The blossoms on the sourwood trees are opening. This is exciting for mountain beekeepers, though in their enthusiasm for the light, fine honey that bees produce from this flower, they sometimes dismiss as paltry and unacceptable to their delicate palates the earlier dark wildflower honey.

I have even known beekeepers in the area — usually small, wizened grumpy ones who are old enough to still be angry that the park moved their family and others to make way for a national playground — who refuse to even harvest the spring honey. Instead, they either don’t collect it at all; or they do, but they feed it back to the bees come winter.

Each to their own, of course, but I say phooey — this prejudice must be, I believe, a hangover from poorer days here in the mountains of Western North Carolina. A belief, hard won through poverty, that things white are more genteel and more refined; which, of course, they are  — in every sense of that word. People with a bit of cash in their hands could choose white bread instead of heavy brown, white sugar instead of sorghum or molasses, store-bought clothing instead of rough hand-me-downs. These days, they instinctively reach for light sourwood instead of dark wildflower honey, according it virtues that are more related to childhood training than taste.

Having grown up myself using an outhouse and without electricity or hot water unless you fired up the woodstove (my family were 1970s back-to-the-land folks, but poor is poor, whether you are born to it or come to it), I’m not unsympathetic with that line of reasoning. Once I could afford to do so, I found it quite exciting to buy clothes full price from a real store rather than for a few quarters from a thrift store, as crazy as that might sound. Though now that I’m older and so amazingly cool, I’m back in thrift stores by choice instead of need. Which somehow makes it just peachy, a free choice you understand instead of one forced upon me by necessity, or in my case, through others’ choices.

As it happens, I most enjoy the robust notes of the spring wildflower honey. In it you find a roll call of the early bloom: dandelion, blackberry, privet (“hedge” to you older locals), holly and more — most importantly the tulip poplar, which this year to me at least appeared heavy but brief lived.

I’m not selling honey these days to make my living, so the mad rush to remove supers and extract the wildflower honey before the sourwood emerges is no longer part of my life. I don’t particularly care if the two varieties mix, though I’d still like to have some supers (boxes the bees pack honey in so that beekeepers can rob them easily) with pure sourwood. Or, as pure as one can ensure, knowing that bees  will damn well work what they want. But at sourwood time, there is so little other bloom, and the sourwood nectar is so enticing, bees tend to focus on it almost exclusively.

That focus can be problematic for migratory beekeepers, who make their living helping farmers pollinate fields of crops. I understand, by way of example, that good orchardists mow their apple orchards before the bees are brought in. Otherwise, the bees of the migratory beekeepers might just choose to focus on dandelions, say, to the exclusion of the apple trees. This focus is very intense, and very much part of the honeybee makeup — their obsessive-compulsive disorder is one big reason they are such excellent pollinators for us, because once you can get them focused on your flower of choice, they stay with it.

They don’t, like the independent bumblebee, visit an apple bloom on one outing and a dandelion on another, willy-nilly with no consideration at all for the poor farmer needing a field full of trees pollinated. Bumblebees just bumble mindlessly about, heedless to others’ desires and wishes, landing here one moment, there the next — how infuriating for us humans not to be able to control their movements and selections.

But I digress. The sourwood trees are blooming, and this is exciting, as I mentioned previously. Sourwoods, if my memory serves correctly (the Internet has been out, and so I can’t easily check, unless of course I were willing to get up and walk three feet to the bookshelf, which I’m not) are only found in the Appalachians. Or, that’s not quite true — they can be found outside that narrow band, but they don’t produce enough nectar, or aren’t found in enough numbers if they do, to be of use to the beekeeper.

This is swell for savvy beekeepers, because they often market the sourwood honey as a varietal. That’s a fancy word for you-pay-more-for-it, though I didn’t fall in with that line of reasoning when I was peddling jars of honey. I love wildflower and I figured the bees worked just as hard to produce it, so I asked and received the same amount for both. Folks didn’t object, or insist on paying more for sourwood or less for wildflower. They instead seemed quite happy to accord dark and light honeys equal respect, based on taste preference only, a nice lesson from the apiary for us all about not making judgments based on something as arbitrary and meaningless as color.

(Quintin Ellison can be contacted at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)

I have not put the time into my garden this year that I usually do. Between a lack of rain early on and a failure to attend to weed pulling, the beds aren’t looking particularly attractive.

