Sunday Garden Report

I have completed the Dragonfly Trifecta!

In July, Patrick danced with dragonflies and Joe had cocktails with one. Today, one of these garden visitors decided to stop teasing me and posed on the faded head of a plantain flower. And what a chance to see what the new camera could do.

Do click to embiggen and admire those wings!

Yes, there's a new camera. It's been a tax-free weekend here in Massa chusetts and I'd been saving up some money saved from not smoking (30 days today!!) and such since my old camera went on to its reward back in the spring.

So now I'm experimenting with something new, an Olympus FE-310. So far, I'm having a great time with it, though I'm not sure I'm interested in the photo program that came along with the camera...my PhotoPlus 6.0 does all I need it to for developing purposes.


The first tentative photos were taken at that house party I visited last night. To the left are Vera and Chicao, two of our hosts...and down below is the whole bunch of us.

There had been other guests earlier, whom I unfortunately missed, but it was still fun to hang out for a while with everyone who was there when I arrived after a long night at work. Good tunes, a little dancing and Vera's special Brazilian potato salad!

Mmm mmm.


Here's me with Maria Paolo, Rocio and Katerin, who are all here on work visas from Columbia this summer.

By day, they are working as chamber maids, but in the evenings, the make the best team trio of dishwashers our restaurant has known in years! Plus, they're funny and sweet and great to party with!!


Despite the late night (it was around 2 a.m. when those pictures were taken!), I was up pretty early this morning, since I couldn't wait to get the new camera out for a spin in the garden.

A fresh round of bachelor's buttons provided some nice camera fodder. These little flowers - each one's about an inch across - just keep coming and coming...and in a great assortment of colors.




I just love the blue ones, but there are many of them up and down the fence garden. Naturally, I'm being won over by the purple ones in the color range, which were part of a range of about five different colors, so they are fewer in number.


The dappled sunlight behind this pair of purple pals is pretty delicious, too.



There's lots to learn about the new camera, so eventually I will have to sit down and have some quality time with the manual, to make sure I'm making full use of everything.

But I'm happy to say that its also pretty intuitive, and I've been having fun exploring some of the different settings.

As you might guess, my favorite, and one of the most appropriate to the Midnight Garden, is the macro-focus...and this camera also has a super-macro focus, and to celebrate I managed to stalk a few bees who were visiting the border this morning for your entertainment.


As you can see, sunshine made a full return to the Cape today and it really felt like summer. Looks like that'll be staying with us a for a few days, which is a comfort, since it's clear now the summer season is in decline.

In a moment typical of the sort of Charlie Brown-y moments which punctuate my life, last night I finally discovered my official cocktail for the 2008 Summer Season.


It's light and refreshing and mellow enough to enjoy more than one without falling down on my face. Being a frozen drink, the only real danger is a brain freeze from speedy consumption.

And no sooner did I victoriously hoist that Midori Colada in the air than leaves began falling from nearby trees, signalling the end of the season.

; )



Howdy, pardners! Life brought a straw cowboy hat my way this afternoon at work, when we hosted the annual un-birthday celebration of a local family.

This year's theme was cowboys and they were all appropriately attired, a wonderful Cape Cod mix of cowboy boots and flip-flops...and there were hats for all the staff who worked the party, too!

And just in time for Carnival Parade.

As I tried out the zoom feature, I caught this sunset-illuminated jet plane high overhead. It was flying east, out over the ocean, so I assume it was an international flight, though it occurs to me it might just have been circling around to approach Logan Airport in Boston from that direction.

In between pictures, I managed some serious dead-heading of the garden tonight. As always, lots of spent marigolds to remove, some more allyssum to trim back...a few faded bachelor's buttons here and there.

More of the daisies had gone past, so they were taken out and some of the coneflower rudbeckia was thinned a little, to encourage some late season reblooming.

I also took shears in hand and addressed the business of the now- tower ing spikes of evening primrose, pruning them back to something lower growing.

We'll see how well they respond to this sort of treatment; my suspicion is they will get bushy and stay a little shorter--I wish I'd thought to cut them back earlier in the season.

Once again, I unwound a great many morning glory vines around the re-captured flags on the fence, so for at least the next few hours, they should be able to flap with abandon on the occasional sea-breeze.


With nightfall coming just a little sooner, the deadheading turned into lighting candle lanterns in the garden and before long it was dark, leaving me free to head inside to sample that first Early Girl tomato.

There were two, actually, but I discovered that the second one had a nasty patch of mold growing on the bottom of it, so that one was jettisoned, but this one sliced nicely and was very tasty.

It would've made a nice tomato sandwich - the kind I've been craving all summer - if I had remembered that we had no bread in the house. But it was yummy just as it was...and tomorrow I'll make sure I'm stocked up to make a proper sandwich with the next couple in the harvest schedule.

It's not quite a full moon anymore--that was last night, but that just means I have a whole month to figure out how to take a great moon photo (no wisecracks, you lot...oh, ha ha...cracks...yah, whatever...) with the camera.

This one's not bad, but you can't see Jackie Gleason's face.

Gold and Glory

It's a good thing I gave you a one day break from the morning glories, because they sure figure prominantly today. But look at these colors and decide if you can blame me.

Once again, I am running a day behind and these are photos from Saturday morning's garden.

We had a late-night party at work (I expect that often sounds more fun than it is, though this was not an unpleasant evening by most accounts), so I didn't actually get out of there until well past midnight...and then stopped in briefly at a friend's house party, so my arrival at home was rather late and I really wasn't up for posting at that particular hour.

I didn't even get to watch much in the way of Olympic coverage yesterday, though I was finished with my shift in time to catch the medals ceremony for the US Swim Team, including wonder-aquaman Michael Phelps, who earned his eighth gold for these games, breaking Marc Spitz' old record of seven at the Munich Games in 1972.

