Country Mouse Monday: bees are just yoga, man

This was one of those weekends that was all bees, bees, bees from beginning to end, a blissful playing with and talking about them, first on Saturday at Glide, where I think we taught about 30 interested strangers, to yesterday when my friend Fredo came over for lunch and hive inspection.  Super-duper fun.

Somewhere along the line on Saturday afternoon, standing on the roof at Glide Memorial in the Tenderloin in San Francisco, one of the students, all geared up in her full-body bee suit turned to me and said,

"It really helps if you stay calm, right?"

Yup. Exactly.

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Country Mouse Monday: summer doldrums

It's that time of the summer that I dread a little every year, the time I think of as the doldrums, when it's so hot out, the social calendar so busy, and the plants so big now that I am more and more absent from the garden just as it reaches its peak of packed-ness and glory.

It's almost like the garden that was dreamed and planned and created just gets to a point where it takes over, doesn't need me, runs itself, and I take a step back, then another step.

This is when I start to miss the zucchini, and they grow to enormous dimension, hidden under all that foliage, too large to give away. Enough zucchini bread already. I am overwhelmed and it falls apart a bit.

The doldrums happen every summer.

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Country Mouse Monday: bees in the Tenderloin, stranger in a strange land

On Saturday, I had the very great good fortune of assistant-teaching for the Round Rock Honey Beekeeping School, a possibility I wrote about last month in Why Not Just Ask For It? The two classes -- one at 10, the next at 1 -- were held at Glide Memorial in San Francisco.  Taken on its own, that's entirely intriguing, right: bees in the Tenderloin? Who knew (not me) that Glide has a charming rooftop garden project -- Graze the Roof --  that also houses two honeybee colonies?  Amazing.

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Country Mouse Monday: Honey Sale, a sweet dream come true!

It's funny how dreams can sneak up on you. How you can have a dream and not even realize it's a dream of yours until you wake up into it and it's unfolding and it's perfect.  

Like how I only realized yesterday that having a Honey Sale was a dream of mine, and I only realized it as it was happening all around me.  

It was apparently a deep yearning of my whole entire being, one I didn't know about until I made it happen, to have people in my farmlet on a beautiful Sunday, to have the chance to show them what's growing, what the bees are doing, and to sell the fruits of this labor.

The Honey Sale was a sweet dream-come-true! 

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