A Rainy July Day

This morning I awoke to the sound of the gutter gently running. By the time my alarm went of, the rain was drumming quite hard on the rooftop. So much for a chance of showers! By the end of the day we had .25 inches of rain in the rain gauge. That is very unusual for our "normal" Mediterranean dry Summers that we have here. But this year's weather has certainly been anything but normal. The rainfall did allow me to skip out on watering for a day which was nice. It also turned the soil a beautiful dark color which really made all of the different shades of green in the vegetable bed pop. The contast of the two colors was striking to me.

As you can see, the tomato plants have just exploded the last few weeks. It is now on my "to-do" list to add the second tier to the cages. I have lots of blooms now on the plants but so far only one variety had set any fruit.

The onions are also doing really well. The bulbs are starting to expand now that the days are starting to slowly decrease in length. This is a plant of "Prince" a yellow storage onion.

And this is "Red Bull". You can clearly see it is a red onion.

I don't have any idea how my two Sweet Potato varieties are performing. The plants have definitely perked up since the weather has warmed up. They are now constantly putting out new leaf growth. I do love the rich purple color of the new leaves. They slowly mature to green.

My two plants of "Marina di Chioggia" Winter Squash that I started from seed have now tipped over and are starting to crawl. Soon it will be hard to see any dirt through all of the leaves and vines.

And a pretty bloom from one of my four plants of "Pastel Mix" Morning Glory. The plants are growing like crazy but so far I am a bit disappointed with the color mix. The label promised a mix of pink, purple & white but so far it has been white, white & white!