The summer garden is over, but there is still plenty of life in the garden. The roses are happily blooming now that the dreaded Japanese beetles are long gone. The crepe myrtles are still blooming, and the parsley is a beautiful, huge green mound, ready to eat.



There was a heavy mist going on when I took these pictures yesterday. It felt wonderful. Although officially it is still a few days away, the scent of autumn is already in the air. I love it! I'm ready for pumpkins and scarecrows and leaves blowing in the wind. I will miss the flowers, though, and especially the fresh tomatoes.



These are the Texas Bluebonnets that I planted in June. I became fascinated by the raindrops puddled in the center of the leaves. They did not bloom this year; hopefully they will come back next year.



It misted rain most of the day yesterday, except for when it flat out poured down (known around here as a "toad-strangler"). It was a nice day to stay in with a cup of hot tea and a good mystery.



Most of the vegetable garden has been put to bed for the winter. We pulled up all the tomato plants today, along with the two remaining squash plants. We were still getting a few squash every couple of days, but they were tough and a little bitter. It was time for them to go. We still have a couple of red long bean plants and I planted a patch of Swiss Chard a couple of weeks ago which has started sprouting.

We pulled up one patch of zinnias, but there are many more to go. They looked good for a long time, but that time is over, I'm afraid. I need to order garlic this week. I usually plant it around Halloween. I already have a couple of packs of hyacinths and grape hyacinths that I will plant at the same time. I would still like to get a couple of rose plants in the ground before winter. Since school has started, it has been hard to find time for the garden. Winter holiday is twelve weeks away, and believe me, I am counting down every single day! It will be time for a long nap and a chance to plan my spring garden. That's what cold winter days are for, right?

Now that the tomato plants are almost dead they have begun to produce heavily. The rabbit must have had its fill and has stopped eating them, so now we have plenty to eat. Too bad the plants are almost finished for the year. This evening I will be pulling up what is left of the squash and cucumber plants. It's time to clean up and give the beds a rest for the winter. Soon I will be ordering garlic, which I usually plant around Halloween; it will be ready to harvest early next summer. I'm also going to plant a small section of Swiss Chard, which will hopefully be ready to harvest before the first hard freeze. The red long beans should be ready soon, so we will have a colorful fall season in the garden.

The wait is over......

Finally, we picked our first tomato, a Pink Grapefruit (plus a few Snow White cherries). We sliced it and ate it right away, even though it was slightly green. It was luscious!!! There is nothing like the first juicy tomato of the summer. Of course, in my case, it's usually almost fall before I get my first tomato. We have lots of jalapeno peppers, seen above in various stages of green, purple, and red. This is my mutant jalapeno; it isn't supposed to look like this. Next year my pepper plants will be isolated from each other.

It is official; the garden is out of control. The squash and cucumber plants are taking over the back yard, even as some of them are slowly dying. At least, I thought they were dying, but they are getting new leaves. I almost wish the cucumbers would die. I am so sick of cucumbers. I have four plants this year; next year I may only plant two. But we are still enjoying the squash, especially the lemon squash, and I will still plant several kinds again next year; maybe I'll get some more mutants.

The herb garden's glory days seem to be over for the summer. I cut back the spent flowers from the lamb's ear and the lavender cotton a long time ago. The anise hyssop and the yarrow seem to be finished blooming. I need to dead-head the purple cone flowers, but a couple of days ago we saw a little yellow finch perched on a flower head eating the seeds. I guess I don't have to dead-head just yet. The only thing left to bloom are the roses, which should still do well for quite a while, now that the Japanese beetles have moved on. The germander still looks good, even though it isn't blooming anymore. At least now I can walk in the garden without the continual humming of bumble bees. I leaned to co-exist with them but they still made me nervous.

I have killed six sage plants. Tricolor, bicolor, every color of sage you can imagine, I have killed it. Why???

Cross Pollination

Today was a successful day because I learned something new. I didn't know a thing about cross pollination until late this afternoon when I picked a Black Beauty zucchini from a Golden Zucchini plant. I first noticed the bright yellow coloring on the green zucchini, then realized that I had plucked it from the golden and not the black plant. This has never happened in my garden before (that I know of)! After doing some research online, I now know why my purple jalapenos don't look like jalapeno peppers at all. I've grown plants from the same seed packet for about three years, but this year they have a different shape. I didn't have a clue before, but now I am blaming it on cross pollination. It's good to have answers.

I've also learned a thing or two about the dreaded squash vine borer. Aunt Susie has asked me several times if I have trouble with worms on my squash. I smugly assured her that I did not. I guess now I've gotten my comeuppance for being smug. When I told a co-worker about my dying zucchini plant, she told me the most disgusting tale about slicing open the root of her squash plant and removing a worm! I told her if that was the problem with my plant, the worm could have it. I think she was right, though. I removed some dead leaves from around the plant base and found that it was indeed mushy and oozing and totally repulsive. I found a link that show the worm inside a plant stem, as well as the adult moth.

