My Garden of Earthly Delights

What's inside your veggies?

Someone took an MRI to find out what veggies look inside.  Fascinating!  I love how watermelon seeds are on curls inside - something you don't see when you cut them open.

Inside insides

Carving the giant pumpkins

It's Halloween, so now is the time I need to carve up these sort of giant pumpkins.  Being big, they aren't real nicely shaped, but I cope and do the best I can.  It was fun though.

 

this above turned into this below

Dragon gourds

I ran across these exotic gourds at a fair and just had to buy some and take them home to take pictures of.  I will use the seeds next year and see if I can grow my own.

Soft warm shades of color

Spent a while messing with some gebera daisies that I had bought and came up with this shot:

Purty pictures

Today I was roaming the property looking for purty things to take pictures of.

Here's what I found:

a graceful gourd

 

a luscious red pepper,

A sculptural sunflower bud

another sunflower that opened

I'm starting to think praying mantis's really like sunflowers to play on

It's actually hard to take a bad picture of a cone flower once you have it in focus

Carpenter bee disembowels a blossom

Carpenter bees are fascinating to watch, as they are huge and always very busy.  Unfortunately they tend to disembowel the blossoms they visit.

Dancing on the sunflower

A praying mantis performs acrobatic moves on a large sunflower:

My nemesis - squash bugs

My husband hates Bermuda grass above all other pests in the garden.  My nemesis is the squash bug - shown here with their disgusting brood.

Squash leaf wierdness

I found a couple of my squash plants suddenly with this big streak of white.  Maybe they are getting old.  I don't know, but it looked very striking.

 

Trouble in the garden

I  noticed a raised bed of potatoes was suddenly covered in webs. I know this is not common behavior for spiders, so I had my husband look at the plant, he had to go get a magnifying glass to see what it was.  Unsurprisingly, he found tiny red mites and looked it up and found it was spider mites.

 We have some unintended brussel sprouts.  Every year, I get a little too fast throwing plants into my shopping cart and each time I end up with something I didn't want.  Last year, it was cabbage which got huge and filled with earwigs.  This year, it was a six pack of brussel sprouts.  I never can leave little plants to die without at least trying, so I put them in.  Right after I noticed the webbing, I found a white powder around them and the leaves looking wilted.  Aphids my husband told me.  I looked closer, yup a thick layer on the bottom of each leaf of little white bugs.

My husband put some insecticidal soap on both and it looked good at first, but the aphids came right back and the potatos immediately died. 

I dug up the potatos, so it wasn't a big loss.  They weren't that far from being harvested, but the brussel sprouts are laying around still.

 

Grow your veggies stuff

Get a cool gardening sigg bottle with veggies on it