Just What I Wanted to Hear

I’ve been reading through Keeping Bees And Making Honeyin my effort to learn about beekeeping. I came across this quote yesterday.

Unfortunately, some of the most spectacular garden flowers are of no use whatsoever to the honey bee. Double headed roses, chrysanthemums and dahlias, provide no nectar and hardly any pollen. In contrast, many flowers that are often discounted as weeds, such as dandelions and forget-me-nots, provide a rich source of food. That is why one of the best and easiest things you can do to make your garden more bee-friendly is to throw away the weedkillers that maintain those immaculate lawns and let your lawn and your flowerbeds go wild.

This is the kind of thing I like to hear. We’ve already gone organic, so no chemicals & weedkillers are used here at Chiot’s Run. But I still spend hours and hours pulling weeds. I think when I have bees I’ll be seeing all these weeds in a different light. Those dandelions will look like tasty honey in my tea.

I’ll also be incorporating a few more pollen rich flowers in my gardens. I have forget-me-nots already and those seed down easily so I’m going to try to move them throughout the gardens. I also have a ton of echinacea that the bees love, and they spread like weeds since they’re a native plant.

Even if you don’t have bees it pays to have some native plants for pollinators and butterflies. You’ll be cultivating a natural environment which will be a refuge to these beneficial insects since so many other gardens are full of pretty but useless flowers and so many people use chemicals and pesticides on their lawns & gardens. So I think this year I won’t cringe when I see a yellow dandelion in the lawn, I’ll smile knowing I’m doing something beneficial for the bees.

Are you willing to let weeds grow & bloom for the bees and other beneficial insects? Have you ever planted a flower or plant just for an insect or bird?

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Guess What’s Coming this Spring

Guess what I’m reading up on for the new addition to the gardens here Chiot’s Run?

That’s right, beekeeping. I’m hoping to join a local beekeeping club and get my first hive this spring. My grandpa & dad used to keep them and my dad has a box hive he’s going to give me. It’s painted bright white and it has a copper roof, it will be lovely in the garden (and I’m going to be quite smashing in that hat).

I think this will be a great addition to our gardens. I always buy local honey from local beekeepers, but I would like to make my own. That way I know that it won’t have pesticides or chemicals in it. Warren from My Home Among the Hills keeps bees. I’m sure if I have any questions he’d be happy to help.

Anyone else out there keeping bees? Or do you just buy local honey?

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Birdhouses in the Garden

I have a few birdhouses in my gardens. The funny thing is that no birds live in them. I originally put them up for decoration last winter to bring some color to the gardens during the dull winters, but come spring I forgot to take them down.

They’re only eighteen inches off the ground so no birds live in them, but do have residents. One day I noticed that a wasp flew into one, then I noticed a few more wasps. So I guess they’re no longer bird houses, they’re wasp houses. I don’t mind wasps in the garden, they’re beneficial insects and with the exception of yellow jackets they don’t bother you unless you bother them.

Wasps and yellow jackets are beneficial insects. They feed their young on insects that would otherwise damage crops and ornamental plants in your garden. They can also feed on house fly and blow fly larva. Wasps and yellow jackets become aggressive when their nests are approached or disturbed. This is often when people and animals are stung. While these stings are painful (and life threatening to those that are allergic), these insects should be respected and tolerated under most conditions.

Here’s one of the residents.

This looks like a paper wasp to me. I spent some time on this great website looking at pictures trying to figure out what kind it was for sure. We have many different kinds of wasps living around here, I’ve been trying to take photos of all of them so I can identify them. Generally we leave them alone but if the paper wasps are building a nest in a high foot traffic area I usually just knock it down and they build elsewhere.

We also have yellow jackets that live around here. Last summer we had a huge nest in our front yard. We had to spray it because I’m allergic and they kept chasing me. A skunk dug up the nest and ate the rest of the wasps, so that was a relief. We leave them be if they are in the woods around the house.

This is another kind of wasp we have. They are teeny tiny (less than a centimeter long) and they love my oregano when it’s blooming (which are the flowers in the photo) as well as sedum and a few of my lace cap hydrangeas. I think they’re cuckoo wasps (also called jewel wasp, gold wasp, or emerald wasp), but I’m not positive on that.

So what about you, do you leave wasps to work in your gardens, or you spray like most people?

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Will it be a Mild or Cold Winter?

Here in Ohio we have a huge festival in the fall called the Woolly Bear Festival. Here in Ohio we call the caterpillars of the Isabella Tiger Moth “Woolly Bears”, in the south they are called “Woolly Worms” in other areas they are called “The Black Ended Bear”. You always know that fall is coming when you start seeing these crossing the roads and around the yard looking for a warm spot to overwinter. I spotted a teeny tiny on earlier this summer on my parsley plant.

There’s a saying that the bands on the woolly bear will tell you what kind of winter you’re having. According to legend the wider the band the milder the winter. So does it work? Read this article and see for yourself. You have to be careful because the all-black or all-tan ones aren’t really woolly bears, they’re caterpillars of a different species of moths. Accurate or not in predicting the winter, they’re fun to have around.

I always like spotting them about the garden, it seems like they’re always headed somewhere in a hurry. Sometimes I uncover them when raking leaves or moving a bale of straw. Usually I find them another warm spot where they won’t be disturbed and put them there. In the spring they will emerge as the Isabella Tiger Moth.

Have you been spotting these little fuzzy caterpillars around your home? What are they telling you about the winter?

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The Itsy Bitsy Spider

While out walking through the woods last week I almost walked right through this little guy’s web. He’s barely bigger than a kernel of popcorn. Amazing how intricate their webs are.

Spiders are one of those insects most people hate, but they’re so beneficial in the garden. They eat all kinds of other bugs (including mosquitoes). When we first moved here we had tons of those huge wolf spiders in our basement and around property. I grew up in South America with tarantulas & brown recluses, so I’ve easily made peace with the small North American spiders that inhabit Chiot’s Run. I know they’re good for my gardens, so I’ve taken to naming them instead of trying to kill them, makes them a little more endearing (I had a huge one I named Winston last year and it turned out he was a she – so Winstonette she became).


So do spiders creep you out or do you welcome them to you gardens?

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