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| Sunrise this morning. |
February is crawling by, as expected. We’ve passed the mid-month point, but it seems like it took us eight weeks to get here.
My first week of living my new “insulin resistant” lifestyle went well. It seems a lot of my thinking is focused on food now. After a small slice of birthday cake last Sunday evening, I haven’t had any sugar. I have to admit I am going through sugar withdrawal. There’s a half gallon of mint chocolate chip ice cream in the freezer that calls to me from time to time like the Lorelei beckoning poor sailors to their doom. But I have been triumphant in resisting it. Stacey is getting good at making me delicious and nutritious low carbohydrate dinners. I’ve been taking my half hour brisk walks and I’ve found that the brisker the weather is, the brisker my walk becomes. I always take my camera with me on my walks, just in case something photo-worthy appears.
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| On one of my brisk walks to the hollow and back. |
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| Icicles in a seep in the hollow. |
Because of my new diet, I’ve altered my garden plans. Why grow so many potatoes and so much corn when I can’t eat them? So my garden is now focused more on green leafy vegetables and lots of brassicas. I have plans to make a big salad garden where I will grow lots of lettuce and celery (my new favorite snack food) and maybe some spinach. I will plant rows and rows of broccoli, cauliflower, and cabbage. There won’t be any kale. I know it’s so good for me, but I still can’t bring myself to embrace it. I’ve planted it in years past and it mostly goes to waste. We can’t find a way to eat it that we enjoy. No matter what, it always tastes too green. In my garden there will also be lots of tomatoes, peppers, onions, garlic, and beans – all things I’m allowed to eat that I love to eat. It is soon time for me to place my seed orders – one of the things about February that I love most.
One of the other things I love about February is also underway now. There are flowers blooming in my house. By great luck or divine design, many of my houseplants bloom in February. My orchids, amaryllis, clivia, geraniums, and walking iris are either in bloom or are about to bloom. I love flowers in February. It’s like shaking a floral fist at Winter and telling him that I will survive his cold and dreary season and I will triumph with the spring.
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| One of my orchids in bloom now. |
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| Another of my orchids. |
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| Clivia in bloom now. |
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| My amaryllis in bloom now. |
School is out for a long Presidents’ Day holiday. We had a half day on Thursday and no school on Friday or tomorrow. And, like a gift from Mother Nature, the weather has been fantastic. Yesterday it was 65° and sunny. I had planned to spend the day pruning the orchard. Pruning is an iffy thing. I never know when I’ll be able to do it. I always wait for a warmish day in February or early March and some years it happens and some year it doesn’t. In bad years when the cold weather holds on too long, I have to go out and prune anyway before it’s too late. Some years I’ve pruned on days when the temperature was in the teens, which was miserable. So I was happy for a 65° day in February. But things didn’t go quite as I’d planned.
You may remember that I’ve developed extreme sensitivity to bee stings and had decided last fall that I had to get rid of my hives. I offered them to my Amish friend Irvin Coblentz. He finally called us early Saturday morning (using a neighbor’s phone, of course) to tell us he’d be coming by that afternoon to see about taking them. I had three hives in the orchard and I knew that two of them were dead. The third one is still alive. I wanted the honey and wax out of those dead hives and I knew I couldn’t open them unless it was cold enough to keep the live bees in the third hive inside. I wanted to do that before Irvin came by, so Stacey and I trudged out at 8:00 a.m. with the temperature at 32°, and opened the dead hives. There was lots of full honeycomb. We pulled it all apart. While we were working, our niece Phi came from next door to watch and help. She got to taste honey right off the comb and chew a bit of beeswax. A little later her sister Freyja came over and they got to eat sourdough toast with fresh honey smeared on it (I had to leave the room, I couldn’t watch). We finished our work outdoors before the temperature warmed enough to get the live bees stirring. Seeing all that honey, I was sorry to dismantle those hives, but I can’t have bees stinging me anymore. Besides, with my new diet, I can’t eat honey anymore anyway. That makes me sad.
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| Headed out to the hives. |
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| Phi with a chunk of honeycomb. |
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| Dismantling a hive. |
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| Honeycomb in the hive. |
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| Stacey processing honey. |
So I had to put off pruning fruit trees for a while and process honey and wax instead. Stacey had to leave to go run the Family History Center, as she does every Saturday, so that left me to do the honey work alone for a while. It’s a slow, sticky, messy job. We don’t have any extracting equipment, so we do it the hard way – capping and crushing comb and letting it drain and then filtering the honey. I use an old crock pot to melt the wax. Stacey got back around noon and took over the honey processing and I finally went out to start pruning. Of course by then it was warm and the bees from that third hive were out. As I approached the fruit trees near their hive, they came after me and I had to retreat indoors again. Finally, towards evening when it started to cool off a little, the bees went in and I went out again and pruned more trees. I got a lot of it done. Tomorrow the weather will not be quite as nice – they say 45° – but that’s better than 25°, and it will keep the bees inside, so I will finish the pruning then. Irvin will be coming by sometime during the week to take that hive away and then I will be free to roam the orchard at will.
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| Pruning. |
With the coming of this warm spell also came the red-winged blackbirds. I heard one on Saturday morning singing high in one of the maple trees. The sound of its “ok-la-ree” song always makes me smile. Later in the day there was a flock of about thirty of them at my bird feeders. I tried to take a photo of them, but they were skittish and flew away. I’m glad they’re back. Most people look for the first robin in the spring, but the red-wings usually beat the robins by several weeks. Seeing and hearing them makes me happy.
It’s another beautiful day today. It’s sunny and 58° and the snow is melting fast and it smells like spring. We’re home from church and lunch will soon be ready. Parts of the flower beds are free of snow now and I think I’ll take a quick walk around the yard before it’s time to eat to see what I can see. I know there will be signs of spring – new green pushing up from the earth. Spring is coming.
