Spring Rolls On

written by Yvonne

Beekeeping mentor and Mecklenburg Beekeeping Association Vice President, Richard Flanagan, helps Tom assemble his first set of frames for his first hive.

With Richard's help, the two built enough frames for the entire hive. They also built two hive bodies, a hive stand, and an imrie shim. (I don't know what any of that means either. Email Tom with questions.) Tom was ecstatic with the amount of work they got done.

Here, Richard shows Tom how to light his smoker.  Clearly Olive didn't get the memo about the uniform requirement for the day.

He showed him how to maintain a nice, cool smoke.

Then they wired-up the frames. The wire gives extra support to the foundation on which the bees will build their comb.

Here's the finished product: a frame that's been assembled, wired, and foundation installed.  One down, 34 to go!

On the garden side of things, we finally figured out what to do with this space. Those of you who have been following along from the beginning may recall that we cleaned out this area of all the monkey grass and changed the stones around to create a bed.  Because it is mostly shaded we tried growing lettuce here last summer.  But the soil was just too dense and nothing grew - even though we added compost and wood ash to lighten it up.  So we let it go to the weeds for the rest of the year (which is what you see here).

While looking at it this weekend, I noticed that some of the weeds look like mint which gave me the idea that we should grow mint here!  I love mint and use it in iced tea all summer.  We didn't try to grow any in the main beds because it will encroach on the rest of the garden.  So we'll isolate it in this bed and see how it goes.

Boy, you turn your back for a second and next thing you know, things start growing.  This is the potato and onion patch.  It was clear something was growing but truth be told, we thought it was mostly weeds.  But when you get real close, you can see what seems to be the spindly tops of onions.  They are easy to miss because they are so skinny, but there they are!  The other green things growing are either weeds or potatoes.  We'll give them a few more weeks and see if they start to look like the potatoes we had last year.

Spinach is crazy happy with the cool weather and rain.  Every time a leaf gets harvested, five more jump up and take it's place.

What goes for the spinach goes for the collards as well.  Note: This picture was taken Sunday. This is what the collards looks like after a friend came over and harvested almost three pounds of collards on Saturday and I harvested about two pounds last Monday!

Garlic looks pretty happy.  I'm just DYING to pull one of these up to see what's happening underneath.  But I'll be patient.

Peas are doing OK.

And finally we see signs of carrots and lettuce.

The apple tree is budding and some of the blossoms are blossoming.  We have not yet gotten this apple tree pruned and nursed back to health, but it is on our list of things to do.  Maybe once the bees arrive, they will do their magic and the tree will be healthy and produce good apples.  Stay tuned and we'll all find out together.  For now, it makes for pretty photos.