Years ago, we removed all the lawn from our small front yard and planted a purple and white garden. It changes every year, and lately, we’ve been adding more and more native plants. It is constantly changing, something is almost always in bloom, and we get great fall color from our neighbor’s Japanese Maple.

We’ve been keeping bees for years in a top bar hive. It is a more natural way of keeping bees, especially since honey production is not our goal. It is great knowing that we are sending chemical-free bees out into the world, and fun watching them coming home in the afternoon laden with pollen. Our hive has a flap in back which we can open to see the production happening through a window. When we do take a bit of honey, we actually just take out a full comb, and hand squeeze the honey out through cheese cloth.

I water my small kitchen garden from an old whiskey barrel that catches roof water, though,