been eaten through and thus the queen had been freed already. The bee I saw was likely just a worker bee exploring.

I was glad of this because otherwise I was going to have to pry open the cork that was on top of the box and let the queen out myself. Next I replaced the bars back in order and then switched out the sugar water for the Mason jar of sugar water I had made up. Finally I put all the bars back in place and let them bee. (oops, I’m already subbing words…be for bee. hah!)

Every morning and evening I open up and check the hive via the window on the front. They were quiet this evening, huddled together after this cool front that came through this afternoon. They have definitely laid down a line of wax along the tops of the bars but no significant comb being built yet.

And if you know me in real life and know how my pets ‘talk’….well, the bees got their voice this afternoon.

We got up this morning, stopped for breakfast tacos at the gas station, and drove through rural Montgomery and Grimes Counties to get to R. Weaver Apiaries just outside of Navasota. If you are looking for bluebonnets, you Texans out there, FM 2 in Grimes County has a ton of bluebonnets in the ranch pastures, sweeping vistas of them. Very beautiful!

The bees were very quiet on our way home, not a buzz, and then, as you see in the video above we put them into the hive. They are doing well, bees flitting about the garden right now. We’re doing a bunch of yard work today so we’ll be able to keep an eye on them. It would be awesome if next spring we were harvesting our first batch of honey!