November 2023: A Short Month

I was traveling at both the beginning and the end of November, so I don’t have as much to show from my garden this month. Overall, there was a gradual decline in greenness and growth. November 1 dawned with the first solid freeze of the season. This halted most of the plant growth, but surprisingly not all of it. I was amazed to even have a few tomatoes to harvest mid-month. Things faded a little more every time that the temperatures dipped near or below freezing. Finally temperatures got to the low 20’s at the end of the month and crushed the last of the green out of any remaining tender leaves.

In my garden, I had only a couple accomplishments for the month. I got my garlic planted in my vegetable garden and then I blew all of the fallen leaves around to cover it and my other garden beds. Hopefully the garlic grows happily all winter now that it’s tucked into its bed. In addition to tidying up the leaves, I started my general garden clean up before winter hits, but there’s still plenty more to do.

October 2023: Fall Fluctuations

Temperatures were all over the place in October. We began with days in the 90’s, but things quickly turned colder, and after the first week the lows were consistently forecast to go below 50. That was my signal to bring in my houseplants. Often, this process is really rushed because I like to leave everything out till the last minute, but then the last minute comes unexpectedly and the next thing I know I’m dragging a bunch of plants into the kitchen in the dark after work. This time around, I was able to spend an entire morning giving the plants a little TLC before I brought them inside and found places to put them all. Finding places for them is always a challenge because there are very limited spots inside the house where they will get enough light. Because of that and because they take extra fiddling indoors, I start looking forward to taking them outside again as soon as I bring them in.

Temperatures stayed pretty steady through the middle of the month. Some days were a little warmer and some were a little cooler, but there were no extremely warm or cold days. That meant everything could just keep growing pretty happily–as long as I watered. Our drought continued with hardly any rain to speak of. Leaves gradually started to change. My plants started to crisp here and there as they began to anticipate the end of the growing season.

I picked several rounds of lima beans and got a few more of the fancy blue beans I was trying to grow. Among the limas, I successfully got some very pretty ping zebra beans. I’ve been trying to grow them for a few years without success, but this year I’d read that they simply take a long time to mature. I took the suggestion of starting some plants early indoors, and that did the trick. The blue beans were an experiment that I shouldn’t try again, but it will be tempting to give it a shot. They have an amazing blue color, but only if they mature in cool temperatures. Apparently, temperatures here weren’t cool enough for blue beans until September, so I only got 5-7 blue ones, but those few were pretty spectacular!

I also got an assortment of tomatoes. Every time I enjoy fresh autumn tomatoes in a meal, I think of the guy I passed once at a farmer’s market who was proudly proclaiming that he never eats a fresh tomato after Labor Day because he thinks they’re inferior then. He’s missing out on a couple months of tasty tomatoes!

Things continued along until the final full week of October when temperatures ticked back up into the mid-80’s. Despite the toasty temps, the forecast was to end the month with a serious freeze, so I spent the final weekend of October working to harvest everything I possibly could. We also (finally) got rain, though that made the harvesting more difficult. I was able to harvest my sweet potatoes before the rain started, which made digging through the soil much easier. My harvest was ok, but not nearly as good as last year. The plants had looked healthy, so I’m not sure what happened. I also picked even more lima beans, a few more of the giant zucchino rampicante squash, all my basil, some tomatoes, and some melons that may or may not be ripe.

The zucchino rampicante squash was incredibly happy in my garden this year. I’d gotten three giant squashes from it in September and it was working on several more through October. Unfortunately, quite a few of them had blossom end rot and weren’t usable, but I also got the biggest one of the year that was about 34 inches long. Another had buried itself in my neighbor’s hydrangea plants. A few more of the squashes were still young and tender, so I picked those to eat like zucchini.

I’d hoped to have time to turn all the basil into pesto to freeze for later, but there was too much to do and I wasn’t prepared with enough of the right ingredients, so I decided to grind up the basil with a little olive oil and freeze that. My hope is that it will still be relatively easy to pull out of the freezer and turn into pesto one batch at a time.

