Blog

We Bay Area folks are lucky to have so much choice in fruit to eat during the summer. The Free Farm Stand had a good selection of local fruit today. On Saturday night Angie and I visited friends in El Cerrito in the east bay. Having a one track mind and thinking a lot about food harvesting and collecting, I realized that a social visit can be turned into a fun fruit gleaning trip. I noticed right away that the family we were visiting had an orange tree loaded with fruit and the next door neighbor a tree loaded with apples. And the house on the other side had been foreclosed and was abandoned and up for auction. It had a dying lemon in the front yard and an apple in the back. Both had a lot of fruit on them that I picked, and I also got to pick some oranges from our friends. The other apple tree I had to get permission from the neighbor, but I didn’t have time.

So besides the apples, oranges, and lemons, I scored a lot of delicious organic Brown Turkey figs from the Ferry Building Farmer’s Market. Of course they were delicious and very popular and I learned the word higo for fig. We also had more plums from the Secret Garden and a woman came by with what looked like the last of her tasty dark red plums. I am still picking cape gooseberries that I wrote about previously and had some to give out today. People don’t know what they are, but once they taste them they usually like them. This was the first week we had a lot of tomatoes, another fruit of the summer though we think of it as a vegetable. I picked them from all the gardens. And then Dave from down the street came by with three bags of the most delicious cherry tomatoes he just picked. I want to find out the variety name for his dark red ones that looked like Cherokee Purple.

Eli who I also wrote about last week, came by as promised with a large jar of plum sauce that he made from a half bucket of plums that he got from the stand last week that I picked from the secret garden. I am going to give it away next week probably if I get some small plastic yoghurt containers with lids to put it in. Brooke and Justin recently found an abandoned pear orchard in Moraga in the east bay and picked a lot of pears and have been drying them with a food dryer. I tasted one of the dried pears and it was yummy. I am really busy all this week, but would like to organize a trip there to pick the pears. Also, I would like to organize a community food processing day to can or dry some of our abundance.

Again I was surprised with the amount of other produce we had at the farm stand and that I was able to give almost all of it away. The secret garden produced a lot of lettuce, kale, and Asian greens. The runner beans are declining in productivity, I picked just a handful. A Treat Common gardener complained to me that she didn’t like the way the runner beans tasted and that the fuzziness was unpleasant, but I disagreed with her. Am I a minority of people who like to eat runner beans? Christy came by with the end of her harvest of purple string beans, more rhubarb, and some summer squash from the Corona Heights Community Garden. I am continuing to grow sprouts and people like them.

Christiane came by with some honey from her bees in Golden Gate Park and it tasted very different from our honey. She put it in larger jars and once I get some more jars, I will bottle it up to share at the stand. She left some honeycomb in it for people to see it. I really appreciate people sharing something so special like honey that comes from hives taken care of with love and gentleness.

I was happy that Allegra and Christy came by and could speak Spanish with the large number of Hispanic people who come by the stand. I love all the families that get fresh organic and local produce, knowing that the kids are getting real healthy food. With diabetes and obesity of the rise, especially in minority communities, encouraging people to eat and grow some of their own organic food is a step in the right direction we all need to go in. I hope the free farm stand is getting this message out to the people who come. Here are some photos of some Mission kids, some of the cutest ones around.

Slow Food Madness

I made it down to the Slow Food events in the Civic Center on Saturday. The main event down there seemed to be the farmer’s market with all the hippest probably most expensive, organic and sustainable produce and products around. I understand the labor that goes into growing this kind of beautiful loving food and probably putting your money into organic food (if you have it) is worth it to support the industry and the bees (more on that later). But the market by its nature and the whole Slow Food weekend hardly promoted slowing down and moving away from consumerism.

Personally, being a wannabe farmer, I got over excited and stimulated being down there with all the crowds and the excitement of all these groovy booths selling the most wonderful melons, or dry farmed early girl tomatoes, or Koda rice which I have never heard of but made me want to buy it all. Each booth had a printed sign describing the farm or product they were selling, and where they were located and why what they were doing was so great. I fell in love with the heirloom potatoes and was able to talk the saleswoman into giving me a red Peruvian spud to try growing at home (I didn’t have say much she was very generous). To tell you the truth I didn’t even look at any prices. The elephant heart plums were exciting too. I recently tasted an elephant heart plum at Martin’s soup kitchen before I knew what variety they were, and they were absolutely delicious. The woman at the stand said they were alternate bearing, but worth growing them. I can’t wait to get some scion wood for them and try growing them myself. I also dropped in the bookstore booth and checked out all the books out promoting local organic food, there are so many of them out now. Plus all the cookbooks with the same theme…”cook you own local organic sustainable slow foods”.

