Somebody please think of the bees!

I love bees, I always have. I love their shape, I love their colours, I love their fuzzy little bodies, I love that my name starts with "B", and I especially love their honey (I really love honey!). But I have come across some startling news. Apparently, the honey bee population in North America is dwindling! Yee gads! I first heard about this on Planet Green, the sister site of TreeHugger.com. Apparently Haagen Dazs is trying to bring awareness to this issue with a website and by promising to donate part of the proceeds from the sale of their "bee-dependent" ice cream flavours, including a brand new flavour called Vanilla Honey Bee. Yum. I hardly need an excuse to eat high quality ice cream, especially with spring (supposedly) upon us and summer round the bend.

You may be thinking, "why would I care if the bees all die? I don't like honey, all bees do is make honey and sting people". Well there, fussy britches. Don't write off bees so fast. Making honey is the most obvious thing that bees do for people, but it's far from the most important. Bees are pollinators, so along with birds and bats bees are responsible for fertilizing 1/3 of all of our agriculture. Every third bite you take of a peach this summer is thanks to the work of bees. So raise your spoons high and dig in for the bees!

Hey, where'd that sun go?

Despite the imminent snow forecasted for today and tomorrow, we' had yet another lovely weekend. I think, if we have to keep see-sawing between winter and spring weather, I like our current mix of cold, bitter weekdays (when I'm stuck in my window-less office) and warm, sunny weekends when I can go out and play. With the previous weekend being a long weekend, the weather gods decided to take that into consideration and gave us a lovely Friday, too!

On Friday Mr. Broccoli and I went to mosque with his family. There isn't really an equivelent to East in Islam, but because everyone gets the day off it tends to be one of the days when everyone goes to Friday service. We didn't balance this off by attending church on Sunday, but when we have kids that will definitely be the rule. Before mosque we spent about an hour and his parents' house so that I could go through the picture boxes with Mr. Broccoli's mother. My mom wants to do a slideshow during the reception and has asked for pictures of my sweetie growing up. I ended up taking all the boxes and albums home and I will hve a phone conference with my mom sometime this weekend to decide which ones she wants.

The rest of the weekend was taking up with my fierce and sudden urge to nest. All I wanted to do was spring cleaning, so I did several loads of laundry, some organizing of my craft studio, and some baking. I'd like to get into the habit of baking every weekend. I made some crepe batter, which I promptly forgot about in the fridge, and pie crust dough. The crepe batter will keep for a few more days, so I'll need to make the crepes some weeknight this week. Ihope to keep a batch of cooked crepes in the fridge for quick breakfasts.

The pie crust was an experiment of sorts. I took the recipe from a 1970s book about cooking food for the freezer. I got it at a church sale and I love how it refers to freezers as brand new technology and even has a chapter on why you would want to bother buying one. I substitued whole wheat flour for white in the hopes of making it more nutricious (Mr. Broccoli is trying to lose weight), but it turns out the whole wheat flour isn't as easy to work with. It took more water than the recipe called for to make it ball up without crumbling in my hands (and I still didn't quite overcome this) and it baked into a much denser crust. I wanted to make little mini pie crusts to use some of my homemade caramel apple jam as filling, but the only circular cookie cutter I had was smaller than the tart molds so I ended up with all kinds of little slightly curved disks of whole wheat crust. Hmmm, not quite what I was going for. Next time, I'll use white flour so I can get a sense of what it's supposed to come out like and then maybe experiment with substituting part amounts of whole wheat flour. I'll also need to get a larger circlular cutter of some sort. Maybe an aluminum can. I'm still eating the little disks with apple jam for breakfast.

Pi is round

Happy Pi Day everyone! Today is March 14 or 3.14. Get it? :)

Pi Day is celebrated by math enthusiasts who, we all know, are renowned for their geeky sense of humour. I love the idea. If it weren't for the fact that Mr. Broccoli and I had already decided to make soup tonight (sweet potato and corn soup with organic whole grain bread fried in olive oil and spices; yum!) I would make some kind of meat pie. Maybe I'll make mini pies with my homemade apple jam for dessert. Anyway, everyone get your geek on and let me know what you did to celebrate the great infinite number.

Also, I got a raise today! Inching ever forward in my effort to pay off my student loan. Hurray!

Plants on the brain

Despite the serious dumping of snow we received this past weekend, I'm already starting to feel the coming of spring. For example, last night it was 9:30 before I noticed that I hadn't turned the heat back up to 70F when I got home from work (I always turn it down to 65 before I leave for work). I eventually turned it up so that I wouldn't freeze in bed: Queen sized bed + 1 person sleeping alone = cold nights. I can stand waiting for the bus in the morning without loosing feeling in my smaller appendages and walking from a warm doorway to a cold car seems like less of an Arctic expedition. All in all, the warm weather is coming.

