Dear Marybeth,

You wanted to know what I was growing in Montana?
Here are some photos with explanations!
It has been brutally hot, this end of June, so some things are very happy (tomatoes and zucchini) and some things are very sad (peas and cucumbers).


This is the zucchini; I think perhaps in your area they're called summer squash (?).  They have the most gorgeous orange-y yellow blossoms (that are edible!) and they produce baskets of little green squash per plant.  I have four zucchini plants which is considered insane around here.  Seriously.  When these babies start putting out the veggies, people lock their car doors for fear of being zucchini bombed, which is when an anonymous gardener who is swamped with the squash leaves a grocery bag full of them in your back seat. This happened to me, once.  Now I'M the zucchini bomber! (It's considered much kinder to first bake the zucchini into bread before leaving it in the car.)

Here are the zucchini plants with their friends the carrots (on the edge of the bed) and zinnias planted in the middle.  I know; zinnias are flowers!  But I love to blend the two !  More on that later...

Little carrots! I had just gotten done thinning them, took this picture and realized I needed to thin them more, yet.  I hate thinning carrots.  It's hard to decide who's going to stay and who has to die.  And it takes FOREVER.  By the time I get done, there are little carrot carcasses laying about and I'm thinking, "I can buy carrots...WHY am I growing them?!?!"  But home carrots actually have flavor, where boughten carrots are really rather bland.

Baby cucumbers....aren't they CUTE?!  I go out and check them every day, smiling at how they are so tiny.  My cucumbers are unhappy.  I think it's because I amended the soil in those beds this spring and perhaps got it a little "hot" with too much manure.  Either that or they're just mad about the weather being so blasted hot.  I can't tell.  But where the zucchini are growing wildly, the cucumber plants are just sitting there pouting and staying stumpy. Yellowing on the edges of the leaves, even.

I think spinach is beautiful.  I love to eat it in salads, I love to watch it explode in the garden...one day, nothing; the next day...SHAZZAM! spinach!

Tomatoes....personally, I think the smell of tomatoes is the smell of summer.  These are little pear tomatoes which will be used for sauce, not eating.  My cherry tomatoes are just setting on fruit and I'll show you pictures of them in another post.  I'm the only, only, only one in this house that eats tomatoes and I have at least eight plants.  I can't help myself!  Part of the reason I plant so many, though, is because tomatoes are delicate, needy things that die easily in this part of the country.  They don't like wind (it blows 20 mph almost every day, here), they need lots of water (it rains once a month), they desire a perfect soil (ours is sandy and needs amendment constantly) and they won't produce unless all these elements are just so.  Also, my dogs lay on them.  That tends to inhibit growth.

I have some herbs.  This is the cilantro.  I make a lot of pico de gallo in the summer and like middle eastern dishes, all of which call for large amounts of cilantro.  This little plant re-seeds itself in my herb bed, but every year I panic and think it might not, so I buy a couple plants just in case.  Then, about 2 weeks later, it's everywhere and I feel so foolish for doubting...but one never knows!  I think it has lovely leaves, all scalloped and fringe-y.

I tuck vegetables in with my flowers wherever possible.  This is a whiskey barrel planter with dahlias (not blooming at the time) petunias and a little patio tomato plant.  The tomato is very happy, the flowers are very happy and when I can snack as I weed, I'm happy, too!

I'm embarrassed to show you OUR pumpkin plant.  Maggie and Angus, my kids, were supposed to be taking care of them but they are not as interested in pumpkins as they are toads, so I'm watering them occasionally and apologizing for the lack of care.  That's salvia in the background because, yes, the pumpkins are planted in a flower bed....

This is a poppy that volunteered to grow by the woven wire fence....I love poppies, with their tissue petals and stubborn will to grow in awful spots.

Columbine, raising its face to the sun. This is my favorite flower.  They look like shooting stars!

Flax, which only blooms in the morning.  The birds love the seeds and I love the true blue-ness of the blossoms.  There are very few honest-to-goodness blue flowers...have you noticed that?  Most are purple-y!  But flax is blue, blue, blue.

I have calves that are named for flowers....here are Poppy, Buttercup and Johnny-jump-up.  Poppy gets in my yard and I noticed this morning that she's been eating the lettuce...how NAUGHTY!  We will have words, later...

Here's my pergola, with the garden beds at each corner.  There's a picnic table under it that we use for just everything...the kids take color books and projects out there, I read and pot plants and have snacks, we have picnics, the dogs lay under it for shade.  There are solar lights strung so that when the sun goes down, the tiny white lights make a soft glow and we can stay out even longer.

That's all I have for right now.
I need to get busy watering because it's supposed to be 97 degrees today, a nice break from the 104 degrees of yesterday, and the plants are gasping!

Your friend,
Mary