Return of the rain

I spent the morning redirecting passionflower vines in the vegetable bed-- forgot to mention them among the rogue's gallery of vines yesterday as they are not part of the problem in the front flower beds-- the vegetable bed is the newest  bed and gets more attention than the other beds. Trumpet flower vine tries to come over from the woods but I pull the roots where I can find them. There is very little Virginia creeper in the vegetable bed and even less after this morning. I have several trellises for the passionflower vine and I let it grow on a couple of big sasanqua camellias as well. The passionflower vine is not as much of a problem as the other vines, and it is easy to persuade it to grow in the direction I want it to go. The caterpillars eat it and in winter the leftover vines dry up and fall apart by themselves. I pulled just a few passionflower vines that were coming up in problematic places, like the Alachua Red Climber rose trellis, the Sweet One Hundred cherry tomato cage, and the mystery cherry tomato cage. I'm pretty sure the mystery cherry tomato will turn out to be a black cherry tomato. The seedling came up next to the strawberry plants and I let it grow. It's vigorous and the tomatoes are big, even bigger than the tomatoes on the plant that stood in that spot last year. One fruit started to change from green this morning.

After Tropical Storm Andrea came through, we have had several days without rain. Now a storm is moving in from the west. I had come in for brunch, and because my neighbor was kicking up noise and smoke with his lawn mower, when I heard the thunder. The light has dropped quickly in the past ten minutes, and now it looks like a cloudy twilight outside the windows. The rain has just started now.

I also devined the last and most heavily covered pine tree in the front yard. Carolina jessamine had formed a beautiful mass about twenty feet up. It bloomed gloriously in January. It will not stay there, however, and it is joined by grapevine and Virginia creeper, and all of them are growing over the camellias next to the tree. If it is too wet to work in the yard after the storm passes, I will resume the destruction tomorrow. I also have my eye on a grapevine that is covering my buckthorn saplings, growing over onto them from my neighbor's hedge. Buckthorn is one of my favorite trees. We first became aware of it when we discovered it growing in our previous house's back yard, and I have loved it ever since. I will let it grow just about anywhere it sprouts. Beautiful leaves and demure little berries that the birds love. It's a great understory tree, very sweet.