Plan Bee: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the Hardest-Working Creatures on the Planet

by Susan Brackney

The book for today’s review was provided by: Perigee Books, Penguin Group (USA)

The harvest bounties, floral comforts, and kitchen creations that I share at AppleJade would none of them be possible without the bees.  This is why Susan Brackney’s book Plan Bee is one of my favorite book reads so far this year: it is fun to read, useful, and relevant.

Plan Bee tells us about the biology, history, lore, and functions of bees, emphasizing the honeybee and its place in agriculture.  Susan Brackney writes Plan Bee from her own honeycomb adventures, such as they were launched at the intersection of curiosity, love, and a fateful garage sale.

Brackney affords her readers the unique opportunity to learn about the art and science of beekeeping by candidly sharing the fruits of her own learning process along with a spoonful of humor.  Brackney provides meaningful scientific information including physiology, habitat, and ecology, as well as domestic beekeeping (apiary) and its history.  Although she details the nuts-and-bolts of bee workings, Brackney provides no indecipherable scientific diagrams, and no unpronounceable terminology.

Throughout Plan Bee Brackney interlaces cultural context, folklore, mythology, and the many uses and applications of bees, their activities, and their byproducts.  The reader’s focus is aligned to incorporate flowers, table honey, pollination, and agriculture.  Brackney helps attune the reader to the significance and importance of bees and their well-being for the health not only of humans, but also the environments of which we are all a part.

In addition to the wealth of what I learn in its pages, what I like most about Plan Bee are the little moments of recognition that I feel as I read: wild flowers that I recognize from my Pennsylvania gardens, wild bee homes that I find in my Washington gardens, and raw, local honey that I search out in farmer’s markets and local stands wherever I go.

In Brackney’s book I hear the balance of practicality and sustainability that I attempt to achieve in my own life.  Although she provides great information for aspiring apiarists, she also offers simple suggestions which everyone can try.  For example: she suggests that an easy way to help all bees might be to leave a corner of the lawn to “go wild” with weed flowers, or to raise the lawnmower blades a few inches in order to spare the violets and clover.

By helping her readers to understand Why Bees Matter, Brackney inspires us to action.  I came away from this book knowing that I’m not ready to be a beekeeper, but that I am prepared to grow more flowers, provide the trappings of wild bee homes, and offer bee-baths (located away from the existing bird-baths).  Brackney provides a measured sense of doable action with suggestions for anyone who wishes to improve – or at least not worsen – the fate and survival of bees.

In Plan Bee Brackney titles her Final Note, “Who Needs Chickens Anyway?”.  We learn at the beginning of her story that Susan Brackney ended up on the honeybee path when she first decided she was ready to try something new; a garage sale which offered a beekeeper’s gear cast the deciding vote in the toss-up between chicken-raising and beekeeping.

For this twist of fate, I feel that we are all fortunate: Susan Brackney’s Plan Bee invites its readers to re-approach the world with curiosity in order to explore, investigate, and notice.  Like a bee, Brackney gives careful attention to each subject as if humming from flower to flower, connecting insects with habitat with agriculture with humanity with choices with actions.  Plan Bee leaves its readers with a sense of wonder for, and belonging to, the natural world and all its honeyed sweetness.

A quick peek ahead at what’s to come at AppleJade: here you can see my plant starts enjoying a little sunshine outdoors thanks to this nice, warm weekend. Not pictured here are the cold frames under construction. I am preparing some step-by-step instructions to help you build your own. More soon!

Greetings from sunny, southern California!  Blogging will be light until the autumn while I travel, but I will be sure to stop in from time to time and share garden finds and recipes.

Later this year we’ll check back in on the Kitsap garden and see what comes up!

Gardening can benefit from a healthy combination of vision, creativity, and random surprise.  For me, gardening serves the dual purpose of helping me to discover things about myself while I slowly learn about the green world.  This summer I have been extracting my garden from weeds and tree sprouts.  In these pictures you can see what I’ve uncovered so far.  It may not look like much, but all I see is endless potential!

The strawberry harvest was excellent.  This small patch yielded about 2-3 cups of fruit for 3-4 weeks (making for some delicious, vitamin-packed margaritas!).  In a few more weeks the blackberries will begin to ripen, and I’m confident that I’ll have enough for pies and freezing.  I will relocate a few plants to increase my yields next year.

The herbs bring back a strong sense of nostalgia as they work their way back into my meals.  Certain herbs and spices remind me of places I have lived (and grown) or visited.  Lemon rosemary reminds me of Kitsap, Washington.  Greek oregano will probably always remind me of Chester County, PA.  I have already taken cuttings of the herbs so that they too can be relocated around the property.  I also found time to plant a couple tomatoes and an Anaheim chili pepper - I’ll show you what they’re doing next week.

While the wild plants had to be removed to make room for planted vegetables, I’ve made sure to leave many in place.  These wildflowers are an important attractant for bees and butterflies (and besides that, I like them).  The rest of the garden is slowly being cultivated into soft, open beds like the one you see here.  This is where I will be sowing seeds for cold-hearty plants which will likely survive the temperate Washington winter even outside of the coldframe.

