I'm Your Homesteading Honeygirl
Hi Bestie!!
I'm only teasing myself; I'm no homesteader. (I have read every Little House on the Prairie book.) I'm a decent gardener. I think that's a hobby you can share with people: What do you like to do? Oh, I like to read, I have a beloved collection of indoor plants and I'm a member of the community garden. Better not to add, I like to iron glitter letters onto tie-dye tote bags expressing my displeasure with two former presidents. Just in case.
The road to the community garden wasn't an easy one, but I find my time there deeply satisfying, especially post-2020. In the chilly days of April, the trees are filled with chattering birds and delicate blossoms. Hundreds of daffodils and tulips are in bloom and overwintered plots are waiting for their stewards to return. One year I bought a bunch of seeds and sectioned my plot into 1x1 plots. I even had twine! I planted peppers, flowers, and rhubarb. The peppers come and go, but the rhubarb remains. It appears that she'll flourish this year and one warm summer evening I'll pluck a fistful of stalks, rinse them with a hose, and walk them to the bar, to go into a sour beer. Or home with me to have cocktails.
(Last year the rhubarb went into a jar with beer and fermented over the summer and then the neighborhood drank it in the fall. I love that!)
My candy tuft, Iberis, is back, too. I think I'm going to fill the middle of my plot with plants that don't get harvested, but I'm not sure yet. I vowed not to grow from seed this year but I have a pot of pepper seedlings in my bedroom – and my mom sent me peas and dahlia bulbs for Easter. (I LOVE DAHLIAS.) So I'm already backtracking on my plans.
The season hasn't begun, but the work has. The garden got a hive two summers ago, donated by a nice man who has tended his own hive on a fire escape on Eastern Parkway. The hives have died. This time they succumbed to a mite infestation (and some froze to death). The hives didn't have bees but they had honey, and members were invited to help extract the honey. The empty frames will be move-in ready for a new hive. There was an extraction last year and I missed out on the honey – I have been desperate to taste the honey.
Now I am desperate for honey in other seasons. Desperate, I am always desperate.
The year after I graduated college I started reading about beekeeping. I wish I could remember why – I think Beekeeping for Dummies might have been on sale at Borders. It could have been articles I fact-checked about bees for City Paper.
(An aside: the for Dummies series is still in print.)
I read a library book about beekeeping and its history at the gym while unemployed (I was cleared for light activity at the crash and trapped in a contract that I couldn't cancel). I read about a beekeeper from North Dakota who drove an 18-wheeler across the country, pollinating watermelon farms in Florida and almond groves in California. Both crops have a limited window for pollination, or that's what the book said, and I find it remarkable how lucky we are that we have any food to eat at all, since so much of it depends on pollinators.
I do not depend on myself for my own food. I have dragged Charles Ingalls so thoroughly (as I should, the family's hardships and poor health were likely the result of long-term starvation and he dodged serving in the Civil War!)
The call went out to help with the honey collection and I accepted that I would have to miss a Polar Bear swim to see what the work is like. I know how it sounds, but my overall impression is that I was right, I would have been such a good beekeeper in Walkersville. (Or maybe they would have died every year, and devastated, I would have given up.) To harvest the honey you remove the frames, pierce the wax comb, and put them in a centrifuge. The force of the centrifuge clears the frames, and now our hives in the garden can accept new colonies at the end of May. Gravity lets the honey flow out of the centrifuge, and we used cheesecloth to filter the wax from the honey.
My primary job was to pour the honey into jars. We soon ran out and I ended up with almost 100 ounces of honey myself. When we ran out of jars I walked to the dollar store and bought more jars. (This is fine because I'd like to make cherry bounce this summer for all of you this winter and like any good Brooklynite, that requires a lot of mason jars.) People went home to their kitchens and came back with jars and I filled them, and then I frantically bought small jars at Target and the other dollar stores and began distribution. The honey is a light amber color and tastes like nothing; the bees made the honey to get through winter after most of the garden’s flowers had already bloomed.
I thought I would have more to say about honey but I am coming up dry. What are you growing in your garden?
Dribs and Drabs
It was a long day in the garden, which is pet-friendly. (One member brings their cat! I pet the cat once!) I would like people to leave their fucking dogs at home but I am also delighted to pet someone's dog when I am planting bulbs. The way that most animals love me is a huge confidence boost. Your Bestie: Hated by men, loved by animals and babies.
