This would be a long blog if I wrote about everything I spied on my late morning meander through the gardens. Some of it is just awesome (such as dramatically blossoming flowers like Hibiscus, or trusses of ripening - long anticipated! - tomatoes). Some is a bit more sobering (finding half of a tomato chewed away, or tomatoes with tell tale signs of fruit worm, and the inevitable passage of this or that variety due to one of the plethora of diseases that strike).
What a week it has been - we are hosting our daughter and her family...such fun (such non-stop activity - young boys....say no more!). Tomato dinners, tomato day, a podcast (my first with Margaret Roach of A Way to Garden), a radio show with my friend Niki . Daily thunderstorms, stifling heat and humidity. Through it all, the garden marches on, fueled by the heat and the rain. Gardeners - well, this one, at least - thrive on routine, plans, daily rituals. Gardens thrive when those daily rituals happen. Weeks like this bust the rituals, fiddle with the routines - and this is not a complaint at all - life happens, as it should. But it reinforces why there is no perfect garden, or perfect gardening season. Life happens, family happens, diseases or weather or critters happen. Isn't it great that we get to do this every year, approaching but never achieving the ideal...but we still try.
I took dozens of pictures, and a few are shown below. I spied a tree full of figs only weeks from ripening....all of our various hibiscus varieties in bloom, along with lantana and butterfly bush in our side pollinator (formerly main veggie) garden. There are eggplant and tomatoes ready to pick (next thing on my agenda for today). And, there is creeping foliage disease, signs of critters (deer prints, worm holes, visible chewing of squirrels, I suspect), plants that need topping and tying and reinforcing (the gusts from this weeks' thunderstorms, or growth of the plants, or weight of the fruit perturbing the order of things).
The boys are at the pool, the house is quiet, I've got a few hours to fight entropy - bring a bit of order to that which so desires to go to disorder. Which is just as it should be...because such is inevitable!
Below are pics of two eggplant - Skinny Twilight (one of mine from the hybrid Orient Express) and the incredible, striped Listada di Gandia - as well as a few other this and that pics from my late morning garden saunter.