(thanks to Afod for IMing me in the office as the shift wound down to let me know of Phelps' latest victory!)

Is it strange that I remember that? I think '72 was the first time I watched the Olympics. I'd have been seven years old at the time. Of course, those games were marred by awful things, so perhaps that burned it in my young memory, as well. But I remember Mark Spitz' poolside moments, too.

In an interesting bit of foreshadowing of Phelps' Olympic glory perhaps (because it's always easy to see the foreshadowing the next day), one of the sulphur cosmos plants - which had previously only been producing blooms in electric orange - began blooming in yellow...or maybe we should say, gold.


The garden is a wild patch of chaos still. No amount of deadheading will change that, though at least I can keep the blooming going.

Any serious attempts to weed things out at this point would probably leave big patches of emptiness and cause instability for the plants that would remain, as everything has grown together into something larger than themselves.

Which is fine by me: between work and life there's plenty to keep me occupied away from the business of obsessive garden tending. I'm afraid every August finds me leaving it to its own devices to some extent.


I have now harvested the first couple of Early Girl tomatoes, since they had finally come on with some nice color. I haven't tasted them yet, though, so I'll have to wait to give you the remainder of my review of them...and we'll see if mine are any tastier than other garden bloggers' reports.

Finally, I'll deflect your attention away from the garden for a moment, to show off my African violet, which is merrily blooming its little head off by my bedroom window.

Have a great Sunday, everyone!

Tuesday's Morning with Monday's Photos

So, here's the rest of the photos Blogger wouldn't let me upload last night. Nothing especially new and spectacular, just a few shots of yesterday's morning in the garden. That's the red dianthus, above, making an August return following deadheading.

To the right is the agastache I showed you a few weeks ago, with the licorice-y flowers and leaves. It's become a tidy little plant this summer, but I wonder just how tall it will become before we wrap for the season.

In the distance there, you can see the pale purple thistle flowers. I've mentioned before how I dug the seedling of this wildflower out of a railroad right-of-way...but I'm pleased with it in the garden. It's populating an area of poor soil other things might fail in and I just love those little flowers. Plus, it's turning out to be a good trellace for errant morning glories.

(Actually, apologies are offered...now that I'm looking at this post on a properly-colored monitor, I can see it's not that good a photo...you should see it in just blue, yellow and black...)

I've had lots of compliments and kind words from the neighbors on Not Wisteria Lane this summer. You can imagine they are mostly happy to have the colorful show on what was previously a bare split-rail fence. But the other night, one of our neighbors - in his 80s, we believe - walked over and grabbed hold of one of the branches of this wild thistle and said "What the hell is this?" (yelling more because of deafness than anger, I think...) I replied it was wild thistle. "You planted this? It's a weed!!" I tried to explain about a plant out of place, but that generation knows a weed must be eradicated. He shook his head in something like disgust and walked away.

Ah well, you can't make everyone happy.

It's a beautiful day this morning. There's bright sunshine from a brilliantly blue sky, with an assortment of white puffy clouds here and there overhead. The temperature is an even 70 degrees, but there's not a hint on humidity in the air.

In fact, it feels a little like September.

Garden In the Rain

At the end of what was a somewhat rainy and not overly-sunny week, the heavens opened up and the skies poured down with rain last night.

At one point, Em indicated a need to go out and when I opened the back door, we listened to the steady rain and she looked out, and then up at me with a "hell no" all over her face and went back to the couch to wait it out. Eventually, we tried again and only when I agreed to go out first and get wet with her did she quickly tend to her business. Then towels all around.

This morning I woke early to the sound of a renewed downpour, stronger than the night before and coming in the windows now. I got up to shut them and snapped a few shots before climbing back into bed.

There are, after all, few comforts nicer than being in your warm bed with the sound of the rain outside, especially when a cosy kitty curls up against your legs.

But this was not the sort of rain that's especially kind on gardens. There was a surplus, which tends to collect out front before soaking in...but a hard rain is also tough on delicate plants and causes everything to droop and bend and look pretty awful.

Okay, well, not necessarily awful...but besodden, bedraggled and forlorn, at the very least.

A morning rain does cancel the morning glories, who just sort of sag and droop without unfurling, their potential for brightening the day called on account of showers.

All the Queen Anne's lace hung heavy with raindrops. There will be much deadheading when all these wet flowers have dried in the sun.

The coneflowers were hit especially hard, some of them falling down flat as their roots loosened in the soaking soil and were particularly sad looking.

Of course, the flood waters were at an all time high, as you can see. The boat shoes were more like U-boat shoes this a.m. Perhaps they will have dried out in a day or so.

But I knew the coneflowers would be fine if I got them support right away, so I waded in to rig some loops of twine off the fence to hold them upright.

Only one stem had broken off, and it's good sometimes to have a reminder to bring some flowers inside. All too often I forget to do that.

Things looked a little better when I'd tended to that, though it would still be a little while before the rain tapered off to nothing and the excess began to soak in...which took a few hours more.

But as it was going, there were new surprises. This lavendar beebalm (monarda) has begun its serene display today...and not far from there I discovered a stalk that's suddenly leaped out of a low rosette of leaves. I'd been watching it to see just what it was going to be, and it appears I'll have some bellflowers/harebells to enjoy in a day or so.

And just a little further down from there, the first flower of the Stargazer oriental lily had sprung open in the rain.

So it's not all bad.

"The thirsty earth soaks up the rain,
And drinks, and gapes for drink again.
The plants suck in the earth, and are
With constant drinking fresh and fair."
- Abraham Cowley