Oh, Honey!

Lately I’ve noticed several farm stands selling their own honey. Wow! As an avid follower of Sunset’s One Block Diet blog, I have a new appreciation for honey. If you’re new to their tale, the staff at Sunset Magazine is taking the locavore concept to the extreme in creating a meal with items raised on their own block. As the project branched out, they created teams. As in Team Garden, Team Olive, Team Chicken, Team Bee and so on.

While Team Garden had some fairly predictable types of challenges, it was Team Chicken that had me hooked for quite some time. Talk about a learning curve! Through them I learned about chicken coops, the different colored eggs proudly laid by “the girls”, sweet Honey (the chicken), dangerous Carmelita, chicken massage, and that teen age girls have nothing on chickens when it comes to unbelievable bullying.  Note to self:  don’t even try raising chickens.

All seemed to be settling in nicely for the Sunset crew, then they decided to raise their own bees. After some field trips and general learning, they were up and running. The bees? No problem. Ants and mites? Big problem. Read for yourself how these bright people went head to head with these pesky critters. They are getting some honey along with the obvious benefits of having bees working in their garden, but boy has this been a rough road!  Note to self:  don’t even try raising bees.

Back to the start here … I’ve noticed honey at Lon’s, Smith Family Farms, and TK’s Best. With such small, local, production, the prices vary greatly. In my indecision, I went with the honey from TK’s Best, which is actually a blend of honeys from the three towns with the farm stands mentioned in this blog. This was my first ever purchase of local honey (that cute little bear had been the mainstay in our household for years), and boy was I thrilled! Sweet, sticky, and with a flavor of flowers! Yes!

And why did I need the honey? To make some more of that lovely Chilled Golden Tomato Bisque. Oh yeah.