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.

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.

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.)

August 2022: A Promising Start

My review of August in my garden will be relatively brief. We were home for the first two weeks of the month and then gone for the following two and a half weeks. Things started out relatively well. We finally had some nice rain, breaking the drought conditions. Unfortunately, this included a really severe storm on August 1 that felled trees and knocked out power to 30,000 customers in our area. The power stayed on at my house, but several of my plants were a little battered by the wind, particularly my tomatoes that ended up getting beaten at least three feet lower to the ground.

Before heading out on vacation, I had seven varieties of tomatoes with ripened fruit, melons forming (but, sadly, not ripe enough to pick before we left), the last of my blackberries, and a lot of flower blooms. Flowers included everything from zinnias, maypops, and my potted jasmine plant to the surprise lilies that are fixtures in yards this time of year throughout our area. They pop out of the ground with little warning on long stalks. Their leaves came and went in the spring, which lends them another common name: naked ladies.

As always, you can click on any of the photos to get more of a description of what’s in it. I also recorded another garden tour video. When I recorded it, I had a fear that we would come back from vacation and my garden wouldn’t look nearly so go–and, sadly, I was right. We got nice amounts of rain for a couple weeks leading up to vacation, and I gave my garden a good soaking the day that we left. That watering would have held the garden beds for the first week of our absence. After that, I prayed for rain, but it didn’t come. Our time away was unexpectedly extended by a few days (more on that in an upcoming post), and I anxiously watched the Evansville weather radar from afar as several rounds of rain and storms dodged every which way, always managing to miss my house. Additionally, my other efforts to get my plants and garden watered fell through, though last-minute action by my neighbor friend did save some things.

We made it home late on August 31, and even in the dark I could see a lot of things didn’t make it. I thought about sharing the photos in this blog post, but I decided to start my September post there. I rushed to soak everything with water as quickly as possible. Two days later, we got intense rain, and we’re forecast to get rain all week. Of course, I’m sad that all this rain didn’t come earlier to nourish my garden in my absence.

I’m thinking it would be a great venture for someone to start a Garden Sitter business, especially considering all the people who discovered gardening during the pandemic and who are now traveling more. It would be great to be able to call a fellow gardener to have them monitor and thoroughly water my garden. Maybe they could also identify and remove garden pests (like the fat and happy yellow-striped armyworms I found eating my tomatoes when I returned from vacation). Till someone starts that business, I’ll be stuck with the usual trepidation leaving my garden for an extended time.

July 2022: Endurance

The heat cranked up in June and stayed hot through the entirety of July. There were some short respites (a 90° day, yay!), but they were few and far between. We had weeks with multiple Excessive Heat Advisories (maximum heat index temperature is expected to be 100° or higher for at least 2 days, and night time air temperatures will not drop below 75°) and plenty of Excessive Heat Warnings (the maximum heat index temperature is expected to be 105° or higher for at least 2 days and night time air temperatures will not drop below 75°). On top of the heat, we had drought conditions. It was brutal.

I watered my garden a lot all the way through July. It’s painful knowing that our water bill will be extra high, but I know if I don’t water it, my garden will die. It’s one of the costs of gardening, and a time when I’m glad that my space is really pretty small. Even with the small space, it’s an all-day project. And with things being so unpleasant outside, watering about all I did in my garden in July.

My tomatoes haven’t loved the heat, and I’ve barely had enough ripe ones for a daily sandwich for lunch. The ones in the raised beds at the side of the house have done ok, but the ones I planted in the vegetable bed in the back have yet to produce. They’ve all grown a lot, but I’ve had few ripe fruits. The lima beans have also seemed lackluster this year. Only a few plants are growing big, but there’s still time to get some beans. Melons and squash have been slow to take off, but they’re doing ok. The blackberries have done well, though they’ve appreciated my watering. Meanwhile, the basil and the sweet potatoes are quite happy with the excessive heat and have exploded. I’m glad at least something likes the heat. (I sure don’t.)

Another area that seems particularly happy is the row of prairie plants I put in the “hell strip” area in front of our house between the sidewalk and the street. It gets direct sun, has compacted soil, and is far from the outdoor water spigot, so the conditions there are pretty rough. What I have planted there are mostly native prairie plants that are supposed to do ok in dry soil. This is the first year for this group of plants and so far I’m enjoying them and their hardy nature. Since they’re still getting established, I’m watering them regularly with a soaker hose, but they seem plenty happy with the environment they have. I threw in some non-native annuals this spring as they all get established, and I think the color combinations look good.