Even given my unusual neglect, however, there are still many vegetables to harvest and eat. Evidence, perhaps, of the undeniable will of living beings to produce, though perhaps not thrive, in the worst of situations.

Lettuce, the summer variety at least, is coming on strong, though it will probably bolt in the next week or two. There’s chard, beets, carrots and onions. The soybeans look good, too.

And busy I might be, but now is the time to plant a mix of greens to serve when the summer lettuce bolts and turns bitter. Sometime this week I hope to broadcast patches of kale, chard, collards, mustard, beets and arugula. I usually add whichever Asian greens I happen to have on hand, and this year that would be mizuna and kommatsuna.

Some people grow these green mixes on top of hay bales, crowning the bales with prepared soil mixtures or mushroom compost. This removes the possibility of weeds, and is a very nice idea, except that most of us would have to buy hay. At about $6 a pop right now through the local feed and seed stores, that route seems a bit pricey. You would, of course, get a desirable return on the cost of the bales because they would be turned to rich organic material for the garden. But still — there are less expensive ways to have your salad and eat it, too.

The other option is to pay great attention and care to the area being planted. Eradicate every weed possible, knowing that despite these great efforts, weeds will still compete and ultimately emerge victorious against the greens. All we can do is the best that we can, taking satisfaction in the effort, I suppose, if not always the results. Though in this situation, I believe the results will be surprisingly pleasing if you’ve not grown hot-weather greens before.

Prepare the planting areas. Broadcast the seed (this means to scatter it liberally about by hand), rake the seed in lightly, and be prepared to water frequently if there isn’t adequate rain. In this case, adequate means enough rain to keep the beds continuously moist.

Germination occurs quickly this time of the year, almost as if by spontaneous combustion — within two or three days, generally.

These greens are to be cut with scissors, or handpicked, when they are still quite small: three to 4 inches tall is about right. You are not growing cooking greens, but young succulent baby greens to eat raw in the place of salad.  

I like to cover my greens patch with an insect barrier so that I don’t have to use sprays. The problem with that method is the possibility of trapping moisture, and a corresponding risk of rot, if we are experiencing a humid weather pattern.

Every two to three weeks, plant the mix again. This ensures a constant supply of greens for the table. And when you lose the race against weeds, you switch to the other beds that are now ready for cutting.

One other note: do not mix the greens. That is fine in the fall when you are allowing them to mature before cutting. With baby greens, however, there are extreme variations in rates of growth — one variety of green will grow wildly with great joyful abandon, others will pick their way into the world slowly, with apprehension and fear. It is imperative — if one is to sustain the greens beds for salad production — to keep them cut back. The new growth is what we are seeking for our salad bowls, and it helps if the rates of production are identical, or nearly so, when you go to cutting.

(Quintin Ellison at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)

There are two puncture wounds decorating my left leg, courtesy of a rooster who has taken an inexplicable but pronounced dislike of me.

This rooster is a white leghorn. He has a twin, another white leghorn rooster, who also escaped the hatchet. Both roosters should have been sent to freezer camp a good two months ago.

I spared them because I couldn’t capture them. They’d taken to roosting 20 feet or so up in a tree, and were well out of my reach that April evening when I came to collect the others. You want to capture chickens either at dusk or before sunrise in the morning, after they have gone to roost or before they start the day’s activities.

I’ve pretended since not to notice these two very white, very large, very visible roosters strutting about the chicken yard having their way with the hens. I guess I’ve been hoping they’d be raptured up into the freezer without my divine assistance, but reality has proved disappointing — they’ve just lived on, getting bigger and bullying the hens more and more.

The rooster started our duel by getting underfoot while I was feeding the hens and the chicks. I somewhat sensed that this rooster was with me every step of the way, but didn’t pay him any attention.

While getting feed for the chicks, I inadvertently left the gate to the chicken yard open. Of course the hens wandered out. The roosters, who weren’t about to let the hens find respite from being ravished for even a moment, went out, too.

Seeing the chickens escape, I went over, picked up an empty plastic feedbag, and used it to scoot them back into their yard. I closed the gate, and returned to feeding the chicks.

In retrospect, the rooster must have been working his nerve up all along. Being touched with a bag was the proverbial straw, however: He’d identified The Enemy.

