Almost a year ago I wrote over on Sprout Dispatch about starting a mushroom log. Yesterday I took a walkabout in the yard with Forest as it was our first bit of sunshine in nearly a week. I spotted that the mushroom log had sprouted mushrooms. Unsure if they were from the plugs or if they were just random mushrooms from the yard I mentioned it to Chris who confirmed they were the edible kind. Unfortunately I caught them past their prime and they were still quite small, however I’m happy to know that I may be eating mushrooms on a semi-frequent basis in the near future. And it only…

Chris has been managing the vegetable garden for the last three months. He’s been great at tending the new seedlings, ripping out weeds, and lamenting the poor harvest of sweet potatoes. Next year—that’ll be our year for sweet potatoes and garlic—we hope. The luffa was bit back by frost with the fruits ready to harvest. We should have plenty of dried sponges to share once again this year. The brown cotton managed to survive my neglect this summer, going on to flower and produce the fluffy cotton bits you see below. It’ll die back with the freeze but I wonder if it’ll resurrect from the roots come spring. I had…

The overgrown and weedy section near the bees. When I stole 10 minutes the other day to wander around the yard I also tinkered in the garden for a few minutes. My time spent enjoying the garden is practically non-existent now that the weather has turned cooler, the daylight is short, and I have returned to work. Weekends are spent trying to catch up on chores in the house and keeping the baby fed, changed, and happy. Gardening? What is that? Despite being a little sad that winter is coming, I’m glad at the same time—I can just abandon the garden and not worry about it until spring. I can’t…

I was thrilled that this year the roselle plants (Hibiscus sabdariffa) grew enthusiastically, almost too much so. Frankly, and I knew it at the time, they were planted too close to a few other plants and ended up shading those plants out. Next year I’m thinking that maybe they deserve to be in the perennial herb beds instead, just to give them more room and sun. Last weekend I decided to trim back the branches that had fallen over and were heavily shading out our variegated hydrangea. I clipped off most of the calyces, the red pods on the stalks, and they lingered there for several days until I could…

The area where the brug’s are has turned into a complete jungle. The brug’s themselves were over 10′ tall at one point this summer, but the weight of the stems has caused them to lean over to the ground. I really need to clean up this area of the garden—and forget looking near the bees, it is absolutely overgrown with weeds. I avoided going over there while pregnant and Chris was too busy working on the guest room and Forest’s room this summer to get over there and weed. Perhaps it is time to dig out the bee suit and clean up over there! The bottle gourd in the vegetable…

My parents were down for the weekend which meant that Forest had two people who wanted to give him attention so yesterday I was able to spend almost two hours piddling in the garden. I first took some time to trim up the roselle bush that had fallen over and started shading out our variegated hydrangea. I clipped off all of the red calyxes from the branches I trimmed back so I could make hibiscus tea from them—more on that later this week. Then I began weeding and trimming the flower bed directly in front of the house, which was/is still quite overgrown. I’ll try to get out more this…

The daturas have really grown well out on the side garden this year. We purchased several small containers of them from a nursery just outside of Nacogdoches back in February. The plants have already set seed this year and I suspect we’ll have a lot of volunteer daturas next year. Chris wants to get some more varieties as I think these were the double or triple purple variety. The plants themselves are probably 4′ tall and have survived being barreled over by the armadillos earlier this summer. I love seeing them when I take something to the compost bin.

Chris has been working hard the last few weeks getting the vegtable garden up and going for fall and winter. You may remember, if you read Sprout Dispatch, that we spent some time this spring building the perimeter herb beds but stopped when we needed to switch to work on Forest’s room. Chris was amped up to finish those beds these last few weeks and he’s done just that! He’s even hooked up the water to work out there, albeit on the hose and not through the trench that we’ll have to dig sometime later, but the plumbing in the garden is set up and he has it working through…

In the last week I’ve managed to spent a few hours in the garden doing a bit of weeding. It hasn’t been much but it has been enough to start trying to recover from two months of rampant and unchecked growth. Somewhere in the midst of it all there have been a few garden surprises such as this yellow lycoris. We planted the bulbs two years ago and I don’t believe they came up last year, however this year they sprung up and provided a happy surprise near the pathway and our front deck. This luna moth has been hanging out near the front window by our stairs. I saw…