Saturday Gardening and Puttering Thread, July 18, 2020 [KT]

Hello! How are all you gardeners, putterers and dreamers among The Horde doing today. Today's short thread is dominated by nature lovers and putterers.

The great hummingbird photo above is from PointyHairedBoss, who also sent in another of his great SloMo insect videos:

If you're wondering about the flowers in the background of a few of the clips, I'm sorry but I won't be much help. That's the Missus' department. I'm only in charge of puttering.

Edible Gardening and More

Brent sends in the following great design. Yes, those are hummingbird feeders hanging from the frames. Fun!

Thought folks might to see my design for a raised bed garden. I originally had four 4x4 foot beds 1 foot high, but when I added the covered greenhouse enclosures, it was hard to maneuver around, particularly when the covers were in place. So I reengineered things for four 14 x 2 foot beds, two feet high for less stooping, with a center aisle in each greenhouse.

Irrigation is necessary here in arid Utah, so you can also see the overhead watering system I installed that is tied into my automatic sprinkler system.

Yes, outside of arid climates, overhead sprinkling would probably not be the best choice for crops like, say, squash. Clever design!

Bonus: NaughtyPine sent in some fun photos a while ago:

Other things that flowered this past week but normally aren't considered flowers: rhubarb, chives, and a tiny strawberry in the mulch aka weed pile.

See an insect?

The strawberry looks like one of those new pink-flowered "ornamental edibles". Can you name any of the weeds?

Tools

redc1c4 IRL noticed that this catalog had a wide variety of gardening tools:

Off hand, I went there because a catalog showed up at the house, and I went looking on their web page to see if they had something i was looking for, but it's more gardening type stuff than wood handling tools, which is what I needed

Since I live with "Gadget Girl", my tools already have tools, I didn't look very closely. besides, my yard is mostly native plants, which require very little maintenance, once established.

I just figured it would be a place the hordian green thumbs might find interesting to peruse.

Thanks! Sometimes a special tool can make a difference. Let us know if you do any interesting wood working.

Nature

Willow's Apprentice sent in this lovely photo. Can anyone ID the bird?

PointyHairedBoss sent in some more nature photos from around the house, too:

Mama snapping turtle was laying eggs at the edge of our driveway.

Later I just managed to miss stepping on baby turtle which looked like a piece of gravel.

Sawyer beetles eat dead trees. If it's quiet you can hear them munching away.

All photos were taken with an Olympus TG3 point & shoot camera. On macro setting it can focus as close as 1 cm & has a cool feature called "focus stacking" that automatically combines several photos at varying focus distances to get maximum depth of field. A good example is the sawyer beetle photo.

This one is remarkable:

Glad you didn't squish this baby:

Dragonflies can be dramatic:

Remarkable details above about the Sawyer Beetle:

Over at Maggie's Farm, Bird Dog re-posted a thread on the Day of the Cicida.

Gardens of The Horde

We still have peaches. And Pluots are ripening.

Anything going on in your garden?

If you would like to send information and/or photos for the Saturday Gardening Thread, the address is:

ktinthegarden
at that g mail dot com place

Include your nic unless you want to remain a lurker.

posted by Open Blogger at 01:07 PM

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