The pepper plants have begun to flower, adding a new shade to the garden’s palette!
Blue /
It may be monsoon season, which means frequent storms around dinnertime, but mid-morning there’s often nothing but clear skies overhead.
Green /
The melon plant has yet to fertilize more flowers, but its one existing fruit is doing well these days (even with a pockmark from the recent hail).
Yellow /
Another female blossom opened this morning! More pumpkins are on the way!
Orange /
While new pumpkins begin to grow, their older siblings have quickly darkened from green to yellow to deep orange.
Newbie /
We have a newbie on one of the pumpkin plants today! So much for hail damage ending their proliferation. Welcome to the family, cucurbit number three; can’t wait to see how you develop, and what your features eventually reveal about the pollen that fathered you.
Sneezy /
I swear I won’t let my love of alliteration and internal rhymes turn this into a series of posts named for Disney’s seven dwarfs. But it so happens that I woke up this morning all puffy and snuffly, sneezing nonstop for a half hour or so until my antihistamine pill kicked in. Could be caused by the thin veil of smoke that’s wafting all across the American West this August; seems more likely that some species in the area is at that special point in its life cycle when it’s compelled to release billows of pollen into the air. Good luck with your reproduction, mystery plants. I’ll be keeping the windows shut and sneezing it out.
Cozy /
For some reason today I was driven by a rare but urgent desire to clean the whole house. After hours of dusting, decluttering, and proudly rearranging all my various books and trinkets, I realized maybe this random nesting instinct kicked in as a reaction to my recent travels. Adventuring out into the world is wonderful. So is having a deep connection to one’s home. I don’t normally think of August as a time for coziness, but for today, at least, it is.
Hazy /
The ongoing thunderstorms across the state are a mixed blessing. They’ve brought fresh moisture in a year of drought, but also sparked forest fires with lightning strikes. I might not have noticed the hint of smoke in the city’s atmosphere if my partner hadn’t pointed it out to me, but now that I see it I can’t not see it. Even the clearest blue skies look a little hazy these days.
Hardy /
Well, I stand corrected about the pumpkins. It’s almost as if, despite the hail-sized holes riddling their stalks and leaves, the plants heard me express doubt that they’d be able to produce any more fruit and put out a single fresh flower this morning just to prove me wrong. Of course, one flower isn’t enough—we need a female to be pollinated by that male. But it’s a sign that living things are often hardier than they look.
