Things starting to happen now that we’ve hit the summer heat!

On the lemon cucumber front, they’re getting big. Like, bigger (and spikier) than I was expecting considering the picture in the seed catalog. One of the cucumber plants is doing amazing, one is possibly going to pop out a couple cucumbers maybe, and one is trying desperately to stay alive. It’s so strange to me how plants all planted at the same time in the same dirt with the same sun and water can grow so differently. 

The tomatillos are starting to pop up as little tiny green lanterns, and they are adorable.

And the first of my blueberry tomatoes turned red! But it was way tinier than I was expecting it to be (also because of the picture in the seed catalog). Maybe this was an early bloomer and the other tomatoes will get bigger? I have no idea. I harvested it, and cut the tiny thing in half to share with my daughter (who loves eating tomatoes). It was yummy (tasted like a tomato, so that was...good), but it was so tiny that I’m not 100% sure what I was tasting before it was gone. 

Some more flowers popping out (still don’t remember the name for this...I really need to go look for my bag of bulbs in the shed). Trying to decide if it’s way too late in the year to plant the rest of the bulbs, since I have two empty areas just waiting on dirt. 

And the first of my hibiscus flowers unfurled its petals. Unfortunately, the hibiscus bush (which is gigantic now, probably from daily watering) has an aphid infestation. There’s like thousands of tiny white & black dots on a lot of the buds, and like two lone ladybugs trying their hardest to eat all of them. I’ve been blasting the plant with strong streams of water to try to knock them off without buying pesticides or anything (sorry poor ladybugs who were just trying to help me out!), but not sure if it’s a good long-term plan despite it being surprisingly cathartic.

I did a few chores yesterday. I deadheaded most of the remaining chrysanthemums (they were kind of sickly looking blooms anyways, wilting before they were fully bloomed) and getting rid of any dead stems. I also read this thing about creating a mowing garden, where you plant clover or other similar plants that will help pollinators when they flower, but then are meant to be mowed down. Since my front lawn is mostly this dead brown crunchy expanse (like, seriously, the gardener doesn’t even show up anymore because there’s literally nothing to mow), I shook out my remaining half a container of grass seed and then added a couple of packets of clover and buckwheat that I had anyways (they were supposed to go in the spaces between the sidewalk and the street, but we’ve resorted to just cutting everything down). I’m hoping that these plants are hardier than whatever my grass was. Plus they’re supposed to be nitrogen-fixing, meaning that when you mow them when they flower, nitrogen goes into the ground (making it better? I’m hoping it’s better), so perfect for a mowing garden. We’ll see what happens. I didn’t really prepare the ground, just tossed them in my lawn and watered thoroughly. A little worried the abundance of birds outside are just going to eat it all before it sprouts, but whatever. They won’t even touch the fancy peanut-butter bird food I put outside, so their loss.