Bingoandlove

I already posted this on Places of the Spirit.  Surely it really belongs in Natural Gardening, but the margins between the two blur. Young ferns appeared at the base of the sedum bed this spring, a charming and welcome addition to the shadiest part of the bed.  They're now a lot bigger! I'd initially thought that the spores had floated in from our neighbor's garden, but now -- well, it's clear the source is the robust wood fern at the corner of the house.     Dryopteris intermedia (intermediate wood fern) does well here in the North Carolina mountains.  And in this year of plenty of rain (and afternoon thunderstorms), well, it's flourishing.

My trombocino squash plant is spreading everywhere in my front raised bed, swamping the baby butternut vines, the herbs, and the Sweet Million tomato that share that bed.  Yikes, I think, as I�m trying to figure out how to subdue it. I have to step carefully around it as I harvest the Sweet Millions and look for young developing squash. Somehow I missed this large squash - hidden in the middle of the bed. (Normally, I like to harvest them much smaller, but fortunately it�s still quite nice.)     I need to get out and prune off the yellowing leaves, but haven�t had the time.  Thank goodness that this year is a low insect and disease year so far, so the rambunctious garden still looks attractive in front of the house.   This was a week or so ago.  The squash are on the left.  Beans and tomatoes are trying to keep up. The blessings of a late summer garden.

Farewell, my old Blogger template, which I quite liked.   Perhaps it wasn't mobile friendly, but I liked it and had used it happily since 2007, with modifications to gadgets (posting presentations and info, as it evolved). So being nudged/forced/encouraged into something new, well it was a bit unsettling.    I've been resisting the upgrade for some time, as the revert to legacy switch made all of my sidebars disappear.  But finally, this afternoon, I tried to see what might work, among the "new" templates. Happily, a sister format to my Places of the Spirit blog template found me able to recover my side bars, even though the archive posts require some scrolling.  Whatever.   I'll keep reviewing the site, but at least it's not the mess that some of the new Blogger templates create. I've made over 2200 posts so far on this site and accumulated followers along the way (all of whom were disconnected, I think, with the "upgrade.")  Whatever, ...

Stymied by our urban bears, we can't have bird feeders or hummingbird feeders at ground level this summer in Asheville. Note this fellow's activities in this post in Places of the Spirit : He enjoyed the bird seeds followed up by a downing of sugar water from the hummingbird feeder. So, we've regrouped and added supports for feeders up on our covered deck, both for hummingbirds and for seed feeders. Happily, a hummingbird appeared today, visiting, shortly after the feeder was up.

With warmer temperatures this summer, Passiflora incarnata seems to be thriving here in the Asheville basin.  Two of our neighbors have robust vines, with lots of flowers, as do others in the neighborhood. It�s a host plant for gulf frittilaries, a semi-migratory butterfly that often didn�t make it to the Piedmont in colder years, in the two plus decades we lived there. But the plant itself seems to be fine in the last couple of mild winters here in the mountains of Western North Carolina � it won�t survive a return of the polar vortex, but who knows what our weather may bring in the coming years.