Fall Food

A few random photos of fall foods from the garden...

We grew our first fig this year on our smallest fig plant.  It was little but delicious!
 

We also canned tomatoes for the first time...the tomatoes were probably overripe and we obviously did not put enough in each jar, but it was a learning process and it will be interesting to see how they turn out as sauce this winter.

We also made pesto with the abundance of basil we grew.  We prepare it without the cheese and freeze it in ice cube trays so we can just use however many cubes we need for a particular dish during the winter.

Outside at Ocean Street

Here is a series of photos of our yard and veggie garden over the past couple months...

Baby Praying Mantis!

The last time it was mowed...

Self seeding Bellflowers and Bronze Fennel

Grapes

Mexican Sunflower

Milkweed

Lavender

New plant book

bad picture of our first fig!

tomatoes growing...

early in the veggie garden

Leadwort

Different view of coop

Dust bathing

Allium in bloom (probably should have harvested the onions already but they are pretty!)

A pear hiding amongst the leaves and flowers

Poppy

Clematis

Hens chomp down on some fresh greens

Bad little striped cabbage moths- found on the kale

moonflower

St John's Wort

A blurry pic of our natural meadow of bellflowers and brown eyed susans.

Crocosmia

Bronze fennel and grape leaves

Hungry Hops

Wild Variegated Staghorn Sumac

Impatience always looks a little crazy...

Bounty from the garden

The woodland sunflowers are so tall you can barely see the coop!

Blooming fennel and Mexican Sunflower

the growing veggie garden

What Grows

This year we discovered that we have a Fringe Tree (Chionanthus virginicus)!  We knew there was a mystery tree getting swallowed by the enormity of the beautybush (light pink flowers on the right), but realized it is a Fringetree when it started blooming this spring.  I'm not sure what we are going to do with it.  Ideally it would be transplanted but the root system is probably pretty entwined with the beautybush and the small dogwood tree to it's left.  We may leave that project for next spring...
 

The veggie garden getting going...

we had an abundance of strawberries this year from our spreading patch.

hens checking out the blooming Clematis and photographer.

We have a few pears on each of our new pear trees this year so fingers crossed they won't get the black spot that killed off the fruit last summer.

Our annual snapdragons didn't die this past winter and the white ones just kept on growing!  I've never seen them this tall!

Garden beds and our new car!  A generous gift from my grandmother.  We still have the Volvo to match so now we are a 2 maroon station wagon family.

Siberian Iris

Gas plant

the St Johnswort  keeps getting bigger-

As do the woodland sunflowers...