For instance… you can put in your city / state here and it will give you the dates when you should sprout/plant common garden vegetables based on your last frost date. Neat! I put in my town — and I should probably get moving this weekend with ramping up supplies. The early plants need to go in soon.  Growing plants from seeds really helps to instill a strong feeling of ownership over my ‘crops’.

I was perusing and found a ‘Top 30 Weed Identifier’ – WOW! I have seen just about all of them at the garden this summer! There is one, the bane of my existence, that grows through the weedblock, and sticks you even through garden gloves. I’m constantly removing it, and I had no idea what is was. UNTIL NOW!

the DEVIL

This is Canadian Thistle. It is terrible. It’s a perennial herb, and the root system gets everywhere, which explains why it keeps coming back after pulling, and even through the weedblock. We need to dig a little deeper for those roots, and maybe next year we will see the end of them!

Also, how awesome is the weather in NJ the last two days? PERFECT “fall is coming” weather. Last two nights we were perfect for open window sleeping, and the AC finally got a break.

Before shot… seemingly healthy pumpkin

After shot… dried pumpkin seeds

I guess we’ll try again next year!

As you can see on the last picture, the ‘good’ bugs like to hang out there, too! Praying mantis is on the most top flower to the right. The butterfly is a bit harder to see on the bottom left in a bit from the last flower.

Zinnias on the table!

Zinnia ‘Bush’

Zinnias with Praying Mantis & Butterfly

Anyway, so much has been going on in the garden (no thanks to me, thank Mother Nature!), so I needed to post. I showed a few weeks ago that our first sunflower was blooming. This one we had sprouted indoors, and I think came out a bit stunted in the terracotta pot while it waited to be transplanted, and now it is happily creating seeds (albeit stunted, too).

Once we got the rest of the garden cleaned up, I planted some seeds direct in the ground — and WHOA have they taken off! They are seriously living up to the “Mammoth” name and are like trees growing out of the ground. The “trunks” are about 2.5 inches in diameter, and are currently standing a little over 5′.  I have 3 regular “Mammoth” growing — which are the kind with edible seeds which we hope to harvest, and 3 “Evening Sun” that will be a deep red or orange. I’m planning on having a fabulous vase at some point in the early fall with the Evening Sun! I’m pretty sure next year we will just plant direct in the ground.

Anyway, the reason I’m telling you this, is because I wanted to have some flowers this year that I could cut and bring in to my table basically for free (cost of seeds is negligible, I think). When I looked up recommendations for the best flowers to do this with, zinnias seemed to provide the best results. In fact, the seeds I found are “Cut & Come Back” Zinnias, which means you are supposed to cut them and enjoy their beauty inside!

I should have started these babies inside before the frost, but I just didn’t get to it. I planted these from seed in the beginning of June in the garden (I don’t think they are deer resistant), and the first is already blooming! Can’t wait to have my first vase full of zinnias from my own garden!

We decided to try growing both of them this year from the seeds, as you can see in the top right corner of the Garden Map. I planted and labeled each one in its own terracotta pot earlier this season, but failed to realize that the marker I used would fade in the sun. Now, both plants look exactly the same, and right now, we can’t tell them apart.

Today, we noticed one of them already has a baby pumpkin on it! Look how cute!

Of course, we don’t know which pumpkin it is! We are not sure if the elongated pumpkin was a different type of pumpkin or if it a ‘normal’ pumpkin and just grew that way because we let the vines climb the fence. I am hoping we will get to find out soon enough! (For the record, this year they should have enough room where they should not need to climb a fence)