X-ray of a garlic clove. Image by Antonio Fortunati, 2010.

Last fall I did something every gardener should try: grow garlic. It’s not that hard, you can grow it in a pot or in the ground, and well, garlic is awesome.

Growing garlic takes nearly all year, but not that much effort. Plant it right around now, before the ground freezes, let it hibernate under the snow all winter long, water them in the summer til it’s time to pull them out, then hang them somewhere to cure for two weeks. There’s some luck and chance involved, but that’s what makes gardening fun, and you’ll be that much more proud once you’re pulling your precious, delicious heads out of the ground next summer.

Bright white brined garlic cloves. Image via Katayama.

The first time I grew my own garlic, my head swam with the possibility of putting local pizzerias out of business with my own signature garlic knots, selling the rest in such large quantities that I could retire a very rich and smelly man. If you ever took 8th grade math, or have a Ti-82 calculator, you might be convinced to grow garlic by math alone. For every CLOVE of garlic, you can grow up to seven HEADS of garlic (each containing as many cloves). See that? What’s that like 49 cloves? How’s my math?

But things went a little awry. Thanks to a series of beautifully warm November days with global warming highs in the 70s my garlic was fooled into thinking spring had arrived.

Despite the heap of protective mulch over them, garlic scapes busted through, ready to party, not realizing a long winter is just minutes away. I’ve never been so disappointed to see healthy vegetable growth. When the ice cleared in the Spring, there were only three left, from the original ten I had planted, standing proud but conspicuous in otherwise empty pots.

Gelasio Laura Prosseda standing in front of an impressive garlic harvest. Image from the Prosseda Family.

I kept watering them well into the summer, finally pulling them in late July. I stopped watering them a week before harvesting, letting the scapes go brown. Then I gently raised them with a trowel. I can’t tell you how proud I was of my three, weird, tiny heads of garlic.

I cured the precious heads in dry heat and shade under my grill and wound up using most of it in a hodgepodge, hurricane-induced culinary experiment involving sauteed onions, peppers and chicken sausage. It was delicious. Pungent. Spicy. And totally worth the effort.

Boxes of garlic scapes. If you want to be classy, call them fleur d'ail. Just as delicious either way.

Here’s what to do:

• Get good planting stock: Get the kind of garlic that reproduces. Supermarket varieties are probably not the ones you want. You can find out where to get some good, local planting stock on the Garlic Seed Foundation, or take your chances with farmer’s market garlic.

• Planting in the ground is the conventional way, but pots will work too. If you’re a city dweller who wants to plant in the ground, have your soil tested first.

• Plant later in the season, and plant more of it than you want to eat; you might lose some to idiocy. (Ahem). In New York City, that’s less like October and more like late November. You don’t want the garlic to grow too much before the winter, just enough to get some roots going.

• Drop one clove into holes in the dirt 3-4 inches deep, pick the biggest, non-bruised cloves of the bunch. Give them some room too, 5 inches apart from each other.

• Mulching can help protect them from super cold temperatures.

• Continue to water into the colder months, the idea is that you want the roots to continue to grow before the frost hits, but… you don’t want them to sprout too early.

• Cut the scapes (the big green part above the ground) a few weeks before harvest in the summer. Impress your friends and throw them on a pizza. Cook with them like you’d cook with scallions.

• Gently raise the garlic with your hands or a trowel. Dust off the dirt and cure ‘em up by hanging them out of the sun in a breezy spot for about two weeks when it’s warm.

• Celebrate! You just grew garlic and damn, it tastes good.

Cure some garlic heads like this old Cajun woman. Image via Pop Art Machine.

Scott Moe blogs about gardening on his rooftop at Panthy’s Garden. Image research for this post was done by Gijs van der Most.

FURTHER READING
Saveur’s How to Peel Garlic in Less than 10 Seconds, YouTube.

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Nature's life cycle is cinematic. Little Edie of Grey Gardens standing in front of her overgrown garden. Image via Swell Dame's Parlour.

It’s Fall and our gardens are dying. You probably spent some time deadheading basil and mint flowers and getting upset when lettuce bolted. By the time herbs and plants start developing seeds and flowers, they’ve slowed down on producing the leaves we love to eat. They have one foot in the grave. Keep the life cycle cyclical and save their seeds for next year.

