Buzzed

When I walk through my garden in the morning. There are lots of visitors. Cicadas, hover flies, butterflys, grasshoppers(grrr), dragon flies, wasps, and bumble bees. The bumble bees buzz by my head almost every day. This is a little startling, but I have learned not to swat. The bees will not sting unless disturbed (touched) while nectaring or when they feel the hive is threatened. This is a live and let live situation. I rarely get stung and the garden is covered up in bumble bees and wasps.

Unfortunately, I have not seen many honey bees this year. I look for them, they just don't seem to be around. This morning, I found one. She was nectaring on this sun flower. She buzzed off before I could snap her picture. Boy, was I happy to see that little critter.

Here is a short list of things to grow and provide to help out the bees

1. Nectar and pollen flowers. I like zinnias.

2. Violet colored flowers.

3. Bees like a bloom with a bulls eye - Dark eye.

4. Puddled water

5. Variety of blooming plant material.

6. Native plants.

The don't list is pretty straight forward. Pesticides are out. Even many organic pesticides are not selective. They will harm a bee just like they will harm a squash bug. If the bee is visiting a squash bloom you sprayed with poison to kill the squash bug, guess who else gets nuked. Oh and anyone who wants to get into the argument about BT, that's fine, but it will kill butterfly caterpillars, just like it will kill cabbage loopers. Just saying.

One other odd factoid. Bees can't see red.

Here is some moth Middle Monkey found. I think it had just come out of it's chrysalis and had not pumped up its wings yet.

Site Meter is Causing Blog Problems.

I have noticed that several of the blogs I like to read as well as my own were having internet explorer problems. VP sent me a message and it turns out that my sitemeter was the problem. Here is the web address she sent me with an explanation. Thanks VP. I removed it from the blog, and now all is well. This is sort of sad, because I love my sitemeter. It let me know all kinds of cool stuff like where readers come from and why. Someone got here once looking for a fracus tree - Teehee, people are crazy. Anyway, when they fix the problem I will reinstall the sitemeter. This may mean I start over, but that is okay. If you are having trouble with your blog and internet explorer, take a look at your sitemeter, it may be the culprit.

This is a test. My blog is messing up.

Pepper Harvesting Begins

The peppers are getting ripe. I brought in jalapenos, serranos,cayenne, and chili pequeno. There are also habanero, TAM jalapenos, and some sort of sweet pepper. The sweet pepper is Teenage Monkey's plant. I like my peppers hot. The little chili pequeno peppers along with the serranos and habaneros are all ground up in a blender with sea salt and good vinegar to make a Tabasco type sauce that will, wait for it......knock your socks off.

Mixed Results

I harvested the corn today. As you can see it is pretty pitiful. The pop corn did better than the sweet corn. It would turn out that my corn started making ears when the rain stopped. Moral of that story, start corn earlier. In fact, I should have started everything earlier. Next year, I am going to do a little math and try to plant backwards. Start from the the point that the drought usually begins and count backward the number of days each particular plant needs in order to produce fruit. Sort of like working with the last freeze date but backwards. Maybe that way the plants can produce fruit before the water runs out. So if the corn needs 70 days, then I need to plant it in the middle of April. I will have to go back and look, but I am pretty sure it was late May before I planted it this year. My tomatoes are suffering from the same fate. There have only been two tomatoes so far, though the yellow pear is still setting fruit. I will be fall before they begin again. I only plant indeterminate tomatoes.

I am still going to plant more corn this summer and give it one more shot. Maybe, we will get more rain. I will just grow the popcorn, not the sweet corn.

In other Debbi's Garden news, IT RAINED. We have had about half a inch so far. My rain barrel has rainwater in it. One-half inch of rain equals about half a barrel of water. I am pretty excited.

It Rained

I woke up this morning to a pair or royally ticked off cats. They decided to sleep on the deck last night and it rained on them. As soon as I opened the door they high tailed it into the house complaining the whole time. Well, they didn't really high tail it, they don't have tails, more like high nubbed it.

It was not enough rain to make much of a difference. Most likely, all it will accomplish is making it more humid this afternoon. Of course, I washed a rug yesterday and left it out overnight to dry. Yep, it's wet.

There is a slight chance for more rain this morning and over the next couple of days. Wish us luck.

Milestones

I started this blog back in November of 2007. I was so serious in the beginning. The first post was on propagating roses. I intended to blog about gardening and then the content took on a life of its own, and here I am blogging about gardening, kids, food, and anything else that I find interesting.

This little blog of mine is about to reach a couple of milestones. I am within 300 points of becoming a guru on Blotanical. The cool thing about that is I get to pick 40 more blogs to add to my favorites list. Lately, I have stumbled upon a lot of great new blogs and a few older blogs that have just come to my attention.

Also, according to my site meter, I should reach 10,000 visitors in the next ten days or so. While this may seem like nothing to some of you with hundreds of visits every day, to me it is mind blowing. Never in my wildest dreams did I think that many people would have any interest in what I have to say. The site meter has also revealed that people visit here from all over the world. This is just amazing to me.

Through this site, I have been able to keep family members up on what is going on with our little family, which was my intention to begin with. I have also reconnected to a long lost cousin. She began reading this blog after getting in touch with one of my sisters. I saw her on the sitemeter, who else could be reading from Pampa, Texas.

Possibly the best thing that has come from this activity, is meeting such a great group of fellow bloggers. Most of the blogs I read and bloggers who come here and read mine are garden bloggers. There are a handful that I found through other links. My sister also has a mommy blog and a craft blog. I try to visit the blogs on my links frequently to see what everyone has to say. I consider many of these bloggers dear friends.

I love reading and responding to comments. There has been very little trouble with spam and I have never had an ugly or hateful comment. Occasionally, though, the comments do take on a life of their own. Gardening Injuries comes to mind. Some of the commentors (I know, not a word) had some pretty gnarly injuries.

All in all, this has been a great experience and I have really enjoyed myself. I can't wait to see what the future holds for my little blog.