With the tiny but noticeable changes in the weather, my thoughts inevitably turn to my annual attempts to maintain a garden that doesn't shrivel up and die by mid-June. I've decided to keep it simple this year by starting out with only one crop: tomatoes. I'm not a huge fan of eating tomatoes by themselves, but I do like a lot of things that tomatoes go into, like beef stew that uses tomato paste, spaghetti sauce, and, of course, ketchup. Plus, back when I actually had a back yard, tomatoes were always the vegetable that managed to grow, even when we had a drought and all other plants had scummed.

I've isolated that my main obstacle to green-thumbed success is my inability to regularly water the outdoor plants during the peak of the summer when my job is at its busiest and I'm at my most stressed-out. Of course, that is the time of year when they most need regular watering, especially since my balcony is South-facing, so this usually ends in disaster. To prevent that from happening this year I'm currently devising a self-watering plant container out of plastic popcorn buckets from the movie theatre (Mr. Broccoli has a serious thing for popcorn and a large bucket of the stuff - covered in powdered flavoring - is considered a requirement for any movie outing, so we have about a dozen). I'll post pictures of the construction when I can realistically start to make it (i.e. when there's no more snow on the balcony). Until then, viva spring!

Edited to add: I've found a few Instructables on how to make self-watering planters. I plan to use bits and pieces from each one. There are two methods of using a plastic bottle or milk jug that would be a great seed starter or herb container, there's a much larger one for multiple plants using a Rubbermade container. Apparently you can buy premade planters call Earth Boxes that are self-watering, but there is always someone out there who wants to try and make it themselves. This is closer to what I have in mind with the popcorn buckets. Here's a good one on general organic gardening. It's meant for large-space in the ground gardening, but there are some good resources. This is a great one for adding a self-watering bottle into a unmodified planter. (These links are for anyone interested in this DIY project, as well as for myself to get back to later.)

Don't throw out that tea bag!

I love discovering surprising and ingenious ways of reusing something, especially a something that I use a lot. I've just come across this web page that lists various uses for used green tea leaves. My favourite is cat litter deodorizer. Since we use a natural cat litter, Swheatschoop, that doesn't have a deodorizer or perfume and we usually end up buying baking powder just for this purpose. I drink green tea almost every day at work, so I could really amass quite of few leaves. I just need to devise a way of discreetly drying the leaves in my office. :)

What are your favourite ways to use brewed tea leaves?

What I would do if I wont the lottery

I can't remember when I first heard of the concept of volunteer tourism but it's something that has held my interested since I was in high school. If I had the finances to take off from paid employment for a few months (or a year) and travel Latin America (where such programs are usually held) tracking turtle migration or doing community work, I would do so in a heart beat. However, I have found it more and more difficult to find such oppotunities (although when I search, I always do so only out of curiosity), so I was very happy to stumble on this website from the blog currently hosting Carnival of the Green. The website is for Volunteer Latin America, which matches volunteers with a huge list of volunteer opportunities in Latin America: everything from medical work, to conservation, to social work and building houses. And, of course, the ubiquitis ESL teaching opportunites.

Looking through all the projects I have a really hard time deciding which one I would do if I had the chance. Would I want to track the behaviour and migration patterns of bottle-nosed dolphins and other marine animals, or work with an indigenous community that makes traditional textiles for sale? Or run a theatre group for street kids? My brother would love one of the many monkey conservation projects. And there is a leather-back turtle conservation project that only requires a 1 week commitment. I suggested to Mr. Broccoli that we incorporate that into our honeymoon, since we'll be in Latin America anyway (we've decided to spend 2 weeks in Ecuador) but he told me I was crazy. Spoil sport!

Worms!

I've just begun my third attempt at vermicomposting. I won't go into what went wrong with my previous 2 attempts, but suffice it to say third times a charm, right? I got a proper vermicomposter bin from someone on Freecycle. It's from the now defunct Toroto Municipal vermicompost program, as you can see by the label:

It's a good sized bin, larger than just Mr. Broccoli and I probably need, but it'll be good for me to use to get the hang of it and hopefully keep it going this time.


My cat is quite curious about this new contraption in the kitchen. Unfotunately, I couldn't get a shot of her looking into the bin when the top was off. She's not very considerate about posing for the camera. I did take a picture of the worms, though.

These are my little kitchen helpers. So far I've fed them twice. They got the solids from Mr. Broccoli's left over soup earlier in the week, and a yummy worm fruit salad yesterday, consisting of the banana peels from my banana bread, some mostly spoiled strawberries and a bit of corn and peas from when I still had to eat mushy foods (I couldn't actually eat the corn and peas, they were for Mr. Broccoli). I'm fascinated with the little guys. I've always liked watching worms, and Mr. Broccoli keeps having to tell me to put the lid down and leave them alone, or I'll just sit in front of the bin and watch them. I don't think that makes me weird.