I was carrying a refilled waterer when he attacked. I knocked him back and off with the container; then the rooster and I squared off for a showdown. My leg hurt and blood was dripping steadily, but I realized this was no time to nurse my wounds.

It looked like a possible fight to the death.

The rooster was about five feet away, dancing about like a boxer taking my measure, his beady eyes fixed on my every movement. I knew then that I had a serious contender on my hands.

I had a secret, though, that the rooster didn’t — couldn’t — know. The rooster had taken on a former, albeit mediocre, student of Shotokan karate. I’d worked my way from a white belt to the dizzying heights of a brown belt before, as is typical with my athletic endeavors, I quit.

Taking deep calming breaths, I reached back into my athletic memory, tapping those three or so years of not-very-intense martial arts training. I tried to bounce a little on the balls of my feet, just like I’d been told to do when sparring, but found it impossible to bounce lightly in rubber muck boots. Deciding that bouncing was overrated, I braced myself instead, waiting for the rooster to make the first move.

He danced, I braced; he danced, I braced.

Finally, the rooster lunged. And my moment arrived.

The killer rooster came at me, and I planted a perfect front kick on his chest, booting him back and up several feet through the air. I can only hope that the hens saw me kick the snot out of one of their great tormenters.

Temporarily cowed, the rooster backed off; I finished taking care of the chicks. By that evening’s feeding, however, he was circling me again. I was forced to feed and water carrying my shepherd’s crook, figuring in a pinch this symbol of good husbandry would serve as a rooster cudgel and I could batter him to death.

There is no end yet to this story, no fitting finale with which to neatly sum up the situation. Instead, I’m licking my wounds, left plotting against a rooster who is busy plotting against me.

(Quintin Ellison can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)

Goats view a gate left open as a passageway to excitement. And it is exciting, too, for the goat keeper, when the entire herd escapes the barnyard. Lesson: When you open a closed gate, shut it behind you. This isn’t an original thought, but that doesn’t make the saying any less true.

•••

Honeybees are insects. They do not think or act like we do. But they seem to feel fear, or perhaps it’s anger. If you swat at them when they are buzzing around your head, they sting in response. Lesson: Don’t swat at honeybees, you’ll get stung. Retreat is the best course of action.

•••

Reading books about farming is fun and educational. But it doesn’t get the barnyard mucked, the animals fed or the garden weeded. Lesson: If you want time for lying in bed and reading, have fewer animals and buy your vegetables at the farmers market.

•••

Only a fool works honeybees without smoke. Honeybees know we are not their friends; we come to them as robbers and intruders. They defend themselves with righteous anger, even when we plan to bother them “only” for a few seconds. Lesson: Use a smoker.

•••

Only an even bigger fool works honeybees without the protection of a veil or other protective clothing. There is no such being as a “bee whisperer,” though I’ve met a few people new to beekeeping who seem to believe otherwise — for a while. Lesson: Learn from my sister; don’t work bees wearing flip-flops.

•••

Beware the middleman: If you want to support local farmers, buy directly from the farmer. Lesson: If you want to make money at farming, be the middleman — open a store selling the fruits of others’ labors.

•••

‘Good fences make good neighbors,’ might be true, but I’m terrible at building fences, and practice is not making perfect. Lesson: stock panels are the greatest invention of modern times. Yes, they are pricey, but what is lost in dollars is saved in time and frustration.

•••

Building barns and chicken houses and other structures is time consuming and expensive. Lesson: Bend stock panels in half-hoops between T-bars, then put tarps on top, and the result is fast, relatively inexpensive shelters for animals.

•••

If you do not have pastureland, do not buy animals such as sheep that rely on grass. Lesson One: Impulsive farming and homesteading decisions rarely work out very well. Lesson Two: Feeding sheep hay all summer is hideously expensive.

•••

Neglecting your honeybees is not organic, natural beekeeping, even if you aren’t using chemicals. It’s just bad husbandry. Lesson: At least be honest with yourself if you aren’t caring properly for your charges. Otherwise, learn and put into practice known, successful methods of natural, chemical-free beekeeping.

•••

Don’t adopt and bring home a kitten with the expectation it will grow up to only kill voles that are destroying the garden. Lesson: Cats kill whatever the hell they want to, including cute chipmunks, skinks and songbirds, which they dismember into bloody little pieces in the middle of the living-room carpet. And they view newly tilled gardens as convenient toilet areas.   

