Fall!

While we were away for nine days in Colombia, the rains happened and everything grew. The vegetable garden we rely on is covered with weeds threatening to overwhelm the seedlings I had left in pristine mulched rows and mounds. The lawn needed cutting.

After two days of recovering from Montezuma's revenge, doing all the trip laundry, tending to hundreds of e-mails and family needs and reassuring the dog, I am back! Everyone in Florida is excited that there is going to be a cold front coming through tonight (they say). After the extreme heat and humidity in Colombia, it already seems cool to me.

The giant cosmos have started to bloom and the hummingbirds have left and soon the chimney swifts will be on their way and we will not hear their twitter until next spring. I see a few love bugs beginning to mass for their fall invasion. We need to put up our bird feeders for the returning migrants.

I left the automatic watering on for the vegetable garden and I see that the sweet potatoes are lush and there is enough eggplant to feed an army. The broccoli and collards I planted before I left are doing well, and even the carrots and peas are pushing up through the weeds. The summer zinnias have repopulated themselves from dropped seed heads and I must transplant them to more suitable places in planters I have next to the front door. The lettuce in the raised beds are almost big enough to pick. Deer tongue and black seeded simpson have grown well, but it was obviously too hot for the rest of the mesclun to germinate. The beans have been attacked by the grasshoppers but they will recover. Wild red sage grows rampantly everywhere, even in the vegetable garden. I hate to take it out because it is such a butterfly attractor and I can love even weeding when I am surrounded by those huge tiger swallowtails and gulf fritillaries and monarchs and all the others. I love seeing the queen butterfly caterpillars eating away at the milkweed. So, I cannot remove these plants, not yet!

The compost pile is now perfect, sweet and crumbly brown, and I can dig out just what I need to spread around the vegetables. Just next to the compost pile is our old time friend, the giant gopher tortoise who comes out and hisses when I am out there sweating in the garden. And the cows come to the fence hoping for some collard leaves or a scratch on the head.

But the BEST was the orchids that live in the swimming pool enclosure and are all in glorious bloom.

Now that we have a sniff of cool weather, we have so much to do outside. The asparagus bed, and the roses, and the wild place outside the screen porch. They all need tending. All potential!