Living things

Just thought to make an update on the animals and bugs... since not much exciting is happening right now with the vegetables. It is mostly cloudy so growth is slow. The beans are trying their best though. Somehow the beans in the backyard have grown twice as fast as the ones in the main garden. Maybe it is because they get double sunshine thanks to the reflection from the big windows on south side of the house.

backyard beans

Compare them to the garden beans:

It's the ones on the back

Maybe the soil is not so rich there.. I don't know. By the way I got tired of waiting and dug a bit to see what is happening with the broad beans and why only three of them popped out so far.. and yep it looks like the recent constant rains have made the seeds to rot, so these three are all I got now.
Already aphids have started sucking on them too with their ant guards... so I spread a bit of DE around them, and flour where the aphids gathered. Now we are back to Halloween mode again. The onions are too small and too far to repel them I guess. Lessons learned? I don't know. A couple of hours after I doused the beans with powder we had a nice rain that washed away some of it and made the rest into dough. Thanks weather!
To comfort myself I picked a mikan that looked almost ripe and had a taste.

Not super sweet, but not bad neither.

Looking for more sweet stuff I went on to check on the carrots. They are still small though...

Maybe a couple months more?

If you wonder why I keep talking about veggies when this post was supposed to be about animals, you can stop worrying cause here it comes.
Looking at the nice carrot leafs and starting to forget about the aphids, I thought some of the leafs have a bit odd color... had a closer look and:

Aw crap

Damn, the carrots need all their tiny leafs in this cloudy weather to produce anything useful. Stop eating the leafs!!!

How did you get so big without me noticing?

For some odd reason the chickens just take a look at these fat ones and just walk away. Maybe they taste bad. Anyway, all I could do is to squish them. Which is rather fun because just before their innards pop out their orange antennas roll out like party whistles. Oh small joys of gardening. More bugs...

Jack having his breakfast.

Grossed out by the bugs? Here is a cuddly triple. First time ever they do this, and I suppose they won't be able to do it much longer as the two kids are growing bigger by the day, and they won't fit.
Anyway, it is starting to get cold so they decided to sleep together.

In the background is the aquarium. Cats lost interest eventually.