Garden Walk April 06, lots blooming!

Folks, its likely the best time of the year for flowers in our garden. We are finally getting it to what we want. OK yeah right. Part of the joy of gardening in experimentation and exploration.

Anyway there is a lot of photos to share, let me begin..

  Creeping phlox.

  Creeping phlox and primrose together.

 Creeping phlox.

 Woodland phlox.

Muscari with an honey bee!

Pansies, we have lots of different pansies, this is just one of them. Survived an 8 degree night this past winter as you can see. Planted last fall.

 Daffodil 'Hawera'

 Daffodil ' Mt Hood'

Daffodil 'Actaea' Showy and tall makes a great cut flower!

 Daffodil 'Broadway Star' one of my favorites for sure.

Daffodil 'Sailboat' These produce a lot of flowers!

Daffodil 'Sir Winston Churchill'

 Daffodil 'Quail' at least I think it is Quail.

Daffodil 'Pipit'

Daffodil 'Sound'

Daffodil 'Delibe' drop dead gorgeous!

 Daffodil 'Pink Charms' never seen any pink on this.

Daffodil 'Silver Smiles'

Daffodil 'Falconet' Nice..

 
Snow Flakes!

 Penny's Pink hellebore. Wow wow!

 Bleeding Heart, this is our newest one Meg brought back from Wilmington! Nearly 3 foot tall.

 This is a tiny Wild Bleeding Heart. About 6 inches tall.

Bleeding Heart from the front garden.

 15+ year old primrose. The oldest in our garden. Has been known to shoot about 50 stems of blooms, slow to burst this year.

 We've had this primrose 3 years, man its crazy.

I split this primrose when we planted it, the other plant looks almost as good as this one.

 Blue primrose

 Red primrose

Purple primrose.

Native anemone "Windflower"in our garden.

Our newest camellia, Camellia X 'Tiny Princess'. Meg and I visited the Coker Arboretum in March of 2010 and saw this blooming with thousands of fallen flowers covering the ground. Anyway Camellia Forest had it and I brought it home, see my post from 2010 about it with photos at 

Planted Sugar Snap Peas Today!

The best crop of sugar snap peas we have ever had here were planted early, on January 21th. Here is central North Carolina it gets pretty hot by the end of April, peas do not like warm weather. So given my work schedule was open today I went out and got my hands dirty! It is supposed to rain the next two days so it was now or wait til the soil is dry enough.

I worked the two 8 foot strips were I was planting with a shovel then sifted the soil with my bare hands. I had to remove acorns, henbit and other weeds. I've told this before and will tell it again as we have a lot of new visitors here. First inoculate the peas with a little water and inoculant, I poured the 3/4 lbs of peas into a quart container and shook them up so the inculcate would stick to the peas well.

Here is the real trick plant your two rows about a foot apart under your trellis and drop the peas in very heavy like in the photo below.

Putting so many peas in the furrows is insurance against birds, squirrels, slugs and peas that do not sprout. This way you get a nice full trellis of peas. It just works, Meg taught me this. These two rows 8 foot long may produce 4-5 gallons of peas this way.

Then cover the rows with wheat straw to hold in the moisute and hide the peas from critters finding them. Then we let the peas grow. This trellis will need more strings before the peas grow very much. Make sure your peas do not fall over by making sure they stick to the trellis or the plants will bend in half and you'll loose your pea crop.

 Above is our garlic patch, that first one is about 3/4 inch in diameter. I added fertilizer today to the garlic. What type, grocery (coop) store garlic. That green clump behind the garlic is the sugar snap peas Meg planted last fall.

 These hellebores opened today in the garden. The white one I call Breezy 13 and the pinkish one I call Breezy 14. These were given to us by our friend Breezy, she gave us a lot of them.

 Above is Henbit a weed that grows in our lawn, it is very invasive, but the bees like it and I heard the pollen from it is red.

 Here are some of my girls with pollen sacs on their hind legs from today. The brown pollen below was being carried in like crazy. Three colors of pollen was seen.

 Anemone blanda I think from the garden.

 Firefly crocus is still hanging on. It is my favorite, for now.

Gypsy Girl crocus has just opened up, kind of sneaky about it, never saw it coming.

Spring like day here! Looked into the Hive..

Today it reached 65 degrees after 4 very cold nights down into the 20s. On Thursday I grabbed the hive and lifted it to check the weight. I thought it was getting light, bees need 10 pounds of honey a week when they are raising brood, that is 40 pounds for just February. With all the recent pollen that has been brought back to the hive I suspected the bees were raising brood so I was a little worried they needed syrup as a supplement.

I put on all the gear, gave them a little smoke and opened up the hive. The upper super had 3-4 frames of partially filed honey last I check in late fall, today 2 frames maybe half full of honey. The deep box in the middle was slap full of honey(10 frames) in the fall, today it was still full best I could tell.

This is a full frame of honey from the middle deep box. It came from the end of the box, bees fill the frames from the center and work to the outside. So we have lots of honey for the bees to make it through the winter still. Question is have the bees refilled these frames as they fed on the honey? Or have they subsided mostly on what they have found during warm winter days? Before I opened the hive I saw hundreds of bees bringing in pollen.

 Here is a bee gathering from a pansy flower in our garden today. It checked all the pansies at this planting and proceeded to check several crocuses. Bees are supposed to most of the time stick to one type of pollen source at a time, the bee did not utilize the crocuses.

This photos does not show real well that the entrance was very busy.

 Crocus ancyrensis "Golden Bunch" bloomed last year on January 23, it is only a week behind last year.

Here is  muscari "Golden Fragrance ' just getting started in the garden. This is the third year in the garden for these bulbs.

 Crocus "firefly" looking lovely.

 Woodland anemone

 Last from the Poets Walk parking lot yesterday! I got a big kick out of this bumper sticker.