Summer Garden Tour 2021

 Hello there!

Well, it's just about August and the hops are sky high!

 The garden is in full swing, kicking out basketfuls of green beans and enough tomatoes to share the love a little bit.  Plus some peppers, eggplant, summer squash, and basil.

A pretty nice haul!

Beans been on the menu.

Theodore took a moment out of his busy schedule to come join me in the tomatoes and look handsome...
(He promised he wouldn't pee on anything this time, and I think he lived up to it.)

I am looking forward to melons. . .

There are a couple dozen on the vines, sizing up, but none ripe yet.  Until that day comes, I enjoy the structure created by the vertically-oriented plants.  Their vigor seems promising.

Well, I wanted to share a video walk-through of the garden, but I guess the file size is too big.  So instead, here are a couple shots that give a little idea of the lay of the (20' x 30') land, fenced off from voracious deer, safe for the tenderest of leaves to make a life for itself, unharassed by large mammalians, except for myself and Charlotte.

Below is the view from right behind the above photo's POV, standing just outside the fence.  Some milkweed, yarrow, a volunteer (rather pretty flowered) oregano, and some groundcover chamomile, among other things, line the outside... all plants not favored by the deer.  You can see the pole beans (a flat-pod variety called Helda) towering on the right.

At the other end of the Cage of Life, the south side of the melon trellis.  An eggplant cut-off on the left, summer squash at the bottom, and peppers on the right hand side of the photo.  Sunflowers popping up throughout!

I noticed something interesting about sunflowers' blooming cycle... Being that they are asters, their "flower" is composed of many smaller flowers grouped together on the main disc, with the petals (or, technically, "ray florets") skirting the disc.  Well, I realized that you can tell how old a sunflower is depending where in the disc the little flowers are blooming.

The above flower is about mid-way through its life as a flower.

Whereas this one is just about done, the flowers which release the pollen having made their way from the outer edge all the way to the center of the disc.  As the flowerhead dries up, each little flower becomes a sunflower seed.

This also applies to zinnias and other asters, I think!  This fresh newborn zinnia blossom is just opening its first true flowers (technically, "disc florets" I believe) on the edge of the disc.

How is this useful information, you ask??  Well, actually, it kind of comes in handy when cutting flowers to bring indoors... Knowing which flowers will last the longest.  But mostly it is just cool to stumble across something new in nature, in the garden.