It’s Friday morning. I awake at 6am from bleeting cats. After letting them in for their breakfast, I boil the kettle for French press coffee while I could hear my husband stirring upstairs. After bringing him a steaming cuppa’ java, and checking my email, I put on a huge pot of water to boil for making sugar syrup. It’s August and this means there are far less flowers for the bees to suck on. So the feeding begins. Did you know that Costco 40kg bags of sugar cost approximately $33. And in full feeding time, that may last me a week for 23 hives. Greedy bees!

Then I pull my bee-suit on over my growing belly and my pjs and tromp out to the hives behind the house. I crack the first lid open with my fancy new hive tool.

This is my cool new hive tool. It works great. I got it from Bees ‘N Glass. I try them for my every beekeeping need. This is not only because they give great service, but they have become friends, they are teachers and they host a herd of barn cats where we managed to procure our lovely balls of fluff.

The smell as you crack a hive lid is intoxicating. Especially in the Summer when the bees are drawing their wax comb and filling it with sweet honey. In the early morning sun, there are few smells that compare to the warm golden smell of honey wafting from a calmly buzzing hive.

After checking on my flower-girls, (the beehives behind my house are all named after flower names) I have second breakfast with my husband and perhaps a cup of tea. Then I proceed to the blueberry field hives. They are 4 in a row, Rapunzel, Lucy, Beatrix and Adelaide.

After spotting Rapunzel and her very extended backside, (Rapunzel let down your golden bum…..?) I load up the truck with the supplies I need for my outyards. I have 10 hives that are not on my property. Sometimes it’s inconvenient to drive to all these different spots on the island and it would certainly be faster to have them all in one spot. But I don’t believe that it’s best for the bees on Pender. I don’t think that there is enough food in one place. And I like the fact that if one hive gets a disease, it doesn’t automatically mean it’s spread to all the other hives.

Plus, I get such different scenery at each of my outyards. I have one on the ridge of a cliff that looks out onto the San Juan and Gulf Islands. It’s so peaceful there I can hear the tiny feet of the bees pattering against the frame as I examine them for mites, check that they are making babies and that they have food.

After finishing my rounds, I am exhausted. The baby is kicking and hungry and I’m ready to head home. I have this great idea for a luscious pizza with extra mozzarella.

After fulfilling this craving and sitting down to home-made pizza crust topped with golden bubbling mozza, like a blanket over the chard, mushrooms, olives, artichokes and green-striped cherry tomatoes, Marc and I sit down for a re-run of Dr. Who.

Sometimes life is sweeter than honey. Just by the company we keep.

If all of you have been on the edge of your seats for the last week wondering what happened to my elusive swarm, wonder no longer. Or keep wondering… They are gone. They have flown from their very high perch and found another home. And it is not the home we designated for them. I suppose they wanted to make their own realty choice and did not appreciate our promise of coziness and ample food. If someone promised you milk and honey (sans the milk) wouldn’t you take them up on the offer? I suppose it was just too good to be true. So Gertrudabelle is carrying on, hatching and mating a new queen, Gerty the Second, and the bees are concentrating their power on the blackberries which are in full bloom.

The blueberry watch is on now. We have 500 blueberry plants that Marc tends faithfully, weeding, scything, fertilizing. And they have a great set on them this year. They are hanging in luscious green clumps right now so we keep checking the weather, hoping for some heat to turn them blue. Rather ironic when you think about it that blueberries turn blue because of heat. I turn blue because of cold. Or because I’ve eaten too many blueberries! These are our big farm crop for the Farmer’s Market.

Speaking of Farmer’s Market, I was asked to give a beekeeping workshop this Saturday so off I trotted. I was fortunate enough to snag an observation 1-frame case from someone getting out of beekeeping, and I put a frame from Cleo Hive and took them for show-and-tell at the Market. I think the talk went well and I was encouraged to have people asking really intelligent questions. The children there even seemed quite informed about the honeybee’s life cycle. Except one well-meaning child asked me if I had bees in the case, or wasps. Marc and I giggled about it afterwards, the thought of farming wasps was quite amusing. It ranks up there with farming mosquitos. I think perhaps if I were to be a super-hero villain, I would choose something so insidious.

I had my first ultrasound on Wednesday to see how “Womb-eo” is progressing. Thankfully, he/she has two arms, two legs and a head. And apparently the technician could see the cerebellum (how you would know in a squirming blob of a tiny sea monkey, I have no idea.) and the kidneys, bladder and spine. It was good to see that the squirt was very active and fiesty. Perhaps 5 months squished in utero will calm that down so that the baby will be nothing but a cooing joy when he/she emerges… Well, we can all cling to our delusions!

And I did want to share with you my successes. Since being pregnant, my baking and cooking skills have completely disintegrated. I have burned more things than ever in my life! And I completely blame the cocktail of hormones coursing through my veins, but a couple of the burning incidences have reduced me to tears and hopelessness. But last night, I had a first ever success!

I attempted yorkshire pudding in muffin cups. I have done this before and they have ended up the consistency of hockey pucks, with the potential of seriously cracking drywall. Well, behold these puffy beauties!

I hope your Canada Day was splendid!

We’ve picked our first handful of strawberries, hot from the tardy June sun. We’ve picked our first bowl full of peas, and our first meal of scapes. This feels like bounty after not planting a proper Winter garden and buying our produce from the store for many months.