September 2023: Bugs and Blooms Abounding

September in my garden was hot and dry. I think we got less than a half inch of rain all month, so I had to water often. Thanks to those efforts, my plants stayed happy enough, along with the menagerie of bugs living on them.

Most of my fruits and vegetables quietly did their thing all month. The sweet potatoes grew ever-bigger, so hopefully there’s a good crop under all the vines. I’ll find out after the first frost when the plants will die and I’ll dig everything up. My mass of melons kicked out a ripe one for me every so often. This year they’re on a trellis next to the sidewalk in the side yard, so it’s been easier to monitor them. In previous years I’d had trouble knowing when they were ripe, but this year I finally cracked the code. The ones with netted skins drop off the vine when they’re ripe, so if I keep an eye out I can collect them off the ground soon after they’ve fallen. The non-netted variety doesn’t drop off when ripe, but it does start to smell super melon-y and turns slightly tan in color when it’s ready to eat.

My squashes have been slowly maturing on the plants. I got one butternut that had mostly finished maturing before the plant died, but the big successes came from the zucchino rampicante squash plants. When mature their squashes are a lot like butternuts, but when they’re young they can be eaten like zucchini. These plants grew and grew and grew. I got three huge squashes from them in September (the largest of these is almost 30 inches long!) and now they’re working on a couple more fruits. I didn’t need something like a zucchini during the window of time when they were young and tender, so I didn’t eat them that way. Now the new squashes are at a point where I think they’re too tough to eat like a zucchini but not mature enough to harvest like a butternut, so I’m hoping the weather holds out long enough for them to fully mature.

My lima beans have also grown and grown and grown. I’ve been picking the pods as they dry. I should also pick some to eat fresh as a supper side dish, but it takes quite a bit of picking and shelling to get enough for a side dish, so I haven’t felt like I’ve had time. Meanwhile, my tomatoes have not looked great. Four of the seven varieties that I planted really struggled and haven’t produced much since early August, but the remaining three varieties have done their best to make up for that. Thanks to them, I’ve had sufficient but not bounteous tomatoes this year.

Meanwhile, bugs and blooms have abounded, particularly thanks to my native plants. I’ve been watching for monarch caterpillars on my swamp milkweed all summer. I finally saw one on September 3rd and I was excited to see it would grow into a butterfly in my yard. I went to check on it the next day and found a green Carolina mantis instead, so I suspect that the caterpillar was eaten. That was sad, but on the bright side I spotted the mantis all around my garden during September. She soon settled into the plains coreopsis at the entrance to our side yard. She was beautifully camouflaged there, and I checked on her every time I passed by. One evening, I discovered her laying an egg case on the fence. She stuck around for a few more days after that before disappearing for good. I hope I see her children next year. There was a second, brown Carolina mantis that spent time on the blazing star and Illinois bundleflower where she was particularly well camouflaged. I saw her regularly, but not as often as the green one.

In addition to the mantises, I saw a nice selection of butterflies, katydids, spiders, and other insects. I know that I notice more of them because I’m taking pictures of the flowers and that makes me look more closely. I think I’ve identified all of them below, thanks to Google image searches.

August 2023: Bountiful Blooms

Since John and I were on vacation for two weeks in August, I thought my garden update for the month would be short. Not so! There were still many things to photograph with lots of great colors and textures everywhere. Flowers were blooming, plants were fruiting, and there were interesting bugs hanging out everywhere if I just looked closely enough.

A serious bonus was that my garden got a good amount of rain while we were gone, so the plants were able to take care of themselves. When it’s dry and I need to water things myself, it usually takes me a whole day to do that. It’s nothing I want to ask someone else to do, so I just leave and hope for the best. Most summers things get brown and crispy, but this summer things were still in great shape when we got home. It was nice to come home to everything well-watered naturally for once!

