Fruits of a Neglected Garden

I thought the garden was done for the year - I went out to pull up some of the dead, dried up plants and found a very short, fat cucumber!  I laughed - it was sort of funny-looking.

Then I went toward the last of my zucchini plants and noticed something dark green and shiny under the dried-up leaves.

Oh, my.

I brought my loot in and laid my cordless phone down next to them for size reference.  The first is the cucumber.  The rest is zucchini.



That is the single biggest zucchini I have ever grown!  Mostly because I pick them small, but still!

Also, we planted watermelons this year, and they didn't do very well.  At least, in the 'real' garden, they didn't!  But earlier in the summer, we had a pool party and someone apparently spit their seeds into the old, empty flower beds that line one side of the pool.



Those are some good-sized watermelons, considering we just decided to leave the plants and see what would happen, and they got no attention at all.  Not even Miracle-Grow.  We are picking them tomorrow and I will take a picture with something for size reference.  There are three or four other watermelons on the plants, but they are not this big yet and we are trying to nurse them along, with newspaper over them at night to keep the cold away.

Here's a tiny bit of stitching for you - I took this picture a week or two ago and forgot about it.  It is Fred with a little more than 1/4 of his backstitching done.  I'm working on the second half of the top shelf, now.  He still needs his whiskers, but they are last!  It's taking me a little bit of time since I found some missed stitching, there are metallics, and also I keep putting him down to work on afghans.



And another HAED for your viewing pleasure!  This is Sun and Stars by Katerina KouKiotis:



And QS Kissy Fish by Hannah Lynn



By the way - there is an un-announced 50% off sale at HAED right now!  May I have another layaway, please?

Some Fruits of My Labor

It has rained all summer.

All.

Summer.

Long.

It has been hot and humid and dark and rainy and horrible.  My poor, poor garden!  It did so well at first.

My tomatoes are literally rotting on the vines - they get big and green and pretty, then start to turn red and almost every one rots off overnight.  If they don't rot, blight starts setting in.  It's happening to every single garden around here, so we're all picking our tomatoes green and bringing them inside to ripen on windowsills.  I thought I'd show you yesterday's garden basket.



There are two cucumbers down in there, too, but I forgot to pull them up where they could be seen.  The zucchini plant is producing like mad; no problems with it!  I only got one in this basket but I usually have two or three.  And my 'winter' squash, like butternut and the white scallop you see here, is just starting to come in and seems fine.  It's mostly the tomatoes - the cherry tomatoes are doing the best but about a third of them go bad.  They ripen so fast it's hard to keep up, though.  You can see some spots on a few tomatoes where they were already starting to turn bad - and one, lone, healthy, almost ripe red one.  Oh well.  They taste just as garden-fresh when they ripen in a sunny kitchen!

That basket was soooo heavy when I was done!  And tomorrow's will be just as full, but it's starting to turn cold at night so I don't think the garden has much longer.  Grow, little squashes!  Grow fast!

May Flowers

Alternate blog title - 'Now I Will Ramble About Plants, After Some Stitching Progress'

So April is over and May is here - I had lots of fun with the A-Z challenge and wanted to say 'Welcome!' to my new followers!  I'm slowly working my way through all the blog posts I missed - April was crazy with work and all.

My stitching goals bombed, too, but I did get another motif on Mary done.  It was a rich burgundy-brown shade this time around.  I hadn't used this color in the pattern yet.



And I promised a picture of the whole project - here is how she looks!  I think there is another motif and then a really small one and I will have reached the bottom on the left hand side.



The colors are still washed out - I have yet to manage a good picture of the colors.  Those two nearly-invisible motifs show up perfectly well in real-life.

After the luck I had with Patty, I was telling a co-worker that I thought I might get a few more plants, maybe, and she took that as a hint that I wanted cuttings of the ones on her desk, because I had told her before that I knew how to do that - sometimes.  It works with some plants, others it doesn't.  But she immediately handed me some scissors.  It actually works better to break them, or so I've found, so that's what I did.  I really wasn't hinting, by the way, because starting plants from cuttings can be annoying.  But I took what I thought might work, and wrapped them in wet paper towels and took them home.

There were four - a plain green leaf, a cactus-y plant, a pretty little heart-shaped plant, and one of those pink vines.  The cactus and the heart-shaped one I was able to get a bit of root, so I started those in soil.  The other two were in water, with paper towels to hold the leaves above it, so they wouldn't rot.






