Way to go, bees. That nuc I bought has saved my bees. All the hives have now been combined and it looks like the new queen is doing a fantastic job. I’ll have to check on her next weekend to make sure; eggs on some frames were a bit spotty. But I’m crossing […]
We have strawberries, people! Boy, howdy do we have strawberries. When I made the big terrace on Backfill Hill two years ago, I ran out of Freecycled landscape blocks and was left with a fair bit of steep hillside. I planted a whole bunch of strawberries on the slope just as soil retention, not really expecting […]
An update on the plight of this year’s bees: Those supercedure cells … weren’t. They had drones in them too, but they had fooled me into waiting a little too long to intervene. Last week, out of hope and patience, I found both dud queens and removed them. Eggs kept appearing in Darjeeling, and on closer inspection […]
Josh used to say, “How can they be ‘volunteers’? So your plant made seeds and those seeds grew… isn’t that what plants DO?” I just laughed. Any experience with gardening will tell you that if it were that easy, there wouldn’t be colleges and libraries and $2,000 academic courses dedicated to figuring it out. That’s why […]
Well, ok, not the kind you probably thought. I’m talking about my peaches. Six years gardening, and I have yet to eat a single one of my own peaches. The damn bugs get them every year – it’s a race between them and the brown rot. And yes, I’m aware that they’re just peaches, but […]
My black australorp hen went broody about a week ago. Only a few days before, I had been lamenting that probably it would never happen – but when she did and I checked my garden notes, it was only 3 days later than last year. See her bridling her hackles at me? A broody hen is a […]
So in fine, long-standing Summersweet tradition, my two new packages of bees are determined to auto-annihilate before summer flowers even bud up. This’ll be the …sixth?… year in a row where I get bees that just aren’t up to the simple task of staying alive. Every year it’s a new problem. The first year, I […]