Nacho - The road to sufficiency!

[Marianne]

I think most of us had crappy gardens this past season. I sure did!

Glad to see you post!

 

[BarredBuff]

 

[nachoqtpie]

We have lots of things planned for the upcoming year! We want a fence around the garden, plant more fruit trees, set up for some bees (hopefully, going to try my hand at building a top bar hive!),take out all the sod in the garden and replace with straw, put in a couple new composters, put in some more flowers for the bees/beneficials, and hopefully put in a trellis for maybe climbing roses. OH! And build/make some containers for potatoes. I'm thinking about making some burlap bags to plant the potatoes in with easily opened side so it could be reused. This will be our first year growing potatoes next year. I'm excited about it actually.

 

[Marianne]

How do you make a top bar hive?

You don't have to take the sod out of the garden area. Just smother it with flakes of straw. A lot of people put cardboard or newspaper down first. I can't unless I'm going to have some rock on top so the wind doesn't carry it off. But flakes of straw work really well.

 

[nachoqtpie]

My husband bought the book diy projects for the self sufficient homeowner and it has plans for a top bar hive in it. It seems like a fairly easy process. I'm going to show the plans to one of the more seasoned beekeepers here before I make it tho.

We have thought about doing that, but the type of grass we have, we think it might actually work better if we just cut it up.

 

[Corn Woman]

The local farm store has top bar hives on sale this week and I went and took a look to see how they would work. I think they will be fantastic for the backyard beekeeper the lid comes off and you can just lift out one of the bars. For me the regular type of hive might be too heavy to lift off one of the boxes when full. The instructions said to always keep 3 empty bars so I figured you can just rotate the bars out as you harvest. Seems like a nice setup.

 

[nachoqtpie]

I'm really new at bees, so, I don't quite know how to do everything yet. There is a local beekeeping group that meets once a month tho and they are very helpful. I'm hoping that everyone gets the hints I've been dropping on my facebook tho and they get me some of the books on my amazon wishlist... Lol