August Garden Update & Honey Harvest

Like every year, I neglect to blog during the busy summer months. This is partially due to our travel schedule this time of year, but also because the condition of the garden deteriorates the deeper we get into summer. I've come to the conclusion that for my purposes, we have two growing seasons, Spring which is mid-March to late June (although that might be pushing it); and Fall, which is early September to early December. The most of what remains are the doldrums for my vegetable crops, with a few noteworthy exceptions: okra, field peas, some peppers, and some eggplants.

The last time I posted I was composing the epitaph for my garden because of the monsoons we had had. Somehow, we were able to recover. For a period of time in late June, we were picking over a pound of tomatoes per day, as well as abundant carrots, cucumbers, muskmelons, an occasional watermelon, peppers, and leeks.




Then we stopped getting rain. And it got hotter. Together, these two whittled away at the garden's vitality. Plus, my summertime travel schedule kept me away from my weeding responsibilities. At this point, amidst the knee high weeds, we have a few strangling plants (tomato, pepper, eggplant, etc.), but it's about time to prepare for fall planting. I've already started kale and collard seeds indoors. I will post about fall planting later.

Overall, it was a tough Spring season, with June being a very difficult month. Monsoon rains in the first week, then record hot temperatures for the remainder of the month. We were able to somewhat bounce back from the rain, but the early heat didn't help.

Other exciting news, we harvested our first honey yesterday with the invaluable assistance of Leverne Newman (who graciously let us borrow his extractor and hot knife for an afternoon). Our hive has two boxes that are filled with honey, but we only harvested one of them. We don't need that much honey, and we figured we leave them some for the winter. Well, I'm glad we made that decision because we ended up with almost 2 gallons of honey. The process went pretty smooth, except that after we had removed the honey-filled frames from the hive, we left them out so that the few strangler bees could return to the hive. Well, the opposite happened. A bunch bees from the hive came over and started reclaiming their honey. We didn't know this was happening until we returned a few hours later and saw that some frames had a third less honey than before. The bees were literally stealing their honey back. Once we realized this, we put the frames on the screened porch and proceeded with extraction.






As you can see, our honey is very dark and strong flavored, almost like molasses.