Rainy August segued into pumpkin September in the most delightful way.
With wonderful late August monsoon storms and reading into the middle of the night with windows wide open, and curtains billowing in the breeze to the sound of rain drops.
I wake up daily with such excitement to check the pumpkin patch, along with all the other places pumpkin vines are growing.
It’s always exciting when zinnias are about to unfurl, when you’ve watched them grow for months, and you are finally about to see what colors they are. It’s like finally getting to open a random grab bag, and it never stops being wonderfully surprising.
It is late summer at the country house and the miniature Jack-be-Little pumpkins are being pollinated by the giant Fairytale Pumpkins, which are creating the perfect Cinderella’s carriage pumpkins here and there (as seen above). I love when that happens, and different types of pumpkins are created.
There are many types of pumpkins out there, such as the heirloom Fairytale pumpkins, which are the caramel colored heavily ribbed pumpkins that I have been growing for over 20 years. They are the best for baking with, so rustic, charming and very dear to my heart. I harvest the seeds every year and grow my own grand-pumpkins year after year. They are actually named Musquee de Provence and are a French pumpkin that grows in Provence, but are also widely known as the Fairytale pumpkin.
If you are interested in different types of pumpkins and would like to read about them, here is a link with great descriptions and photos.
The rain has turned the entire garden practically neon green and so lush.
I couldn’t be more thankful for a rainy monsoon season, we really needed it.
Enter through the wild rose arbor…
As you can tell, there are pumpkin vines growing everywhere, and not just in our giant pumpkin patch.
I will never stop being amazed at the curly cues of the pumpkin vines and the tiny, almost microscopic yellow pumpkin dots that appear tucked into leaves. You can spot one on the bottom left below, which will be a flower with a baby pumpkin behind it if all works out well (and it did).
Speaking of baby pumpkins, my sweet Poppy girl is doing well. So many have asked about her, so here is a little update. Her little knees are still healing (torn ccl’s in February, hereditary and common, overly strong quads and weak knees), but she has been on only controlled leash walks for the past few months, and something is finally changing for the better. I started taking it extremely seriously when she started to get better at first and then ran a little and reinjured herself. Weeks and weeks went by and she had been hobbling around and whimpering, not going up on the sofa or bed with her little stairs anymore, and not even wanting to play. I did so much research and found that it takes a really long time to heal (about 12+ weeks or more, sometimes 6-12 months, but it is possible to heal), so I talked to Mister Lovee in May/June and I said, now we have to get ridiculously serious about this, so we did. At first you think your dog will get better quickly, but when it is not happening and they get reinjured you really have to get serious about it. It’s pretty much the unknown until you go through it and figure things out.
She was on painkillers for a while, but when I became a sergeant about her only walking a little on leash (controlled leashed walks are the recommendation from professionals), something finally started to change after months of her really struggling. After about 9 weeks of controlled leash life when outside, she started being her happy self again, and she has recently started using her little stairs to get on the bed and play with Teddy again. She even has jumped onto the couch by herself regularly over the last couple weeks. This was such a good sign that she is getting better. And while she still can not run, to know that she is healing by seeing these changes means the world to me. I was a very worried and sad dog mum for a while. It broke my heart to see her struggling like that at only 2 years old. It is likely hereditary and a very common issue in dogs, but 5 dog kids in, I had not experienced it before. She is a wild child that longs to run, and I hope she can one day. But for now, to see her not in pain and playing with Teddy again means we are doing something right and we will continue with the leash, as well as plenty of knee and back massages that also help.
Thank you for asking and caring about our little Poppy (we actually still call her Puppy).
And now, lets continue on our garden stroll, shall we?
You may or may not know that before the female flowers with the baby pumpkins appear, many male squash blossoms appear to let the bees and winged pollinators know that there is something going on. The male flowers are covered in yellow pollen, and the bees and other insects go crazy over them. By the time the female flowers appear, the bees will jump between the male flowers covered in pollen and the female flowers and hopefully successfully pollinate to create pumpkins. Sometimes you have to step in if the bees haven’t gotten the memo, and with a fine tip little paint brush you can take pollen to the female flowers, which I do try to help with to ensure we get pumpkins. But sometimes you can’t help with them all and you hope nature handles the job well.
I feel like summer isn’t really happening if there aren’t pumpkins, zinnias and cosmos in the garden.
