The summer of 2023 is drawing to a close. They days are getting noticeably shorter. The kids are back in school.
Good riddance. In part, that’s because it’s been a mediocre gardening year for me. But mostly, that’s because I can recall a time when reading the weather report didn’t routinely scare the crap out of me.
I’m looking forward to the mediocrity of fall weather. I need a few weeks during which I don’t read about the ______-est ________ in recorded weather history. Biggest wildfire. Hottest Gulf temperatures. Deadliest wildfire. Longest heat wave. Densest rainstorm. Worst air pollution.
I realize this is an El Nino year, with an expectation that global temperature records would be set. And, as predicted, that has happened with a vengeance. But Mother Nature seems to have picked up the pace on this whole global warming thing, all out-of-proportion to mainstream forecasts.
Not that anybody truly gives a damn. Or, at least, not enough of a damn to do something as serious as, say, changing vacation plans.
Source: Analysis of data from the US Transportation Safety Administration.
Except for the giant mutant bumblebees, it’s been an OK gardening year.
Above is my conceptual plan for my garden area. Instead of just placing garden beds at random, then fighting the deer, I designed the garden with deer deterrents in mind.
Below is how that actually worked out.
In terms of deer control, this has been a success so far. I’ve managed to keep the deer out of my garden with a combination of:
- a low (5′) trellis around the garden area,
- a portable electric fence, and
- motion-activated sprinklers
Of those, I think the biggest credit goes to the electric fence. Cheap, portable, easily reconfigured, and apparently quite effective at teaching the deer where they are not welcome.
Now that the trellis is covered with vines of various sorts, the entire setup is a fairly low-key and effective deer deterrent. The local deer still walk through my back yard, but they walk around the edge and give the garden area a wide berth. We peacefully coexist.
Separately, I ended up attracting a different pest this year. What I thought were short, small sunflowers turned out to be giant sunflowers. I unintentionally ended up with a nice row of giant sunflowers in the middle of the garden.
And, naturally, as soon as those giant sunflowers started blooming, they began attracting giant bumblebees. At first, I didn’t really notice it. I get a lot of big bumblebees in a normal year. I leave them alone. They leave me alone.
But once the bees got to be the size of small birds, I really couldn’t ignore it. It started to seem a bit dangerous.
But seriously, that’s the AI lesson for today. I took a couple of pictures of my actual sunflowers, and I wanted to see how close to that an AI could come, with just the prompt of bumblebees on sunflowers.
For whatever reason, neither AI I tried (Gencraft or freepik) knew the right proportions for bumblebee relative to sunflower. Both of them gave me some version of freakishly large bumblebees.
And so, what you see above is my actual sunflowers (first two pictures), followed by increasingly large bumblebees on sunflowers, courtesy of artificial intelligence.