I also made it over to the free ‘Soapbox” events in the fabulous Victory Garden. Our local permaculture promoter Benjamin Fahrer was doing a great job as MC. When I showed up he was talking about pee-pee ponics and saving your nitrogen rich urine for your citrus trees (10 parts water to one part piss). I thought that was far out to talk about that with that crowd (the place was packed). He also made a great pitch to make the Victory Garden there permanent and told us to contact our local politicians to tell them that.

I spoke later in the day with John Bela who helped make the garden a reality and he told me that the garden was going to stay there until November. He says they already have harvest over five hundred pounds of food for the food bank! (By the way if anyone has an extra scale to loan or give us, I would love to weigh how much produce we are giving out at the Free Farm Stand each week, I think it is great to document these things).

John made one of the best arguments for moving the garden from its present location. He said that the space should be preserved for large gatherings that often happen in front of city hall, like big protests or rallies. I see his point, but am not sure if there isn’t room both for garden and rallies. I saw a complaint on the SFist website (http://sfist.com/2008/06/25/farmers_market_survives_newsom_thre.php) about the closing down of the City Farmer’s Market for the Pride Sunday event.

There has been a fair amount of complaints about the Victory Garden being only temporary and even a protest on August 20^th by Food Not Bombs (http://sffnb.org/2008/08/13/event-protest-serving-at-city-hall/). .. “In this case the garden is temporary and at a cost of $180,000 (though sponsored by a private group), while the nearby Heart of the City Farmers Market, a critical and much needed source of healthy food in the tenderloin and south of market neighborhoods has fought for it’s survival and against massive rent increases pushed by the mayor and real estate
department“. SFBG Politics (http://www.sfbg.com/blogs/politics/2008/07/a_hollow_victory_for_urban_gar.html ) called it a “Hollow Victory”. .. “Indeed, if Newsom and other city officials wanted to make a real commitment to support this effort, they would pursue a citywide program of supporting community gardens (which keep getting ripped up these days) and doing a survey of what surplus city properties could be turned into gardens that might still be there after the television crews have gone.” I think having the garden downtown and across from city hall is a valuable educational tool that gets a large number of people thinking about all kinds of food issues and gardening in general. I think finding another sunny place downtown to grow a big garden would be a good goal of the city, Slow Food Nation and Victory Gardens 08. There is a lot of lawn around the new library though not as sunny as where it is. I also like community gardens, but I think we need more Victory Gardens that grow food for non-profit groups feeding the hungry. Like FNB writes, “Enough with theatrics, resolutions and press conferences, San Francisco needs concrete support for permanent, healthy and accessible food for residents of civic center/tenderloin neighborhood and other low-income communities.” They might have missed the point that the current garden is doing that right now and it is a beautiful effort, it just needs to be made permanent.

The best talk I heard was by Serge Labesque who is a bee keeper and teacher from Sonoma County. He is the teacher that my bee teacher Bryan respects. He spoke about the “trouble time for our bees”. He explained what the factors are for the pollinators declining in the U.S. He said the number of honey bee hives have declined to critically low levels for the past six decades. He said there were a number of things we can do. Among the things he recommended to help the bee is to buy locally grown organic produce, to provide habitat for pollinators around your homes, don’t use chemical compounds in your gardens, become an organic backyard beekeeper, propagate local bee stock (don’t buy bees especially queens that were raised away from our area), or join a local bee club.

Wild Boar Eaters

Last Thursday went to a local event don’t the street called the Pirate Seed Swap. The poster I got by email said “The Greenhorns, a sneak peak at the documentary about America’s young Farmers”, “Heather Flores, author of Food Not Lawns with a slide show about saving seeds and swapping them”, “with slow nibbles, biodynamic wines, seed to swap, handout, nation –wide slow food friends”. The event was hosted by the Greenhorns, Slow-Food Nation, and the Bull Moose Hunting Society (it was in their warehouse). Here is a review of the event on the web: http://www.saveur.com/article_print.jsp?ID=1000064576. Here is my reporting.

