Mavis Mail – Garden and Beehive Photos From Connecticut

Check out this recent email I received from a reader in Connecticut:

Hi Mavis,

I wanted to join in on the gardening feature because I’m an avid gardener that got on the organic, sustainability, gardening bandwagon years ago. Here’s a little about my garden adventures.

I live in suburban CT, zone 6b, and grow as much as I can squeeze into my 1/4 acre backyard.

Using the companion planting approach, in my 6 raised beds, I grow tomatoes, onions, garlic, basil, peppers, green beans, peas, lettuce, spinach, asparagus, pumpkins, zucchini, butternut squash, watermelon, cucumbers, carrots, cilantro, and nasturiums. I build frames for the vine plants to grow vertically and this allows more space for other plants below.

Outside of the enclosed beds, I grow broccoli in pots and strawberry plants in window box planters so the chipmunks can’t get to them. Last year, I put in a medicinal herb bed with lemongrass, sage, thyme, fennel, calendula, comfrey, dill, lovage, stevia, feverfew, and bay. This year I’m going to expand the growing space and put in a culinary tea bed and more edible flowers, such as amaranth.

Interspersed around the property are 3 apple trees, that are plagued by apple rust so I might take them out, 2 Red haven peach, 1 Bartlett pear, 1 D’anjou (to cross pollinate the other pear), 2 Brown Turkey fig (grilled figs are yum!), 2 Paw Paw, 1 Nectarine and 1 apricot tree. In winter, I wrap the figs with burlap and frost blankets to protect them from the cold and it looks as if I have ghosts haunting my yard. Under the fruit trees, there are delicious thornless blackberry, raspberry, and 8 blueberry bushes.

Along the property line on one side, there are legacy grapevines that were there when I bought the house. I’m not sure what kind of grapes they are, but my goal this year is to trim them back and turn them into a useful food rather than a privacy screen. Usually the leaves are harvested for making stuffed grape leaves. Along the shed, I have Kiwi vine growing.

{Eagle the Ameracauna chicken}

We have 9 chickens and 6 ducks, that make the most delicious eggs possible. They live in “The Girls with Feathers” coop I designed and then expanded to fit the ducks in there too. I keep the fowl in a chicken yard, but I let them out to forage near the chicken run in the Summer. Along two sides of the run, I grow hops, to provide some shade for the chickens and to produce hops for my eventual beer brewing that I will begin experimenting with this Fall, and lots of sunflowers.

I fertilize the trees with rabbit manure from our adopted rescued Angora rabbit. (She grows the most wonderfully soft fur that I’m going to have spun into yarn.) In the basement, we have a vermicompost bin and use the worm castings to fertilize the veg beds. Because I don’t want to risk ecoli contamination, there are separate compost bins allocated specifically for the coop shavings. Every now and then we go down to the beach to clean it up after a storm and carry home buckets of seaweed for the compost piles.

To pollinate the backyard, I have two beehives, one with Italian and the other with Carniolan bees. In a few weeks, I’m adding two more hives. I bartered 2 ducklings for a top bar bee hive on craigslist and recently acquired a Warre hive. Since everything in this backyard is an experiment of one kind or another, I want to find out if the hive body design effects how robust the bee colony is.

The bees have done an amazing job pollinating my gardens and I love watching them early in the morning from my kitchen window as they fly off in search of pollen and nectar in the Summer. The honey they produce is another plus because I use that instead of sugar. I also have 5 mason beehives spread throughout the garden to encourage the solitary bees to hang around.

There’s a lot of trial and error that goes on in this 1/4 acre, but that’s what makes it a challenge. I know I have written way more than many of the garden posts you’ve featured and I haven’t even gotten to my seed starting plans for the year. ~~*~~

All I can say is WHAT A BEAUTIFUL GARDEN! What an amazing job you have done and your love of gardening really shines though in your pictures. Thanks for sending in your photos.

~Mavis

{Sara from Fox Island’s Garden Tour}

If you would like to have your garden, chicken coop or something you’ve made featured on One Hundred Dollars a Month, here’s what I’m looking for:

• Your Garden Pictures and Tips – I’d especially like to see your garden set ups, growing areas, and know if you are starting seeds indoors this year. If so,  show me some picture of how you are going about it.
• Your Chicken and Chicken Related Stories – Coops, Chicks, Hen’s, Roosters, Eggs, you name it. If it clucks, send us some pictures to share with the world.
• Cool Arts & Craft made from your very own hands with detailed {and well photographed} pictures and instructions.

If I feature your pictures and the stories behind them on One Hundred Dollars a Month, I will send you a $20.00 gift card to the greatest store in the world: Amazon.com.

Go  HERE for the official rules.