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Summer’s Tomatoes, In October

October 25, 2014 by Pamela Parker Caird Leave a Comment

tomato1

I had nearly given up on having tomatoes at all this year — they kept getting munched — but the fall cool-down is making for tomato heaven. It’s cool enough for flowering and pollination, but not cold enough to freeze them. Long may it last!

Those purple blossoms are eggplant blooms. So far nothing has come of that particular crop this year, so we’ll see if we get lucky. For gardening success, at least in my experience, springs from a few things: careful observation, hard work, and a lot of luck.

big-tomatoes

The basil, too, is flourishing anew, after beginning to show serious signs of wilting. We’ve even got a few new “volunteers” that have appeared from the seeds apparently laid down last year — including some spicy Thai basil, which has been lovely in stir-fries.

basil-plant

Speaking of green, we’ve been given the answer to a question we’ve been asking ourselves for a while.

Green-Egg

Yes, that egg on the right is green. One of the two of our Easter Eggers — the ones that we got a week after the others — has begun to lay. For quite a while we called her “the runt,” but, when it comes to egg laying, she’s quite precocious. We call her Pikachu.pikachu

 

The Barred Rocks have been our earliest and best layers so far, and the supposedly world-champion Black Australorps have been doing a whole lot of nothing… other than making noise, demanding food, flying over the electric fence we set up, and looking at us questioningly.

chickens-close-Oct2014

Time for them to get to work! Looking pretty isn’t everything, girls!

chickens-october-2014

I just stepped away from the computer for a few minutes and heard a very interesting sound in our living room. All seven chickens had wandered in through the open back porch door.

They were just making themselves at home, pecking at the walls and floor, hoping to turn up something edible, as if it were perfectly acceptable for them to come inside. Next they’ll fly up onto the kitchen table or make themselves comfortable on our bed. Nothing against chickens — but only housebroken chickens or chickens in diapers are allowed inside.

Filed Under: Food & Drink, Kitchen Gardening, Nature, Photography Tagged With: backyard chickens, basil, easter eggers, eggplant, green eggs and ham, tomatoes

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