I actually looked the documentary trailer up online and I discovered my friend Brooke was in it. It looked interesting, stories about young people that become hip farmers that grow safe and sustainable food. The filmmakers want to inspire a new generation of farmers that will preserve our farmland and our food supply. And make a living out of farming (good luck!).

I checked out the seed swap and it was mostly seeds from seed companies, some seeds that people saved and brought, but I didn’t find anything I needed. I talked up the seeds I brought to share to a couple of people looking at the seeds, the Double Purple Orach that I grew this year. I also attended the talk by Heather and she was mainly promoting seed swapping events. I like the idea of people saving seed and sharing it and eventually having a seed library, another wonderful project a local garden team could organize.

The part of the event that really sent my mind reeling was the introduction by this man from the Slow Food Nation. He welcomed everyone and explained the nature of the event and that people were invited to join in the feast, that include recently hunted wild boar from Sonoma (inspired I suppose by Michael Pollan in Omnivore’s Dilema). The article above said it was shot on a non-functioning ranch north of Sacramento. He introduced
a man who lived at the warehouse that was hosting the event who is a member of the Bull Moose Hunting Society. The society is about promoting hunting and tracking, and teaches young people how to hunt and shoot a gun and clean and gut the animal for meat. The wild boar are non-native pests (kind of like non-native trees but more destructive) according to them and so it is good to shoot them and eat them and to know where your food comes from and what they eat. It is sustainable they claim and a good thing that we should all learn. My friend Antonio was trying it out and he said it was weird tasting, but that he has been eating vegetarian for a while so maybe he wasn’t used to it. The platters of boar disappeared pretty fast as people chowed down on it all.

I just want to put this matter to rest. As much as I understand this boar eating, I personally prefer to remain a vegan and stay with my principles of doing as little harm as possible in the world. About a year or so ago I was so mad at the rats eating the avocadoes in the trees in the garden I was working in, I thought about getting night vision goggles and a bb gun and shooting them. I think I could have done it at that time. Now I am thinking that the wild boar eaters don’t have to travel out of town to go hunting. They should stay local and hunt the rats that are everywhere here (it is a delicacy in Thailand and it doesn’t come with the karma of eating pork). Then they could go for the feral cats that are everywhere pooping in our gardens and eating the birds and over reproducing.

Apples, plums, lemons, and tomatoes

There was lots of locally grown produce on Sunday. I could tell people who came that ” these tomatoes came from Treat Ave. your neighbor Dave grew them and put them in used strawberry baskets. ” Some apples and huge lemons came from around the corner on Folsom St. from Olga’s backyard. Other apples came from two other people. The plums that everyone loves are from the Secret Garden on Harrison St. around the corner of 23^rd St.. The lettuce and the kale come from that garden too, the kids who worked in the garden with Robert , Corrine, and I this summer grew it. Some of the tomatoes came from Treat Commons and my backyard nearby and a lot of the salad mix was from Treat Commons. Others came from a garden in San Mateo that Sigrid who also brought along with more of her green beans. The beets, stir fry greens, turnips, basil, herbs, and bok choy was unsold organic produce from the Ferry Building Farmer’s Market or the Now Valley Farmer’s Market and was probably the food that came from furthest away (at the most 100 miles). It is collected and redistributed by Food Runners. For some reason they often have a lot of beets they don’t sell so we gave away about 30-40lbs of them! I think that leftover organic produce from the fancy farmer’ market is great to give away and is a form of city gleaning, but I still hope we mostly can grow and share a lot of our own home grown fruits, vegetables, and flowers. It is the freshest and tastiest. A friend came with some organic carrots that looked like they were dumpster dived or sitting in a refrigerator too long, and I was reluctant to put them on the table, even after he clean them up. If I don’t know exactly where they came from I am a bit concerned. They looked sad, tasteless and were probably low on nutrition, but he didn’t have a garden and he really wanted to bring something to share, so I let the handful of them sit there with the more regal produce. And it turned out they were all given away.

Local honey

I brought some small jars of honey (I still have more to bottle but ran out of 2,4 or 8 ounce glass jars if anyone has some we can sure use them…baby food jars are the best). A great surprise is that Eli, a beekeeper I met at the San Francisco Beekeeper’s Association, came by with some honey from his five hives in his backyard at 20^th and Dolores St. And he brought some homemade plum jam. He likes to cook down fruit and bottle it, so he took half the plums I brought to make into more jam and some of the apples to make applesauce. So soon we will have more canned fruit, hooray. I forgot to ask him how he sweetens it.

