season's greetings

 I love this time of year.  Hello, old friends!

I picked the first batch of pumpkins this week, mostly minis.  

It's a great harvest from just a few vines.  I will wipe these down with a weak bleach solution (1 teaspoon per gallon of water) to help them last until December.  I can't wait until the larger pumpkins are ready.  One of my favorites is the Long Island Cheese...

photo courtesy of Johnny's Select Seeds

...and I've got a few planted.  A single planted seed of a miniature variety will yield many pumpkins, but seeds of larger varieties will only produce a few pumpkins per vine.  I would love to get five of these this year, but I'll have to wait and see what happens!

It's been uncomfortably hot for the past week (summer's last gasp?), but I still make it out to the garden sometimes.  Strawflowers are shouting the colors of the season...

Zinnias are coming into their own.

Beautiful colors...

...and good hiding places for clever hunters (spider averse, skip next three pictures!).

Every single time I pick flowers, I hunt for crab spiders.  Sometimes tiny, and other times, big and bold...so to speak.

In reality, crab spiders are tiny, and they need to be, to hide beneath petals.  They wait for pollinators... and pounce.

And look who we have here!  So much milkweed planted, and at last...the face I've been waiting to see.

It's a monarch butterfly caterpillar, which feeds exclusively on milkweed.  

Hello down there!

It's the first (and only) that I've seen this year, but since I've suddenly started seeing a lot more monarch butterflies, I'm hoping to see these plants covered in caterpillars soon.

Hot days are uncomfortable, but combined with the cooler nights make a dramatic daily fog that we both look forward to seeing.

To help celebrate the season, I've done something that I don't normally do...purchase a quilt kit.  I love scrappy quilts and prefer to put together my own color schemes, but I've had my eye on this particular kit for two years...and decided to finally take the plunge.  It's always a gamble.  Quilt kits are expensive, and if you wait, you can sometimes find a bargain.  But they (and fabric bundles in general) are usually one-time releases.  Wait too long, and there's the very real possibility that you won't be able to find them for any price.  

I like this kit because it's Halloween-esque, but not Halloween patterned.  It's great for October and November, and for December, I can switch to another seasonally-colored quilt kit that I purchased last year (but still sits in its bag, waiting to be sewn):  Camille Roskelley's Patchwork Sky kit.

It doesn't SCREAM Christmas, but I think it's really cheerful for both December and January.  A nice bit of cheer during those cold, dark winter months.  I can't wait!

Have a great week!