My Calendula

Eloine

Calendula
Calendula

I noticed my calendula was in bloom. So naturally I checked th Internet to see what I could do with it. I ran accross this really cute story:

Miss McGlaughlin was supervising the playground on a summer afternoon when one of the first grade boys suddenly began shrieking and running around in circles. She quickly determined that he had been stung by a yellow jacket on the upper arm. Casting wildly about for help, her eyes fell on the calendula flowering against the south wall of the school. She pulled the boy over to the flower bed and picked a large blossom, popping it in her mouth. Having heard that masticated calendula quickly relieves the pain of bee stings, she was ready to give it a try. But the flower tasted funny. As she spit it in her palm and applied the soothing mash directly to the sting, she realized that she had chewed up a fat, black “calendula bug” along with the flower. The injured boy had quit crying and was observing her with rapt curiosity. He’d never seen anyone eat a bug before . . .

Read more here: http://www.horizonherbs.com/pilot.asp?pg=calendula

My first pond flower!

Eloine

I took my laptop down to my garden to work on some web pages. I like to sit there so that the scenery isn’t always the same old office set up. I love being surprised by my garden. As I walked by my bathtub pond I saw something bobbing in the water under the waterfall and it was a water lily!!! I was certain it wasn’t going to bloom. I was having so much trouble with the water hardness and other things that I gave up on those plants a while ago. I guess I was wrong because there it was in the water. I had my iphone with me and turned the flower around to face me (careful not to drop my iPhone in the water!). Then with the little photo applications that are offered by the App store at Apple I sharpened it some and increased the contrast etc. I don’t think it did too bad for a camera phone!

Played around with the apps on the iPhone
Played around with the apps on the iPhone

A spider with an attitude!

Eloine

I love these little crab spiders. They get on my sunflowers and blend right in with the petals. They will stick to one flower for the life of the flower and grab insects out of midair that fly by. I brought a cut sunflower into the house unaware there was a passenger on board. A little disturbed by the cutting down of its house it decided to move over to a money tree and take up residence on one of the leaves. There it sat waiting all day until I came along jamming a camera in its face. As you can see it told me what it thought about that!

Keep scrolling…

Just waiting
Just waiting
Dracula pose
Dracula pose

Teeny weeny tomatoes

Eloine

liltomatos

Gosh these are so cute! Literally handfulls of tomatoes 🙂

These are red current tomatoes and are indeterminate. It took me a little while to pick all these and there are literally hundreds more on the plant. Besides being incredibly small they are really sweet in flavor. I think they would be great in salads or anything you want to throw a little tomatoe into.

Another thing they are good for is hanging baskets. I have one plant in a hanging basket and it has many flowers but no fruit yet.

Here is a link to someone I think beat the size of mine. Look how she has them right inside a thimble!