By Living Room Realty, September 11, 2020
It’s so fun to be an urban farmer in Portland!
We keep two bee hives in our very modestly sized backyard and collect the honey every year around this late summer/early fall season. It doesn’t take much to have 20,000 loving pets buzzing around the yard. We have really appreciated the platform it gives us to teach the kids about local honey’s medicinal qualities, the ecological life of bees, and how they are essential to almost all of the food we eat.
What’s amazing is that each hive has its own very distinct characteristics and personalities. One is super organized and the other is quite haphazard in its comb production. Plus they each produce their own unique taste. My 13 year old said one tasted like apricots, and the other like wildflowers. Ever since we’ve kept bees, our urban fruit production has gone bananas (actually it’s gone pears and plums, it’s the PNW after all).
We live only a single block off a bustling commercial area of SE Portland so it’s not like you have to live in the sticks to be an urban farmer. It’s so fun to see what one small lot can produce.
When I have an abundance of honey, it makes such a fun client gift!
~ Natalie Strom, Living Room Realty
