How do you know if your cantaloupes are ripe? Well it seems that the wild critters have an uncanny ability to know, and I'm guessing they don't have to tap the melons to tell. I lost two cantaloupes earlier this week and then put out deer and bird netting on the remaining two.
The next morning, something had attempted to pull back the netting to finish up it's work on the canta-carcus from the night before. The bugs were feasting on the remains the next morning.
Fortunately, one of the remaining two mellons was ripe at the end of yesterday and it now on my kitchen table waiting to be sliced into.
Cucumber beetles have been busy munching on the remaining lettuce stalks.
Finally and most exciting is a yellow jacket nest I discovered after church. I went out in the 127 degree heat to water the charred remains of my two blueberry bushes and saw a hole in the ground. On further inspection I saw a yellow jacket fly into the hole. A smart person would have left it alone, but I shot the nest with a jet of water from about twenty feet away. I wasn't wearing my glasses, but it looked like there was a hot vapor around the hole. Really it was a swarm. Whoops. Joe who is highly allergic to bees decided he needed to take some pictures because at the time we didn't know if they were bees or yellow jackets. Thanks to a 15x optical zoom, he was able to stand six feet away (not far enough in my opinion) and get some great shots in series. He's now researching (googling) all these creative ways to get rid of the nest (dead fish over a bucket of water in a hanging tee-pee, anyone?). While we like that yellow jackets help control mosquitoes, an angry nest in the yard just isn't safe for a toddler.
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