Sprinkled through the entire month were plenty of insects–and a lot of them the bad kind. I went out multiple times a day to collect and destroy Japanese beetles. They’re remarkably easy to knock off leaves and into a mug of soapy water where they drown. They love my raspberry plants, but have also bothered the blackberries and azaleas. In addition, I’ve had more Mexican bean beetles than I ever remember having before. They look a little like orange ladybugs, but they munch through bean, squash, and melon leaves like there’s no tomorrow. Toward the end of the month, I started to get some of the Japanese beetles’ bigger, nastier cousins: green June beetles. They easily destroyed blackberries and instead of falling gently into my mug of soapy water, when frightened they tore through the blackberry bushes and toward my face. I don’t remember having them ever before. I’ve learned that they are incredibly unpleasant though also an incredibly beautiful, iridescent green.

Not insect pests, but I also had batches of bird pests–mostly robins but also catbirds and maybe a mockingbird–discover my blackberry plants. I think that just before my blackberries were ripe, my neighbor’s black cherry tree fruited and attracted scads of birds. When those cherries ran out, the birds looked for tasty alternatives nearby and found my blackberries. I hung sparkly, silver fabric in the blackberries to try to scare them off. I think it kind of worked, but didn’t entirely.

As a happy finale for the hot, dry, rough month, I finally got a maypop bloom. They’re alien-looking with a wild disk of frilly white and purple threads above a second disk of white petals. I’ve always wanted to try growing one, and I finally found one at the Master Gardener’s plant sale. What I’ve also heard about them is that they tend to be aggressive spreaders, so I’m attempting to grow mine in a container. Hopefully it works because the blooms are amazing and so much fun.

October 2021: From Tomatoes to Turning Leaves

October finally saw summer turn to autumn. I started the month by cleaning out the mass of plants in my vegetable garden. By that point, the tomatoes and melons were pretty rough looking. There were several melons to pick, but not many tomatoes anymore. There were also some pretty Klee’s orange marigolds mixed in. Covering it all was a mass of Mexican sour gherkin vines. They’re so cute and fun to grow, but, sadly, I didn’t get inspired to use them in anything this year, so they just grew and grew and never got picked. Next year my garden will be swarming with them because so many unpicked fruits fell on the ground everywhere.

Once the mass of plants was out of the way, I planted my garlic. I always think I have a great new plan for how I can plant garlic so that I’ll be able to plant something else around it in order to maximize the little space I have. But it never works that well. I always get the Small Garden Sampler from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange. It’s four different kinds of garlic. This time around, I thought I could plant four rows lengthwise in the raised bed. Surely that would be enough space, right? Well, a couple of the kinds of garlic had lots of small cloves in each head, so there were a lot to plant and they took up more like three rows each. I couldn’t throw any out, so I planted them all and, like usual, hoped something will work out brilliantly next spring. I don’t know what that solution will be, but I’ve got several months before it’s a problem.

Mid month, the overnight temperatures started to regularly be below 50 degrees and that meant it was time to bring in my houseplants for the winter and to harvest my basil. I’d used leaves of the basil here and there all summer, but at the end of the season I always pick everything and turn it into pesto. I made three rounds of pesto and froze most of it. We did use some as the bottom layer on a few pizzas, covering it with fresh mozzarella, pizza cheese, and roasted red pepper. It was delicious!

All month, my garden was brightened with a lot of blooms. Most of them were zinnias and marigolds, but there were also morning glories on the back fence (the kind that come up on their own and not the fancy kinds I planted, not that I noticed (I did)) and tassel flowers by the front bottle tree. I also had pretty blooms from a daisy-like chrysanthemum located by our front steps. You’ll see photos of the flowers here, but not of the plant. It got really leggy and not very attractive. I need to keep working on my mum-growing technique. The last half of the month was time for some of my favorite flowers to bloom–toad lilies. I love how bright, new, and fancy they look just when everything else is getting kind of tired and brown as it coasts into fall.

Toward the end of the month, I tried a project I’d always meant to do: using cement to make casts of big leaves and using those casts as stepping stones. The leaves on my elephant ears are always so beautiful and I’m sad every year when the frosts come. They’re the perfect leaves to turn into stepping stones, and now I can keep them year-round. I made five stones, plus a first one that turned out ok but not great. Next year I may try to add some color to them. For now I’m glad to have finished them before the frost destroyed the leaves (but not long before the frost so the plants didn’t look chopped up for long).

