Good morning to you all on this cool and bright Thursday morning. And we expect it to stay cool and bright all day which is good after yesterday when we got up to 90 with high humidity. We had to close up and put on the air. Thankfully, most of the garden has been able to get along without a great deal of attention for the last two weeks. I thought I would show a few new pictures taken yesterday afternoon.

My roses are doing very well now. After an earlier episode of black spot the are looking very good. As I clean out the spent tomatoes I will put them in a main container for the winter. Thankfully, the containers don't all have to be cleared at the same time.

It may still be summer but fall is already in the air. I was right when I wrote earlier this week that I thought I saw the first faint signs of color change. We saw much more of that when we went out on our errands especially among the lower trees and shrubs. With fall I start assessing how the gardens did--what succeeded, what didn't, should I try the failures again under what changed conditions. The was an unqualified success. I bought the spearmint along with the ginger mint and stevia. Only the stevia was planned. Both mints are vigorous and very pretty. But, thankfully, I was smart enough to put the mints in their own pots because they would have taken over. I will take cuttings for new plants to over winter inside and transplant into pots for next season. I got a lot (and will be harvesting more) of both mints that I dried for tea during the cold months.

These are Blue Lake pole beans. After a slow start these pretty much took over the container much to the detriment of the Fresh Salsa tomatoes and the Dragon's Egg cucumbers. We decided on this variety to replace the Asparagus Yard Long beans I grew over the last two years. Though prolific the Yard Longs are a bit tough. Next year these will get their own pot as will the cucumbers.

These are the Vietnamese Multicolor peppers which though absolutely beautiful and vigorous will not be making a repeat appearance in the gardens. We wanted a small pepper with a bit of a kick--less than jalepeno but more than the False Alarm. The Multicolor is way too hot. It is curious though how differently the plants grew. Two of the seeds I planted grew into shorter fully green plants whose fruit went from green to red. One seed grew into a tall plant with purple foliage, lavender seeds and fruit that went from purple to lavender to cream to gold to orange to red.

If you look closely you can see the little splashes of color that are the peppers. I wonder if the differences represent a natural variability that carries through and if I saved seeds from the purple plant they would produced the mono-colored variety as well as the multicolored variety. Oh well, that ends this phase of the evaluation process. I will bring back the mints, cucumbers, and beans next year but not the peppers.