Cooling Down

 Our nights are getting cooler and I wake to temps in the 60's. As pleasant as this is, my garden suffers. I have at least two dozen big green tomatoes on the vines. They need the temperatures to come up considerably to ripen. The beans are still producing daily, the peas have slowed down, as well as the squash. I only got 3 cucumbers from the vine and it is turning brown. 

As much as I love the cooler temps, it makes my garden look sparse and sad. I suppose today is as good as any to build my frames and cover them with plastic to create my green house over my garden beds. Since I found the electric stapler, this will be a breeze.

My flower gardens are showing signs of hibernating for the winter, as well. I now have four hibiscus. The two that produce the large white, with red throats are already setting seed. The apricot one and the red one are still blooming. Had I clipped back the spent flowers sooner, the white ones would have bloomed again .... my bad.

Cosmos are still flowering daily, but not as many. I have gathered enough seed to flower the entire ravine! Since we have stopped having it weed whacked down to the ground, I am noticing many things growing that I want to thrive. Blackberry bushes, for one. The ferns are a delicate green and so nice to look at, as opposed to the bare landscape after being cut. Just yesterday, I noticed that some of the zinnia seed had been washed down the side and they are blooming along with a couple of hosta. Now I feel the need to rescue them or at least weed around them.

This particular spot is really steep and there is a huge boulder sticking up out of the ground, maybe 8 feet down. That would surely stop me from rolling all the way to the creek at the bottom! No way I would make it to the bottom, as there are some really big trees along the way. I have not been down to the creek since Martha, the boy cat was mauled to death by the pitbulls belonging to the idiot redneck further up the mountain side. 

I lost interest in the ravine after my cat died, but now, as time heals the pain of watching him die, I am thinking that a tree house deck would be nice to retreat to. The Patient does not agree. This poses no particular threat to my plan, just have to make him believe it was his idea all along.

In the meantime, Dora and I had a nice walk-about this morning. Her shell is molting again. It looks dull right now, like it has a coating of something on it. A piece of the old shell came off in my hand as we were chatting. Dora doesn't say much, but she is a good listener. I told her that the discarded shell looked like a fish scale. Must have been insulting, she turned away. The tiny reveal of the new shell is bright and new. I told her how pretty she was and she looked at me again, her tiny eyes bright with recognition. I gave her head a good rub before I finished cleaning her habitat and brought her back inside to annoy Toni Louise.