Late summer garden, a visitor, and new litters of babies!

Kits have been born! These three are Dawn's current set of kits, I'm not sure if she was done fully yet, so I'm hoping to see a few more in her nest.  Twilight also kindled today, but I wasn't going to reach in there and try to get kits out without a second pair of hands, and the Lady of the House is not feeling well today. She's doing ok, just a bit under the weather so I was on my own for kit checking. So, let's talk about what's been going on other than babies being born.

So I mentioned last time a bear visiting. Rico has been getting good at alerting when creatures come into the yard, and this was no exception. The difference this time is that the creature in question left a souvenir! This is  a 12" or so grill pan that must have had some drippings left in it. The bear left his paw print in the aluminum foil that was left in it. It isn't as easy to see the paw print in the photo, but it's a big paw print! Fortunately I think the dog scared the heck out of our ursine visitor, and I don't expect this one to be back soon if at all. In general we prefer to have predators and scavengers in the woods around us, just ones that know well that it isn't worth coming up to our house. They do a better job of keeping unwanted others out than we possibly could! This is especially true of foxes, bears, and coyotes that stay in a general area for a long time.

Other things that are going on, our garden is doing well. Probably not as well as the weeds due to the limited weeding time now that the Lady of the House can't bend over to do it anymore. Our tomatoes seem to be doing Just fine as ground running tomatoes. They're getting fairly huge. You can't even really see the bed under them anymore. In fact, they seem to be killing off everything around them that can't get taller than they are. They have something of an advantage in that I kill off anything that does get taller than they do. Our pepper plants are also doing quite well, as are the eggplants. We are still having the problem we did last year of lack of female squash blossoms. We need to do some investigation into possible things we can do to fix that since I suspect soil problems have something to do with it at this point.

We also had some friends from the Hilltown Seed Saving Network come by, and look around our garden as part of the "garden tour." Our garden wasn't the largest, and it wasn't the prettiest, and it certainly wasn't the most productive. Never the less, as second year gardeners with minimal time, we're fairly proud of it. I was especially tickled that one of our visitors commented that the other two gardens we saw for the day were the work of great gardening, but that our garden is what frontier living must have looked like, and that we were essentially out on the frontier. I'm not sure why, but I kind of liked hearing that. Not that I don't want to have a more productive better looking garden, but I am proud of what we've managed.

Finally, the wasp situation. I've resolved the two nests of wasps in the hutch I was going to put the teenagers in, and moved them in as you can see Left. They're doing just fine, and enjoying the room to run and bounce around without annoying their moms. For the second wasp nest it was too big for me to mess with experimenting with, so I used canned air for keyboard cleaning, turned it upside down, and hosed the wasps down with it. It killed off the nest efficiently. Of course, now there's one in Dawn's hutch, and I can't use canned air on that for fear of harming the kits, so I'll have to do that the hard way if they object to me checking on the babies too much. So far they haven't even come down to land on me, just buzzed at me to warn that they were there. We'll see what happens and keep you all up dated on the babies as they grow.