Oh my what a crazy day...

The past two nights and tonight included we have had several windows open and turned off the heat. We hear the American Toads calling most of the night, it is my favorite time of year, the frog and toad concerts. Also been hearing Pickerel Frogs calling once in a while, I had a photo of one in my last posting. Eastern Painted Turtles are now lining the edge of the pond, have been for weeks.

OK, now for today's excitement. It was a hot day reached 85 degrees here and was sunny until we were ready to split a nuk from the beehive at 6pm. Around 5:30 the clouds gathered and spilled a few drops and finished by 6pm. For those of you that do not know what a nuk is I'll explain. A nuk is a small beehive about half a normal hive, this one is 5 frames wide, my main hive is 10 frames wide. The reason for the nuk is three fold, one it creates another hive and breaks the varroa mite cycle, two it frees up the main hive to prevent swarming and three the main hive still is very full of bees and hopefully will have extra honey by May or so.

This nuk is queenless, we found my queen and left her in the main hive. So now the nuk has 2 frames of honey, one frame of pollen and 2 frames of larva and we hope eggs. The light was fading and the frames we used should have had eggs but we could not see them. So now it is up to the bees to rear some eggs into new queens and in 16 days she'll emerge and about 10 days later she'll fly out and find a group of drones and mate with them and start laying. So then after 3 1/2 weeks I look for eggs. In the mean time the mites have no new larva in which to lay eggs on, hopefully breaking their cycle a bit.

The main hive had likely 50% more brood than I have ever seen in it, looking pretty good. We did see four bees with deformed wing virus, a result of the varroa mites. Four is a small percentage of 10s of thousands of bees. A few beetles were seen maybe 6-8 not too bad, none would be better but what can you do. Pollen stores were very impressive, my girls have been working real hard.

Last item about bees. I picked up some scrap plywood at the clean wood pile at the landfill last week. Then made 3 swarm boxes out of the plywood. Purchased some bee lures and in case any local bees swarm they might just more into my swarm boxes. I'll show you some photos soon, been to busy to think about the camera.

Sorry I was not able to do bloom day this time. We have a fair number of daffodils blooming in the garden and two new double hellebores, that I purchased unbloomed last year from Pine Knot. One is pure white with lots of pointed petals, the other is a deep red, stunning color yet a semi double. The bleeding hearts just popped out of the ground in the past day, I was a bout to give up on it. Primroses 4 new ones from last year have survived and are blooming, my decade old primrose has no blooms yet. Peonies are a foot tall already! We moved about 8 Trout Lilies and a Christmas Fern from our wooded slope into the hellebore garden on Sunday.

Here is my new favorite daffodil 'Delibe' they are blooming in several spots in the garden. The center of the cup is yellow, so beautiful.

First double Hellebore!

This morning I found our first double hellebore blooming in the garden. It is a Pine Knot Farms 'Southern Belles' Double Pink. I purchased it late is the season last year and this is our first ever double bloom in the garden! It is a tiny bloom perhaps at best 1 1/2 inches across.


Other news in the garden on Saturday we had 5 different crocuses blooming in the garden and our first daffodil. Never had a daffodil or the other 4 crocus bloom in January before.

We have two of these open, very tiny I think there are Crocus vernus 'Jeanne d'Arc'

 Crocus chrysanthus 'Gipsy Girl'

 Just a couple of these have started to bloom. Crocus sieberi "Tricolor"

Daffodils in November??

Spent Thanksgiving in Wilmington, NC, hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving!

On Saturday we visited Airlie Gardens to see the camellias in bloom. The gardens were wired with lights everywhere, it was early morning so we did not see the displays lit up. We were taken in with the dozen or so bottle trees on display with lights all stuffed into the bottles on the trees. The bright sun prevented my getting a good photo of the bottle trees.

The Airlie Live Oak had several clumps of daffodils blooming under it. I did not find them to have be recently planted paper whites as these plants were firmly weeded in. Not sure what to think about these blooming in November? I'd enjoy any insight about them?

This was not isolated to just Airlie Gardens, a yard along the way back to where we were staying had some daffodils blooming as well. Then later on a walk in the neighborhood I found more daffodils in bloom....

Here is a 4 + inch camellia bloom found at Airlie Gardens.

And from our garden 'Kanjiro' one of our best camellias, this is a 3 inch bloom. Moondance had 7 blooms while were were gone, but they all looks bad, the new camellia likely needed watered.

A Sea of Blue

Last year we thought the Dwarf Crested Iris did very well in the shade garden. This patch was 10 ft x 10 ft and native when I moved in years ago. In 2008 the new septic field was put in and the irises were left to fend for themselves. Here is last years blooming photo of about half of them.

Now today's photo, many many more blooms. My guess would be 600-700 blooms! Certainly the largest patch of them I have ever seen. What do we do to them? Nothing they are wild, never watered or fertilized.

You can see why my estimate is 600-700 blooms, this is a square foot of them.

 Dr Ruppel clematis is doing better than ever, we have 5 blooms right now.

 Our first Fava Bean blooms, these plants are new to me. The Sugar Snap Peas are a good 2 foot tall, no blooms yet. Meg planted some at school a week or two before ours and she has tons of flowers right now.

Never showed you the bamboo border I did this winter. Here are 20 new daffodil bulbs. The ones on the left are Sir Winston Churchill. The woods behind the daffodils is the main hellebore garden. On Sunday I dug out a new bed and planted 5 of the new double hellebores and several of our own babies.

Here is my current job that I'd doing, another screened in porch. Today I spent all day on a ladder tearing off the little roof over the stairs and building a new roof. The new porch roof will link into the little roof. If I'm lucky I'll have it ready for my roofing guy by Monday. This photo was taken on Monday.

Oh notice the underside of the deck on the left swing mounts(the swings I brought home already), where should they go in our garden?

This is the deck three weeks ago before I started on it. The stairs were scary, very steep (8 1/4 inch rise and 10 inch treads). I have salvaged most of the decking boards and most of the lower deck which was made for kids.