Mud Songs is written by Jenny and Phillip (just Phillip really), a couple of backyard beekeepers who have been keeping bees in the cold wet climate of St. John’s, Newfoundland, for exactly 47 days.
Phillip got interested in honeybees after reading about people keeping bees on their roofs in Chicago. Then he discovered the Backwards Beekeepers and got hooked, which led to online lessons from Long Lane Honey Bee Farms, which led to several months of intense research, then another couple months of waiting in agony for a beekeeper to supply him with some honeybees, and finally on July 18th, 2010, the bees arrived. Presently, Jenny and Phillip have two Langstroth honeybee hives in their backyard and expect to harvest their first batch of honey sometime in August 2011.
Jenny and Phillip also began growing vegetables in an 8-by-8-foot raised garden bed in 2009 with great success. They used various containers and contraptions to grow herbs and veggies around their yard, all of it organic and accomplished on the smallest possible budget. And just for the fun of it, they grew some sun flowers too.
For 2010 they expanded the operation to include a 4 x 8 raised bed along with a couple mini potato towers (instead of a potato tower). With green things growing everywhere and bees buzzing all around, their tiny backyard has turned into a jungle. And they love it.
Mud Songs is a record of all their successes and failures, written and illustrated with photos and videos specifically designed to be useful to other backyard gardeners and novice beekeepers.
Read Is This a Gardening Blog, or What? for more information on the gardening posts and why they’ll only show up at certain points of the year for now on.
Contact Jenny or Phillip through @mudsongs.org. Just add the name of either Jenny or Phillip to the front of the address (and that’s Phillip with 2 Ls).
Artist’s rendition of Phillip & Jenny © 2007 by Jonathan Adams.