Well house
Over the last few days I have been framing up a new well house for the mountain property. The old one is slowly falling apart and it has created freezing issues. The only solution is to build a new one, the old one isn’t salvageable.
I decided it would be best to built as much of it here as possible in some sort of modular fashion. I’ll post more about it later, tonight it will just be pictures in this for my partners to see:
Sunflowers and the pollen miners
Poodles for justice
Albert (the anti-squirrel poodle) has been exonerated of any implication in the tomato thievery scandal.
The story:
A couple of nights back, I discovered that the birds had discovered my ripened Romas:
Needless to say, I got immediately motivated to pick anything within 24 hours of resembling a ripe tomato. As I picked, I tossed the 20+ pecked and gnawed fruits to the end of the beds next to the composting manure pile. As sad as this picture makes me, I’ll post it for the sake of tarnished poodle reputations both here and anywhere else they may stand falsely accused.
Last night I protected the plants with a sufficient coverage of the godawful but effective bird netting (invisible to the middle aged human eye, it snags on everything including belt buckles, watches, sunglasses, hats, cell phone carriers, Ipods, shoelaces, wood chips, ……. seriously, you get the picture.)
In the process I found that some cardinals were loitering, waiting for me to turn my back so they could return their illicit red smorgasbord. About that time I saw Albert snatch one of the damaged Romas and run to the grass to play with it. (Yes, apparently Romas are a decent stand-in for a ball in most individual poodle sports.) He was trying to bring the game indoors when I snapped the picture.
To show his forgiveness, he treed a squirrel a few minutes ago. Well done.
Footnote:
The birds got almost 30 Romas Tuesday, but that evening I did manage to harvest 306. I’ll count the 30 as my 10% tithe back to nature, but the netting stays up for the rest of the season.
Garden Scandal?
Previously praised for diligent patrol of the garden, can this poodle’s reputation as protector of tomatoes be saved?
Flashback
450
As I set out my plants back in mid April, I was hoping to have some tomatoes by the 4th of July holiday weekend.
Well, 450 is the official tally as of the 4th, not counting the Tommie Toes eaten straight off the bush. (In order to stay out of trouble I will publicly say the snatched / sneaked Tommie Toe count to be just a handful, 4 or 5 at most. ;))
The Brandywine count is only 29 at this point but they are beginning to crank up; Three plump ones are riding on top of the Romas below. (Yes, they do require the special security detail if you were wondering).
Remember this gal?
Remember this gal?
She is a “writing spider” aka Argiope aurantia
When I originally posted the picture in Little things of note, another smaller Argiope aurantia had built a smaller web nearby in the same plant. I didn’t think much of it since I had seen 5 or 6 others in the beds closest to the house.
Well, it turns out the smaller one was a male; once at sexual maturity, males leave their webs and go wandering in search of females. Once they find one, it is common for them to throw together a small web nearby before they “make their move”. They eventually get the attention of the female by loitering at the edge of her web, tapping to try and get noticed, waiting until she is receptive (or whatever the term is for when spiders get in the mood).
If successful, the female will lay between 300 and 1200 eggs in a protective egg sack that is literally left hanging for the winter.
So what becomes of the smaller male after fulfilling his biological duty for the season? Maybe the expectant female somehow knows there is no way she can get enough child support out of the deadbeat to cover 300, 500, 1000 or more children…….
So she just eats him:
Gourdhead
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No man is sane who does not know how to be insane on proper occasions.
Henry Ward Beecher
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🙂
Garden Fireworks for the 4th
I know….
This picture completely overruns the page
🙂
But nobody really likes little fireworks on the 4th do they?
😉
Sunflower, Arikara:
Behind cohutt's fence 