Vintage Home and Farm

Today when I was in the garden I noticed that my bok choy is starting to bolt, and I was wondering if the flowers are edible.  The flowers haven't opened yet and they look very similar to broccoli florets.  After some research, I learned that indeed all parts of the bok choy plant are edible including the flowers.  The flowers are best eaten before the petals open.  Interestingly, the bok choy flowers not only look like broccoli, they also taste like broccoli. Last March, I had written about brussels sprouts flowers being edible .  Kale flowers are also edible and we have been eating lots of kale flowers over the past month as the row of kale plants has bolted as well.  Our kale is providing a long season of delight, as we enjoyed many months of tender kale leaves, followed by kale florets, and now our honeybees are buzzing all over the bright yellow kale flowers that have opened. It seems that most (if not all?) plants in the brassica family have edible flowers.  The closed flower

Our honeybees need to be fed every 4-5 days.  Since we have brand-new hives and our bees began their journey here without any honey already stored, they require sugar syrup made at a ratio of 1:1 (1 part sugar to 1 part water) this time of year.  We've noticed that every 4-5 days, the gallon-sized feeder that's inside each hive has been nearly depleted.  Eventually, as they build up their own stores of honey, they won't require as much or any extra sugar syrup during certain parts of the year after there has been plenty of nectar and pollen for them to forage. Today I made more sugar syrup for them. The sugar syrup I'm making has 16 cups of water and 16 cups of sugar. Knowing how quickly we are going to be going through sugar, we have been purchasing 25-pound bags of sugar from Costco. To remove any impurities in the water, we first bring the water to a boil in our big stock pot on the stove.  After it boils a few minutes, I turn the burner off, add the sugar, and stir

Handmade quilts add a cozy feeling of warmth to a room, especially when the backdrop is a knotty pine wall.  A few days ago, we were blessed to receive from my father-in-law, Richard, three vintage quilts that had been passed down in the family. He included with the gift two beautiful quilt racks that he had built.  (Thank you, Dad!!)  Each of the quilts is about 80 years old and has been preserved lovingly all that time. We decided to place the quilts where we would see them regularly, and so we put them in areas of the house that we use every day.  One quilt rack went into our living room and the other is placed at the top of the stairs near our bedrooms. Before placing the quilts on the racks, I spread each one out on the bed in the master bedroom so that I could take a few photos to share.  One of the quilts was signed in embroidery by the woman who made it; its quilt blocks feature the letters of the alphabet. Two of my favorite blocks in the alphabet quilt are the Windmill and th