I don't want the zucchini enough to dissect the plant and go looking for a worm. I'm a history major; I don't do dissections. The worm can have it.

Butterfly Festival

A couple of weeks ago we went to the Butterfly Festival at Close park. They have a butterfly garden, which, strangely, appeared to be butterfly free. All the butterflies were in the new butterfly house, along caterpillars and demonstrations of the entire butterfly life cycle. It was geared to educating children, but it seemed the house was just as full of adults hoping to see a chrysalis transform to a butterfly.

No such luck, but there were plenty of beautiful butterflies to chase around the building with my camera.

We had been to Close Park before and had enjoyed the rose garden and the hosta garden, then walked around the lake. But until this event, we had no idea of the many gardens that were in the park. There is an English garden, a Lily garden, an ornamental grass garden, and many others. This will be a place I will return to again and again to see what is blooming throughout each season. Did I mention that it is free?

The amazing thing is that the garden is strictly a volunteer effort. Donations and public funds keep the garden up and running, and each garden is designed and maintained by volunteers. Ultimately, there are a total of 41 different garden styles planned. Volunteers (Friends of the Garden) have worked for years to raise interest and money for a Botanical Center in the park. That goal has been reached, surprisingly enough, during the most difficult economic environment in many years. The Center is scheduled to open in 2010.

As for my garden, the Black Beauty zucchini is dying and the Lemon squash is producing heavily and taking over the back yard. The Lemon cucumbers are doing pretty good, as well. The rat-tailed radish plant is still producing, thankfully in much smaller quantities. Long beans everyday, along with a few snow peas. The zinnias are blooming all over the place, but they look horrible because of the blasted Japanese beetles. I have a row of pink crepe myrtles (plus one white one, it was an accident) along the neighbor's fence in back , but they only have blooms on the bottom because the beetles apparently started feasting at the top of the plants.

I'm not tired of squash anymore since we started grilling it or roasting it in the oven. Steamed or sauteed squash was really getting old. I'm still waiting impatiently for some tomatoes. I found two perfectly ripe Snow White cherries on the plant this evening, but something had partially eaten them. I'm really not into sharing my tomatoes with birds or rabbits.

Tonight I picked sixteen squash, four cucumbers, and a handful of long beans. There may have been more to pick, but I was having trouble getting to everything. I didn't wear my garden gloves because they are dirty and I didn't want to mess up my manicure, so I was trying to pick squash bare-handed. It was very painful, so I didn't dig too deep under the leaves. Besides, lately every time I lift a squash leaf I come face to face with an angry sounding bumble bee. So I just move on and try to pretend I don't notice.

I diced up about a dozen squash and froze them. They were ones that had been laying around for a couple of days and I hated for them to go to waste (and I did just pick 16 more), so I thought I would just freeze them and this winter they would be good in soups or stews.

Tonight I read in Organic Gardening magazine that many heirloom tomatoes can take as long as 100 days to ripen. That made me feel better about my lack of ripe tomatoes. I thought it was some gardening defect on my part, but it is apparently just the nature of the kind of tomatoes I grow. That's OK, they are well worth the wait!

I don't know why I do this to myself. Planting a boatload of onions means I have to dig up and wash a boatload of onions. This is why I don't plant lettuce anymore. I found out I had to pick each leaf, wash each leaf, then spin the whole mess dry. Forget it. I'll buy my lettuce bagged, thank you. But for some reason, I want my own onions. Last year I planted 160. We had onions around all winter long. This year I cut back by about half. Today I plucked 72 onions. It sounds like a lot, but unfortunately, I did a lousy job of keeping the weeds away from the onions and so the majority of them are quite small because they didn't have room to grow. Lesson learned.
I wash the onions outside under the faucet before bringing them in, cleaning off all the dirt and excess skin. By the time I'm about half way through, it no longer matters so much if I take dirty onions into the house. After all, the dirt will clean off easier once it has dried and caked on, right? Anyway, besides the onions, I picked one lemon squash, a lemon cucumber, a Chinese yellow cucumber, and three kinds of yellow squash, one of them a double-header.
Something had dug a crater between the long beans and the former onion patch. Probably a mole. Moles get blamed for everything in our yard.

