three photo bee update

the boys are still buzzing around the bee houses...

and with five tubes sealed off with green leaves in this house...

and the girls woeking tubes in this one as well, i'd say they are keeping up thier end of the bargain.

busy

in the six days since the bee release the girls have hatched out...

and a busy bee mom has already sealed off a tube in one of the bee houses with what i can only hope is alflfa leaf...new generation on the way...and i am most pleased at the prospect.

corn sweat

it has been warm here again and i surmised the maize on campus probably needed some water so after a short shift at work i headed out to campus on my way home...

and sure enough the stomata on the underside of the maize leaves had opened to evaporate water to keep the leaves from cooking causing the leaves to curl up along their length...corn sweat...

this is the plant i rock mulched my last trip out and its leaves are relatively smooth...

particularly when you compare them to those of its neighbor immediately to the south...

so i stood it upright...rock mulched it as well...and soaked the entire bed with the garden hose...i will be expanding the rock mulch to cover at least that row of plants...i may do them all despite the tediousnes of cleaning up the mulch in the autumn ( there is no telling when the bureaucrats may decide to move me so the bed is mandated to be cleared at the end of the season )...

in other garden news, the asparagus is still upright...

the einkorn has topped out...

more ears of grain have appeared and they are flowering...

while the alfalfa, in full bloom and still intent on escaping, is full of bees...which is why it's there...more as it comes up.

campus run

it has been warm here the past few days...actually three of the past four days since my last visit...so i wanted to see what was going on...

it has been breezey as well as warm ( in fact there was a derecho that ran through here monday evening ) and the first thing i noticed was a jute twine failure in the asparagus...a few new turns and they were vertical again...

the einkorn has reached it ultimate height...

and the first ears of grain are emerging...ancient dna ready to ripen...

over in my "official" bed things are going along...

the rye grass is filling in well and the hopi turquoise is looking robust in the heat...

the alfalfa continues to mock the corral...

and some of the volunteer spuds are blooming...and while we are talking solanum blooms...

so are a number of the carolina horse nettle plants...without being exhaustive i counted forty plants in and around the beds...if there was an eradication attempt it has decidedly failed...there will be more...nothing has disturbed the rock mulch around the one maize plant so i may invest in more rock and expand that to encompass at least one row of maize just to see if it has an impact...still a considrable part of the season ahead...we'll see how it goes.

BEES!!

my two hundred alfalfa leaf cutter bee cocoons arrived via fedx today...i knew some of the boys would have hatched out on the way ( the boys always hatch out first...they are the ones with green eyes ) so i put the tubes in the refrigerator for fifteen minutes to calm them down...

when i opened the tubes a few were very calm...

it is in the nineties ( fahrenheit ) here so between the ambient air temperature and the heat of my hands they perked up and flew off fairly quickly...

i placed the unhatched cocoons in the hatchery...

put the anti-bird netting in place...

affixed the roof...

and because it is so warm i placed a damp towel over the hatchery to keep it a bit cooler...tomorow it is supposed to be only in the eighties so that can come off in the morning...

when i finished i had a look around the yard and found...blooming alfalfa...timed it right.

forecast confirmed

there was nothing extraordinary about yesterday's temperatures...ninety-six degrees ( fahrenheit ) at seven p.m. is not unusual...themperatures hovering around eighty at twenty after four a.m. is not the norm here,,,it usually cools at night and tropical eveings are something of a rarity...so a bit later this moring i rambled over to the portage garden to water and have a look...

and since the population in my bed consists of two distinct classes of plants there is a limted amount to tell...the seventeen potaoto plants begin to look more like shrubbery...

all reaching for sunlight in a bed that receives direct sun most of the day...some energy use there that i could have hoped for them to have applied to tubers...

quite a few of them are investing in blooms as well...i am disinclined to pinch them off ( unlike the garlic here at home ) so, perhaps i will go back a bit later and photograph them in a more open state as compensation.....

the northern peremeter of the bed is inhabited by some sturdy looking maize...i planted them on the north side because i did not want them to shade the spuds..clearly ( at this point anyway ) an unecessary precaution...the spuds are dwarfing them...this should ( hopefully ) change...we will be empirical and wait and see...perhaps some bloom photos later...