Garden grows and sparrows have lunch

We have a sparrow issue, they have decided to eat the chicken feed. This weekend Jacob is going to build an automatic chicken feeder, thus closing off the sparrow feast. Hopefully they will then leave my crops alone, but we'll see... more drastic measures may need to be taken, like a bb gun. LOL.

It has been a busy spring. It's funny how, myself included, all the blogs I read drop of the face of the earth for much of May and June. To much to do outside getting everything ready.  Here's the back garden, looking good in it's early stages. To the left the garlic is HUGE! The strawberries and raspberries are both going gang busters. But my snap peas are being eaten alive. I finally put up that row cover cloth so that the sparrows can't land on the pea trellis and have a snack! I doubt I'll get much of anything from them, but I might try again this fall.

The two white buckets in front are squash, a pumpkin and a winter squash called queensland blue. I plan to train them over the fence and let them take over the grass. WOOT!

It's hard to see from the deck all the tomato plants in there. I need to go out and get a better, close up picture of them. I have all the tomato's and peppers in the ground, and the weather is getting consistently warmer. We've yet to move downstairs though because the seed starting room is still set up.

The bee's are doing good. About 2 weeks ago we did a hive check and noticed 1-2 swarm cells on every frame and they hadn't started using the second box. We weren't sure why they didn't notice the 2nd story addition to the house but?? who knows? So we decided to take frame numbers 3-5-7 from the bottom box and move them to the top, then adding the top 3-5-7 to the bottom box. Hopefully triggering a "wow... look how much room we have...." Jake checked all the swarm cells to see if there was any larva present and she hadn't laid in any of them. I think they were "just incase" preparation cells. Jake collapsed the wax starter cells and we closed up shop. This week they have built a TON of new wax on all the frames, nectar must be flowing because our bees are actively making comb. Plus we only saw 2 swarm cell starts, both empty, and only on the upper 3 and 5 frame. So the moving frames around seemed to work and cancel out the "swarm" trigger.