Garden 2011

I don’t think I have posted much about our garden this year. *hangs head in shame* We have quite a forest of green out there with lots of green (zucchini, garlic, lettuce, onions, basil, oregano, mint, and cucumber), yellow (yellow squash and tons of yellow veggie flowers), white (patty pan squash), red (tomatoes and strawberries), and purple (blackberries) coming on strong. Soon we will see some orange (pumpkins).

I was a bit worried about whether we would have good pollination this year as last year I had to go out with a small paint brush a few times and we did not have a great year. A couple of weeks ago I went out with my morning coffee in one hand and my long nose tweezers in the other. You see, as the garden started to take off and the first few blooms began to appear among the squash plants we had quite a number of cucumber beetles causing me some garden angst. The cucumber beetle looks similar to the lady beetle but is not something one would want in their vegetable garden. While the lady beetles are beneficials and eat aphids and larvae of other pests the cucumber beetle will snip the blooms off the plants and prevent any fruits and veggies from growing and they do not only hide in the cucumber plants. They seemed to be very attracted to our squash plants. So I put on my angry eyes (è_é) and headed out to conquer them.

Since we garden as organically as we can about the only thing we could find to aid the killing of the cucumber beetle was the tweezers. So for a few minutes each morning I become Eduarda Tweezerhand. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. Sorry. We have two carpenter bees that hang out in the garden and I love to watch them. One of them gets very curious about me and buzzes all around my face staring at me and then goes back to being busy in the garden. It is as if he is saying good morning to me. I know it is a male because he has a white dot on his head. This year I have a sneaky suspicion that we have someone fairly near us keeping honey bees. I started noticing a lot of other bee activity over the next few days and OHMYSWEETPICKLES the number of bees that are hanging out in my garden now. I love it!

I go out every morning now to check on things, but honestly, I really just like to watch the bees. I sit there with my coffee and just watch them. They stay very busy until around 9:30 or 10:00am and then they start to settle down as the sun makes the garden warmer. It looks, at times, like they are in the flowers sleeping. If I lean over close to look at them, they simply stare back. A few of them will fly out of that bloom and into another nearby. I am rather fascinated by them all and they do not seem to be the least bit bothered by me. I do not take the time to harvest any crops while they are so busy; I wait until later in the morning. Even in late afternoon when I go out to check on things and do some weeding I find a bee or two inside a shriveled squash flower or under a large pumpkin leaf just chillaxin’.

I have decided that if God will ever bless us with a bigger place and the little bit more land (and acre or two) that we desire then I want to keep honey bees.