Peppers and Plans

December 8th here and it hit 80 degrees Fahrenheit today.  Lots of fog in the morning, too, that didn't burn off until around 10 AM.  The plants are really growing.  A few days ago, I had the opportunity to plant some mustard greens and two rows of spinach.  The only thing I've left to plant is turnips.  I'll get that done this weekend.  I also dug up the rest of the sweet potatoes.  That will give us room for the onion crop for next year that I'll be planting in January.

The peppers have been producing nicely.  Here are some Lilac Bell Peppers showing off with their snazzy colors!

This year we've had a nice pepper crop and have frozen some, eaten a bunch, dehydrated some, processed some into dried peppers.  Since it hasn't frozen, they continue to produce and produce.

I mentioned plans.  We're planning for a new homestead venture this spring.  We'll be getting a couple of boxes of honeybees.  We've kept bees for the past 7 or 8 years, but they live in the hollow column by our side entrance.  We cannot access their honey, but they do pollinate our garden and fruit trees.  Once we get some bees in boxes, we'll get pollination and will also be able to get the benefits of honey.  Can't wait.

But we don't know much about beekeeping.  In order to learn, we were invited to join the local beekeeping club.  They meet the second Thursday of each month at 7 pm at a local diner here in town.  We went to our first meeting tonight.  There were about a dozen people in attendance.  We had a fried shrimp po-boy and fries and listed and learned.  The beekeepers were friendly and knowledgeable and willing to answer our questions.  Some have only a couple of boxes, while others in the club have 100 boxes.

It was very interesting learning about feeding, splitting hives, supplies you need, hive placement, how to not lose your bees, swarming, etc.  They are very motivated to get more people involved with beekeeping and aim to get beekeeping into the Ag departments at 3 local high schools.  Hathaway High School, the school Benjamin graduated from already has 8 bee boxes.  We are going to have the students come to a meeting and tell us what they've been learning.  

It's nice to have helpful folks like this to help get us involved in this new undertaking.  We are excited about learning something new to add to our homestead.  We plan to learn as much as we can for the next couple of months and purchase supplies and equipment we need and then will jump into this new endeavor this spring.  That's our plan, anyway.