This morning is overcast and cool, with some pleasant breeze. We’re still not getting rain, yet there is beauty everywhere.
On Monday I got a “new” vintage lens: a Minolta 135mm 2.8 MC-Rokkor, which I adapted to my Canon R6 and took out shooting around the food forest and garden.
The chaste trees are back in bloom:
And the sugarcane is coming in, despite the very dry weather. We won’t get great yields, but the sweetness is excellent.
Sugarcane is so beautiful I don’t understand why it isn’t grown as an ornamental in landscaping.
The pokeweed is going to seed. We don’t eat them, but I like to have them on the homestead as a chop-and-drop plant.
The Jerusalem artichokes are in bloom now, cheerfully pressing on through the drought.
And the compost pile pumpkin vine has decided to create at least a dozen new pumpkins around the edges of the garden.
It’s amazing how long this vine has lasted – and how much it’s yielding!
The sunn hemp didn’t get nearly as thick and tall as it did when we planted it last year, probably due to the extreme heat and lack of water. Yet it’s covered the garden with lovely blooms.
And speaking of blooms, the bees really love the African blue basil. It’s always a-buzz with activity.
A common weed here is the railroad vine, which I like to see in the wild but not so much in our gardens.
Another lovely red flower that is appearing everywhere now is the spider lily. They disappear through the summer and then shoot up flowers in the fall, followed by leaves that persist through the winter and spring.
God is good. Even the “weeds” have beauty.
18 comments
Beautiful. God is so good! Thanks for sharing.
Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge of gardening David! It’s amazing to learn all the plants and flowers name, this is a challenge to me. But to learn how to grow them that is even harder.
Anyway I’ve been following you since 2020 right after we moved to N FL, my bookworm husband bought me several of your books as Christmas gifts. In the beginning I absolutely hate them due to my vocabulary limitations ( ESOL), I wining and complaining ” David the Bad.” “ unfriendly language “… Now the transformation has been done I love your books, the articles and your channel, of course your sense of humor too is very delightful … the most important that I am so grateful for you to educating me.
I’ll share the secret transformation in person with you on 14th October at Scrubfest II, my husband just bought tickets for our anniversary. I’m counting down, 17 days to go. Can’t wait.
Awesome, Ashley – thank you – that is encouraging. It will be great to meet you and your husband in person.
Fear was my problem in the beginning. Once I put it on the side everything is clear. I had you Grocery Row Gardening book right after you published in February 2022. The fear prevented me to finish till last month. I’m very glad I did it and gotta so much out of it. I’m so ready to go forward on Step 4 and 5 this fall season, your Scrubfest II is perfect timing for that!
Do you still collect 1 or 2 + gallon nursery pots? Can I pre order some plants, fruit trees?
Ashley with an appreciative heart
Yes, we can always use pots. We’ll probably have a plant sale after SCRUBFEST II.
I am not good at keeping track of things, so preordering would be hard. I’m likely to forget.
And also, God bless you – thanks for the encouragement.
Beautiful pictures! Thank you for sharing!
We call those hurricane lilies. Just spotted a few in our yard that I didn’t know were there!
Thanks for the beautiful pictures and informative post.
Thanks for sharing the beautiful images from your garden. We’re finally getting rain here on the Texas mid coast and the plants are responding beautifully. Hope you start getting rain soon.
Your railroad vine is my cypress vine. As you said previously…. a good reason for the latin names!
You’re right. Let’s just call it Ipomoea quamoclit!
The thing I missed the most moving from 35mm film to digital was the loss of the shallow field of focus. The cost of a digital camera that can do that sort of focus is getting lower. You remind me why I liked shooting plants like that, it makes the subject pop from the background and anything in front of while letting it fit into the landscape it inhabits.
I like your photography.
Thank you. I love using the vintage lenses because they make the perfect digital image look filmic.
Nice. Yesterday I went across the street on the woodsy right of way where a couple of spider lilies were blooming to get a bulb or two and actually got about 20! Transplanted to my flower bed. Left a couple though. They are also called surprise lilies. The foliage comes after the bloom. Love it. I’ve also spotted a large stand of paper whites back in the swampy area around an old home site. Now that we are in a drought — good time to score of few of those also. Think I will.
Good kids could save seeds from that cypress vine to sell to us northerners. It takes so long to get warm enough that the vines just don’t get that big here. One man’s weed is another man’s ornamental.
That is funny – good idea. They are like a weed here.