•••

Broody chickens don’t lay eggs, and they block the laying boxes so other hens can’t lay eggs. Lesson: Old wives tales often don’t work. Dunking hens in cold water doesn’t make them any less broody; it just leaves them — and you — wet and indignant.

•••

Using chemicals to kill mites that afflict honeybees does work, at least until the mites get resistant to the chemicals and your honeybees sicken from chemical “cures.” Lesson: Using an insecticide to destroy insects that are residing on insects is crazy; beekeepers themselves are more responsible for the honeybee disappearance than any mite, virus or mysterious plague.

•••

Letting all the female goats mate with the billy and have babies seems fun until the herd jumps from six to 15. Lesson: That’s way too many goats — don’t ever, ever do that again.

•••

Having dirt under one’s fingernails from farming doesn’t make a person inherently trustworthy. Lesson: Get to know the person you buy vegetables and other products from at the farmers market. Visit the farmer’s farm; ask about farming practices. If it doesn’t feel right, buy from someone else.

•••

Farming is physically hard; writing about farming or anything else is mentally hard. There’s nothing about farming, writing, or writing on farming that’s easy. Lesson: Too late now, but maybe you should have remained a classical musician. Oh, right, that was hard, too.

(Quintin Ellison can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)

Last night, lying in bed on the screened porch reading before darkness fell, I looked up from my book and noticed a wasp crawling on the inside of a window screen.

I was reading “The Way of the Bodhisattva” by Shantideva, a translation of an ancient Tibetan text on cultivating compassion, generosity and patience. I noted the wasp — it was a small wasp, more black colored than brown, of a type unnoticed by me before — and returned to reading the book.  

“If such a thing as ‘I’ exists indeed,

Then terrors, granted, will torment it.

But since no self or ‘I’ exists at all,

What is there left for fears to terrify?”  

I (or wait a minute, there is no I), or some part of me (if there is really a me) looked from the book and back up at the wasp to check on its progress. The wasp was still crawling about trying to find a way to the light outside.

I wondered: if I ignore the wasp, would it be there in the morning, still trying to find an escape. Or, more likely, would the wasp sting me during the night. Probably on my face, causing my eyes to swell shut for three or more days, which has happened before. Because, when you work with honeybees as I enjoy doing, you inevitably get stung. And, sometimes, you get stung in very tender places indeed — such as when angry honeybees crawl up your pants leg and make a beeline, as it were, for the “straddle area.” This is what a friend of mine used to call that place-he-would-not-name, even under the most dire circumstances, such as when he was dancing wildly about grabbing at himself (as delicately as one can under such circumstances) in the straddle area. One learns to tuck pants legs into boots, or to tape them shut.

It was getting darker outside. I returned to my book.  

“The agent of sensation has no real exis

tence,

Thus sensation, likewise, has no being.

What damage, therefore, can sensation do

to it —

This aggregate deprived of self?”  

Hmm, I thought wisely to myself. So if I do get stung, then who actually got stung? If sensation has no being, what then is a sting?

The problem with thoughts like these is they don’t really go anywhere. Or, at least, they don’t progress to any suitable conclusion when I’m the thinker involved. The truth is if the wasp did sting me, I believe it would hurt. A lot. And it would hurt me — if I really am, and whether I actually exist or not.

Finally, defeated by my own circular illogic, I got up and opened the window screen. Using “The Way of the Bodhisattva,” I shooed the wasp, unharmed, out into the fading light. It flew away without so much as a thank you.

There was a time, maybe even no more than a year ago, when I would have killed the wasp, probably using whatever book or magazine I was reading at the time. With no real malice, you understand, but with no actual thought, either, about the value of a life — even if it’s a wasp that is under consideration, and a particularly small one, at that. But one can’t very well grind the life out of a sentient being using a text that states:  

“With the wish to free all beings

I shall always go for refuge

To the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha,

Until I reach full enlightenment.

Enthused by wisdom and compassion

Today in the Buddha’s presence

I generate the mind for full awakening

For the benefit of all sentient beings.

As long as space remains,

As long as sentient beings remain,

Until then, may I too remain

and dispel the miseries of the world.  

