Garden Goings-On

It's funny how near the beginning of summer, everything seemed to be coming on so fast and furious,

All the spring flowers bloomed (and faded) weeks early, the strawberries jumped the season by a week or two, and the peas were all eaten and pulled up by mid-June.

But now that we're nearing the end of the season, everything seems to have slowed to a crawl.

We just started getting tomatoes last week (and many of those are dropping off the vine before they turn red--tomato blight again?)

C just dug up all the potatoes last weekend and he estimates that he took out of the ground about an equal weight to what he put in as seed potato. 

And he just planted the beans, which seems a little late to me, but since I'm not the gardener, I guess I don't get to criticize. He claims they're a 45 day crop (but won't we have frost in 45 days? Perish the thought!).

My own efforts at keeping the herb garden and "perennial bed" weed-free have been completely defeated by sheer laziness and a preference for spending summer days at the beach (or doing almost anything other than weeding).

Saturday afternoon, while C took the boys to town for junk food (this is how the menfolk bond) and I was putting in some much needed writing time, this butterfly came and visited the deck.

It liked posing for photos. At first I thought it was a black swallowtail. It was joined by this white admiral, which was much more skittish, and would only sit still when on the old bath mat I had draped over the deck rail.

When I looked it up in the butterfly book later, I learned it was a red spotted purple, which is a different morph of the exact same species as the white admiral! According to the book, it shouldn't show up this far north (nor should it have those rusty spots with the blue ones on its hind wings). Was it lost?

In other butterfly news, the monarch caterpillar Z found had made its chrysalis while we were away camping and it emerged today. When we got home this evening, Z took the jar out on the deck and it flew off before I even got a chance to look at it (let alone take a picture!).

How does your garden grow?