Gardening with an eye towards next season. Photo of Maud Cooper and Sarah Spaulding Castle by Charles J. Van Schaick via the Wisconsin Historical Society.

Why bother with saving seeds when you can buy a new random hardware store pack next spring?

Saving your own seeds gives you more control over which traits you’ll have growing in your garden. If you prefer delicious tomatoes over ones grown for uniform size for easier mechanized picking, then save the seeds of the delicious ones. The season after that, you can save the seeds of the best ones from that delicious batch, and the next year’s will be even better. Same goes for peppers, morning glories, beans, or even the basil and mint in your windowsill. There’s no need to take your chances with a new, potentially lame batch of seeds.

Let the healthiest, juiciest plants go to seed to be sure that their tasty genes are around for next year.

Also, have a look at this depressing infographic. All that loss means fewer flavors and more of the same boring fruits and vegetables that are bred to be shipped from one end of the earth to the next, among other not necessarily tasty goals. Collecting seed from heirloom or heritage plants (read: the open pollinated, non-hybridized kind) helps preserve biodiversity. Also note that standard hybrid plants aren’t necessarily programmed to have a life cycle. Their seeds may not produce offspring similar to the parent plant — or any plants at all.

Biodiversity is the key to food security, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization. It’s an old idea corroborated by anyone who lived through the Irish potato blight.

Because seed saving is simple and free, it was a popular, even revered act for our ancestors (and current small-plot farmers). And for the same reason, the act has been marginalized (even criminalized) by certain parties that hope to monetize nature’s basic processes. Stick it to Monsanto and monoculture by saving some of your own seeds.

The cycle of morning glory seeds from fresh to bursting.

NOW FOR THE SEED SAVING

For most flowers and vegetables, wait until seed pods have formed, turned brown and dried out. If you normally deadhead your flowers, let a few go to seed. Allow some of your culinary herbs (like cilantro) to flower and go to seed too. Like magic, you’ll have coriander seeds for cooking or the makings of next season’s crop.

Catch the seeds before they naturally pop out or fall. To do this, stick a brown paper bag over the seedheads and snip.

Poppies have bulbous and easy-to-spot seedheads when ready: it sounds like a baby’s rattle when gently shaken. Clip and collect in a paper bag and shake the seeds loose.

Protecting their biodiversity. Photo via St. Croix Valley Landscaping.

Let vegetables like squash and peppers fully ripen (beyond when you’d pick them for eating). Let beans get bloated and huge on the vine. For most vegetables (tomatoes are a little more complicated) simply scoop out the seeds, clean them and spread them out to dry completely.

Store collected seeds in paper envelopes (marked with variety and date) inside an airtight container, like a glass jar, and use it next season. Seeds may keep longer than a year, but viability will lessen as time goes on.

Garden for the best. Photo by Russell Lee, Pie Town, New Mexico, September 1940. From the Library of Congress via The Denver Post.

Always look for the best quality plants and most desirable fruits (in terms of color, size and taste) for harvesting seeds. Disease-free plants that produced well this year provide the best genes for next year’s harvest.

To ensure you save seeds from the brightest, healthiest flower, tie a ribbon around the stem when it’s in full glorious bloom; you’ll remember where to go once it’s an ugly brown stump.

Our agrarian ancestors would be turning in their plots if they saw us throwing away perfectly good seeds at the end of every season, only to buy seeds of unknown origin. Become a seed-saver and preserve our food heritage while making it easy to grow better, tastier, healthier plants at home.

Do you want these agrarian ancestors getting mad at you for throwing out perfectly good seeds? War gardeners feasting on their crop, 1918.

*Image research by Michael Wojtas.

FURTHER READING

“My daddy saved seed. I saved seed,” says [Horman] McFarling, 62, and sued for tech piracy by Monsanto: Seed Saving is Latest Tech Piracy, Wired

Our Dwindling Food Variety, National Geographic

Basic Seed Saving: International Institute of Seed Saving.

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A topiary dreamscape. "Passage, Leavens Hall." Archival pigmet print by Beth Dow.

On a walk through Versailles, its maniacal grandeur is impossible to ignore. In the film The Shining, it is an endless maze with horror at every turn. It is a dark art that literally comes alive for Edward Scissorhands. This shear madness is topiary.

