Bogieblog

Seeing Red

We have never had cardinals in our yard before. In 16 years, we have not seen one in this area. Oh sure, we have seen them not 1/4 mile from here - but never on the Bogie homestead.

That changed on Saturday evening. The Wonderful Spouse, who also has wonderful eyesight (20/15), spotted a cardinal under the birdfeeder in the driveway. It was pretty much dusk; cloudy and dark (not to mention rainy), and WS managed to see the cardinal just by glancing out the window.

The bird was under the birdfeeder, which placed him in the shadows of the evergreens (what shadow there were). I had a hard time verifying that it was a cardinal, because the bird was fairly dark on his back, but his breast was a bright red. When he finally turned his face my way, I could see the distictive black markings to identify him (we couldn't see his crest until he flew up to the top of some trees).

Sunday evening, WS saw him again, by the bird feeders in the back yard. And, he had a female with him. This time, it was sunny (the rain had stopped and the sun had just come out about 1/2 an hour before), so it was much easier to see him. He and the female flirted for a bit before settling under the feeders to eat a few seeds.

It would be great to finally have a resident pair of cardinals. Although, now I'm getting gready; I really want that idigo bunting we had a couple of years ago to come back!

Bionic Tomatoes

After putting up the cold frame a week ago, and transferring the tomatoes to it, we've had some cold nights (days haven't beeen warm either). I figured that it would at least slow the growth of the tomatoes down, since there is no heater as there was for the greenhouse. Instead, the tomatoes seem to love it, and are larger than they ever got when we had the greenhouse (and I've had some pretty huge tomato plants to place in the garden before).

Let's recap this: I planted seeds a month later than usual; put them under grow lights (which aren't nearly as good as a cloudy day in a greenhouse); exposed them to air pollutions in the house instead of having nice clean air in a greenhouse; exposed them to loud, earsplitting heavy rock music; put them in a cold frame where they don't have a heater for the cold nights (I even set them up in spot where there was still ice on the ground). And how do they repay me? By growing faster, stronger and taller than they have ever done before (maybe they're $6 million dollar tomatoes).

I have done everything to keep them from being huge plants for other people to take care of while we are gone for my niece's wedding. And none of it has worked. They are just growing like weeds.

Why can't they behave more like the pepper plants that are still a nice manageable size and will be able to stay under grow lights until we get back?

I think it is Cop Car's fault. She sent me some seeds from a crop of yellow tomatoes she had last year, and they are setting a bad example for the rest of them!