Hey kitty cats! This week has been a little hectic tiring for me and we all know Kate is weeks away from giving birth so there are your excuses. I figured we would just get that outta the way right now. Why? Because today’s post might be a little underwhelming unless you’re a dog lover.
Wow, our first monthly welcome post took place one year ago, and we had just started Live Seasoned a couple of weeks before that, which means we’ve had our first anniversary and didn’t even acknowledge it! Sarah and I make the perfect old couple.
March is a tricky month for bees. Bee colony activity usually starts up again during late February or early March depending on the temperature. Temperature is the determining factor as far as honeybees are concerned. As the weather gets warmer, the days lengthen, and pollen becomes available, the queen starts laying eggs, and the bees become active gathering nectar and pollen from early flowers and storing honey in combs.
If you’re backyard beekeeping, March is the month when colonies can die of starvation if their honey stores aren’t big enough. There is a lot of activity and lots of hungry bee bellies to fill, so you may want to take a peek into your boxes to make sure there’s enough sugary syrup for your bees to feed on. Later this month, bee colonies increases brood combs and populations reach their peak capacity. The brood combs are the beeswax structure of cells where the queen bee lays her eggs. When the hive gets too crowded, the colony gets ready to swarm, which sounds terrifying, but it is actually the natural method of reproduction of the colony.
When the colony preps to swarm, the drone population increases and a few queen cells are built to produce a new queen. A few larvae that would normally develop into worker bees are fed a special gland food called royal jelly, their cells are reconstructed to accommodate the larger queen, and her rate of development increases. If you’re new to this bee business, a drone is a male bee and the product of an unfertilized egg. If the egg was fertilized it would be a worker bee not a drone. Worker bees are female, they have stingers and they help collect pollen and nectar. Drone bees exist primarily to mate with a fertile queen, which brings us back to swarming. Swarming usually occurs in March to June. The old queen leaves the hive with about half of the bees to a new home elsewhere. The remaining bees in the colony continue their work rearing brood and collecting pollen. When a virgin queen emerges from her cell, she stings the remaining queen cells and kills any other queen she finds – real nice lady that queen. Six to eight days after mass-murdering the other queens, the virgin queen flies out to mate with drones and return to the colony as the new queen. A few days after mating, the queen bee will start laying 1,500-2000 eggs a day.
As you may know, I’m lunar obsessed and while I remind you guys all the time to check out the moon, THIS IS THE MONTH! Ok, every month is the month, but during March the full moon hangs out in the sky all night long. On March 5th we’ll see the full crow moon rise around sunset and set around sunrise. During the rest of 2015 the moon will spend some time in the daytime sky. It’s no super moon (it’s actually the smallest full moon of 2015), but it will be glowing allllll night long. So take a night hike or at least spend a few minutes gazing up!
Venus is visible as an evening star in the southwestern sky this month. If you’re in the southern hemisphere, Mercury is your morning star during March. Last month, Jupiter was in opposition (meaning opposite the sun) and this month it will still be shining brightly most of the night!
Starting on March 8th and continuing for a couple weeks, a faint zodiacal light will be visible just after sunset. Find Venus and Mars (I use Star Walk for help) and you should see the zodiacal light that’s being reflected from interplanetary matter.
In a few weeks we all celebrate the Equinox, which means the start of Spring or the beginning of Autumn depending on which hemisphere you reside. Friday, March 20th is a day for celebration as the sun crosses the celestial equator – pull on your rain boots and go splash around in the snow melt. If you’re in the southern hemisphere, appreciate each and every Autumn day this year 🙂
Venus and the moon buddy up in the western twilight sky on March 22nd.
On March 24th, the first quarter moon passes close to the red giant star Aldebaran and the Hyades star cluster. The moon passes in front of Aldebaran if you’re an observer in northern latitudes: Kazakhstan, Russia, northeastern Scandinavia, extreme northeastern China, northern Greenland, northwestern Canada, and Alaska. More on Aldebaran and the Hyades cluster here.
There are a handful of great environmental holidays to celebrate this month! I plan on participating in each one, wanna join me?! I am so thankful for water and woods that I feel like every day is international river, forest and water day, but I’m going to try to do something extra special on those specific dates this year.
