Exploding

The giant sunflowers are performing according to plan, rising up over the deck and bringing in the first hummingbird and gold finches. 

The garden is now a riot of green, and it is starting to produce actual food. 

It seems like the garlic is ready to pull. I've been doing this slowly to make sure that we don't harvest too fast. 

It's also time to plan ahead for next year. 

We're going to have to try to save some cloves for next year from this year's crop. It turns out that purchasing cloves to plant is pretty expensive. I just spent $90 at Seed Savers Exchange for 20 bulbs to plant in the fall. That's quite a bit. I'd like to plant more, too. So we'll have to keep at least one of this year's crop to put in the ground. 

We went on a short weekend vacation, and came back to peas & beans heavy-laden. A giant English cucumber manifested itself in the course of a few days. I swear, I looked away for a minute, and this thing was there:

Some of the tomatoes are beginning to turn red. There's another zucchini popping out. There are three small sweet pumpkins forming, and a bulbous spaghetti squash is blurping up, dangling outside the small bed by the garage. 

There are tons of bees & insects swarming all around the pumpkin/squash bed. They seem to love the blossoms. 

 That tiny little black thing next to the stamen there, that's a bee. See it? 

We learned how to really use the rain barrel effectively by filling a bucket while watering with the watering can, then transferring the water from the bucket to the can. It eliminates some of the time spent waiting for the can to fill. 

Some of these skills might seem pretty basic, but it's the little tricks that make things go easier. I suspect there are a lot more tricks to learn. 

Today we get more much needed rain. Then ten days straight of no predicted rainfall. This is far from a wet summer.