Welcome to the first entry on my garden blog!  Just in time for fall clean up of the garden.    Summer harvests are slowing down after a fabulous season.  All those tiny seeds planted in March produced hundreds of cherry, olivade roma, big boy and grape tomatoes and numerous zucchini and  cubanelle, bell, habanero, jalapeno and banana peppers.  The wonder of this marvelous bargain, one seed planted buys a crop of nourishment.  It is hard to say goodbye to my generous plants.  How is your garden clean up going?

This week in our garden plot,  I uprooted five brown shriveling  tomato plants and sixteen huge sagging sunflower plants.  The tomato plants folded and twisted nicely into my crowded compost bin.  But the  10 foot sunflower plants stood rigid.  Immovable posts stuck in the dry dirt.  I used a shovel to chop the 4 to 5 inch thick stalks and dig around the wide root balls.  When the first giant toppled to the ground, hundreds of bugs scattered.  I destroyed  the Sunflower Hotel for bugs!  Ugh!  stink bugs, wasps, bees, flies, caterpillars, butterflies, beetles and even a wolf spider evacuated in a flurry.   After my skin stopped crawling, I felt appreciation towards those stubborn sunflowers.   They brought  VIP bugs to our garden…..wasps, bees, flies and a wolf spider!  Unfortunately,  the Sunflower Hotel had to be condemned because the pesky stink bugs outnumbered all the VIPs.