People who know me know I love honey.
I’ve loved honey for years, but it wasn’t until a dinner party in New York City that it went from loving honey to knowing honey.

It was a party thrown by a running partner’s family. On the table was a tray of mixed meats and cheeses, each one topped with a different kind of honey. I asked her about it, curious.
She smiled and said, “Different honeys pair with different foods.”

I had no idea.

She walked me through it, how Acacia honey pairs perfectly with meats. On its own, Acacia is fine, but not nearly as sweet or bold as something like Tupelo. Then there was Sourwood, paired with soft cheeses, a honey that’s tangy, citrusy, with a little caramel on the back end. And for breads, tea, and coffee? Blackberry and blueberry honeys.

Before that night, I’d only ever had honey straight from a local hive or off a grocery store shelf. I figured local honey tasted better because it wasn’t cooked to death like the stuff in stores, cooked so hot that it wouldn't crystallize but at the cost of flavor and nutrients.

I didn’t realize honey had varieties, like wine.
That night, my honey world was rocked.

I had to know more.

So I called Maggie, our local beekeeper, and she laughed.
"Oh yeah," she said. "I bring in honey from all over the country. You wanna taste some?"

She showed up with little spoons and a box of jars. Six or seven different honeys — each one more interesting than the last.
It was like a guy who had only ever drunk Bud Light discovering there’s an entire world of craft beers, bourbons, and cocktails out there.
I went from loving honey to absolutely addicted.

The next weekend, I hit the farmers market, looking for more.
I quickly realized most beekeepers weren’t chasing flavors. They were chasing healthy bees. Whatever the bees brought back, that’s what they sold. And most of them hated selling at the market anyway.

The problem was simple:
Everyone had pretty much the same honey, so everyone charged about the same price. Then one guy would drop his price to sell more, and the next week, someone else would go lower. Ten weeks later, everyone was practically giving it away.

Selling honey became just a way to cover the cost of beekeeping supplies.

And that’s when the lightbulb went off.

What if I bought in bulk from local beekeepers around the country?
Not just any honey, but unique flavors from good stewards of the bees.

Over the past three years, that idea became a full-on mission.
I learned more about beekeeping and honey varietals than I ever thought possible. I also learned how ridiculously hard it is to find true flavors.

Bees don’t care about our plans, they go to the nearest flower.
If you want blackberry honey, you better have hives sitting in the middle of a massive blackberry farm.
Want pure Tupelo? You better float your hives out on a barge next to a Tupelo grove.
It’s not easy.

My best sources turned out to be professional pollinators, the folks who truck bees around the country to pollinate food crops. Honey’s just a side hustle for them. The upside is they can produce pure, single-flower honeys. The downside is they want to sell in bulk bulk. Fifty-pound pails minimum, and if they had their way, 600-pound barrels.

There were other challenges too, especially around chemicals.
You have to be careful where your honey comes from. Pesticides, herbicides, they’re everywhere. The good news is bees do a decent job of breaking a lot of it down naturally. But still, I get my batches tested at Venture Labs to be sure. Every test has come back clean enough to meet human safety levels, but let’s be real: you can’t find anything truly chemical-free anymore.

And that’s not even getting into the nightmare of packaging, bottling, shipping, and everything else that comes with selling honey online.
I’ve been figuring it out, one mistake and adjustment at a time, for three years now. Add in my wife absolutely hates hundreds of buckets and barrel of honey in the “honey room” Its a mess. A mess she is always cleaning up. One drop of honey on the shoes venturing out of the dedicated clean space gets everything sticky. Lids on everything. Stainless steel or granite tables. I say I do a good job. Wife would say 5 out of 10.

And despite all the hurdles, I love it. I think my wife does too because we have an endless amount of flavors for our coffee and breads. Honey drug dealers eating their supply.

I’ve found some of the most incredible honeys — flavors I never even knew existed — and every year, I add new ones to the lineup. Some day it may become a real company
with rare honeys from all over the world.

One bottle at a time we’ll get there.

