Smallest Farm Sunday

Smallest Farm Sunday: Pollination Edition



I got really really lucky with the shutter timing and caught this bee doing its thing on the catnip blossoms. The bee balm is about to bloom so I'll bee seeing a lot more black and gold soon.



But mostly this week I've been seeing purple. We picked at least a gallon of mulberries. I used to have an unofficial rule: if the berries are too high to reach, God meant them for the birds. But the gardens have been so wet that getting in them has been problematic, so my theology had been amended to: if God meant me to spend less time picking mulberries He would have turned off the rain sooner.

We're freezing most of what we pick. The trick is to lay them out on something flat to freeze them, then bag them. (If you bag them unfrozen, you get Frozen Berry Blob Mush.)



Also in the purple food aisle we have eggplants in bloom...



...and my favorite purple beans. Notice that the flowers and vines are purple. The beans ripen purple, but turn green when cooked. They're a lot easier to find in bush variety than in pole variety. (That is, of course, the top of the eight foot fence.)



The more conventional Kentucky Wonder beans are in bloom, too. The vines are starting to send out secondary stems and almost all of the individual plants have reached the top.



Here's how the fence is looking so far. It'll be a wall of green (with a hint of purple) in a month.



Also in the south garden, the first tomatillo is growing in its husk.



Here's the big picture of the north garden. I managed to harvest the mulch (i.e. mow the lawn) Saturday so there's a nice blanket of grass clippings around the tomatoes, peppers and eggplants. We also have the first teeny zucchinis.

The small critters seem tamer than usual this year and barely run away when I show up. As for our old friend the gopher...



My neighbor has contacted Carl Spackler Pest Control Inc. to try to catch him. But he's an elusive varmint. They're like the Viet Cong. Varmint Cong.