Scotty Landes, Banana Boy No. 2 on the Bananas podcast (which I can't recommend enough) is going to pet 100 dogs this year, and I had been on a walk to the bar the day before and I thought, "I could do that. I'd have to talk to more strangers, though." Talking to strangers does not seem to bother Scotty. I don't know a lot about Scotty's motivations – I met him once at a podcast taping and found myself utterly speechless (so tall, so handsome, from Maryland, where did I start?) –except that he seems capable on following through on every whim (and pumping out screenplays in a way that I envy, deeply). It seems like he just…decided. I'm not trying to step on any tails. I like petting dogs and the neighborhood cat.
Anyway: I pet three dogs and started a list in the Notes app. There's a feeling of satisfaction when I start a new entry in my Notes app, ya know?
(The bar has a cat in the basement and now that I've seen her in the shadows I need to see her in real life, as a vanity project.)
I don’t have formal rules for this project–I try not to name names, because I remember what blogging in the early 2000s was like–but I find that screaming into the void about current events isn’t helpful. Not because we couldn’t talk about the election or the Supreme Court over beer and fries–we would! We do. But if you want to hold hands and scream into the void about the way this country is treating the Right to Assemble, my right and left hands are open. I woke up this week and wondered if any students at Columbia had died. (I didn’t know that the Proud Boys had shown up at the UCLA campus.) I can’t prove that the Proud Boys were there, but given that Columbia and New York City went out of its way to separate journalists from the NYPD’s campus expulsion, I don’t have a lot of faith that someone from The LA Times was on the ground to confirm that. I watched the tail-end of the press conference and was somewhat delighted to hear journalists challenge the city’s mayor and NYPD.
Both declined to name “agitators.” They declined to name anyone, or answer questions in any concrete way, except to dredge up old, harmful lies. And here’s why I’m on the lip of the void: the local news–and to some extent, the national news–is repeating it. Or airing it without challenge. One woman said that students don’t come to campus knowing how to barricade a room–but they do! Today’s college students are experienced with active shooter drills. I’ve never had an active shooter drill (I had a lot of uncomfortable conversations about what to do if we had an active shooter at school and the advice offered was not helpful). I did take an online course with my employer and it recommended barricading an area in the brewery. They also said that the bike locks are not standard–but the campus sold those bike chains to students at a discount. They acted like students don’t bike. (Biking to campus and around campus was the only thing that made my life easier when we moved to our apartment.)
The city’s lack of evidence would be so funny if I didn’t have to point it out to everyone around me.
I’m also incredibly mad that we value private property so much. It’s just property. Their tuition will pay for it. It’s not people–not that the NYPD cared when it tossed students down the stairs. As if peaceful protests accomplish anything. (They didn’t end the War in Iraq. They didn’t codify Roe v. Wade.)
Always your friend, on the precipice of the void or not,
Katherine
Sources (MLA 9)
“Bananas Podcast.” BANANAS PODCAST, www.bananaspodcast.com/. Accessed 1 May 2024.
“Charles Ingalls: The Civil War Years.” Pioneergirl, www.pioneergirl.com/blog/archives/12435. Accessed 2 May 2024.
Fraser, Caroline. Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Large Print Press, a Part of Gale, a Cengage Company, 2019.
Khullar, Samaa. “Locked out and Locked in at Columbia University.” Curbed, Curbed, 2 May 2024, www.curbed.com/article/locked-out-columbia-campus-nypd-raid-student-press.html.
“Learning Made Easy.” Dummies, www.dummies.com/. Accessed 2 May 2024.
“Podcast Transcripts, Sponsors, and Audience Data.” Podscribe, app.podscribe.ai/episode/94548792. Accessed 1 May 2024.
Prater, Nia. “NYPD Attempts to Back up ‘outside Agitators’ Columbia Claim.” Intelligencer, Intelligencer, 2 May 2024, nymag.com/intelligencer/article/the-nypds-outside-agitators-columbia-claim-is-thin-so-far.html.
“Scotty’s Gettin’ Pettin’.” Scotty’s Gettin’ Pettin’, www.scottysgettinpettin.dog/. Accessed 2 May 2024.