And speaking of cold frames, now that we have completed new gates for the garden, cold frames are the new weekend projects.  Stay tuned for diagrams, pictures, and step-by-step instructions for you to build you own cold frame in time for autumn and winter planting!

Our garden in Kitsap is a forest garden by nature (no pun intended).  Despite our three year absence in Philadelphia, our vegetable garden nestled in the Kitsap forests has persisted with chives, onions, thyme, mints, rosemary, strawberries, and other assorted flowers and herbs.  Thanks to the temperate Western Washington weather, these plants have patiently grown year-round without any tending from me.

In between my work I take every chance I can find to get out in the garden and extract the “garden plants” from the “weeds.”  Here in the forest, hemlocks and alders seed themselves readily among the vegetables.  I’ve been fortunate to find that several wild herbs I like have incorporated themselves into the beds including sorrel, red clover, and dandelion.

This July I will be sharing the view from my forest garden as I revitalize my own local food source.  I am in the process of reestablishing the beds in order to sow greens, late tomato starts, and herbs.  We will be building new cold frames, which will be a great opportunity for me to show you some step-by-step instructions for how we build ours from what materials we have available.  Finally, time permitting I will be sharing some simple ideas for drying, storing, and using herbs.

Greetings from the Emerald City!  I am settling in to the Pacific Northwest after enjoying a most excellent roadtrip from Philadelphia to Seattle.  I will resume blogging in June with a post frequency of 1 – 2 times per week on each blog: AppleJade, Arboreality, and Brainripples.

At AppleJade we will be discussing healthy, happy lifestyle through attitude, gardening, cooking, and simple, green living.

At Arboreality we will be exploring the woods of Western Washington and other localities within reasonable driving distance.

At Brainripples we will be sharing methods of creative exploration, successful approaches to working independently, and unique perspectives from featured artists.

You will also find me blogging at the Pennwriters Area 6 HQ, a new blog created as a resource for writers living in and around southeastern Pennsylvania.  I will be blogging with other Pennwriters about local news, events, information, and of course – writers!

If you are a writer in the Puget Sound Area (Seattle, Tacoma, Olympia, Kitsap Peninsula, Bellingham) and would like to join my newly forming Seattle Pennwriters Critique Groups, please contact me for more information.

More to follow!

PS – Today’s image is of the columbine flowers still growing happily in my Washington gardens.

PPS – Please bear with me as I acclimate to the new WordPress interface, and please let me know when things don’t look *quite right*.

I am returning to Seattle this May, and AppleJade will be on vacation until June 1, 2008 while I pack and travel.

Once I am settled in Seattle you will be able to join me here at AppleJade as I create a new vegetable garden from seed to table.  Until then, have a wonderful, productive season, and feel free to stop by and consider goal-setting, attitude adjustments, and easy ways to simplify your life.

See you in June!

Happy Spring, Northern Hemisphere (and Happy Autumn to the Southern Hemisphere)!  If the season has you looking for new, creative ways to make positive changes in your life and attitude, try a new approach: simplify.  Simplifying your life in small ways can have an enormous impact on your health and happiness.  Today I’d like to talk about how to simplify your life by reducing your wealth of material “stuff.”

Spring cleaning should not be limited to the dusty windows and the ceiling cobwebs.  Cleaning our homes can make us feel better by improving the quality of life in our living space.  Cleaning is also a great excuse to get up out of your chair and move around.  (Anyone who tries to say cleaning isn’t exercise has never properly scrubbed their bathroom.)

When you tackle your spring cleaning this year, I encourage you to get rid of some STUFF.  If you’re a pack rat, it’s easy to forget just how awesome it feels to downsize your materials things.  Take a look around your home: where do you see piles of “stuff” collecting?  What shelves, desks, drawers, corners, even rooms seem to be magnets for all things useless?  If you are in need of a lift, get rid of some stuff:

Donate – donate useable goods that you no longer use!  In the US I recommend The Military Order of the Purple Heart Service Foundation.  You can make an appointment and they’ll bring a truck right to your curb.  Visit their website for more details about items they will accept.

Freecycle – useable goods that cannot be donated are still useful!  I’ve been Freecycling happily for three years.  It’s easy to do, and you can truly make someone’s day by sharing an item you no longer need.

Recycle – items which are no longer useable should first be recycled or composted wherever possible.  Seriously: get in your filing cabinets and decide how much of that old paperwork you really need.  (Remember to properly shred ALL items with personal information).

Trash – do not try to donate or Freecycle your trash: if it’s trash, trash it.  If you’ve got a major load, call 1 800 GOT JUNK.  They’ll come out and give you a no-obligation estimate for your load of “stuff”, and haul it away without you so much as glancing at a transfer station.  (Of course, if you grew up enjoying trips to the dump with Dad, you might want to save the fun for yourself.  It’s incredibly good for the soul to heave items into the dump.  If you think I’m joking, you really need to try it out for yourself).

