Mortgage Lifter

This is a gigantic tomato called Mortgage Lifter--so called because when these huge tomatoes started coming in, the farmer could pay off his mortgage! One slice exceeds the sides of even the biggest piece of bread!

Tatume squash

It occurred to me that these look like little bombs lined up on the windowsill, but they are Tatume squash. Where is a farm stand willing to sell your produce when you need one?

one cayenne pepper

I've got squashes piling up in my kitchen like logs, but that conglomeration seemed less interesting to display than this one cayenne pepper, which I "submerged" in a small, narrow-necked  vase.

praying mantis on the window pane (inside!)

So--I had just pulled these dahlias together in this vase and was about to photograph them when I realized there was an insect on the window pane--a young praying mantis! I must have brought him (her?) inside with the flowers. So beautiful. If you look hard, you'll see his slender body framed by the storm window handle, just above the rim of the vase on the right.

And here's a photo of the mantis up close. Looks like he's on the screen, but he was actually on the glass window pane, inside.

homage to Pluto

This is my tribute to the photos coming from Pluto. AMAZING. Heard somewhere that the spacecraft taking the photos flew at 31,000 miles per hour, and that, had it struck anything as big as a rice grain on its journey of over 9 years, it would have been destroyed. Even more amazing! My little "pluto revealed" is a tomatillo with its outer covering pulled back.

blackberry lily with Japanese Solomon's seal

I'm not sure this counts as a windowsill arrangement, but it's something I created today in front of a window (on the radiator). One tall stem of blackberry lily (small orange flowers, iris-like leaves) with one stem of variegated Japanese Solomon's seal. So easy and so satisfying.

red dahlias, from seed

I'm embarrassed by the weeds these dahlias are competing with in my garden, but here, they look positively "kept." And I love the fact that they're small enough to use in windowsill vases. I've got two patches of them in the garden--both grown from seed--and one patch has plants about a foot tall in it, the other plants about two feet tall. Both have about the same number of harvestable flowers, but obviously I can cut flowers with longer stems from the second patch. Seems I should be able to account for why plants in the second patch are so much taller,  but I can't. It could be that I added more compost to the soil there, but plants there might also be taller just because they're jammed in with other tall plants requiring them to stretch for the sun. What a puzzle this gardening business is!

London pub arrangement

I was a very bad girl and didn't create a single windowsill arrangement while on vacation in England and France (lucky me!), but I did create this scene by moving the arrangement on a pub table over to a windowsill near London. The pub was The Holly Bush in Hampstead--very hard to find and very wonderful, especially after hiking Hampstead Heath.

grapevine grabbing artificial foliage

This "arrangement" stopped me in my tracks today. I was in the shed looking for something when I glanced over at a pitcher of artificial foliage I'd put in front of the shed window months ago. From a distance, it looks almost exactly like lamb's ear foliage and I had gotten away with using it in a large arrangement in April. The foliage has been in the shed gathering dust since then, but evidently, over the past few weeks, grapevine has grown through the shed window, grabbed the artificial foliage, and climbed up into it. (The grapevine leaves are the bright green ones.) Too funny and so pretty!