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.

False Alarm

It was to be a glorious event.  Something we were looking forward to for some time now.  A treat to tantalize the taste buds .... yes, our first red ripe tomato after months of nurturing the seeds and plants. 

The holy grail of gardening

While working in the garden all day I kept glancing over at the red ripe tomato while it basked in the sun.  I figured that it could soak up the sun all day and continue to ripen while I worked.  And then just before I get in my truck to go home it will be plucked from the vine and become our first tasty home grown tomato.

But as every gardener knows ... victory can be elusive and deceptive.  There are many ways to foil success in a garden, especially in Florida.  And in this case I was once again foiled and the trophy quickly taken away after discovering a worm hole on the other side of the tomato.

foiled again

I guess it's time to mix up another batch of natural organic anti bug spray for the plants.  And manually search through the tomato vines for the fat tomato worm that caused this tragedy.

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.