Love Thy Neighbor and Thy Bees

A nice story showed up in a local paper today...here's an excerpt:

Her house was riddled with termites, and Big Sur resident Belinda Shoemaker needed to call an exterminator. But tenting the house would also mean killing a colony of bees that were living in the roof — something she could not bring herself to do. But how do you get rid of thousands of honey bees in an inaccessible part of your house? Shoemaker did the time-honored Big Sur thing, and asked her neighbors to lend her a hand. But only after failing to get professional help: At the beginning of June, she contacted bee experts, television and radio stations, and even posted an ad on Craigslist. Unfortunately, she couldn’t find anyone willing or able to take the bees away. “Nobody wanted to make the journey to Big Sur,” Shoemaker explained. So Shoemaker started passing the word around Big Sur, and one of her neighbors, Blake Forrest, who turned out to be an amateur beekeeper, offered to help.

The full story can be downloaded from the Carmel Pinecone. Couldn't we all use a little more community interconnected-ness?

Central Coast Tomato Trials - part 3

All of my 13 trial varieties have set fruit by now and some are getting rather large...
like this Nepal variety.

I also noticed something a bit strange going on here...

Can you see the sucker growing from the end of the fruiting branch? What's up with that? Do I cut it off? Or will that hurt the developing fruit?

I like to see tomato flowers.

Do you give your plants a shake everyday? I've heard that this aids in pollination. I'm not sure if it's true, but that hasn't stopped me from trying!

Here is the updated data for the Central Coast Tomato Trials:

You can click the image for a larger view.

In other vegetable news, I harvested 1.4 lbs of zucchini today,

along with 1.8 lbs of German Butterball potatoes,

and another 1.8 lbs of Yukon Gold. That largest one is hefty!


I've also collected a total of 14 lbs of plums over the last week. I'll do a post soon on what I'm doing with all THAT pound-age!

Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day - June 2009

orchid - Angraceum dideri

orchid - Cymbidium Dancing Mother 'Kotone'

And now moving outside to the vegetable garden, we find this strange creature:

can you guess? it's a humble radish that I'm letting go to seed

a lovely pea that surprised me by seeding itself in a perfect spot

And now on to the ornamentals:

tea tree

yarrow

a geranium that grows like mad! It's 10 times bigger than it was last September when I planted it!

a close-up of the pink geranium

a sweet little pelargonium that blooms freely for a very long time

another reddish-geranium

hydrangea

marigolds...tomato protectors

Blotanical

Lovely lettuce.

Hey all you garden bloggers! There's a new(ish) website in town. And it's called Blotanical. It's a great social networking site for garden bloggers and non-blogging gardeners. The site is designed to allow for easy viewing of top blogs and bloggers and allows a bit of competition... Users "pick" their favorite posts which can gain key real estate on the site for a few days. You can also "fave" your favorite bloggers, which makes it easier to keep up with their posts. The best part of blotanical (in my biased opinion) is the tool which allows you to view blogs by region or city. This allowed me to find some really great blogs by people who live nearby. It's helpful to find bloggers with similar growing conditions to your own. Or alternatively, you might decide to see what people are up to in a climate that's completely opposite from what you have. Anyway, if you are a garden blogger, it's definitely worth your time to check it out.

Awe, you shouldn't have....

...but I'm glad you did! Thanks, to Ellie Mae's Cottage, I've received my first award! Check out her great blog at http://elliemaescottage.blogspot.com/

In the spirit of "spreading the love", I'd like to give this award to:

A Girl and Her Garden

City Diggity

Daphne's Dandelions

From Seed to Table

Inside Red Studio

Keewee's Garden

Mama What The

My Little Vegetable Garden

My Secret Garden

Sicilian Sisters Grow Some Food

The Garden-less Gardener

If you'd like to pass the award on to a favorite new blogger, these are the suggested rules.

1. Accept the award, post it on your blog together with the name of the person who has granted the award, and his or her blog link.
2. Pass the award to 15 other blogs that you’ve newly discovered.
3. Remember to contact the bloggers to let them know they have been chosen for this award.