Chill in the air...

Yesterday it was 85 degrees, but now I can feel a chill in the air.

Here's what I picked in the garden this morning. Before:



After (in my new bowl!):



Sedum is blooming. Can you see the two little creatures in this shot? (Click through to Flickr if you want to see where/what they are)



I hope this little sedum survives this winter, I do love it so.



Late summer rose is stunning.



Hydrangea with fall colors.



And September strawberries!

Color, but not flowers

Beautiful day out today, did some "harvesting" in our garden:



Steve dug the onions a couple of weeks ago:



Happy weekend!

Oops...bad blogger

Has it really been (more than) a month?! Sorry about that... Things were pretty status quo in the gardens in September, and now things are fading, dying back, going dormant. No real frost or freeze yet, but I'm sure it will come soon. Steve and I were talking in the car today on the way to pick apples (yum - cider donuts!) and I realized that I probably spent more time this summer in the kitchen then in the garden. In the past I would spend plenty of weekend afternoons outside, but this summer we bought a chest freezer and committed to freezing as much local, fresh produce as we could to try and get us through winter. Many a weekend afternoon this summerI spent blanching, quick cooling, freezing and foodsavering! I should have blogged everything we froze... hmmm. Maybe I'll blog it as we eat it!

On September 20th we had "Brunch in the Fields" at our CSA, it was absolutely a beautiful morning and a wonderful event! Here is the set up before we all sat down to a delicious homemade from local stuff brunch!

Tomatoes kept both of us busy in the kitchen one weekend in September. We bought 50 lbs. from one of our favorite farmers, froze some and Steve also made sauce. After ruining a few t-shirts this summer I finally started wearing an apron while processing stuff!

The roses were blooming again late in the month.

The firecracker fuscia that Mom brought us is still going strong.

The aster is blooming, and looking good!

And this little guy (or one that looks just like this one) was in our green beans earlier in the summer, and here it is on our neighbor's house.

Catching up!

It's been a while! Things have been busy the past couple of weeks - 4th of July weekend, then my husband's family came for a visit and we went to see the Yankees and the Mets, and had a really enjoyable visit! So now I'm trying to catch up a bit with the blog, here goes.

Remember that strange looking thing I showed you last time? Here is what it is - a voodoo bulb! Have you ever seen one bloom? Or smelled one. It's nasty. Next year I'll take a picture of it blooming. We have two of these that Mom brought us, one one each side of the fireplace. I like the tropical look they give the beds!



Okay, so these are from the end of June, but thought you'd like to see all the basil we had then, and the result - yum, pesto!





Back to flowers!

We planted spider flowers from seed, but they haven't taken off like I had hoped. They are blooming, though.



The hosta are blooming and look great in front of the shed.



The phlox and echinacea are blooming. I'm still waiting for that big patch of phlox in the middle to bloom, I can't decide if it's the white one I planted when we first got the house, or one I picked up at a plant sale last year.



The sunflowers out front are blooming. These are all the result of seeds that fell from the sunflowers we planted last year. There are tomato plants there, too. Yes, tomato plants in the front of the house. We planted a random, leftover cherry tomato plant there last year and on one day I picked 167 tomatoes! Yes, 167! Apparently they like this spot, because there are 4 or 5 plants that grew from tomatoes that dropped last year, plus we planted a couple of new ones.



I love the pollen on the leaf: