Been a while...

 Wow... Been quite some time. I guess I got burnt out on gardening, then my camera died, then my computer died, and then I lost a lot of plants through one winter, and when I got a new computer, every site got mad at me and refused to let me in. I finally wrestled my way into this plant blog again though I don't know why! Heh!

Last year I wanted to take it easy and stick to annuals.

(I apologize for the quality of pictures. I used a very terrible Kodak camera to take these pictures and the view screen isn't a touch screen at all.)

 

Tiny Tim and Micro Tom tomato plants

I wanted to grow these tiny varieties of tomato plants, figured they'd be fun. I was trying to find Tiny Tim that I grew from a tomato kit years back but the plants that grew this time around didn't match what I grew years back so I'm still trying to figure it out.

And it was super fun watching all these tomatoes pop up and I couldn't wait to try them all.

 

But then some animal came by and chewed Micro Tom in half and took off with the whole batch of tomatoes on that one. Geez.

Velvet Queen Sunflower

Velvet Queen Sunflower

Lemon Queen Sunflower

I also wanted to grow multi-headed sunflowers and poked around, saw that Velvet Queen and Lemon Queen sunflowers were multi-headed. I fought tooth and nail to keep these plants alive and when they did grow, they seemed stunted? I was under the impression they were supposed to get very big but they didn't seem to want to get tall. They did at least grow a couple more heads which was all I wanted, I suppose. The seeds were from Ferry~Morse and I still have some seeds leftover to try again this year.

Sadly none of my morning glory seeds took off. I planted Heavenly Blue and Blues Bros and so on and none of them did anything.

Birdhouse Gourd

I had a volunteer birdhouse gourd pop up last spring and I said I wasn't going to invest any time at all in it because I was so discouraged from the squash lady beetles that keep showing up and killing off the plants. They look like ladybugs but are orange in color. 

So naturally I invested a lot of time. 😂 I cross-pollinated 3 flowers, only 1 took, and two more started growing that were openly pollinated by bugs. And I had to go out there every day with soapy water and pluck off 3, 4, 5, 6 of these orange squash beetles off my plant so that I'd at least have 3 gourds by the end of the season.

It finally reached a point where I'd go out and there'd be no beetles but once in a blue moon one would show up and thankfully not much damage by the time I come across it.

Then the strangest thing happened; these moths showed up and they were super aggressive. They were just flocking up and down the vine through all the flowers. Then the underside of leaves were huge fuzzy patches that I assume were their eggs or something, and I went from 3 big gourds I fought tooth and nail for to a whopping 21 gourds that started growing and I was worried the vine would feel overloaded.