After that, I went to sleep. No wiser about the world or even about my own life, I admit, but free of worry about getting stung during the night. And the wasp lives on, I hope, doing the things that wasps do, whatever those things might be.

(Quintin Ellison can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)

I traveled over the Balsams this past weekend from Sylva to Lake Junaluska for a native plant sale, and I’m very glad that I set time aside to make the trip. Not only were there some nice specimens to be had, I was able to tour the Corneille Bryan Native Garden.

I did know the garden was there, though many folks in the region don’t realize this tiny labor of love exists in Haywood County. I used to run regularly at Lake Junaluska before going to work weekday mornings at a regional office for the Asheville Citizen-Times in Waynesville. I’d sometimes trot through the garden area, dropping off County Road through the garden on my way back to the lake, happy for a bit of trail under my feet instead of pavement. Or, for variety, I’d run up the hill from the lake area to the road, optimistically dubbing my crawling, gasping effort a “hill workout” in my running journal.

No matter how pathetic and slow the actual effort, running through a garden is not a mindful way to enjoy flowers. Most of my attention, frankly, was devoted to not falling flat on my face. So the opportunity to stroll leisurely through was a delight, heightened by chats beforehand with garden director Janet Manning and Linda McFarland. Linda, in 2003, helped Janet Lilley put together a book, “Seasons in a Wildflower Refuge,” on what one can enjoy there. Well-known regional botanist Dan Pitillo, now retired from Western Carolina University, wrote descriptions for the book of the garden’s plants.

The genesis of the garden dates to the summer of 1989, according to a brochure about the Lake Junaluska site. Tuscola Garden Club members had been discussing the need to encourage more native plantings on the Junaluska Assembly grounds. Maxilla Evans (who died in December 2007) expressed a desire for a place where her lifetime collection of wildflowers could be preserved; and the family of Corneille Downer Bryan was looking for a suitable memorial. Bryan was a nature lover, artist and member of the Tuscola Garden Club.

So began the Corneille Bryan Native Garden, now home to about 500 various trees, shrubs and herbaceous plants. These include shortia, which is native to only an extremely limited area, pinkshell azalea, and various trillums. An endowment through the Bryan family helps maintain the garden.

The garden’s “primary function is to serve as a place of respite and renewal for all who draw strength from the beauty and quiet of this place,” the writers of the brochure note.

I believe what interests me most is how well Manning and the others involved are using such limited space — limited in both terms of size and context. The garden, as noted earlier, is on a fairly steep hill in a ravine, with a mix of oaks, black walnut and locust overhead. The area had become a dump for trash before the garden was created, with new steps, paths and bridges built, and a variety of habitats created.

Manning said the group is working to complete a bog section now. This is only one of many habitats featuring a variety of shade-loving and sun-loving native plants. (Much of the ravine is shaded, but a small area (euphemistically dubbed the “sunny meadow”) gets light. There you can find asters, penstemon, columbine and more).

There is much to enjoy and learn from the Corneille Bryan Native Garden. If you take the time to stop and smell the roses, that is, and not run mindlessly through. If there were any roses … but you get the point, I’m sure.  

To get there, go to Lake Junaluska Assembly. You can get to the garden on Stuart Circle from Lakeshore Drive, or by turning off County Road onto Oxford Road or Ivey Lane. Go to www.lakejunaluska.com/facility-maps for even better directions — click on “grounds map.”

(Quintin Ellison can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)

Some years ago, confined to an office through work obligations but dreaming of farming, I spent more time than I should have surfing the Internet in search of agriculture and back-to-the-land related sites.

Amazingly, many of the same ones I visited regularly then are still up and running. Though these days, I find more pleasure in the actual doing than the reading, still sometimes I turn to old favorites for information or to recharge my batteries. Here’s some of the ones I’ve found most useful:

• urbanhomestead.org — The Dervaes family lives in a sustainable fashion on a tiny (1/5th of an acre) lot in southern California, where they grow a garden, raise livestock and undertake interesting homesteading projects. The father, his grown son and two daughters (the wife and husband divorced many years ago) have developed a slick Website chronicling their journey. In fact, the site has gotten a little too slick and commercial for my taste, but maybe I’m just jealous of this family’s exceptional marketing abilities and beautiful urban homestead. There is a lot of good information here if you are willing to dig around, and this is a particularly useful site if you don’t have much room to create a sustainable lifestyle, but still are looking for ways to do just that.