Topiary is the horticultural art of training landscapes into defined shapes and recognizable figures and most likely developed in the stoic confines of Hellenistic Greece (topia is Greek for ‘places’). From the carefully pruned evergreen plants popularized in the atriums of Ancient Rome, to the weathered pines of Chinese penjing and Japanese bonsai, to today’s limitless mosaicultures, topiary has evolved to serve the maniacal inspirations of its creators. From Louis the XIV to Edward Scissorhands, these artisans have sought to amaze with mazes and unhinge with hedges.

In the battle of wills, man dominates tree. Sheared into an unnaturally obedient shape.

Topiary’s provocative blurring of the line between nature and sculpture has often maddened critics. In fact, the earliest known mention of topiary, by Roman Pliny the Younger, was a rebuke of its use in the villas of Rome (Historia Naturalis xii.6). In 18th century England, Alexander Pope ridiculed the mad topiarists with his “verdant sculpture.” The written piece included catalog-type descriptions of the most absurd topiary imaginable: “Adam and Eve in yew,” “The tower of Babel, not yet finished,” and “a quickset hog, shot up into a porcupine.” Though the article presaged a temporary decline of the practice in England, its vision of extreme sculpture perhaps inspired the next and most recent wave in the art.

Donald Duck topiary pounces on an unsuspecting fan.

Modern topiary, also known as mosaiculture, has taken Western aesthetic, Eastern construction and contemporary materials to limitless new heights. Using steel frames stuffed with planting material to free artisans from earlier constraints imposed by bushes, such as size, growth time and plant selection, topiary’s modern iteration is super-sized. Everything from gargantuan dinosaurs to corporate logos can be executed with these new methods.

Topiary Joe tows a menagerie of animals in his truck. Image from Topiary Joe.

Joe Kyte, aka Topiary Joe, is a topiarist who calls the British royal family among his many clients. The tool kit for a practitioner has changed, he says. “I use an old arc welder, a table vise and a pile of 3/8″ round, cold rolled steel. That is my shop… and I can duplicate it anywhere a larger project is required. Making projects on the job site is much less of a carbon footprint.” Quite a departure from a pair of shears and a pair of gloves. Kyte creates extremes, shearing into shape ‘”a Bugatti type 35b for a collector, 12-foot naked ladies for restaurants, a rather large penis in the ground, and monkeys peeing out of the tree on guests as they go toward the garden.” Extreme indeed.

A pair of perfect order flanking a picnic table.

While its early artisans’ wildest visions pale in comparison to the sheer madness of modern topiarists’, traditional strains remain to turn simple staircases into greenery dreamscapes. Topiary has not only withstood the test of time, it also incorporates the tastes of time.

Bushes are just never bulbous enough on their own.

Balls, birds and pyramids — the components of classic topiary.

FURTHER READING

Behind the Scenes: Tim Burton: Topiary. MoMA videos, YouTube
Green Animals Topiary Garden, Atlas Obscura
Aerologging, Pruned

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Robert B. Thomas Farmer's Almanac, 1907

The oldest running publication in North America was first released in 1792, when George Washington was president. Practical and sound in its advice, it was of great help to a young industrious country. Like the hundreds of other almanacs in print at the time, it offered the familiar tide tables, sun and moon phases, eclipse dates, but it was its strangely accurate weather predictions that made it a huge success over its competitors. Utilizing statistical analysis, solar activity and weather patterns, Almanac founder Robert B. Thomas proved himself to be a reliable friend to the American farmer.

Robert B. Thomas

Not only was Thomas a savvy weatherman, he was extremely adept at marketing to boot. The Almanac’s motto “Useful, but with a Pleasing Degree of Humor” seemed to describe exactly what his readers were looking for. Almanac favorites such as how to cook a 1000 lb. ostrich and the best time to castrate a bull were balanced by a goofy sense of humor and became an iconic part of U.S. culture, Thomas even had the sense to punch a hole in the corner of the publication, making it familiar in American outhouses, where it could be read and used as toilet paper. At the time of his death, at the ripe age of 80 in 1847, Thomas’ almanac was the best selling magazine in the country.

