My Garden Looking Like a Fall Garden

This morning I just had no choice but to hand water my small veggie and flower garden
  The "promised" rain by the weatherman has fallen short. We were right in the area to get two days of rain and at the very least one evening of t storms and rain We got nothing at all not a drop. Hoping at least someone in Missouri got some rain as the ranchers are really suffering here and are already selling off stock for lack of hay.
   We have a well, so when we are in drought conditions like this I don't do allot of watering-I have learned from a past dry summer that even when I watered twice a day my veggies still did not produce well so now I just don't waste our well water-even though we have a very very deep well that is tapped into an underground river.
  In the veggie garden area I lay down a very thick mulch to keep the weeds down and moisture in around the plants. it does help allot.

  After watering I grabbed the camera-as yellow leaves were falling from plants as I was working. I did get a surprise though-a nice first picking of beans considering the conditions. I think I will make ham, fresh green beans and potatoes-in memory of my Mom-one of her favorite dishes.

   Yesterday morning I canned up a half batch of gherkin inspired pickles-I combined two recipes from the Ball canning book-one I like the spices and the other I prefer the method better. It takes two weeks in two different brines but these are a favorite. These are a crisp sweep pickle but I sprinkle red hot pepper flakes in when I can it up.

Found one yellow hot cayenne pepper (my first time growing these) and one small cucumber

Wisteria in the maple tree-turning yellow already and dropping leaves

note all photos will enlarge to full size

This is the worse section of the zinnias, even watered they have turned yellow and brown over the last few weeks  On the trellis is the yellowing wisteria

This is the view beyond the trellis-these zinnias get full sun all day and seem to be doing a bit better-which is strange to me-but already dyeing off--I have only seen a very few butterflies this summer
  On the plus side I will have lots of seeds for next years

I grew this pretty marigold from seed and only 4 survived but I love how big and spreading they got-will plant them again nest year-but remember to give them much more room

This is tansy-they are suppose to have these yellow flowers-they produce a yellow dye, and dried are great keeping moths away in wool

This is Hopi amaranth for dye. and they will reseed themselves and take over if you let them I planted them to dye with but when I got into really reading about the dye-it is not colorfast or lightfast so I now just keep a section of them going every year since they are pretty. This is probably the 4th year now they have reseeded

These are my only pretty petunias this summer because they are mostly in the shade my others look terrible do to the very hot sun this year.

Happy Wednesday!!