JUST MAYBE, SPRING // elspeth

Quickly: I saw my first herring yesterday, picked more nettles for tea, and today it's 53 degrees. Maybe, just maybe, spring is really coming ! (Cross fingers, toes, eyebrows, hair.)

In other news, this week's Local Food Report is another honeybee spotlight: this time a conversation with a Wellfleet beekeeper working to breed honeybee queens adapted to our Cape Cod climate conditions and resistant to the menace that is varroa mite. You can listen over here. 

And while we're on the topic of hope: there is nothing more endearing and rewarding than encouraging and allowing little hands to be helpful and responsible and to move with purpose. This is a note to my future self: a reminder of the importance of this for those times when it feels too slow or too tough. It is not the easy things that are the most rewarding, for us or for them. 

Finally, if you're in the kitchen this week, these latkes are a killer way to use up the last of the potatoes. The apples at the grocery store have been terrible lately but also cheap—homemade applesauce is a thrifty way to put them to good use and makes an excellent addition. For tomorrow I'm marinating a batch of lamb loin chops and thinking of going hunting for watercress that grows at a friend's house along the Herring River. 

Spring ! I think it's really here.