Month: May 2019

We got two nucs (pronounced “nukes”) of honeybees back on May 12. This is our first foray into beekeeping, but then again, most of these farming endeavors lately have been “firsts” for us. With the bee thing, this is 100% Elissa. She took a beekeeping class for a couple months earlier this year and scoped out and purchased all the necessary materials, etc. So far so good. Our understanding is that the bees will spend roughly the first year building up their hives and stocking them with honey… eventually generating surplus honey in the second year (ie more honey than they’d need to get through winter). So for now, we just make sure to supply them with sugar water (simple syrup) to supplement their pollen intake and do weekly status checks on the hives, like Elissa is doing in the photo, to make sure there aren’t any issues (mites, signs of swarming, etc).

Maybe a month or two ago, we heard about this website called The Fresh Harvest which is basically an online grocery store that focuses on selling locally-farmed goods. In this case, “local” is anywhere within some radius of Remington, VA (near Culpeper). So the deal is, customers do their shopping at this site online, submit their orders by Sunday each week, and then the orders get processed and delivered the following Thursday. There are a few standard delivery drop-off locations (I believe there’s one in Warrenton, for example), but you can also request the order be delivered to your door.

So we ended up contacting the company’s owner, Matt Coyle, and started a discussion with him. A few weeks later, our eggs are up for sale on The Fresh Harvest! So check it out, give it a try if you’ve maybe thought about shopping at farmer’s markets but haven’t had the time to get out to one, etc. It’s like Peapod, but local, small-business goodness.