Mrs. Chippy's plant world and edible landscape design

Debra from Mrs. Chippy's plant world

 Last week I took an incredible road trip to visit Debra from Mrs. Chippy's plant world and edible landscape design in St. Petersburg.  She had a large diverse collection of beautiful tropical edible plants throughout her entire property.   No wonder, she's a master gardener and practices natural organic permaculture gardening principles.  This tropical paradise was loaded with honey bees feasting on all her flowering plants.  The bee in the sunflower image below was completely covered  in pollen.  I wish I had a better camera to show the mess she was making.

honey bee completely covered with pollen

Debra sells red wriggler worms and was able to set me up with a nice worm casting / compost system.  With this system the worms will make super food for your plants and provide a powerful compost that makes the best compost tea.  Plus the worms multiply.  More worms = more compost.

Getting up close and personal with my compost

I had purchased her worms through the Indian Rocks co-op but incorrectly placed them into my compost pile which I later found out was a very bad idea.  Thinking it through, I quickly realized the mistake and dumped my two compost bins and manually went through all the compost looking for worms.  Since it was the next day, three hours of sifting only yielded about 20 worms or so.  They blend in so well.   Debra was a great help and quickly set me on the right track to raising worms correctly.

In addition to learning about many exotic plants I traded honey for plenty of cuttings and plants to bring back to The Florida Bee Farm.  It was a blast learning from an expert.    Here's a few pictures of Mrs. Chippy's plant world.

Pineapples, Peanuts and Paul

The projects are never ending at the Bee Farm which keeps me busy.  This weekend it was transplanting flowers and trees from the front of the shed area to the Bee Garden and the area around where the Honey Bees Live.  To make a green fence around them to define their space.  Kind of a separation between the garden and bee space.  Gives the apiary a more natural look.

Pineapple emerging

Yesterday while talking with a fellow gardener, she noticed that one of my pineapples was growing a baby pineapple.   Something I hadn't noticed.  After looking at all the pineapple plants I noticed several new pineapples. Also while looking at the pineapples I pulled what I thought was a weed from one of the pineapple plants.  Low and behold there was a peanut shell surrounding the root of what I thought was a weed.  These pineapple plants were in my front yard in an area where I would feed the squirrels and blue jays peanuts.  Apparently one of the squirrels hid one of his peanuts by the pineapple plant which was later dug up and brought out to the Bee Farm.

Today, the peanut plant was replanted into it's own pot and now we can try to grow peanuts on the bee farm.

Peanut plant buried several years ago by squirrels

The other major project that has taken so much time this weekend is the Honey Bee Garden.  It quickly gets overgrown and is difficult to maintain because I'm often not sure what is weed and what may be flowers coming up from seed.  Many hours were spent weeding and planting some daffodils and other flowers I purchased.  The goal is to spruce up the Bee Garden and make it a memorial in memory of our son Paul.  When I mentioned it to our other son, he thought it was a good idea and added "maybe we should throw a half dozen empty mountain dew cans in the garden for realism which was funny with our brand of humor .... and I'm pretty sure Paul thought it funny also.

Honey Bee Garden a work in progress

I posted in a local plant and seed swap facebook page that we would trade honey for flowers to build up the honey bee garden area.  And we already had someone come out with some passion fruit vines and had a couple other offers.