Do you have kiddos? Teach them the importance of forests and rivers this month. At least read The Lorax or watch the video! During the Meatout, I plan on eating these scones, cold oat salad and maybe a rice pulse. I can’t wait to relive my days without power (when I first moved into my current apartment) during Earth Hour. Maybe we’ll make it a whole Earth Night in our household. Whatever you do or don’t do, at least spread the word to your family and friends about these environmental holidays this month. The bottom line is getting the word out, someone needs to speak for the trees 😉
That’s right, nuts, and we’re so excited about this pick. As you are well aware, we love varying our diet to take advantage of the freshest foods each season. At this time of year, as we’re anxiously waiting for the first spring spring markets to start up, our diets can become particularly boring if we aren’t careful. That’s why focusing our attention on nuts, which store well and are readily available year-round, can be a lot of fun and get us out of any creative ruts that we we were having in the kitchen!
Of course, we’ll do quite a bit of dessert baking with nuts, but we’re also excited to stretch our culinary muscles by finding more ways to incorporate them into main dishes. It’s likely that there will be some more nut milks in our future and some condiments too. As well as a lot of general snacking: in our trail mix and on our cheese plates. What about you, do you have a favorite nut recipe that you’d like to share?
Happy Monday! Hope you’re having a good start to the week! Here are some sweet treats for your desktop enjoyment. If you don’t feel like looking at donuts all day there are also nature shots to feast your eyes on 😉
You can upload one or all of these photos to use as your desktop background or as phone and tablet wallpapers. Simply click on the download link below each photo and save the image. Enjoy!
Click for A Frame.
Click for Donuts Forever. Remember this donut roundup? You should probably make these.
Click here for Full Snow Moon – read about moon names here.
Click for Lake Jordan.
Click for Winter Foliage.
Peace out cub scouts!
Hey, it’s almost the end of February! Often one of the hardest months to get through mentally because we’re all getting a bit sick of winter’s cold, snow, and short days. BUT ~ March starts next week, and while more snow is sure to fall, it seems to be that it’s also the month when we begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
So we just wanted to wish you a warm and cozy weekend, full of winter indulgences like afternoon matinees in front of cozy fires with big bowls of simmering soup, because before we know it, this season will be far in the rearview mirror and our weekends will be packed with all the projects that those warm and sunny spring days initiate.
xoxo
Even though it doesn’t feel like spring, we’re happy to turn our sights towards longer days, warmer weather, and a variety of new topics starting with the introduction of our ingredient of the season next week! In the meantime, we hope you enjoy clicking back through our favorite posts of winter. If you had a fave we didn’t mention, we would love to hear in the comments!
I’m a big fan of crispy, salty snacks, but I feel pretty bad about myself when I eat an entire bag of kettle cooked chips. Maybe you don’t, which I applaud you for, and that case go open another bag while you read this recipe. I think these garlic and parmesan roasted chickpeas are the perfect substitute for potato chips because they provide the crunch and the salt that I’m craving, but they also pack some protein. They’re baked, not fried like chips, and really you could season them however you see fit. I recently kicked my chips and dip habit (thank you, thank you very much) and I found I’m baking these up quite often to satisfy my salt tooth. Is that a thing? It is for me at least.
Hey travel bugs! I’m extremely amped to write this post full of tips about saving money for travel because I’m in the midst of a big savings year right meow! I have a huge trip planned for the end of 2015 and if I want to make it a reality I need to keep it at the forefront of my consciousness. For me, a big part of successful savings starts with being mindful of it. If I’m always thinking about the trip and being frugal, I’m much more likely to skip the little extras: the cup of coffee, the random tank top, the $4 bar of delicious dark chocolate, you get the picture. This post applies to any big ticket item you want to save for not just a trip. Maybe you want to splurge and get a fancy new DSLR (and by you I mean me), or pay off a huge chunk of student loans, or put aside money for your snazzy wedding, whatever you’re planning, you can save for it and these tips can help you!