But this is not overwhelming though I feel overwhelmed by the bounty my life is giving me right now. I’m so appreciative of this moment. I can look back and how I got where I am.  I’m living on 160 acres of beautiful farmland, keeping bees, growing veggies, expecting my first child, I can look back and take credit for some of the decision-making that brought us here. But a lot of it was very good timing and a faith that everything would work out.

Moving to a Gulf Island was a fancy of mine for a while. I loved the slower pace of life here, the lean towards artistic visions, the small-island community. I was thrilled with Marc agreed to moving to Pender. (It wasn’t a hard sell.) By picking up and moving away from the city, the conveniences, we moved a step in the right direction, but it was a small step. We dreamed of growing our own food, we dreamed of a slower and simpler life. Our first year on Pender, we lived in a house that made no provisions for the frequent power outages. So when the lights were taken away, so was our heat, our means of cooking, making our little house an ice box. There was no sun there and I kept a hive of bees in the shady flowerless backyard, hoping for a better place. We and the bees  survived but we did not thrive. When we had the opportunity to caretake such a large and beautiful chunk of land, we jumped on it with one swift “YES!” We knew we would never be able to afford buying such a huge amount of land so it was like aiming for the stars and then finding one within reach, lassooing it and holding on!

Despite all of this sentimentality, things are not always perfect here, but they are pretty close. I remember a month after moving to Pender Island, I realized the cramps in my stomach were gone. These cramps from a job I hated, the stress of city life, the demand to have more stuff, to earn more, to spend more. When I was living in the city, I didn’t even notice the cramps because I thought they were part of daily life. It was a miracle to realize life without this!

I look back on some of the photos of our first couple years here and I am in awe of the beauty here, of our little lives. We’ve done a lot, yes, but we’ve been given more. I am very grateful.

I was sitting one morning, patting my growing belly, and I was thinking about the next stage of this pregnancy. When will I feel the baby kick, I have an ultrasound coming up. Then I stopped myself. I knew right then, that I needed to appreciate every fleeting moment, because it will be so soon when my child is ready for kingergarden, then high school, then graduation. This is my very first baby, at 17 weeks old. I will never be here again. So I stopped, I breathed and I sent my thanks upwards. These are incredible moments and I am here, now. Thank you.

The blackberries are starting to hold out their flowers like presents and the bees are gulping it up. They are on the blackberry bushes on the entire walk to work, just over 1 km. It’s like having friends to walk home with.

We ate our first small handful of strawberries from our own garden yesterday. Our garden is in shambles this year. The upper garden, right in front of our house, is green and growing with inadvertent things. Potatoes that we did not get out last year in time. They are over-running the celeriac, the peas, the strawberries, the spinach and the beets. We have another fragrant invasion. The oregano. What I thought were weeds, and I was pulling up with fury, then wondering why I kept thinking of spaghetti. I put it down to a weird pregnancy craving, until I realized the little fuzzy stems were babies of our oregano monster.

Our lower garden needs constant love and weeding or the horse-tail takes over. We’ve tried mulching (which helps a little) weeding, though not as often as required. And we’ve got strawberries, asparagus, beans and garlic down there. The garlic is growing tasty scapes which we harvested for dinner last night.

Scapes are the Dr Seuss looking curls atop the plant that are where the garlic makes it’s flowers. Garlic has been sterile for many years and can only make clones of itself. There is research into putting the umph! back into garlic’s genetic pool but what we’ve got right now are clones of different varieties.

If you ever see garlic scapes at a farmer’s market or in the grocery store, snatch ‘em up! They are such a treat. They can be eaten raw but they have quite the bite to them. If you toss them in olive oil and put them right on the barbecue, sear them a little on both sides, it takes the sharpness out of the taste and you get such a tasty treat. They made the perfect compliment to our kale and potatoes last night.

They are also great for freezing and putting into soup, stock or stews in the Winter.

Have you discovered any amazing foods lately? I’ve been really interested in using more beans in our diet. Does anyone have good recipes for different kinds of legumes?

And since it’s strawberry season, don’t forget to pop a few of these drops of sunshine in your mouth!

It has been remarkably cold for the mildest part of BC this year. The bees I’ve ordered are much later than expected. The tomatoes are dreadfully behind, and our garden has gone to shambles. In the midst of the chaos, between family weddings and family events, our garden has continued growing alongside the weeds. The lettuce has bolted but now we can collect seeds. The radishes have self-seeded from last year and the peas are climbing the trellis, aspiring to be Jack’s “pea-stalk.” Potatoes have sprouted in every corner, despite the cats’ best attempt to dig them up and turn their growing bed into a potty.

Between reading Gabor Mate’s book “When the Body says No” and attending weddings, I have found time to knit a baby vest for a friend who’s having her first born. This friend’s mother and my mother were friends since they were wee. This friend of mine and I are a year apart and grew up together. And finally, she is expecting her first baby. It was with such love and pleasure, I got to knit her this little vest. The thing I love about knitting for others is that it is a meditation for the person it is going to. I can sit and knit and think about the person, the impact they’ve had on my life, and what good things I wish for them.

Even though today feels like October with the weather wet enough to demand a warm up with the wood stove, I am looking forward to the summer commencing. The blueberries have a great set on them and I’m happy to return to the season of plenty as the Farmer’s Market really expands into veggies, fruits and flowers.

Wishing you, dear reader, all the best as your May folds into June!