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!  

...and bad mistakes, I've made a few...

Sweltering, humid, and no rain...hello, August!  At least the daily dew is really heavy.  

It's a good thing, because unless we actually get rain, this is the only moisture that my garden will be getting. My fatal mistake of expecting pathway weeds to die has pretty much sunk the garden this year.  The weeds thrived and spread into the beds.  It was hot and dry, and belatedly trying to pull them proved impossible.  Then, while we were on our trip, everything sprouted.  Now the flowers are like a museum exhibit - see, but don't touch.

Ticks, spiders, snakes...the paths are gone, and it's a jungle out there.  As much as I'd like to just mow it down, we still enjoy looking at the flowers (from a distance).  Of course, the pollinators and the birds are loving the smorgasbord.  When it finally cools down, I can take a weed whacker to the worst sections.

The newer garden isn't nearly as overgrown, at least!

I'm collecting a few seed types this year, but not many.  Multi-variety flowers like zinnias, cosmos, celosia, sunflowers, etc. will not grow true from saved seed in an open-pollinated garden, so I'll just order the varieties that I'm interested in.  The birds can have these!

I am saving a few types of flowers for drying.  Celosia, gomphrena, yarrow, and strawflowers are supposed to be great for this.

I've got a nice variety of celosia this year! Pink, yellow, cream, sherbet, orange, red...plume, wavy, and wrinkled...I hope they'll dry well.

Strawflower petals are already dry, so they retain their appearance well after hanging.

There are still beautiful things to be discovered in that tangled jungle, like an edge patch of zinnia with beautifully saturated petals.

I planted red, yellow, and white milkweed...none of which grew.  However, a stray wild milkweed is looking gorgeous and ready to provide for the monarch butterflies!

A painted turtle peeked out of the grass at the edge of the garden.

Just beyond the back garden, a fawn was surprised by the dawn.  In the fog, she'd gotten turned around...and Mom was on the other side of the fence.

She didn't appreciate my attempt to open the back gates for her.

I had to leave the front gate open for an escape route!

August is tough, absolutely my least-favorite month.  That's one of the reasons why I wanted to get married in August...so at least there was one good thing in it! I'm just focusing on getting through the next couple of sticky, hot weeks...working on winter projects...

...and dreaming of the day when I can finally open a window to let in fresh air.  September is coming!

Have a great week!

the last of the red [cool] lovers

I love my little herb garden, even though it's pretty inconveniently distanced from the house.  Dill is great for salmon, cilantro puts out beautiful tiny flowers that I love to use in bouquets, and parsley is great for a mild accent.  I haven't used any thyme yet, but I have plenty...along with the basil.  When you plant 10 varieties, you get...a lot of basil.

So far, I'm only using 2 varieties in cooking.  Cinnamon, Ruffled, Lemon, Holy Tulsi, Amorotto, Cardinal, etc. sound interesting, but they don't smell quite right for recipes.  Thankfully Todd likes pesto!  So far, a broccoli lemon pesto pasta and a standard mixed-basil pesto for an artichoke/roasted tomato pizza have been rousing successes.  And, of course, all basils are lovely in bouquets!  

We had one last blast of rain before the summer heat set in.

My beloved sweet peas and snapdragons are rapidly going to seed.  I've picked a last few bouquets using those and other last-legs cool flowers.

The final poppies are giving up the ghost, but leaving behind gorgeous seed pods.

Thankfully, there's new growth in the garden to distract me.

These are strawflowers, which look like juicy raspberries before opening.

They are so named because their petals already feel dried - like straw - when they bloom.  Naturally, they last forever in bouquets and dried arrangements.  Aren't they unusual?

See the little hunter?

We have a lot of other life around here.  Deer...with baby!

A lone turkey, hurrying into the underbrush.

Growing tadpoles!!

Bees...

Dragonflies...

...and loads of butterflies.

Pests are abundant, like Japanese beetles...

...and the flea beetles on my amaranth.

You have to take the good with the bad in gardening, of course.  Now that the heat has set in, "the bad" includes 3 hours weekly of monotonous watering for me, and around the same for Todd with mowing, just to keep our paths clear around the barn and to the pond.  Typical summer stuff!

At least the dry, hot weather slows down the weeds. 

Have a great week!