Spring time is here. Or will be soon. And with spring comes all the hope for a new year. I've been planning out my garden this year. We have the 3' x 6' plot of earth in front of our apartment that we plant every spring. Last year we augmented with 4 unsightly buckets with tomatoes and zucchini. My wife made me promise not to do the buckets again. I agree that it's not pretty, but we did get quite a bit of food out of them.
We are fortunate to have some friends in the area that offered to let us use one of their garden boxes this year. It will double our growing area! We've decided to keep it simple and to focus on just a few types of plants this year. The cherry and pear tomatoes we planted last year went crazy, even though full sized tomatoes hardly had time to ripened in the short summer we had. We are going with those again. We are complimenting them with Basil and Kale. We ate incredible amounts of free salsa last year from tomatoes. We want to take a crack at pesto this year.
My mother, and oldest son checked on the bee hive yesterday. It was the warmest day we've had in a long time. Warm enough to be able to expect some bee activity. It's the time of year where you crack the hive for the first time in months to see if the bees survived the winter. We were fortunate again this year. The hive is alive and quite healthy. There were big clusters of bee sitting on the grass outside the hive soaking up the rays, looking a bit hungover from their winter sleep. Armies of more alert bees were climbing around the top frames, looking for honey no doubt. Hopefully the heat and dry weather with arrive on time this year so they can forage more easily.
We have talked about expanding to two hives this year. There's always a chance the hive will try to split, and we want to be prepared for it, if it does. We have considered trying a top bar hive. Top bar hives are a less traditional method that allows the bees to build comb hanging from thin boards, rather than on a wax coated frame. We are considering building one from scratch. Should be a fun project.