We got home just in time for a “heat dome.” Actual air temperatures were around 100 degrees and the humidity brought the “feels like” temperature up about 120 degrees. It was horribly hot. My garden made it through just fine, and so did the outdoor cats. Temperatures were 20 degrees cooler in Michigan during that time, so we wished we were still up there but were glad to be home to monitor everything and everyone. I do think the heat supercharged the sweet potatoes, lima beans, and zucchino rampicante squash. They, in particular, have exploded.

I can tell fall is approaching. Summer-blooming native plants have gone to seed. Late summer blooms like the blazing star have just begun. The monarch butterflies are visiting. The tomatoes are getting tired. Soon enough the leaves will turn and it will be time to pick the squash and lima beans. With a little frost, it will be time to harvest the sweet potatoes as well.

July 2023: Blooms, Fruit, Bugs, and Brutal Heat

July was dry and very hot, but in looking through my photos I realized it was also filled with plenty of happy blooms and happy bugs crawling on them. (I was not happy with many of those happy bugs, though!)

My garden in front of the house is filled with mostly native prairie plants and it really exploded in July. I had a lot of coneflowers blooming along with some coreopsis and an Illinois bundleflower. The bundleflower is a plant I bought without really knowing much about it. I got it from the Master Gardeners, but the Master Gardeners who happened to be there selling it didn’t know anything about it. It turns out that it’s a pretty interesting plant. It has wonderfully feathery leaves that fold up at nighttime. It has puffy little white flowers that turn into amazing “bundled” seedpods. You’ll see plenty of it in the photos below. Many bees, butterflies, and other insects have visited all of these flowers.

Meanwhile my vegetable garden has exploded from meager starts to plants spreading to fill all the space available. One that’s doing amazingly well at that is the zucchino rampicante squash. Its vines keep going and going while also setting several huge squashes. I got the seeds from a friend who said it was impervious to squash vine borers, which has been the case this summer. I also have a butternut squash that hasn’t done quite as well, but it hasn’t been done in by the borers, so that’s a win. Both squashes are favored food of squash bugs, so I’ve done daily patrols to try to pull off the squash bug eggs before they have a chance to hatch. So far I’ve avoided an infestation, but I’m not letting my guard down.

My lima beans and sweet potatoes are also growing nicely. They love the heat, so they have been in their element. Another happy grower is a cucumber. I’d picked a new variety to grow this year. It’s a French pickling cucumber, and I thought it would give me cute little cucumbers like you often see pickled whole. Well, they’re cute but they’re covered with black spines so I don’t really want to touch them, and then they grow big and are still covered with spines so I really don’t want to touch them. Unfortunately that means they’re just getting big and ugly on the vines without me picking them. Oh, well. I won’t grow them again.

My tomatoes have been a mix of good and bad. Several plants had some kind of problem and shriveled up and mostly died. I didn’t put much effort into figuring out which of the many, many things might have caused this, though there were a bunch of stink bugs hanging out on one of the plants that died. I started picking them off during my daily bug patrols. The bug patrols also included picking a lot of Japanese beetles off of my azaleas, raspberries, blackberries, and bundleflower. Other tomato plants in my garden have been happy, so I’ve gotten plenty of nice tomatoes to eat.

It’s also been blackberry season. The blackberries have ripened nicely and haven’t been too bothered by the birds or bugs. It helps that they ripen around the same time that our neighbor’s black cherry tree ripens, so the birds are really distracted with cherries and miss the blackberries. I usually realize the cherries are ripe when I hear a wild hullabaloo high up in the tree next door and realize there’s a feeding frenzy going on. Clearly the cherries are some prime eating!

Things were hot and pretty dry all July. I watered every week. However, it was at the end of the month that things got really brutal. When the “heat dome” blasted through our area we had temperatures at or near 100 degrees, extremely high humidity, and heat indexes well over 110. We monitored the outdoor cats, who were clearly very hot but were able to manage. They had plenty of water, food, and shady spots. The plants seemed to manage, too.

