I can't believe it's already August. The year is flying by. I was just looking over my old blog entries, at older photos of the garden. So much has changed! We've had many gardening successes. This photo to the left is a picture of one particularly lovely purple pole bean in my Three Sisters garden. I just love that photo. And I love those purple beans, even though I think we harvested a grand total of three of them so far. But the season isn't over yet! Hopefully we'll get some more. We have both purple and green pole beans, and some green bush beans as well. But I know we won't have enough for canning. What little we get, we end up eating right away. So I'll definitely plant more next year.
Here is a photo update of our Three Sisters garden where you can see the different leaves of the two types of beans, crawling up the corn stalks. We actually ate the corn shortly after this photo was taken. The ears were small, but there was no mistaking the difference between home grown and store bought corn.
We've also had gardening victories with our zucchini.
This is a common sight in our kitchen. This year, I have learned several new ways to work zucchini into our diets! I wish my kids were more excited about it. My oldest son can't stand it. Even if it's something delicious like zucchini orzo, where the zucchini is shredded and mixed in with a bunch of pasta and cheese. Who could argue with that? But he won't touch it. Sigh!
Here is a photo of my cucumbers, taken about a month ago. They were growing up their little mesh trellis and seemed pretty happy. We had tons of adorable baby cukes growing all along the vine. New tendrils were sprouting every day. It was really thriving.
And then I'm not sure what happened exactly. The leaves started looking a bit spotty. Then they started looking sort of bleached out. And then, adorable baby cukes that looked like this:
Looked like this a week or so later (you can see the diseased leaf in the background):
So, no pickles for me this year. I'm so sad. We also had two Boothby's Blonde Cucumber vines. I got two cukes from them, before the same disease (fungus? mold? blight?) killed them off.
In addition to that disappointment, my watermelon vines are likewise shriveling. We had over 20 baby watermelons at one point. But only 3 actually grew. The rest shriveled and died, though we have another variety that is doing OK so far. I'm not giving up hope yet!
These lovely things are sunberries. They're relatively new to me. I don't think I'd ever heard of them before my friend Cassie started growing some in her garden last year. And, since lots of sunberry seeds went into her compost pile, she ended up with tons of sunberry seedlings this spring - which she then shared with me! I believe I planted about six sunberry plants in my garden this year. Sunberries are lovely with big green leafy plants and tiny white flowers. The berries themselves look sort of like blueberries, but they taste more like sweet tiny tomatoes. 
To be honest, they're not my favorite things to eat - though strangely enough my children who usually avoid tomatoes (and blueberries, for the most part) loved the sunberries. Know what I love about sunberries? 
That's right, I just love to squish them. They're full of all these tiny seeds, and smooshing them between my fingers is strangely satisfying.
And with all the seeds I've squished and then dropped into the garden, I'll probably have lots of sunberry seedlings in the Spring, next year myself!
