Garden Bounty

The gardens are showing the signs of late summer now. Less flowers, more yellowing, not so much growth.

The tomato plants are looking spindly. The zucchini plants have a few bug eaten leaves.

I've been picking cucumbers lately however.  Cucumbers are looking good. I had a hankering to make pickles.

Voila!

Made these the other evening trying a new recipe. These cucumber slices don't first sit in salt and after several hours of that  then get packed into jars with the pickle juice concoction. Like the pickles I've always made in the past when I made pickles. Not that I have made tons of pickles before.

With these pickles, you pack the jars with fresh sliced cucumbers, put the salt into the cooked vinegar  and spice brine and then pour this mixture over the cucumber slices.

Then they need to sit for a month.

I can tell you then how they taste and whether I will use that recipes again.

And speaking of bounties-

 the roses are gorgeous right now.

Last spring I bought and planted a bunch of rose bushes in my yard.

They were small little bushlettes really. I bought 8 plants, and dug up part of my lawn where the grass never did very well.

I am amazed at how much they have grown and right now they are full of beautiful blooms.

Pink, orange, red and yellow.

And I moved this little stump  into the new rose garden.  I had had this bush in another garden and it hadn't yet greened up for the season. It was probably one of my best looking rose bushes, but this spring it was just a lot of branches without leaves.

So I dug it up and put it in the new rose garden expecting it to thrive.

All summer it was just a little brown stump.

I almost pulled it out and tossed it.

But look what just appeared.

Maybe it is symbolic of something in my life?

(Or maybe I am reading too much into it?)

But it is pretty exciting. Good thing I didn't yank this stump out of the ground and toss it like I wanted to so many times.