Rat-tail update

I rushed home after work to pick the radish bean pods before the rain started, and in no time I had picked 400 rat-tail beans! No kidding! Plus various squash, cucumber, snow peas, and long beans. A few squash and cucumbers got a bit larger than I would have liked, but the green varieties stay well-hidden behind the huge leaves. The lemon cucumber plant is finally producing, although the cucumbers look white to me. The lemon squash plant is loaded with what look like miniature lemons dangling everywhere. I planted a couple of red long-bean seeds last week and one has sprouted. I can't wait to see these!

Back to the beans, after washing 400 rat-tail radish beans, I chopped off the ends of one and popped it into my mouth. Guess what? It tasted like a radish. Go figure. It was somewhat hot and spicy, and not being much of a radish fan, I wondered what in the world I would do with 400 beans. I went ahead and chopped up a few and added them to our salads, and mixed in with everything else they weren't half bad. So, we can use a handful of them for salads, but I don't know what I am going to do with 400 bead pods. Did I mention that I picked 400 beans today, with more growing of the bush as we speak? Once I was finished with the picking, it didn't really look like that many beans, but it sure sounds like a lot.

Still no sign of any tomatoes turning red, or white, or yellow, or whatever color they are supposed to be besides green. I should have planted nothing but Green Zebra plants this year, then I would have a reason to still have nothing but green tomatoes.

Bloom or die

This is my new best friend in the garden. With any luck, he will eat the Japanese beetles that have decimated my roses and will soon have plenty of crepe myrtles to feast on.

While on the way to pick some squash last evening, I was first distracted by the roses that needed pruning. There are only two of them and one is a miniature, so it didn't take much pruning. I was further distracted by the overgrown wisteria tree. It was beginning to look like an alien invader in the process of devouring the backyard.

We bought it about four years ago in late spring from a local nursery, and we were told it was already five years old and therefore could potentially bloom the next spring. So we brought it home and I dug a hole in the ground big enough for a body so the roots would have plenty of room. I watered it thoroughly, then left it alone per my instructions and waited impatiently for what the next spring might bring.

I'm still waiting. Not one bloom. Nothing. Ever. I don't know what to do to make it bloom. I was told that once it was established it would not need any attention other than a semi-annual pruning, so I left it alone. That didn't work, so I tried a Google search and found a woman who insisted her Wisteria never bloomed until she started beating it with a chain. Being fresh out of chains, I have continued with the hands-off approach. If anyone has any less violent suggestions, please share them. Otherwise, I am quite tempted to take an axe to it rather than a chain. It takes up an entire garden plot, but never earns its keep as it should by blooming each spring.

I pruned the beast down to nothing but a handful of leaves and the twisted main trunks. It looks less dangerous now.


Yesterday's harvest. Despite all the pruning, I did finally make my way to the cucurbits. I picked as many more today. We are now having squash and cucumbers with every meal.


The Purple Jalapenos are almost ready to pick. If I let them stay on the bush long enough, they will eventually turn green, but I think they are more attractive in recipes when they are still purple. They are not very hot, which is fine with me, but H (husband) would like something with more heat.

Bowl Full of Squash

We had our first big crop of squash this weekend. Golden zucchini, Black Beauty zucchini, Early prolific straight neck squash, and Fanfare cucumbers. This is only round one, so we will soon be forcing squash on everyone we know. I only wish the tomato plants would show signs of producing. Hopefully it is only the heat that slows them down. It's been 95 or so for two weeks, and we've been that long without rain, as well. Apparently it rained last night, but not much.

The zinnia seeds I planted are sprouting everywhere! Not so the bluebonnets. Only two germinated and the neighbors dog destroyed one of them. Grrrrrr.


Golden zucchini grow at the base of the plant, and are very hard to reach through the huge leaves. It's fun raising the big leaves of squash and cucumber plants to see what treasures are hidden beneath them.

We staked the squash and cucumber plants about a week ago and they have doubled in size since then. I find that tomato cages, though quite useless for tomatoes, are perfect for squash and cucumbers. This is my version of square foot gardening where everything grows up so there is space for more plants. It is also easier to find the produce when it is dangling in the middle of a cage instead of sprawled all over the yard (not that I've ever let that happen). Anyway, we should have yellow squash ready in just a few days! The cucumbers seem to be taking their time.

Cucumbers:

• Longfellow
• Fanfare
• Lemon Cucumber
• Chinese Yellow

Squash:

• Black Beauty Zucchini
• Lemon Squash
• Early Golden Crookneck
• Early Prolific Straitneck
• Golden Zucchini

I started these indoors in mid-May, from seeds I got from Baker Creek. Fortunately, these kinds of seeds germinate and grow rather quickly, since I started them and planted them out later than normal. They don't seem to do well when the weather gets really hot, which unfortunately has already happened this year. The temperature was 95 today with a heat index of 102. Believe me, it felt like 102! Hopefully we will get one good crop before the plants wilt.