Plants of the Moment

But first: happy b-day to both my parental units, Mom yesterday and Dad today!

Despite the drought, the plant life has managed to hold up reasonably well through the summer. Maybe the rainy spring gave them enough of a start.

Back in February, I mentioned diverting the kitchen and laundry drains into the back yard. We must have had a few seeds go down the drain — literally — because now there’s a clump of tomato plants springing up.

Mrs. Fetched was like, “Do you really want to let them grow?” Heck yes — I want to see what kind they are, if nothing else. I can’t blame her for moaning about it — the tomatoes have done very well this year and Mrs. Fetched’s mom is ready to yank her plants out of the ground so she doesn’t have to pick any more. It’s not just the tomatoes… her scupperdine vine got so laden it pulled down the tree she’d used for a trellis; I found a persimmon tree at the bottom of the driveway that’s weighed down pretty heavily; her fruit trees are doing very well too. Only one of my yellow pear plants survived, but it has done quite well despite not being staked… it just sprawls everywhere. But if these particular plants do well, and the frost holds off long enough, they'll be ripe around late October.

Out for a walk on Thursday, I saw some wildflowers managing to grow among the kudzu.

The kudzu itself blooms, a pretty purple pyramid with a grape-y smell. But the blue blooms here were not of the kudzu; it was some other plant trying its luck among the tangle.

This kind of thing gives me a little hope. We’ve only begun to see how much our climate change is going to screw things up… but once we get out of the way, nature will adjust and fix things.