Garden Oddities

I started out thinking of taking a picture of our sprouting blue agave. Even the baby agaves huddled under the skirts of the giant mother one are sending up sprouts. The problem is, the whole thing has gotten so tall that I couldn't figure out the best way to get the whole thing in one shot with any sense of scale. The main sprout is now probably 30 feet high with flowering side shoots and towers above our house. 

I went up to the upper arbor to shoot down on it and was arrested by the volunteer sunflowers which came up in one of the veggie boxes. It wasn't until today that we discovered that the leaves are being eaten not by bugs but by goldfinches! Of course I had the wrong camera to capture the little bird so intent on eating a leaf that I was able to get quite close. It wasn't close enough, but I put a picture in extras. See if you can locate it.

The roses were pretty well finished off by the hailstorm, but tomatoes are beginning to appear! Tomatoes are a big deal here, and people can spend hours (even OilMan) discussing methods of propagating, watering, stressing, pruning and feeding tomato plants. I usually refrain from mentioning that the best home grown tomatoes we've had since we've lived here came from a volunteer plant that came up by the back fence unnoticed by us until it suddenly was sporting huge yellow and red heirloom tomatoes.

When I came back down to the patio level, I was charmed by a scrub jay vigorously bathing on the edge of our fountain. Again, I had to make do with the wrong camera again, but I put a picture of him fluffing himself on the edge of the fountain....not so easy to fluff when you are sopping wet!