Ack

With a forecast like this: 

All I can do is water and hope things survive!

Embarrassing

Because we made it to 101 on Monday, it was time to pull out the tomatoes. We harvested all the remaining tomatoes and have a plan to make some green tomato chutney. While pulling them up I saw my plant labels. 

For the first time since I planted I realized I bought some yellow cherry tomatoes. This explains why some of our tomatoes never seem to ripen, but now I've got a ton of tomatoes and I can't tell if they are unripe red ones or ripe yellow. The vines got so intertwined by the end I can't even guess based on where I'm pulling tomatoes from.

Lesson learned. Next time if I buy yellow tomatoes, I will make sure they are cherries and my red ones are grape. Or just pay better attention to what I buy in general.

But the garden is still going! We've got some squash blossoms. I can't wait to see if they are yellow or green squash. I planted both, but I don't know what grew.

The basil is thrilled to have some more room- the tomatoes were taking more then their fair share of the garden.

And now that the tomatoes are gone, maybe my pepper plants can get enough sun to grow!

101, but still flowering..

We had our first 100+ day on Monday. So far, everything we planted is still alive and we're getting some flowers...

Even my hydrangea

Our neighbors might think we're crazy

If you walk by our house today, you might notice this in a tree in the front yard:

Inside is this:

It appears a blue jay nest fell apart somehow and there are at least two fledglings in our yard. We've successfully gotten one into a box in the tree but the other one we know about is currently hiding under the shed. The parents are understandably upset. 

So far they've survived two nights and from what I can tell they seem pretty close to flying so hopefully they'll make it!

Looking out the dining room

When my dad was here, we finally got around to putting up the pot hangers I mentioned here. This weekend I was able to find 6 inch pots (Home Depot was out, but Lowe's came to the rescue). I added two varieties of sweet potato vine and some coleus. I really like the view now...

Tomato Fortress

I love having tomatoes, and love that we've had so many (I just canned my first ones on Sunday). What I don't love is picking some and finding holes in them already from birds and squirrels. 

I bought some garden netting a few weeks ago, and it's worked pretty well, but was hard to pick the tomatoes. Twice a bird got in and had a lot of trouble getting out, and the squirrel figured out he could jump on top and push the netting down to meet the top of the plant and still eat tomatoes.

So I made a fortress!

It's just a cube of PVC pipe with netting tied to it, but it works pretty well! I made myself a little "door" that I can untie and get in there, but so far it seems to have kept everything else out. 

I also like that I didn't glue it, so I can pull it apart and store it pretty easily once we're done or add some expansions for when our garden grows!

Here's my favorite helper in Home Depot's PVC aisle.

Longshot

I am very jealous of my sister Karen's hydrangeas. She lives in Atlanta and the house they bought already had some. She just waters and they grow really well!

I've been reading a lot about them, and I know they need part sun and prefer it to be morning sun rather than the afternoon. I was sitting in my kitchen looking out and realized that the area under our trees in the back gets morning sun! So it might be a longshot, but we bought a hydrangea and planted it. I'm picturing it as a huge bush with a ton of flowers. If it even gets close to that, I'd like two more for that area (and we'll move the caladiums to the perimeter. 

G helped me dig the hole and water it (you can see it behind him on the right). In this picture he's working on his watering skills, but on the grass.

Uh oh..something more interesting came up!

Just a little hydrangea, all alone...

New Gardens

My parents were here a few weekends ago and my dad added to our garden area by turning the soil in the spot next to the shed. It doesn't get a lot of water, so anything that goes here needs to be drought tolerant. For some reason, I bought all sun plants even though this area is definitely shaded for a solid part of the day. However, they are still doing really well so maybe it gets enough sun! I had to move one plant because Chuy kept stepping on it.

New Garden: 

He also finished extending this garden as far as we want it to go. I'm not sure why this picture is so fuzzy- I guess I moved the camera. He builds really nice rock walls, which you can't see from this picture at all. 

I wish I could say I helped, but I didn't help as much as I was planning to. My biggest contribution was telling him that our garden cart was a dump cart and so he could just dump the (still very many) pebbles he collected instead of having to shovel them in and then out.

Gladiolus

They're blooming, and I love it!

Giant Sunflowers Indeed

My sunflowers just keep growing. They are now well over our fence. Hopefully the high school kids working out on the football field behind us appreciate them!

We're not planning to harvest them for seeds or anything- we're going to let the birds take care of that and hope some seeds get left behind for a crop next year. After all, most of the birdseed I look at buying in the store has  sunflower seeds in it!

Here's a look back. Empty garden:

Sunflowers just starting to come up!

Growing...

I thought they were big when I took this picture!

Today!