5 Interesting Plants and Things I Found This Week

Mechanical Strawberry Harvesting

We all know the hardest part of harvesting fruit is the manpower it takes to do it.
Take strawberries, for example. Harvesting them means days of bending over, carefully handpicking only the berries that are perfectly ripe. It’s grueling work- work that fewer and fewer people are willing to do.

Technology has helped with some crops, but I always figured strawberries would be one of the last to be solved.
Then I came across an article about a company that changed my mind.

They’ve built a machine with AI that can not only scan a plant and identify which berries are ready but also cleanly and safely pick the strawberry, without damaging the plant or the fruit. It works 24 hours a day, running the rows without a single human hand.

It’s a little scary and a lot amazing.
But it’s a glimpse of the future — for better or worse.

Cool Wave Pansies: A Hanging, Cascading New Pansy

We all love pansies for early spring and late fall color.
They take the cold better than almost any other annual.
But let’s be honest, they’ve mostly been pot fillers. Definitely not what you’d pick for a showy hanging basket.

At least, not until this year.

I spotted some hanging baskets overflowing with a new line called Cool Wave. I believe it’s from the same people behind Cool Wave Petunias. These pansies don’t just sit there, they trail and hang over the edges, creating full, colorful displays.

It’s all the great pansy colors we already love, but in a whole new form.
Now, thanks to Cool Wave, I’ve got two or three extra months of colorful hanging baskets on my porch — something I didn’t even know I had been missing.

My Newest Addiction: Caladiums

Like I don't have enough addictions or plant collections already.
I go through phases. Right now, I’m deep in a Dahlia phase. By deep, I mean I ordered 40-plus varieties of dinnerplate Dahlias.
All of them with blooms over 10 inches... some even hitting 14–16 inches across.

But right alongside that addiction is another one: Caladiums.
I love foliage. Coleus will always be my favorite, they’re easy to grow and put on a show, but right behind them are Caladiums.

Turns out Proven Winners picked up on that too. They launched the Heart to Heart series with around 30 different varieties.
I didn’t even know about it until I spotted a test plant called Crème Brûlée . It immediately caught my eye.

When I found out there was a whole series behind it, I just shook my head.
"This is not going to be good."

At this rate, I’m going to need to buy more land just to have room for all my hobby plants.
If you’re anything like me, once you see one variety you like, you end up wanting all of them.

Take a look at these. You’ve been warned.

Brunnera: The False Forget Me Nots

We’ve already established I like foliage, and one of the most beautiful shade foliage perennials out there is Brunnera. Bonus: It also has great flowers
Especially the silvery-leafed varieties.

They used to be extremely expensive per pot, but prices have come down with newer introductions like Alexander the Great and other varieties that aren't as pricey as the first big name everyone fell in love with: Jack Frost.

While out running this week, the Brunnera were in full glory, and it’s easy to see why they call it the "False Forget-Me-Not."
The flowers look almost identical to a real Forget-Me-Not.

One yard in particular caught my eye, the entire median covered in shade plants, not an inch of dirt showing.
Several different types of Brunnera mixed in, and judging by the leaf size and how established it was, I’m pretty sure it was Jack Frost.
It’s been there long enough that it had to be an older variety, before the newer introductions even existed.

One of My Favorite Plants: Viburnum opulus

The other day, I came across one of the best specimens of Viburnum opulus I’ve ever seen- 15 feet tall and 15 feet wide.
Funny enough, I smelled it before I even saw it.
Running down a side street, I caught that unmistakable scent and thought, "That has to be a Viburnum." So strong the scent was coming from the street one over.

The Snowball Bush is one of the best scents of spring.
Sure, there are other trees like cherries or Prunus padus that smell good, but in my opinion, nothing compares to a Snowball Bush in full bloom.

When you say "Snowball Bush," a lot of people immediately think of hydrangeas.
But this is the real Snowball Bush.
Big, round clusters of blooms that last two to three weeks each spring.
Thick, full foliage through the summer.
And in winter, the birds love to nest in its branches.

It’s a true four-season shrub, or multistem tree, and honestly, every good garden should have one.

A Picture is Worth a Hundred Words

HAVE A GREAT WEEKEND and thanks for reading…..tell your friends or respond for a question or comment



The company I discussed above….. Beehouse.com.

Try a bottle or two…….

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