Lee Harps

Tonight, with the wind blowing and the temperatures dropping, it becomes most apparent that gardening, as we know it, will soon come to its end for the season and the winter will bring with it indoor activities so sorely ignored because of the garden’s perpetual requirements.

As the wind blew some of my wife’s scarves, it reminded me of a scene one might see in the movies.

Nearby, one of our many squirrels was enjoying a feast on the new bird feeder.

We have not yet experienced frost, so the insects continue to thrive, working until the very end of the season laying away necter for a long winter. Here are a couple of the local bees hard at work.

The veggies in the garden are still producing a bit. I had lost all my zucchini to the borers some time ago, but was surprised to find a small side shoot alive and well as I walked thru the garden this week. The fruit on it is small, but with a few additional warm days, it would have promise.

This tomato plant is looking a bit worse for wear, but even so, I was able to pick quite a few very nice tomatoes from it.

The sweet peppers, while less in numbers, are still producing quite nicely.

I had mentioned my “cole crop” late plantings in an earlier posting. It was quite warm mid-week, and to my chagrin, the white cabbage butterflies were having a heyday! I decided it wise to apply the bacterial remedy for them, bacillis thuringensis, which organically gives cabbage worms a fatal tummy ache. This is a liquid mixed into water and applied to the leaves via a sprinkling can.

The row is looking pretty healthy.

On closer examination, some very nice heads of broccoli are developing.

We had a particularly nice return from the cantaloupe seeds I had “recycled” from an early season cantaloupe we had purchased to eat.

Like the “perfect” gardener, I was able to wash and dry more seeds for next summer; so much less expensive than buying seed.

Here’s an unusual caterpiller story. Several weeks ago, my Martha Stewart wife brought into the kitchen a bouquet of lovely dill blooms which she arranged artistically in a lovely little pitcher of water and placed it visually and strategically near the kitchen sink, mostly “for pretty”, as the Pa. Dutch would say it. Soon thereafter, we noticed that the dill was inhabited and being consumed – by a very lovely little caterpiller.

Isn’t this nice, thought we?! As with all beings that eat, what goes in must come out. Tiny though it was, Mr. Caterpiller didn’t have the greatest toilet habits and began to leave a most unpleasant residue of black pellets around the pitcher. After a short time of tolerating this, Mrs. Stewart decided that Mr. Caterpiller should spend the rest of his development on the deck.

Unfortunately, this story does not have a very happy ending (or so it seems). Yesterday, in the process of renewing the dill leaves for his diet, I was able to get a rather nice photo of him.

By evening yesterday, much to our dismay, Mr. Caterpiller was GONE! My guess is that one of our many birds happened to see this lovely dish and had a feast. SO, it was fun while it lasted.

It is surely fall, most of the final tomatoes have been picked.

and the annual decorative gourd collection seems to have appeared on the deck once again.

It’s a wonderful time of the year.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 12th, 2006 at 7:38 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.