Honey from the flowers at Putney Farm.

The crew busy at work on the mint. Supposedly we may get a bit of mint flavor in this honey.

This week we got the first large batch of our late spring / early summer honey. (We have sort of a co-op going on and will explain how this all works in a later post). Very exciting. Most of this honey comes from our early season flowers, so it combines the nectar of the fruit blossoms, herb blossoms, roses, wisteria and the ornamental plants. Later in the year the lavender dominates, but this is truly a blend from the garden and orchard. Surprisingly the honey is very light in color and flavor, with some delicate herbal notes. We served it with grilled figs and it was lovely. (And we just ate a bunch with the honeycomb…what a treat. Might include it in a few cocktails, too.)

Arugula flower.

Red leaf lettuce flower.

Normally our local honey is a “mountain” or “forest” honey that runs darker with more bitter notes from the variety of flowers the bees work, and that is not a bad thing at all- these honeys are big, rich and complex. But we will admit to enjoying our more traditional golden honey. It seems the bees focused mostly on our garden this spring. And that got us thinking about all the “little” or “lesser” flowers that supplied such light, tasty honey.

Rosemary flowers.

Like many gardeners, we sometimes focus on our “big” flowers like roses, but we have many lovely flowering ornamental or ground-cover plants. The bees seem to like most of them, and we figured it would be fun to take a few photos of these “little” flowers. And after enjoying the honey from these flowers, maybe we shouldn’t call them “little” at all…besides, any excuse to walk in the garden with a Macro lens is a good one 😉 Continue reading →