In the last year my husband and I have been fortunate enough to purchase several acres in the Nashville area. We have really enjoyed cleaning out the existing flower beds and replanting in a style that suites us and inspires us. By suites us, I mean mostly perennials or shrubs that do not require much tending throughout the year. We are also moving into the ‘wild areas’ and beginning to remove non-native invasive species and even some natives that are just not desirable. Those undesirables would be a native rose, which we realized this summer was starting to show Rose Rosette symptoms. Since we never want to be part of the problem, we began removal of all the wild rose on our property so as to not harbor this disease.
As we began developing all these areas and ideas I decided to find a beekeeper that would work with us on our property maintaining a hive or two. At first my husband was against it, making the argument that we should foster native bee species, not exotic honeybees. My argument? Why can’t we do both? We plant native and non-native plants side by side all over the yard, we can do the same for bees. We came to the agreement that we would have no more than two exotic honeybee hives and leave plenty of open meadow, dead trees and bee houses to attract native bees and pollinators. So far we have one thriving hive with another planned for spring and plenty of carpenter bees and yellow jackets. Not too sure how I feel about the yellow jackets but they haven’t made themselves too much of a nuisance yet.
Along with this decision came another decision to plant extra native plants. I am not now, nor will I ever be, a ‘Native Only’ person. If you are, I hope you don’t hate me and can understand that I am trying but also enjoy some diversity. I do plant more Native plants than non-natives and this year alone put out about 50,000 seeds for native plants. Everything I read tells me that native plants, and closer to the species are better, have more abundant nectar for all types of pollinators. Also, native plants are better for insects especially caterpillars that will turn into butterflies and moths.
As we go through this process I have been photo documenting and have now started this blog. So here we are in Fall of 2019 and we have been in the house since May 2018. If you follow this blog here
or on Facebook you will get to see our progress. Here are some before and after photos of what we have accomplished so far.
Comentarios