The Summer Garden is Winding Down

The blooms of Summer are beginning to wane and look a little puny.


 

Yet more zinnias are popping up.  This pretty thing used to be a seed from a zinnia head I nicked from Stonewall Jackson's home garden in Lexington, Virginia last Fall.

Seed nicking from gardens has long been an obsession of mine.  Does that make me a bad person?


 

Looks like I will be able to enjoy the zinnias for awhile indoors.  Orange bouquets are brought in on Saturdays for my OSU Cowboys football games!





I don't have too many Fall blooming plants in my garden.  But the few I do have I love.  This is Sedum "Autumn Joy"

 The Liriope start showing off their pale purple flowers about this time of year.

 The coleus are feeling the cooler weather too and they are going into survival mode by wanting to flower and set seed.

They've actually been flowering for awhile now but I've been pinching them off the minute I see the flowers.


 

The flowers of the coleus are really pretty but once they start going to seed the plant itself starts to thin out and get really spindly looking; and not attractive at all.  I've been pinching the flowers out to stretch out the life of the plants.

I can feel a full day of Fall garden clean-up coming on.  Such is the change of seasons in the garden.

The Accidental Pumpkins

Aside from totally disrupting the planting structure of my front flower bed, the accidental pumpkin patch has produced a fine crop.  These are the first two; harvested the first week of August.

They're a nice size, around 9 to 10 inches across.  I don't know if they are good for cooking but I'll find out.  I plan to roast them and make soup.



There have been 10 to 11 pumpkins from this one plant.


The bees did their job well in pollinating.


The transition from green to orange has been interesting to watch.  I placed folded up newspaper underneath each young fruit to keep them from rotting on the ground (you can learn all sorts of things from YouTube)

I am amazed at how beautifully smooth and round these pumpkins have been.

I've noticed that the last few pumpkins that developed are getting smaller and smaller.

The plant can produce only so many fruit.

Evey visited week before last and we found a female flower that we self pollinated.  I'll be keeping track of that pumpkin for her.  It will most likely be a very small pumpkin as one of the last that the plant produces.

Watermelon Update

The watermelons have proved to be disappointing.  Granted, they were not planted at the right time so they have been trying to produce in this extreme heat.

This little guy grew to the size of a ping pong ball and then one night, when I was too lazy to spray the deer/rabbit repellent, it was a snack for a deer.  The plants haven't produced a female flower since.

So much for the first try at growing watermelons.  Lesson learned....plant in March!

Butterfly Flutterby

 
Here are photos of the 'kids' from this Spring.

All in all there were 12 cocoons that produced butterflies. 

 

I like to think these are the kids returning home.

I'd like to think this is one of ours.