Greetings, friend. Good luck and feel free to post pictures. All garden thread pics get likes from Feeny.
Got a break in the rain to put my last bees in. Now there's just waiting for them to buildup so I can put honey supers on.
I have a portion of my yard where it seems like rainwater drainage takes out anything that starts growing there. The ground is dark and fertile, but nothing will grow there. You think chocolate mint might work in that environment or should I get some moss? I really have no fucking clue what I'm doing.
My dad worked for the Auburn extension system and used to teach this course. Old people love that shit. /coolstorybro
If nothing else grows i dont see why mint would. Is the water pooling in this area or is it flowing through and washing the plants away? If it is pooling, you need to route the drainage away with buried PVC or increase the drainage of the soil with sand or perlite. If it is flowing through and washing things away then either routing the drainage again or use more strongly rooted plants that love water. If you mix in some sand for drainage I bet banana trees would probably work.
Really like the direction the thread has taken with all the bee stuff added in. Thanks for the updates. Side note: while helping my beekeeper friend put in a drip system this weekend, we noticed his bees were doing this strange back and forth movement along the entrance that I guess is called washboarding? He was all stressed out about it since only one of his three hives were doing it and it was the only one of his three that were inhabited by a recent swarm from somewhere else. He was concerned about them possibly having neurological damage from pesticides or something but google told me otherwise. Anyway, it was just new and interesting experience for me. Thought I'd share. Here's a video for everyone who hasn't seen it before.
So this shit is popping up thick as shit in my garden, not sure i have ever seen it before I cant tell if its some sort of grass or what And i sure dont know how to combat it
I had grass like that pop up last year. It took over the garden. You can try tilling between the rows now to see if you can help it. Due to my cantaloupe and watermelon spreading all over the place, I couldn't till and ended up taking the weedeater to it.
My corn popped up today. Still waiting on the cantaloupe and watermelon seeds. Will be planting zucchini and green beans tomorrow.
Don't know a thing about gardening, but I do know some drainage. If it is pooling, just bury some perforated(holes in it) pipe underneath and that will carry the water away.
If you need a lot of drainage pipe, there is a black plastic pipe(ADS pipe) that is cheaper than PVC if you're needing larger diameter pipe.
Area between my house and my neighbors house holds water- my yard is higher than his, so his backyard holds a little also. I may talk to him about doing this to drain that area...only problem is our power box or whatever you call it is between our houses near the street right there also- so doubt I can get it all the way to the street...
Only thing I have growing is lettuce and radish yet, few weeks will plant everything else but all the flowers are in bloom
Have you seen it before? It's hard to tell what it might be with it being so small. Your local extension website should have a weed identification link on it specific to your area. You can try hoeing it under, but if it's something prolific like purslane, you're going to need to get on your hands and knees and start pulling. Some of those weed seeds can remain dormant in the soil for upwards of 5 years and one plant that goes to seed can produce thousands of seeds. You have to suck it up and get ahead of it. If you don't mind losing your garden or sections of your garden for a season, you can try solar solarization.
Yea the last thing you would want to do is cut one of those underground lines. Maybe you could run it the opposite way behind your houses? Not sure how your set up is, obviously if you have neighbors right behind your house you can't but if you're somewhat out in the country you could probably run it behind there into the woods or something. Like I said, not sure how your set up is. I know from where my house is I have a huge downhill slope in my backyard that runs into a creek, so my situation is ideal for that.
Up until 6 months ago I had an old cow pasture behind me.... Now it's a neighborhood. One of my friends is a safety guy for our power company- he's going to come look at it but said call the dig hotline and they'll say if it's possible
I'm jealous of you guys who already have stuff coming up. We just had a hard freeze last night, and won't be "safe" to plant for another 2-3 weeks.
I already have squash growing, ate my first blue berry yesterday- and a few small peppers are already on the plants. Don't know how long for my blackberries to be ready but holy shit it's loaded.
Yup, USA notifies the appropriate utility companies and they come out and mark it for you. http://usanorth811.org
here it's still in the 40s, went down in the 30s last night. I am so itching for nice days to plant. I have my tomato plants all growing in windows around the house. Can't wait to get them outside.
Not sure for the 811 site for your area, but on ours here in Texas you can pull up a satellite image of the property you are digging on and put a rough line around the area you are digging in and they will make sure and mark that specific area the old way was you call in an address, no matter how large or small and they come mark that entire property
Do lemon trees need a mate nearby to fruit? Planted one a few years ago and have only ever gotten one fruit and that was the first year
It's flowing through and honestly it's right in the middle of my yard, so I'd like grass to grow there if possible. I really have no idea to handle the drainage though since it's basically like a slope from the very front of my property to the back of it. I just spread some dense shade grass seeds on it after tilling a little bit, so maybe that will work. But if not I'm open to any suggestions on how to fix this shit. I'll try to post pictures when I get home if I can remember.
