•September 7, 2016•

By Kim McDonald
NP Gardening Columnist

August was a wonderful month full of tomatoes, peppers and lots of grapes to harvest.

We spent hours canning and freezing, trying to keep on top of the producing garden. The steamer/juicer, strainer and water bath canner has been a regular in the kitchen this past month, and a couple of the newly tried products that we tested were the grape syrup and grape jam. The aronia was all frozen just because of the lack of time…I’ll get to them later once overtime at works slows down enough to just run at a normal pace.

The roses have been beautiful, and I have tried to keep up with the deadheading so they continue to produce more flowers. The butterfly bushes have attracted butterflies to watch, and the spent flower heads of the coneflowers have attracted small birds. It makes my day to go out and see nature’s bouquet of flowers right there in my own yard. Different flowers, different colors and different textures all mixed to add beauty to the landscape.

The parsley worms finally showed up in August, and we watched all five of them every day until they each disappeared. I’m hoping to catch a glimpse of them once again as they turn into a Black Swallowtail butterfly. Each year as I watch the parsley worms, they remind me when I was a kid catching the monarch caterpillars and putting them in a container to take to school so we could all watch as they went from caterpillar to butterfly.      Login or Subscribe to read the rest of this story.