drive-by update
I was AWOL last week because I was on vacation in Iceland. It rained the whole time, so no aurora borealis for me. Very sad about that, but I had a fantastic time otherwise. Yes, blog posts and pics are to come in the next few weeks.
My garden is starting to shift into autumn. The daisies are all dead, the tomatoes are still producing but showing signs of slowing. The green beans are all small and curved--they ate all their fertilizer. The Brussels sprout plants are getting bigger every day, but something started chomping on them big time, so I doused them in nasty poison, but I suspect I will need to keep dousing.
I need to harvest the last of the catnip before it goes to seed--I don't want that growing wild in the garden, oh no no. The dwarf basil went to seed, which is fine. I like watching the bumble bees in the basil flowers, with fat clumps of pollen around their legs. It makes me happy to think I'm feeding the bees, and in return the bees will make sure I have seeds for basil next year.
The four frisee plants that sat doing nothing all summer have woken back up now that the weather is cool, and I've tied three of them off. #4 will get tied off later, and I still have two more seedlings in reserve, just waiting their turn to go outside. I love how being lazy works out to having my produce spaced along. Even the tomatoes: the four original plants are nearing the end of their production, while the erstwhile "redundant seedlings" are now ripening and, barring early frost, will continue to produce for a few more weeks. (They're also massively overgrown. I need to work out some other system next year.)
Perhaps this weekend I will do front-yard cleanup and get all the daisy corpses out of there. I should probably also cut back the sea grass--it's becoming very untidy. I like how it makes noise, but I don't particularly like it as a decorative element. I suspect I'll be digging up a lot of the front plantings now that I know what they are. The black-eyed susans are pretty, but the gerbera daisies are a very strange color. They look as if they're trying to be pink or lavender, but are just gray-brown. Greige. Not attractive. How Stuff Works suggests this might be a mold infestation. Ugh.