Entry No. 1 | January 2026
Where This Farm Sits and Why It Matters
Encanto doesn't come up often in conversations about ecological restoration. It probably should. The neighborhood sits inside the Chollas Creek Watershed — a natural system that stretches from La Mesa and Lemon Grove all the way through Southeast San Diego before emptying into San Diego Bay. For most of the 20th century this watershed was neglected, paved over, and largely forgotten as an ecological resource. That's been changing. The Chollas Creek Enhancement Program, a city-adopted restoration master plan, has been working to bring it back. A regional park designation followed in 2021.
Sibee in the Garden sits right in the middle of that story.
When we look at this 0.313-acre plot not just as a farm but as a potential node in a larger web of restored habitat — connected to canyon corridors, to Chollas Creek, to other properties in the watershed — the stakes of what happens here get bigger than one garden.
How This Partnership Began
This project started the way a lot of meaningful things do: with a question that led somewhere unexpected.
Charles Beard, the steward behind Sibee in the Garden, came to Kemi at SAVAGE BEE-CHES boutique with a straightforward goal — he wanted to install honeybee hives on the farm to support his crops and operations. It's a request we hear often, and it comes from a genuinely good place. People want to support pollinators. They want their farms to thrive. Honeybees feel like the obvious answer.
Kemi gently declined — and then took the time to explain why.
Here's the short version of what she shared: European honeybees (Apis mellifera) are not native to North America. When managed hives are placed in urban and suburban landscapes, they often outcompete the native bees that have lived here for thousands of years — the bees that co-evolved with our local plants, the ones our crops and wild ecosystems actually depend on. San Diego County is home to over 600 native bee species — the highest diversity of any county in the entire United States. That is an extraordinary ecological inheritance. And it's one that managed honeybee operations can quietly erode.
But Kemi didn't just close the door. She opened a different one.
She proposed something better: a real partnership. O'Shun's Orchard would work alongside Sibee in the Garden — at no cost — to assess the property, design a native pollinator habitat plan, and document everything along the way as a case study. In exchange, Sibee in the Garden would give us access to the land and permission to share what we learn publicly, so that other farms, gardens, and communities can benefit from the experience.
Charles said yes.
We are genuinely grateful for that. It takes openness to hear a new perspective, especially when it means rethinking an approach you'd already decided on. Charles and Sibee in the Garden didn't just say yes to a project — they said yes to learning something new and to being part of something bigger than their fence line. That spirit of community and curiosity is exactly what this work needs more of.
What We're Setting Out to Do
Over the coming months, this journal will follow the Sibee in the Garden project from the ground up — literally. We'll document what we find, what we recommend, what gets planted, and what starts to change. We'll share the science in plain language and the stories in real time.
Our goal is for this case study to answer a question that more and more urban farmers, backyard growers, and community stewards are starting to ask: What would it look like if we designed our land with native bees in mind — and what would that mean for our crops, our soil, and our neighborhood?
We scheduled our first site visit for January 24th. Check back for the next entry to find out what we observed.
O'Shun's Orchard LLC is a San Diego-based native pollinator habitat consulting firm. We are minority-owned, woman-owned, and veteran-owned — and we believe that real pollinator conservation starts with the bees that belong here.
Follow along as we document this case study, entry by entry.
Next Entry: Site Visit Observations — What We Saw at Sibee in the Garden
