Sunday Garden Walk and Harvest

Hello Everyone, Today is a beautiful sunny day in South Florida! I hope all of you are enjoying a Spring day wherever you are. I have been working a bit on cleaning up the patio and surrounding garden. The elevated garden bed ( horse grain trough) is really growing and I have been harvesting tomatoes and peppers. The zucchini squash plant, however, doesn't look so good and 3 or 4 little squash have turned yellow and dropped off. Others are doing o.k and I have my fingers crossed that they will survive. The plant had heaps of dusty mildew and I found out that diluted milk put on the leaves would help, which it has. I have also harvested a lot of delicious rocket lettuce, yum.

The Spring flowers are really pretty and I hope they last awhile but we are now getting some high temperatures! Today is 90 degrees! So soon the flowers will begin to dry up and I will be forced to scatter zinnia seeds about. Zinnias do well in hot weather here.

Below is the pineapple getting fairly large. It won't be ready until about July or even early August. An Easter lily to the right of it has not bloomed yet, but has several buds formed.

Below is a closer view of the elevated garden. If you enlarge this photo by clicking on it, you might be able to see some green tomatoes.

And here are the red tomatoes I harvested yesterday!

What's Happening at Ten Gables??Hi

Hi Everyone, Here is a little update about what is happening at Ten Gables Cottage. For one thing, my friend and I have completed the handkerchief  quilt for our quilting group who hosts a bazaar in November. It will be displayed and raffled off then. We used 30 vintage hankies, or more, as some blocks have 2 in them, plus a bit of lace and embroidery to embellish. 

We were really pleased at how it turned out. Some lucky person will win it come November.

  The garden continues to grow. Here are the tomatoes in full bloom with lots of small green ones on them. This is in my "Granny Garden", the elevated bed made in a horse grain trough. You can see the big squash leaves on the side. I have 3 or 4 little zucchini growing, but if all the bloom made squash, I'd have 35!! Why is that? The plant itself doesn't look really good. It has lots of dried up leaves as well as blooms, but lots of green leaves, too. I think it has something wrong....maybe a dusty mildew. I am not sure if I water too much or too little. I don't get water on the leaves when I water, but then the rain does fall on it.  I need to read up on growing zucchini, for sure!! Any advice out there??

A pineapple is coming on. It will be about July or August before it reaches full size and is ripe.

I am not sure what kind of bird this is. He has a curved beak and talons, but is smaller than a full grown eagle, so I am not sure if it is some kind of hawk or a young eagle. Maybe it is an Osprey. It was far away and I had to use my max close up lens which isn't the greatest. He is eating a fish he has caught, so I am thinking it is an Osprey.  Well, that is the morning at Ten Gables. Hope you are having a great day.

Florida Harvest

Hi Everyone, Hope you are having a good Saturday! It is beautiful here in South Florida and I thought I'd show you a few things from my garden (above). The broccoli is still sprouting and every day I pick a few new sprouts. I have let some of it bloom and the bees are loving it.  The Arugula  and Pepper is from my Granny Garden, the elevated garden.

Helen brought me over these green beans, already broken up and ready to cook, from her garden. They are Kentucky white half runners, which, if you are from Kentucky, you know that they are considered to be the Premier bean in flavor as well as production. My Mother and Dad always planted plenty of them in their Kentucky garden and we ate them all summer just about every day! I am thrilled with Helen's gift, but not only did she bring beans, but strawberries from her garden, too.  I need to take some gardening lessons from her and her hubby, Mike, because they planted their garden way earlier than I did and they didn't have any trouble with what little cold weather we had damaging anything. I think in Florida the hardest things to damage gardens might be heat in summer and the need for water.