It was also a handy tool in a court of law. In 1858, when a young attorney named Abraham Lincoln was asked to defend a man tried for murder, he refuted the prosecutor’s case using the Almanac. The accuser, claimed to have seen the defendant commit the crime in the bright light of a full moon. Lincoln proved his testimony to be weak, citing a quarter moon that would have made accurate identification impossible, and cast doubt upon the case. The press celebrated the job of the defense and the story became legend.

1796 Editon of the Farmer's Almanac

In 1942,The Old Farmer’s Almanac came to public attention once again when a German spy was arrested with a copy in his coat pocket. The FBI became convinced that the enemy was using the Almanac to predict American weather patterns and almost stopped the publication from printing. Luckily the publishers convinced the government that its “weather indications” rather than prediction would not violate the “Code of Wartime Practices for the American Press” and the Almanac was saved. The formula remains hidden to this day under lock and key at the Almanac headquarters in New Hampshire.

Released just once a year, the Almanac has remained something to not only read, but also rely upon. It even boasts the very same cover first unveiled in 1855 – a detailed “four seasons” drawing by the artist Hammatt Billings. There is something to be said for consistency.

Now available both in its classic print addition as well as contemporary online version, the Almanac continues to deliver. With its recipes, natural cleaning methods, fishing guide, repair tips, tips on watching meteor showers and even astrological advice, The Old Farmers Almanac has never gone out of fashion. It’s proof that practical wisdom, combined with “pleasing humor” might just be the perfect recipe for a long and lasting life.

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Image by jakob Mosur, Courtesy of Chronicle

Kaufmann Mercantile: What kind of pumpkin grows to be 1,323 pounds, anyway?
Dan Carlson: It’s a Dill’s Atlantic Giant – or just ‘Atlantic Giant’. Howard Dill is the guy who developed the seed way back in the sixties, I think.

KM: How do you grow it?
DC: Basically you grow a plant for two months, and then you get a pumpkin started by hopefully early June, and then you got the month of June and July, and then you got August to get it as big as you can possibly get it.  And at that point… well, this fruit that won this year was 65 days old.

Dill's Atlantic Giant Seeds

KM: Do you live on a farm?
DC: Nope, I live in town.  My pumpkin patch is in the empty lot next to my house.

KM: When you wake up in the morning, do you go straight out to your pumpkins to see how much weight they’ve put on in the night?
DC: [This year's winning pumpkin] put on about 950 pounds in the month of July.  With 31 days in July, it averaged about 31 – 32 pounds a day.  That’s a pretty good grower.

KM: Will you harvest the seeds from this pumpkin for next year or will you buy new seeds?
DC: Nope, I’ve never bought a seed and I’ve never sold a seed.  I usually give them away for those who want to try it.

KM: Nice.  So this year’s seed?  Where did it come from?
DC: This particular seed that we grew this year was from our 1370-pounder that had been attacked by a groundhog two years earlier…a groundhog had come in and started eating it and – yeah, pretty much cost us a good pumpkin there.  That was 2008.  Oh well, that’s the way it goes sometimes.  Pretty much if it can go wrong, you pretty much experience it – but that’s how it goes in the pumpkin world.

Image by Robert Guth, Courtesy of The Wall Street Journal

KM: What else has gone wrong in the pumpkin world?
DC: I’ve had ‘em blow up, I’ve had ‘em split – hail.  Hail is hard as hell on ‘em, let me tell you.

KM: How do they blow up?
DC: They grow too fast and blow up on one side.  You’re growing a freak of nature that’s about as fragile as an egg.  You’re going against all odds, and a lot of stuff goes wrong.

KM: Do you ever name your pumpkins?
DC: Aw years ago maybe, but you don’t want to get too friendly with them, because they can disappoint you so quickly.

KM: What are your secrets to success?
DC: Well, one of them is that you gotta have good seeds.  But another one is you gotta have nice, fertile soil and we use nothing but natural stuff.  We get our manure from the Blue Hill Dairy in Andover.  They got some of the best crap in eastern Iowa, let me tell ya.  We use manure, leaves in the fall, and we get all that to break down – we run a soil test to make sure the Ph level is where we’d like to see it, but as far as putting chemical 10/10/10 or 20/20/20 – I haven’t put a chemical like that on my patch for probably ten years now.   I do spray for a couple of bugs that if I didn’t spray, they’d kill me – but other than that, I don’t use anything I don’t have to use.  We’re not totally organic, but we try to be as organic as possible, and the pumpkins really seem to like it.