It’s just my own personal thing, but I try to do my very best to get all the seeds planted in spring so that August and September feel like this.
Our early summer apples had a second little harvest and we are enjoying apple crisps made with our own apples again.
And then the garden became a jungle.
The Lady Banks’ rose arbor is like a giant chia pet from all the rain.
At the bottom right of the arbor is a rosemary plant, grown from a sprig of rosemary from our main bush that rooted in a pitcher of water. I planted the tiny piece here a few years ago and now there’s this massive rosemary here. I love fun garden happenings as such.
And then the wild pumkin patch.
It grew so huge so quickly with many male flowers, but the female flowers were lollygagging, so I side fertilized (as recommended) with organic bone meal, and bam, many female flowers began to appear.
There are zinnias growing here and there, and some are even in the middle of the pumpkin patch. I was pretty much 1.5 months behind in planting my pumpkin patch this year, so I didn’t know what to expect. It was just cooler for longer, so I waited and used all the seeds in one of my own fairytale pumpkins. I also used some of my own harvested zinnia seeds. I love seeing them on the window shelves in the kitchenette off of my studio.
Here is a more zoomed out shot of our wild country garden below. I am not sure if I’ve shared that this part of the garden is in the front of the house. You can glimpse our extended front porch sticking out to the right. So really, this is our front garden, although it is set back, and there is still a large tree and shrub path beyond this before you get to the road. In the back is where I have my enclosed vegetable garden. We have worked really hard in our gardens this summer, with crazy hot weather but wonderful storms for a little reprieve. We tend garden 3 hours in the morning and 2.5 hours in the evening. But I suppose we do that every year.
It is a labor of love that means everything to me.
I feel like my garden keeps me sane, happy, hopeful, and gifts me with so many surprises.
Like the orange sulfur cosmos that were unexpected but grow readily at my other house’s garden.
There’s nothing really like taking the big camera out and taking close-up photographs of things.
I love looking through my camera roll, but it’s so difficult to choose what to share.
I had about 135 photos I liked, and I had to pare it down to 60, and then 34 to share here today.
And even that seems like enough to bore you silly, haha!
I really can’t get over the curls in the pumpkin patch.
Isn’t nature just incredible?
And since both ML and I have curly hair (well mine is wavy and curly combo) it seems quite apropos for our garden to be curly as well.
Oh, and Teddy is a little curly too when his fur is wet.
Wringlets.
Fully happy garden paths, goodness how I love to look around and roam.
I couldn’t get over the photo below, that one rain drop in a perfect circle.
Curly curly, curls for support.
They grab on to everything and help the vines immensley.
And then there have been the squash blossoms we have indugled in.
You only eat the male flowers after all the pollen is gone, which is usually about 9 a.m.
By 9 a.m. there is no sign whatsoever that the flower stamens were laden with pollen.
They wilt very easily in the sun, as well as after being cut, so you have to have perfect timing between them getting too wilted and the pollen being harvested by the bees.
I used our own red bell pepper’s and red onions to make a garlicky cream-cheezy mixture to fill and fry up our squash blossoms, yumm. We never eat fried food, but that was a delicacy.
So delicioso.
A store bought mini yellow rose bush from a few years ago has surprised us greatly by turning into this massive climbing rose that has flowered non-stop all summer.
Speaking of tall and climbing…
The birdhouse gourds have climbed up so high into the tree it’s astounding.
And some really old morning glories I had saved from Miss Charlene (thank you beloved friend) have joined in the beanstalk climb.
It’s just all such a wonderful muchness of growing things for my simple little garden-keeper heart.
I’m just so thankful.
This song burst of garden goodness sort of came to this epic fruition right at the end of August, which also happens to be the anniversary of my father’s death. I really struggled in the week leading up to it this year (he died August 24, 2024), but then I realized that I am starting to let go of the pain and agony of it all little by little. Waking up in the middle of the night with terrible visions of it all are starting to fade a bit more. That feeling of helplessness as well as feeling sorry that I couldn’t save him or save him from his fate (not that I could have, but it’s what I felt) has begun to diminish.
How can one of the most significant people in your life just poof, disappear into the great beyond as though they were never here?