We talked about organizing a plum picking day at the Secret Garden and then he would make more jam. If anyone wants to help make this happen please let me know.

Everlasting Flowers

Earlier in the week Jo brought the most beautiful blue statice flowers she grew in the Candlestick Point Community Garden (she also brought apples). I love everlasting flowers and like the fact that everlasting flowers retain their form and color after they dry. It was much fun to give them away.

Slow Food Weekend coming up

As I have written about before, there is a lot of excitement in the air about growing local foods and eating organic. The Slow Foods Nation big event is coming up this weekend and I am feeling pretty alienated from what is going on: A food tasting pavilion that is not only expensive to go to, but offers little for vegans, a high price speaker series with all the foodie/ecology big names and stars, and an expensive I am sure marketplace with vendors approved by the Slow Food Nation staff for their commitment to using good, clean, and fair production practices ($50 a pound chocolate).

There are going to be free talks and events all three days at the Soapbox (http://slowfoodnation.org/events/the-main-event/marketplace/soap-box/ for schedule). At 2:300 on Saturday Serge Labesque a Sonoma area beekeeper is speaking and I hear he is a great teacher.

There is a also list of Slow Journeys that also require you to fork over a good chunk of change to see places like wine vineyards, cheesemaking farms,a gourmet mushroom facility, some organic farms, and an olive oil ranch. There is one free Slow Journey to Alemany Farm (no bus ride included), the hip San Francisco farm that “provides green jobs for low-income communities, while sowing the seeds of economic and environmental justice.” You have to bring your own potluck lunch to that journey and you can stick around and volunteer at their workday.

So the Free Farm Stand will not be represented at the Slow Food big to do and there won’t be a Slow Journey to the Farm Stand on Sunday. I know I am all for local food and slowing down, but I am not on the big Slow Food Nation radar (though I have spoken to many of the people involved). Maybe I am too on the fringe with my crazy idea of giving food away. I don’t think the idea is taken seriously. It could be a good thing actually and maybe what we need is similarly minded gardeners to unite and work together: those who like the idea of forming a network of neighbors helping each other to grow food and sharing it with each other, and giving away the surplus. Right now there is so much gardening that can be done and all that is needed is a group of committed people to put in a minimum of work every week. In some ways this is already starting to happen. On Tuesday afternoons from 1-3pm I meet up with a few people in Treat Commons and we work together. I am hoping to make Saturdays a regular work day at the Secret Garden for now, maybe at another garden in the future.

The Victory Garden in front of city hall is still one of the best parts of the Slow Food show and I think it will be taken down after labor day (hopefully moved to a permanent location). For anyone interesting in growing food and flowers, it is really worth seeing just to see how close you can plant vegetables and flowers. Things are growing so well there and I love it that the food is being given to the Food Bank. I especially liked seeing the three sisters and how well they are growing together.

Blog zine?

Someone suggested that I print up my blog postings every week and hand them out at the stand for those who come and don’t go online to read it. I am thinking about this, maybe publishing a shortened version, and wonder if there is anyone out there that could translate a copy of it in Spanish every week. I could also use artists that might illustrate the zine. Please contact me if these ideas inspire you to get involved.

Shooting on 23^rd and Treat

I learned from a neighbor who came to the stand that the night before a young man was shot and killed on the corner of 23^rd Street and Treat Ave. The neighbor who told me about it had witnessed the previous shooting of someone right outside his door on Treat Ave, a few months ago I believe. He heard the shots and ran out to help and saw a man bleeding on the doorstep. This kind of violence makes me feel powerless and I am not sure what I can do to help the situation out. All the good vibes at the farm stand may or may not have an effect in the long run, but right now it’s a whole world I am not a part of, though it is in my neighborhood. I send out a prayer for peace and love to the young mans family and for all of us that are touched by this senseless violence.

I am writing this blog a day late because yesterday I spent the day extracting honey (see below). But for a few days I have known about what I wanted to share with people and have been anxious to get it down in writing. I can’t remember what day it was last week that I had d an amazing experience that is hard to describe. This wasn’t a dream but was real. I put my experience into this poem:

I stumbled across a field of gratefulness growing in the garden

as I fell into it I harvested bushels of the stuff

I am especially grateful for all the wonderful friends I have both old and new really too numerous to name

I am grateful for all the beautiful people I meet that do such great things

or who create more magic in the world

I am grateful for Angie in my life

I am grateful for all the places I have to garden in right now

I am grateful for the scarlet runner beans that keep pumping out the sweet green beans for the free farm stand, what a loyal friend!

