This is the Color I am talking about!!

I took this picture yesterday of some morning glories blooming in my back yard. If you look out the window in the living room you can see them. The color is more blue than the lavender that shows on a computer screen. THIS is the color I had hoped those Dahlia's might be.

I have shown you in the past the PVC tee-pee that I made so that morning glories could grow up them. It has filled in nicely but they haven't bloomed yet but when they do it will be a lovely sight.

Here too is a neat little surprise that I found growing the other day. Cute isn't it?

Fascinating

Spiders are fascinating. Let me get one on me and you will see the "Oh, my god, get it off" heeby jeeby dance, that in and of itself is fascinating as well.

Alan and I were sitting at the kitchen table drinking our coffee and looking out the window and there was a pretty cool web with a spider in the middle - duh. Later, after Alan had gone to work, I was sitting here, once again at the kitchen table and watched the spider take down its web and then disappear. As I got closer to look I found it's little hidey hole. You can see the leaves of this apple tree have been sewn together to protect the little guy (girl?). So I wanted to take a picture to show you all. You can just barely see the legs sticking out.

In this picture I got a shot up into the leaf so you can see it sitting there. I wonder when it will spin another web? In the cooler part of this evening? To catch the night bugs? Just fascinating if you ask me.

Recent happenings

I am very excited to say that today I saw my first female humming bird!! At this house that is. It was pretty cool - I was looking out the window at the gold finches and there she came, checked out the hanging basket of Million Bells, and then away she went. I went on a mad search for my humming bird feeding which has disappeared since we moved. I guess it will turn up by next years hummer season, I hope.

Bad news, I found another Black Widow, this time in my garage and with a 2 huge egg sacks. I killed her and folks, let me tell you, I am all about natural and organic, but Orkin is going to come and take care of that little problem. I just can't have my kids getting bitten by one of those, I guess it would be better if I got bitten, but I don't want that either - YUCK!!

I am proud to say that the Bachelor's buttons I started from seed OUTSIDE, are now blooming:
They aren't as full as the picture on the seed packet but they are blue and they are pretty. We will see what happens from here.

Sometimes it doesn't work

Should be, about this time, that tomato plants are so big you are wondering how in the world you are going to keep them up off the ground. Well, mine aren't. HA!! I have them in a place that isn't the best - obviously!! Sure there are some tomatoes on the plants but they aren't as big or producing as much as I would hope. Same with the pepper plants, both sweet and jalepeno. I mean sure they are beginning to get fruit but the jalepeno's are a bit bitter and the sweet are just beginning to have fruit and the plants are tiny. My belief is that they aren't getting enough sun. I put them up next to the fence, which is fine, but the sun doesn't hit them until 1 or so in the afternoon.

So, Alan and I are already planning where to put the garden next year. I am going to get a couple loads of compost here in the fall and get the area turned over and the compost mixed in well so that it can be ready come spring. I really enjoy growing stuff - makes me kind of sad that the plants aren't doing the best they can be. BUT, I do have a bunch of cantaloupe vines that are doing AWESOME!! They are growing out of my compost bin. I haven't looked close but I don't think there are any small fruits growing yet - tons of flowers though. The gourd vines are growing up the fence now. I think I saw a flower on one the other day, but I have been bad and not been out there looking a lot here lately. I guess I could do that today, or something.

On the flower side, I picked a "Blue Star Dahlia" from a catalog because of the color it was portrayed as - BLUE. It has started to bloom and it is purple. The description actually said "lavender blue" but there is no other color to call it but purple, I mean it is a pretty but not what I wanted. I emailed the company and asked about the color not being properly described and they wonderfully sent me a voucher to get something else. That was nice of them I think because that doesn't happen often I don't think. You can see there to the left it is pretty, but no where near the blue color category.