Below you can watch a video garden tour from mid-July and see a little bit of everything that was growing in July!

March 2023: In Like a Lion, Out Like a Lion

The saying goes that if March comes in like a lion it will go out like a lamb, and if it comes in like a lamb it will go out like a lion. Well, this March was bookended by tornado warnings. It’s also been pretty consistently rainy, so I haven’t been able to get into my garden to get any work done. I have not enjoyed this weather very much, though at our house we got through it all without serious damage.

The worst of the March storms for us came on March 3 when we had a tornado warning that included downtown Evansville. Tornados did touch down in the Evansville area, but at our house it was just the damaging winds. The Weather Service reported that we had 50-70 mph wind gusts. They were strong enough that we had a big branch break in the magnolia tree. I heard it crack and fall as I headed to the basement. My weather station isn’t very high up, so the wind speeds are never really accurate, but I will say that before that day I’d never seen it register a wind speed over 18. On the 3rd, its peak windspeed was 27. The storm also included at least three inches of rain and the all-time lowest recorded barometric pressure for our area. Even after the storms moved through, the very strong wind blew and blew and blew for hours. It was unrelenting.

Other than the storms, we had some warm days and then some cool days and then warm and then cold. I was grateful that the magnolia tree’s early blooms reached their peak before the cold weather moved in and edged their blooms in brown. Looking back, I like the look. In the later half of the month, we had lows in the 20’s, and that completely froze the magnolia petals, turning them completely brown while preventing them from falling off the tree. They’re still stuck on the tree and don’t look very attractive at all.

In March my late crocuses finished blooming and my daffodils began theirs. The hellebores grew and developed nicely. The two larger hellebores expanded and filled out beautifully. The two smaller plants were almost destroyed by slugs, but once I figured out that they were under attack and gave a counter attack, they each produced a single, fancy flower. I love the white flower with magenta dots, but I also like the way the light came through the all-pink double bloom.

By the end of the month, the hops was up, and so were the ferns. The redbud was budding. Also, enough green stuff was popping up everywhere to give everything a decidedly fresh, green color. In terms of edible plants, my garlic started to emerge, and it looks like most of what I planted survived. I also started my tomato plants under a couple grow lights.

December 2022: Polar Plunge

December dawned a little warmer than usual, but not much. There were cold spells with lows in the 20’s, and there were sprinklings of rain here an there. Most color had faded from my garden, save the last of the leaves to turn and fall: the leaves on my blackberry. Every year they are some of the last bits of red, yellow, orange, and green to leave my garden. I always enjoy seeing them. Meanwhile, the last of the tomatoes left on the vines withered away to nothing, but indoors I had one final round of fresh tomatoes that I’d picked green in November and that had ripened on my counter. Fresh garden tomatoes in December! John and I baked them with chickpeas and feta for a tasty meal.

Mid-December, John and I got a Christmas tree. This year we didn’t even check the traditional spot in a strip mine where we and others from Patchwork had gone to collect cedar trees for decades. If you remember, lately it’s only been John and I going to get trees there and last year when we went it just felt like too much had changed and it was no longer a good idea. So last year and this year we got a normal commercial tree. Times change.

Just before Christmas, I pulled a year’s worth of raspberries and two years’ worth of blackberries from my freezer and turned them into jam. I like blackberry jam a lot better without seeds, so I used my Squeezo Strainer to separate them out before making jam. It was more difficult than it should have been because I got impatient with the slow-to-thaw berries and tried to run them through when they were still a little frozen. Eventually I got one batch of raspberry jam, two batches of blackberry jam, and one batch of blackberry preserves.

