It's Time For Garlic Scapes - GF Radio 345

Rick and Eric talk about harvesting garlic scapes and what to do with them on this episode of GardenFork Radio. Scapes can be found in the farmers market and some food stores right now. They are the flower of the garlic plant, and when growing garlic, you want all the energy going into the bulb of the plant, so we harvest the immature flowers.

Here are some of our garlic scape videos: http://www.gardenfork.tv/tag/garlic-scapes

Beekeeping comes up as always this time of year. Rick captured a honeybee swarm the easy way, here is the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rwpsyph9XOQ

One of Eric's hives swarmed and flew off, ignoring the fine bait hives he had put up. The bees remaining in the hive were re-queened yesterday. Usually when a hive swarms, the old queen flies off and leaves several queen eggs, so you can requeen your hive by putting in a new queen and removing those growing queen eggs.

Talking about how to use a cast iron dutch oven comes up, as Eric posted a video about using a dutch oven to bake cake outdoors.
A neat camping recipe or just cooking outdoors in your yard: http://www.gardenfork.tv/bake-a-cake-outdoor-cooking-dutch-oven-gf-video

Eric tells of being an assistant plumber helping to install a new boiler, which was quite a bit of work to do. Lots of running to get stuff for the plumber.

And how to use a jackhammer to open a hole in a cement floor is not as hard as one would think. For the sump pump install, we had to open up the floor, and the jackhammer was very pinpoint in breaking up the cement just where we pointed the jackhammer, and not spider-cracking the cement floor. a good thing. We rented a 35 pound medium duty jackhammer from the local home improvement store for 4 hours, and it was ample time to open up the hole we had to do. The hard part was hand digging the hole, removing the dirt. Eric found that loosening the dirt, and then using the shop vac to suck up the dirt worked pretty good. You could also use a quart yogurt container to scoop it out.

A wave of tree pollen came over Eric's yard last weekeknd,  huge release of white pine pollen so thick you could see a green cloud in the yard. Thanks to modern over the counter allergy meds, we made it through the weekend. Pollen happens.