See the original blog post giveaway from Mr. Brown Thumb here

It’s never a perfect scenario weather wise, right? Too hot, too cold, too wet, too dry. Spring flooding, summer drought. But we got a nice break in the drought over the weekend with rain. Rain that’s now forecast daily until early next week. Which is good for the most part but also puts a damper in finalizing summer gardening chores, pulling those ‘last’ weeds, etc. The wheelbarrow has been sitting in that spot for over a week with little activity. From a distance the garden looks good. You can’t see the weeds and it is evident that the yard needs to be mowed but the mower is on the fritz…

We’ve reached that point in the season where not much is being productive in the vegetable garden but the peppers and cucumbers, and even the cucumbers are worn out and fading. Most plants out there are just putting on growth and holding on for slightly cooler temperatures to start producing flowers for reproduction. These are sweet potato squash that I’m excited to try out when we get fruit. I planted them in the hugelkultur perimeter beds. Like I said, the cucumbers are barely hanging on. Several vines have up and died but a couple are still trying to grow and put on flowers. I started new seeds and will try…

It is pretty common for random plants, including weeds of course, to sprout in our compost. Tomatoes, melons, potatoes, we’ve seen all sorts of things sprouting. This year a gourd sprouted in the right compost bin, the side that we’re currently not resupplying and are using in the garden when we need compost. The vine grew up and over the side of the compost bin before we knew it and since we weren’t actively adding to that side we opted to let the gourd continue growing. I’ve had to maneuver it off of the water hose multiple times, redirecting it to head for the fence and vegetation on the neighbors…

I’ve been missing the gym this summer, the working out. My body feels it too. But while I’ve forgone building muscle and cardio I have really enjoyed my lunch hours in the garden. It’s a workout, in a way. Mostly it is a method of losing water weight via sweat because sometimes I am not even moving much but still find myself dripping by the time my lunch break is over and I need to clean up to head back to work. A lot of times I’ve planned for it, going whole-hog into a good 30-40 minutes of gardening, getting dirty, with the plan on jumping in the shower to…

Several years ago when I got on Twitter there was a chat called #seedchat that I would pop onto most Wednesdays. That chat is now dormant but I ended up ‘meeting’ a lot of great gardeners through that chat. One of those was BMT 108. I’m keeping her real name on the downlow because of her husband’s occupation and she likes to keep it sorta anonymous online, as much as one can get these days. Remember when everyone used to only go by handles? Those were the days! Anyway, she lives about thirty minutes from me so it was nice to have a local person to talk to about gardening…

About a week ago I was finally able to say I was ‘done’ weeding the paths in the vegetable garden, except for a tough spot of Bermuda grass near the gate entrance. I had Chris get mulch one morning and I was able to mulch most of the paths. I didn’t have quite enough to cover all of the area but I got the worst places. I opted to experiment with sheet mulching in the worst section, the Bermuda grass section, that extends from the gate down one of the rows. Bermuda grass is an incredibly stubborn plant to get rid of and I’m hoping this will tame that area…

Back in May I mentioned finding monarch babies on our milkweed. For weeks after that I couldn’t find any more caterpillars or any sign of chrysalides so I thought maybe birds or wasps had predated them. Recently I began noticing that the swamp milkweed was being chomped on so I checked out those plants and found two caterpillars. Then another evening I trudged through the jungle of weeds in another bed to see about the tropical milkweed and found two more caterpillars! Happily they seemed to be gorging themselves quite satisfactorily and it was nice to sit and watch them for a few minutes. The bottom monarch decided it was…