random bits of everything

Happy Father's Day to all the daddies out there.  Today began with French toast, cantalope, coffee, orange juice, and a big bowl of cherries.  We got out the china (which is so rarely used we found the coffee cups still had the store tags on them) and it was a lovely  breakfast.  

      

I love the colour and gloss of cherries, don't you? 

 I got the upper deep on the second hive - no pix - and found the girls had built a bunch of burr comb and were rapidly running out of room, so my timing was good.  The build up of a nuc is so much faster than with a package of bees, I am still learning every time I go down to the hives.  I'd call it a bee yard, but two hives barely qualifies!

       For everyone who has been asking me for pictures of the kitten, here she is.  She is pretty in the way all calicos are. We are lucky that she seems to be sweet, although she is trying very hard to tell the dog that she is the alpha animal - Ha! like that's gonna fly!

   

Here we see a picture of my sleep muzzy husband, just trying to get his coffee ingested  with a cat trying to explore the upper reached of his his shoulders.  

My eldest son really likes to mow the lawn.  Really.  He is not really allowed to mow it without supervision, since his  means of mowing  is generally to use the tractor.  Today he decided that the push mower was fine and spent a fair amount of time mowing the fenced in part of the back yard.  The dog is very funny, because as a border collie mix, she has a strong herding instinct. The way my son mows is very frenetic - no real pattern, as the next shot shows, just random moving around in the long grass until eventually it is mostly shorter.  So when he mows, she sticks close by, ready to herd him should he need the extra help!

You can see the pattern of the mowing in this shot if you look carefully.

These are some roses which are in the yard - they are very bushy, but tall - maybe a climber, but they are so interwoven with raspberries and the rhododendron that it is hard to follow which plant is which.  Does anyone know what they are?  They bloom once and have little to no scent. It is not a major "need to know" thing.  I suppose I could research it if I cared that much, but right now I am off roses for a bit.  In Baltimore I had some gorgeous roses - a climbing Don Juan that was easily 12 feet high and 5 across, a golden rose - climber - whose name I forget, and a couple of damask roses with perfume that would scent the entire yard.  However, these were fairly time consuming plants, and with all the things I have going on right now, I just drool over the rose catalogues and wish of a rose garden again - but I do not really have time to plant and care for one. 

If you look hard, you can see some of the seedlings that have emerged in the lower garden - the raised beds are further along, but this may prove to be the more interesting garden of the three.  A week ago we had a big rain storm - a real gully washer - and indeed that was what happened. The brick and stone sluiceway we have to focust water run off failed, and the rain washed through the garden digging that large gorge through the center of it.  It went around the hills of zucchini, but the lettuce, basil, carrots - all the tiny "surface planted" seeds were washed hither, thither, and yon.  I see small leaflets popping up in places I KNOW I did not plant things, and now I am waiting to see what grows where.  Interesting grouping may ensue!

My daughter and youngest son. He wanted to touch the kitten's nose.