Harvesting Garlic

When the bottom 3 to 4 leaves on the garlic turn brown it's time to harvest. This year's crop was very nice and as an added bonus I had sizable crop of "volunteer" garlic that grew from last year's discarded seed head.

The garlic on the right was planted in the garden and the garlic on the left started as discarded seed heads in an unused section of the garden.



Some nice sized garlic bulbs.



After the garlic is dug it needs to be dried for long-term storage. Once dried the garlic will keep for 6 to 8 months. I'm drying this year's crop in the upper level of the barn where it's warm and dry. Each bundle has only 10 plants to allow for good air flow. This year's crop was about 100 plants.

Buzzards - Nature's Clean-up Crew

This morning I drove up to check on my newly seeded wildlife food plots and found a woodchuck grazing in a clover field. The woodchuck unfortunately succumbed to a sudden injury and I decided to give the woodchuck a Tibetan sky burial and placed it in the open field. By the afternoon the buzzards (vultures) had arrived for the funeral.



The buzzards took flight at first sight of my truck but after a short wait one of the buzzards returned for the funeral services.



Additional buzzards soon returned and the sky burial proceeded.



In my rankings of an animal's net worth, I don't have much use for woodchucks and place buzzards far above woodchucks.

Butterflies

I'm not sure if it was caused by this year's wet spring, but I haven't seen too many butterflies this Summer. As I prepared to mow our lawn I was able to take some photos of this male Eastern Tiger Swallowtail Butterfly.



View of the underside of the Eastern Tiger Swallowtail Butterfly.



I also found this Baltimore Checkerspot Butterfly in the driveway, next to my truck.