What’s the difference between jam and preserves, you ask? Well, I accidentally used half the sugar I should have on my last batch of jam. I knew I should have made myself check the recipe, but instead I told myself that it was the fourth time through and I remembered the recipe just fine. I didn’t realize my mistake until I noticed that the jam hadn’t gelled correctly. I looked online to find a remedy and the first search result started with the words of wisdom, “If you don’t want to invest any additional work in that jam, the best choice to make is to change your expectations. If the finished product is just sort of runny, call it preserves (they can be great stirred into oatmeal or yogurt, or spooned over waffles). If it’s totally sloshy, label it syrup and stir it into sparkling water.”

As I was finishing the jam, a serious winter storm was gathering. Snow and extreme cold air were forecast to hit our area in the afternoon on December 22. Everyone was urged to get our affairs in order. Suddenly we were prepping our home and workplace for bad weather at the same time as we were preparing work to be closed for the holidays. On the day the storm blew in, the high temperature on my weather station was 44 degrees and the low at bedtime was 3 degrees with a windchill of -10 degrees. Very early in the morning on December 23, the low on my weather station got down to -6 degrees and the windchill reached at least -19 degrees. In other areas around the city where the wind could blow even harder, the windchill got to at least -29 degrees. On Christmas, it was still cold. Christmas night it snowed more. Things started to ease on December 26, but it was still plenty cold.

It was stressful. One night we had an alarm going off on our furnace at home. We had a couple furnaces at work limping along and spent time during our holiday working to keep them going. We had a pipe briefly freeze at home. We were monitoring two buildings at work and the four cats sheltered in them. We pushed off leaving to visit my family for Christmas once then again then just decided to stay home. Since we’d intended to be gone, we hadn’t stocked up on groceries before Christmas, but we still managed to use things we had around to make a fancy Christmas feast of Chicken Cordon Bleu and roasted sweet potatoes from my garden.

The snow was pretty while it lasted, enhancing all of my outdoor Christmas lights. After it melted and the weather warmed, I did notice that many of my plants that normally stay evergreen through the Southwestern Indiana winters have turned black. The leaves on the honeysuckle on the back fence are brown and limp. The azaleas in the front have many leaves that turned brown and are falling off. I will be interested to see how well things come back to life in the spring. Clearly this weather was on the colder end of what they can tolerate.

And with that, we ended 2022! Now it’s time to look toward next summer and to start ordering my seeds.

November 2022: Final Harvests

Remarkably, the month of November began still with no killing frost or freeze. We came close very early on, so I harvested all the tomatoes I could find along with all of my sweet potatoes. It’s always interesting to see what I have growing underground in the sweet potato patch. The vines looked healthy this year, but did they produce sweet potatoes? The answer was yes! I got a good harvest and can tell that there are several varieties represented in that harvest. Some have orange flesh and some are all purple, but, as in previous years, the best grower was a Japanese variety that has purple skin and dry, white flesh. They’re all tasty.

I’ve been growing the sweet potatoes in a raised bed that contains sandy soil, so to harvest them I just reach my hands into the earth and feel around for the lumps of potato. The whole process is a lot of work, particularly because I have to dismantle my Boo Boo butt shield (aka: the metal hoops covered in bird net to keep the cats out because…you know…sandy soil). I let the sweet potatoes cure for a few weeks and then we roasted some to sample. They were excellent.

That same weekend I also raked up all the leaves on the ground. I wanted to make sure to do it before they started to break apart and smother the grass under them. They were still wonderfully fluffy and colorful when I raked them, which made them much easier to deal with. Normally the leaves would be coming off the trees a little after we had a frost, so I’d just get my leaf blower out and blow the leaves into my garden beds to decompose over the winter. This year, however, everything was still growing when the leaves came down, so I bagged them all up to store temporarily. I’ll spread them on my garden beds as I clear those beds out for the winter. I got 15 big bags of leaves, including some nice maple leaves I raked up from my neighbor’s house!

