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June 30: honeybee gardens

2016/06/30 Danielle 1

It’s the last day of June, the end of #BlogJune for this year. It’s been a challenge to keep up with a post every day, and we haven’t (as originally intended) managed to complete a farm or house task every day, but it’s been fun anyway. Today’s task has been using some of the kumquats I picked on the weekend, making most of them into candied kumquats, and some (along with some limes) into lime-and-kumquat-jelly (not marmalade, as I’ve sieved all but a few decorative strips of zest out of the jam, but basically lime marmalade flavoured – hopefully it […]

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June 25: Less is More 2016 (hosting a beehive)

2016/06/25 Danielle 0

Today I presented at the 2016 Less is More festival, on hosting a beehive in your back yard. Here are some of the points I covered, just in case you couldn’t make it to the talk, or need a little reminder of the content. 🙂   Why host a beehive? Well, it’s more a case of why wouldn’t you, really. It’s easy and safe, the bees will pollinate all your vegetables and your fruit trees, and produce honey as well. Plus, honeybees are under a lot of pressure from climate change, pollution, disease and the use of damaging pesticides such […]

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June 23: Making Mead

2016/06/23 Danielle 0

On Saturday I’ll be presenting at the 2016 Less is More festival in Peppermint Grove. I gave a presentation last year, on urban livestock, and I really enjoyed the experience. I’ve signed up to present again this year, this time on beekeeping.   I’m no expert bee-keeper, but I do have bees and I love them. They’re fascinating, and very low maintenance, and they produce amazing honey from the flowers around here. My first introduction to bees as anything other than a flying insect in my garden was in Melbourne a few years ago. I did a one day “intro […]

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plant profile: honey locust

2016/03/23 Danielle 0

I’ve just ordered another selection of wattle seeds, to germinate and plant out. These are all varieties with edible seeds, so they’re a pretty good multi-purpose plant. The idea is to plant about half of them in our Zone 5, along with holm oaks, cork oaks, stone pines, and a variety of other semi-wild food plants and bee forage plant species – the other half will go in the pasture/woodland area as shade trees. This pasture area is going to include a series of paddocks through which our poultry and the hypothetical future goats (and maybe cow!) will be rotated. There will […]

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bee update

2012/11/28 Danielle 0

Sadly, one of our two bee hives didn’t survive. In our wisdom as new bee parents, anxious to make sure our hives were safe and comfortable, we decided that we shouldn’t open up the flower-pot hive and cut the comb out to transfer the bees to their proper home until the weather was a bit better. We got them to the property late at night, and the next day was unseasonably chilly, grey and rainy. So we left them in their flower pot, inside the plastic crate we used to transport them. The lid was open enough to allow for […]