We’ve been raising the garden beds using the same material that we used to make the beds last year. I went to Community Forklift in Edmonston, MD (near Hyattsville) and bought all of the composite deck boards that they had left and I’ve been building the next level of the beds. The total height of the raised beds is now 1 ft above the ground. We’ve forked the soil in the beds (last year we double dug each of the beds but the soil has compacted significantly over the winter so that it’s pretty much clay once more) and we’ve now gotten two out of four beds planted. We still have two more to do before we start expanding the garden.
The bee hives appear to be doing well. The bees have plenty of food with the hive top feeders and they’ve been building out comb on the new frames. They’ve even been building burr comb in the crawl space in the hive top feeders. I’ll have to put in a queen excluder between the feeder and the top of the frames so that the queen won’t lay brood in the burr comb. The nectar flow seems to be going well as I only had to refill one of the feeders with syrup — the other one appears to still be about half full. I did manage to see the queen in one of the hives which was reassuring. I’ll be checking again in a couple of days as soon as the rains stop. One thing I did definitely notice is that the hive on the right is definitely stronger than the one on the left…it worries me a little bit since I’m concerned that the one on the left may have to be merged with the one on the right before the winter in order to improve their survival chances. Still, it’s early in the summer and there should be enough time for them to strengthen sufficiently to go into the winter strong enough to survive.
One thing we did do, however, is transplant the peppermint, spearmint, and lemon balm from one of the garden beds and plant them near the hives. Turns out bees go nuts for mint and lemon balm and I’m hoping that the smell will help control tracheal mites (should they appear).
Other projects include moving the butterfly bush and the bee balm plants, after they’ve finished blooming, from just behind the garden to another location in the front yard so we can expand the garden into that area. And I still need to finish the two rain barrels. It rained buckets a couple of days ago and the barrels are nowhere near ready to be installed so all that rain just washed away…bummer.
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