Our Garden

We have a "work in process" yard. Little corners that work and most corners that are experiments. I took pictures this morning and thought I would share.

While digging through the garage this spring I found bags of dried out bulbs. So Taleah and I dug holes and threw handfuls of bulbs in each hole telling them to "live or die". These are the bulbs that have chosen to live. It makes us happy to watch them poke their heads out and grow.

Last spring at a garden show I picked up some upside down tomato grower thingies. We planted Early Girls in it this year and have gotten a couple, but their skins are tough and the plant is sadly anemic. There are still a handful trying to grow, but we can't wait for our "regular" tomatoes to ripen. It's taking forever this year.

For Father's Day the primary had the kids plant pumpkin seeds. This is one of the two plants growing in our yard. Besides the droopy "give me water, now!" leaves, they are very happy.

The sunflower saga. I heard on the radio about a research that was going on with bees. You were to call/email and they would send you specific sunflower seeds to plant and then when it bloomed you needed to count how long it took for 5 bees to come to your flowers. Long story short, they ran out of seeds because it was such a big success and so I planted a different variety only to have the real seeds arrive a month later. (I didn't plant them.)

So here are our sunflowers that aren't participating in the bee count. As you can see in the picture some grew VERY tall - about 8 feet and some barely made it to 1 foot. The thing I have found facinating is that they are all flowering at the same time. The tall one just started to open this morning, but all of them have a flower developing.

Don't sunflowers just make you smile. They are like sunshine on a stick.

If you look really hard you can see the flowers forming in the middle. The horizontal board in the back is about 10 inches from the ground.

Our other tomatoes that are plugging along. Our weather has been so wild this summer. If it warmed up at all we would have a hayday trying to get rid of all of the ripe ones.

Lastly, our happy basil.

Okay, so our "garden" is sad and pathetic. Actually we didn't get our normal garden in this year. We usually aim for April conference weekend, but we were in the middle of a musical, Seussical (fun!) and by the time it was over (early May) we had a boatload of other put-off activities to fill our Saturdays and evenings with. This is the first time I can ever remember not doing a garden. We do have a zucchini plant growing, bell peper, and jalepino plant but that cant really constitute a garden, can it?