Little flowers

I saw the first flowers on a couple of our plants this evening as I was walking in the garden. Our golden raspberries are blooming. I hope that means we'll get some fruit this year. I also saw the first little yellow blooms on one of the tomato plants. You know what that means - in a few weeks we'll be seeing fresh tomatoes. The bees are doing well. As I was standing near the hive watching the activity one of my cats, Rooney, our first feline leukemia rescue cat, came over to the hive. He was not very aware of the bees. He is now. His tail brushed against the front entrance to the hive and he got a nasty surprise. He had a small number of bees burrowing into the thick fur on his tail to sting him. Poor kitty. Of course, Steph and I tried to remove the bees without getting stung ourselves, which we accomplished but not without a fight. Encountering one bee that is determined to sting you is a serious challenge (and a GREAT adrenalin rush!). Encountering a lot trying to sting you is a hopeless cause. We got away without being stung. Rooney wasn't so lucky.

As an aside, all of our cats are rescue cats that have feline leukemia virus. Feline leukemia is often fatal but some cats survive if diagnosed and treated soon enough. Feline leukemia is responsible for more feline deaths than any other infectious disease. We have two male, orange tabbys and a calico female. We also had the gray and white kitten of our female calico, but she succumbed to the disease and passed away very young. Most feline leukemia positive cats are kept indoors and isolated because the disease can be spread through their bodily fluids to other cats. Once we moved out here we began letting the cats out a little at a time to increase their quality of life. At this point, they are very much like any other cats and you would never know they are positive for feline leukemia. They roam outside and catch mice, voles and birds like any other barn cats.

Coming along well.

We have a garden! So far we have even harvested leaves from the spinach and lettuce for our salads and made a Sunday brunch of spinach and Swiss cheese omelets. Our own eggs and our own spinach. I have to say, it tasted great! The potato plants are going wild. I will soon cover them with a new tire and some more compost, leaving only a few inches exposed above the soil, to encourage them to grow more tubers in the compost. I have read that a 4 tire stack of potatoes grown in this fashion will yield far more potatoes than we can consume in a season, so plenty for storage. The beets are coming up slowly. The onions are doing very well. The broccoli plants are soon to produce and my intent is to cut the early heads off to encourage the heads to split and grow even more heads. I planted some carrots in among the tomatoes and they have real carrot leaves now. Our Silver Queen sweet, white corn is doing quit well also. Silver Queen is a hybrid that is supposed to be the best tasting sweet corn variety. We shall see.

Corn. Now that leads me to another topic. I don't claim to be an expert or even have a complete understanding of the issue of genetically modified vegetables, but it seems to me that Monsanto and the big corn producers are taking it on the chin for producing varieties of corn that require less water, fertilizer and pesticide. With the population of planet Earth growing ever steadily and the demand for food along with it, doesn't it make sense to modify food product to feed more people? Being a beekeeper I understand the concerns about genetically modified plants producing genetically modified pollen, etc. I do not want my bees effected by pollen that could hurt them. So here is my question: What are you doing about it? Me? I'm growing my own food, at least some of it, to reduce demand on global food resources. I hope to make a small dent in that demand by doing so. It may seem inconsequential on the global scale, but it also seems like the responsible thing to do. This appears to be a topic surrounded by a lot of hype and emotion. Where is the science?

Off to a good start.

Well, the garden is off to a good start. We have both white and yellow sweet corn in, cukes, green beans, spinach, five types of tomatoes (beefsteak, cherry, romas, lemon boy and golden hybrids), sweet basil, onions, garlic, carrots, bib lettuce, broccoli, green peppers, banana peppers, Anaheim chilis, and large sweet peppers, beets and of course, Pontiac Red potatoes. We also have watermelon, cantaloupe and pumpkins. We still have to put in the sunflowers, although we have some seeds in peat pots along with the zucchini, yellow squash, more corn for the three sisters gardens and more bib lettuce because I'm sure we'll go through it pretty fast. I started some Blue Lake pole beans for the three sisters gardens as well. I also installed a beehive just outside the wire fence of the garden in hopes that the bees will be happy to help us pollinate the garden. That is a story all to itself. Beekeeping is an awesome past time and super beneficial to both agricultural and natural plants. Not to mention, you get honey out of it.

We are using our companion planting charts to keep our tire beds full. The lettuce shares with carlic, the tomatoes share with basil, peppers, carrots and garlic and the three sisters gardens share corn, beans and squash types including watermelon, cukes, cantaloupe, pumpkins as well as zucchini and yellow squash. Eventually, I'll put some pictures on here, but for now everything still looks pretty small, although we did have our first garden salad of bib lettuce, spinach, green onion and boiled egg. Hard to beat that, at least until the tomatoes are ready.