• www.homesteadingtoday.com — General homesteading forums that, subject wise, ranges far and wide. The forums are moderated, which helps keep people on-topic. Forums include general subjects such as “homesteading questions,” “countryside families” and so on, plus specialized areas on goats, bees, gardening, market gardening, sheep, rabbits, guard animals and more. Also includes a useful “preserving the harvest” forum and a recipes forum (need to know how to cook a possum? These are the folks who will likely know).

• www.gardenweb.com — Skip all the junk and go directly to the gardening forums. These are terrific, and you’ll soon find your own favorites if you poke around long enough. Some of mine include “vegetable,” “tomatoes” and “organic gardening.” The search engine for the site is also quite good, allowing you to search within individual forums, so give it a shot next time you have a gardening question.

• www.thecontraryfarmer.com — Writer Gene Logsdon’s site. This man writes and writes and writes, and yet still finds time to run an actual farm in Ohio. He has published more than 20 nonfiction titles, including his latest, “Holy Shit, Managing Manure to Save Mankind.” He also writes fiction, and these days, blogs on the Internet. Check him out, he’s funny and knowledgeable and agreeably opinionated (in that I agree with most of his opinions).

• www.backwoodshome.com — If you can handle the survivalist paranoia that crops up here, then this is a good general source of homesteading and information on self-sufficiency. I subscribed to the magazine of the same name for a year or so, but didn’t renew because I couldn’t handle the rightwing Republinuts agenda. That said, the basic information offered here is sound, if you skip articles on storing up ammunition and the need to buy gold coins. Unless, of course, those are the sort of topics that interest you.

• www.motherearthnews.com — So sad, so bad, but true: Mother Earth News is not what it once was. Still, ignore the yuppie, often shallow content and use the archives online, and you can tap right back into the original and best back-to-the-land magazine.

• www.ces.ncsu.edu — At your fingertips, here is all the specialized agriculture-related information on North Carolina you could want. This site serves as a direct line to decades of state-funded research and work. On that same track, check out www.growingsmallfarms.org, a site built and maintained by Debbie Roos, an organic specialist for the state in Chatham County. Here you’ll find very specific information for organic and small farms in North Carolina, from marketing information to specific state regulations and laws.

(Quintin Ellison can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)

Just a few minutes into weedeating and I feel lobotomized. Perhaps the heady roar of the little engine that can obliterates my ability to discern what’s being whacked until I’m in full, lethal motion. Maybe it’s the power of wielding a mechanized cutting machine mixed with the angst of an uptight, obsessive personality that does me in.

Be that as it may, once launched with a weedeater in my hands, I sense a strong internal drive to cut everything the same height — somehow blind to the carnage I’m wreaking in my lust for a flawless, perfect, three-inch tall green expanse.

In a different life, I might have been an excellent builder of golf courses. Though in this life, I dislike golf and golf courses (environmentally poisonous cesspools built so a few people can tap little balls into holes using sticks). And I would add a dislike for those who play golf, but that’s not actually true. I don’t dislike people who play golf. But I don’t comprehend the fascination, and I don’t much care for those I inwardly suspect of ulterior motives for playing golf: the modern Silas Laphams of the world and their upwardly mobile climb to the top. (Though having advertised my snobbishness, I’m tempted to add qualifiers about how I know golf is a fun game (though I don’t really believe it’s fun), and how I’m sure people don’t really hit the golf course for networking reasons alone (though I know many, in fact, do just that)).

Whatever … I give up. I’m heading from this self-built sand trap back to safer ground: weedeating.

It seems I always destroy at least one irreplaceable and expensive flower, shrub or tree during a weedeating outing. This weekend, the sacrificial victim was a serviceberry tree. It’s a fact that our forests are filled with serviceberries. So, on first blush, the loss of one, tiny serviceberry doesn’t seem like much. But my friend, a few years ago, had carefully selected this tree from a nursery, ordered the serviceberry sapling and planted it. She had weeded and nurtured the serviceberry, openly admiring her excellent work mere days before I, with a single heedless pass of the weedeater, took said prized serviceberry from a height of three or so feet to a mere three or so inches.

I looked back, oops, too late to prevent the destruction, and there — stark evidence of my recklessness and need for perfection — was a tiny stump, the remnants of her beloved serviceberry tree.

