Melissa Majora

Hello and welcome to the Melissa Majora Blog. This is a new project both in regards to the gardens and the blo.... hey, can you guys in the back hear me? Sound guy, is this *tap*tap* thing on? Oh, here's the control.
I'll just crank it up. YOW!
Sorry. Is this better? Anyone hurt? Like I say, this thing comes with a learning curve. *heh*

Anyway, let me explain why I am taking to the bandwaves here. A long-time gardener, I've always enjoyed the busy hum of bees in my garden. Honey-, bumble-, minor-, mason-, you name it. Several years ago there was a huge concern that the honeybees were being decimated by mites, but they are tough little gals and they managed to rebound.

But now there is a much bigger concern when it comes to our most important pollinator: Colony Collapse Disorder (known as CCD). There is a good article about this problem in Wikipedia and you might want to take a moment to link over there and check it out. That would save you having to listen my attempts to adequately describe this serious problem. CCD/Colony Collapse Disorder

There, caught up now? See the concern? Domestic hive stock can just vanish overnight. And with the worldwide decline of feral (wild) honeybees, there is a very real disaster in the brewing if honeybees die off. So much of what we eat are pollinated by honeybees, and honeybees alone. As it is, the honeybee gene pool is already in jeopardy.

So this year I felt I must do what I can to help. We're all in this together, right? So I have turned my entire property into a honeybee sanctuary. My goal is to create gardens and grow as much bee forage plants as I can, plants that have high nutritional value and, in some cases, medicinal benefits to the local 'wild' hives.

I have friends in England and they name their homes. My last home was under a lot of trees, so had named it ShadowHouse. I moved to this house almost 6 years ago and at the time I had initially named the place HollyHouse for lack of a better idea. When I decided this past July to turn the property into a bee sanctuary, I pondered long and hard for a new name. Then, not long ago I was watching one of my favorite SF BBC series: Doctor Who. In that episode when he asked his companion if anything unusual was happening to Earth, she replied that the bees were dissappearing. The Doctor determined that the bees were all going home to their own planet: Melissa Majora. Well, there you go! You can't get any better than that and so I've renamed the property to Melissa Majora.

(this note posted 1/2/09: Can you believe it. After setting up a blog, even paying for a site name, I managed to mis-hear what the Doctor called the home planet of the bees. It's not Melissa Majora. Nooo. It's Melissa Majoria! *sob* And for months and months I've not been corrected. Well, folks, I'm not about to switch horses in the middle of the stream. Majora it is and Majora it stays. (Darn British accents!) :-P)

In future posts I'll describe how I've gone about developing my idea, the garden beds, the plants, the help and resources, and the 5-year game plan. I hope you'll stick around.

And I promise not to mess around with the sound again. ;-)

More garden buzz soon!