My corn's popping up now. Still waiting on my cantaloupe and watermelon to come up. Just planted zucchini and green beans. I put out a paint pan full of water and rocks for the bees, but I've yet to see any on it. Instead, they pile on my daughter's water play set. I've seen upwards of 30 on there, but here's an idea of what it looks like. I also checked on some of my early bee hives. The first one was looking good and hopefully I can put a honey super on next week. The 2nd and 3rd hives had no new brood or eggs in it, which means something was up with the queen. I saw some open queen cells and found a small queen, so it looks like the old queen died or left for some reason and they grew a new one. I'll have to check next week and hopefully the queens are laying. Here's what I saw in those hives, the queen cells are the bigger cells towards the bottom:
Also, I went around and checked on my fruit trees. My peach tree is loaded down, there are a bunch of baby plums on the plum trees, and some baby apples on the apple trees. My blueberries and blackberries are still blooming. Peaches: Plums: Apples:
I'd like to get into beekeeping. Unfortunately I have a habit of picking up too many hobbies that I don't have time for all of them.
My wife just rolls her eyes and laughs every time I say that something interests me and I'd "like to learn more about it." Learning about it inevitably leads to doing it and becoming fully immersed in it. Between training, rugby, fishing, hunting, gardening, competing in strongman comps, wine making, etc, it's amazing I have time to sleep, let alone be a father and husband. My next endeavors are reloading ammo, composting, and making my own fishing lures, none of which I have any time for.
We've got a small composter that we throw our plant scraps into. I then put it in the garden under my hill plants. I think CharlieKelly does a lot of it and is probably the best resource here. Or extensions such as this link: http://www.clemson.edu/extension/hgic/plants/other/compost_mulch/
I compost all my chicken waste with the odd food scraps from time to time. I use it after one year. I do not turn mine, which is not ideal but I have so much....
I did a bunch of reading and was going to build a bin, but I ran out of time this spring. The basics, from what I remember: 3:1 browns to greens No meat scraps No animal waste from carnivores Ideal temp is 130F Turn occasionally I'm sure there's more to it, but that's what I remember from my cursory reading.
Building a raised bed on the other side of the yard is planned...but when we first moved in we threw a few herbs in this side area. Parsley, Chives, Mint, Rosemary, Cilantro. Didnt really do much...occassional water. Maybe fed a couple of times when we first planted. Anyway, the mint and chives live on. The mint takes over more and more of the area every spring. It started as one or two little springs we planted. Shit keeps spreading for wonderful mojitos.
Trust me when I say pull up half of the mint. If you don't keep ahead of it, the entire place will be mint.
Checked on several of my hives today. I put honey supers on hives A and F and will probably put ones on hives D and E by the end of the week. Here's the queen in the center. Another queen
So I tilled the hell out of it, fertilized, then replanted dense shade grass. I think part of the problem was how compact the dirt was. I also aerated the parts where grass is already growing sparsely. Hopefully breaking some of that up will give me a little grass eventually. Yard looks like shit right now though. Spoiler I'm worried it's never gonna happen with that big ass oak tree just soaking up all the nutrients.
So how do I spot these queens? I've been lurking in this thread for a while and can never locate them in the pictures you people post
Let me know on the reloading. I can send you some free starter shit I was going to sell in a garage sell
They can be tough to spot sometimes in the middle of thousands of bees. I don't always see them, but I at least look for eggs so you know they've been there in the last couple of days. The main thing is that their abdomen is much longer and cone shaped. I've pointed the queens out in the pictures below. The two zoomed in ones are from above. The red arrow points to the queen. The blue arrows are drones (males). The other bees that look like neither are the worker bees, which are >95% of the hive. You can also spot the queens sometimes because the bees will form a circle around her, like the bottom picture. If you look, they're all kind of facing her. She was in process of laying an egg in this picture. Same queen, from large view.
Lettuce for days. Rosemary also Tomatoes and carrots are doing their thing...have a bunch more stuff planted but nothing to exciting yet
Got my blueberry bushes in the new raised bed this weekend. Still need to mulch, but it's basically done. I noticed one of the bushes already has flowers on it which is surprising given how much the temperature has been fluctuating.