Harvest time!

I've been up since 7:30 this morning which, yes, is a bit sad considering that this is summer and I'm taking the time off. ("Just relax," mom said, while I was busy trip-planning last night. "Didn't you say you're taking the time off?" "Um," I said, "I am.") But -- it's round-two of the garden clean-up after a quarter (well almost, I did come back once, in the beginning of spring quarter) of neglect, and it's really hard to stop a work already in progress, especially if it's something that you enjoy and you're getting really into it.

In fact, this morning's round of digging up weeds (three piles yesterday, two more piles today) has left me positively bouncy. There's nothing like weeding to make you feel productive, because afterwards you get to see a giant pile of weeds that you dug up. Nothing like a cleared path of garden plot, with a pile of weeds beside it, to give you the warm glow of a job well done.

Picking bugs off of myself, on the other hand, is the less appealing aspect of gardening. That's what warm showers are for, right?

I harvested loads of seeds today. The columbines are pretty much spent at this point, though way in the corner of the garden I did find a late blooming plant. Or maybe it's just one that has a really long blooming period. In any case, it's this gorgeous double-tiered dark blue-purple flower from the McKana's giant hybrid mix. I took a photo of it and collected a bunch of seeds of it. Then I remembered that columbines are notorious for not breeding true to parent, but well --! Purple and white ones are pretty, too.



Have giant amounts of calendula seed now. In another month or two I should also have a healthy load of butterfly iris and carnation seeds. The dill seeds are drying still, and I will have a lot of those again. This year's dill is somewhat shorter than last years (a reassuring 4ft instead of last year's giant 6ft tall monsters), but they seem to be sturdier, so there's less chance of them falling over half-way and losing all the seeds. I might have lavender seeds, but I haven't actually checked yet. Alyssum seeds are...well I've given up on harvesting them. They spread. They eat other plants. My goal in foreseeable future is just to keep them contained enough so that they don't end up devouring my entire garden.

We're getting strawberries now! After I divided the plant (into 3) in the ...spring? there was a pot kept in the shade, one in the sun, and one directly in the dirt. The one in the pot/sun environment did best (pot/shade died due to over-watering, dirt/sun is recovering from being under-watered while in poor soil) and it smells fantastic. Store-bought strawberries don't smell like that...it's a little bit like an almost sticky-sweet scent of honey and strawberry mixed together. Too bad the fruit is really small and the plant produces about three ripe strawberries at a time. Oh well....