We attended a bee conference in Charleston, SC last month. While there, we stayed at James Island County Park in the camper and it was lovely. It was so hot but most of our time was spent at the convention anyway; we did enjoy a very nice meal at Florence’s Lowcountry Kitchen though! Casual dining and delicious food…yum! While there we met some folks from Clemson University who spoke on things that plague Honey Bee Hives and how to treat them.
Then George was made aware of free farming courses available online through Clemson that teach you about the next steps in gardening. We have six raised beds but we’d like to venture into ground planting and maybe even selling our harvests at our local farmer’s market in the spring.
To prep our ground, George took some soil samples to the Clemson exchange office and had it tested. Then he covered the areas with thick garden plastic to kill all the grass and weeds. In a couple of months, we will till in some amendments based on the test results and cover it up again until spring planting time.
This may be for organic farming but if needing to add compost to your garden, he learned you have to leave it to “bake” for a certain amount of days/months before planting food crops. I suppose this is for safety reasons which sounds right by me.
We are doing this for a couple of large garden areas as well as for the blueberries we bought a couple of months ago. For those, we plan on lining them up along the back of our property as a privacy hedge…although I do love looking at our neighbor’s horses, it will be nice to have a barrier.
Since birds love berries and we only have around twelve to sixteen plants, we are planning on caging them. George has done a bit of research on using bird netting and such to keep them safe from wildlife. We want something that will last and be easy to maintain because we sometimes get flocks of hundreds of birds migrating in our backyard. He jotted down some ideas but by the time you buy everything to build them, I found something comparable on Amazon that might make this a lot easier! Amazon sells metal walk-in chicken coops that are of various lengths. I am not sure how it will look but we will share what we end up doing once we know.
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