Blueberries and bees, bees, bees

Tomato plants are almost all gone now and in a way I'm kind of relieved because I spent a couple hours a day working on them.  It was pleasant working on them but a lot of work.  Now the blueberries are just going crazy and we're getting a lot of berries.  My wife and I were out close to sunset picking blueberries and got several quarts of them.  And boy are they delicious.  We're also getting a lot of various peppers and papayas. 

Papayas, blueberries, tomatoes and peppers for today

delicious blueberries

The Honeybee and pollinator garden is also blooming like crazy and the sunflowers are making their debut.  It's so wonderful sitting out there and watching all the butterflies and bees zipping around among the flowers. 

Sunflowers starting to bloom

I had a phone call yesterday asking if I could remove a hive from a fallen tree in one of our local parks.  For some strange reason I said yes even though I don't have enough hive parts available.  That and the fact I had a dozen other things going on.

The guy from the county said he thought the tree was hollow and would be easy to cut into.  But that was not to be.  It was a massive tree and where the bees lived it was slightly hollow but mostly solid wood.  The guy from the county offered to help but said he couldn't because he didn't have a bee suit.  So I said "I have a spare you can borrow" and suited him up so he could run the chain saw while I vacuumed the bees into the bee vac.  It turned out to be a good amount of work but the good news is I got the queen which is always a concern.

The big dilemma I was facing however was the fact that I didn't have any more bases for my hives.  So I decided to set up the new hive using the bottom of the bee vac contraption I built.  The entrance (temporarily) would be the hose hole for the vac until I could build, source or buy another base.  So problem solved for the moment.

But the big surprise of the day happened when I arrived back at The Florida Bee Farm and was greeted with two new swarms that had taken up residence in two empty Nucs that were sitting on a bench.  Bees everywhere !!  When I woke up this morning I had no desire to get any more bees as the apiary was pretty full.   Now I have three more hives counting the squatter bees in my nucs.  Time to build more bee stuff !!!

Morning pictures

Since it's been much too busy to post a blog post lately I snapped several pictures around the Florida Bee Farm gardens this morning. 

Tomatoes

pineapples and blueberries

Newest growing area

The nursery with all the baby plants

Moringa, Fennel, strawberries, bananas, and sugar cane

Honey Bee Garden

Honey Bee Garden

Spoiled honey bees with shaded luxury suites in the apiary

Banyan tree

Everything's growing like crazy

Florida Green house

Irrigation barrels and compost tea

Bernard the watch lion

Retired battle droid contemplating life after the clone wars

eggplant

broccoli

Rain barrels working well with low pressure soaker hoses

The rain barrels are filled and the plants are thirsty.  So the next step is to get the water to the raised beds and come up with an efficient irrigation system.  One local gardener I bumped into at Home Depot was showing me pictures of his garden and recommended using soaker hoses instead of drip irrigation.  He told me that it's more of a long term solution that works regardless of how you space your plants.  He didn't have a rain barrel system and used city water so soaker hoses hooked up to a pressurized system are much different than low pressure soaker hoses and a rain barrel system.

One option was to hook a pump up to the rain barrels and make my own pressurized system but a simple system was more what I wanted to build.  After extensive browsing the internet, there was one video about a soaker hose system hooked up to rain barrels.  The guy seemed pretty happy with the system but it bothered me that there wasn't more youtube videos or websites talking about the rain barrel soaker hoses from Mr. Drip / Mr. Soakerhose.  And there wasn't much else out there that worked on low pressure and rain barrels.  So I wasn't sure what to expect when the two 50' hoses and fittings arrived in our mail.

The first thing was 3/4" PVC pipe from the rainbarrels were ran underground to the garden area (about 25-30' away).  Then a 50' section was installed in each raised bed.  One bed was installed and tested it and it really worked well.  After doing the second section, I was surprised to find out that both of them hooked together worked just as efficient as running one. Plenty of pressure and moisture delivered to the plants. This system is just right for my setup as you cannot attach a standard soaker hose from a hardware store to a low pressure rainbarrel system.  And you cannot use the rain barrel soaker hoses with pressurized city water or it will blow them out.  Here's a video of the system in action.  (sorry about the smudge on the lens)

In the future the plans are for adding 2 more raised beds and a dual outlet irrigation timer if I can find one.  Otherwise it will be 2 separate timers.  Timers I also discovered are picky about water pressure and this system will need a low pressure timer.

I have been so busy there wasn't any time devoted to blogging about the plants I put in this week.  It's a work in process and the cold weather earlier in the week messed me up.   Tomatoes, kale, chard, onions, califlower, peppers, mustard greens, and a few others were planted.  It's all starting to come together.

Green Peppers and Tomato worms

Today I picked the first bounty from the garden ... two healthy green peppers.  Everything in the garden seems to be thriving in our homemade earth box type containers.  One problem though was several tomato worms that I found in the tomatoes.  I'm glad I found them because they can decimate tomato plants in no time.

Added some more paint to the shed and painted the bee hives white and turquoise to match the house and shed (I had spare paint so why not).  Suspending a 2x4 between the scaffold and hanging all the hives on the 2x4 allowed me to easily rotate them while painting all 4 sides at once.  Quite convenient.

The new batteries in the solar setup work excellent.  It was without a doubt the best deal I ever got on CraigsList.  So now we have all the power we need for the bee farm.