Once your house has reduced, reused, and recycled, it’s time to rethink: take a breath and feel the difference in your home.  Acknowledge the change in your mindset about what you really NEED in your life, and what really brings you happiness.  Apparently, it was not all that stuff!

Now that you have removed the first layer of stuff, you will be able to see the next layer of things-you-don’t-need cluttering up your living space.  Give yourself a week to bask in the awesomeness of your newly-cleared home, and then if you’re feeling brave: repeat.

It may be too cold to sow seeds in the garden, but it’s the perfect time to be sowing the cold frame.  As spring approaches, the sun’s path rises; this gives more warming light which the cold frame is built to capture.

While these pictures may not look pretty, they are actually very exciting (ok, at least for me).  [Remember you can click on pictures to enlarge.]  What you can see here are the lettuce, mustard, onion, chive, and cilantro plants which have grown slowly throughout the winter.  Scattered around them are open patches of earth which I used to sow radishes, carrots, spinach, lettuce, onions, and cilantro.  As soon as we have another warm day, I’ll open up and take some pictures so you can see how big the radish and spinach sprouts have become!  The carrots seem shy – it may be too cold for them to germinate just now.

In coming weeks I will remove the small, mature plants and place them out into the main garden where they can grow full-size.  Every time I pull out plants, I create open space in the cold frame.  Those new open spaces are where I sow the next succession of seeds.  This “succession planting” can continue every two weeks well into the summer, allowing me to have small, regularly maturing crops to feed us.

It’s taken me a while to get the hang of “succession planting.”  When I was first learning how to garden, I had no concept of succession planting, and happily unloaded entire seed packets into pots and garden spaces.  The result was a lot of wasted seed, and a whole bunch of plants that all matured at the same time.  Succession planting allows me to grow usable amounts of food that sustain us over the months.

We’ll be using a similar succession approach with the onions to keep a regular crop in stock.  Currently I’m germinating onions in the cold frame.  The seeds were sown close together in a small patch, and I expect to have slender onion sprouts in April or May.  At that point, the onions that overwintered in the garden will start to mature.  As I take out an onion or two for dinner each night, I’ll replace its empty seat with one of the young sprouts from the cold frame.

As you can see, life is busy in my garden, and it’s busy on my desk too.  I am the new Pennwriters Area 6 Representative for membership in southeastern Pennsylvania.  I will also be attending the Annual Pennwriters Conference this May in Lancaster, PA.  You will be able to find me blogging at AppleJade about once per week through March and April, and our focus will be in the garden.

Not Just for Vegetarians: Delicious Homestyle Cooking, the Meatless Way

by Geraldine Hartman

The book for today’s review was provided by: Geraldine Hartman, Veggies, Yarns and Tails

I write AppleJade because I honor the connection between kitchen, garden, and health.  Geraldine Hartman’s cookbook Not Just for Vegetarians extends the connection between vegetables and cooking to our relationships and traditions of friends and family, and our attitudes toward our food.  Healthy living incorporates more than the mere substance of our food, and Geraldine speaks to the soul of it.

Not Just for Vegetarians reads and functions with the friendliness of a neighbor or grandmother.  Indeed, Geraldine dedicates her book to members of her family, and there is a clear influence among her recipes of friends, traditions, and memories which help to sculpt each dish.  Geraldine tells us that in her journey to a vegetarian lifestyle she has found “that the vegetarian diet can be much more varied and interesting than the conventional ‘meat and potato’ menu.”

I began experimenting with Geraldine’s book by exploring the first segment: bread.  We enter her book as we enter our grandmother’s kitchen, with a warm loaf of bread cooling on the counter and filling the house with honeyed aromas.  I am still in the learning process with breads, but I had no trouble with her “Quickie Oatmeal Bread,” and I am slowly improving with “Grandmother Sabina’s Best Bread You’ve Ever Tasted!!!”

I wander her book like I wander my pantry, seeking out unexpected treasures tucked in the corners.  I do not look in the index for refried beans under “B” for beans; instead I find them under “M” for Main Dishes – “Homemade Refried Beans”.  The result is constant experimentation.  I need only to flip through the pages until I find something that sounds interesting, and I’m off to try something new.

Thus far, my attempts at all recipes have passed “The Yucky Test” in my home.  This says a lot for Geraldine’s down-to-earth, home-comfort style: anything which is too bland, too strangely textured, or too-rabbit-food will not pass muster on our table.  Geraldine’s recipes lend themselves to spicing and modification according to taste, and she offers numerous variation suggestions of her own within the pages.

Not Just for Vegetarians is more than a simple vegetarian cookbook.  Geraldine has crafted her book to be a friendly, helpful voice to inspire creativity and experimentation with healthy food.  Books like Not Just for Vegetarians help move us away from bland, packaged foods and back into the substance and soul of our kitchens.  Regardless of whether you live a vegetarian lifestyle, Geraldine’s Not Just for Vegetarians offers recipes that will delight everyone at your table.