More vacation gardening and wild prairie

Lyre leaf sage blooming. Hopefully mine will be blooming soon in Oklahoma.
A Swiss Chard is coming up.
Mystery seedling… Too early for oregano??
Dogs!!
Clouds like mountains.
Native tiny bee on Callirhoe involucrata (winecup).
Chickadee wasn’t on her nest yesterday, but she was today.
More fun!!
A solider beetle yesterday. Mom has the ID.
Two of these moths in one day (yesterday).
If you look just above the moth, you can see a tiny planthopper.

Plants for Mom

Mmm seeds from home!
Seeds smell like people she knows.
We’ll wait a few more days to plant the tomatoes. Mom put a few more bags of topsoil in.
An unknown seedling volunteering. We’ll leave it for now.
We seeded lacinato kale, Scotch blue curled kale, Fordham giant Swiss chard, marigolds, red rubin basil, Italian large leaf basil, green wave mustard greens, and oregano.

Thinking of summer yesterday

Tomatoes, peppers, tomatillos, and chard and roman chamomile in all the rest. We need a lot of chamomile starts as I want to use it as a ground cover around the vegetable raised beds.
Sitting on the saffron leaves.
Gram’s not sure about outside leash time but he’s getting more confident.
He always perks up and feels safer when big sister comes by to check on him.
“Hello big sister”
Maybe he could do without getting groomed. She nibbles him.

Generous neighbors

Our neighbors have a crabapple tree that is loaded with fruit, and offered us as many as we can pick.
Yesterday, with the Chef and Paula and me, that was about 50 pounds.
Paula and the Chef cut off the blossom ends and boiled them. More updates as they occur!
The Chef made tiny adorable ham croissants with lemon garlic aioli for dinner. Swiss chard (Fordham giant variety) from the garden is the green.

The illusion of plenty

Green tomatoes have been gradually ripening indoors.
Had kale and tomato salad and a chard salad last night. The Chef is not a kale fan. I’m not sure I was either by itself, needed either more pre treatment or mixing in other greens.

Sort of a rainbow

‘Diane’ purple Salvia greggii and purple moss verbena (non native, bought it by mistake), mealy blue sage, ‘Fordham giant’ Swiss Chard and lacinato kale for green, marigolds for yellow (but they turned out more orange…), Linnaeus burning embers marigolds for orange, and ‘Will Rogers’ zinnias for red. Needs some work on colors, but not bad for a start!