1524 Pound Pumpkin, Thad Starr of Pleasant Hill, Oregon

KM: Can you imagine if a boar grew to that size in 65 days?
DC: Yeah, I don’t think anything in the world puts on 40 pounds in 24 hours – or 50 pounds.  We’ve had them put on as much as 60 pounds in 24 hours, but those are the ones that blow up.

KM: Have you ever had a pumpkin come out looking like someone you know, or something?
DC: I can’t tell you what my pumpkin kind of looked like this year.

KM: C’mon.  What?
DC: Did you notice that lump on the one side that stuck out?

KM: I’ll have to study my photograph, because I can’t say that one lump stuck out for me.
DC: Well there’s one lump that looks just like a boar nut.  I’m not kidding you – if you took a picture of the boar (and you can’t help but notice [his nuts]), and you took a picture of the pumpkin at the right angle, you would swear it’s the same thing.

FURTHER READING
Big Pumpkins – Giant Pumpkin Community
The Great Pumpkin Commonwealth
Iowa State Fair

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Heirloom Tomato, Courtesy of Oui Chef Cook

The word heirloom has been tossed around farmer’s markets and food magazines for years, often without much regard given to the actual meaning of the term. It seemed a stylish food spread simply wasn’t complete without an heirloom tomato. With the rise in interest in urban homesteading and the Grow Your Own movement putting modern consumers in charge of their food’s origin, the idea of growing heirlooms now goes beyond culinary trend – it’s about protecting biodiversity in the food supply and preserving our agricultural heritage.

Country Gentleman, Sept. 1945, Courtesy of Cover Browser

By definition, an heirloom crop is one that has been passed down through generations. Years ago, families were seed savers and chose to grow the crops they had always grown, the ones that suited their climate, stood the test of time and took pride of place in cherished family recipes. Ask anyone with a green thumb and romantic inclination which heirloom they are most passionate about – amongst all the Kentucky Wonders and Black Beauties of the world – and people inevitably go misty-eyed the most over their favorite heirloom tomato.

The mutations and nuances of texture and taste appear endless, the names dream-like: Brandywine, Principe Borghese and Cherokee Purple. The whimsically named Zapotec Pleated, a pink variety said to resemble a girl’s twirling dress. The voluptuous shapes and brash colors of these fruits appear like characters from a Picasso painting, with each edible gem seemingly endowed by nature with a particular destiny: Amish Paste for sauces, Chianti Rose for cool weather, San Marzano for just about everything from canning to eating barefoot in the garden.

Courtesy of Eat. Drink...Better.

From a more scientific perspective, heirloom crops are open pollinated varieties that existed before mass hybridization became commonplace, before commercial farming started breeding crops to resist certain diseases and to last longer on the shelves and in the backs of long-traveling trucks. The result however is that many of our oldest native crops, ones that had adapted over time to thrive in specific regions, making up the fabric of local agriculture – have been lost. Now, as more home growers and small farmers look to simpler, organic growing techniques, the idea of seed saving and seeking out heirloom crops is returning to the fore.

First Shipment of Tomatoes, Jacksonville, Texas, 1906 (Click on Image to Enlarge)

Growing heirlooms means preserving a variety of a crop that for years has grown successfully in one’s local area, naturally adapting over time to the weather and pests of the region, surviving the elements without the need for chemical fertilizers. It also preserves the tastes and characteristics that might otherwise have been bred out commercially – those unusual colors and textures, once considered imperfections, now cherished for the regional personality and history it embodies.

Growing these crops also means protecting biodiversity. When these heirloom varieties are lost, we narrow our pool of crop species, thus opening our society to risk when large scale commercial crops are hit by disease, weather or pests. The more varieties we maintain in our food supply, the less disastrous crop failures will be.

