Beekeeping at Bill's

I went over to my beekeeper friend Bill's place last Thursday to learn how to start shutting down the hives for the winter. I hope to get my own hives in the spring.  Meanwhile it has been greating helping Bill a few times this summer and learning how to check the hives and extract honey.  They are amazing creatures and the honey straight from the hive is incredible!  It's like tomatoes from your garden vs. store bought ones.

Smoking the hive to calm the bees

Seed Saving

It's that time of the year...saving and storing seed from my most productive veggies.  So far I've got corn, string beans ('Blue Lake Climbing', 'Purple King' and 'Rattle Snake' ), chives, and tomatoes set aside.  This will be my second or third season collecting from some of them and they have been very productive.  This year the beans have been less abundant than last with the rain we've had, but I'm not complaining!  I put more blood and bone on the veggie patch hours before the huge rain and hail storm in Melbourne a couple of weeks ago and I'm getting a second round of beans.  I'm going to have to net them though to keep the possums out!  It's the start of breeding season and they've recently started a full-scale invasion.  Think pub-crawl on a Saturday night.  Previously, we were living in harmony - I have been throwing anything with blossom end-rot developing (usually a few days after a big rain storm) up on the carport roof for them to eat and they only seemed to leave their little teeth marks in a few on the vine.  Now, they are eating any ripe tomatoes (well...eating a few bites and chucking the rest on the ground as they do) and all the young beans and flowers. Time for some netting.

Here are instructions for saving tomato seeds,