a note to a friend...

too busy right now to blog much, but here's a note i sent to a friend who asked me what's going on in the garden...

hey, mary! we just got from the keys, where i attempted, unsuccessfully, to catch all the fish in the straits. but i got most of them. what fun! the garden was a bit of a mess when i got back -- it's amazing what hell can break loose in the space of a few days, but it's summer in fla, i guess i should have expected it. a good mowing and an hour weeding took care of the worst of the problem. i'm definitely in tropical mode -- yardlong beans, crowders, sweet potatoes sprawling everywhere, yucca growing six inches a day, peanuts blooming, malanga finally leafing out. i finally got around to planting a bunch of okra, too. your white ruellia has finally started to bloom -- pretty stuff! does it bloom just in the summer? amazingly, my snaps still are going strong. this year, instead of pulling them when they started to fail, i cut them back almost to the ground. they seem to bounce back this way really well. i've also been deadheading them aggressively, which seems to help them to bloom faster.