Growing Garlic

Seeing 'Growing Garlic' as one of the weekly reading kind of surprised me as I didn't think we would be looking so closely at individually plants. However after reading the article I realized that garlic is unlike anything that my family has every planted before. I did not think that so much preparation had to be taken care of before any actual planting could take place. I know that my family uses garlic a lot in cooking so I was curious to see where we kept it. Turns out that we are following the rules very well as they are kept in a very dry place that is well ventilated.
I found it interesting that while it takes a lot of work to plant the garlic and take care of it and harvest it, it also seems quite hard to pick out what garlic to plant. I don't think that I would want to try and pick out local garlic without the help of someone else. I was wondering what the uses of elephant garlic would be if no one plants it for the taste.

Planting Winter Crops

I figured that with planting crops in the winter you would have to provide some sort of protection, but the only things that came to my mind were building shelters for the plants. I did not know that raising the crop beds and the location of where you plant the crops could provide protection. I noticed that a lot of the crops that were on the list that could overwinter were also options for us to plant at our school. I remember planning out our gardens and we chose many of those plants for the reason that we would need to plant them to last the winter. I learned that August is a very good month to plant many crops, and is the ideal month for most overwinter crops. Some however are ready sooner than that and are ready to eat by october. This brought pumpkins to mind for me as they always seem to be ready at the exact right moment. I also noticed that a lot of the vegetables that you can plant for the wintertime seem to be the vegetables that a lot of people dislike. I am curious if being tougher to survive the winter makes these vegetables more bitter or harder to eat.

Bee Waggle Dance

I thought that the way the bees communicate to each other is amazing, and also a bit harsh. The video said that if the bee does not stop dancing immediately after the other bees want more information, they sting that bee to death. That seems like a very high pressure way to tell bees where to find flowers. When the video actually showed the bee dance, I thought that it was amazing that bees could count and tell direction from the sun. When we go into the hive we probably disturb the bees too much to see the waggle dance but it would be incredible to actually witness. However I was wondering, since bees have very poor eyesight how they would be able to discern the precise movements of the bee. Especially the counting part, it happened too fast for me to see it the first time. I could only see it when the video slowed it down, so with the limited eyesight of the bees I'm not sure how they can determine that the bee wagged back and forth six times.