Late Blooming Babies

 It's late September and my peppers and zucchinis finally decide to start producing!  

Nothing but flowers all summer from my peppers.  

The zucchinis have had beautiful flowers all summer long, but some critter keeps snipping them off before the veggie can grow.  

It's a coin toss as to whether I will get any harvest before the first freeze.  The biggest pepper is about the size of my thumbnail.  The zucchini is about 1.5 inches long.  They are very cute though.

Caprese

 Made some chopped Caprese salad with fresh tomatoes and basil from the garden.

Fruit of my Labor

 We had strawberry plants when I was a child.  I bought a couple plants this year to see how it would go and so far I've been really pleased with the plants.  They are getting big and starting to produce lovely ripened fruit (as long as I get to them before naughty critters.)

They had a rocky start with some of the earliest fruit in June getting bug infested or chomped on by critters.  I'll get more plants next year and work harder to keep pests away.

Bedraggled Butterfly

Thursday evening I was out checking my garden when I noticed a butterfly upside down in a cup of water.  I saw it struggling to right itself, so I quickly and carefully picked it out.  The poor, bedraggled, soaking-wet creature sat on my finger fluttering its wings and trying to dry out.  

I looked for a safe place to set it and found a nice milkweed.  It latched onto the milkweed and sat sunning itself in the evening glow.  It may not be able to fly with such tattered wings, but it seemed grateful for the helping hand.

Blooming Strawberries

 

This is How My Garden Grows

It's been 12 years since I've planted a produce garden!  We got a couple raised planters this spring.  One is fully complete and I'm enjoying watching everything grow.  These plants (zucchini and snow pea) were supposed to go in the second planter, but they were starting to grow so fast that I decided to plant them in bed number 1 instead.  Yes, I ate that first snow pea.