First things first. How much do you actually need to save? I get questions like this all the time: ‘how much should I save for a cross country road trip’ or ‘how much do you think I need for two weeks in Brazil’ and at first these questions seem unanswerable, but in truth, they’re pretty easy requests and they can be worked out with a pen, paper and a tiny bit of research. The short of it: what I need for a cross country road trip is probably not what you need for a cross country road trip. Why? Because we all have different lifestyles and ways of traveling. That’s why it’s important for YOU to estimate your own travel costs and don’t worry, it’s not as intimidating as it sounds.
This is the third post in a series where I’m slowly taking you on the adventure* of figuring out how to recreate the sweater above. The original sweater belongs to a friend and has been well-loved and well-worn for at least a decade or so. Over that time, it also became slightly felted. I’m knitting a new sweater to be exactly like the old in every way except length – the new one will be a touch longer (one diamond cable’s length).
In the first post, I introduced you to the sweater, it’s three cable patterns, two yarn options, and two swatches using those yarns. Both of those swatches were too small to match the original sweater, but I was able to work out the stitch patterns. By the second post, I had found a yarn and needle combination that produced a swatch that was the perfect match to the sweater! I also discussed blocking in that post.
Today I’m back to share a minor update ~ mainly that actual sweater knitting has commenced, and I’m about halfway done with the body of the sweater!
I also wanted to share my initial pattern notes for each of the cables. I often see a cable stitch that I’d like to incorporate into my own projects, but if it’s part of another pattern then I either have to buy the pattern of figure it out through trial and error. Of course, sometimes I get lucky and will find exactly what I’m looking for in a stitch guide, but even that takes a bit of hunting. Each of these distinct cable patterns can be incorporated into any variety of projects, from hats and sweaters, to throw pillows and afghans.
The notes are written as if you’re knitting in the round and moving along each row from right to left, which is often the case for a sweater. If you need any help translating them to a flat piece of knitting, please let me know!
Cable Abbreviations:
*Go ahead, you can laugh at my use of the word adventure to describe this series, and if you do, know that I won’t be inviting you over for knit night ;-).
I have to admit, this is a week I’m happy to put behind me. Nothing bad actually happened, just a consistent flow of minor stumbles. And since this is all I have to share, I’m sharing it ~ maybe you’ll get a laugh, or you can commiserate if your week was equally blah. The babysitter arrives, I leave the house with my laptop to work, sit down at the coffee shop and realize that my laptop’s COMPLETELY (won’t even turn on) uncharged and I don’t have a plug. Next day, I finally try on a sweater that I knit for Alex, photo above. He looks sooooo stinking cute, but I know that the sweater’s going to fit him for about three days before he grows out of it. We had to take our car to the garage, and what should have been a 30 minute trip turned into a 2.5 hour adventure because of the silliest traffic jam at a freeway onramp. Yesterday the little man gets sick. Today, he wakes up at 4:30 throwing up, so I wake up at 4:30 to be thrown up on. awesome. Fortunately, the high note of the week is that he seems to have the bug out of his system. How do I know? Around 9 this morning he requested cold refried beans for breakfast (no joke!). I was hesitant to serve them, but then I figured, maybe his little body knows. He ate about a quarter of a can, and he’s been as happy as a clam ever since. Ending the week on a high note!
I almost feel bad writing this after I read Kate’s Two Bits, but this week may have been the best of 2015! These past two months work has been slooooooow. To keep the cost of my business low, I don’t advertise. I get a lot of work through referrals or by seeking it out myself and for the most part that works out really well for me, but sometimes there’s nothing going on. Fortunately my luck changed and last week I worked in Houston, Texas and this past week I had a really cool gig at the North Carolina Central University Art Museum. Those jobs left me feeling motivated, which is so much better than how I’ve been feeling about work and my own self worth.
Besides the photo gigs, I accepted a new part time position at a local pottery studio! I’m super excited to work on production as well as all their media materials. I can’t wait to have a project to work on that isn’t so personal. It’s nice to be a little bit removed so that I can clearly look at the brand and figure out how to represent it in the best possible way. I’m also pumped to get out of my house and into a studio a couple days a week. The studio is way out in the country side near the Haw River, which is a really pretty drive from my house. No more hermit-working-from-home lifestyle for me! Well, at least for two days a week. 😉