On Sunday, August 9, 2015 at 1:43:58 PM UTC-4, songbird wrote:
Steve Peek wrote:
...
You might want to check with local beekeepers, most honey from mint plants is not palatable or saleable. It's alright if you can segregate the honey and leave it for the bees to eat. Buckwheat is pretty much the same. It's the darkest honey you ever saw with a medicinal aroma and taste. However it is popular with the modern "hippie" types who use it like medicine.

Not trying to be a know-it-all here, just trying to prevent some of the mistakes I made 40 or so years ago.



i've never noticed anything medicinal about buckwheat
based honey, tastes could vary? i'm not sure it matters
anyways as what Snag asked about was feeding his bees
with flowers instead of having to feed them using sugar
water.

if you read back in my suggestions you may notice that
i suggested other plants in the mix, the buckwheat was
the gap filler for the rest of this season... the other
plants would help provide food for next year and years
after.

anyways, how is your blueberry season shaping up? are
your beans doing well this year?

i did not plant any of the greasy beans this season as
i was late and i knew they would not finish very well as
compared to the many other shorter season varieties i have
(which look to be doing great). also, i didn't have the
back trellis set up yet for more climbing beans so i did
not want to put anything back there. with the many
groundhogs around i wasn't sure i'd have much of anything
outside the fences actually surviving anyways...

today i went out and picked beans for making some three
bean salad tomorrow and there's plenty of cucumbers ready
to make some more pickles. we sampled the bread and
butter pickles (made a week ago) today to see if they were
edible before we started giving some away and they were
deemed good.


songbird

Apparently there are at least 2 types of buckwheat honey. The eastern variety is as black as can be with an aroma and flavor somewhere between old vitamins, cough syrup and strong blackstrap molasses. The local "tofu/granola" types think darker and stronger is healthy and good for you similar to dark greens being more healthy. I agree that buckwheat is great bee fodder especially at that time of year when little else is available.

Blueberries are pretty much a bust for this year. We've been hit with a fungal disease called "mummy berry". Spores are released at blossom time and are wind distributed to the blossoms. The affected berries grow to nearly normal pre-ripening size then begin to shrink and dry basically mummify. We have about a 90% crop loss this year. The county Ag agent has no organic means of control other than picking up and burning all the affected berries. With over an acre of berries this is not physically possible. I've found a source of elemental copper that I'll try next Spring at blossom time. If that doesn't work I guess I'll have to give up on the blueberries or loose my organic rating.

I've started picking the Maine yellow-eyed beans, looks like a bumper crop this year. A neighbor and I disposed of 4 ground hogs last fall and aarly spring so no damage this year. Cucumbers and squash have died and the second planting has started to bloom. Chili peppers are tall and loaded and tomatos are producing about a bushel per week so we have lots of preserving going on now. I grew a new (to me) crop this year called "West Indian Burr Gerkin". They have a tart cucumber flavor but are supposedly not related to cucumber. They look like watermelon plants with dozens of little spiky green balls on them. They don't appear to be susceptible to mildew or cucumber beetles, so they may become my new pickle plant.

I'm preparing ground for the fall crops this week. I'll be planting daikon, beets, spinach, turnips, mustard, and maybe some kale, collard and mustard..

Steve