“Well, if you had to cut something down, I’d rather it be that than, say, the plum tree,” my friend said bravely, as if she were in the Strait of Messina choosing between Scylla and Charybdis.

A few years ago, I ordered eight very expensive tea plants from a nursery in Chapel Hill. I planted them. Within a week, I had chopped down two. Innumerable flowers have given way to my weedeating, and even a fair number of vegetable plants — each time I mow the paths in the garden, I take out a broccoli here, a row of carrot tops there.

I’ve long toyed with the possibility of using a scythe rather than a weedeater. My biggest fear isn’t the physical labor involved — a weedeater beats the hell out of you, anyway — it’s sharpening the blade. I’m very bad at sharpening anything. I have ruined many a fine knife by trying to “fix” it, dulling the blades beyond the repair of the most skilled professional knife sharpener. These days, I use a serrated knife that never requires sharpening, and I resolutely squelch desires for chef-quality kitchen equipment. I know I’d just be throwing away my money if I bought nice knives.

This might prove the case with a scythe, too. There is something deeply satisfying, however, about the thought of using this finely crafted tool instead of a machine. No motor, no need to string; more time to think, some protection I hope for the plants. Additionally, my inner peasant finds a certain rustic appeal to the possibility of looking like I stepped out of a Bruegel painting. And that’s a feeling I certainly never get when using a weedeater.

(Quintin Ellison can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)

The next time you are standing about the yard scratching your head in confusion about which tree climber in Jackson County to call because there’s a swarm of bees in the tippy-toppy portion of a tree, let me please recommend David Hatton, a very fine tree climber and a man whose resume now includes experience in the hellish ways of honeybees.

David this week heroically ascended a rather smallish but very tallish white oak at my behest. He cracked jokes about how much he was enjoying being 50 to 60 feet up the tiny tree as it swayed wildly about, rather like a Q-tip might writhe before gale-force winds. He endured four stings in his scalp without (much) complaint — although David did, I noticed, descend the oak tree at an alarmingly rapid pace after announcing: “That’s it” in a calm, but resolute, tone of voice.

David endured all of this only to watch the bees take off for parts unknown, sort of “Westward, Ho!” and down, out of sight they disappeared into the valley below.

And thus this tree climber unwittingly, but gamely, became an initiate into the world of beekeeping. David learned firsthand the great lesson bees are here to teach us: the knowledge that the subject of one’s ardor will, as often as not, receive the attentions lavished upon them ungratefully; and in return for adoration, will visit great pain and, sometimes, absolute rejection upon us.

Does that sound a bit dark, a tad jaded, a wee bit pessimistic? Let me hasten to add that I am wild for swarms, and passionate about honeybees. Something deep inside me thrills when I see that tornadic rotation of thousands of bees launching upwards from a hive, and I hear the astonishingly loud buzzing roar that signals a swarm.

Even if, as so often proves the case, the swarm disappears without so much as a “thanks, dedicated beekeeper, for feeding us all winter.” And this just a couple weeks before, you’ll note, it is time to start collecting honey for said beekeeper. And just one day — one day! — before I planned to split this particular hive to hinder swarming.

I console myself it’s only through my losses, and the losses of other beekeepers, that the forests will be repopulated with honeybees.

(Though, philosophic resignation be damned, I would really like my swarm back. So if someone in the Fairview community spots a large wad of honeybees hanging about, please get in touch with me (unless the bees went into the walls of your home, in which case, that most certainly wasn’t my swarm)).

•••

This seems like as good a place as any to answer some of the many questions I get about honeybees.

Q: Dear Quintin, I’m really interested in getting into beekeeping. How many hives should I own?

A: Two to start with. More than two is too much work; fewer than two and you don’t have a point of comparison.

Q: Dear Quintin, where can I get bees?

A: It’s really late in the season to be getting bees. Most beekeepers take orders in the fall for the following spring. So think about doing it next year, and in the meantime, join a bee club (call your local N.C. Cooperative Extension Service agent for more information).

Q: Dear Quintin, I have bees, somehow they survived my total neglect and lived through the winter. What should I be doing now?

A: I hope you’ve been feeding them sugar water, or there’s a very good chance your bees starved this spring even after surviving the winter. If they are alive, I for one am strongly considering putting my supers on now — I spotted some locust in bloom, and it looks as if the poplar trees are getting ready to bloom, too. Stop feeding sugar water when you super up. Actually, I quit earlier this month — you don’t want them to store sugar water instead of honey.

