self sufficient life

Attract bees to your garden

The decline of bee populations has been a hot topic for quite some time now. While the decline has been slowing slightly, bee colonies are still being decimated by causes that are not fully understood yet. Bees are the most important pollinators for many fruit bearing plants, so it is important to attract bees to your vegetable garden.

Bees are constantly searching for nectar and pollen, so make sure they can find plenty of flowering plants in your garden. Plant many different kinds of flowering plants, so the bees will find something in bloom from early spring until autumn.

You can also provide them with housing. A chunk of wood with holes drilled into it makes the perfect home for mason bees. If you want something that is better looking, you could get a ready made bee house or make one yourself.

In addition to housing and flowers, bees need water. A nearby pond or bird bath is not a safe water source for bees: they can get trapped in the water’s surface tension. A small container filled with sand and water is preferred. Keep the sand wet and the bees will be able to drink from it.

Kitchen-ponics

I have been doing quite a bit of testing with aquaponics over the last year. One of my aquaponics systems is growing herbs and lettuce right in my kitchen. The distance to the stovetop is about 80 cm, how’s that for reducing food miles!

This system is a small aquarium with some NFT channels on top. I made the channels from rectangular plastic air duct, the ones that you can buy at any home improvement shop, they are normally used for kitchen and bathroom ventilation. Water gets pulled through the black filter box on the right and pumped into the channels where the plant roots can take up the nutrient rich water. One channel has 7 planting sites for herbs and the other one has 3, which are spaced further apart to grow lettuce. Since the plants don’t receive any direct sunlight, I had to provide them with some artificial light. Things are growing quite nicely and I often use fresh herbs from this indoor garden.

The fish are growing pretty fast as well, but they will take some while until they are big enough to eat.