The sun spots perfect on this one.
Lookin great Paws 
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Thanks lz appreciate it. I think it’s a neat pic
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Update all three kiss fem beans have germed, and have been planted in solo cups.
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i wish i had started some fruit trees or something ten years ago. there was a tiny tree starting in front of my house and now it’s just massive. i don’t know why i didn’t do it.
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I was planning doing this for 6 or so years before I had moved onto the property. Now that we’re here it was able to happen. So glad we did it. Someday it will be massive
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yeah… i have no space to plant anything. maybe a vegetable garden next year, we’ll see what happens.
cucumbers, tomatoes, maybe some jalapenos, maybe pumpkins for the hell of it, not sure how to grow potatoes, i’ll have to learn all of that. it’s just not the same as weed. starting seeds is a pain anyway.
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I plan on doing two 6 by 12 foot raised beds in the coming seasons. Right now I have the 20 fruit trees, and 4 tomato plants
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2 of my ibg fems were runts and ended up getting culled for deformities. So I decided to plant 2 4 kingdoms fems I got from the @The_Vault_Team
this time I decided to plant directly in the soil. Haven’t done that for a long time.
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I know a guy in the columbia gorge who keeps orchard mason bees and makes bamboo bee houses for them. They pollinate his pear orchard. Might be fun to make some bee houses and hang them up among your fruit trees, see if any native bees take up residence.
Companion plants and wildflowers will also help to attract diverse pollinators.
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My next door neighbor keeps 10 racks of bees. I thought it would be neat too. But we have them around.
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Good man! As a restoration ecologist by profession, a diverse ecosystem is a healthy ecosystem. If you plant it, the animals/pollinators show up so quickly. One of my favorite bees, the blue sage bee, only uses, you guessed it, blue sage as it’s host plant. Without blue sage it’s not able to survive. Now that the prairie is so fragmented, and the bee can only travel about a mile, it’s creating islands where they are stuck. They can no longer diversify genetics with bees of other populations. We planted blue sage in some folks yards, and blue sage bees showed up in just weeks. 
Btw, many native bees live in the ground, or in the stems of old plants. One reason we try to get folks to not clean up their gardens so early. Let the bees emerge before you clean up the duff.
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That’s neat to learn about.
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how long do you recommend waiting before cleaning up the garden?
is temperature or timing more important?
I also like to do that, I just started weeding and cleaning things up this last weekend. Usually I wait until the weather truly warms up, or when my wild california poppies start blooming I clear things up so the wildflowers don’t get choked out by weeds. whichever comes first.
The migrating songbirds flying north for the summer also get attracted to the garden if it isn’t cleared up too early. they love to eat the seeds from my dried out lemon balm, so I let the old brown lemon balm stand until about this time of year when the fresh lemon balm starts coming in.
The other day I saw a bunch of really cute black and white speckled birds with patches of bright yellow and sky blue, turns out they were “yellow rump myrtle warblers” which is a great name.
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Oh man… honestly, 2 years, but no one does that, so we often will clean the garden and leave the stems 8+ inches high. Then we’ll take the rest home and lean it up on the back of our compost area. Hopefully this will help some of them survive.
People say after 5 days of 55° plus, your safe, but we like to just observe around us, and let nature say when is good. When the bees and pollinators are out, is what we’re looking for.
Just like leaving your lemon balm seeds, all those stems still holding seeds are so important for overwintering birds. I have hemp that grows all over because harris sparrows love it and the move it everywhere. But what a great plant to have wild on your land. Except for my attempts at outdoor growing. 
All this to say, I am in Kansas and I’m sure the info is a bit different for your area. But just watching for them to get busy before you clean them up in their homes, is going to help them out 100%.
That’s awesome that you caught sight of those warblers. What gorgeous birds. I have grown to love birds since I moved out from the city. There’s so much diversity on my land. We have woodcocks that nest out here every year. 
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Well what do you know, I’m not just lazy, I’m a conservationist!
Every spring there are at least some patches of the garden that I don’t get to, and have left completely untended for 2+ years.
I’m actually right in the middle of the city, but it’s amazing how wildlife flocks to this spot just because it has a little bit of biodiversity and tall brush.
It must be like an island in the midst of all the developed areas and aggressive residential landscaping.
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