Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Bees knees

Bees have baskets on their legs where they put the pollen they collect. I like to think about a bee with two little picnic baskets tied to its legs, but I don't think their baskets really look like that. Bees get their best food from pollen. You can buy bee pollen, and put it in a smoothie, but I think it is gross.

I do like honey. Something to know: don't feed honey to a baby. They can die! Can you believe that? All the time it would seem like feeding honey to a baby is a good idea, BUT IT IS NOT.

There are the bees that farmers use to pollinate their crops--almonds in California and everything everywhere else. These bees have keepers that move them from farm to farm in big trucks. The bees that do the work and move around on trucks work really really hard, and they don't get to choose where to go. This can make them die faster than bees that live in one place because they chose it.

And there are wild bees.

I think that bees used to like to live in the hollows of trees. Now, there are not so many trees and hardly any hollow ones. How do I know that? I haven't been around that long. But I talk to old people. The really, really old ones. I ask them about the food they used to eat, and how they liked to play, and stuff like that. And they tell me some amazing things. This one lady, she told me that in fifty years she saw the world change from a beautiful place of dirt roads lined with cherry trees to a bunch of boxes on the side of the hot rock road. And other people talk about milk in glass bottles getting delivered to their doors, or how their family had a cow. I like talking to old people. But I hate it when they have old wrapped candy in glass bowls in their houses. That is also gross.

Tuesday, May 29, 2007

more about me

So, I'm a kid who likes vegetables. I like them because they grow in the sunshine and under the stars. They drink sweet rainwater and they can never run away, so they make friends where they are.

My favorite ones these days are sugar snap peas and those sweet orange tomatoes, I think they're called sungolds. Some vegetables you can add sugar to, like rhubarb in a pie, and others like parnsips and beets are already full of sugar that just needs to get crawled out by baking them in the oven. Baby carrots in a bag should make you laugh because they're made with big carrots that get lathed in a machine. That's OK, you're still eating a carrot, but I am just telling you. There are also some weeds you can eat but I won't tell you about those yet.

And when you're talking about fruits, I like strawberries. Did you know you can plant them in the fall and they'll come in the spring for just one season? Or you can plant them in the fall and get them to come back for three springs. I also like figs. There's this lady my mom knows who makes fig jam from a recipe that her grandmother gave her, but she won't give my mom the receipe. I can tell you that it's very good, and I ate mine on a saltine, and it was still good. Our neighbor to the left of us, his name is Booze Allen, he tore the fig tree in his backyard out. Because it "attracts bugs." And that is true. I think wasps crawl inside them to live, and I think there's a reason that you wouldn't get a fig without the wasp eggs too. I'll try to find out to explain.

Broccoli Rob, Meet Nut Ella

So I went to the grocery store today with my mom, and there was this little girl there in the chocolate aisle. I asked her her name and she said "Nut Ella."

Her mom told my mom that they just moved in down the street. Her mom doesn't know jack about gardening, and she shops the center of the grocery store.

That said, I think we're all going to be friends. It seems inevitable.