Eastside Honey Co. Serves Fresh Honey from Rescued Bees

Bee rescue is one of those jobs that most people don’t know exist until they find themselves with an infestation on their property. At that point they usually want an expert available right away. In Austin, Brandon Fehrenkamp of Eastside Honey Co. is the go-to guy for bee removal and relocation.  He has relocated bees from hives that were established within the walls of homes, from beneath floorboards, from water boxes and 55-gallon drums, and from swarms in transition from one hive location to another.

Urban bee removal is a delicate process, and it can vary greatly from one location to another. Brandon decides on a course of action for each particular infestation, and then he delivers flyers to neighbors letting them know when a removal will take place. A bee removal usually requires dismantling walls inside homes. He uses a combination of low-suction vacuums to draw the bees out of the walls without injuring them and into containers to be transported to manmade hives.

Once all the bees have been removed, the honeycombs have to come out of the walls. Otherwise, roaches, rodents, and other undesirable critters will move in for the free snack. If the combs have honey, Brandon takes the combs to one of his locations around Austin and lays them on the ground at a reasonable distance from the hives. The bees that live in the nearby hives will remove the honey from the combs and take it back to incorporate into their own hives. For this reason, if a homeowner has sprayed pesticides in an attempt to kill the bees, Brandon is unable to rescue and relocate the hive.

Sustainable Futures at Springdale Farm

Springdale Farm has a simple yet laudable goal: to build a sustainable future for themselves and for their community. Glenn and Paula Foore started out because they wanted to provide healthy food to their own family that was not laden with pesticides or other harmful substances. Like so many other urban gardeners in east Austin, they soon found that the land, which had been a major agricultural powerhouse a hundred years ago, provided much more abundant produce than they and their own family could consume. 

Neighborhood Pop-Ups bring HOPE to East Austin

What do you do when one of America’s most popular music festivals necessitates a relocation of your farmer’s market for two critical weekends in the springtime? Some markets may despair and look at the disruption as a loss. But Elizabeth Garrett and the staff at HOPE Farmer’s Market decided to turn the annual SXSW displacement into a major opportunity.

They came up with the idea of neighborhood pop-up markets – mobile markets that would show up in neighborhoods in East Austin known for being food deserts. And they wouldn’t limit themselves to SXSW, either. These markets would pop up weekly in the same location for anywhere from one to three months, and then after establishing CSA relationships with residents, move on to other neighborhoods in need of fresh food.

I met up with Elizabeth, HOPE’s Market Manager, at the first such pop-up market in the Cherrywood neighborhood of East Austin. Mid-day on a Wednesday, the small market was bustling with customers. The pop-up market is truly made in a collaborative spirit, with area businesses providing the lot space necessary for the markets to take place, and with neighborhood vendors providing goods that are suited to the demographic they serve.

Because HOPE’s pop-up markets are still in the prototype phase, there are many possibilities for new ways to serve the community. One of the most exciting goals is a collaborative effort between Elizabeth, Ramon Martinez of HOPE Likes Bikes, and design students at the University of Texas. They’re working to build bicycle-towed farm stands that are fully mobile and can bring fresh produce deep into the food deserts of East Austin. What a pop-up concept!

The Commercial Kitchen that Could

Winfield Farm outside of Bastrop is a thriving family business, sustainable in a very real and practical way. The four members of the Hough family prove that it does not take very much land to grow an abundance of food using ecologically harmonious methods. The key to their success is doing a little bit of everything, and tying it all together with their licensed, certified commercial kitchen.

Countryside Family Farms

The way Sebastien Bonneau sees it, there’s no bad meat; only bad cooks. That’s why, on his Countryside Family Farm in Bastrop, you’ll find varieties of meat that are unfamiliar to many American palates. His message is one that encourages people to try meat from animals they’ve never eaten before. Countryside Farm offers a wide range of high quality meat, from the exotic-sounding feral hog, to guineas and even pigeons, and familiar standbys like ducks and chickens.