Early Fall Weekend

I've been busy harvesting in the garden this weekend, as you can see from the photo above.  The surprisingly zesty 'Italian Roaster' peppers (the long red ones on the right) are going ganbusters, but all of my bells are disappointingly small and thin-walled. But the tomatoes and eggplants are doing just fine in spite of this summer's drought.  The colors in the (old, trashpicked) sturdy trug above sort of remind me of the foliage colors in the mixed veggie-and-ornamental garden:

That photo was taken from a crouching position in front of one of the clay tile planters, which you could see dead center if it weren't obscured by bloodgrass, purple basil and portulaca.  The swirls of plant colors in this area even look cool when viewed from above:

And here's a fuller shot from the front, so you can get a better sense of what all is going on here.  Bloodgrass, basil, cabbage, tomatoes, salvia, amaranth, oh my!

I thought that this might be the first summer without my beloved 'Hopi Red Dye' amaranth, because the seedlings were so late to emerge.  But they came up eventually, and now tower over my head in spite of the cutting back I did in August:

Speaking of slow starts, my tropical purple passionflower vine FINALLY began to bloom this week:

It is now making up for its slow start adding color through the artemisia:

And all across the fence:

A slightly less wanted bloom is this:

At first I thought that this explosion of purslane in my garden came from the common weed, and a dry summer... but this looks like the progeny of one of the fancy, large-flowering 'Yubi' portulacas that I have had in the clay tile planter for the last few years.  The individual flowers are the same size, but they aren't nearly as floriferous as the true Yubis.  Bummer.

Well, it smells like my latest batch of roasting veggies is about done, so it's time to post this and get back into the kitchen to cut some more tomatoes.  Hope that you're either getting all of your gardening chores done this weekend, so you feel both tired and satisfied...

... or that you're enjoying your trip to wherever the wind decides to take you:

Either way, have a wonderful weekend!