Wordless Wednesday - Winterthur Garden Fixtures

Harvest Monday

This has been the best week for harvesting in the vegetable garden. Lots of variety!
Lots of peppers that made wonderful stuffed peppers this week. There are more peppers on there but I pick as needed if I can.

Amish paste have slowly ripened.

Zucchini is at the giveaway stage. I have given some away twice now and even tried freezing it for soups this winter. We have it almost at every meal in some form.

Cucumbers have filled up my refrigerator pickle jar. I found another smaller jar to use at Goodwill and that's full too.

This Amish paste looked lovely on one side but was eaten on the other. I cut off the bad part and the rest was fine.

More peppers for salads and other uses.

Cherry tomatoes are ready every day. They are best in salads or to eat by themselves.

A typical day's harvest.

First Goldie today.

These Rutgers fell off as I touched them. I think the plant is going.

See other harvests at the host of Harvest Monday - Daphne's Dandelions.

Not Just a Greenhouse!

Longwood Gardens in Kennett Square, PA has an enormous garden display under the sun, trees, and glass. But the latter isn't simply a greenhouse; it's much more and deserving of the word conservatory. I'll let the photos speak for themselves.
















I have more photos of Longwood Gardens and also Winterthur that I will be posting in the weeks to come. If you get a chance to visit the East Coast, make Longwood Gardens created by Pierre du Pont one of your stops.

A Conglomerate of Unrelated Observations

I. Amish Paste
First of the Amish paste tomatoes harvested at 5 o'clock. Yum!

II. Fragrance

The stargazer and white lilies are in bloom and the fragrance is extraordinary in my perennial garden. Each stalk is loaded with blooms so this display will be around for quite awhile.

III. Refrigerator Pickles

The pickle jar is filled to the maximum. The cucumbers are being transformed into pickles. I've been sampling them every couple of days. After the first sampling I had to add more sugar because I had put in too much salt. Only half of the last cucumber would fit so the rest of that one was eaten for lunch. There are more cucumbers to be picked ~ how do they grow so fast overnight? ~ and another refrigerator pickle recipe to try.

IV. The Culprit
Here it is, the bunny eating my plants. We sat at the dinner table last night and watched it munch away on the remaining impatiens. Fortunately for this rabbit I wasn't able to move all the impatiens to pots out of its reach. It has enjoyed them and now there are hardly any left for it to eat.

After eating it ambled over to this spot of grass and stretched out. It had its eye on us the whole time so we finally decided to get the camera and take its picture. My zoom isn't the best and I did crop the photo to enlarge it, but you can get a sense of how relaxed this critter is.

V. A Good Book
I do a lot of reading, some good books, some okay books. Terrible ones, I don't bother to finish. I finished a good book this weekend: "Prayers for Sale" by Sandra Dallas. Set in the midst of the Depression in the Rocky Mountains' gold country of Colorado, it is the story of a friendship between two women, one 86 years old and one 17 years old. They have quilting and sorrows in common and the friendship builds from that. The older one is a story teller so you're taken back to the Civil War and events that transpired then. It was a lovely read all the way through. I'll look for other books by this author next time I'm at the library.