The cold snap didn’t materialize as early as first expected, but from the forecasts it was certain to arrive in the third week of November, so I picked one final round of lima beans and tomatoes before it hit. For the record, I picked them all on November 11 with weather so pleasant I didn’t need to wear a jacket. Then on November 12 we had a surprise snowfall followed by frigid temperatures. Finally all of the summer’s growth stopped in my garden. Sadly for me, the snowfall occurred on the one day I was out of town visiting friends, so I missed it! Hopefully this won’t be the one and only snowfall of the year, but that’s exactly what happened a few years ago.

In my absence, I told John to take my camera out and capture some images of the snow on top of green, blooming plants. He did, so all the photos below with snow in them are thanks to him. It’s an interesting juxtaposition of still-vibrant plants frozen under snow. The concern that this raises is whether the plants will be damaged by the quick change from temperature highs in the 70’s to a stretch with lows in the 20’s. That other year that I mentioned earlier when the only snow came in November, we had a similar shift in temperature and my plants were damaged because they hadn’t gone through their normally gradual autumnal shutdown. Adding to the potential plant stress this year was the fact that our area’s moderate drought continued into November. In fact, we got only about three-quarters of an inch of rain for the entire month. I tried to counteract this by watering up until the freeze.

After the snow and cold weather finally killed things off, I was able to start clearing this year’s plants out of my garden and start planting for next year. I reworked the soil in my main raised bed for vegetables, adding leaves and stirring things around with a broadfork, then I planted my garlic. The garlic went in a little later than I thought was best, but I’d wanted to get the area cleared and the soil turned and couldn’t do that as easily until things had died back. Time will tell whether it was ok to wait.

Only at the end of the month did the plants finally start to settle back into the earth, with leaves and fruits gradually losing their shapes and colors. Meanwhile, I still had bright, fresh garden tomatoes to enjoy indoors! They’d ripened nicely in a bowl on my counter. It was pretty remarkable to have fresh garden produce at the end of November.

October 2022: Turning Colors

October began green and ended in a beautiful multitude of yellows, reds, oranges, and browns. That’s all despite the fact that we remained in a drought, which I might have expected to mute the colors more than it did. We also went the whole month without a killing frost or temperatures below freezing, so everything was still growing at the end of the month. In fact, the month was all unseasonably warm.

Early in the month we did have a stretch of nighttime temperatures forecast to get to the freezing point. Of course it wasn’t conveniently on a weekend, so I spent one evening harvesting all my basil and the following evenings going step-by-step through the process of turning it into pesto. I’d thought that a lot of my basil had died when it didn’t get watered this past summer, so I was surprised to end up with a gallon or more of pesto. It’s all in my freezer so we can pull it out for a quick meal anytime all winter long. The air temperature reached 33 degrees, and that’s as cold as it got, so it appears I wouldn’t have needed to rush harvesting my basil. It was good to have it all taken care of, though.

The last of my monarch caterpillars disappeared from my garden on October 1. I never saw any chrysalises this year, so I don’t know where they went, but 14 days later a monarch butterfly flew by me at Patchwork. It’s not that far from my house, so I told myself that maybe it was one of my caterpillars headed for Mexico.

My harvests included several rounds of tomatoes that ripened nicely indoors, lima beans, squashes, and one final melon. My zinnias and marigolds continued to bloom profusely. My toad lilies also bloomed happily. They’re a plant I’d never known about before planting one the first year I had my garden. I always feel echoes of my initial pleasant surprise when the fancy, orchid-like blooms appear. They look like something tropical or spring-like, but they bloom in the fall and their purples and blues look fantastic with the yellow and orange leaves falling on the ground around them.

Toward the middle of the month, John and I returned to Scratch Brewing in Ava, Illinois to sample their Octoberfest beers. You may remember some of our previous visits. They make very unique brews using local ingredients from farms and plants foraged from their property. The flavors are really unique. Some taste like you’re drinking a tree–but in a good way. It’s in the middle of nowhere, so it’s beautiful place to sit and eat and drink all afternoon.

