Hello, welcome to The Bee Vlog.
It's been a little while since I shot a video so I thought I'd show you what I've been up to.
We've been pretty busy here working in the backyard and getting things ready for the bees and the chickens.
So I'll show you what I've been up to.
Our backyard here use to have a large playset right over here
for the kids to play on.
They've since outgrown it and we sold it off last year.
The chickens used to have free-range of our backyard here, everywhere, and they would eat all the vegetation
except these bushes here and a few of the other bushes in the back that they didn't find tasty.
Other than that though, they pretty much killed everything by eating it.
So any plant we wanted to plant to keep, we had to protect it with some chicken wire.
Over in this corner over here we used to have a cement patio or a sport court.
Last year we broke that up and got rid of it.
And then the backyard was pretty barren.
This area here was covered by wood chips to act as the soft play surface for the play structure.
And the ground underneath became pretty compacted.
So we're going to have to go through quite a bit of work to restore the soil here.
But meanwhile, in order to plant more plants we had to corner the chickens off.
That's one of the reason we got rid of the sport court.
So a couple weeks ago I built this fence here.
Now that they're penned up we were able to plant some plants.
So over here I have some borage.
It's not looking too good because we had to transplant it.
It was actually looking worse last week, but it's making a come-back.
Planted another bee-friendly bush over here that should grow much bigger.
It will eventually be the same size as this bush here.
We transplanted some lemon balm.
It's not looking too good either, mainly because when it was growing it was getting choked out by raspberries.
And it wasn't a very big patch, so I broke up the roots and replanted it here.
It's not looking too good...a couple of the plants look like they're coming back, but we're just going to leave it alone and see what happens.
We're planting a lot more other bee-friendly and butterfly and hummingbird-friendly plants
because we do have all of these types of pollinators in the area and we want to attract them and help feed them.
One way to tell a good bee plant is by the color of the flowers.
Bees tend to like blue and white flowers while hummingbirds like the red flowers.
Up here I believe these two are a fuscia (wrong)
and it will bloom with a red flower (wrong again).
This one back here is a deep red lobelia.
This is definitely a fuscia because there's the card.
So I think I was wrong about those first two
I don't know what they are.
These three here are a pineapple sage.
Also a red flower.
This is a hotlips salvia, more of a hummingbird plant. We have three of those.
This one over here used to be in a different part of the yard.
It was under some shade, that's why it's growing crooked, because it was reaching out towards the sun.
So we're hoping it can eventually reshape itself.
Now this is more of a bee plant here, and I forget what it's called.
I think it's a lobelia.
And over here we have some other types of salvia.
This is more of a bee-friendly salvia, it makes a blue flower.
And this is a liatris. We got a couple of those.
We're going to be planting some seeds in this area for bachelor button.
And this is going to be a walk-way, a path.
On the other side we're going to be planting more seeds. We've already planted some seeds.
I don't remember what we planted here, but they should be coming up soon.
And this area over here, I plan to build a planter box, right over here, for a vegetable garden.
Down here in front of the chicken coop we have some more bee-friendly plants, and I forget what they're called.
This one nearly died last year, and it's coming back.
This one we just planted.
A couple others here and here.
And some hummingbird plants back there.
The side-yard here...I forget what these are called here but I planted them last fall and they're coming back nicely.
They should be blooming with a blue flower eventually.
I think they're more of a fall bloomer.
On the other side-yard we have some bee balm over here that should be growing out and filling out more.
And then down here we have a blackberry.
It hasn't blossomed yet, but it should be very soon.
And we usually get some nice blackberries from it.
So that's our progress on the backyard so far.
In a couple years this should all look filled out
and be going very well.
I'll do an update in a couple years and we'll see what it looks like then.