Our Garden Slowly Says Goodbye to Summer

The torrential rains today were most welcome in Sara’s flower and vegetable garden beds! We tried to irrigate them as best as we could with our system of soaker hoses that could be hooked up with a click of a plastic connector, but some parts of the garden had to be watered manually, including a series of Dahlia flowers that she is cultivating to enter into the Fall Fair competition.

Hedgehog is looking forward to adding wheels and decorating some huge zucchinis to enter into the races at the Fair. We added extra Iguana Juice and Voodoo Juice to the

zucchinis to help them grow big. Some of the beneficial nutrients and microbes spilled over to the pumpkins growing next to the cucumbers, and a huge pumpkin that still has a lot of time to grow before Halloween, is the result!

With our tomatoes, we seem to have hit the jackpot! We eat Greek salad almost every night, so we grew a lot of cherry tomatoes. The orange cherry tomatoes this year are very numerous and have a heavenly taste! The yellow ones are okay, too, but the orange ones are superb! We also have some red ones, but they take a very long time to turn red.

The long dry spell and warm sunshine worked their magic on the hot Hungarian peppers. If you haven’t tasted one of these straight off the vine, you haven’t really tasted any. The supermarket variety pales in comparison. It’s not that they’re the hottest I’ve ever had, it’s the freshness of the flesh of the vegetable that makes me go back for more, each time. Next year, we’ll plant a lot more of these.

The phlox are still trying their best, but we’ll have to start deadheading them soon. The black eyed Susans are still in their prime, as are some yellow flowers whose name escapes me at the moment. Sara has collected so many different kinds of plants over the years, that it’s really hard to keep up. Even she draws a blank sometimes, when asked.

This rain will be followed by summer sunshine and temperatures over the Labor Day weekend, but after that Sara will start slowly removing the yellowed, dried up stalks and deadheading the flowers. She redesigned her main flower beds and it’s still a work in progress. As a result, we had very few roses this year. I’m sure that will be corrected in the coming year, because we both love roses!

The largest and best tomato plants in the entire neighborhood!

Sara has been diligently nurturing our vegetables (tomatoes, zucchini, cucumbers, snap peas, lettuce--of five different kinds, dill, oregano, red bell peppers, yellow Hungarian banana peppers, beans, pumpkins,  and the best damn home-grown carrots you can imagine.) They are growing in a flower bed circumscribed by a wooden enclosure in the front, or in another bed made of composted kitchen scraps and shredded fallen leaves, in the back of our house.

Our summer weather is nothing to write home about, but we managed to get enough sunny days, between rainy and overcast ones, to enable the Advanced Nutrients organic Iguana Juice to work its magic. The lady from the local garden club came by and told Sara that she has the biggest and most fertile tomato plants in the entire neighborhood!

As usual, Sara's flowers are twice the size of what they should be (a three-foot Phlox is now a six-foot super Phlox!). Sara does take good care of her soil, to be sure, but I suspect it's the regular application of the Iguana formulation that causes the growth spurt. As well as the prolific number of Roses on one of her prize bushes.

She started growing Dahlias in semi-hydroponic plastic containers. You have to fill up the reservoir at the bottom of the container and the soil and the roots get moisture through capillary action from below. Sara also has a network of soaker-hoses intertwined with her plants, and buried near their root systems to keep them well watered during the hot, summer days.

It's a lot of work, Sara's style of gardening. She is redesigning the main flower bed and has bought some very nice rocks to build a rock wall around it. Prior to this, the soil in this particular bed was contained by select pieces of driftwood, which are slowly rotting away and are even growing mushrooms!

The huge Lilies dominate one portion of her garden, not just by their sheer size and beauty, but also by the wonderful fragrance they emit, causing each passer-by to comment very favorably!

I wish I had more time to document Sara's garden, but this will give you a taste of what it's like living near this small Paradise surrounding our home--and created by my wife.

BTW, that muddy gardener is our new puppy, Cooper!