Flowers of Fall

More from Rose Tree

A weed in the corn and another shot of a goldfinch in the sunflowers.

Hummingbirds at Rose Tree Park

How to Eat Sunflower Seeds

Harvest and Cooking

The fledgling tomatillo plants that I rescued from the shovel are doing great. I thought I'd already told the story of rescuing them but I can't find it. Suffice it to say that I got to the garden center too late to purchase any tomatillo plants. I thought I'd have to go without them, a real tragedy. The next day I was turning over my last row of dirt and weeds and found one plant- a volunteer from last year. It was abused, having been dumped over with my shovel. I searched the rest of my turned-over row like I was looking for victims of a building collapse. I found three total. Their poor bodies were pathetic, two had been upside down in the dirt for two days. It was touch and go at first but they all made it. In fact as the garden got going more volunteers sprung up.



The back right corner of my garden is a tangle of tomatillos and tomatoes. No actual ROWS to speak of. Harvesting is a treasure hunt. Today we gathered up handfuls of tomatillos, heirloom tomatoes that are purplish-green and cherry tomato sized, and three great looking full size heirloom tomatoes. Yum.

Last night Salsa Verde!

Birds in the Garden

Other People

These literally ARE photos of other peoples babies...I mean plants.

Proud Gardener

This may be about as interesting as other people's baby photos. (By the way, I love other people's baby photos.) So if you don't want to see INCREDIBLY exciting photos of my garden produce then avert your eyes.

Sunrise at the garden.

My garden.

Cayenne

Edamame

Eggplant

Tomatillo

Tomato

Love the Garden

It's time for some garden shots again. I'm not sure what this first plant is. My neighbor is growing it and I love the yellow, not to mention those green crispy leaves. I could grow a whole garden just for the shape of the plants! But then I'd miss out on the tomatoes whose plants are a big huge mess. (Partly because I planted them too close together and partly because I don't have big metal cages to contain them.) I pulled my first ripe tomatoes today. Saturday I couldn't wait any longer and fried up some green ones-yum! This whole tomato thing is very exciting (to me anyway) because last year they all rotted and died.


This big monster is in my garden. It's a volunteer from ancient times. Seriously the stem (at what point is it considered a trunk?) is at least 3" in diameter. A woodpecker was hiding in this one when I arrived but he flew off before I got a good shot.

Garden Envy

I thought my garden looked very professional until I strolled around to look at these. Um, yeah, my plants were still about 5" high at this point. So... I downgraded myself to competent amateur. haha.

Garden Textures

Dirt

"image of dirt"

Working in my community garden plot today made me think of my blog. I'm missing a lot of last years enthusiasm because of the weeds. I think I was too ashamed to post a photo of my garden at the end of last summer.

"image of garden submerged by some crazy vine weed"

But as you can see here (in your minds eye) it wasn't pretty. So I waited until the day after the last possible moment to go dig some dirt. Yesterday was the 'must plant by date.' I don't feel so terrible ignoring it since it's too early for most of what I want to plant. But I went over and spent an hour making a row. I've altered my expectations. Last year I actually laid out a pretty design. This year I dug a row and put down kale, spinach, two kinds of lettuce and radish. And my only objective is to protect the row. I must defend the row from the diabolical weeds. This will be even more difficult because I didn't actually remove all the weeds from my little trenched off row. I just buried them.

More Polination

Sunflower

Marigolds

One of our garden neighbors deadheads her marigolds aggressively. The kids were thrilled to find the still fresh "heads" tossed about the edge of the garden. They gathered them all up and took them home. I always wanted to do this as a kid but never had access to so many flower heads. Of course now I could barely breathe around the marigolds. I had to satisfy myself with taking pictures and stringing needles.