Garden update, and crafty wildlife

Still life with sweet peas

It's really beautiful in this part of the world right now, if just a bit on the hot side (we made it all the way to 82F yesterday), about fifteen degrees above normal, with the first cool-down looking to come at the end of next week. Other than having to keep a close eye on my garden, with all this sunshine and lack of rain, I'm truly enjoying myself.

I was supposed to be skydiving today, but my friend Linny called and told me that she isn't doing very well at all and will try again next weekend. Plus two of my other skydiving friends aren't going to be out today or tomorrow, so I just decided to let it go. It's a long drive down south without my friends to play with. So instead I joined the Fairhaven walkers for my usual Saturday trek around town. We stopped frequently to hydrate and let the slower walkers catch up. We walked down by the bay, so the breeze off the water and the early hour made it especially enjoyable. Then I went out to get some pictures of my garden.

Happy bumblebee

My garden neighbor Nate has allowed his leeks to flower, and this bee is certainly happy to see this blossom. It was simply vibrating with delight, or at least that's what it seemed like to me. Everything is going pretty darn well in my neck of the woods. The garden has been giving us beets, sugar snap peas, broccoli, lettuce, and more zucchini than we can eat. I've been giving them away to the neighbors, since they are not taking them out of the community garden.

Mr. Big Crow

We have four crows who have discovered the cat food I've been leaving out during the daytime. After a few days of chasing them away, I decided to just let them be. They are a lot of fun to watch. Plus I got a larger container for water, since I realized that many birds are having a hard time finding fresh water as it gets drier around here. This is the biggest of the four, and although it's hard to judge how big he is, with nothing to measure him by, many ravens I've seen are about his size. They are very clever, and they have already figured out that I'm the feeder and watch me going about my business.

I also ran across an interesting YouTube video that was posted by a Facebook friend. I really enjoyed watching this a few times. Some information about the making of it is as follows: "This takes place in England - the owners of the yard added each piece of the Rube Goldberg contraption slowly so that when the squirrel learned one section and got the nuts, they then added the next section. Finally it ended with what you see on the clip! It took over 2 weeks to get to this point."
Enjoy!
:-)