Another project at the end of the month was a round of garden-fresh ravioli. I hadn’t made any ravioli all summer and I decided that that needed to be remedied. Made from scratch, it’s absolutely delicious, but it’s also a lot of work. This time I made it even more work by attempting the fancy, multi-colored pastas that I’ve seen people making on the internet. I needed some natural coloring, so I used the one brightly colored thing I still had in my garden: sweet potato leaves. I cooked the leaves and pureed them and added them into some of the pasta dough to make striped dough. It was a lot tougher to do than they make it appear in internet videos. The pasta was stuffed with a cheesy, garlicy, roasted squash mixture. The squash and garlic were both from my garden. The pasta was served in a brown butter and sage sauce. It was sublime, but took most of the day to make.

Overall, the month was a little dry and quite warm. There were multiple weeks I decided to use my sprinklers to water because we didn’t get nearly enough rain. And our air conditioning was on for a lot of the time while the heat was only on for the last couple days (we tried to engage in the local sport of holding out till at least November before turning the heat on, but we quit when the temperature indoors didn’t get above 62 degrees for the day). There were no frosts and no temperatures near or below freezing, so most of my plants were still going strong at the end of the month.

John and I have been talking about how much we need to take more time off to help us cope with the stress of the pandemic and work. Then I saw a reason to take a long weekend away. There’s a place in Southern Illinois called Scratch Brewing. One of my Facebook friends wrote about visiting it a couple years ago, and I’ve wanted to go there ever since. They use all kinds of locally foraged plants in their brewing. I was intrigued but we never actually went there. Then Scratch’s announcement about their Octoberfest popped into my Facebook feed, and I decided it was time to visit.

We organized a couple days around our visit to Scratch. We found a cabin nearby where we could stay for a couple nights and drove out on a Friday so we could be at Scratch when they opened on Saturday. It was fantastic! The flavors were incredibly complex and layered. Some were surprising. All of them were fantastic. It was a cool, rainy day and was absolutely perfect for sitting in their outdoor dining area sampling all their drinks and eating good food. We spent several hours leisurely drinking and eating. All of it was created with an eye for what’s local. It was SO GOOD, and we can’t wait to go back.

September 2021: Quite Buggy

When I went through my photos from September, it seemed like there were lots of bugs. Some I didn’t even notice when I took the picture, but some were very noticeable indeed. The month began with me noticing hordes of squash bugs on the squash, a discovery that marked the end of all remaining hope for nice squash this year. Then there were numerous yellow garden spiders that strung their webs here and there throughout my garden. And the stink bugs, praying mantises, bumble bees, cicadas, and other small beetles and moths.

But the big insect story from the month were the monarchs. I saw probably 4-6 different caterpillars on my swamp milkweed in August and September, and finally in early September I saw one turning into a chrysalis. It’s the first time I’ve seen a chrysalis in my garden and it was very cool! I watched the chrysalis for about two weeks. Finally it got darker, and gradually I could see the butterfly’s wings inside. About a day or two later, my research told me to expect the butterfly to emerge. I watched it happen over my lunch break. Of course, I missed the exact moment the chrysalis broke open, but I saw most of the butterfly’s emergence. It was very interesting, but sadly something went wrong and the wings never fully filled out so they dried with wrinkles in them and the butterfly couldn’t fly. I was sad about it, but hopefully my milkweed will feed new caterpillars next year and at least one will successfully turn into a healthy butterfly. In the meantime, my flowers are feeding plenty of other monarchs passing through on their way to Mexico.

I’ve had plenty of blossoms in my garden including sunflowers, zinnias, tassel flowers (that the butterflies love), marigolds, hardy begonias, and tons of morning glories on my back fence that come up on their own. Toward the end of the month, I added a small strip of native plants by the street. I’m hoping it will fill out next year and I plan to add more. My patch of basil has been providing nice seasoning for meals, I’ve eaten some of my okras (and I’ve enjoyed even more of their pretty blooms), and my melons and beans continue to produce.

But most of my vegetable garden area has been a big mass of leaves and not much else. The Mexican sour gherkins took over and blanketed half my tomatoes to the point that the tomatoes mostly just gave up. The other half of the tomatoes never had been happy, so they also just gave up but for different, unknown reasons. The gherkins (aka cuke-a-melons) are really cute, bite-sized fruits, but I didn’t have time to really do anything with them this year. I ate a few raw and the rest stayed on the vines. Last year I made fun little pickles with them, but I didn’t have the energy to do that this year.

However, over Labor Day weekend I DID have the energy to make fresh pasta with a raw tomato and basil sauce. The basil was from my garden, the tomatoes were from my garden and Patchwork’s, and the pasta was made with eggs from a friend, fancy eincorn flour, and semolina. I also made a peach dessert using local peaches.