As you scroll through the photos below, notice the changing colors that predominate. It’s pretty cool to see the way that fall arrived. And click on any individual photo to get some more detail about what is in it. After the photos, I’ve included another video tour of my garden recorded at the end of October.

September 2022: Bugs and Recovery

September in my garden began at daybreak on September 1 when I got my first good look at the damage that happened because of insufficient water while John and I were on vacation. I immediately set up my sprinklers to bring moisture back to my plants, but some were already in desperately sorry shape. I spent a day watering and watering and watering.

Some plants were clearly done for. But then there were others. Do you know what doesn’t mind hot, dry weather? Lima beans! I had a lot of them. You know what else likes the heat? Sweet potatoes! And what else was barely phased by the lack of water? My strip of prairie plants by the street! And you know what else wasn’t phased by the poor conditions? Tree of heaven! That last one I really wished would have been negatively impacted. I’m so tired of that awful, invasive tree.

As I looked around my garden, I started to discover some gems hidden among the dry, brown leaves. Most notable among them were the monarch caterpillars quietly munching milkweed everywhere I looked. They were a good reminder that many things were still ok. My garden was also filled with yellow garden spiders trying to keep the pests at bay.

Of course, I also found some bad bugs that were ready to strip my tomato plants. At the start of the month, I discovered a family of yellow-striped armyworms all over a section of tomatoes. I’d never seen them before, so at first I didn’t know if they were good or bad and left them alone just in case. Then a little voice in my head said I really needed to do my research, so I did and headed straight back outside to kill them all.

Later in the month I discovered two tobacco horn worms poised to destroy more tomatoes–except by the time I spotted them they had been parasitized by wasps and doomed to soon die. The wasps lay eggs under the caterpillar’s skin, the pupae hatch and eat the caterpillar alive, then they eat their way out of the caterpillar and form white cocoons sticking off of the caterpillar. Interesting and also pretty gross.

Also kind of gross was what I realized when I had a chance to observe so many monarch caterpillars: the poop A LOT. In thinking about it, Eric Karle really missed out on some potential children’s book gold in The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Watching these monarch caterpillars, it should have been a poop book as much as an eating book. His book could have been even more popular and could have taught a valuable science lesson!

There were plenty of other bugs, both good and bad, around my garden. And zinnia blooms. I love zinnias! The more I look at their flowers, the more interesting details I start to see. And my final prairie plants bloomed so I could see what they look like. The one the butterflies loved most (by far) was the purple button blazing star. It was not uncommon for me to see multiple monarch butterflies at a time crowded onto the two flower spikes.

In the vegetable department, I got plenty of tomatoes from my plants–enough to do some cooking. I also got some mini melons, but I’m still terrible at judging when they’re ripe, so none were exactly perfect when I ate them. I had three varieties, and apparently none are kinds that release from the vine when they’re ripe. I’ll keep trying, though. I think they’re fun. I also got two butternut squashes and one zucchino rampicante squash. The zucchino rampicante can be eaten as a winter squash, but since I started them late I wasn’t going to have any that were mature enough for that. Luckily they also function like a summer squash when they’re young. We ate that one in a pesto pasta dish with turkey meatballs. It was delicious.

Only two days after my September 1 watering blitz, we got an historic downpour with something like 3″ of rain coming down in only an hour or so. It was an incredible amount of rain. And then it didn’t rain by any real measure for the rest of the month. I was out watering every weekend. By the end of the month, everything was doing relatively well and had mostly come back from the brink. By the very end, even the final couple plants that had looked completely dead were beginning to show signs of life. Hopefully they don’t burn through all their energy reserves growing a lot of new leaves just before winter and then start next spring without enough stored energy to come out of dormancy.

(Below is a photo collage. As always, click on any image for a little more information about what’s in it.)