A pleasant surprise

I'm home sick today. Some sort of stomach virus or the vengeance of the sausage biscuit we got from Brookshire Brothers yesterday morning. Between trips to the bathroom I went out this morning to take pics of the garden sans the trees and brush my honey cut down last week. Light is flooding in! Of course, now that it's hot, the garden may miss the shade it was getting.

Less trees = more daylight = happier veggies

My tomato plants aren't looking all that great. Some of the leaves have sort of withered away, and my blooms are falling off the plants. I don't really see a lot of bees around my place so I wonder if the blooms aren't getting pollinated....

Last week I decided to plant some hardy hibiscus seeds that I bought from Baker Creek a few months ago. My sister-in-law really likes Hibiscus, so I plan on giving her some. I don't think she will need 8 plants though.... They're perennial plants that are supposed to have dinner plate sized flowers. I'm excited to see how they turn out. They've started to germinate, so hopefully I won't have to wait too long.

Itty Tiny Hardy Hibiscus

While checking on the little Hibiscus seedlings, I noticed that a lemon tree cutting a friend gave me had decided to start blooming. I thought it was dead, and I'd been neglecting it. I haven't watered it in over a month. I guess it has retained enough rain water to still be viable. That was a nice little bright spot in the day.

Non-dead lemon tree cutting

Flowering Fooled You

My flowering "compost potatoes"

Okay, my flowers are not in the square foot garden, but I'm so pleased with how they're doing that I had to take some pics and show them off. Last year I bought a pre-planned garden from Bluestone Perenials. I ended up dividing the garden and putting half of the plants in the bed in front of my house and the other half in front of the guest house. Despite my best efforts to kill them most of the plants have managed to survive. Most of these plants were only 6 inches or so high when they arrived via UPS last year. Now they're huge. Below are a few of the hardy survivors.