I do not know, but what I do know is everything I have learned through this grieving process, and how despite the pain you have to just keep on taking little steps. I kept telling myself that I was taking my little cloud of pain everywhere with me but still moving forward even if it had to come with me. Sometimes you think you are getting beyond it, and you go to the dentist for your yearly check-up and they ask in a really lighthearted manner, “well Miss Vanessa, have you been going through some stress or what, because you are really grinding your teeth.” For a minute I just sat there, and I looked at the beautiful hygienist and giant tears just plunked out of my eyes, because for a moment I didn’t know what the stress was. And then like a wave of pain, I was reminded. I said, my father died.
I just looked down and said, I’m so sorry, as I started sobbing.
I said, I’m sorry, you just never know when you are going to feel this way.
She grabbed the Kleenex box and sat by me with tears in her eyes and in a soft sincere caring tone said, it’s totally ok.
The happy dentist then walks in and goes, oh boy someone is grinding…
He looks at us, and the hygienist says, she’s been through a great hardship, and then whispers to him.
He puts his hand on my shoulder and smiles, you’re doing great, we all grind, don’t worry. Then they made me a bite guard.
He’s so funny and reminds me of a university frat boy turned grey haired kind of Santa in his joy.
The one thing was, being older and less worried about what anyone thinks (I tell Mister Lovee every day that I am in the I Do Not Care Club – which I think he finds a bit frightening, haha!), I didn’t feel bad or ashamed for showing emotion, I was just unprepared for how that sort of happened.
Did my dad really die?
The question that has plagued me.
But I get better all the time and I have let my grieving/healing go with the flow, doing whatever it has needed.
I’ll show you my doodles on the subject when the time is right.
But that date has now gone, and the rains and pumpkins exploded even more the entire week after.
And like it always does, the garden helped healed me once again.
What a place.
I hadn’t planned to share that story, but somehow there it is.
I am so thankful for all the growing things that bring me so much joy.
That little pumpkin below is smaller than your thumb nail.
It will grow a large blossom and get bigger itself, and then flower.
And then it will grow into a great big pumpkin if it gets pollinated.
Below, a large carpenter bee flies behind a regular bee.
The difference in size is astounding.
I look forward to reporting back to you with how everything is going.
I have this one huge fairytale pumpkin that I call the queen pumpkin.
I hope she makes it all the way, as she has the loveliest long stem as well.
So, it’s been a busy garden summer, grueling but wonderful days, with dogs and healing and flowers and raindrops and all manner of things. All the things of summer, too hot, popsicles, bites, fluffly clouds, garden baths and a ton of reading of books.
Snipping little flowers to bring inside…
And hanging out with my garden helpers.
We have arrived at September 2nd, which seems sort of amazing.
It was just July yesterday, but time buzzes on at the speed of light it seems…
And September is a mighty good month.
The garden loves September in the high desert.
Go gourds go.
You never know what you might see, such as these wild Morning Glories that popped up below.
The wild ones have these pointed leaves.
ML put this plant stand here and secured it in the ground for them to climb up.
And now they have grabbed on to the tree and are climbing high.
In the land of the sea of leaves…
With fairytales to be told, growing quietly underneath.
As we enter the garden path into September.
Where little mushrooms are popping up right down the path.
Magical times are brewing.
I meant to be here so many times this summer, but I was wildly busy.
Not only with the garden, but I hosted my family a couple of times and it was such fun.
One of the times was a week of partying for my mom’s birthday.
I bought a light machine and we danced and danced, it was incredible.
It was like being at a discotheque in the 80’s and 90’s.
Then in mid-August my sister came for a visit and we did a bunch of crafts.
In fact, I have a video I will share below of our paper chain crafts.
I really do love September, I can’t believe the summer months have come to a close.
I have also been working on a few things for my shop that I will add in about a week.
There are always so many things going on, but I think it’s nice to have things to look forward to.
I just finished listening to Roland Orzabal’s audiobook and now I’m playing my Tears for Fears records non-stop.
It cracked open my 80’s tween heart like a piñata.
Kind of heart wrenching, but fun too.
I can say with certainty, that one of the top things to make me happy is watching pumpkins grow in September.
I really can’t ask for anything better.
It adds to the magic of the season in ways I can not even describe.
Well, I have typed and typed a novel to you, and I hope you enjoyed it at least a little.
Poppy is ready for her walk and I hear thunder.
I hope you are very well in your neck of the woods and would love to hear about it.
I shall chat with you again soon, lots of love from that place where the desert meets the forest.
All my best, Vanessa
P.S. Here is the crafting video of the paper chains I was talking about…
You must make some yourself <3
