Bees & Dirt.... — Wandering in Wildwood

The spring we were longing for is passing quickly. Temperatures this past weekend were solidly in the 30C and the sun was scorching at times.

Cath worked on the 5 hives, looking for the queens and cleaning up the extra wax that they seal all the boxes up with. She found 4 of the queens but the one hive she split looked weak and upset. She's reserved another queen from Dancing Bee and will make the trip on Wednesday to put her into that hive and hopefully the colony accepts her quickly. The other 4 hives are coming along nicely. All the vegetation is lush with the amounts of rain and sun, so everything seems to point to the bees having a decent year.

It's a bit gross but it was a good sign to find larva and eggs in a number of the cells.

We had started to lay in the topsoil, manure and mulch into the new part of the garden the other weekend and continued to work on it this past weekend. We laid in more rows, trimmed up all the grass back from the area and built two 8x8 raised garden beds for the girls to plant their gardens. J is going to be our herbologist and so she planted a variety of herbs and aromatics. M started her Faerie garden with various small white and purple flowering plants. The girls scattered wildflower bomb balls that their auntie T gave them for Christmas. Excited to see how those work.

The rhubarb and garlic were doing great and the leeks were holding their own. The girls put in a lot of tomato seedlings and hot pepper plants. We're hoping to can our own tomatoes this year.

I worked on trails and cutting down whatever buckthorn I could cut with the brushcutter. The 3 toothed blade that it came with worked well...but as it was a cheap blade it took a beating and will need to be hammered back into shape. I scattered a bag of wildflower seeds on the barer parts of the trail...but my planting method is shaking the bag as a walk along and then walking over the seeds a couple of times as I go back and forth.