Look At the Greenhouse Now!

It continually amazes me how much things grow in the greenhouse!  The difference between what's inside the greenhouse and what's outside in the regular garden is like night and day.   It's a jungle in there now!  Even my regular tomato plants are about 9 feet tall.  and even though I have given them massive trimmings, they are still wide and bushy.   Here is a photo I took just about an hour ago:

The ceiling in the greenhouse is about 10 1/2 feet high, and as you can see, the tomato plants are just about that height.   We have to stand on a ladder to tie them up to the ceiling!

Here's another view of how thick they are.

And not only tomatoes are growing like crazy - check out this row of lima beans.   They are growing out of the box and spilling into the walkway.   Every one of the blossoms is growing a lima bean.  

This is half of the limas, the other half is on the other side, even bigger.

It seems like just about everything grows in the greenhouse, even stuff I didn't plant!  I had some leftover soil in a tray of petunia flowers.  I threw the soil in the corner and forgot about it.  The other day I saw that what I thought was a weed growing around the tools stored in the corner, was actually a little petunia plant! 

Cute little flower that grew from tossed out soil.

Here's a view from the back of the greenhouse.   You can hardly see the door anymore!  If you look closely by the front corner near the doorway, you can see the little petunia growing among the garden tools.

Not only are the tomatoes tall, but the pepper plants are about 4 feet high, and full of salsa peppers.

Out in the regular garden, things don't grow quite as large.  In the natural garden, the tomatoes are only 3 feet high.   What a difference a protected environment makes!

The garden is doing well, but nothing is growing as tall as in the greenhouse!  These tomatoes are about 1/3 the height of the ones in the greenhouse.

Well, so much for the greenhouse.   The bees are doing well, too.   But we have a problem with the bees drinking up all of the cat's water.   Even though we give the bees their own water, they prefer to drink out of the cat dish.   And even if we MOVE the cat's water elsewhere, the bees come back to it.   At first this scared the cats, having to work around the bees all the time, and I was hesitant to pour more water in the cat's dish because the bees would fly up in my face.    But they didn't bite, and they don't bite the cats, so I guess everyone has to "share" the water!  I think the bees really like the shallow dish.

Of course, when I walked up to take a photo of the bees on the water dish, there were about 50 bees all lined up at the edges of the pan.   But they didn't want to be photographed, I guess!  Only 6  die-hard bees stayed for the picture!  At any given time they are lined up all around the dish and the cats have to drink right beside them.