Q: Dear Quintin, why not just put the supers on early, say March? Why the what’s-in-bloom-now fixation?

A: Put supers on too early and the bees will use the wax in the frames for other purposes, not necessarily as a place to store honey.

Q: Dear Quintin, what the hell is a super?

A: Supers are boxes that contain frames of foundation, usually made of wax that encourage bees to store honey, which you can later rob from them.

(Quintin Ellison can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.)

Tonight’s menu calls for salad from the garden, which reminded me to jot down a method for growing lettuce that, being very lazy busy lately, I’ve grown quite fond of doing.

Lettuce doesn’t need coddling, or careful spacing of the seed, or much of anything at all for that matter. Those expensive bags of mixed salad you buy at the farmers market or in produce sections of grocery stores? You can easily and inexpensively grow the stuff at home.

Here’s how you to grow your own Mesclun mix:

Broadcast lettuce seed thickly over a prepared garden bed. Broadcasting means strewing or scattering. A properly prepared bed is one free of rocks, amended with compost or, short of that, amended with organic fertilizer. The soil should have been limed to sweeten the soil, ideally some four months previously. The state extension service people will fuss at me about this — they do so like to recommend soil testing, probably in part because of the job insurance such testing entails — but don’t wait for results to come back from the laboratory if you haven’t tested and limed yet. I can pretty much guarantee that in Western North Carolina, home to acid soil, you need lime if you haven’t limed before. So get a bag of the stuff and, using a light hand, dust the top of the bed. It won’t hurt the seed, and this way rain will drive the lime down to where it can do the most good.  

Your seed should be leaf lettuce such as Black-Seeded Simpson, not a heading lettuce. Though having said that I hasten to be contradictory by adding Buttercrunch lettuce — which is a Bibb type — works particularly well when broadcasted.

After you’ve gotten the seed down, stir it around a bit using the back of a rake. This presses the seeds into the soil and helps with germination. Don’t try to cover every seed, that’s unnecessary; in fact, some lettuces (the white-seeded types) need light for even germination. By stirring the seed you are simply trying to make some contact between said seed and the soil.

Keep the bed moistened if the weather turns dry. This is very important because, using this method, the seed is more or less on the surface of the ground and subsequently will dry out very quickly. The lettuce generally germinates in about a week this time of year.

One wonderful side benefit to using my method if you, too, are really lazy very busy is that by broadcasting thickly, weeds are crowded out.

When the lettuce leaves have grown a few inches tall, take scissors and whack them off, a couple of inches from the ground: tah dah, you have salad. The lettuce will re-grow; you will take a pair of scissors and whack the leaves off again, fertilizing every couple of weeks (liquid fertilizer, such as compost tea or a fish emulsion). Over and over you cut, shearing the bed, at least you can do this until the weather turns really hot and the lettuce bolts or turns bitter.

You can help slow bolting by putting shade-cloth over top and watering frequently, but don’t bother until temperatures stay consistently in the 80s. Interestingly, once your lettuce starts tasting bitter, try rinsing it in warm water: for some reason, that helps more than cold water.

I’ve also found Slobolt, a leaf lettuce readily available through various seed companies, lives up to its name. I seed Slobolt in late spring to help tide me through the hot summer when Black-Seeded Simpson and Buttercrunch are a distant spring memory. I also have a hot-weather mix that I’ve grown for market I’ll write about another day. It has no actual lettuce (which is a cool-weather crop, and germination rates drop accordingly as temperatures rise), but instead relies on baby kales, collards and so on.

Other items that go into my salad mix this time of year: baby beet leaves, particularly the variety unappetizingly called bull’s blood beets. This type has lovely dark purple leaves and really dresses up a salad, but any young beet leaves will do. I also add claytonia, or Miner’s lettuce, a West Coast native that has a wonderful buttery taste; lamb’s quarters, a pernicious weed in our soil but a nice salad addition; sorrel; Asian greens such as tatsoi and mizuna; and Arugula.

Don’t forget to clip some dill or other herbs into the salad. I also enjoy adding edible flowers, such as violets or nasturtiums, for both beauty and gustatory pleasure.

(Quintin Ellison can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)