Gardening

Bees like garlic chives.
I wonder if it impacts the taste of the honey? The hive is only a few hundred yards away.

I'd make a soup out of that!

The chives or the honey? 

I planted one plant three years ago. I let it go to seed. I let those that grew the next year go to seed. And the next. I now have a patch of garlic chives about two feet by 3 feet in one of my beds, just opposite the "regular" chives that were there as a small clump when I took over the allotment. (They've done the same thing - packed in there now.)  I'm going to transplant half of both varieties to a new bed to get some room for some carrots while I can still potentially get some to grow before winter.  It's nice, though. The "regular" chives bloom quite early and the bees love 'em, and these bloom late and the bees also love 'em. I actually heard all the bees before I saw what they were doing - and I'm a bit hard of hearing. It was really cool to watch them enjoying themselves.

This is on the menu for later in the week - https://www.centraltexasgardener.org/resource/vietnamese-garlic-chives-soup-canh-dau-hu-he/

Oh for goodness sake!  We've got a frost warning for tonight. Our "first frost" date is Oct 15, normally.

Looks like the geese were right!

Oh my!  This does not sound good. - https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/the-us-is-tracking-14-potential-rabies-outbreaks-in-20-states-here-s-what-to-know/ar-AA1MP9Qq

And at the allotment yesterday (enlarged image) -



[Yes, animal control was contacted. No clue what's going on about it, though. And note the article doesn't say where - 14 outbreaks in 20 states? Uhh...Should that be 20 outbreaks in 14 states? If so, which ones? Oh, of course. Mine is one of them. ]

We recently had a case of rabies here, which is pretty rare.  A woman had been scratched by a stray puppy on holiday and died after coming back to the UK.  Being completely free of rabies as an island is one of the great things about living here.

Wow.  I know it's pretty uniformly fatal, but there have been some survivors in recent years. Sad to hear she didn't make it.

Animal control is not going to do anything.  I will only be going to the garden to refill my auto-watering barrels for the next few weeks, and will have a long-handled shovel with me at all times. It's kind of all I can do for defense, as I don't own a shotgun.  My tomatoes and other plants that I hand-water will just have to suffer. I would assume that, as sick as that poor animal appeared, it'll be dead by October, and I don't need to plant my garlic until mid-October.  I would also imagine the carrion-eating birds will let us know where it ended up.

I notified this morning the department in our state that monitors rabies and other diseases in wild animals.  I would have thought that health officials would want to catch it if for no other reason than to test it (and let it go if it's not ill), given several dozen people (including very young children) visit and work in that garden and it's right on a hiking trail that is heavily used. But what do I know?


EDIT:  And the response was that I should contact a wildlife rehabilitator and work with them on my own. So, basically, the state is doing nothing. I responded that I had done my civic duty and reported a potentially dangerous situation to the state, and now it was in the state's hands - I'm now permanently out of this loop.