This was two or three weeks ago, and today I noticed that the little pink plant was putting out a tiny bit of new shoot - very good sign!  So I checked, and yes - there was quite a bit of root under that paper towel!  So into some dirt she went:



See her little, tiny new growth? And her other leaves are bigger.  The plant beside her is doing so well that she's got a name (Agnes) and is about to put into a real pot.  The little pink one will get a name if she continues to grow.

The other two - I don't know.  The first one is getting very pale, and I checked and there is no root growth.  I'm not throwing her out yet, but I don't think she's going to 'take'.  I'm not sure about the cactus.  He wilted rather badly for a while, but now he has plumped back up again.  He still doesn't look all that healthy, and there is no new growth, but I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt.  This pic shows the whole little shelf under my kitchen window, where they are sitting, along with some strawberry plants.



The point of all this rambling, is that taking care of these wee ones has started my gardening itch up big time.  So when our little mom-and-pop grocery store got their spring plants in, I bought... um, a few too many.  Here's what most of my kitchen is covered in (makes it hard to do dishes.  I hate doing dishes.  Wonder if there's a connection?)



This is about half of what I got.  There are a lot of veggies and some flowers.  I'm nursing them along until May 10th - that's the almanac date for going outside!  These will mostly be in containers this year, because I didn't get a garden spot plowed up.  Next year will be different!  The flowers will be going in the 'real' dirt, though!

One last picture - last year my snowball bush was, um, it looked really mangy.  This year I went out when the blossoms first started and cut off a good half, at least of the parts I could reach.  My snowball is much taller than me!  Now the blossoms are already the size they were last year when they turned white - so I hope they will grow much bigger!  That big one isn't turning, it's just flash-burned.



This is the only kind of snow left around here!  Knock on wood - but I've never once seen it snow after the last week of April.  My Dad says it has, but I don't remember it.  Is it Spring where you guys are?

Nostlagy's Hair

It's done, at least on the first page.



I even got a little tiny bit of the next page.

Onward! to the rest of the hair : D

By the way, remember my little adopted plant, Patty?

She's feeling much better!  (and apparently reaching for something...)

I think it's sort of neat that her newer leaves are very shiny compared to her older leaves.  I don't know if they'll change or not, but I like them.

Some more HAEDS - these two are sort of a set.

Sessler's Companions: Friendship


and Companions: Trust

Patty Makes Three

Random post!  And unfortunately, that post title does not mean I have a new kitten.

I'd love one, Grizabella would (eventually) love one, but Audio would never forgive me.  Grumpy old man-cat.

Once upon a time, before I moved to where I live now, I had quite the collection of houseplants.  Forty-seven, if I remember correctly.  All kitty-safe.

Then I moved, and the propane was supposed to be gone, because even a whiff gives me a migraine.  Instead, I moved my plants carefully, and some of my furniture, and came back after the weekend to find the house stinking of propane and most of my plants dead.  I know I'm lucky the place didn't blow up, but I still was upset about my plants.  Only eight of them lived.  I didn't have the time and money to invest in replacing them, so I just babied the eight to the point that I jokingly gave them names to annoy my siblings.

Last year, during the blizzard, I lost six of those eight.  Our generator wasn't working and that was that.

The two I had left were Penny and Polly, respectively.  One Aloe plant and one Christmas cactus.  And I only managed to save part of them.  They seemed to go dormant for awhile, but recently they've been getting bigger and bigger and now they pretty much need new pots.

Here they are, cavorting with my owl collection:


Penny is the Aloe, and Polly is the cactus. (She likes to grow down instead of up.)  It was just coincidence that left the two live plants with P names and double letters.  I decided to just keep the two and not worry about houseplants for now.

Yesterday, my Mum, who is not much of a plant lover, had a friend hand her a very, very sad little plant.

She promptly handed it to me.  Here it is as it looked yesterday:


I don't even know what those brown things are supposed to be.  They are paper-mache or something.  They are plant-pokes, and there were five.  All stuck in the dirt of a very, very pot-bound plant.

Here's the new plant today - named Patty so she would match, haha! - in her temporary pot.  It was all I had available until I can get some new ones.  I'll be leaving her in it for a while now, though, so she doesn't get shocked by too many moves.  It's sitting on her old pot until I can get a pie pan or something to put under it.  Doesn't she look a lot happier, though?  In just a day!


It's going to take a little while to coax her into a pretty shape - vines can be a lot of fun when you train them to grow where you want.

I don't really plan to add any more right now - does anyone happen to know what the plant-name of Patty is, though?  I haven't looked her up yet.

To keep a little stitching interest, here is another HAED from my layaways:


Prindle's 'Untamed Spirit'.