weeds – Windtree Bee

After a three week hiatus, we’ll be back at the Hereford Farm Market tomorrow! We’re bringing: Mimosa Jelly, Pina Colada Jam, Black Cherry Preserves, Maple Strawberry Jam, and our Chai Tea loose-leaf blends. The market is on Saturdays from 9:00 a.m. to noon at Hereford High School.

Honey Update

We’re currently out of honey but will be offering a second harvest soon. Craig pulled a bunch of supers off the hives, so now we just have to centrifuge the frames, filter the honey, jar and label it. We’ll probably have it ready for sale in 3-4 weeks. I’ll definitely let everyone know when it’s available again. End-of-summer honey is always delicious!!

Another Use for Our Chai Tea?

My younger daughter, Ellie, is a Fashion Design student at the Fashion Institute of Technology. She wanted to experiment with natural fabric dyes, so earlier this week we spent one morning testing tea blends, including chai, to see which worked best.

Ladew Gardens Butterfly House

The Butterfly House at Ladew Gardens is open! It’s early in the season for butterflies, but the interns have caught a half-dozen or so beautiful, native butterfly species. One of the neat things about Ladew’s Butterfly House is that you can see all four stages of a butterfly’s life cycle: egg, caterpillar, chrysalis, and butterfly. The docents there — including me! 🙂 — will happily show you which species are in the house on the day you visit and point out where all the life is happening inside.

Our Garden

Absolutely overgrown with weeds! I made the mistake of not weeding before vacation and — wow!!! — came back to monstrous growth. (I know, I know… I should not be surprised; this is what happens when you let a garden run amok.) There are more weeds than flowers in there right now, so I spent a lot of time this week trying to restore order. It’s an ongoing project.

One silver lining is that the pollinators don’t care about the weeds. In fact, they’re thriving amongst the chaos. Because of that, I’m being selective about what I yank out. A bunch of mint and three ginormous yellow sweet clover plants sprouted up in the middle of our white clover walkway. I left them. The yellow sweet clover is always covered in different types of bees, but was quickly growing to overtake the entire middle of my garden. I gathered up all of the overflowing branches/vines/tendrils and gently staked them.