Of Bumblebees and One Local Summer-week 8

Posted on | August 20, 2007 |

On Saturday morning, I went out to check on the Pattypan plants that are limping along in the lasagna bed and there were five huge open blossoms…each with a sleeping bumble bee in it. Actually, one blossom had TWO sleeping bumblebees. At first I thought, holy mackerel, these plants are poisonous and are killing the bees, but when I touched one flower the bee stirred, looked around and then burrowed in deeper. Then thoughts of a long, hard winter crossed my mind, but that’s probably unrelated and the bees were likely just enjoying the shelter of the tunnel-like blooms overnight. Bumblebee motel. So weird that there were six bees, though, all checked in to rooms next to one another. Were the two sharing a room a couple? Or was that just a one-night-stand?

I thought about running in to get the camera, but I was enjoying a few minutes away from the Lila Show (Mo-ooom! Watch what I can do! No! Watch it again! No! Just watch what I can do!). I didn’t want her to bring that show outside where it was relatively peaceful for five minutes. Then a chicken started in, belting out the Holy Crap This Egg Is Splitting Me In Two song like Ethel Merman so I just went back inside to make a grocery list.

I missed OLS week 8. I cooked a local meal, but forgot to take photos and forgot to post about it. We had local Amish raised chicken breasts on the grill with the local Maple BBQ sauce, my potatoes sliced thin and layered with my onions, slices of tomato and local Amish farmer’s cheese, all wrapped up in tin foil and cooked on the grill. I sliced a few pattypan and grilled those, and steamed up some haricot verts. It was a delicious, fresh meal with just nonlocal salt and pepper.

I’m falling behind with a bunch of things. But I’m exercising some and I’m going to let that count as progress.

I’ll leave you with a couple of garden shots. This is a Bright Lights Chard, taken before we got all of that rain. I tend to let the Chard fend for itself with the straw mulch and maybe an occasional watering, unlike the tomatoes which I watered almost every day in late June and all of July.

Poor thing’s looking pretty limp there. But then we got several days of rain, I think a total of almost 6 inches.

Looking pretty great now. And I finally realized that I have to stop planting my chard like inner-city row houses. I thinned them down quite a lot and gave a good 8 inches between plants and now the leaves are growing big, ruffled and strong.

[tags] bumblebees, garden, critters, one local summer, eat local [/tags]

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