garden miscellany

Various things in the garden:

terra cotta

Say ‘Hello’ to Terra Cotta, one of the new tomato varieties in our garden: A green cap fades into beautiful orange skin. The meat is a marbled mix of the two colors. The taste is high in acid but more berry-like in its sweetness.

you take the good, you take the bad…

…and there you have the facts of ‘maters. The Terra Cotta is promising: full healthy plants with large clusters of fruit, slow to ripen. The Black Beauty had a great start, but the most mature fruit just rotted on the vine. The plant looks perfectly healthy. The San Marzano are prolific, even if the lower […]

lawn care in high heat

This evening was overcast and in the mid-80s for the first time all week. And the only time, with a heat advisory through the weekend. So, I gassed up the Toro and cut the yard. It needed it. For all the drive I have to diminish the lawn and replace it food and flowers, cutting […]

today’s haul + flowers

After a heavy rain, I harvested the botched garlic crop (planted late) and hope to dry them some and replate this fall. What we got right this year are beets and carrots. some are still growing to size, but they are gorgeous! Additionally, the randomly scattered dill seeds (plus some volunteers from last year) were […]

what’s the ‘mater?

Overall our tomatoes are doing well. We are losing a few plants, but they put out a good round of fruit before they started drying out. The other plants are doing fine. This is the third time I’ve grown Black Prince, and each time they only get so far into summer before the plant shrivels […]

orange you glad to see me?

Some overlying goals of my garden plans are a broad range of blooming times and a color pallette that rolls through the spectrum as flowers come and go. Currently, the featured color is orange, which is heavy through most of peak summer. The gorgeous triple daylilies are about to finish: As the daylilies finish, the […]

it don’t mean a thing…

If it ain’t got a swing. The frame was a gift from a lovely friend. I searched with the manufacturer’s name and found the swing online. I recently realized that the garden has advanced enough that planning seating and social vignettes should step up to match. For one step away from hodgepodge, we’re starting from […]

sowing autumn

I wanted two beds for fall harvest, and the beets and carrots are still going, so… I built another bed yesterday, picked up more topsoil to fill it today. I still have to clear the first bed of whatever garlic managed to grow (I planted it much too late this year), but I sowed the […]

humming among the flowers

I caught this gal buzzing through the bee balm and crocosmia today: