I have a spot in mind for growing something new, figured a perennial plant that I can eat would be a good idea. I settled on Asparagus and got two kinds, some green Jersey Giant Knight and Purple Passion. I dig trenches for the roots and widen out the rows a little. I then drop in the crown of the plants, I get them in clusters. With it facing up I add dirt and then mulch. I dug the trenches roughly dug in February, I have a few 10 foot rows and a few 15 feet rows giving me close to 50 feet of Asparagus. I add about 25 crowns to this area and back fill with my hardwood chips. I would have to wait a few months for my crowns to arrive but at least the trenches are dug and ready for them to show up. I fill them in so no one gets tripped up on them. My bunches arrived, they are Jersey Giant Knight and Purple Passion. I talk about how the positioning of the crown is crucial. And how deep they are planted is important as well. I go through the area and place the crowns in the grounds. Then checking my work and spacing any out I missed when I placed about 25 of them in the trenches. Using hardwood mulch I have acquired from tree trimmers, I fill in the space using a mix of the dirt I upturned and the mulch I collected. We have red clay high in iron but the wood chips should help out alot as well. Ill add more mulch when the stalks come up, I want to give them as much cover as possible. After planting it can take a few weeks before new growth shows up on the surface. Sometimes it may take up to a month. And I cant harvest them right away, need to let them grow a few years so the crowns below the soil get big and strong. Digging those trenches was hard work, took me a better part of a day. Though I think the yields Ill get with the Asparagus being happy, with all the root room will be worth the effort I put into the ground and these crowns.

This plant just showed up one day in the wild. I did not plant these but glad to see they sprouted here. I have seen them native here in Georgia, but this is the first time I have seen them produce fruit, known as Passion fruits. The plant can be found growing in the wild and I have had them pop up a time or two around where I live as well. Though two other vines have already established itself right by them so I hope it can keep up. I have a Jasmine Vine and Muscadine vine right where the Passion flower decided to grow. If the Muscadine does not produce in the next year or two I may just clear it out to give the Passion flower vine more space to grow. It seems happy enough at the moment that it produced four fruits. I wonder if there was another vine in the wild near by that the flowers got pollinated by. It was probably those Bumblebees I saw all over this plant, glad they helped me out in making some fruit. The Passion fruits will take a few months to ripen, waiting for the outside skin to get wrinkly. By that time they should be ripe and ready to eat. Maybe in the next month or so they should changing and I hear they tend to drop off the plant when ripe as well. I started a few other Passion flower vines around the yard, since they fruited this year it encouraged me to start some more to help with a successful pollination next year. I also see vines coming up from the ground by the Passion flower vine so maybe we will get some more growth next year as well in the same spot. This will be the first time ive tried Passion fruit. I really enjoyed their flowers, the shape and design is so unique. Maybe the fruit will be real tasty as well. @cryptopie told me they make nice fruit smoothies and have a tropical flavor to them. Looking forward to it.

I found some extra footage though its pretty short, so I talked about their life cycle a little bit in the video. Also it includes some video that I took using my modified GH3 camera using an infrared bandpass filter. Footage includes the bees visiting the boards I made for them, all of this is at normal speed but the bees move so fast I normally slow down the video by half. Easy to do when I have 60 FPS video to work with. But in this case I left it at normal speed. They stay quite busy up till the end of season for them around April. So all of this video is from last spring, but I am going to do it all again next spring! Planning on doing a follow up post on my Mason bee project showing how I store them and showing off next years bee boards I have built for them. I have nearly completely filed the cubbies for them which would give the bees probably over a capacity of 10,000. This year was the first time I used the boards and they worked to great success. But I had a high male population this year due to using less than adequate homes in the previous year. But this year I got many females produced so it should be exciting to see how active these boards are next spring. In the video you can also see my 2x4 homes that were my first generation of mason bee homes. Though they cannot be cleaned and I plan on disposing of them after anything emerges from them. Its not a good idea to keep them around as if mites are inside they will spread to my healthy bees and make them slower to produce homes. My infrared camera was modified by a company called Lifepixel, they removed the hot-mirror and replaced it with a full spectrum mirror. Using bandpass filters I can then isolate the light that comes into the camera. In this case it was infrared light. I use this camera alot when going to state parks or other places out in nature but it was also fun to use it a little on my bees. I was worried they would be too fast to capture with my special camera but was surprised to notice they were indeed visible. Addresses below to help me buy better camera equipment and support me to travel to locations to do photo and video and overall great blogs in new places. Coin| Address -|- https://i.postimg.cc/dVBF2MCM/btc1.png BTC: |bc1qhfmvd2gywg4fvrgy2kkkkyqta0g86whkt7j8r7| https://i.postimg.cc/JhYWFbKP/ltc.png LTC: |ltc1qdyzm5cwgt8e2373prx67yye6y9ewk0l8jf3ys9| https://i.postimg.cc/R0ZBGP1W/dash.png DASH: |XkSqR5DxQL3wy4kNbjqDbgbMYNih3a7ZcM| https://i.postimg.cc/76CyrfWD/eth.png ETH: |0x045f409dAe14338669730078201888636B047DC3| https://i.postimg.cc/Y9JBrM5F/doge.png DOGE: |DSoekC21AKSZHAcV9vqR8yYefrh8XcX92Z| https://i.postimg.cc/WzgLtxVH/zen.png ZEN: |znW9mh62WDSCeBXxnVLCETMx59Ho446HJgq|