Vegetables are cooking

The veggie plants are really taking off. It seems that the automatic sprinkling system has substantially helped the yield and caused lots new growth.   The Japanese eggplant plant is really successful, it has three eggplants hanging off of it as I write.

I bought two of these plants both had the same identifying tag on them, and the two plants aren't even alike. I think the grower blew it. One has the expected purple tinge, the other is purly light green and white, and has no fruit, and sickly buds that haven't change in weeks. There are tons of green tomatoes, and quite a few red cherry tomatoes.

I await the ripening of the large tomatoes in order to make some bacon lettuce and tomatoe sandwiches...a gift of summer! The sugar snap peas have a bunch of pods on them, and though the pods are stringy, we have discovered that the peas inside them are great for salads. We have a couple of giant peppers, but they are currently green. We are awaiting the delicious red color seen on the identifying tags. The zuccinis have been bearing for about three weeks, and the butternut squash and cucumbers have beautiful leaves and a bunch of flowers, but no fruit. Sweet potatoes seem to be coming along, but who knows what is really happening since they are underground.

Morning Glories have grown to cover the post at the corner of the vegetable garden, and now climbs across the perimeter fence. Unfortunately my trip out of state prevented me from enjoying the flowers it bore, and the heat has prevented more flowering since I returned home. I look forward to seeing the flowers soon.

My flowers have been somewhat disappointing. Disappointing, because the sprinkler has helped the plants become green and full, but it has not helped the plants to bear flowers. I used Osmocote time release fertilizer, I am sure this helped green things up. It did not help flowering, so I just hit much of the garden with a high middle number fertilizer to color things up. Don't know how long it is going to take to work, but it is all a learning curve. I would say that this is the most successful experience I have had with flowering perennials, but it is still not up to the pictures of my garden that my mind has conjured. My New York garden was beautiful, but it was a shade garden. I thought I was creating a sunny garden here, but it seems I should have employed my shade gardening knowledge for a more successful garden.  I didn't realize just how shady the perennial garden really is, so I am now onto experimental mode to find some good combinations. Two years aren't going to do it for making a successful garden here. I know, I know, it is a process, not a destination. I keep on telling myself that, but my vases are screaming "Where are the cut flowers? You need some color inside this house!"

The heat which has been over 100 degrees for the past four days, has singularly melted all possibilities for cut flowers...and the sprinkler system doesn't seem to hold much ground against the high temperatures.

The flowers like these Rudibeckia are blooming but the flowers and buds are malformed and more than half dead. It is just plain sad, in addition to be disappointing. There are a couple of worthy posies but nothing to get excited about that is for sure.

It seems I just can't win. There are some flowers to cut out there, but not enough to fill a vase, and not enough in healthy bloom...the melt has brought them all down. Somehow these three survived, they are low on the plant so that might have shielded them from the baking sun.