Fall wrap up

Time to tear down the garden.

Weekly roundup - August 13

This weekend was rough. H was gone all night Friday and all day Saturday and Sunday. This meant all of the yard work was going to fall on me.

So, to get a jump on things, Friday night I went out and harvested our garden. At night. In my PJs. H got home a few minutes before I finished and snapped this photo of me with the massive zucchini I found.

This is over 12 lbs of produce. The zucchini counts for 4 of those.

I ended up making a batch of zucchini bread and another 5 jars of pickles (2 of bread and butter spears and 3 more dill). Two more zucchini got sliced up and a lb of beans sauteed for dinners this weekend. I'm thinking a lot of fajitas and stuffed peppers are in our future though. It's also a good thing G loves raw bell peppers now.

Our coneflowers continue to be a pollinator heaven. I snapped this photo of a lovely female eastern tiger swallowtail with one of many honeybees.

Garden roundup

So much going on right now.

We have tons of rose hips nearly ready to be picked.

And the bushes are about to put out another round of blooms.

We were visited by a Painted Lady butterfly today.

Black eyed susans are in full bloom.

BES, coneflowers and miscanthus.

Same, plus the phlox.

The bean bed, now with some midsummer blooms.

We had about half a dozen volunteer tomatillo plants in our corn and pumpkin bed.

One lonely pumpkin.

Sunflowers.

Loaded tomato plants starting to ripen.

This one pepper plant has 20 peppers on it.

Sunday photos

Some more photos from today.

Sunflower about to bloom

Overall view of the veggie garden.

Phlox, coneflower and black-eyed susans.

A particularly fun phlox with the miscanthus.

Pretty sure this guy is a red-spotted purple.

Saturday harvest

Photos from around the yard today.

Pumpkin blossom

Lots of sunflowers, some of which are confused as to where the sun is

Lots of veggies

I weighed them all. Notes are in a paper journal, but I had enough cucumbers to put up 3 jars of pickles and still have plenty of leftovers.

Happy hounds in their favorite shady spot

Lucky dog is a sleepy dog

July roundup

Our lavender patch was lovely this year. Also, there's G looking all grown up.

G in our Annabelle hydrangeas. He's 4' 4", so they're pretty tall.

Honeybee on native milkweed

Our new native redbud

And our new native musclewood.

Sunflowers facing west in the afternoon.

Our black-eyed susans are starting to bloom. Native echinacea behind it in full throttle with the remains of salvia out front.

I just happened to snap this photo of a bumblebee just starting to take off. 

Here he is working on another coneflower

Garage bench

Finally got around to installing the pegboard. If you remember the before:

Not so great, right? So we removed the post in the center and I went out and got a 4' square sheet of pegboard, plus a basic kit of hooks. Everything else that had been there went in the trash.

We now have an actual cleared work space! I also relocated a bin of spare soccer equipment so our yard waste bins have a home now.

What's blooming week of June 5

Gorgeous