Following The WebWitch's Garden Hive - pre 2007

When we moved up into the woods, we had to build a special place for a veggie garden.   There was only one place that received full sun during the day, and it was on a hill so we had a cinderblock retaining wall put up and backfilled it for a garden.

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We had to put up a deer fence too, because we live on a major deer highway in our woods...

I had to put in raised beds because all the water runs down and collects by the garden wall.   Everything drowned. I love the raised beds, it is so easy to work them - they keep the soil moist when there is no rain, too.  And I made them wide enough that I can run my little Mantis tiller down each box

May 2006 - see the sugar and snow peas climbing their fences? June 2006, after the peas are done, my beans are climbing up their fences along the edge of the garden.  I figure the deer can nibble whatever hangs outside the fence...

To pollinate everything, we put in a garden hive.  Here it is in May, inside its electric bear fence (did I tell you we have bears up here too?) I didn't think we'd do much more than pollinate with them this year because they were from a split..

...but here they are in June with two completely full supers already and the sourwood hasn't even begun yet - These are some busy little ladies, I will keep you posted on how they do this year. Just an August note - I took another two supers of honey off my garden hive yesterday.  That makes five supers of honey I have extracted and they still have one super full for themselves to overwinter.  My little Russian bees made me 3 supers of Sourwood and two of Wildflower in their first year! the WebWitch

I even have a nice little
stair to the woods road that
runs alongside my garden...