I promised I'd show you some pictures of and around our garden, so here goes...
This is one of our several semi-dwarf apple trees. They're about 6 years old, and not producing like the dickens yet. The fruits tend to be small and ugly (we don't use chemicals), but the flavor is so complex, it's like the best Pink Lady you've never eaten. ;)
I didn't get a photo of the Asian pear tree, but these are just a few of the fruits we harvested:
I bought a couple of geraniums from someone selling them for 4-H earlier in the year, and, for some reason, they just never did very well. One of them is finally putting out a bit more bloom:
...but the other has one foot in the grave, apparently:
And speaking of grave, one of our summer squash plants bit the dust - a sad combination of the fruits not being harvested enough while we were away and borer worm damage.
Sometimes, though, what looks like death just means it's ready to harvest. Take these sweet onions, for example:
The yellow onions are not quite harvest-ready yet:
We finally bought some grapes to plant this year! Here's a close-up of one of the 3 plants:
From farther out, you can see they're kind of tiny and pathetic. Deer got to them one evening (before dh put up the fencing) and munched one heavily.
The opposite of tiny and pathetic would be our tomatoes. Dh thinks it's because of the grass clippings mulch he's been putting on them, but these babies are 8 feet tall!
We're growing several varieties, as usual, but these grape ones are especially cute and tasty:
The corn is doing splendidly too:
We had our first meal of it Friday evening. Look at those lovely ears:
Wandering around, here are some of the (messy) leaks:
and some mildly spicy yellow peppers that dh thinks might be Hungarian yellow:
One of our green bean beds:
The celery always does pretty well for us. Because we don't "blanch" them, they retain a very strong flavor that you'd never find in ones from the store.
Inside the greenhouse, we have the Japanese eggplants which have never failed us yet. They're not bitter like the fat eggplants that are more common and the skin isn't tough either.
And here's another killer tomato plant inside the greenhouse (notice how it presses on the ceiling?).
Most people grow flowers to attract bees and other pollinators. We just grow flowering veggies, which are useful/tasty as well as pretty. Here's a bee on a gai lan (an Asian green) flower:
Not from our garden, but this is the wackiest case of a dead frog. Yup, you read right: it's dead, but looks amazingly alive. Dh found it in the pool. Fascinatingly creepy.
Do you have anything wacky or fascinatingly creepy to share? Hope you're all enjoying the weekend!
"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be." ~ Douglas Adams
I didn't get a photo of the Asian pear tree, but these are just a few of the fruits we harvested:
I bought a couple of geraniums from someone selling them for 4-H earlier in the year, and, for some reason, they just never did very well. One of them is finally putting out a bit more bloom:
...but the other has one foot in the grave, apparently:
And speaking of grave, one of our summer squash plants bit the dust - a sad combination of the fruits not being harvested enough while we were away and borer worm damage.
Sometimes, though, what looks like death just means it's ready to harvest. Take these sweet onions, for example:
The yellow onions are not quite harvest-ready yet:
We finally bought some grapes to plant this year! Here's a close-up of one of the 3 plants:
From farther out, you can see they're kind of tiny and pathetic. Deer got to them one evening (before dh put up the fencing) and munched one heavily.
The opposite of tiny and pathetic would be our tomatoes. Dh thinks it's because of the grass clippings mulch he's been putting on them, but these babies are 8 feet tall!
We're growing several varieties, as usual, but these grape ones are especially cute and tasty:
The corn is doing splendidly too:
We had our first meal of it Friday evening. Look at those lovely ears: 
Wandering around, here are some of the (messy) leaks:
and some mildly spicy yellow peppers that dh thinks might be Hungarian yellow:
One of our green bean beds:
The celery always does pretty well for us. Because we don't "blanch" them, they retain a very strong flavor that you'd never find in ones from the store.
Inside the greenhouse, we have the Japanese eggplants which have never failed us yet. They're not bitter like the fat eggplants that are more common and the skin isn't tough either.
And here's another killer tomato plant inside the greenhouse (notice how it presses on the ceiling?).
Most people grow flowers to attract bees and other pollinators. We just grow flowering veggies, which are useful/tasty as well as pretty. Here's a bee on a gai lan (an Asian green) flower:
Not from our garden, but this is the wackiest case of a dead frog. Yup, you read right: it's dead, but looks amazingly alive. Dh found it in the pool. Fascinatingly creepy.
Do you have anything wacky or fascinatingly creepy to share? Hope you're all enjoying the weekend!