I am grateful for the sun and the soil

I am grateful for the bees

I am grateful for difficult people in my life that challenge me

to lay down my ego

I am grateful to all my teachers

I am grateful for bacteria, fungi, protozoa, nematodes, worms, and bugs

I am grateful for roots

and trees of all kinds

especially fruit and nut trees

I could go on about my harvest of gratefulness

it seems the more I think about what I am grateful for

the more things pop up in mind

today I kept thinking about other things I am grateful for

an unlimited bounty indeed!

Highlights of last week

Friday

The previous Sunday I went to the graduation party for the students who took the permaculture class and went to see the projects that everyone has been working on. It turned out I spent a lot of time talking to and meeting new people and I didn’t get to see much of the projects. I did get to see the design for the project of adding trees and food plants to the park where the Free Farm Stand is located and it is really exciting to see a dream that has been in my mind for a long time going slowly forward. While there Kat who helped teach the class invited me to come up to Marin on Friday to take the class on the Soil Food Web and making compost tea. She said I could get in free and that perhaps I could get a ride with Diana who might be going up.

So it all worked out and Diana and I drove up on Friday. I got a chance to meet the sweetest man around name Caleb Summers who runs a business called Soil and Life (http://www.soilandlife.com/). His knowledge of gardening and soil is extensive and I was really impressed by how much he knew. I was a bit familiar already with brewing compost tea and the idea of the Soil Food Web, but his talk made things so much more understandable for me. His excitement and passion about what he calls “bio-agriculture” was contagious and I left the workshop wanting to go home and making my own brewer. I now look at the garden with eyes focused not only on the plants, but on the critters (he calls it biology) that live in the soil and help make our plants grow healthy.

It was also nice to meet Diana who it turns out lived in a couple of communes in the seventies and was familiar with the newspaper I help put out with my fellow communards called Kaliflower. She shared with me some wonderful stories involving people we both knew.

Saturday

I always question myself when I think about giving up a day of gardening to do something else. I love to be in the garden more than anything and it sets me back a day when I do that. I decided to go to the Community Day at the Victory Garden across from city hall anyway. There was a Sustainable Resource Fair there and I thought I would get the word out about the Free Farm Stand. The garden had grown a lot since I had last seen it and it is totally worth the visit downtown to just see it grow. I finally got to meet John Bella (with the Victory Garden project) who helped start this garden Actually I didn’t talk to him much, but he told me they had just harvested 100 pounds of produce that I assume went to the San Francisco Food Bank. I actually thought the event was not too exciting and I started feeling like I should have stayed home and gardened rather than sit at my table and give away plants and talk about the farm stand. I didn’t get too many people visiting my table nor that many people curious about the free farm stand (maybe people just don’t what a free farm stand is and aren’t interested enough to ask). Part of the idea of me going down there was to see who I would meet and “network”. I did meet some people that I enjoyed talking to, including an interesting woman who was involved in a local mushroom education program that among other things inoculates gardens with mushrooms (she didn’t have a card but the name of the group was something like Sporios). I also met a woman named Lena who is an “Agrarian Arts Coordinator” of Slow Foods Nation. I was glad to meet her because she has collected songs and dance related to agriculture (I think at their event there will be some dancing going on). I have been wanting to organize an event for children and adults where we sing to our plants in the garden. If anyone wants to help make this happen please contact me.

It turns out the best part of me hanging out there was meeting Rebecca who was one of the first people to visit me at my table. She is a gardener in the Tenderloin and was asking me a lot of garden questions. On Monday she was in my neighborhood checking and gardens and called me. I invited over to help us with our honey extraction and she came by and was a lot of fun to work with and get to know. And then on Tuesday she came by to help me in Treat Commons and in the Secret Garden. Another person I am grateful for meeting.

