Today, as I was walking out to my truck, I checked the butterfly weed. Sure enough, I spotted a little striped caterpillar, munching away. When I got home, I took a moment to check the whole plant over, and discovered two more, parked underneath a leaf. These little guys are monarch caterpillars. Each September, they […]
Fresh from the garden and into a pan.
After roughly 120 days of growing from seeds to enormous bushes, my eggplant jungle finally bestowed upon me today these three Black Beauties: They are eggplant perfection. Avert your eyes. They’re also tomorrow night’s dinner. I see one more eggplant amongst the four bushes, which are still producing a ridiculous number of flowers. I’ve tried […]
It’s the 15th of the month, so it’s time for another Bloom Day post. It got blazingly hot here in North Texas, way before it’s supposed to happen, so that garden has been in a bit of a shutdown. We did get about a week of slow, drenching rain that helped, but seriously, the plants […]
I worked in the garden for a few hours this afternoon, mostly putting together my new tumble composter, which I didn’t remember to photograph before the sun went down. It’s pretty nifty. I did snap a few pics of things that are weird and wonderful…The purple coneflowers are just about spent. I should probably cut […]
Continuing my independence from inferior supermarket tomatoes, I planted the fall crop today. Three Romas, and two Husky Cherries. Both varieties have done well for me in the past. Getting plants, soaker hoses and cages in place was sort of a comedy act, but none of the neighbors were working in their yards today, because […]
Today was a sort of fix it day in the backyard vegetable garden. One of the things that bugged me about the spring veggies was the way the cucumbers sort of sprawled all over the place, quickly outgrowing the flimsy bamboo stakes I provided for growing upward. I’ve been wanting to expand the vegetable patch […]
Since I was taking photos for today’s Bloom Day post, I decided to shoot a few things that showcase the not so pretty things happening in my garden… Trellis failure. I don’t know what I was thinking when I used tiny little bamboo stakes to make cone trellises for the cucumbers. They’re WAY too small, […]
It’s the 15th, and time for another Bloom Day. We’ve had a string of days over 90 degrees in June, so a lot of plants have shed their blooms for the moment. Here are pics of those few hearty souls that are still hanging in there…In the backyard, the vegetable garden is producing, even when […]
I finally snapped a few long shots of the backyard garden this morning. Here’s what’s happening in amongst the weeds… I replaced last year’s single row of cinder blocks surrounding the herb garden with this new wood box planter. My plan is to do the same thing, reversed, to the south, and then some plain […]
I keep hoping I’ll get a chance to take some pics of the garden to show how pretty all the raised beds look, but I can’t seem to get out there when the light is good. However, I have remembered to go out every day and see if anything is ready to pick, and today, […]
It’s the 15th again, which means it’s time for another bloom day. Here’s what’s blooming in my front yard today… Moonbeam coreopsis has burst into a bazillion blooms. This plant was sort of stingy its first year, and died to the ground last summer, so I’d sort of given up on it. It formed a […]