Courtesy of Clay Irving's Flick Stream

Thus friends, families and neighbors are once again making a move to become more self-sufficient as food consumers and choosing to take up the old time tradition of swapping seeds at markets, exchanges or simply over the backyard fence. The result – that kaleidoscope of fruits and vegetables, with quaint names and unique characteristics – links us to the past and our pioneering ancestors who introduced Old World crops to these lands. New enthusiasts who have missed out on the chance to grow their own pieces of agricultural history this year can do some enviable homework this summer and sample the heirloom varieties available in their local areas, in anticipation of next year’s garden plan.

FURTHER READING:

Oui Chef Cook Journal, a cook blog by chef Connie Thadewaldt

Seed Savers Exchange, a leading non-profit organization dedicated to saving and sharing heirloom seeds

Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds

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All Americans Urged to Grow Victory Gardens

People are returning to home gardening by growing fruits and vegetables on allotments, in community gardens, in pots and planting boxes on apartment balconies and roofs – and returning in droves. While there might be some amongst us growing potatoes and hoarding bottled water in preparation for World War III, the resurgence of urban gardening differs from the Victory Garden movement of the 1940s. Unlike the patriotic zeal that fueled citizens to roll up their sleeves several decades ago, urban gardeners of today are digging toward a different kind of freedom: freedom from reliance on tasteless, long traveled  fruits and vegetables;  freedom from contentious petrochemicals for fertilizer; freedom from mass produced agriculture; and ultimately, the freedom garnered from a return to self-reliance and the pioneer spirit that was once a pillar of American life.

Grow It Yourself

Following the cessation of the war, mass interest in home gardening as a national duty, as well as government support, dried up almost instantly. The post-war shift in agriculture from small and local to large-scale, monoculture meant the increased use of chemical pesticides, shrinking of varieties and genetic modification. Henry Ford was on to something when he proclaimed: “No unemployment insurance can be compared to an alliance between man and a plot of land.” But following WWII, gardening was relegated to a quaint hobby.

I grew up in a family of suburban gardeners and always admired my parents’ ability to grow their own tomatoes, the smell of which, as any enthusiast can tell you, is intoxicating. Cucumbers, rhubarb, pumpkins – all possessing color and texture indescribable to those who have never stepped foot on the loose earth of a home garden. The shapes and sizes, even its mere existence, all dependent on the whim of Mother Nature and the sweat of your brow.

Victory Garden Advertising

I inherited an appreciation for the home-grown from my family yet I only recently broke ground in my first urban garden – after many apathetic years of imported supermarket produce. And while the farmer’s market – now commonplace in every major city – has answered the growing call for farm-fresh, organic produce, the goods on display at these tantalizing markets have always represented an indulgent treat, something of a demonstration of what I’d like to eat, yet couldn’t always afford.

Given the low cost of a pack of seeds, growing your own produce makes economic sense as well as taking the mystery out of our food’s often dubious origins. Yet, what lies at the heart of home gardening, as with any homesteading tradition such as sewing clothes or food preservation, is the feeling of accomplishment that the novice will soon discover upon the emergence of their first seedling or the succulent taste of the summer’s first berry. The delicious, satisfying joy of the fruits of your labor will stick in your memory like the juice running down your chin.

There is community spirit to be nourished through urban gardening, familiar to anyone who has made friends over the allotment fence. The sense of camaraderie gleaned from the nostalgic propaganda material from the Victory Garden era is of course appealing, harkening us back to our agrarian roots. But more immediate than that is the quiet sense of accomplishment and wonder that can be achieved on a windowsill or a fire escape.

FURTHER READING:

Kristin Hohenadel. “Reporting from Paris: Urban Gardening for the design-minded (or yardless)”, Los Angeles Times, January 26, 2010.

David Josar. “Urban gardeners nuture nature in Detroit”, Detroit News, April 24, 2009.

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Blue Banded Bee on a Pin, Courtesy of Padil

Bees are integral to the growth of a variety of crops across the globe. According to biologist, science writer and bee advocate Dr. Reese Halter, bees contribute $44 billion to the US economy alone, pollinating crops food products like almonds, apples, avocados, alfalfa and clover for the beef and dairy industries, as well as cotton for our clothes.  Halter has just released a new book – The Incomparable Honeybee & the Economics of Pollination – that documents the plight of the bees. “They are the most important pollinator on Earth,” writes Halter, “Every third bite on our plate comes from the honeybee”.