Sunday

I was lucky that I didn’t have to go to church on Sunday morning (it was canceled so church people could fellowship with other church members). I needed the morning to harvest food from the three gardens because I didn’t get any food harvested on Saturday. I picked a lot of lettuce, kale, jalapeño peppers, tomatoes, and plums from the Secret Garden. I picked tomatoes, green beans, baby greens for a salad, chard, kale, and flowers from my backyard. At Treat Commons I picked scarlet runner beans, tomatoes, baby lettuce from my “lettuce lawn” that Ruben inspired me to plant, yellow zucchinis, and flowers. While I was there a man name Josh came by that wanted to interview me about the garden and the Free Farm Stand. He was making a radio documentary about urban farming and had just visited MyFarm, a San Francisco business run by this guy Trevor: He designs and plants organic gardens in people’s backyards and charges a weekly fee to maintain and harvest the vegetables. “MyFarm installation costs $600 to $1,000, and maintenance costs $20 to $35 per week, depending on the garden’s size, and includes weeding, harvesting and composting. Those who opt to have larger gardens installed pay a smaller weekly fee and provide food to customers who, eventually, will be able to order a weekly vegetable delivery collected from MyFarm backyards.” I have heard that their business is booming and they are having a hard time hiring enough people to keep up. I agreed to be interviewed because I wanted to present to radio listeners another possible way of getting people to eat local. I must admit I was somewhat unsure about dealing with the media again, especially after Angie showed me a copy of 7 X7 with an article in it about Alemany Farm. The article and photo of my friend Jason who is the part time manager of the farm really turned me off. I am not sure why, partly because of it seemed superficial and slick (the magazine itself is itself a turn-off in it’s glossy hipness http://www.7x7sf.com/features/cover/25761489.html). I really don’t want to see myself inflated like that since this Free Farm Stand is not about me but the project itself and all the characters that play a part of it.

So Josh came over to my house after I finished harvesting to see my backyard garden and watch the whole operation of me loading the food on my bike cart and hauling stuff to the Free Farm Stand in the park garden.

The knock on my door

While I was starting to get the bike cart, my door bell rang (it could have been a knock I don’t remember) and I opened the door and two of my most favorite and beautiful women gardeners where standing there with their arms laden with baskets of garden produce and flowers. I was truly shot right up to heaven and the wind of gratefulness blew me away. This is one of the things about the Free Farm Stand that just gets me so excited, when out of the blue people demonstrate the best side of human nature, to do something not only beautiful but helpful, with a touch of class to boot. It is sweetness sublime. Caitlyn and Brooke who garden in a backyard on Guerrero whom I have written about before, stayed the whole morning and some of the afternoon, helping me set up the farm stand, arranging the table beautifully. I am glad Josh the radio interviewer got a chance to record all this and see how magical the universe can be sometimes.

The Free Farm Stand

Besides Caitlyn and Brooke showing up, a whole lot of other neighbors and friends came by and made the Free Farm Stand a lot of fun this week. Leslie from City Slicker Farm in West Oaklandbrought surplus cucumbers from People’s Grocery in West Oakland too. I enjoy just seeing her and talking about what is up with her and City Slicker Farm. Josh brought the prettiest yellow and most round and large lemons from his friend Nicole’s backyard in West Oakland (I am thinking it might be a good place to live if you are into farming). The neighbor that has a CSA drop off at her house came by with melons, garlic, and potatoes that were not picked up and they went pretty fast. I ran out of bags towards the end and will really need some next week. I am not sure how to get people to bring their own bags. I think it is harder to get plastic bags these days in San Francisco which is an interesting problem for groups like us that depend on used bags to give food away.

Honeymania

On Monday some friends showed up to help us extract honey and it went smoothly. On Saturday I put the bee escape on the hive which is a one way door that allows the bees that are in the top boxes of the hive where the honey is to leave but not come back in. Since our last honey extraction at the end of May (about 2 ½ months ago) we have had two medium supers or boxes on top of the brood boxes (each box filled with honey approximately 2 gals or 24 lbs.). Three or four weeks ago I looked in the boxes and saw that they were full so I added an empty box on top to give the bees more room. On Saturday I discovered they had filled that box with honey too so there must have been a big honey flow.

We wound up harvesting about 6 gallons of honey. I just don’t understand all the beekeepers in the bee club we are in that have more than one hive (some have five or six). Not only is it a lot of work to extract the honey, but what do they do with it all? Like I have said in a previous post, I have been a vegan for over twenty years so maybe I have a different perspective on beekeeping. I am not interested in honey production as much as just loving to live with bees in my backyard. It seems animals and gardens go together. I would like to live with more animals like with chickens or ducks, but I don’t feel comfortable killing them when they get old. When I give away honey I want to remind people that honey is a special gift to be respectful of. Bees can teach us to be humble and to respect all living creatures. We can learn to curb our tendency to get greedy when we taste something so sweet and delicious.