Ginger

For as long as I can remember, I have been very prone to motion sickness. As a child, I needed only to say, "I don't feel so well" from the back seat of the car, and my parents would slam on the brakes and/or jam a bucket under my chin for the inevitable deluge. After a while, I learned that sleeping would keep me from being sick to my stomach, so I spent most car trips of over a few minutes in length asleep, stretched out on the back seat, since we didn't have booster seats Way Back Then.

As I've gotten older, it's gotten both worse and better. I don't tend to get carsick when I drive, and I've never noticed any tendency to get sick in planes or on any size of watercraft from a canoe up to a ferry. Most of the time if I am riding in a car and do start to feel queasy, I can fight it off and just feel miserable rather than actually being physically sick. Or I can fight it off long enough to fall asleep, which is quite easy for me to do thanks to the childhood Nap Conditioning of car trips. On the other hand, more types of roads make me sick than ever before. It no longer requires a hairpin road to make me ill; a parking lot or a bumpy road will work just fine. I now also become sick on roller coaster rides, carousels, and swingsets, for crying out loud. There's no way anyone would get me on the Teacup ride at Disneyland, thank you.

For a while I took Dramamine to combat motion sickness, but that requires a little pre-planning, as it's most effective if you take it more than an hour before you leave. In its favor, one dose tends to last me up to 48 hours and leaves me completely free of motion sickness to the point I can even read in the car. Unfortunately, even the non-drowsy formula tends to put me right to sleep, which is okay if I'm a passenger in a car but not great if I'm trying to ride a roller coaster.

Sometime this summer I finally decided to try a cure I'd heard about long ago but never investigated: ginger. I opted for crystallized (candied) ginger, some ginger chews, and some ginger candy to try various forms against one another. I also picked up some hot ginger lemonade. We gave it a try on a windy road out to the Oregon Coast, with me eating a couple of slices of candied ginger before leaving. Though I'm never going to eat candied ginger as a taste treat, it's not bad, and it has zero negative side effects. And it actually works. Doesn't last the 48 hours Dramamine or similar pills might; it lasts more like 6 hours. But it doesn't put one to sleep, it's inexpensive, and you can share it with anyone else who might be motion sick or even just peckish. The hot ginger lemonade was outstandingly good, but I can no longer find a source for it.

For anyone who wants to try the ginger route, I recommend going to an Import store and examining their selection of candies. I find mine at Cost Plus World Market, where I can get candied ginger, "Ginger Bears", ginger chews, pickled ginger, ginger ale and several other forms of ginger, some of which even tell you how much actual ginger is in the product. Even strong gingersnaps made with real ginger are effective. The trick is to be sure that the product contains substantial amounts of real ginger, not merely ginger flavoring. And if you really can't bear the taste of ginger, you can get ginger capsules in the Supplement aisles of some fancy supermarkets or vitamin shops, or you can make your own with ground ginger from the kitchen and gelatin capsules from the vitamin shop.

And as an added bonus, I have discovered that ginger works significantly better and faster for my heartburn than antacid tablets, and about as well as liquid antacids, without the potentially worrisome ingredients in the antacids. Wish I'd known that when I was pregnant!

Bees!

The second swarm of bees installed in my Top Bar Hive has indeed settled in nicely, and is busy busy busy. You know, like bees. I've been peeking probably more than necessary, through the little portal window on the side, but I'm curious and was a little nervous about their health and inclination to stay.

I was, until today.

Opened up the peeper window, and FINALLY got to see what was inside that mass of bees. Usually when I open the window, the bees are all clustered up towards the front quarter of the hive, hanging on to each other and generally being mellow. That's because I usually check in the evening, when I have time...and when the bees are all in for the night. Crowded digs make it hard to see what's going on. But today, I opened it up midafternoon, and saw several sheet-straight, beautifully white combs being made. Rock on. Go little buggers go! The wax is so amazingly white, not at all like the yellow beeswax you see being sold after it's been used in a hive. And did you know that wax is secreted by the bees themselves? It's like bee sweat!

I observed them for a little while, and darned if I didn't see several GINORMOUS bees coming in and out. Big, shiny eyes and huge abdomens, almost black. Drones. They're the males of the colony, whose only purpose in life is to go hang out in some Drone Bar In The Sky, waiting for virgin queens to fly by so they can all make a nab for her. The rest of the time they just hang out and bum food off the worker bees. I know some men like that...fortunately for them, humans don't also follow the bees' practice of kicking all the drones out to freeze to death at the start of winter.

One of the things that made me decide to peer in the hive at midafternoon when the bees were all very active was the fact that yesterday I got my new Sheriff-style beekeeping jacket and leather long-sleeved gloves. It is totally the bomb. Easy to put on, zippered at the neck so the hood can be thrown back, secured with velcro as well to keep the truly intrepid bees from finding their way through the opening where the zippers all meet. Double plus bonus, it actually fits me, which was of some concern as I'm not a tiny woman. Found it on eBay, though they also sell them in various beekeeping shops online, and at Ruhl's Bee Supply in Portland, OR.

Speaking of Ruhl's, I picked up another little tidbit of "country wisdom" from them today. When the blackberry petals fall, the supply of food for the bees has about run its course. Soon after, hives are prone to robbing and predation by yellow jackets. Given how much clover we have in our grass, and how long its growing season is, I'll be waiting to see if that's the case. I hope my girls can get their combs built and filled before the growing season is over!

Wisdom from the Neighbors

We have an older couple living next door to us. They've been here 40 years, which is long enough to have seen this town go from a wide spot in the road to...well, a wider spot in the road. But it's on its way to becoming a fairly large town in its own right, and if the City Council has its way, it'll be down right urban. (I suspect if the locals have their way, it won't. People don't move here for the Night Life and the urban amenities, they move here for the elbow room and the scenery.)

At any rate, I got to talking to the lady, Pat, over the fence this morning. She was watching my husband and I put out ground cloth for the base of our soon-to-be giant garden plot, and commenting that it reminded her of what she and her husband did 40 years ago. We talked about the wildlife she sees in their yard at night (mainly opossums and racoons, with other occasional visitors), and about my chickens, and about the Mason Bees I'm hoping to raise to pollinate the garden.

She then asked me, "Well, you know what the old timers will tell you, right?" Well, no...what will they tell me? "Don't plant your garden while there's still snow on Silver Star." First off, I didn't even know that mountain over to our East had a name. Well, the one directly to our east is more of a large hill, and it's Tukes Mountain, which I knew. But the one a little farther south and then east, which is often covered with snow, is apparently Silver Star Mountain. I looked it up on Google maps. Learn something new every day!

Pat told me that when she first moved out here, she got that advice, and didn't heed it. She'd never had problems with a garden before, so she just did her thing. And she didn't have much of a yield that summer, though nothing actually died. She thinks it's because it got so cold in the spring that the plants just got sapped of energy and never really recovered. I've had similar experiences with tomatoes, only in reverse; I was extremely busy and didn't get mine planted until mid June one year, and my mother in law had planted hers about 2 months before, yet by mid August my plants were outproducing hers. Every year I have to remind myself not to get too gung-ho about planting early or as soon as the weather seems nice, because we almost invariably have some late frosts and cold evenings through mid-April at least, and often through the end of April. Our last "frost danger" day isn't until almost the end of May!

The other thing Pat told me was that until the Oak and Walnut trees bud out, we're still in winter and in danger of frost. She said she has neighbors who don't have walnut trees who come over and take a look at hers to see if it's budded yet. I might have to do the same thing!