plant survey

Not much to do outside today but yank a few weeds, so I walked around admiring the plants and taking pictures. My Pumpkins are doing fabulous. I've never seen such huge leaves before.

They seem to like their grass-clipping mulch. Here's the other side. There's lots of little flower buds and reaching tendrils inside there, under the leaves. I'm waiting for them to start crawling out all over the place!

I've just sown some Sunflower and Cosmos seed in a row behind the pumpkins. It might be too late for them to grow and flower, but I want to try. On the side of the driveway, the Tithonia sunflowers I grew are getting bigger, but they don't look very nice. The leaves have uneven edges, and they look like nothing more than overgrown weeds.

 The Zucchinis look lovely and are making lots of flowers. I'm satisfied I've beaten the cucumber beetles this year, but there are no fruit forming yet. The flowers just dry up and fall off.

After looking at some photos of Zucchini flowers, then at my own again, it looks like all the flowers are male so far. But- I didn't know this before- most Zucchinis grow both male and female flowers on the same plant. They sometimes make male flowers first to produce pollen, the the female flowers come soon after. There are lots more flower buds on the plants, so I'm still hoping for Zucchini!

 My Pepper plants are nice and big, too. I'm amazed how large they grew from the tiny plants I set out weeks ago. More small white flowers, and the first tiny nubbin of a fruit is forming.