Bee Farm, Courtesy of Anarchy Apiaries

As a result of both the dependency and struggle between insect and farmer, the honeybees have become victim to pesticides and industrial farming methods – mono-crop culture rendering their pollen infertile and miticides and chemicals creating a mass demise. In combination with climate change, which has affected the timing of plant-flowering farming, these factors are contributing to what is known as ‘colony collapse disorder’. While scientists are still not quite sure what the definitive cause of the phenomenon is – Halter believes it’s some combination of the above.

So what can you do about the apocalyptic state of the honeybee? Easy – become a beekeeper. While domesticated honeybees might be dying, feral bees’  are fighting for survival, and need safe sanctuary.

Beekeeper, Courtesy of Salvador Photo

Apiculture, as bee-keeping is known, has been in practice for centuries, with pre-historic anthropologic digs uncovering smoking pots and honey extractors amid ancient sites in Greece, Jordan and Egypt. Honey, beeswax and pollinating, these are the triumvirate of contributions the good bees have been granting us since time eternal. This makes the honeybee’s current situation even more heartbreaking.

But there is some good news in all this, as ancient methods of keeping bees are making a decided comeback. Hundreds are donating their time and money to play Florence Nightingale to a species in jeopardy. Recently, New York City, which has long outlawed beekeeping in city limits, lifted its ban and made hundreds of hobby beekeepers, who had been risking $2,000 fines for keeping the bees ‘llegally’ ecstatic. In Los Angeles, various workshops, bloggers, Yahoo-groups and schools are spreading the gospel of urban beekeeping.

Bee Larves in their Hives, Courtesy of The Honey Gatherers

One of the new wave’s loudest advocates is LA’s Kirk Anderson, a 30 year beekeeping vet who espouses no chemical bee-keeping, arguing that the simpler the bee-keeping, the better. “Humans are actually late on the chain compared to the bees,” he says, “bees have had a lot longer to evolve and become perfect little creatures. They need our help right now, mostly just in leaving them well enough alone.”

'The Beekeepers', Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Circa 1567

Anderson is a proponent of a method of beekeeping first introduced by fellow bee-keeper Charles Martin Simon, who avidly encourages what he calls ‘backwards beekeeping‘, which essentially supports the idea of working with nature, not against it, in order to keep natural, chemical free hives. Both Martin and Anderson’s ideas are simple, but they have been huge in helping to inspire a fast-growing number of first-timers. Anderson removes unwanted hives lurking everywhere from garages to backyard bbqs – and relocates them into beekeeper’s backyard hives. He does this all without chemicals and he stresses to his followers – “keep out of the bees way, and they’ll do just fine.”

Brooklyn Beekeeper, Courtesy of Green Brooklyn

“The most important thing is to observe,” explains Anderson, “to watch over the bees and see what they might need. And that watching can be a real pleasure. So many people are out of touch with nature – there are kids out there that don’t know where a potato comes from! We need to connect with nature again and this is one way to do it.”

Bee Beard, 1946, Courtesy of Life Magazine

Aspiring beekeepers can find a myriad of resources online and by going to Kirk’s site and his beekeeping collective to learn more about his methods. For those who don’t have the space or the time to play host to some backyard hives there’s still a lot one can do to lend the bees a hand. Buying organic food and cotton is a huge help to the plight of our honeybee friends, eliminating insecticide and miticide use. Also, planting purple and yellow flowers, two of the honeybee’s favorite colors to pollinate, can attract bees to healthy plants, which equals healthy pollen. In addition, a bowl of water outside keeps the bees hydrated and happy. In the end, even small changes can help the plight of the honeybees. As Anderson says “have a simple goal with chemical free, drug free beekeeping and that goal is to change the world.”

Bee Hunter in Nepal, Courtesy of The Honey Gatherers

FURTHER READING:

Elizabeth Kolbert. “Stung: Where are all the bees?”, The New Yorker. August 6, 2007.

Dr. Reese Halter. “The Incomparable Honeybee & The Economics of Pollination”, 2009

Adrian Higgins. “Bees are busier than ever as disease besieges colonies”, The Washington Post. March 15, 2010.

Eric Tourneret. “Nepal – The Honey Hunt of the Tiger-Men”, The Honey Gatherers.

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