My Favorite View in the Garen

You have to love early August in the morning light. All the plants are trying to take over the garden. My major job is turning the ends of the cucurbits and sweet potatoes back into their beds so they don't take over the world and I can actually walk down my path. The path above is a three foot wide straight path. Not that it looks straight from the photo. It looks like a pretty curving path and most of it is just a foot or so wide with all the flowers and plants in the path. Some of my side paths are even worse. They are all green. I have to be careful where to step.

Though it might not be a view, this is my current favorite bee, mainly because it is the most prolific bee in my garden is this all black fuzzy bee. It is about the size of a typical honey bee, maybe a bit shorter and wider. I'm currently trying to figure out what kind of bee it is. It looks a little like a black carpenter bee, but I always thought carpenter bees were larger. I know the Eastern Carpenter bees that we get are huge and aren't fuzzy like this bee is. They love the corn, the cucurbits, and the beans. The actual honey bees seem to be sticking to my mustard plants and zinnias right now. And as Granny has noticed, it has been a good bee year, well bee and wasp year. I've seen several varieties of wasps I've never seen before. Including a huge blue black one. I've had smaller blue black ones in the garden in the past, but they only got to about an inch and a quarter maybe. This one gets over an inch and a half and its width can be over 1/4 inch. A very big wasp. Another is interesting because it has almost a translucent orangish abdomen with a black thorax.

This is my favorite bee's favorite spot, my two sisters' garden. It is one of my favorite spots in the garden too as the corn is almost ripe. I can't wait.

And the squash is just starting to set. Go butternuts. Those black bees keep them well pollinated.

My other cucurbits are doing well. The melons have set at least 7 and they are big. Above are my zukes and cukes. I've never had my zukes this big before. They are four feet tall. I wish I had planted my cukes somewhere else. The row cover worked fabulously to keep off the vine borers. But now those three zucchini are very hard to control. I keep trying to loop them back into the middle of the bed.

I'm trying to keep them away from my carrots which are tiny little things. The zukes keep trying to smoother them. As you can see the carrots needed thinning, so I thinned and weeded them today.

Then I got their row cover on. Sweet potatoes are to the right. And do you see that nice looking spot behind the sweet potatoes that has just a few dill plants?

Well earlier today it looked like this. I pulled all the Tiger's Eye beans out and planted some yellow mustard. It is an experiment to see if the yellow mustard can produce before the frosts hit. I would love to keep growing mustard seed, but it takes a lot of space for very little production. So the hope is that it can produce as a fall crop. If it can, I have plenty of space to give it.

And speaking of fall crops. The fall peas have come up.

And the beans are starting to come up too. I was very worried about them as the skunk had dug up this section of beans before they had broken the surface. I'm sure he was looking for insects. Interestingly enough he had dug up the yellow jacket area in the rock wall garden. Now I need to fill in that hole sometime at night when the jackets aren't active. The skunk didn't eat any of the bean sprouts. Sadly I planted the sprouts back into the ground unevenly. So I'll have some gaps. But as long as I get some beans. I'll be happy. I figured the other beans aren't producing because they are under water stress, so I hand watered them today. The rest of the garden doesn't need water, but that bed just doesn't do well with overhead sprinkler watering. I think the leaves just shed the water onto the path.