Fall color

I went out into the garden early this morning—well, early in terms of sunrise; it was 7:45 and I’d been up for two-plus hours—to have a look around and hunt for strawberries.

Someone got to this one first, but that’s OK: “If nothing is eating your garden, your garden isn’t part of the ecosystem.” (Critter and berry still got relocated to the compost pile.)

I also admired this blanket flower growing on the edge of my clover lawn:

It’s the Arizona Sun variety, and it makes a neat little mound that blooms all summer and apparently well into October. I thought I was planting the same thing behind the garage, but apparently not all blanket flowers are created equal:

This variety I’m calling Sprawly McFlopperson. I’m truly not sure if this is just what the offspring of Arizona Sun do, or if I got these seeds from somewhere else. I have been to a lot of seed swaps this year.

So little of my yard is successfully covered in plants at this point that I would hate to remove anything, but Sprawly is not my favorite. I think will try Chelsea chopping them next spring and see how that goes.