Fiacré's spade: Varmints and plants

Shortly after we adopted two cats, we found ourselves with five cat trees. For a while, the cats dutifully napped in said cat trees. Recently, however, Banjo has decided that my desk chair is more comfortable. Knowing that resistance was futile, I put a towel over the chair so the cat would not get fur all over the seat. Apparently, the towel is not a satisfactory sleeping surface.

If I want to sleep on the chair, I'm gonna sleep on the chair.

I have also been unable to outsmart the damned varmints that have been eating my lettuce. I tried marigolds and coffee grounds. What was once four nice rows of lettuce and spinach looked like this recently.

Lettuce seedlings chewed down to the nubbies

Now it is completely bare except for some weeds that have sprouted since the lettuce was eaten.

With no lettuce left, it/they moved on to the bok choy, which is all gone, and started on the Napa cabbage two days ago. Today I deploy the netting! This is war.

The chicks are getting more feathers every day. Already the meat chickens are noticeably larger than the layer chicks. I like how the two chicks in the front are posing together with their head over one shoulder.

Posing for the camera

In this photo, you can see how the tail feathers are coming it. They are starting to experiment with flying. Pretty soon we can let them out into the run. We have to put up the chick fence first, of course.

Tail and wing feathers

I am done planting the garden at last. The white row cover is over the cabbages and Brussels sprouts in an attempt to discourage the varmints. We’ll see if it works.

The garden, all planted

Our bees seem busy, flying in and out of the hive all the time, but they return with no pollen. We’re a little concerned, even though they have honey from last year to eat. I took a walk looking for pollen sources and found some, so it’s a mystery why the bees aren’t bringing pollen home.

The grapes are blooming. Terry brought my attention to the inconspicuous flowers. The middle part of each flower has the ovary and other girl parts while the thin white structures have the pollen-bearing boy parts on the end. Carl Linnaeus, that cheeky, bawdy fellow, would have referred to this flower as “a wife with six husbands,” which was considered scandalous in his day.

Each petal-less grape flower has one female part surrounded by six male parts on the white stalks

There are numerous dogwood shrubs (I don’t know the species) blooming around the edge of the property,

Dogwood

As well as the evil, invasive, thorny multiflora rose.

Multiflora rose--pretty but out of control

If people were scandalized by the grape flower, think of their reaction to the rose flower!

Multiflora rose up close--a wife with a whole lot of husbands!

Smooth roses are blooming down by the road, also with many husbands for every wife. All of the rose family is like that. These, at least, are natives.

Wild roses look quite different from florists' roses, hey?

Terry is also excited that one of the Osage orange trees is blooming. (He said there were two, but I couldn’t find the other one.) This curious little flower looks a lot like the fruit.