Separation Anxiety.

Tomorrow I'm leaving for Portland to visit my Mom. I'll be gone about two weeks, and Alex will be looking after the garden while I'm gone. I know he'll do fine, and really the only thing that needs to be done is watering (my hope that raised beds make for little weeding seems to have been fulfilled). Still, though, I can't help but be a little nervous. Aside from worrying about something going wrong while I'm not there to help fix it, I'll miss watching some of the new flowers open and seeing the growth of my little pepper that I just transplanted into the big garden. The lemon basil is growing like mad, and I've only just been able to keep ahead of it's flowers. I'm going to cut it way back today and hang the cuttings up to dry, but still; I wonder what it will look like when I get back.

I've decided to wait until I get back to restart my tomatoes, so I can monitor them in their early stages. I'm still not sure exactly what I'm going to do, either. I talked to my Dad and he said it sounded like there might be some sort of fungus in the soil that killed them. Any major imbalance in nutrients or pH would have killed off (or at least drastically effected) everything else in the bed. Since it was just the tomatoes that kick it, it must be something more specific. But that means that I'm not sure I can grown them in the raised beds. If it is something in the soil and if I did try to grow them there again, the same thing would likely happen. So I'm thinking I might buy a big, deep tub of some kind and fill it with actual potting soil, then plant the tomatoes in that. This being Florida, I'm not too worried about starting them late; we probably won't get a killing frost until late November.

Alex being in the military means that we have a very interesting sleep schedule. We're usually in bed by 8:00 pm, and get up at 4:30 am. This means that I see the sun rise every morning, and I've found that that is a great time to take pictures of my flowers. The other morning the light was particularly odd. There was a storm front coming in, and the sky was glowing kind of yellowish green. It was a little hard to capture how cool and glowy the flowers looked in that light, but I still got some cool pictures. Warning: I got a bit artsy. Enjoy!