Evening check up and this morning.

 It's such a wonderful feeling to go out and not see dry dirt in my beds. Dry mulch yes, but the soil an inch down is fine and dandy. Another toasty day but less breeze unfortunately. First, my evening foray thinking I would put more mulch out. Well, mulch happened but not as much on the beds as in the bucket.

I should take pictures at dusk more often, the lighting is perfect for getting details on the plants. Four peppers now on that bush, might cull the smallest one to give the others more energy. Sunflower doing what it's doing, the but is more prominent now and it's facing west...where the sun was.

The dirt pushed into the hole when it was open earlier in the day. Sigh. Until those gophers are gone, can't plant anything in that bed. The bean sprout is easier to see in lower light and wet mulch.

 

Remember the bean leaf positions? Now that the sun has gone down, leaves are down too. It's not wilting it's night time position because there's no sun, no need to have them open to the sky. Wish I could get a time lapse camera and put it out there.

And what I didn't see earlier in the day, a second bean coming up at the other end of the row I planted. Not sure how it's going to go because it isn't showing any leaves. And a picture of how many flowers are on the top of that pepper plant and close up of the larger one. Such high hopes for all these plants.

Now on to this morning just to check on them. No other signs of activity, Rocky decided to go check the garden out and likely smelled the gopher as he stopped at one of the holes to sniff really well. I didn't get a picture last night of the mulch bucket so did that this morning.

 

I dumped some into the back of the north bed then put as much as possible in the bucket and dropped the remainder kind of tucked behind the aloe. Can't put any more in the north bed because there's two new seedlings, the fence bed doesn't have anything in it so no use for doing that. 

When I scrape aside the mulch to check on the soil I am occasionally seeing pill bugs rolled up. Not sure if they are dead or alive as they're curled up in a ball. They're good clean up crew under that mulch breaking down the bits and pieces. They can do some damage to seedlings though if there's enough of them.

Seeing one lone tendril reaching out from the cucumber I decided to put in another stake to help it out. Then lovingly checked to see all the buds forming at the axils that will produce fruit (hopefully) and saw another tendril looking for support so...

 

That's all it really needs since it's going to be a bush type, it's almost full height actually, but since it now has tendril support it may well climb a bit. Just hope I can figure out how to give the fruit support so they don't break the stems.

I could technically have used one of the small tomato cages but that's hindsight as I didn't think it would get this far.

That sunflower will likely be blooming next week with the one next to it sometime later. The beheaded one has a bud on the side, but as I said, it could well get in the way and will have to sacrifice it soon. The other two small ones, they get to live another day.

 Going to look back in my photos and see just when that sunflower center disappeared, it was a very precise removal seemingly in one night. 

Frustrated and curious at the same time.

Last sighting was July 19th and it looks like it was gone the next day. The next full picture I have of it is the 23rd because I was preoccupied with the con and didn't get pictures of everything. This is why pictures and checking every day is important. Chronicling events and progression, or regression in some cases, for future  reference.

July 19

July 20

July 23

I was more concerned about the peppers and the gopher than paying attention to the sunflower that seemed to be doing so well. Just the difference in two days of the size of the leaves is incredible. From the 20th to the 23rd the leaves almost doubled in size.

Gardening is always an adventure and frustration goes hand in hand with excitement.